marxism: if it were the 'real' deal

[henry quirk]

Pro,

The short answer to 'what would a Marxist society look like' might be something like a link Henry ain't botherin' with.

I wanna read your ideas here.

Probably the biggest noticable difference from western capitalist societies would be: people would work less and have more.

How?

[henry quirk]

flash,

So I'm not the guy to promote Marxism

okay

[promethean75]

A observation that strikes as absurd on the face of it. Consider that with the use of modern technologies and machines, any essential or non-essential commodity (a physical product) could be mass produced by a single person or small group of people, in a relatively short period of time, that would create a surplus far exceeding what that single person or small group of people would ever use.

And yet, the vast majority of people in countries with advanced economies are typically working at least fourty hours a week, while living most of their lives in debt.

Think about this arrangement for a minute. Stay with the premise that a single person is able to produce far more than he'd ever use... and yet somehow he's found himself in a world where he can't get by unless he works a third of his day... and even then he's still in financial debt most if not all of his life. Neither can he 'drop out', if he chose to, without eventually risking legal confrontation with the government.

Just this fundamentally absurd fact alone is enough for me, personally, to consider society as little more than a well crafted joke devised by conspirators who have been working for centuries to make it that way. Today, it's just part of the ideological furniture and accepted by everyone as 'normal', and this is unbelievably naive.

[henry quirk]

with the use of modern technologies and machines, any essential or non-essential commodity (a physical product) could be mass produced by a single person or small group of people, in a relatively short period of time, that would create a surplus far exceeding what that single person or small group of people would ever use.

yep

And yet, the vast majority of people in countries with advanced economies are typically working at least fourty hours a week, while living most of their lives in debt.

yep

why?

(I have an idea of why, but: stirnerite before natural rightist)

Stay with the premise that a single person is able to produce far more than he'd ever use... and yet somehow he's found himself in a world where he can't get by unless he works a third of his day... and even then he's still in financial debt most if not all of his life. Neither can he 'drop out', if he chose to, without eventually risking legal confrontation with the government.

yep

[Sculptor]

I'm told all the world's communisms and socialisms (past and present), aren't the real deal.

I'm told Marx would spin like a top in his grave if he could see how his ideas have been twisted, misinterpreted, etc.

Fine.

Tell me how Marxism is supposed to work: paint me a picture of a working Marxist community, society, nation if the citizens, workers, etc. got it right.

I don't wanna read theory, no: I wanna read your vision of application.

I, of course, will attempt to wreck your utopia.

Who's first?

Answering your question would be like puttin Champagne into a toilet.

[trokanmariel]

First, the premise that a system of exchange is the virtue of civilization would have to be dispensed with.

so: what's the replacement?



paint a picture, trok, of what could be, not of what needs to go

Buzz heading would have to go, which would mean that true civilization could take off.
Buzz heading just means walking around fast, at regular times.

The replacement, is the universal possession of Philosophy Now, in which all people speak the language of the science of need

[henry quirk]

Answering your question would be like puttin Champagne into a toilet.

okay

[Immanuel Can]

Answering your question would be like puttin Champagne into a toilet.

okay

I'm seeing a lot of things that are going away...money, work, anger, injustice, guns, suppression, dishonesty, alienation, laws...all kinds of disappearing stuff, but nothing appearing out of the fog. This is standard, for Neo-Marxism: it's against everything it considers "bad," but has no vision at all of what it is for, or how it's going to produce it.

How do people live without money to buy what they need or want? What's the incentive to invent or create when one gets nothing for doing so? How will a society in which every person gets to make his or her own laws work? Why is it good for people to have no work, since work is part of their identity and their power in the world (and even Marx insisted that mankind "self-actualizes through praxis" i.e. through work)? Why are people who have nothing but what they state allows them going to be less angry? How did moral improvement get rolled into all this? (People who have formerly been susceptible to breaking contracts and being dishonest will suddenly stop?)

This is no positive vision of a Marxist future: it's the old-stock "we hate everything that exists now" version of Marxism. It's utterly uncreative, utterly destructive, and devoid of any positive offering. It says what it wants gone, but doesn't say how the world will be able to function when all the things that are in the status quo are pulled away suddenly. It doesn't tell us what goes in their place.

Unless somebody's got something better. It hasn't been mentioned so far.

[promethean75]

Yer homeboy fukuyama might be right when he says that capitalism is the final stage of history. I mean anything short of violent working class world revolution will end up again as some manifestation of top-down social democracy and the majority of business will remain privatized. 'Fraid this means that the parasite bourgeois class is here to stay like fleas onna dog.

Tell ya what we need. Some cataclysmic event like an asteroid or an alien invasion or a virus so bad it shuts everything totally down. I have faith that once all basic economies are re-primitivised, they will be rebuilt and restructured according to the needs of the working classes. The sheer number of people alone will draw the support of the military - as soldiers are working class too - and co-operative syndicates of production and distribution will begin to slowly evolve out of the rubble. Strong leninesque leaders will rise (like moi) to give the proletariat direction and organization, and a new golden age will dawn.

Verily, I speak thusly.

[henry quirk]

I'm told all the world's communisms and socialisms (past and present), aren't the real deal.

I'm told Marx would spin like a top in his grave if he could see how his ideas have been twisted, misinterpreted, etc.

Fine.

Tell me how Marxism is supposed to work: paint me a picture of a working Marxist community, society, nation if the citizens, workers, etc. got it right.

I don't wanna read theory, no: I wanna read your vision of application.

I, of course, will attempt to wreck your utopia.

Who's first?

[promethean75]

In other news, following my assessment of the forum, my preliminary findings suggest that the resident anti-marxists are too far gone to warrant any real effort from myself or my colleagues to reeducate them. We note that conservative ideology and right-wing propaganda has completely subsumed western intellectualism and once again, sabotaged any potential for philosophical reform. We therefore conclude that our project must be abandoned and that we, as Nietzsche once put it, 'should kick what is already falling'.

[promethean75]

Um henry, Marx and Engels expressly argued against this notion of a 'utopia' and a 'workers paradise' and that 'every is equal'. These ideas are exaggerated caricatures of Marxist theory put into your head by conservatives who know as little about mar....

Oh nevermind.

[henry quirk]

Where, dear, pro, did I ask for anyone's idea of utopia or worker's paradise?

All I'm askin' for: a picture of a working Marxist community, society, nation if the citizens, workers, etc. got it right.

Ain't no one stepped up yet: which is peculiar in a place with so many willin' to defend marxist theory.

[Immanuel Can]

'Fraid this means that the parasite bourgeois class is here to stay like fleas onna dog.

Well, in Marx's analysis, the "bourgeousie" was the mercantile middle class, not the elite rich of the aristocracy. So you would have to say that the mercantile middle class comes closest to describing OUR middle class. But most people in the West are IN the middle class, and certainly they are, relative to the world average. So the Marxist revolution becomes not the "proles" overthrowing the "bourgeois," but the bourgeois eating its own. There really is no "proletarian" class anymore, because factory labour is pretty much dead in the West.

I have faith that once all basic economies are re-primitivised, they will be rebuilt and restructured according to the needs of the working classes.

Wow. That is faith indeed.

What gives you reason for such faith?

The alternative is much more historically likely: that out of chaos, people will look for a single, strong leader, and things will devolve into tyranny...or maybe a new monarchical order...or worse, that society will become viciously tribal again. What gives you reason to think the proles can profit from chaos, since they are a small and shrinking class now, and have no power in the first place?

P.S. -- And if you remember the Peterloo Massacre, you'll probably rethink the idea that soldiers regard themselves as proles.

[henry quirk]

Mannie,

I'm glad the LARPer has you to debate theory with.

I thought he had promise, but *sigh* no, he doesn't.