Intelligent Conversation about Karl Marx, Socialism and Communism

[HorizonParty2021]

One of my favorite podcasters, Lex Fridman interviews Richard Wolff on these subjects.

[monteparnas]

Listening to it a little at a time, seems promising, thank you!

[HorizonParty2021]

Listening to it a little at a time, seems promising, thank you!

Quite welcome.

[AnubisXy]

In general, I think Marx was right about some things and wrong about others. Historically, especially pre-Industrial Age, I don't think that a lot of human history fits into his ideas concerning Class Warfare. Especially when you're looking at kingdoms run by actual kings, his stuff doesn't work. And there were large empires like the Mongols where his idea of classism just didn't fit because, while the Mongols did have some idea of class, it was incredibly fluid. Now, of course, there was tension between the poor and the elite, more so in some places (you can't look at the history of Rome or Athens without seeing the struggle between the poor and the wealthy), but I don't know that it was necessarily the fundamental struggle in history and there were a lot of other concepts that were important too.

Now, once we get into the industrial age where money started to become more important, and landed gentry and inherited wealth started pushing a class/wealth based system I think some of his ideas were more accurate. And I think, when you look at what's going on in the current world, even just in the US and western countries, with a massive growing gap between the poor, the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy and then you throw in landowners and non-land owners and how many people are being priced out of not just the housing market but even being able to rent homes to the point where people often can't even live in the same cities where they work... well, you are definitely seeing more of a struggle between the poor and the elite these days than you did fifty or sixty years ago.

Really when it came to pointing out the problems with post-Industrial Revolution Capitalism, and if you look at the social and economic problems of the times in which Das Kapital was written (a nearly complete lack of a social safety net for people, lack of workers safety rules, or food safety rules, or environmental safety, etc) he was pretty much right on. And I believe his argument that if these problems were not addressed then eventually the people would reach a breaking point, would revolt and seek a way to address those issues themselves was absolutely correct.

When Marx began releasing his works, it was a lightning bolt and a call to action, not just for the poor but also for the wealthy. Rich people read his books and thought, "This sort of revolution could happen and it'll be me against the wall." You saw Communist uprisings in places, and during the Great Depression in the US there was a serious fear that Communists would tap into people who were upset and start an uprising here. So there was a concerted effort by the government, and supported even from many wealthy business owners, to try and create a strong middle class. A strong middle class is the greatest deterrent against Communism. Once people get a certain amount of wealth and a home and economic stability, they're not going to support any sort of economic revolution because they'll stand to lose more than they could gain.

Unfortunately since the fall of the USSR and the fact that Communism is no longer viewed as a threat, the government and businesses support for keeping the middle class strong has started to backslide. The size of the middle class in the US and other western countries has slowly been shrinking. In the US the middle class has fallen under 50% of the population and low income Americans now make up almost 1/3rd of the population. As more people fall into poverty and can't afford things like rent, you'll start seeing more support growing for socialism, communism, eating the rich, and other radical forms of economic or gastronomic reapportion.

Now, like I said earlier, Marx was right about some stuff and absolutely wrong about other stuff. Communism is simply non-sustainable longterm. Even in the absolute best of all possible circumstances where there was no need for violence and everyone agrees to begin sharing their wealth and their goods, Communism would still not be able to last more than three generations at the maximum. By that point people would have been born and raised in a system that never experienced any problems with capitalism, and human nature and greed will convince people to start trying to use capitalistic ideas. It's a dream, maybe a nice dream in some ways and a nightmare in others, but it's not something that could last in the long term without some sort of science-fiction based assistance (like a government and society fully controlled by impartial machines or something).

At best you can get some form of Democratic Socialism, such as you see in certain European countries. But often that's funded by governments nationalizing resources and then using the profits from selling those resources to fund strong social safety nets.

But anyway, I think that Marx was right in the general idea that if the needs of the citizens/workers are not met, and if they feel that they are being exploited and taken advantage of, then eventually they will revolt and institute a system which meets their needs. That doesn't have to be Communism (and I again I don't think Communism would work). There are other systems though, which would probably include things like more legal protections for workers, a stronger social safety net for citizens and possibly some level of nationalization of companies or resources.

[Kammerer]

The size of the middle class in the US and other western countries has slowly been shrinking.

While technically true, this obscures global trends of middle-class growth. Because world-wide the middle-class has been rapidly expanding, from 1.8 billion in 2009 to about 3.5 billion people in 2017 — more than half of the world population. Marxists tend to point finger at the ultra-rich and say "Only an extreme minority ever become ultra-rich and they tend to have an ultra-rich background. Therefore, capitalism doesn't work, ha ha!" And the ultra-rich are a problem (and the grotesque extent to which they get ultra-richer is a root cause for other inequality problems). But what capitalism has repeatedly proven itself capable of is lifting people from poverty into the middle class. I will also add that historically communism has failed at curbing the elites and wealth inequality, so once we acknowledge these flaws of capitalism - communism doesn't answer them either.

Wolff in the video's section on Capitalism makes emotional attacks, claiming that Capitalism failed to stop famines. But a simple look at the Wikipedia page "List of famines" will tell you that the overwhelming majority of famines happen during wars, as a deliberate measure of oppression by one local power or another. You can't "buy" your way out of a typical famine, because in a typical famine people are getting aggressively starved by an army.

Currently, my economic capitalist position is the support for strong worker unions as an equalizer enabling fair wage and working conditions negotiations.

[AnubisXy]

While technically true, this obscures global trends of middle-class growth. Because world-wide the middle-class has been rapidly expanding, from 1.8 billion in 2009 to about 3.5 billion people in 2017 — more than half of the world population. Marxists tend to point finger at the ultra-rich and say "Only an extreme minority ever become ultra-rich and they tend to have an ultra-rich background. Therefore, capitalism doesn't work, ha ha!" And the ultra-rich are a problem (and the grotesque extent to which they get ultra-richer is a root cause for other inequality problems). But what capitalism has repeatedly proven itself capable of is lifting people from poverty into the middle class. I will also add that historically communism has failed at curbing the elites and wealth inequality, so once we acknowledge these flaws of capitalism - communism doesn't answer them either.

Communism isn't an answer and won't ever be an answer.

And while capitalism can help people get into the middle and upper class, what can help more is strong social safety nets, easy access to education, things like rent controls, access to food, childcare, healthcare, reliable public transportation, etc. The most important thing for people getting into the middle class is ensuring that they aren't living paycheck to paycheck and that they're able to save up enough money to get the things they will need to climb up into the middle class, like a car, or a house, or a retirement fund.

Capitalism on its own can help some people, but many, many more fall through the cracks without some sort of assistance. Really, you have to have some level of socialism and government intervention in the marketplace in order to set a higher ground floor and make it easier for people to climb up into the middle class, as well as to ensure that that people in the middle class who run into hard times don't fall into poverty. I think the argument really just comes down to how much intervention is necessary.

At this point in time, in the US, Canada and Europe, we're seeing more and more people fall through the cracks. And lot of the problems we're seeing are simply the aftershocks of Covid - many places had a halt on rent payments, so now rent is skyrocketing. Covid caused various shutdowns and those supply chain issues are hitting people. And, of course, Covid itself did a lot of damage to the medical system and many nurses and doctors chose to retire after overworking.

But something needs to happen and if people keep falling behind, and falling out the middle class, or just feeling like they're falling behind and don't have as good of a lifestyle as their parents did, they'll start turning towards more radical ideas.

Wolff in the video's section on Capitalism makes emotional attacks, claiming that Capitalism failed to stop famines. But a simple look at the Wikipedia page "List of famines" will tell you that the overwhelming majority of famines happen during wars, as a deliberate measure of oppression by one local power or another. You can't "buy" your way out of a typical famine, because in a typical famine people are getting aggressively starved by an army.

Arguing about famine is interesting. Especially since some of the biggest famines in recent history, and in general history (the Great Chinese Famine, the Holodomor and the Khmer Rouge famine) occurred under self-proclaimed Communist governments. To be fair, those famines were largely deliberate and were intentionally carried out as a form of population control and genocide by tyrannical regimes. Still, it feels very awkward to point towards famines and use as a way to attack Capitalism.

[Mr Sharp]

At best you can get some form of Democratic Socialism, such as you see in certain European countries. But often that's funded by governments nationalizing resources and then using the profits from selling those resources to fund strong social safety nets.

But anyway, I think that Marx was right in the general idea that if the needs of the citizens/workers are not met, and if they feel that they are being exploited and taken advantage of, then eventually they will revolt and institute a system which meets their needs. That doesn't have to be Communism (and I again I don't think Communism would work). There are other systems though, which would probably include things like more legal protections for workers, a stronger social safety net for citizens and possibly some level of nationalization of companies or resources.

Living in one of those European countries, and having seen that social safety net gradually tighten around a growing sub-population of social dependents as governments oscillate on how much is solidarity and how much is charity while the free global trading system that originally made welfare states possible after WWII has been steadily destabilizing the last fifteen years, I'd like to add that that's still an unproven concept over the long term as well.

I'm also not a scholar of economic philosophy, but living where I do, something I've always found fundamentally disturbing is people accepting generosity of the collective in the form of government benefits and initiatives with entitlement rather than gratitude. A system where you're specifically encouraged to take it for granted that you get to take from other people's earnings to support yourself is never going to be stable or fair to my mind, because that's never not going to be a recipe for class tension and conflict.

To me, even leaving aside the apparent impracticality of implementing communism without instant authoritarianism, it and the Marxist thought process smack of that entitlement with very little appreciation of what it actually means, between humans, for someone else to work extra hard or give away what was supposed to be theirs so you can have a chance too. I just don't see how you're going to get a healthy or moral society when your first step is to trivialize that.

[Heavy Arms]

I feel like it's worth putting something into perspective here:

Humans have been on Earth for ~300K years. To be generous, the concept of civilization that requires formal governmental institutions and economic structures has only been around for ~10K years. Everything from the earliest city-states to modern superpowers represents about 3% of humanity's "stability." In this sense, there has never been a truly stable governmental or economic system relative to a meaningful time scale. None of them have latest in a set form for more than a few centuries at best (despite claims to long term civilizations, we know there have still been radical shifts in government and economic policies within those long-lived civilizations).

Civilization is unstable because we're making it up as we go along. We're constantly tinkering with it and that tinkering usually comes with massive assumptions that never generate anything that's going to last more than the last dozen things we tried.

To the end, one needs to consider is (1) one stable political-economic system even a good thing to aim for, and (2) are humans even wired to handle our own invention?

We survived for hundreds of thousands of years without and of these -isms. We evolved instincts based on that massive period of time, based on millions of years of instincts inherited from our primate ancestors. Any talk of long term stability instead of planned political instability, is going to need a much deeper dive into human psychology and natural history than normally comes up in these sorts of discussions.

[Mr Sharp]

I feel like it's worth putting something into perspective here:

Humans have been on Earth for ~300K years. To be generous, the concept of civilization that requires formal governmental institutions and economic structures has only been around for ~10K years. Everything from the earliest city-states to modern superpowers represents about 3% of humanity's "stability." In this sense, there has never been a truly stable governmental or economic system relative to a meaningful time scale. None of them have latest in a set form for more than a few centuries at best (despite claims to long term civilizations, we know there have still been radical shifts in government and economic policies within those long-lived civilizations).

Civilization is unstable because we're making it up as we go along. We're constantly tinkering with it and that tinkering usually comes with massive assumptions that never generate anything that's going to last more than the last dozen things we tried.

To the end, one needs to consider is (1) one stable political-economic system even a good thing to aim for, and (2) are humans even wired to handle our own invention?

We survived for hundreds of thousands of years without and of these -isms. We evolved instincts based on that massive period of time, based on millions of years of instincts inherited from our primate ancestors. Any talk of long term stability instead of planned political instability, is going to need a much deeper dive into human psychology and natural history than normally comes up in these sorts of discussions.

That other 97% of the human story happened on the other side of massive climate fluctuations that would have sent our civilizations back to the stone age, and we're constantly discovering new evidence that people were more and more cohesive and advanced before those catastrophes. I wouldn't be so quick to assume either that we haven't been playing the society game for more than 10.000 years or that our current paradigm isn't a product of a much longer line of experimentation.

And frankly, I'd say we pretty much have it figured out in terms of a stable system of economic policy when it comes to building healthy economies and maintaining the peace. The contrasts and periods of consistent improvement in the past century are just too stark to say that we've made no significant advancement. There are kinks to iron out, but even the biggest bugs in terms of policy don't seem to be able to truly sink the ship. The threats that system is facing are all coming from the outside, like the other systems over which it hasn't extended yet and the fact that we aren't living on a stable planet, and short-sighted investments or developments we had no idea would undermine us to this extent but which should be easily fixable over the next century if we actually try. Like the fact that we all stopped having kids thirty-five to fifty years ago after moving to the cities, which apparently means that you start running out of experienced labor thirty-five to fifty years later. Lesson learned. Hopefully.

That people in the first world are seeing economic recessions and tightening in living conditions as signs that the economy is failing and wrong is just evidence of how well the system works. We don't even realize just how far we'd really have to fall for this not to be a massive improvement over the last five hundred years, let alone ten thousand.

[Heavy Arms]

That other 97% of the human story happened on the other side of massive climate fluctuations that would have sent our civilizations back to the stone age,...

Yes, that's my point. Every current political and economic model we're talking about is built on assumptions that we know aren't going to last over time. Even if we address human made climate instability, the natural cycles of Earth over time aren't things any systems we currently have or have even put to realistic models, are prepared to handle if they lasted that long.

This is, ultimately, what I mean about planned instability. We've seen how much minor natural climate shifts have had radical impacts on human civilizations; mostly because they're not built to be adaptable to nature. When discussing and analyzing these -isms, we have to decide if we're really only looking at how they'll work until the next major climate shift happens, or if we're going to assume that the goal is for them to endure that, which requires a very radical rethinking of how to build elasticity into the system than any Marxist based models truly account for (though other models don't really do well with it either).

[quote]And frankly, I'd say we pretty much have it figured out in terms of a stable system of economic policy when it comes to building healthy economies and maintaining the peace.[/qoute]

Do we? Where has this been effectively demonstrated and under what definitions of healthy economies or peace? In the past 100 years, which decade hasn't has a major global economic crisis that's still impacting things today on some level? When was the last decade without a major armed conflict (which tends to be hard on our economic systems as it bleeds into countries not actively engaged on top of war always being a major economic problem for the countries directly involved)?

Ideals we can't effectively put into practice don't sound like us having figured it out. In most human endeavors you ave to eventually put your models into practice and show their functional value.

The contrasts and periods of consistent improvement in the past century are just too stark to say that we've made no significant advancement.

Sure, there's been advancement in parts of the world. That doesn't mean we have it figured out, and it doesn't mean there haven't been plenty of regressions as well.

There are kinks to iron out, but even the biggest bugs in terms of policy don't seem to be able to truly sink the ship.

Haven't is very different from couldn't.

If the war in Ukraine has one stray Russian missile land in a NATO country, we could end up in WIII but with both sides having a lot of nukes left from the Cold War (and the Russians have repeatedly threatened to use them to keep NATO from ding more to help Ukraine). Even if that doesn't happen, if Russia gets to just annex a giant chunk of Ukraine in the name of peace, how does that end in improved economic stability or peaceful international relations when it just proves that autocrats with enough military might can just go to war and chip away at their neighbors each time they do. We are exceptionally lucky the ship didn't sink during the most fluid parts of this one war, and the ship is still in very rough condition as the war's settled into a slog.

Or we can look at the political unrest in the US with the Dobbs decision. The US is primed for a civil war, and has maybe 4 years to change things before politically motivated violence is going to escalate to a scale that's nearly impossible to back off from. Given both the political and economic role the US has in the global order, how many scenarios lead to the ship sinking? How long can everyone else hold out in the US enters a civil war and it starts to drag on?

There are paths through these things, but they are narrow and treacherous. It's very easy for the side of a socialist utopia to finally have the power to enact such a vision only for the main deck of the boat to already be been the waves. Marxism doesn't really have an answer here because it wasn't envisioned in such a reality. It doesn't factor in how the global existence threat of nuclear war or climate change getting even worse because of a major conventional war, can sabotage claiming a moment of political upheaval to gain the popular will to enact a better system. Those risks weren't there, and Marxist thought hasn't really produced better answer than anyone else in the meantime.

Lesson learned. Hopefully.

Again... where has this lesson been learned? No Marxist rooted economic policy has successfully addressed the human tendency to reduce child rearing as comfort increases. It's not just a rural vs. urban thing either (India has been trying to reduce population growth for awhile being their cites can't handle it). It's an instinctive human behavior that happens regardless of culture or institutions. Wealth, health, and generational stability leads us to have less kids and put more resources into each individual child because it's a perceived maximal use of resources. Increase our brains' time spent in subsistence thinking, the more kids we have because our brains switch over to playing the odds some survive to grow the population rather than trying to give as much rearing as possible to a few.

As I said, psychology and natural history aren't things that get talked about in this. Instead we see bad correlations like you just made where urbanization is linked to decreased birth rates despite ample evidence that's not actually a casual relationship and other factors matter more.

But, of course, that leads to very complex moral/ethic debates around how do you build a society with a stable reproductive rate if that means making your citizens' lives less ideal than they could be? Does a socialist society use the power of the state to ensure a level of poverty to encourage natural human behavioral breeding? Does it use the power of the state to claim baseline genetic material to produce fetuses and make surrogacy a voluntary job? A conscriptable job? Do we just let the lack of kids diminish economic productivity until things get bad enough instincts kick in?

None of those sound like "good" answers to me. But you look at Japan and you don't see any bright future in just trying convince people to have more kids for the national good through incentives alone.

That people in the first world are seeing economic recessions and tightening in living conditions as signs that the economy is failing and wrong is just evidence of how well the system works.

Which system? There hasn't been one system in the "first world" in that period of time to pin this on.

[monteparnas]

Which system? There hasn't been one system in the "first world" in that period of time to pin this on.

Not only that, it also misses that the world is, and has always been, a complex ecology of human societies.

It is easy to point to one or a group of societies and analyze them as closed systems, but they're not. Their existence affects and is affected by others in several ways. As long as there is civil unrest, war and famine in the world, we can't say "the system" works, we can say the "current ecology of systems" works for some, and even then, maybe not for long.

There are historical signs that as a society we have been experimenting continual, although not constant, improvements to our systems at least since we developed writing. Which makes sense, as among other things it makes easier to pass on your experiences even when you fail. But from there to say that we figured out it is a high bar.

[Kammerer]

The threats that system is facing are all coming from the outside

I would disagree with that. A major developed flaw in modern capitalism is the extreme wealth inequality between the ultra-rich and everyone else. There was a period in the last century where the wealthy elites were only "many times more wealthy" than the middle-class compared to the current "incomprehensibly, categorically more wealthy" than the middle-class. And this shift, spurred by technological development and a number of crippling crises, led to the destruction of many social ladders, in turn promoting further and deeper inequality. This is a genuine, internal issue, and it needs to be solved. You can't eat the rich, because they are not that rich compared to monthly government expenses. But they do need to be deflated and brought down to the level. Which of course ties to further issues like the massively fictitious wealth and the stock market values being very, very arbitrary, and so on and so forth.

[monteparnas]

I wouldn't even state just wealth inequality as inside threats. If you're not adapt to deal with basic interaction with your environment, that's pretty much an inside threat.

The wars we're facing, both the one in Ukraine everyone talks about non-stop because they're white and are affecting our wheat and oil and the dozen more happening at any time in places no rich country cares because it is easier to chalk off problems in Africa and Asia as a result of "I won't say they're barbarians, but they're barbarians" and "totally-not-our-fault", are inside threats.

Authoritarian tyrants all over the world? The system was designed, despite protests about this fact, to be as ineffective as possible against them even when their shenanigans are as clear as day, the whole UN structure is meant to make it incapable of dealing with this kind of pretty much inside threat.

Climate change? How can it not be called inside when literally everything going on was known and warned against decades ago? The first papers about green-house effects by carbon dioxide dumped in the atmosphere are from a few years before the end of the 19th century, it became a strategic and geopolitical matter of state actors in the 1970's and the actual problems gained media attention in the 1980's with the first bouts of famine caused by unprecedented droughts in Africa. Definitely an inside threat.

Diseases and pandemic threats are par of the course, we know the general problem since before writing was invented and we were specifically aware of viral respiratory pandemics since 102 years before Covid-19. Indeed, from a technical standpoint we were totally prepared to deal with it, it simply shouldn't have got so dire. It did because the system completely failed to apply technical knowledge to a technical problem that instead became political all over the world. The specific disease doesn't matter, the threat was pretty much inside.

We can go on and on. Logistic knots causing inflation, healthy prices for consumables at one place being maintained by slave labor in the production elsewhere, contrasts in access to education, security, health and jobs, avoidable crises caused by easily spotted problems not being avoided at all, a freaking war economy running in the background unabated, the one thing we have in spades are inside threats for "the system" as far as we can describe it, and places were it failed completely, affecting billions of people.

[CTPhipps]

Leave the thread, Kammerer. Also take an infraction for a personal attack.

[HorizonParty2021]

I was watching a video on International Trade Theory. It talks about export crops and how a country that is better suited to growing a particular crop than anyone else (having absolute advantage) should grow that and trade with other countries who have absolute advantage in the things it has difficulty growing. That's a basic assumption of economics. Economist, Jeremy Rifkin made the comment that it's a sin to ship a tomato across the ocean when speaking at an event organized by Vice, wherein he discusses a 3rd Industrial Revolution and the necessity of reducing our carbon output.

So there are two perspectives. The first is simple. Grow what your soil and climate favor, put it on a ship and burn diesel to send it to export destinations. The second perspective is that we should use greenhouses to produce almost everything domestically, saving transport cost and reducing pollution. Given that the climate meltdown is a massive inside threat, I favor the second perspective.