Wheeee posted:

Marxism is outdated and in need of a modern overhaul utilizing the advanced economic models and sociological data we now have access to, but it was and is built on a pretty solid foundation

Kurnugia posted:

a solid foundation of make-believe and proletarian dictatorships

Wheeee posted:

lol @ anyone not taking Marx seriously in the 21st century

Nobody uses Keynes' models anymore as we have more accurate ones available, but broadly speaking he was generally right. Same with Marx; he was right more than he was wrong, but it doesn't matter because all that's ever focused on is the poo poo he was wrong about.

Marxism is outdated and in need of a modern overhaul utilizing the advanced economic models and sociological data we now have access to, but it was and is built on a pretty solid foundation and there is no legitimate means of outright dismissing it. There is a substantial difference between an economist saying that Marx provides nothing useful to the mechanics of modern economic study and someone responding to the question of Marx's relevance with "lol" or equivalent: The latter is utterly without merit and the individual stating it can be safely dismissed for being as useless to serious discourse as an Ayn Rand novel.

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

Sergg posted:

It's kinda like how Sigmund Freud was an important contributor and basically the founder of the field of psychology but everyone laughs at how dumb most of his coke-addled theories are today.

duck monster posted:

Aristotle more or less was the father of science, and I'm not sure if a single one of his theories was correct.

Though at least he didn't leave wads of gauze in peoples heads when trying to surgically fix "hysteria" via nose surgery o_O

Good old Freud. "Science"

duck monster posted:

Ffffff Pol Pot was way more direct. Smack in the head with a rock and that unpatriotic professor is off talking his liberal jibba jabba to god direct.

edit: Oh I was beaten to this joke in an absolutely epic manner. drat son.

Kurnugia posted:

The economic basis (lol) of marxism was the idea that working together in a factory, the people would spontaneously develop a "class consciousness" and automatically see themselves as a part of a greater whole, with which they could co-operate naturally and without coercion. This does not happen. Ergo, marxism is impossible.

Sergg posted:

It's kinda like how Sigmund Freud was an important contributor and basically the founder of the field of psychology but everyone laughs at how dumb most of his coke-addled theories are today.

Kurnugia posted:

The economic basis (lol) of marxism was the idea that working together in a factory, the people would spontaneously develop a "class consciousness" and automatically see themselves as a part of a greater whole, with which they could co-operate naturally and without coercion. This does not happen. Ergo, marxism is impossible.

Effectronica posted:

Liberalism, conservatism, communism, feudalism, capitalism, etc. are all fail. Only fascism is still acceptable to believe in.

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

On the other hand, I simply don't understand the logic that communism will be the next inevitable step given that every form of society we have had has been based on hierarchy and division.

Omi-Polari posted:

marxism might have some validity as an economic theory but it blew fat rear end an architectural theory.

TheNakedFantastic posted:

A large portion of marxist theory is more or less concerned with morality (although somewhat dressed up as a "science") and will never become irrelevant. Much of what he wrote concerning working conditions/relations and class are still relevant as well, it's just far removed from the day to day reality of many middle class 1st world workers.

Bob le Moche posted:

I don't think there's that much morality involved in Marxist theory, I think it just is perceived that way by people whose economic interests are not those of the working class because Marxism can only appeal to them on a moral dimension.

Obdicut posted:

There's a huge amount of morality in Marxist theory. Which is fine, there should be. It is based on morality, on a conception of 'species being', on an idea of what human social behavior 'should' be like, etc.

What do you see in Marxism that isn't moral? The analysis of the necessarily conditions that occur when capitalism moves forward?

Bob le Moche posted:

Maybe I've just read the wrong books by Marx or maybe you guys are talking about the wider range of Marxist authors but (aside from the communist manifesto obviously) I find his analysis to be pretty much a descriptive theory of history/economics without much in the way of what things "ought" to be.

Obdicut posted:

What do you think the 'species being' is, then?

Bob le Moche posted:

I always read it as basically meaning little more than "human nature" (and to be honest it's one of the things in Marxist theory I find a bit problematic/unnecessary and stay away from, but maybe that's because I didn't understand it correctly?)

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Or, rather, [a human being] is a conscious being – i.e., his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses the relationship so that man, just because he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means for his existence.

OwlBot 2000 posted:

A lot of people draw a line between young philosopher Marx and older social scientist Marx.

V. Illych L. posted:

What, no, Marx's central critique is that capitalism is inherently an unstable system - alienation etc are simply properties by which the inherent contradictions of the capitalism as a system of production are made clear.

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The problem of capitalism is that it's bound to fail, structurally.

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. I mean, it's pretty clear where Marx's own sympathies lie, but both he and Engels tried very hard to avoid relying on moral arguments in their more academic work.

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The species-being is, quite simply, the material-dialectical formulation of human nature, i.e. the sum of social relations at a given time.

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Complaints of proletarian alienation aren't really moral complaints, they're reasons that the proletariat isn't going to tolerate the system forever.

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A Marxist analysis of, say, the old American system of chattel slavery would probably point towards mistreatment of slaves as a reason for why slaves would end up being rebellious, which makes slaves poor workers, which makes chattel slavery an unsustainable productive system.

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Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man's operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost, estranged essence of private property, private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of man, the externalised mediation between man's production and man's production. All the qualities which arise in the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this mediator. Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes.

Obdicut posted:

It is absolutely central to Marx's theory, and it isn't 'unnecessary' at all. Marx makes the argument that productive work, and the connection with labor, is the central 'species being' of humanity, that without that our lives are suffering and alienated. That is the energy that infuses his criticism of capitalism; it is not primarily the unfairness of the distribution problem, but the divorce between the laborer and his labor, the alienation of people from themselves, society, and work through the atomization of labor that he concentrates on.

Marx's critique is that capitalism reverses the way things should be.

Obdicut posted:

All of Marx's economic analysis of the process of capitalism, the increased atomization and taking wages down to the minimum necessary for the reproduction of class, all of that only has weight and force because of the moral ideas behind it. otherwise, what's the problem with the capitalist system? Why is unequal distribution a problem?

Bob le Moche posted:

To answer this - I still think it's possible to have a reading of Marx where the only "problem" with capitalism is that it's fundamentally unsustainable and carries contradictions that will eventually prevent it from reproducing itself and I personally find such a reading to be most valuable. I guess the notion of "natural == good" is so deeply entrenched in all of our minds that it would be a bit disingenuous to see the idea that capitalism goes against "species-being" as anything other than a moral argument against it, though.

Obdicut posted:

it might be the trivial observation that all systems change/fail, and so gives no weight or need to actually advancing the end of capitalism, since there's no reason to believe what comes after would be better or would be stable.

Obdicut posted:

I think that the 'unsustainable' argument is the weakest because it is the least historically accurate (Capitalism can survive labor uprisings just fine) and, if it is unsustainable, that doesn't lead to an argument that some other system is actually sustainable: it might be the trivial observation that all systems change/fail, and so gives no weight or need to actually advancing the end of capitalism, since there's no reason to believe what comes after would be better or would be stable.

Bob le Moche posted:

Again there is a lot of very valuable descriptive insight about history and economics in Marxist theory after you take out any part where capitalism "ought" to be replaced.

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Honestly I couldn't care less about the moral dimensions of his work and I see them as cluttering up an otherwise clear and elegant analysis. Keep in mind also that I'm saying this as someone who is very much dedicated to opposing capital in my praxis. I don't believe you need to understand Marxist theory as communicating a moral imperative to find value in it.

Laphroaig posted:

Finally, the idea that a system is sustainable and can persist forever, gives it no moral weight. A static system has no inherently superior moral qualities to a dynamic one, even with a historically realistic assumption of the costs of upheaval in human societies (wars, famine, disease, etc).

Bob le Moche posted:

Slavery did not end because slave owners had a moral epiphany and realized it was the right thing to do. The institution of slavery ended (and only where it did in fact end) for material economic reasons - it was no longer sustainable.

Bob le Moche posted:

Slavery did not end because slave owners had a moral epiphany and realized it was the right thing to do. The institution of slavery ended (and only where it did in fact end) for material economic reasons - it was no longer sustainable.

Obdicut posted:

You need to understand Marxist theory as communicating moral ideas to make sense of it, though. Otherwise, why do you care about alienation, about the lack of remotely egalitarian distribution, or any of the rest of it matter?

Laphroaig posted:

Let me make the point I am driving at clear: A Marxist critique of chattel slavery as inherently unsustainable makes no sense because it evidently WAS sustainable for the entirety of recorded human history until the 1930s. It was displaced by another system, capitalism, and it was in many places displaced only forcibly after wars.

Bob le Moche posted:

Primarily because I have to sell my labor in order to survive and alienation + precarity sucks pretty bad so I'd rather do something about it.

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Of course I want to believe that for moral reasons I'd be opposed to capitalism even if I benefitted from it overall because I, like everyone else, convince myself that I'm a good person.