It’s always mildly frustrating reading your pieces, as you give a diagnosis of modern political psychologies that are absolutely spot on, but your economic views are always vague and naive (exactly like the people you criticise). For what it is worth, I would probably be considered a ‘liberal’ in the US - the fundamental basis of my view…
It’s always mildly frustrating reading your pieces, as you give a diagnosis of modern political psychologies that are absolutely spot on, but your economic views are always vague and naive (exactly like the people you criticise). For what it is worth, I would probably be considered a ‘liberal’ in the US - the fundamental basis of my view is that I am in the business of constructing large scale societal machines to improve people’s lives, and however bad the capitalist machine is, the socialist machine has fundamental design flaws that make it even worse. Is there anywhere where you do actually articulate your full economic arguments and views, because in pieces like this it just read like you complaining that things aren’t good now so *clearly* capitalism is a good thing and engaging in the exact same vibes based reasoning as most other left wingers?
And also one of the most fragmented and divided. Calling yourself a ‘Marxist’ reveals almost nothing without a further elaboration of what you take that to mean (in actual policy terms, not vague aspirations like ‘end exploitation of the proletariat’ or whatever).
Freddie: please, for us ignorant slobs, just go ahead and do a Marxism 101 piece one day. You needn't blush to admit your writing is a bit more engaging and accessible, to the average 21st c. reader, than that of Marx and Engels.
Well where in your view does capitalism work well? There are many more capitalist states than "Marxist" states unless you use an absurdly elastic definition of "Marxism". Many of these capitalist states are very, very poor. Even in the richest of these states (the US) there are millions of impoverished children, people who die preventable deaths because they couldn't afford the doctor, etc, etc. Why are you so sure things couldn't be better?
Living standards have improved in places like the former USSR and China, too, though, so it is not necessarily the case that progress is impossible in the absence of capitalism.
It's a question of if things are as good as they could be. I think we can avoid having millions of children grow up in poverty. Others think it is a necessary evil.
And what about the rest of the USSRs accomplishments? Was winning WWII and putting a man in space also possible only because of latent, tacit capitalism, whereas everything objectionable there happened because of Marx?
You NEED "leftism bad" to be true. It's blinkering you
I'm not opposed to 'leftism' in the slightest...would even say it's necessary, etc. Neither am I some capitalist zealot. Capitalism is in many regards Leftism personified if we view its rise as an antidote to Monarchy and Feudalism, etc. Economic systems and the outcomes produced from them are nothing if not dynamic, and MUST be, let's say, 'tweaked' to adapt to various things. So, like many, I'm not 'anti-left' any more than I'm 'pro-right'. Cuz that's just silly.
As to the whole 'there's good stuff about Marxism' angle, that's just pure ideology, and, as such, more pretzel logic.
The Soviets would have gotten stomped flat without the U.S. shoveling food, resources, and war materiel at them. Without American food the U.S.S.R. would have had to ground its air force due to lack of fuel, would have starved in 1942 and 1943, and would not have been able to clothe, arm, or transport its military to the front. Soviet military production was of a horrifically-bad quality, which got huge numbers of their own people killed (and Soviet heavy industry had largely been funded and built by American capitalists in the 20's and 30's anyway). Soviet military tactics - especially in the early war - were hobbled by paranoid political concerns, leading to a complete lack of concern for logistics and the avoidable death and maiming of hundreds of thousands.
At the very least, the Marxism didn't lead to the industrial utopia or worker's state that it promised.
lmao you really threw the kitchen sink here. This reads like the cliff notes of a Thomas Sowell book
The "Soviets didn't really win the war" thing has been done to death. If you really can't see why it's wrong, I'm not going to be able to explain it to you. I will say that the things you're pointing out, like that capitalism created soviet heavy industry but that same heavy industry performed poorly, or that the USSR rather than the nazis are responsible for their soldiers deaths because of lack of "concern for logistics", are not persuasive to unbiased people.
Yes, capitalism set up huge factories for the Soviets to run, and then the Soviets horribly mismanaged the operation of those plants (e.g. by messing up the case-hardening process for tank armor such that T-34 plates frequently catastrophically failed when struck by ordinance that would otherwise not have penetrated, or by setting quotas of "finished" tanks and completely ignoring quality control, leading to frequent lack of waterproofing, functional electronics, or reliable gearboxes). Of course, the Soviets blamed these problems on "sabotage" instead of thinking for a moment that their system could have problems, or permitting some creative destruction of underperforming operations.
For a long time 1st-world wealth depended a LOT on resource extraction from 2nd- and especially 3rd-world states. It's not quite as egregious as colonial times now, but it is still very much a thing.
Regardless, have you ever tried to ask yourself what the difference in relative standard of living gains have been between rich and poor over the last two centuries? I don't have the data for this, but I'd be willing to wager that despite both obviously increasing, the former gains vastly outpace the latter.
And that 'resource extraction' as you deem it is DIRECTLY why industrialization occurred, which in turn has lifted most of the global population out of abject privation! What's ur point here? Has there been exploitation, corruption, unequal outcomes, and unforgivable immorality? Most assuredly. Welcome to human history and civilization. The modern West, Enlightennent, Liberalism, and Captalism has done more to foster the growth and well being of ALL Humanity than anything that has come prior. It's not even debatable...(but folks still try!)
That's of little reprieve to the masses who had to undergo that rapid modernization for the sake of 'progress', as opposed to us who could more or less do it at our own pace because we were the first to do so. The amount of social and economic upheaval that cost the local population is tremendous, in a negative way. Or does that not matter?
Capitalism is not some permanent bedfellow of those ideas you list. And although it has been a predominant feature of modern Western economies, that doesn't mean it goes hand in hand with liberal or Enlightenment values - they aren't mutually inclusive. It's an economic model, not a system of values or a premise for basic human rights.
Except they do go hand in hand. I mean, ffs, let's be real here! Maybe at some point aliens will show up (or angels!) and show us 'The Way', but until then I'll bank on the flawed way it's gone up til now. I want to be clear here!!: I am acutely aware of the pitfalls, incongruities, etc that are, for the most part, inherent in modern 'progress' of the last several centuries. I also am of the firm belief that we, meaning everyone on the planet, will continue to innovate and improve on what we have so far.
No, they don't go hand in hand. Are you actually trying to say that Liberal and Enlightenment values could not have flourished without capitalism? How on earth can you make that assumption, because it happened to happen in the Western world? Correlation is not causation, and it isn't interdependence either.
We really didn't "do it at our own pace." The "first world" had just as much of a technology shock as it industrialized as the third world does now. Remember that the very word "Luddite" comes from violent riots by artisanal weavers smashing up newly-proliferating power looms putting them out of business.
I would not say it's "just as much" as a shock as, say, 19th century colonies in Africa and Asia. Come on man, are you really saying that the European craft industry went through just as much hardship as, say, the Bengali famine of '43?
I'm confused what the '43 Bengali famine has to do with industrialization shocks on craft industry. Wasn't that caused by WWII increasing food needs because of war refugees, diverting local food to military use, and damaging the transportation infrastructure that otherwise could have been used to bring in emergency relief?
But yes, things like the Enclosures resulted in massive immiseration of displaced English workers, including widespread starvation, later only barely averted through the introduction of government poor relief (at the request of the capitalists, who didn't want to have to artificially increase wages above subsistence).
As for the gains aspect, it's no surprise that those on the 'upper' end have gained exponentially more than those not in that class. Again, welcome to history. Is it intended? Maybe, at least indirectly? I dunno. It's likely an indirect function of the increase of modern civilization. Again, I'm wondering what ur getting at by articulating these things? Should the 1st world feel guilty? Dunno. Should we at least be aware that inequalities are a serious problem among humans and work diligently, and INTELLIGENTLY, to mitigate the issues that arise as a product of these inequalities? We do. To the point where currently we are stuck navel gazing, somewhere btwn guilt and shame, and are in danger of losing the whole thing.
If you don't have a problem with progress going hand in hand with a widening wealth gap, then you've lost the plot. Because the whole point is to try and provide everyone with a roughly equal change at a meaningful and enjoyable life. If it doesn't matter to you that some people will just always have an easier go at it, then there's no point in arguing for anything here because basic fairness doesn't seem to hold any water for you.
Did I ever say I didn't have a problem w/incongruities concerning wealth, etc? No. I didn't. Again, what is the fucking point you are trying to make, ffs? Is it that ppl have suffered immeasurably in the arc of progress that has gotten us to the present moment? Cuz they have, and literally NO ONE discounts that. And? Do you honestly think that w/o the advance of industrialization, etc that ANYTHING would have been 'better'? That's not a fucking shrug, pal....it's acknowledgment of reality. Again, can things get better? Ofc...and they are. The Magna Carta and the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are pretty fucking important documents in achieving this 'better'. Finally, your sanctimonious 'good lord' etc betrays your lack of seriousness on this subject. It's just simply adolescent to think, or even dream, that some day all ppl will have 'equal' access to EVERYTHING, including benefits that arise as a result of progress. I'm not even sure they would want to? Again, I dunno. I'd suggest that whole angle is just a tad 'priestly', in a zealous sort of way. I suppose if you need to die on the hill of insisting that 'inequality and unfairness is inherent in the system', or even more absurdly that 'the system' is doing exactly what it's supposed to do (dun, dun, dun!) then so be it. That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Notice how you didn't pay much attention to the next sentence in that response:
What do industrialization, the Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights have to do with Capitalism? You seem to think that Capitalism is this vital thread that runs through liberalism, human rights, and progress in general. And that trying to excise that thread would unravel everything else. Where do you get that idea? Do you really think the world can't have progress without adherence to capitalist doctrine? Or that liberal values would have died on the vine without it?
The entire concept of capitalism is based on a single overarching motivation - greed. Not innovation, nor progress, nor even basic supply and demand...unless it also happens turns a profit. It's not even a governing concept, much less a moral value, yet you seem to think it's this necessary part of human flourishing. Even despite its many flaws, "warts and all" as Loury likes to opine. I mean the stock market is basically just a codified and legalized form of gambling on a massive scale, throwing around people's labor and lives like cheap poker chips at a table most of us never get to see. And you're trying to hold all that up like it's some fucking virtue for christs sake.
No amount of little quality of life tic tacs, like nifty iphone upgrades or 10cents off per gallon, makes up for the fact that all capitalism is really interested in doing is putting more money in the hands of those who either already have it, or are clever and lucky enough to gamble their way into it. It's avarice plain and simple.
Am I to understand that your definition/conceptualization of Marxism is akin to the von Humboldt philosophy of 'to enquire and create, devoid of external influences'? At least somewhat?
Marxism has a big literature but you are basically the only one here who’s read it! You have a huge captive audience here of people who really want to find high quality leftist thinking, even if most of us are not currently leftists. Why don’t you ever write an article literally telling us something about Marxism?
In particular you point at Bernie socialists as having supposedly abandoned the liberal capitalist system, but I don’t see that at all. They’re seem to me to be broadly normie social democrats, committed to democracy, the rule of law, and for the most part property rights, but advocating for much more muscular state intervention in market failures than US Democrats have been comfortable with. But it sounds like you think the overall system does need to be abandoned. In what way? Do you support a vanguard-led revolution? What kind of political system should they impose? As full of material as the Marxist corpus is, you’re well aware that it’s got a broad mix of positions on these questions, and Marx himself was pretty resistant to describing details of a socialist state, so it’s really quite fair that we have no idea what you actually want. I’d love to find out!
Yeah, it seems like Bernie just wants a mixed economy which is further to the left than we have right now. Which makes sense. I don’t think anyone wants to live under a system of *pure* anything, be it capitalism, socialism, monarchy, democracy, etc., and their “true believers,” who usually need to be kept from power altogether. But I did enjoy this piece and agree with the basic principle that equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are a distinction without a difference - though they can be different “North Stars,” if you will, to guide rhetoric and in some cases policy.
But assuming that someone wasn't raised a Marxist and doesn't have the depth of knowledge you have, and wants to have Marxism make the best case it can in the same amount of time we'd give to the various articulations of liberalism that you criticize as insufficient, what would you recommend? This isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know.
If only there was a search engine that would let you google "communism reading list" and get a huge swath of books and essays written over a hundred year period that you could peruse at your leisure.
Are you tone policing everyone in this thread or just the people you don't agree with? You don't have to answer, I can see from all the snarling contempt people are throwing that somehow is not as worth a rebuttal.
Tone policing? Lol. Wtf does that even mean? And ofc no one need answer/comment. The irony of that position is palpable. Who wrote the entirely snarky response? You did. And of what use is it?
You want to defend Marxism? Then do it. Don't expect others to become 'experts' in order to point out the failings and mostly pedantic tenets of some utopian system that has zero chance of EVER being implemented. You know, w/o killing a few million folks here and there. My time would be better spent 'studying' the corpus of astrology....at least no one suffers from astrology.
Yeah, see I appreciate this tone, because at least its honest about what you actually think, instead of pretending that if I put my point forward politely enough you would give a shit. Thank you.
And as a general rule, people don't invalidate an entire ideology on the basis of the failed states it produces or the crimes they commit. If we did, we would have stopped advocating for democracy around the time Athens killed all the people in Melos and then lost the Peloponesian war to Sparta. Or the time the Roman Republic collapsed into despotism. Or the time the French Republic collapsed into despotism, or the US into Civil War, or the Weimar Republic into out and out facism. And yet none of these invalidate what we understand to be the core benefits of Democracy, or the idea that we should improve on it. Only Communism gets held to that standard for some reason.
K-I'm sure you're correct, as far as that goes. However, go to any bookstore, and look for the Marxist literature shelf. Good luck with that. Ditto any public library. The Jacobin Is hardly the most popular magazine in the country. I can assure you that folks in Eastern Europe do not embrace Marxism. My general familiarity with Western Europe is the same. So, quite frankly, I find the basic assertion risible.
The basic assertion is that there has been a huge amount of writing about communism by economists and political theorists, the fact that you are too lazy to go look for it does not invalidate that claim.
With respect, Freddie, the entire Marxist corpus is a tower of verbiage signifying nothing. The entire edifice is incoherent. Pointing to the volume of writings on Marxism as evidence of the truth of its claims is analogous to saying that all those centuries of Scholasticism proves the correctness of Christian cosmology and eschatology. Lots of writers talking to each other in increasingly tight loops of esoteric mutual masturbation does not result in proof of anything. Aquinas and Gramsci are both fancy talkers explaining away the evidence of everyone's eyes. What's the difference?
Human nature is an actual thing. Since we are all doomed to live trapped inside our own skulls, to have our own orgasms whether or not they are simultaneous with anyone else's, and to eventually die in solitary terror, the individualism you decry is inevitable in all societies no matter how their economics are organized. And in truth, all economies are organized the same way at bottom, no matter what they pretend.
In the end, Cuba could not permanently suppress the impulse for self-seeking economic activity among the population at large. And while it tried to suppress private property and private enterprise, the well-situated players in the state apparatus--the army, the ministries--did and got what they could for themselves. It's no accident that the Soviet Nomenklatura became the kleptocrats of the post-Soviet era. Capitalism is the human condition, as itself or under some other name. These conversations always remind of the Soviet satirical magazine, Krokodil, which mocked that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and Communism is the exact opposite.
Look, Marxism is not a system of ideas, it's an understandable and humane emotional reaction to the sadness of economic life in all societies since the species began. In the caves, the headman took too much and left too little for the others. During the Industrial Revolution, the plutocrats exploited child workers and coal miners and women in sweatshops. Liberals feel what you feel about these things and try to do practical things to mitigate the worst of it. But to fundamentally change the underlying hierarchy of human life, or to set parameters on what is achievable by people (you can make between $X and $Y, not less and not more) isn't just politically impossible to get passed. It's impossible to enforce even if it were. Just like it would be impossible to enforce age limits on human beings (you may not live past 85, we need the space for others, so you. must off yourself for the good of everyone). Human nature won't allow it. Only intellectuals living in their heads and divorced from the urges of normal people could possibly believe in a human nature that doesn't contain the selfish Id.
I agree with everything ... except the part about the children. Children in the Victorian era like children in 21st century Asia aren't forced to work because The Man. Children in these conditions beg to work because in the Victorian era, as in modern Asia, food is so very expensive that if you don't work, you also don't eat.
That's a great point. Re-reading this it struck me. First I thought— outside of: an abundant inexpensive energy first world, food is an extremely difficult problem.
Then it occurred to me: Food isn't incredibly inexpensive, globalism has levelized food prices. Because of capitalism, we're so incredibly wealthy, food is incredibly inexpensive to us.
Trade, capitalism, commerce….is bound up in human evolution and the development of religions; it’s the framework we have to work within, like gravity. “tower of verbiage signifying nothing”. Add into that the massive PhD icebergs….it’s meaningless obfuscation.
Your last line lines up with a thought I was having. Marxism, in its applied iterations, reminds me a bit of "The Forbidden Planet" where the Krell build a machine of almost limitless power, forgetting that they are deep down savages, and destroy themselves in a single night “Monsters from the id” :)
Put another way, Marxism has produced the most "talk" in human history. That it's the province of philosophical navel-gazing isn't a feature. How about some "walk"? Instead of merely pointing out the existence of reams & reams of "talk," outline *your* vision for how we get there. Yes, liberalism & capitalism do not produce optimal outcomes. Literally everyone knows this; some people are okay with the tradeoffs in the absence of something that might do a better job. What, then, will (or could)? I would sincerely like to read your positive vision rather than just another "Boo capitalism!" (or liberalism) post.
On this point, I had the good fortune three years ago to read David Harvey's The Limits To Capital. One of the key takeaways from that book is that some key tenets of what is described as Marxist economic theory, which are often considered by a certain kind of self-defined Marxist as fundamental "truths" of the doctrine, are in fact more provisional and less final than they are often considered to be, and may well have been revised by Marx and Engels had they lived to do so. In other words, Marx and Engels developed an interesting program for further research rather than a corpus that could or should have been treated as a final body of doctrine, let alone the official dogma of political parties and governments.
The breadth of "Marxist" thought makes it perfect "motte and bailey" material. Can we, perhaps, judge Marxism as a working political philosophy based on the outcomes it's achieved?
It's the very size of the corpus that makes it vague. Maoism and Trotskyism are both Marxist but very different. When I am in West Bengal a marvel at the communist party flags which are all marked to distinguish which school of communism they are promoting.
I think socialism's curse is that a one-page summary sounds so attractive to young adults who think it's too much effort to study the whole corpus, so lots of socialist coded output (as in tweets, blog posts) is indeed incoherent, like that guy whose tagline is the hammer and sickle plus the anarchy A.
Something closer to this, which is clearly sympathetic to Socialism but also clear-eyed about the functions it would need to fulfill to be an appealing alternative to Capitalism, would be welcome:
Yes, I completely agree. Freddie also takes as a *premise* that liberal capitalism is incapable of producing broad prosperity and then uses that to illustrate a contradiction in Hayes' thinking, when that's exactly the thing Hayes and others would disagree with him on! (I do agree with the point that equality of opportunity is a pretty silly concept, though.)
Indeed, Capitalism is historically quite good at producing broad prosperity, especially when paired with a government and a tax policy engineered toward that same aim. Those are problems of political systems, though, not economic ones.
This hits the nail on the head. Exactly where on the “Political” spectrum can you realistically set the control mechanism for the “Market” to achieve the desired “Outcome.” Both Liberalism and Marxism are unhelpful in this regard. Without a well articulated regulatory framework adapted to the political environment it’s a mess. You have to make the adjustments from the bottom up by marshaling political will. The old “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Liberalism allows individuals to use voluntary transactions--markets--to pursue their ends.
Having a limited government that protects individual rights and fosters the conditions where peace and prosperity can exist is what classical liberalism is all about.
Of course, the Rawls style of liberalism has strayed from the classical liberalism of limited government such that we have way too much regulation, taxation, and redistribution that destroys efficiency (and therefore prosperity). Nowhere is this clearer than in say the UK.
Marxism typically does not do things like limit government power or foster peace and prosperity via voluntary transactions. So for whatever failures liberalism has, it's surely less "unhelpful" than Marxism in that the latter starts off with extremely bad foundations.
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
So you are agreeing that people can starve to death under capitalism, its just not because there isn't enough food. Those social guardrails you are talking about, to a lot of people *that* counts as communism, because its the state interfering with a free market outcome,which is that people starve. You're correct that a good part of capitalism is that we tend to produce plenty of food, but we also end up throwing a lot of that food in dumpsters, which we then lock, so that poor people don't get golroceries for free and screw up the economy. That's not as bad as famine, I'll admit, but its not a great advertisement for our prosperity.
We're going a little out of bounds here. Of course people can starve under capitalism. People can starve in Beverly Hills, if they are denied sufficient calories, and that denial doesn't require an economic system in order for it to take place; captivity and abuse alone are more than capable of starving someone, no government needed.
And yes, the uninitiated may call regulation "socialism", but we are initiated, aren't we?
I'm not talking about regulation, I'm talking about food stamps, which I'm pretty sure does count as socialism, albeit market-based socialism. But the government is redistributing people's wealth to give others more access to food. I think that's amazing, but my point is that even people who are pro capitalism should be honest about its potential failures, one of which is that it has no mechanism to address resource inequality as long as the market stays in equilibrium. We have to go outside it to do that. Its totally fair to sau that communism seems "too far" outside the market, but then you have to articulate exactly where the line is, and also, you have the undenviable task of demonstrating that capitalism can still function with all these adjustments for taxes and social programs and all the stuff that makes living under capitalism not an absolute nightmare. Because a lot of data suggests it may not be possible, long-term, to skim off the top of the market and somehow still leave it functional enough to grow at a pace where it doesn't collapse.
People can starve to death by walking off of a trail in the woods and getting lost. You aren't merely stretching a point equating communism with "interfering in a free market outcome, which is that people starve", you are breaking it. Western liberal capitalism 'interferes' with the market routinely, beginning with enforcing contracts, imposing minimum wage, OSHA, limitations on who can work at what age, mandatory social security and about a million other ways. Respectfully, the farther one goes on the Progressive spectrum, the more tendentious and less tethered the logic and reasoning becomes.
As a final note, kindly provide one example of any element of 20th or 21st century American society standing by and letting people starve in the name of the free market.
So we have to start in the 20th century after huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders pushed for comprehensive reforms? We aren't going to start in 19th century England, or any other period since industrial capitalism became a thing? Because I guarantee you people starved, and died, because their labor wasn't considered valuable enough to warrant feeding them.
I don't really care what you think of my logic, but the way in which you get to cherry pick both what is and is not communism and also what is and is not capitalism.
Well, I'm pretty sure we *were* talking about relatively modern times, but maybe not. I missed the "huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders". When was that? And what was accomplished?
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.
Excellent point. Hunger, for example, is a solved problem. A lot of political theory couldn't assume this fact because for almost all of human history it was an immediate, deadly concern to all but the absolute richest. Virtually everyone was one bad harvest away from death. It is precisely the profit motive and the technological cascade dating from prior to the Industrial Revolution that led to the path of global abundence of food, and it's the modern capitalist states that are its stewards. If we ran the simulation again, would a non-profit motive system have managed this?
Exactly the example I had in mind. Much of the Leftist discourse boils down to well-meaning middle-to-upper-middle-class Marxists in the West obsessing over a belief that their citizenry is somehow entitled to "more", because they have no experience of having "nothing."
I don't defend it. Merely point out that capitalism dramatically improving the lot of many people by doing things like improving crop yields and enhancing technology better than socialism could isn't really a ding against Marxism. Marx would have granted capitalism's great power in that regard. I believe his criticism had to do with the cost, the unjustness of it, and that that inherent unjustness would spell its doom. Again, as I understand Marxism; I'm no expert. I don't believe that to be correct, at least no more than it's correct to say that every massively powerful institution falls from within, not from without.
Exactly. Marx was predicting the natural failure state of capitalism, which is when innovation and productivity are no longer the driving forces of profit but everything has been optimized to a point where the only way for capitalists to continue to profit is to destroy wages. The reason this hasn't happened is because it turns out there were a lot of industries that were only at the beginning stages of capitalist innovation at the time Marx was writing, and I think Marx himself would be surprised and how much runway capitalism turned out to have by innovating entirely new service industries and telecommunications industries into existence. Which, good! But now we are at a point where we can basically see the same dynamic in every single industry that only a decade or two ago was thought to be at the frontier of boundless new potential and they are all flagging and stuttering. The service industries can't afford to pay people a wage they want, and all the fancy disruptive tech industries are instituting massive layoffs and pushing AI innovation in the desperate hope that it will open up some new field of profit because otherwise they aren't going to be able to sustain the share prices that make them seem immune to the economic gravity everyone else is dealing with.
As a narrative, it makes sense. But then, Marx's narrative made sense in his time, too. I'm ever suspicious of (but open to) the idea that now is a time of special stagnation rather than simply much slower overall productivity / growth increase. Perhaps under Marxism that makes now the right time for the revolution. But I can't help but think that, at any point over the previous 150 years or so, you could make an argument for "now" and you'd have missed out on a hell of a lot.
The thing is, it doesn't have to stagnate, it just has to slow down sufficiently. If economic productivity doesn't out pace the supply of workers in any particular field, then wages will go down. That's not Marx's observation, btw, that's Adam Smith.
I mean, I don't think its automatic. Presumably we could collectively find ourselves in a new corpo-feudalism, where the vast majority of people are serfs, for whom every decision from how much they get fed to how many children they can afford is directly tied to corporate profit margins. It sounds sci-fi dystopian, but its not that hard to imagine, or that different from your average company town in the age before big unions and workers reforms.and it doesn't have to be completely dystopic, maybe the company will spring for a football field or a park, or heavily subsidized internet pornography to keep people happy. But only a relatively few people will really thrive.
Presumably that's why so much of communism is built around outreach and organization and prosthelytizing because people needed to be aware of the alternatives way before that stage to have the best chance of determining a more optimal outcome.
Nah, Marx was far less insane than his average follower.
And in one sense he was very right--the prosperity brought from industrialization and capitalism inevitably brings calls for redistribution via political means. (Most industrialized countries do this via social democracy, not via Socialism, however.)
It’s always mildly frustrating reading your pieces, as you give a diagnosis of modern political psychologies that are absolutely spot on, but your economic views are always vague and naive (exactly like the people you criticise). For what it is worth, I would probably be considered a ‘liberal’ in the US - the fundamental basis of my view is that I am in the business of constructing large scale societal machines to improve people’s lives, and however bad the capitalist machine is, the socialist machine has fundamental design flaws that make it even worse. Is there anywhere where you do actually articulate your full economic arguments and views, because in pieces like this it just read like you complaining that things aren’t good now so *clearly* capitalism is a good thing and engaging in the exact same vibes based reasoning as most other left wingers?
Criticizing Marxism as vague, when it's the largest philosophical corpus produced in human history, is... interesting.
I think he just means your defense/description of it.
And also one of the most fragmented and divided. Calling yourself a ‘Marxist’ reveals almost nothing without a further elaboration of what you take that to mean (in actual policy terms, not vague aspirations like ‘end exploitation of the proletariat’ or whatever).
Freddie: please, for us ignorant slobs, just go ahead and do a Marxism 101 piece one day. You needn't blush to admit your writing is a bit more engaging and accessible, to the average 21st c. reader, than that of Marx and Engels.
This would actually be great. I'm a bit of an ignorant slob when it comes to the ins-and-outs of the philosophy as well.
And it works well where?
Well where in your view does capitalism work well? There are many more capitalist states than "Marxist" states unless you use an absurdly elastic definition of "Marxism". Many of these capitalist states are very, very poor. Even in the richest of these states (the US) there are millions of impoverished children, people who die preventable deaths because they couldn't afford the doctor, etc, etc. Why are you so sure things couldn't be better?
Oh come on. This is just a tad 'perfect is the enemy of the good' is it not?
And exactly HOW have things NOT gotten 'better' over the last ~2 centuries?
Living standards have improved in places like the former USSR and China, too, though, so it is not necessarily the case that progress is impossible in the absence of capitalism.
It's a question of if things are as good as they could be. I think we can avoid having millions of children grow up in poverty. Others think it is a necessary evil.
If you think improvements in Russia and China, etc have occurred due to an ABSCENCE of Capitalism, then you are just simply delusional.
And what about the rest of the USSRs accomplishments? Was winning WWII and putting a man in space also possible only because of latent, tacit capitalism, whereas everything objectionable there happened because of Marx?
You NEED "leftism bad" to be true. It's blinkering you
What about them?
I think you have urself wrapped in knots, tbh.
I'm not opposed to 'leftism' in the slightest...would even say it's necessary, etc. Neither am I some capitalist zealot. Capitalism is in many regards Leftism personified if we view its rise as an antidote to Monarchy and Feudalism, etc. Economic systems and the outcomes produced from them are nothing if not dynamic, and MUST be, let's say, 'tweaked' to adapt to various things. So, like many, I'm not 'anti-left' any more than I'm 'pro-right'. Cuz that's just silly.
As to the whole 'there's good stuff about Marxism' angle, that's just pure ideology, and, as such, more pretzel logic.
The Soviets would have gotten stomped flat without the U.S. shoveling food, resources, and war materiel at them. Without American food the U.S.S.R. would have had to ground its air force due to lack of fuel, would have starved in 1942 and 1943, and would not have been able to clothe, arm, or transport its military to the front. Soviet military production was of a horrifically-bad quality, which got huge numbers of their own people killed (and Soviet heavy industry had largely been funded and built by American capitalists in the 20's and 30's anyway). Soviet military tactics - especially in the early war - were hobbled by paranoid political concerns, leading to a complete lack of concern for logistics and the avoidable death and maiming of hundreds of thousands.
At the very least, the Marxism didn't lead to the industrial utopia or worker's state that it promised.
lmao you really threw the kitchen sink here. This reads like the cliff notes of a Thomas Sowell book
The "Soviets didn't really win the war" thing has been done to death. If you really can't see why it's wrong, I'm not going to be able to explain it to you. I will say that the things you're pointing out, like that capitalism created soviet heavy industry but that same heavy industry performed poorly, or that the USSR rather than the nazis are responsible for their soldiers deaths because of lack of "concern for logistics", are not persuasive to unbiased people.
Or Sean McMeekin's book.
Yes, capitalism set up huge factories for the Soviets to run, and then the Soviets horribly mismanaged the operation of those plants (e.g. by messing up the case-hardening process for tank armor such that T-34 plates frequently catastrophically failed when struck by ordinance that would otherwise not have penetrated, or by setting quotas of "finished" tanks and completely ignoring quality control, leading to frequent lack of waterproofing, functional electronics, or reliable gearboxes). Of course, the Soviets blamed these problems on "sabotage" instead of thinking for a moment that their system could have problems, or permitting some creative destruction of underperforming operations.
Pretty clear that US production and Soviet manpower were the winning combination.
For a long time 1st-world wealth depended a LOT on resource extraction from 2nd- and especially 3rd-world states. It's not quite as egregious as colonial times now, but it is still very much a thing.
Regardless, have you ever tried to ask yourself what the difference in relative standard of living gains have been between rich and poor over the last two centuries? I don't have the data for this, but I'd be willing to wager that despite both obviously increasing, the former gains vastly outpace the latter.
Or is that working as intended?
And that 'resource extraction' as you deem it is DIRECTLY why industrialization occurred, which in turn has lifted most of the global population out of abject privation! What's ur point here? Has there been exploitation, corruption, unequal outcomes, and unforgivable immorality? Most assuredly. Welcome to human history and civilization. The modern West, Enlightennent, Liberalism, and Captalism has done more to foster the growth and well being of ALL Humanity than anything that has come prior. It's not even debatable...(but folks still try!)
That's of little reprieve to the masses who had to undergo that rapid modernization for the sake of 'progress', as opposed to us who could more or less do it at our own pace because we were the first to do so. The amount of social and economic upheaval that cost the local population is tremendous, in a negative way. Or does that not matter?
Capitalism is not some permanent bedfellow of those ideas you list. And although it has been a predominant feature of modern Western economies, that doesn't mean it goes hand in hand with liberal or Enlightenment values - they aren't mutually inclusive. It's an economic model, not a system of values or a premise for basic human rights.
Except they do go hand in hand. I mean, ffs, let's be real here! Maybe at some point aliens will show up (or angels!) and show us 'The Way', but until then I'll bank on the flawed way it's gone up til now. I want to be clear here!!: I am acutely aware of the pitfalls, incongruities, etc that are, for the most part, inherent in modern 'progress' of the last several centuries. I also am of the firm belief that we, meaning everyone on the planet, will continue to innovate and improve on what we have so far.
No, they don't go hand in hand. Are you actually trying to say that Liberal and Enlightenment values could not have flourished without capitalism? How on earth can you make that assumption, because it happened to happen in the Western world? Correlation is not causation, and it isn't interdependence either.
We really didn't "do it at our own pace." The "first world" had just as much of a technology shock as it industrialized as the third world does now. Remember that the very word "Luddite" comes from violent riots by artisanal weavers smashing up newly-proliferating power looms putting them out of business.
I would not say it's "just as much" as a shock as, say, 19th century colonies in Africa and Asia. Come on man, are you really saying that the European craft industry went through just as much hardship as, say, the Bengali famine of '43?
I'm confused what the '43 Bengali famine has to do with industrialization shocks on craft industry. Wasn't that caused by WWII increasing food needs because of war refugees, diverting local food to military use, and damaging the transportation infrastructure that otherwise could have been used to bring in emergency relief?
But yes, things like the Enclosures resulted in massive immiseration of displaced English workers, including widespread starvation, later only barely averted through the introduction of government poor relief (at the request of the capitalists, who didn't want to have to artificially increase wages above subsistence).
As for the gains aspect, it's no surprise that those on the 'upper' end have gained exponentially more than those not in that class. Again, welcome to history. Is it intended? Maybe, at least indirectly? I dunno. It's likely an indirect function of the increase of modern civilization. Again, I'm wondering what ur getting at by articulating these things? Should the 1st world feel guilty? Dunno. Should we at least be aware that inequalities are a serious problem among humans and work diligently, and INTELLIGENTLY, to mitigate the issues that arise as a product of these inequalities? We do. To the point where currently we are stuck navel gazing, somewhere btwn guilt and shame, and are in danger of losing the whole thing.
If you don't have a problem with progress going hand in hand with a widening wealth gap, then you've lost the plot. Because the whole point is to try and provide everyone with a roughly equal change at a meaningful and enjoyable life. If it doesn't matter to you that some people will just always have an easier go at it, then there's no point in arguing for anything here because basic fairness doesn't seem to hold any water for you.
"Is it intended?"
"Maybe?" /shrug
Good lord man.
Did I ever say I didn't have a problem w/incongruities concerning wealth, etc? No. I didn't. Again, what is the fucking point you are trying to make, ffs? Is it that ppl have suffered immeasurably in the arc of progress that has gotten us to the present moment? Cuz they have, and literally NO ONE discounts that. And? Do you honestly think that w/o the advance of industrialization, etc that ANYTHING would have been 'better'? That's not a fucking shrug, pal....it's acknowledgment of reality. Again, can things get better? Ofc...and they are. The Magna Carta and the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are pretty fucking important documents in achieving this 'better'. Finally, your sanctimonious 'good lord' etc betrays your lack of seriousness on this subject. It's just simply adolescent to think, or even dream, that some day all ppl will have 'equal' access to EVERYTHING, including benefits that arise as a result of progress. I'm not even sure they would want to? Again, I dunno. I'd suggest that whole angle is just a tad 'priestly', in a zealous sort of way. I suppose if you need to die on the hill of insisting that 'inequality and unfairness is inherent in the system', or even more absurdly that 'the system' is doing exactly what it's supposed to do (dun, dun, dun!) then so be it. That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Notice how you didn't pay much attention to the next sentence in that response:
What do industrialization, the Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights have to do with Capitalism? You seem to think that Capitalism is this vital thread that runs through liberalism, human rights, and progress in general. And that trying to excise that thread would unravel everything else. Where do you get that idea? Do you really think the world can't have progress without adherence to capitalist doctrine? Or that liberal values would have died on the vine without it?
The entire concept of capitalism is based on a single overarching motivation - greed. Not innovation, nor progress, nor even basic supply and demand...unless it also happens turns a profit. It's not even a governing concept, much less a moral value, yet you seem to think it's this necessary part of human flourishing. Even despite its many flaws, "warts and all" as Loury likes to opine. I mean the stock market is basically just a codified and legalized form of gambling on a massive scale, throwing around people's labor and lives like cheap poker chips at a table most of us never get to see. And you're trying to hold all that up like it's some fucking virtue for christs sake.
No amount of little quality of life tic tacs, like nifty iphone upgrades or 10cents off per gallon, makes up for the fact that all capitalism is really interested in doing is putting more money in the hands of those who either already have it, or are clever and lucky enough to gamble their way into it. It's avarice plain and simple.
You have this all exactly backwards. Unsurprising.
Can you NOT see how this makes his point even more apt?
Every time we try and pin you down on how it would work in practice, you just hand wave it away.
Am I to understand that your definition/conceptualization of Marxism is akin to the von Humboldt philosophy of 'to enquire and create, devoid of external influences'? At least somewhat?
Marxism has a big literature but you are basically the only one here who’s read it! You have a huge captive audience here of people who really want to find high quality leftist thinking, even if most of us are not currently leftists. Why don’t you ever write an article literally telling us something about Marxism?
In particular you point at Bernie socialists as having supposedly abandoned the liberal capitalist system, but I don’t see that at all. They’re seem to me to be broadly normie social democrats, committed to democracy, the rule of law, and for the most part property rights, but advocating for much more muscular state intervention in market failures than US Democrats have been comfortable with. But it sounds like you think the overall system does need to be abandoned. In what way? Do you support a vanguard-led revolution? What kind of political system should they impose? As full of material as the Marxist corpus is, you’re well aware that it’s got a broad mix of positions on these questions, and Marx himself was pretty resistant to describing details of a socialist state, so it’s really quite fair that we have no idea what you actually want. I’d love to find out!
I too would love to see Freddie's discourse on this
Yeah, it seems like Bernie just wants a mixed economy which is further to the left than we have right now. Which makes sense. I don’t think anyone wants to live under a system of *pure* anything, be it capitalism, socialism, monarchy, democracy, etc., and their “true believers,” who usually need to be kept from power altogether. But I did enjoy this piece and agree with the basic principle that equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are a distinction without a difference - though they can be different “North Stars,” if you will, to guide rhetoric and in some cases policy.
But assuming that someone wasn't raised a Marxist and doesn't have the depth of knowledge you have, and wants to have Marxism make the best case it can in the same amount of time we'd give to the various articulations of liberalism that you criticize as insufficient, what would you recommend? This isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know.
Where does this corpus reside?
If only there was a search engine that would let you google "communism reading list" and get a huge swath of books and essays written over a hundred year period that you could peruse at your leisure.
Not sure snark is helpful, in any way.
Are you tone policing everyone in this thread or just the people you don't agree with? You don't have to answer, I can see from all the snarling contempt people are throwing that somehow is not as worth a rebuttal.
Tone policing? Lol. Wtf does that even mean? And ofc no one need answer/comment. The irony of that position is palpable. Who wrote the entirely snarky response? You did. And of what use is it?
You want to defend Marxism? Then do it. Don't expect others to become 'experts' in order to point out the failings and mostly pedantic tenets of some utopian system that has zero chance of EVER being implemented. You know, w/o killing a few million folks here and there. My time would be better spent 'studying' the corpus of astrology....at least no one suffers from astrology.
Yeah, see I appreciate this tone, because at least its honest about what you actually think, instead of pretending that if I put my point forward politely enough you would give a shit. Thank you.
And as a general rule, people don't invalidate an entire ideology on the basis of the failed states it produces or the crimes they commit. If we did, we would have stopped advocating for democracy around the time Athens killed all the people in Melos and then lost the Peloponesian war to Sparta. Or the time the Roman Republic collapsed into despotism. Or the time the French Republic collapsed into despotism, or the US into Civil War, or the Weimar Republic into out and out facism. And yet none of these invalidate what we understand to be the core benefits of Democracy, or the idea that we should improve on it. Only Communism gets held to that standard for some reason.
What a weird response.
K-I'm sure you're correct, as far as that goes. However, go to any bookstore, and look for the Marxist literature shelf. Good luck with that. Ditto any public library. The Jacobin Is hardly the most popular magazine in the country. I can assure you that folks in Eastern Europe do not embrace Marxism. My general familiarity with Western Europe is the same. So, quite frankly, I find the basic assertion risible.
The basic assertion is that there has been a huge amount of writing about communism by economists and political theorists, the fact that you are too lazy to go look for it does not invalidate that claim.
Lotsa stuff written about lotsa stuff. What's ur point?
Oh....snarl, snarl
Marxism.org they have a huge library of pdfs
I'm going to suggest that the Catholic Church and the Royal Shakespeare Society, among many others, have large libraries.
With respect, Freddie, the entire Marxist corpus is a tower of verbiage signifying nothing. The entire edifice is incoherent. Pointing to the volume of writings on Marxism as evidence of the truth of its claims is analogous to saying that all those centuries of Scholasticism proves the correctness of Christian cosmology and eschatology. Lots of writers talking to each other in increasingly tight loops of esoteric mutual masturbation does not result in proof of anything. Aquinas and Gramsci are both fancy talkers explaining away the evidence of everyone's eyes. What's the difference?
Human nature is an actual thing. Since we are all doomed to live trapped inside our own skulls, to have our own orgasms whether or not they are simultaneous with anyone else's, and to eventually die in solitary terror, the individualism you decry is inevitable in all societies no matter how their economics are organized. And in truth, all economies are organized the same way at bottom, no matter what they pretend.
In the end, Cuba could not permanently suppress the impulse for self-seeking economic activity among the population at large. And while it tried to suppress private property and private enterprise, the well-situated players in the state apparatus--the army, the ministries--did and got what they could for themselves. It's no accident that the Soviet Nomenklatura became the kleptocrats of the post-Soviet era. Capitalism is the human condition, as itself or under some other name. These conversations always remind of the Soviet satirical magazine, Krokodil, which mocked that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and Communism is the exact opposite.
Look, Marxism is not a system of ideas, it's an understandable and humane emotional reaction to the sadness of economic life in all societies since the species began. In the caves, the headman took too much and left too little for the others. During the Industrial Revolution, the plutocrats exploited child workers and coal miners and women in sweatshops. Liberals feel what you feel about these things and try to do practical things to mitigate the worst of it. But to fundamentally change the underlying hierarchy of human life, or to set parameters on what is achievable by people (you can make between $X and $Y, not less and not more) isn't just politically impossible to get passed. It's impossible to enforce even if it were. Just like it would be impossible to enforce age limits on human beings (you may not live past 85, we need the space for others, so you. must off yourself for the good of everyone). Human nature won't allow it. Only intellectuals living in their heads and divorced from the urges of normal people could possibly believe in a human nature that doesn't contain the selfish Id.
It's human nature to write big corpus.
I agree with everything ... except the part about the children. Children in the Victorian era like children in 21st century Asia aren't forced to work because The Man. Children in these conditions beg to work because in the Victorian era, as in modern Asia, food is so very expensive that if you don't work, you also don't eat.
That's just generally true outside of modernity. Absent refrigeration and modern agriculture, food and nutrition is an extremely difficult problem.
"outside of modernity"
That's a great point. Re-reading this it struck me. First I thought— outside of: an abundant inexpensive energy first world, food is an extremely difficult problem.
Then it occurred to me: Food isn't incredibly inexpensive, globalism has levelized food prices. Because of capitalism, we're so incredibly wealthy, food is incredibly inexpensive to us.
Trade, capitalism, commerce….is bound up in human evolution and the development of religions; it’s the framework we have to work within, like gravity. “tower of verbiage signifying nothing”. Add into that the massive PhD icebergs….it’s meaningless obfuscation.
Your last line lines up with a thought I was having. Marxism, in its applied iterations, reminds me a bit of "The Forbidden Planet" where the Krell build a machine of almost limitless power, forgetting that they are deep down savages, and destroy themselves in a single night “Monsters from the id” :)
Put another way, Marxism has produced the most "talk" in human history. That it's the province of philosophical navel-gazing isn't a feature. How about some "walk"? Instead of merely pointing out the existence of reams & reams of "talk," outline *your* vision for how we get there. Yes, liberalism & capitalism do not produce optimal outcomes. Literally everyone knows this; some people are okay with the tradeoffs in the absence of something that might do a better job. What, then, will (or could)? I would sincerely like to read your positive vision rather than just another "Boo capitalism!" (or liberalism) post.
On this point, I had the good fortune three years ago to read David Harvey's The Limits To Capital. One of the key takeaways from that book is that some key tenets of what is described as Marxist economic theory, which are often considered by a certain kind of self-defined Marxist as fundamental "truths" of the doctrine, are in fact more provisional and less final than they are often considered to be, and may well have been revised by Marx and Engels had they lived to do so. In other words, Marx and Engels developed an interesting program for further research rather than a corpus that could or should have been treated as a final body of doctrine, let alone the official dogma of political parties and governments.
The breadth of "Marxist" thought makes it perfect "motte and bailey" material. Can we, perhaps, judge Marxism as a working political philosophy based on the outcomes it's achieved?
It's the very size of the corpus that makes it vague. Maoism and Trotskyism are both Marxist but very different. When I am in West Bengal a marvel at the communist party flags which are all marked to distinguish which school of communism they are promoting.
I think socialism's curse is that a one-page summary sounds so attractive to young adults who think it's too much effort to study the whole corpus, so lots of socialist coded output (as in tweets, blog posts) is indeed incoherent, like that guy whose tagline is the hammer and sickle plus the anarchy A.
Something closer to this, which is clearly sympathetic to Socialism but also clear-eyed about the functions it would need to fulfill to be an appealing alternative to Capitalism, would be welcome:
https://jacobin.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black
Yes, I completely agree. Freddie also takes as a *premise* that liberal capitalism is incapable of producing broad prosperity and then uses that to illustrate a contradiction in Hayes' thinking, when that's exactly the thing Hayes and others would disagree with him on! (I do agree with the point that equality of opportunity is a pretty silly concept, though.)
Indeed, Capitalism is historically quite good at producing broad prosperity, especially when paired with a government and a tax policy engineered toward that same aim. Those are problems of political systems, though, not economic ones.
This hits the nail on the head. Exactly where on the “Political” spectrum can you realistically set the control mechanism for the “Market” to achieve the desired “Outcome.” Both Liberalism and Marxism are unhelpful in this regard. Without a well articulated regulatory framework adapted to the political environment it’s a mess. You have to make the adjustments from the bottom up by marshaling political will. The old “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Liberalism allows individuals to use voluntary transactions--markets--to pursue their ends.
Having a limited government that protects individual rights and fosters the conditions where peace and prosperity can exist is what classical liberalism is all about.
Of course, the Rawls style of liberalism has strayed from the classical liberalism of limited government such that we have way too much regulation, taxation, and redistribution that destroys efficiency (and therefore prosperity). Nowhere is this clearer than in say the UK.
Marxism typically does not do things like limit government power or foster peace and prosperity via voluntary transactions. So for whatever failures liberalism has, it's surely less "unhelpful" than Marxism in that the latter starts off with extremely bad foundations.
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/agricultural-adjustment-act
vs.
https://holodomor.ca/resource/holodomor-basic-facts/
So you are agreeing that people can starve to death under capitalism, its just not because there isn't enough food. Those social guardrails you are talking about, to a lot of people *that* counts as communism, because its the state interfering with a free market outcome,which is that people starve. You're correct that a good part of capitalism is that we tend to produce plenty of food, but we also end up throwing a lot of that food in dumpsters, which we then lock, so that poor people don't get golroceries for free and screw up the economy. That's not as bad as famine, I'll admit, but its not a great advertisement for our prosperity.
We're going a little out of bounds here. Of course people can starve under capitalism. People can starve in Beverly Hills, if they are denied sufficient calories, and that denial doesn't require an economic system in order for it to take place; captivity and abuse alone are more than capable of starving someone, no government needed.
And yes, the uninitiated may call regulation "socialism", but we are initiated, aren't we?
I'm not talking about regulation, I'm talking about food stamps, which I'm pretty sure does count as socialism, albeit market-based socialism. But the government is redistributing people's wealth to give others more access to food. I think that's amazing, but my point is that even people who are pro capitalism should be honest about its potential failures, one of which is that it has no mechanism to address resource inequality as long as the market stays in equilibrium. We have to go outside it to do that. Its totally fair to sau that communism seems "too far" outside the market, but then you have to articulate exactly where the line is, and also, you have the undenviable task of demonstrating that capitalism can still function with all these adjustments for taxes and social programs and all the stuff that makes living under capitalism not an absolute nightmare. Because a lot of data suggests it may not be possible, long-term, to skim off the top of the market and somehow still leave it functional enough to grow at a pace where it doesn't collapse.
People can starve to death by walking off of a trail in the woods and getting lost. You aren't merely stretching a point equating communism with "interfering in a free market outcome, which is that people starve", you are breaking it. Western liberal capitalism 'interferes' with the market routinely, beginning with enforcing contracts, imposing minimum wage, OSHA, limitations on who can work at what age, mandatory social security and about a million other ways. Respectfully, the farther one goes on the Progressive spectrum, the more tendentious and less tethered the logic and reasoning becomes.
As a final note, kindly provide one example of any element of 20th or 21st century American society standing by and letting people starve in the name of the free market.
So we have to start in the 20th century after huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders pushed for comprehensive reforms? We aren't going to start in 19th century England, or any other period since industrial capitalism became a thing? Because I guarantee you people starved, and died, because their labor wasn't considered valuable enough to warrant feeding them.
I don't really care what you think of my logic, but the way in which you get to cherry pick both what is and is not communism and also what is and is not capitalism.
Well, I'm pretty sure we *were* talking about relatively modern times, but maybe not. I missed the "huge campaigns by leftist organizers and labor leaders". When was that? And what was accomplished?
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
❤️
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.
Excellent point. Hunger, for example, is a solved problem. A lot of political theory couldn't assume this fact because for almost all of human history it was an immediate, deadly concern to all but the absolute richest. Virtually everyone was one bad harvest away from death. It is precisely the profit motive and the technological cascade dating from prior to the Industrial Revolution that led to the path of global abundence of food, and it's the modern capitalist states that are its stewards. If we ran the simulation again, would a non-profit motive system have managed this?
Exactly the example I had in mind. Much of the Leftist discourse boils down to well-meaning middle-to-upper-middle-class Marxists in the West obsessing over a belief that their citizenry is somehow entitled to "more", because they have no experience of having "nothing."
In fairness, I believe Marx claimed that capitalism was a useful (possibly necessary) precursor to socialism.
Which is even MORE magical thinking.
I don't defend it. Merely point out that capitalism dramatically improving the lot of many people by doing things like improving crop yields and enhancing technology better than socialism could isn't really a ding against Marxism. Marx would have granted capitalism's great power in that regard. I believe his criticism had to do with the cost, the unjustness of it, and that that inherent unjustness would spell its doom. Again, as I understand Marxism; I'm no expert. I don't believe that to be correct, at least no more than it's correct to say that every massively powerful institution falls from within, not from without.
Exactly. Marx was predicting the natural failure state of capitalism, which is when innovation and productivity are no longer the driving forces of profit but everything has been optimized to a point where the only way for capitalists to continue to profit is to destroy wages. The reason this hasn't happened is because it turns out there were a lot of industries that were only at the beginning stages of capitalist innovation at the time Marx was writing, and I think Marx himself would be surprised and how much runway capitalism turned out to have by innovating entirely new service industries and telecommunications industries into existence. Which, good! But now we are at a point where we can basically see the same dynamic in every single industry that only a decade or two ago was thought to be at the frontier of boundless new potential and they are all flagging and stuttering. The service industries can't afford to pay people a wage they want, and all the fancy disruptive tech industries are instituting massive layoffs and pushing AI innovation in the desperate hope that it will open up some new field of profit because otherwise they aren't going to be able to sustain the share prices that make them seem immune to the economic gravity everyone else is dealing with.
As a narrative, it makes sense. But then, Marx's narrative made sense in his time, too. I'm ever suspicious of (but open to) the idea that now is a time of special stagnation rather than simply much slower overall productivity / growth increase. Perhaps under Marxism that makes now the right time for the revolution. But I can't help but think that, at any point over the previous 150 years or so, you could make an argument for "now" and you'd have missed out on a hell of a lot.
The thing is, it doesn't have to stagnate, it just has to slow down sufficiently. If economic productivity doesn't out pace the supply of workers in any particular field, then wages will go down. That's not Marx's observation, btw, that's Adam Smith.
Presumably, this wage drop would be the precipitant or catalyst for the kind of revolution Marx envisioned.
I mean, I don't think its automatic. Presumably we could collectively find ourselves in a new corpo-feudalism, where the vast majority of people are serfs, for whom every decision from how much they get fed to how many children they can afford is directly tied to corporate profit margins. It sounds sci-fi dystopian, but its not that hard to imagine, or that different from your average company town in the age before big unions and workers reforms.and it doesn't have to be completely dystopic, maybe the company will spring for a football field or a park, or heavily subsidized internet pornography to keep people happy. But only a relatively few people will really thrive.
Presumably that's why so much of communism is built around outreach and organization and prosthelytizing because people needed to be aware of the alternatives way before that stage to have the best chance of determining a more optimal outcome.
Nah, Marx was far less insane than his average follower.
And in one sense he was very right--the prosperity brought from industrialization and capitalism inevitably brings calls for redistribution via political means. (Most industrialized countries do this via social democracy, not via Socialism, however.)
I guess start here and then come back for more advanced reading recommendations, if you desire?
Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn)
Michael Newman
https://academic.oup.com/book/32741