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I don't know anything about said title topics. Okay, I know a little. But I've never read anything by Marx. I don't really know anything about what he said, or how he came to develop his ideas, or how his influence spread, or the various revolutions associated with it. I don't know anything about Engels, or Lenin. Who was Trotsky? I don't know how Marxism relates to Marxism-Leninism, how it's different from strict communism. Nor do I know anything about Socialism, or its development, or how it's different from Communism. I don't know anything about the different subtypes for either. What's "the Nordic model" or whatever? I've heard of anarcho-syndicalism, but don't know anything other than it's the butt of jokes. I know very little of anarchism, and nothing about syndicalism. Same with Maoism-Third Worldism. If you advocate one particular style, why? What makes it distinct and what are its advantages? What separates "Leftism" from all these philosophies? Tell me about a great mind of one of these philosophies and what their contributions were. Tell me about a country's implementation of a style, and how it went. I know there is much more to talk about, these are just things off the top of my head. So I would ask that you to teach me. Pick out any topic and make a post about it. Anything you want. Just please keep it one topic per post, so as to keep the gigantic walls of text to a minimum. And to hopefully avoid infighting for a little bit, please make your first post directed at me and do not make it a reply/critique/criticism to someone else's contribution.
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Feb 8, 2016 23:25
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I'll copy-paste a few former posts I've made for some basic definitionsquote:For those who keep getting confused about different meanings of communism here's a simple explanation: in marxbook, communism is theorized to be a stage of economic development predominant in the world after capitalism, in the historic procession of primitive communism->feudalism->capitalism->communism->????. any chance of communism's success is based on the gains from modern industry that sprang from capitalistic production being socialized so that instead of going to only a few owners of capital. that means you have to actually have amounts of capitalization in your country in order to get to a modern communism that works right quote:Economic liberalism is a belief that the best organization of companies through free markets, freedom of labor/opportunity, free trade, private property and representative democracy is the best way to go. Live and let live, laissez faire. It's underpinned by enlightenment ideals and adam smith. Everyone is given, in theory, an equal chance to succeed based on merit. (In practice, like in all systems, those who luck out in being born in certain positions have obvious advantages. For instance, in liberalism, one born with enough money to just buy a bunch of machines that they pay other people to temporarily work with to make stuff--private property--can keep their money without doing as much labor of their own. Personal property is something different--poo poo you own for your own use and not for making a profit) Anyone smarter feel free to correct any of this. Rodatose fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 00:59
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As for the other main side of leftism, anarchism: Anarcho- is a prefix describing what the role of the nation-state should be in regards to a government, often followed by an economic system. Specifically, anarchism calls for a limited or non-existent role of the nation-state. There was a big split between leftists over this in the Hague Congress of the First International, with Communists  (this was 1872 so no lenin) maintaining that the nation should be the unit by which economic matters are governed and that political change should be carried out through the nation's efforts. Leftist anarchists (led by mikhail bakunin  ) broke from the party after Marx expelled bakunin for Bak's fears that a nation enacting revolution and taking control over the means of production would result in something as bad as the things it replaced. Instead of the top-down approach that other socialists take, anarchists work on a local scale, with power coming from the bottom up. They propose that any group/union/village/microstate/tribal affiliation that wants to work together should be its own autonomous entity, and it can enter into relations with other entities whenever without being bound by firm political boundaries. Often, if anarchists work with Communists in a political struggle, when both of them win, communists go back on promises to anarchists in forming a new government because Communists have a more centralized military to back them up (see mao going back on promises of self-determination to stateless nations in china after the revolution) Some flavors of anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism: "syndicates" are trade unions. The main economic production is done by trade unions, in which to which everyone has a vote. The IWW (International Workers of the World) kinda relevant here, maybe anarcho-communism: society is organized into communes without an overaching nation-state. this, and the previous are often compared with "libertarian socialism" which is very similar (the use of libertarian here predates libertarian conservatism) anarcho-capitalism: ancaps, or libertarian conservatives. Not leftist, since left/right describes economic policy, not social policy (there are plenty of leftists with illiberal social views, after all ). This is what you think of what you hear of libertarians nowadays. Kill you're parents. anarcho-primitivism: society should revert to a deindustrialized setting. would probably require the death of 99% of the world's population to happen. pol pot wished for society to revert to an agrarian setting (though pol pot wasn't an anarcho-primitivist) and look what happened there. some Greens might be this, if they want to "get back to nature" and if you hear them talking about natural cures while rejecting vaccines. There are others that might be worth noting but someone else can do that. besides it's long and confusing enough already. e: One last thing to mention: all of these above-listed leftist groups either secretly or openly hate each other, and wish to destroy one another highlander style to become the One True Leftist. thank you have a nice day Rodatose fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 01:21
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I will try to make a longer post with more details later but as a general rule you want to keep in mind that most of the theories that will be discussed here were developed in reaction to specific situations. Whereas conservative and right wing ideologies have often tried to root themselves in timeless laws of human nature there has been a tendency for leftist ideologies to emphasize historical contingency. Socialism and communism, in particular, have tended to present themselves as the inheritors of a historical project going back to the French Revolution. This is also key to understanding where many of the theoretical splits and divisions emerge: often the root of the problem is differing analysis of the historical situation. So for instance Lenin, operating about a generation after Marx's dead, confronted a very different world than the one Marx had written about. Lenin and the people around him responded by developing a new set of techniques and ideas, what is sometimes referred to as "Leninisn" or "Bolshevism". A little bit later, after the Soviet Union was founded, there were strong disagreements over the nature of the USSR and over how it should behave, especially in relations to its neighboring capitalist states. These disagreements lead to more splits. Most famously Trotsky left the Soviet Union and developed an analysis of the USSR and the world situation that become very popular in the English speaking world and which survives mostly intact to this day as "Trotskyism". On the other hand the winning faction from this struggle, who retained power in the USSR and were organized around the individual of Stalin, developed a different analysis of the world sitaation and their role in it. They developed a rival theoretical edifice that they labelled "Marxist-Leninism", which became the official doctrine of the USSR and its client states (to this day I believe it is still the official state ideology of China, Cuba and North Korea). The differing details of these ideologies don't matter right now: I think what's relevant, at an introductory level, is recognizing how each of these doctrines is responding directly to events in the world. These are not merely theoretical disputes: they are specifically questions about what were then seen to be the pressing issues of the day. Subsequent splits also follow this pattern. In the 1960s and 1970s the rising prominence of the Chinese revolution and other third world revolutions, plus a growing disenchantment with the USSR, lead many people in the west who were seeking revolutionary doctrines to adopt Maoism. Also after 1968, when there was a dramatic but ultimately faield series of uprisings around the globe, most famously in Paris and Czechoslovakia, this lead to intellectuals such as Foucault and Derrida giving up on the leftist project of reforming society. These thinkers and others like them split off into another direction and developed the doctrines that became post-structuralism and post-modernism. By the way, this truism can be applied to the terms "left" and "right" themselves. In this particular case we need to go back to the early days of the French Revolution. To simplify greatly: the French state went bankrupt at the end of the 18th century. The king was forced to call the Estates General, which is a rough analogy to Parliament in England, except that the Estates General hadn't been called in over a century (so imagine if technically Parliament existed in England but it had been so long since one was held that no one alive could remember it). The king needed the Estates General to legally approve new taxes, but when the Estates General met they decided to levy demands for the king to relinquish some of his power. The king tried to resist, and the resulting struggle is what triggered the French Revolution (again, a lot of simplification here, and this process took several years). Within the new national assembly that emerged from this process there was much disagreement regarding how far the challenge to the king's power should go. A range of different opinions were represented within the assembly: in essence the proto-liberals, proto-socialists and even the proto-conservatives were all existing without clear labels yet, debating and arguing for what should be done. It ended up that the men who were more cautious about defending existing notions of property and maintaining order were clustered in the right hand wing of the room, while the more radical men who wanted to try and remove all inequality and dramatically upend the social order tended to sit on the left. Thus the idea of "left wing" and "right wing" views (note that both left and right were united in opposition to the king at this point, a healthy reminder that at this time both liberalism and socialism were in essence revolutionary doctrines against the old monarchical system). All of that is very vague but it might be a helpful primer for thinking through these kinds of issues. All these different theories and doctrines can mostly be traced back to particular events in which one group of people had one idea and another group had a rival idea, and no consensus could be reached, resulting in a split.
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Feb 9, 2016 01:27
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Quick question: What do you hope to get out of this thread, that you couldn't by simply reading online sources like Wikipedia or whatever? Do you want a really short primer, or are you trying to gauge the diversity of actual opinions on DnD, or what?
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Feb 9, 2016 02:06
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rudatron posted:Quick question: What do you hope to get out of this thread, that you couldn't by simply reading online sources like Wikipedia or whatever? Do you want a really short primer, or are you trying to gauge the diversity of actual opinions on DnD, or what? Wikipedia isn't really all of that great of a reference for socialism.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:14
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rudatron posted:Quick question: What do you hope to get out of this thread, that you couldn't by simply reading online sources like Wikipedia or whatever? Do you want a really short primer, or are you trying to gauge the diversity of actual opinions on DnD, or what? I was hoping people would Teach Me About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism tbh
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Feb 9, 2016 02:15
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site posted:I was hoping people would Teach Me About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism tbh What do you need to know that you can't learn from a hundred million murdered? Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 02:17
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rudatron posted:Quick question: What do you hope to get out of this thread, that you couldn't by simply reading online sources like Wikipedia or whatever? Do you want a really short primer, or are you trying to gauge the diversity of actual opinions on DnD, or what? I remember first starting out reading about leftist things and clicking on Wikipedia and being daunted by the sheer number of new topics thrown at you at once, and there wasn't a single definitive starting point since a lot of the topics had similar sounding page headings. It's not organized very well for someone starting out.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:17
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site posted:I was hoping people would Teach Me About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism tbh edit: Like, your OP has a lot of specific phrases/people in it, each of which could (and have) been answered individually, but you can put them together into a coherent 'whole' in a number of ways. Which way is going to satisfy you? rudatron fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 02:24
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As I said in my second paragraph , I'm explicitly leaving that opened ended because I want you to post about whatever you feel like. Wanna talk philosophy? Go ahead! Want to give some history? Post! I gave some topics in my first paragraph, but those are by no means the only things I want to hear about.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:36
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Communism is a mostly dead ideology that was tried out in a bunch of countries during the last century. At best, it made their citizens paupers compared to their neighbours; at worst, through malice and sheer incompetence, millions of innocent people in those countries died. The only countries in the world that still pretend to be communist are North Korea, and China. In both of these countries, collectivism is for the little people.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:44
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There's no real good way of condensing this into one paragraph, but here I go with a historical footnote: First off, the French Revolution had an enormous influence on leftist thought. A lot of the early free market reforms were done during it (see grain prices and deregulation) and the concept of a professional revolutionary. I cannot stress this enough. By the time Marx started drafting Das Kapital, both capitalism and socialism had already weeded their way into a very feudal Europe. Honest to god, Marx (although very much a leftist at this point) wasn't writing the book in context of ideological slander. He was actually trying to explain the phenomena he was witnessing, but he did it through the looking glass of social sciences, class divisions, and labor interactions. He was also one to point out the transition to modern imperialism that would dominate the latter half of the 19th Century (raw materials <=> manufacturers goods). To get a better understanding of his work, juxtapose it next to any other contemporary/earlier economist of his time (he had very frequent criticisms of Malthus for example). What he did do was explain out in a very concise way the systemic problems that capitalism had and was very scientific about it, but never did he immediately address the problem anywhere in his book. Contemporary and future socialists neglected practical application of critique and then basically just ran with it always in context of their own ideology (see: Marxist-Leninism). e: if it's okay with site, I don't mind a criticism or two of this highly condensed take Also, I kindly direct anyone to just watch this video instead of trying to take a stab at Das Kapital alone. Dead Cosmonaut fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 03:00
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arright let's see how long before this thread, too, gets crashed by the usual suspects so, most brands of ideological socialism these days are at least implicitly based on a marxian theoretical framework. you get some fourierists etc running around still, but they're crazy Marx's biggest innovation was historical materialism, based on a kind of dialectical materialist pseudo-metaphysic. Marx didn't like metaphysics much, but "dialectical materialism" is usually the name given to Marx's method of analysing societies. dialectics is notoriously difficult term to grasp, because Marx's intellectual hero (to the extent that he had such heroes) Hegel invented it, and Hegel writes awfully. the very bare-bones version of Hegel's dialectic is this: a spirit exists in the collective being that we call the world. this spirit can be something like evolution, but it is never content to simply be. It always, in its movements, creates an antithesis - think of this like Newton's 3rd law, sort of, wherein every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. These will then mutually annihilate, creating a new state of affairs called a synthesis, which then creates its antithesis, which annihilates it &c &c, until at some point you reach God, who is the resolved dialectic of the Spirit. What Marx did was take this basic framework, ditch the mysticism and say "this is actually based on Things in the World", thence the "materialism" bit. So, to Marx, the world is not dictated by giant collective moods, but by the objective material facts on the ground, playing out in a dialectical way. To Marx, the most obvious material fact of human society is the fact of production. This far, Marx's views are almost entirely mainstream today, though some are more obstinate historical marxists than others, and many dislike the dialectic for its lack of formal testability and rigour (a bunch of dudes reformulated everything he said using contemporary logical formalism. Those guys are also a bit crazy, and are called Analytical Marxists). So, to Marx, Shakespeare's writing, Rousseau's philosophy, Plato's lectures will all have been profoundly influenced by the material stiuation in which they worked - this is going somewhat back to what Helsing wrote about socialisms being very historically contingent - in any basically marxian model (which is pretty much the official ideology of any party from social-democracy and leftwards and practically any labour union), this view - that people make their history dependent on where they are in the historical process - is paramount. Genghis Khan would not have conquered half the world if he were born in the ghetto in Harlem, or likely even if he were born a in Mongolia a hundred years later. This given, what drives history? It's not the spirit, and it's not great men. To Marx, the answer is clear: production drives history, and defines its epoch. People's relation to what Marx calls "the means of production" define their status in various times - in a basically agricultural society (I would use "feudal" but then Disinterested will appear and scold me), many will farm, some will be craftsmen, priests or other "professionals" (many of these also farm) and a few are going to be nobles, owning and directing society through intricate webs of allegiance. A serf is bound to the land, and is defined by his relation to the land - which is his means of production. This is the big part of marxian ideologies - the objective reality of a society is defined by its dominant mode of production. Everything follows that - dominant values, political ideologies, philosophical views, even art and religion. When Marx sets out to build his model of society, he does so based on systems of production and people's relations to those systems. He calls this the "base" of society. Everything - everything else, from basic family structure to cuisine, is "superstructure", and operates off the premises defined by the base. These will each also have their own dialectics and their own developments, but in the end it all comes back to the fundamental material relations of society. From this, Marx defines various social "classes", such as the famous proletariat, bourgeoisie, and so forth. It bears mentioning at this point that Marx was by no means infallible - he has a number of weird observations and tangents, and sometimes he's just ignorant, like when he's writing about the "asiatic mode of production" which is the way the inscrutible oriental has organised society to avoid the inevitable bourgeois revolutions that categorise western feudalism (which, as hinted earlier, is also a fairly Problematic historical model, but it is generally accepted because it basically works and we get his point). Anyway, this is where the importance of class comes in to marxian ideologies. This is why parties are called things like "Labour" or "Worker's Party", and why many countries lump their parties in "bourgeois" and "socialist" camps. To these parties, class is the one group one can be said to objectively belong to, in the sense that the absolutely primary identifier of society is one's relation to the means of production. All else - tribe, family, race, religion, alliances, etc - is secondary (superstructure, remember). A black worker and a white worker always have more common interests than a white worker and a white member of the haute-bourgeois. And now I get bored, so I'll skip a bit - Marx sees history as a dialectical process. Capitalist society is (very, very roughly) the synthesis of the ancien regime status quo which finally met the antithesis of the rising bourgeoisie and died in a series of revolutions and fragmentary reforms. Now, it too faces its antithesis - the proletariat, created by capitalism, is also the inherent enemy of capitalism, because capitalism is predicated on their Exploitation, which is a technical term which means almost but not quite what you'd think. Anyway, Marx posulated that the proletariat, upon seizing control of society, would essentially self-destruct (since that is the only way it can acheive emancipation from its position), becoming its own antithesis and resolving the dialectic of class struggle. He called this state "communism". Marx wrote a lot, as did his adherents and disciples &c, and they also thought a lot. Even if you think they're all dead wrong, as has been increasingly popular the last several decades, their thoughts, and reactions to their thoughts, still define large swathes of the political landscape in the world, and it's worth picking up what one can about it. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 03:06
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Another note for the thread: No, asking to learn about Marxism/Socialism/Communism is not a quest to revisit the experiments of Stalinism/Maoism/Leninism and is not in any way a political endorsement as such. I hope this helps.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:10
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site posted:As I said in my second paragraph , I'm explicitly leaving that opened ended because I want you to post about whatever you feel like. Wanna talk philosophy? Go ahead! Want to give some history? Post! I gave some topics in my first paragraph, but those are by no means the only things I want to hear about. Well, okay then, let's start with leftism. Broadly speaking, leftism can be characterized as a set of political philosophies that seek to restructure society to make people's lives better, which you can contrast with rightism, that demands that people act better - structural vs. moralistic responses to failures and suffering. A leftist response to failed leadership would be to diminish the chance of that failure, through either limiting the power of that leader or some kind of accountability process. The rightist response would be to try and find a 'better' leader. So, for example, while the 'nordic model' (Capitalism with a large welfare system funded by high progressive taxation) is not socialist, it is leftist, because it structurally ensures that everyone can survive. Socialism is a belief in the necessity to restructure society without capitalist accumulation (disparities in wealth caused by the private ownership of the means of production [factories + tools, not to be confused with TV sets]), by having capital operated & owned communally. There are two solutions for how this can be done, either through a state structure, or absent a state structure - state socialism, or anarchism. The first state-socialists had a utopian vision of socialism, as a kind of series of public works projects that would eventually result in a better society (Fourierism, Fabianism). Revolutionary state-socialism believes that only through the workers themselves imposing such a society through force of arms, will socialism actually exist. Some state-socialists, called communists, believe that a stateless, classless society will eventually exist, after state-socialism has been established for long enough. Marxism and its variants are all revolutionary communism. Marx is a landmark intellectual figure, both because he basically founded sociology, and was the first person to successfully apply a scientific approach to Capitalism as a system. From this analysis, he believed that the revolution required for socialism would occur naturally, as workers gained what he called 'class consciousness' (the recognition of workers that it is in their interest to establish socialism). Lenin disagreed (not completely, but w.r.t whether it would occur in his lifetime), and argued that through the work of a central party organization, a revolution could occur. Maoism is probably best thought of as an application of Marxism-Leninism to the civil war in China. Maoism-Third-Worldism believes that the problem with the world as a whole isn't just the capitalist class, but anyone in the first world (the 'labor aristocracy'), who will eventually be overthrown by the people in the third-world. Anarchists believe that only through the overthrow of the state (and authority in all its forms) will socialism be possible. They all differ in exactly how they want a post-state society to look. The exception is anarcho-capitalists, who aren't actually leftists, but far-rightists, and who want to replace the state with a kind of corporate feudalism. I've been really, really terse and simplistic, both so that it's easy to read and pick through by someone who knows nothing about the subject, but also because gently caress anarchists.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:33
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Karl Marx didn't invent sociology, he was just one of the early writers about it.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:37
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also the genealogy of the radical left goes vaguely like this: proto-socialisms, including utopian variants like fourierism and arguably the first really coherent socialist political philosophy, the proto-anarchist mutualism of proudhon then comes Marx and Engels and shake everything up with their "scientific socialism" ("scientific" because it's based in what amounts to a semi-formal model of society instead of some moral or spiritual imperative) the Paris Commune happens, and is crushed. People have different interpretations of this event; Bakunin has Major Objections to Marx' stuff, and the First International is split between the marxists and the Anarchists Eduard Bernstein proposes Big Revisions, notably the effective abandonment of revolution as an explicit goal becoming the father of social democracy; social-democracy and marxism are still pretty much married, and most social-democratic parties are at least formally marxist. Prominent names in this period are Kautsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin, Kropotkin and Jaurès Jaurès is assassinated, Kautsky goes renegade, WW1 happens; everything goes to poo poo. Lenin goes bananas at the betrayal of the social-democrats, especially the SPD, who infamously voted to fund the war. In the post-war mess, Liebknecht and Luxemburg are killed. A bunch of sects appear and flare out, the Second International goes down in flames, and Lenin and his cohorts declare the Third International (the Comintern) after much ado, several conferences and an armed revolution in Russia. the split between social-democrats and communists is thus formalised. from here, it becomes incredibly messy and you get a host of weird sects which all hate each other, based in large part on their relationship with the Soviet Union and various theoretical questions, but the currently dominant (lol) trends are maoism, leninism, trotskyism, resurgent Spartakism (i.e. Liebknecht-Luxemburg) and analytical marxism as espoused by the September group. on the social-democratic side, you have the Scandinavian tendency, which basically consists of tripartist corporate arrangements, the british tendency, which remained explicitly revolutionary and quite adversarial for a long time but has turned to Blairism (in itself actually a fairly radical ideology, but not something most socialists are comfortable with) and the French tendency which is basically a flowchart that goes "are we striking" (y) -> good (n) -> well what are you waiting for currently, blairism is the ideologically dominant tendency in social-democratic politics, which is why all left-wing europosters hate their lives - it means no meaningfully socialist parties are left with governing potential in europe there are many names here that now make no sense to you. they are important names and concepts to the history of these things you want to learn about, and if you've questions just bring them up
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Feb 9, 2016 03:54
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I love leftist chat! I think a important and relatively timeless component of Marxism is the concept of alienation and commodity fetishism in capitalist societies. Keep in mind everything below is oversimplified. Alienation is the disconnect between humanity, labor, and commodities. It is kind of like the feeling of buyer's remorse. Essentially, the capitalist mode of production disassociates your daily production from your daily life. You spend all day somewhere producing widgets, but those widgets don't sustain you, cloth you, etc. You rarely end up using the widgets you make in your daily life. In other words, there is a strict divide from you at your daily job producing widgets and you out in society. This holds true for factory work, but it does not hold true for many Americans today. Most spend their time servicing other people instead of widgets. That is for another post. What keeps us sustained is a payment we receive for our labor in the form of currency. Not a big deal, right? Yet, when you buy things you don't see the labor, you only see the end product and the price Therefore, your association with commodities, the things which sustain you, is through their exchange value (price). A great example of this is the meat industry. We pump animals, similar to dogs in our own home, full of hormones, have them roll around in their own poo poo for 6 months, and then butcher them by the millions daily. Leaving completely aside the morality, all you see is a neatly packaged piece of meat and a price tag. Issues like slavery, child labor, factory farms, deforestation, and poor working conditions persist in part from alienation. It is much easier to ignore atrocities when you are getting meat at a good price on the table. Alienation has huge ramifications for the economy, politics, and culture, but people better equipped than I can deal with those issues  Commodity fetishism is another critical piece of the puzzle. Because we are alienated from commodities - we don't see their production - we don't necessarily care about how [i]useful[i] they are, but we take pride in their price tag. Status symbols writ large. It feeds the alienation, we come to define ourselves based on the commodities we own (house, car, piano, a guitar) instead of our values, morality, friendships, etc. The situation is much, much more complex than when Marx was writing which is why this may seem obvious. We have a whole industry build around alienation - modern advertising.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:23
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V. Illych L. posted:arright let's see how long before this thread, too, gets crashed by the usual suspects That actually gives a pretty interesting context to marxism as I understand it and I'm surprised I don't object to it, cheers.
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Feb 9, 2016 04:39
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You know how sci-fi/fantasy fans spot errors in continuity and reason from the contradiction towards an underlying truth that explains both? That's what dialectics is. Marx applied it to the internal contradictions of contemporary economic theory, except that he was trying to explain contradictions of perception, not of fact.
Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 05:38
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To add to what V. Illyich L. said, even before the concept was really encapsulated and phrased as it is today (whose genesis he outlines very well) there were movements that espoused objectives or evinced a social view that can essentially be called radically leftist. It's not a perfect fit because some of these ideas have either been widely (but not universally) acknowledged as incorrect or misguided, and some haven't been undone so much as lost currency. Many pre-Industrial such ideas were either religious in inspiration, or at least heavily religious in their view of how things work, which is vastly different from more modern takes on religion on the left. You'll find plenty who think it's bad, and plenty who think it's fine as long as it's not actually directing state policy, but you don't get so many groups who view a leftist society as ideally founded on, or indeed obligated by, the Bible (though without wishing to get into theology right now, it's easy to see how Big JC would be sympathetic towards the ideals of socialism etc.). Also an important point, and building on something Helsing said, is that quite a few splits have come into being because there were radically different situations prevailing in a given society at a given time. Marx's original expectation was that, in part because it was an historical process that relied on certain conditions rather than purely a call to arms to improve your lot in life, communism would first take root in an advanced, industrialized country - most probably a place like England or Germany. It got a little twisted in Russia because outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg the country was barely beyond feudalism, and though the threat of invasion was the more pressing part of the equation, there was at least some element of the belief that industrialization was necessary for communism in motivating the Soviet Union's astounding pace of development. This was a country which went, in less than half a century, from essentially feudalism to a military that could turn back the Nazis, and a scientific establishment that developed nukes and put the first probe, and then first person, into space. (Notwithstanding that they nicked plenty of scientists from the Nazis; being able to use them at all was remarkable). But that was a society which still had something of an industrial base to start from and which had a healthy body of urban proletariat to get started with. Mao faced a very different situation in China and, putting aside the issues of warlordism, Japan, and WW2, his main problem was very simple: The urban proletariat, such as it was, was vastly outnumbered by the rural peasantry. Oh there were some huge cities in China, but many were under a greater or lesser degree of foreign influence and even control, and they were all supported by an unimaginably vast hinterland of farmers, villages, and tradesmen such as blacksmiths who weren't doing business radically different from the time of the Ming. Quite simply, in China, even if they could have won over the urban centers it wouldn't have mattered hugely. Perhaps more pressingly, Mao had little way to win over said urban center at the time. So he developed a variant of Communism which, grossly simplifying, states that the Chinese revolution could not hinge on the disgruntled urban proletariat and the oppressed, exploited masses of the great factories as it might in Europe, but that it must come from the rural peasantry. He developed the idea of People's War, essentially a style of guerrilla warfare, in part because the Russian Revolution was the only one where the urban proletariat had actually succeeded rather than getting themselves brutally crushed and shot, either by state forces or fascists, usually with a high degree of state complicity. There are posters who are way more knowledgeable about all this than I am and I may be full of complete poo poo - if someone corrects this, assume they are right and I am wrong.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:36
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communism is when everybody does what stalin says and also starves to death
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Feb 9, 2016 06:40
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This guy did a big set of mini-lectures that might be helpful as a starting point: (edit - this is more "What do those words mean in this context" and "what were they intended to reflect in the world", and not as much he-said she-said history stuff.) https://www.youtube.com/user/brendanmcooney/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/brendanmcooney/playlists Heres some of the part 1's: What is capitalism? 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Duxkrv4fSe4 Consume! 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4r-LzOQEho What is Credit? 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO0mRT7zW50 DIY exploitation 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xDsAPkRRis Law of Value 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy8y2CCGcwo Falling Rate of Profit 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oXEgH4HzYk Capitalist Equilibrium? 1 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXSGYeppeH4 What transformation problem? 1 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eTTm90LAWQ The dudes blog. Ive barely browsed it, but some of the videos were pretty great. https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/law-of-value-introduction/ FRINGE fucked around with this message at 09:35 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 09:29
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You titled the thread "Teach Me About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism", but what you actually mean is "tell me what opinions to have about marxism, socialism, and communism." The only way to learn about the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and his contemporaries Stalin and Trotsky, and Mao Zedong his contemporaries, is to read their works. You have to gain understanding of them directly, not second hand. Otherwise you'll gain an understanding of Marxism-Leninism that's distorted by other people's understanding (and misunderstanding). You'll be lead astray. The only thing I'll say about other Leftisms is that Marxism in all it's forms is a science. Political theory is scientific theory in that it can only be developed from observing evidence, and it must be tested like a science experiment too. If it's put to the test and reality contradicts it, then the theory must be adapted to the new evidence. If it is proven totally, completely wrong, then it should be abandoned. Knowing this, you must gauge the correctness of an ideology by how successfully it has changed the world. The ultra-left would rather claim moral purity than achieve anything, so their theory being proven wrong by practice does not matter to them.
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Feb 9, 2016 10:54
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I'm not sure how good of a question this is, but ... not just to Marxists ITT, but to everyone: how do you view the landscape of possible economical systems - does it only have one peak, or multiple local maxima? And how sure are you about having identified any such peaks? For example: if you're a Marxist, that probably means you assume a post-socialist, classless society would be the best way to organize society ever, in that it is, amongst all systems that could function in the real world, the one that provides the optimal distribution of welfare. And you probably assume that societies are worse than that ideal to a degree roughly proportional to how different they are from this ideal. So a social democracy with strong unions is comparatively more similar, and better, than a mid-1700s monarchy or a Czardom. Or, is it? Like, is it just a straight walk to the top, or are there local maxima? And then, how sure are you that you know what's the best one - how shaky is your belief? Are you 99% convinced Marx was basically right (or maybe 99% sure that Ayn Rand was basically right), or are you 40% sure and there are some things you assume to be true with some degree of confidence, but if you learned they are false (for example, if you learned that some things you assume about human nature and economical laws and natural resource distribution are a bit different from what you thought), would that mean you'd totally change your views? So, what would have to be found out to be true (to your surprisal) so that you'd give up on Marxism?
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Feb 9, 2016 17:49
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As a marxist I'd say post-socialist society is probably the best one I can think of, but I would be disappointed if it's the best one ever. I would espect that as technology progresses and the conditions of human civilisation change then so would the optimal society. As far as I know this is sort of how Marx viewed it as well. Post-socialism is the correct response to bourgeois capitalism but new conditions will create new antitheses and there will be a need for more changes after the fact. But we won't know what that is until we know how society is going to change. I'd guess maybe we'd end up with something like singularitarian communism or something at some point and while it's likely alien and distasteful to most people today, it'd be a logical progression when it happens. I'm a marxst/socialist because it's the solution to today's problems. So much of life's misery can be attributed to capitalism, so that makes sense to me as the biggest thing to hate and oppose.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:00
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Cingulate posted:And then, how sure are you that you know what's the best one - how shaky is your belief? Are you 99% convinced Marx was basically right (or maybe 99% sure that Ayn Rand was basically right), or are you 40% sure and there are some things you assume to be true with some degree of confidence, but if you learned they are false (for example, if you learned that some things you assume about human nature and economical laws and natural resource distribution are a bit different from what you thought), would that mean you'd totally change your views? So, what would have to be found out to be true (to your surprisal) so that you'd give up on Marxism? Lyapunov Unstable fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 18:07
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OwlFancier posted:As a marxist I'd say post-socialist society is probably the best one I can think of, but I would be disappointed if it's the best one ever. OwlFancier posted:I'm a marxst/socialist because it's the solution to today's problems. So much of life's misery can be attributed to capitalism, so that makes sense to me as the biggest thing to hate and oppose.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:09
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Lyapunov Unstable posted:I'm not some huge academic Marxist but my understanding is that Marxism is a (quite excellent) framework for thinking about the world and understanding things that happen, it's not some kind of suggested end-game. People come up with ideas on how to solve the problems exposed by Marxism, and there can be a lot of those solutions as thinking changes, technological, social, political relations change, etc. the 2nd chapter of the intro to the Wikipedia article on Marxism posted:According to Marxist analysis, class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and appropriation of the surplus product in the form of surplus value (profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat, social unrest between the two antagonistic classes intensifies, culminating in a social revolution. The eventual long-term outcome of this revolution would be the establishment of socialism – a socioeconomic system based on social ownership of the means of production, distribution based on one's contribution, and production organized directly for use. As the productive forces and technology continued to advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would eventually give way to a communist stage of social development, which would be a classless, stateless, humane society erected on common ownership and the principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
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Feb 9, 2016 18:12
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Yeah that was some consequence of Marx's thoughts but "Marxism" is not the same thing as "Communism." In that sense capitalism or feudalism could be said to be Marxist. Marxism is more of an academic/political framework as far as I understand it, not some system of government.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:14
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Lyapunov Unstable posted:Yeah that was some consequence of Marx's thoughts but "Marxism" is not the same thing as "Communism." In that sense capitalism or feudalism could be said to be Marxist. Marxism is more of an academic/political framework as far as I understand it, not some system of government.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:21
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Cingulate posted:Ah okay, good point. So to specify: I meant, amongst the ways of constructing society that have been proposed so far; excluding ones that have not been conceived of yet (doesn't mean they have to be spelled out in full detail, I just want to exclude vague "maybe they'll figure out something even better in the future"), and the ones referring to material conditions roughly like our own (that is, excluding post-sparcity, and excluding an animal state, or e.g. being colonized, where it's about bare survival). Well, as I said, I think that the suggestions made by Marx are very compelling ones. He does a good job of describing material conditions which still apply today. In fact many of the ideas are openly espoused by proponents of capitalism, they're just not viewed as negative. Most obvious perhaps is profit, which necessitates exploiting subjective value to either charge people more than a thing is worth or pay people less than their labour is worth. Once you understand this to be unethical, a lot of other things seem unethical. The power of capital is another one, why should you have to spend money to make money? Why does having money give you the power to take money from people who don't? I think a lot of people probably feel that things like this are wrong but Marx does a good job of explaining both why it's like that and suggesting that it isn't the way things must be. So rather than feeling annoyed at being paid little, charged most of your pay for things you need, and not getting anywhere. Marx explains what is needed to change that way of life. He paints it as being just as unjustified as monarchy, and feudalism, and other things we now are skeptical of, yet somehow we don't apply it to capitalism because we're conditioned to buy into that ideology, because it holds the ever present allure that someday we may be on top, and we may hold the power over others. I find it very easy to view capitalism as the latest manifestation of hierarchy, following directly from the old aristocratic tradition and all the more alluring because it holds that never-fulfilled promise that you might be able to rule one day. Where perhaps aristocracy compelled service by suggesting that your lord was just and had divine mandate, capitalism compels participation by suggesting that doing so will allow you entry into the positions of power. And I also find it easy to see the lie in that, because it doesn't happen, and if all those to whom it never happens were to organize and demand a change, then those who rule by that false promise wouldn't be able to stop them. So I'm pretty drat sure of it, it makes a lot of sense to me, moreso than any other suggestion of how to view the world. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 18:22
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OwlFancier posted:Well, as I said, I think that the suggestions made by Marx are very compelling ones. He does a good job of describing material conditions which still apply today. In fact many of the ideas are openly espoused by proponents of capitalism, they're just not viewed as negative. Most obvious perhaps is profit, which necessitates exploiting subjective value to either charge people more than a thing is worth or pay people less than their labour is worth. Once you understand this to be unethical, a lot of other things seem unethical. The power of capital is another one, why should you have to spend money to make money? Why does having money give you the power to take money from people who don't?
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Feb 9, 2016 18:25
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Cingulate posted:Okay it seems I've not been clear enough yet. I guess while it's perfectly appropriate for this thread, I'm not personally asking for a justification or explanation of Marxist (or other) beliefs. I am asking, how sure are you of these beliefs - 99%? 90%? 70%? And what would have to occur or be found out for you to change your mind? I don't know how to quantify it as a percentage. As I said, it makes more sense to me than any other explanation, so I am inclined to adopt and use it. As to what would make me change my mind, either a change in the material conditions of the world such that the explanations laid out by Marx no longer apply, or the presentation of a better description of the world. I'm not a very specific communist, I see the removal of the power of Capital to be essential in remedying most injustice in the world, and I see the abolition of hierarchy to be a generally desirable thing. I also think that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a pretty excellent mantra to live by. But beyond that I am flexible about the specific methods of achieving those goals. So long as they work, I don't object.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:31
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Cingulate posted:Okay it seems I've not been clear enough yet. I guess while it's perfectly appropriate for this thread, I'm not personally asking for a justification or explanation of Marxist (or other) beliefs. I am asking, how sure are you of these beliefs - 99%? 90%? 70%? And what would have to occur or be found out for you to change your mind? It's like, how sure are you of natural selection? Well, pretty sure, and if something comes along in the future and changes it much, that thing is still going to have to be evolution in some sense and explain all of the same things.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:31
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OwlFancier posted:I don't know how to quantify it as a percentage. As I said, it makes more sense to me than any other explanation, so I am inclined to adopt and use it. As to what would make me change my mind, either a change in the material conditions of the world such that the explanations laid out by Marx no longer apply, or the presentation of a better description of the world. Lyapunov Unstable posted:I'd say about 90%, and anything that supercedes Marxism in my mind would have to explain why Marxism works so well for explaining poo poo (it would have to be the superset of Marxism sort of). Lyapunov Unstable posted:It's like, how sure are you of natural selection? Well, pretty sure, and if something comes along in the future and changes it much, that thing is still going to have to be evolution in some sense and explain all of the same things. And if we were to find a bird with four wings and two legs, or a single, isolated, but stable and otherwise modern strand of mammals in the permian or triassic period, or if we were to learn that the earth is in fact only 6000 years old (carbon dating was wrong and now it's fixed), beyond doubt, we'd become very skeptical of the idea that evolution as we know it has made life as is.
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Feb 9, 2016 18:40
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Cingulate posted:And then, how sure are you that you know what's the best one - how shaky is your belief? Are you 99% convinced Marx was basically right (or maybe 99% sure that Ayn Rand was basically right), or are you 40% sure and there are some things you assume to be true with some degree of confidence, but if you learned they are false (for example, if you learned that some things you assume about human nature and economical laws and natural resource distribution are a bit different from what you thought), would that mean you'd totally change your views? So, what would have to be found out to be true (to your surprisal) so that you'd give up on Marxism? My personal belief that is, in theory, leftist ideas would lead to a much better society. But my certainty that such a system would be both possible and sustainable decreases depending upon how much of a departure from the status quo each ideology represents. For example, in a perfect world it would be ideal if all private property/capital was publicly owned and everyone equally reaped the benefits of its use. But such a society represents such a radical departure from anything we've ever seen done on a large scale that I can't confidently say that it would actually work well in practice. The most leftist society that I believe would probably work well in practice is something akin to former Yugoslavia. In particular, I think that having all businesses be collectively owned and run by their employees would represent a very solid improvement over the way society is currently run. It wouldn't remove all sources of exploitation (for example, businesses could still exploit other businesses, even if they can't exploit their own employees), but it would still probably be better than the status quo. But I'm aware that even this might not work in practice, though I believe the reason it wouldn't work is the same primary reason Yugoslavia failed - existing powerful capitalist nations would economically destroy such a country through sanctions*. I generally use Yugoslavia is an example of why actual socialism (at least to that extent) actually can work, at least absent hostile outside pressure. When people say "socialism is bad because literally every socialist country has resulted in starvation/poverty", it's the sort of claim that only requires one example to disprove (since one working example proves that such an economy is actually feasible). While it's pretty valid to say that vulnerability to retaliation from other capitalist nations actually IS an inherent flaw (since other nations are a part of the environment that a socialist nation would need to survive in), I don't think that's really an accurate argument against whether that sort of socialism is inherently economically viable (and isn't really a good excuse to not try and push society in that direction). *I'm aware there are other reasons Yugoslavia failed, but they generally weren't specifically related to its economic system Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 18:52
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I'm reading and typing up some thoughts right now, but please please please don't ruin this thread on the first loving page by bogging it down in talking about whether this stuff works! Take it somewhere else or wait until down the road when we have a couple pages of content first. In fact, if you guys are just gonna ignore me asking for new posters to make their first be a content post at me, just leave the thread. Thanks. site fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 19:16
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You can't really discuss marxism without getting disagreement about it. If you want to learn about it you're going to have to get used to that because it's probably its most defining feature. The basics are not at all difficult to understand, most of the discussion is concerned with historical attempts and their relative successes, as well as reasoning for and against the positions it proposes.
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Feb 9, 2016 19:24
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