Article - Was Marx Right?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 1:47 am

What Marx predicted: As progress marches on, automation of industry will result in more and more workers becoming less and less employed. This will eventually result in the working class overthrowing the wealthy owners of capital and forcing the government to use the machines to provide for everyone equally.

What actually happened: As progress marched on, the automation of industry has resulted in more and more workers becoming less and less employed, and the rich becoming fewer and richer than ever. This has resulted in the wealthy owners of capitial using their money to sway the masses towards their cause and force the government to allow them to use their machines to profit the rich in new and even more ethically dubious ways.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 7:29 am

cultural marxism

man I love pat buchanan. not as much as I love ron paul but buchanan is sharp

K · Post by K » Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:15 am

Psychic Robot wrote:cultural marxism

man I love pat buchanan. not as much as I love ron paul but buchanan is sharp

I know that ignorant people don't understand Marxism, so posting a clip of it in action is pretty pointless.

What's next? Shall we start posting links of Pat Buchanan accusing homosexuals of being Satanists? Or how about his quotes where he says that Hitler was a "individual of great courage." How about when he said that diesel engines didn't emit enough CO2 and so could not have gassed Jews in Treblinka?

I mean, those are all easily available if you want to derail a serious thread.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 9:28 am

Marx had an actual set of demands. He put them in the Communist Manifesto. They are:

The creation of property tax, and forcing nobles to pay it.
Progressive Income Tax.
Inheritance Tax.
Confiscating the property of French nobility who had taken arms against the republic.
Creation of a National Bank.
National roads and post offices.
State projects to improve land and water use. Creation of state owned industries.
State job creation programs, especially for displaced farm workers.
Creation of suburbs.
Public Education.

Seriously. That's the list. Now admittedly, I doubt many people honestly care whether we honor the property rights of French nobility in exile, but the rest of the list is basically the cornerstones of modern western society.

The United States is a Marxist country. Has been for generations.

-Username17

Neeeek · Post by **Neeeek** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 12:07 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Marx had an actual set of demands. He put them in the Communist Manifesto. They are:

The creation of property tax, and forcing nobles to pay it.

Progressive Income Tax.

Inheritance Tax.

Confiscating the property of French nobility who had taken arms against the republic.

Creation of a National Bank.

National roads and post offices.

State projects to improve land and water use. Creation of state owned industries.

State job creation programs, especially for displaced farm workers.

Creation of suburbs.

Public Education.
Seriously. That's the list. Now admittedly, I doubt many people honestly care whether we honor the property rights of French nobility in exile, but the rest of the list is basically the cornerstones of modern western society.

The United States is a Marxist country. Has been for generations.

-Username17

Well, we don't currently, despite it being one of the absolute backbones of our democracy, have an inheritance tax.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 12:33 pm

Neeeek wrote:
Well, we don't currently, despite it being one of the absolute backbones of our democracy, have an inheritance tax.

Last I checked, the Throw Momma From the Train Act did its thing already. So we have an estate tax again. It's hard to tell if we actually lost more elderly people right when the estate tax was about to come back into effect - not many people owe estate taxes and deaths among the Elderly spike in December anyway.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 3:15 pm

Would capitalism be in such a crisis if both the people with capital and voters realized that the future of work would be to have a small proportion of workers that effectively can't be phased out of the economy short of the creation of strong artificial intelligence (video game designers, teachers, detectives, project managers, janitors, etc.) and that most people are either going to have to work really short workweeks or be permanently unemployed--so income will have to be made up with naked refunds or unemployment.

I mean it's not like workers are becoming irrelevant AND capital is drying up. The productivity is still there. The capital is still there. And if people had some damn money the demand would still be there. People could still very well have a capitalist society indefinitely if A) people regularly funneled some of the money to the non-productive workers of society and B) the idea of not having a job wasn't stigmatized. But greed and a poisonous work ethic will probably never make that happen. It seems more likely that both capitalists and workers won't give an inch until the breaking point... then who knows what's going to happen?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 3:21 pm

So what I'm saying is that even if all of the capitalists had a literal change of heart and decided that wealth redistribution and extremely progressive taxation was the bee's knees, capitalism still would probably collapse because the so-called Protestant Work Ethic demonizes people who don't regularly work for a living. The envy/disdain of the workers towards their permanently un(der)employed brethren would cause the thing to burst at the seams anyway. Work isn't viewed as an unfortunate means to an end, it's actually supposed to be a measure of worth. And of course for the vast majority of people work is supposed to be miserable. Builds character that way.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:29 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Would capitalism be in such a crisis if both the people with capital and voters realized that the future of work would be to have a small proportion of workers that effectively can't be phased out of the economy short of the creation of strong artificial intelligence (video game designers, teachers, detectives, project managers, janitors, etc.) and that most people are either going to have to work really short workweeks or be permanently unemployed--so income will have to be made up with naked refunds or unemployment.

The Keynesian + Neo-Socialist patch appears to be able to keep society from falling apart indefinitely. Unfortunately, it is destroyable from the outside if someone else is dumping goods on you in order to hyperinflate their own capitalist expansion. That is: while technological progress increases productivity and decreases the value of the production end-products, and this difference can taken as shorter working hours or a greater standard of living for the working class, it can also be taken as a higher concentration of wealth so long as there is a consumer of last resort. With globalization, the capitalists thought that they could not run out of consumers, because the extra goods could be sold anywhere in the world.

Of course, what we saw in 2007 was a global failure of demand. An entire world trying to export themselves out of the crisis despite the fact that this is literally and obviously impossible. Still, I don't think that the Swedens of the world are really maintainable as long as any developed country anywhere is willing to turn itself into a Dickensian hellscape in order to pump out more widgets.

The logic of the closed economy and the logic of the open economy are very different. In the closed economy, production has to be justified with demand, and that demand has to come from wages of workers and government social welfare programs. In the open economy, production still needs demand, but that demand can come from other peoples' wages and government social welfare programs. Historically this demand pool was seen (and treated) as essentially inexhaustible. And that was sort of reasonable, since you couldn't meaningfully impact the whole world's demand with the amount of shipping you have available. The ships were treated kind of like the ships in Puerto Rico: they sailed when they were full and there wasn't much purpose worrying about how much total demand there was back in Spain.

Of course, with the rise of globalization, it has become literally true that China and the United States have actually found the actual bottoms of the available demand in various countries and even regions of countries. The entire world is a closed economy and the global limits of demand actually act as a limiting factor for the justification of production. Which is on the one hand super bad for everyone because there is no end in sight as long as Europe and the United States keep competing to see who can reduce their own domestic demand the most. But on the other hand, it means that capitalism has the potential for a lot more life. Demand could rise in Togo by ten times in thirty years. That wouldn't even be hard to do.

There are actually a lot of countries that are only a couple of steps above medievality. Ghana is the 53rd least failed state on Earth. Global demand could increase a lot, and productivity in the "first world" could continue rising quite a bit without actually sharing any of that wealth with the working class.

Even that isn't sustainable forever. But it's probably sustainable for longer than the current batch of capitalists will live, so why should they do anything different than march the West into a Dickensian hellscape as fast as possible?

-Username17

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:34 pm

Bingo. Flogging yourself on the corporate totem pole while screwing everybody that gets in your way is the proof of being one of God's chosen on the 21st century.

In my opinion, the future economic systems won't be neither this naked worship of greed or the long dead socialism. Probably a hybrid of both.

EDIT: That's the optimist side of me talking. The cynical side says that people just LOVE being serfs.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:42 pm

Gx1080 wrote: In my opinion, the future economic systems won't be neither this naked worship of greed or the long dead socialism. Probably a hybrid of both.

Socialism is a hybrid of "both". Assuming that you mean "government investment and industry" as opposed to "capitalism" for the other side of your "both". Having a private sector and a government run fire department? That's socialism. That's literally what the word means.

If you are predicting a mixed economy, you are a socialist. Fox News may use that as a dirty word, but that is seriously the actual meaning of the label.

-Username17

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:58 pm

Nope. The word Socialism means the goverment fully owning the means of production, which are the source of wealth. Though the arguing of semantics is useless, so believe what you want.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 5:00 pm

Gx1080 wrote:Nope. The word Socialism means the goverment fully owning the means of production, which are the source of wealth. Though the arguing of semantics is useless, so believe what you want.

The socialist government of Sweden would be totally surprised to learn that.

-Username17

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 5:32 pm

mfw socialists are trying to redefine "socialism" to mean "not socialism"
mfw marxism has systematically failed in all its incarnations and will continue to do so but marxists insist on trying it again
mfw this:

Or how about his quotes where he says that Hitler was a "individual of great courage."

is the height of leftist debate skills

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 6:04 pm

Buchanan Article Removed. Apparently it was... offensive. Not that we are especially surprised.

-Username17

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 8:15 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: The Keynesian + Neo-Socialist patch appears to be able to keep society from falling apart indefinitely.

Interesting claim. Is America the only country currently part of this reich? When do you feel we entered this era of, at best, very limited social unrest?

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 4:28 am

Americans wouldn't know socialism if it came up behind them and backstabbed them with medicare.
They just hear "socialism bad" without having an actual idea what socialism is. What's worse, everytime they talk about "things that are socialist" they're actually usually communist.

Count Arioch the 28th · Sun Sep 11, 2011 11:48 am

Or talk about Obamacare when it's capitalist.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sun Sep 11, 2011 12:12 pm

yeah, calling Obamacare socialist is.. pretty hillarious. That's like saying Bank of America runs a charity, instead of a home mortgage business.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 11:57 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Marx had an actual set of demands. He put them in the Communist Manifesto. They are:

The creation of property tax, and forcing nobles to pay it.

Progressive Income Tax.

Inheritance Tax.

Confiscating the property of French nobility who had taken arms against the republic.

Creation of a National Bank.

National roads and post offices.

State projects to improve land and water use. Creation of state owned industries.

State job creation programs, especially for displaced farm workers.

Creation of suburbs.

Public Education.
Seriously. That's the list. Now admittedly, I doubt many people honestly care whether we honor the property rights of French nobility in exile, but the rest of the list is basically the cornerstones of modern western society.

The United States is a Marxist country. Has been for generations.

-Username17

Uh... wow. You're seriously mischaracterizing a few of those demands:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- eradication of private land ownership is missing from your list

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
- characterizing this as a tax is a bit of a stretch

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- this isn't just a national bank - this is an "exclusive (state) monopoly" on credit

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
- this isn't just post offices, this is the elimination of private telegraphs/phones/trucking/shipping

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- uh... no.

A lot of the above gets watered down with social democracies - inheritance taxes in place of total abolition, unions instead of industrial armies, post offices instead of state control of communication and transport, national banks assisting private credit - so, while I think it's fair to say that the developed West has incorporated a lot of Marx's ideas from the Manifesto, extending that to say that America is a Marxist state is just too much.

Socialism doesn't mean what it once did... I don't think a 19th century socialist would be overly pleased with a mixed economy, and neither would a staunch capitalist from the same era. Ownership of the means of production, for example, used to be a pretty central tenet that's fallen by the wayside. These days I'd say that distinguishing between capitalism and socialism in developed countries is kind of a cargo cult devotion to American/Austrian myths, hoping to call forth abundance by decrying the latter and embracing the former; the truth of the matter being that socialism clearly won and all that's currently actually being debated in legislatures is to what extent its more extreme tenets will be invoked.

I would argue Marxism, at least as proposed in the Manifesto, is at the far end of that spectrum, and not likely to ever be fully implemented in any developed country.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 12:35 am

FrankTrollman, if you're interested, I'd like to see your respose to mean_liar. Quite frankly you've made quite an outrageous objection to Western orthodoxy considering that people see Marxism as calling for a lot more than that--and I wish that this thread didn't die here.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 4:49 am

K wrote:
Gx1080 wrote:No, Marx wasn't right.

The failure of all the economies that implemented his ideas proves it.
Except China, who is experiencing massive growth while the rest of the world is in decline.

China is growing because it completely abandoned Marxist ideals, and is an extremely laisseze-faire capitalist system.

Also, arguably, the person who implemented the "watered down" Manifesto (mean_liar is right. Marx was nuts) were guys like Bismarck, who understood that while Marx was nuts, it's still necessary to redress problems like workers getting abused or else you'll have a ton of revolts on your hands.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 8:06 am

Huh. I somehow did not notice the Mean Liar response. The answer is that the interpretations you usually see of Marx are basically straw men constructed around the idea that the demands are extreme with regards to what we do today. But actually they were merely extreme with regards to 19th century Europe. You know, when being a Monarchist was regarded as reasonable.

So go back into the 19th century and ask what the "rights of inheritance" were. It was the idea that you had a right to anything your father owned. If the government taxes it, obviously you don't have a right any more. People characterize it as a demand for a 100% inheritance tax, but the Communist Manifesto is really short. It doesn't specify a rate. It just says that we need to scrap the idea that anyone has a right to there not being a rate. Which the United States did - in 1862.

-Username17

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 8:14 am

here's what the demands of the communist manifesto actually are

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production.

frank is speaking out of the side of his mouth as usual. of course the communist manifesto is distinct from marx's ideal society.

K · Post by K » Fri Oct 28, 2011 10:09 am

Zinegata wrote:
K wrote:
Gx1080 wrote:No, Marx wasn't right.

The failure of all the economies that implemented his ideas proves it.
Except China, who is experiencing massive growth while the rest of the world is in decline.
China is growing because it completely abandoned Marxist ideals, and is an extremely laisseze-faire capitalist system.

Also, arguably, the person who implemented the "watered down" Manifesto (mean_liar is right. Marx was nuts) were guys like Bismarck, who understood that while Marx was nuts, it's still necessary to redress problems like workers getting abused or else you'll have a ton of revolts on your hands.

On Wikipedia, the economy of China is described as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and redirects to this.

That's the exact opposite of laisseze-faire capitalism. Hardcore opposite, not a soft opposite. Read up on their direct control of industries and corporations and state mandates.

Now, you can argue the growth is because it's a giant rural nation that is converting to a giant industrialized nation and not because of their socialism, but you can't argue that they are socialists who dabble in capitalism the same way the US dabbles in socialism.