Modern Day Marxism

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Modern Day Marxism

Post by Username17 »

Split off from another thread.

Catharz wrote:I'm just not convinced that the Marxism is really the IF/THEN system it proposes to be. We've met the conditions set out in the Manifesto for a long time, and the only 'revolutions' I've heard of were political vehicles for individuals/tribes. Not for any over-arching good.

Humans evolved as tribal animals, and I'm not sure that we're fully capable of funtioning beyond the Family/Tribe scale. And I think that (not to be a Hippy...) to change that will take some serious psychological evolution. So while Marxism may work, I don't think it works for humans as we are.


OK, Marx predicted that the unification of Labor, Capital, and Government was inevitable. He also predicted that this was a good thing.

The first prediction is almost certainly true. The second prediction will probably turn out to be true in some cases and false in others.

----

The three sided tug-of-war between the needs of Capital, Labor, and Government must eventually have a victor. Things change and systems do not last, so some sort of "balance" cannot be maintained indefinately. Capitalism can't stay Capitalism because eventually investors actually win, and stand in a position to dominate potential rivals. The only escape from that is a government based intervention - which in turn is also not Capitalistic in nature.

In short, Capitalists either become the government (by virtue of getting all the money), or they become subordinate to the government (by virtue of regulation or nationalization). Either way, Marx is right. Although honestly living in a world where the former happens is nothing like the utopia that Marx hoped for.

Similarly for "The People". As technology and organizational levels increase, the existence of the hermit becomes an endangered one. There simply isn't room for people in the modern and future world who are not either in control of or controlled by the government. If Marx's proposed hyper-democratization does not in fact occur, the only other option is a massive authoritarian conquest. The middle ground is inherently unstable and cannot last.

As to whether people can cope beyond the tribal unit, of course they can! The invention of Nationalism has shown without the slightest shadow of a doubt that people can feel loyalty unto death to any entity at all. If people can fight and die for "America" or "Vietnam", they'll be loyal to anything that you include them in. A world government is no harder to swear allegiance to than is a nuclear family. The inability to converse with every aspect of it is as much an advantage as it is a disadvantage. Familiarity bonds, but it also breeds contempt. While an internationalism is hard to ineract with directly, its very intangibility gives it the moral authority of a god.

The contradictions that Marx saw in Capitalism are real. His proposed resolutions to them are also real. Other resolutions, however, also exist. The conservative notion that you can resolve these problems by just closing your eyes and making them go away is of course laughable - but honestly Communism seems just as likely to be achieved by dint of corporations taking control of civil government as vice versa. That's terrifying, but it doesn't mean that Marxist critique is inherently wrong.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by User3 »

I just wrote about two pages, and then realized I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Anyway, what you're saying makes sense.
But it has been said before, and I still have no idea what the possible positive outcome is.

Any of the three sides which win become the Government (in the US, the Capital seems to be in the throwes of becoming a hereditary autocracy). Or simply control the government, which is the same thing. If the Government wins, it gains control of the Capital (through Laws).
Either way, you've got a new autocracy.

If the Labor gains control, (and this may just be a pessimistic PoV) the power-hungry/money hungry Gods/Tribes of the Labor seize control of the Government and/or the Capital and become the new autocracy.

Where is the advantage to the power-hungry individual (AKA the Gods of Old) in balance?

I'm sure these issues have been raised before too. But I'm not much of one for political philosophy, and I haven't heard the answers.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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The answer is the one that Plato gives way back in the ass crack of history: A competently run autocracy is fundamentally more efficient at doing whatever it was going to do than any other form of government. Therefore, an autocracy that happens to do whatever you want it to is the ideal government.

That's the argument that people have used for autocratic rule since time immemorial, and to a limited extent it is true. Autocrats really do make the trains run on time. The problem is getting them to do what you want them to, and not for example, buy off fifty one percent of the populace with low or no taxes by slaughtering some random ethnic or religious group and setting their taxes to 100%.

The Marxist ideal is what is called "The Dictatorship of the Prolitariat", which is essentially an autocracy whose goals are determined hyperdemocratically. As you've noticed, as soon as any group "wins", what they say pretty much goes and the other groups act as neither a check nor a balance. The hope then, is for the group that wins to also absorb and assimilate everyone - so that there is noone left out of the decision making process when decisions become final.

That's where dictatorships that recognize Marxism get their justification. Ideally, the authoritarian regime "represents the people", which in turn justifies its ability to do anything it wants. That's unfortunate, and honestly doesn't have anything to do with what Marx suggested was the proper way to do things.

Marx saw only one end to the three sided struggle: a democratic government with no meaningful opposition. But the 20th century proved that there are other options:

Fascism: The latest incarnation of the government allies with or dominates enough of the Capital and/or Labor to forcibly take control of all the rest. Historically, Fascism has had to make so many concessions to get started that it was unable to fund itself save through the expediency of looting. Which in turn has caused Fascists the world over to murder tremendously huge numbers of people and start a lot of wars.

Corporate Autonomy: Capital interests purchase the loyalty of enough government(s) that they are sceded temporal power and/or purchase the activities of enough mercenaries operating on their behalf as to become a government answerable to noone. The basic corporate method of accumulation (to pay people less than the products they make available for selling cost) means that they cannot continue to exist in a steady state. New sources of wealth have to constantly be fed to the beast, and production levels have to constantly rise, and nevertheless it is impossible to actually fully distribute everything that is produced. As such waste skyrockets and pollution goes haywire.

Religious Fundamentalism: Religious authorities (self appointed or no) convince enough people that two and two equal five that they are able to mobilize people working against their own rational interests that they can overcome state, labor, and capital all at once. The economy atrophies and opposition is crushed under the weight of fear.

I don't know about you, but the idea of a democratic state seizing control of all other powerbases under the continuous guidance of its citizens is looking awfully good right about now.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by Wrenfield »

Unfortunately, there are currently no world leaders with the reputation and chops to mobilize a given group of people under the banner of a marxist state ... and succeed. Same can be said of American style democracy and capitalism.

And due to the way the global collective consciousness has evolved, the world's citizenry has polarized these two government styles (due to global-scale propaghanda, the Cold War, etc.) into extreme camps.

Meanwhile, Euro-style socialism *does* have a pretty good track record at small-scale successes and balanced governances, primarily in the Scandinavian and western countries. There are acknowledged competent and successful socialist leaders as well. Those socialist leaders and governments also have proven to be the most effective as well at dealing with the biggest cancer that affects both communism and capitalism - corruption and graft. Both of which never allowed Marxist regimes to ever come close to its utopic ideals.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1118170814[/unixtime]]
The three sided tug-of-war between the needs of Capital, Labor, and Government must eventually have a victor.


I don't know if I can agree with that assessment. Things tend to happen in cycles, and none generally have any kind of absolute victory for anyone.

Capital and Government inevitably has more power, but laborers are the enforcement of that power, so that if capitalists/government get all the money and the laborers are poor, you run into something similar to the french revolution, where the poor just go crazy and start chopping off heads. The wealth gets redistributed and everything starts over again.

If labor wins, which is what happens at the end of the French Revolution, then laborers need people to run shops and people to organize everything, so eventually you get new Capitalists and a new government. When the workers of the world indeed unite and take over, they realize they're too disorganized and chaotic to actually run an effective government or economy so capitalists and politicians rise up to fill the gaps.

And the cycle just goes on and on. They will always be opposed and continue with a weird system of checks and balances. If the system falls apart and one side wins, then some mass revolution occurs and things start over again.

However, under no condition can any sort of change create some kind of unified labor/government/capitalist, because all of them are working toward different goals, and ultimately selfish goals. And all three sides need each other.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Wrenfield wrote:no world leaders with the reputation and chops to mobilize a given group of people under the banner of a marxist state


I don't know about marxism but if you are looking for one of the good guys with unshakable popular support and a heck of a lot of balls then you can't go past Hugo Chavez.

He's doing the naughty unpopular left socialist wing things needed to pull his countries economy out of the unjust remnants of the feudal era and miraculously stood up against CIA attempts to destroy him and the democracy of Venezuela in the process.

And its been somewhat under the international medias radar since they like to totally ignore the melodrama that is south america and basically print a bunch of trash about Venezuela's recent history. But regardless Chavez and a few other major South American Leaders are beginning to pull of a nice, slow, bloodless Bolivarian revolution at the moment.

As to checks and balances major social forces and all that, well. The only (so far) SURE historical repetition is the collapse of civilizations.

When society screws up it doesn't hit a big reset button and go back to a better bygone era. It collapses. Potentially into the Dark Ages, or even the Stone Age.

Heck, we could even pull of a major extinction event and wipe out most complex life on earth. Admittedly the last dominant life form suspected of being responsible for one of them was a sort of jelly fish but our world environmental policies at the moment aren't precisely in the order of plans composed by things with central nervous systems.

I'm just trying to say there are wild cards that history likes to pull, shifts in climate, unexpected dramatic changes in society or technology that trump all current influences and really mess shit up in unexpected ways.

Remember human society existed for the VAST majority of its history with no technology greater than the stone spear and the fire and no government more complex than that guy standing over there with said spear and fire.

Not only might the sum total of civilization return to that state if certain asses break the current system too badly but something changed society beyond recognition then and whatever the heck it is could happen again. Tommorrow.

And then where the heck will the marxists and the capitalists be?
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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Mobilizing people just isn't that hard. Getting people to buy into a Marxist state is no more difficult than getting people to accept money. It's no more difficult, because it is the same thing.

The state tells you that if you do what you are supposed to, you get to have arbitrary units of no intrinsic value, but that these arbitrary units can be exchanged for goods and services.

If everyone accepts money, and with only a few exceptions they do, then everyone is willing to buy into a Marxist state. It's no more or less of a leap of faith on your part. You accept currency with no backing whatever except the good faith of the government and the promise that everyone else is going to accept that currency. Similarly, under a Marxist state you perform your duties and get produce goods and services with no guaranty that the goods and services you get in return will be there for you save the good faith of the government and the promise that everyone else is going to do their part.

Economies are by their very nature a shared hope. Everyone takes that first step in the dark, because there is no alternative and if everyone takes that step together everything works out. The problem is that any profit-based economic system is going to be unable to distribute everything produced. Some of those people are taking that step into the darkness with nothing there to catch them.

Profit is by its very nature a form of embezzlement, its existence means that the amount people are paid to produce all goods and services in the economy is less than the total cost of all goods and services in the economy. Profit is the reason why we produce so much waste.

And yes, a socialist government is going to have a lot of corruption. A lack of competition allows people who are good at paperwork and obfuscation to sink wealth into their own pockets. But under socialism, that sort of thing is a crime, and under capitalism that sort of thing is legally mandated. A corporation can be sued by its stockholders for failing to skim every possible dime out of the pockets of consumers. Unlike government, whose job it is to convince the populace that their funds are being used as efficiently as possible; a corporation is mandated to use the funds it gets from consumers as inefficiently as possible, providing as little value in goods and services as possible for the amount of wealth paid in.

Example: Fire Departments. A government service called "Fire Departments" is created. They take a collection from everyone who lives in the area based on whatever criteria that government collects taxes by. Alternately, a corporate service called "Fire Departments" is created. They also take a collection from everyone who lives in the coverage area based on whatever criteria their business model and local laws allow them to collect funds by.

So both versions of the Fire Department have some warchest, and the collection criteria may in fact be exactly the same in both cases. What's the difference? The difference is in mandated goals.

The government's mandated goal is to spend the warchest in order to provide as good a set of fire protection as is possible with that amount of money.

The corporation's mandated goal is to spend as little of that warchest as possible on fire protection, so that the stockholders can go to Burmuda.

If either fails to meet its goals, they face legal challenges and/or replacement by competitors. Do you see what is wrong with this picture?

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1120043491[/unixtime]]
Not only might the sum total of civilization return to that state if certain asses break the current system too badly but something changed society beyond recognition then and whatever the heck it is could happen again. Tommorrow.

And then where the heck will the marxists and the capitalists be?


I never bought the "We're all going to die tomorrow, so why try today?" arguement. If all options are equally pointless, then sitting around whining is just as pointless as trying to better yourself, so therefore no one can say one damn thing to me for trying. :uptosomething:

Either way, it doesn't matter too much to me what society is like. I'm going to find the best way to survive, I've been doing it for a quarter century, I will continue doing it, whether I'm getting free education and medicine in a marxist utopia or sitting on top of my house with an assault rifle and a sign that says "Trespassers will be eaten." I'll find a way.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by Username17 »

I think the point was not "why bother trying to do things?", but the opposite.

People on this thread were already making the same tired argument we hear so often from capitalist apologists that Marx picked up a pen about 140 years ago, and noone has managed to overthrow all of the kleptocrats in any area larger or wealthier than a single major city for any length of time, and thus that it was impossible to do.

That's a very weak argument. It took about 145 years of constant fighting to get women the right to vote in the United States, and that's only if you start counting with the creation of these United States in 1776. If you count from when women first started trying to get parlimentary representation, it took hundreds of years. And that's a pretty minor restructuring of society, actually.

Marx was arguing for an economic shift as fundamental as the shft from Feudalism to Capitalism, which you'll recall took about 1000 years. Things change very quickly in some ways, and very slowly in others. Grand-scale Socialism is one of those things that is not going to come to pass in our lifetime. But that doesn't mean it can't happen.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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I wasn't saying why bother, I was trying to say, rather poorly that society does not exist in a state of perfect equilibrium between fixed forces and you can't sit back and happily allow those forces to play out a tug of war and expect good results.

EDIT: changed a mistaken can to can't in the above sentence. Makes all the difference.

Because sooner or later someone wins, or one force vanishes or a new force enters and turns everything upside down. At which point depending on who comes out on top you get either a big win for society or a big lose.

Now an actual honest to goodness unified world marxist state, well that might almost be a nice out come. But the oppossing "kleptocrats" are pushing so hard in such a direction that should they get free reign you can expect a new dark ages and the reinstatement of feudalism.

So THAT is a damn good reason to bother and attempt to fight the good fight or at the very least vote for something resembling the left (who are behind EVERY major social advance we have seen in the last several hundred years thank you very much) when given the chance.

Now if you want a reason not to bother I point out that my current wacky theory is that China achieves bloodless world domination in the year 2020 by standing up and saying "Or Else" to the rest of the planet.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

Marxism is inherently an unachievable goal. The problem with Marxism is that it ignores the fundamental need for human competetion. So long as there are limited numbers of things, food, cars, big houses, women, whatever, people will compete for them. So until we can hand everyone a mansion, give everyone their dream girl(s) and give everyone a $100,000 car, you just can't have Marxism.

Marxism just isn't based off any realistic outlook. Life isn't about cooperation in society, it is about beating the other guy and taking what you want. Life is all about competetion, there's no way you can eradicate that until you can somehow meet everyone's needs, and right now we don't have the resources for that and in the near or even far future I doubt we ever will.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by User3 »

Ah, the classical struggle between social and individual Darwinism.

Here is a little psychological postulate: A truely Marxist society can only flourish when the demands of social Darwinism outweigh those of the individual.

But then the fact remains that tyrants (paragons of individual Darwinism) tend to seize control in times of trouble.

Of course, reproductive demands no longer seem to have anything to do with individual Darwinism, so I'm not sure what the point is. Maybe we're all stuck as pawns in a game of meme (ideological, aethetic, factual) evolution too big to comprehend.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by dbb »

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1120103863[/unixtime]]So long as there are limited numbers of things, food, cars, big houses, women, whatever, people will compete for them. So until we can hand everyone a mansion, give everyone their dream girl(s) and give everyone a $100,000 car, you just can't have Marxism.


Of course -- and you may call me even more of an optimist than Frank for this -- it is entirely possible that at some point in the future we may, in fact, have the ability to give everyone a mansion (if they want one; large houses are an enormous amount of work) and a Ferrari.

I think it entirely possible that within fifty-odd years or so we may achieve a post-scarcity culture. And such a culture is likely to require some fairly radical shifts in the way our economy operates.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by Username17 »

Actually, you can have people compete to contribute the most to society as a whole. At various times, in various places, the worth of a man was not in what they had, but in what they gave away. I don't find it far fetched at all that a similar social system will come into being again.

Marxism does not require that people do not compete, only that the competitive goal not be who can embezzle the largest segment of the economy and sit on it.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120147890[/unixtime]]Actually, you can have people compete to contribute the most to society as a whole. At various times, in various places, the worth of a man was not in what they had, but in what they gave away. I don't find it far fetched at all that a similar social system will come into being again.

The problem is that people don't think that way. People want to improve their own lives and achieve their own goals.

Something like Marxist evolution doesn't just call for certain events to happen, like wars, technological developments, and so forth. It requires an entirely new way of thinking to develop, a way of thinking that is completely contrary to our current way of thinking. Not just some small moral 'truth', like "slavery is wrong", but a thought process change that is anathema to the base fundamentals of human life. With very few exceptions, living beings are inherently selfish and possessive creatures.

While everyone respects the one doctor who decides to lower his prices to treat those who can't normally afford medical care, almost everyone would rather actually be the other doctor who lives in a million dollar home getting wealthy from treating those who can afford to pay exhorbitant prices.

Marxism is the philosophy tha you wish everyone else would follow, but you yourself would rather be a capitalist. Since this is true of everyone, Marxism just isn't going to come to pass.

Marxism is inherently an anti-human philosophy.



dbb wrote:
Of course -- and you may call me even more of an optimist than Frank for this -- it is entirely possible that at some point in the future we may, in fact, have the ability to give everyone a mansion (if they want one; large houses are an enormous amount of work) and a Ferrari.

Well really so long as people are competing to impress members of the opposite sex, I don't think there's going to necessarily ever be a state where people are going to be content to be equal. If everyone has a mansion and a Ferrari, then some people will want a bigger mansion or a better Ferrari just to impress the girl. In this case, it's not ok to just be equal, you need to be better.

And really I can't imagine that problem ever being fixed. Competetion is an innate quality of living creatures, even with infinite resources.

If Marxism were to be adopted you'd need some kind of special technology that alters the mind not necessarily the body. If we could create the Borg collective or something similar, then we could have Marxism, but that's about it.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

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I don't understand your argument here. Girls (and for that matter boys) are not always impressed by bigger houses or better Ferraris, and this holds especially true if the way you get a bigger house is essentially just by reprogramming your nanobots or whatever to build you a bigger house.

But yes -- if one assumes infinite resources, people will still compete to impress members of the opposite sex -- just with other characteristics (they're smarter? They're stronger? They're taller? They're better athletes? They're more fun to be around?). I am not clear on how that bears on Marxism, exactly; as Frank says, Marxism does not require people not to compete. It just requires them not to compete on the level of "my bankroll is bigger than yours". What you are talking about probably is an inherent characteristic of humans -- but saying it prevents Marxism is like saying that the existence of water precludes the existence of hair dryers. One doesn't have anything to do with the other.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by dbb »

Sorry for the double post -- bboard is being a bit difficult.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by Username17 »

RC wrote:The problem is that people don't think that way.


Some do, some don't. In various places and various times, thinking any other way was the bizzare concept that people couldn't understand. Consider the wisdom of sex drives in the seventeen hundreds:

The general consensus was that women had a high sex drive, and men had a low sex drive. The reasoning was that the position of a woman was defined by her having children, so she naturally wanted to have them early and often, while a man was just fine whether he had kids or not. Thus, the reason women needed to be kept away from the outside world and political power was that they were just going to seduce men and ruin their own futures.

Later on, general consensus was that men had the high sex drive, and that women needed to be kept away from the public eye to protect them from the depravations of men.

Or consider ideas about ethnicity:

In the early 1800s, white people were considered more "baby-like" than black people, indicating that they were more domesticated and better prone to reason and less animalistic.

Later on, people discovered that black people actually had higher belly buttons than white people, and suddenly it is black people who are more childlike and white people are more "mature" and better prone to reason than black people.

You got that? The exact opposite reasoning about what human nature actually is is used to justify exactly the same social set-up. And that's what human nature justifications are:

1> Simple justifications for the status quo.
and
2> Bullshit.

The fact is that "human nature" isn't anything meaningful. Capitalism is almost certainly not the natural state of humanity, or we wouldn't have had five hundred thousand years of human history without it.

Back in "nature", when we lived in small communal groups of hunter gatherers, we didn't have profits. We didn't have wage slavery. We didn't have specialization. We just lived in extended family units and shared stuff. That's natural, but that's not what we do here and now. We are a cultural creature, what seems natural to any of us is just whatever we happen to do, and that has only the most cursory relationship to our DNA.

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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1120156342[/unixtime]]
Back in "nature", when we lived in small communal groups of hunter gatherers, we didn't have profits. We didn't have wage slavery. We didn't have specialization. We just lived in extended family units and shared stuff. That's natural, but that's not what we do here and now. We are a cultural creature, what seems natural to any of us is just whatever we happen to do, and that has only the most cursory relationship to our DNA.


Well, back then the strongest ruled. You still had alpha males, just like wolf packs do now. And that's the natural thing. Some people are rulers, some people are followers and the weak die off from natural selection.

And while society develops all kind of weird ass shit over the years, that hasn't changed that much. In feudalism, the strongest was the king, and the lords were the followers. Instead of letting the weak die off and starve, the lords figured out they could exploit them, and so their role slightly changed from fodder for natural selection to serfs. In the modern era it was found that slavery and serfdom was rather inefficient economically, so serfs became wage slaves.

Strength moved away from miltiary power and more into economic, kings became capitalists and politicans, and lords became buisness owners, managers and all sorts of people.

While things seem to have developed, they really haven't developed much at all. The Darwinian hierarchy is still very much there, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. You can change the definition of strength, but whatever that may be, the strong are always going to survive and prosper and the weak will be the ones suffering. The basic concepts haven't changed at all.

The fundamental building block of any community is that the weak serve and the strong lead. That's never going to change. You can dress people up in suit and tie or crude furs and that constant will still be there. You can redefine different qualities of strength and weakness, but still you're going to have a strong group and a weak group. The little things change, but the basics stay the same.

Marxism wants us to believe that everyone is equal, when everyone clearly isn't equal and never will be equal. We can pretend everyone is equal as long as we aren't truly put to the test, but the moment resources, any resource, becomes scarce, the illusion of equality disintegrates. Humanity isn't about making people equal, it never has been. It's about generating an illusion of equality to prevent the weak from going French Revolution and chopping off heads. Keep them working at their crappy jobs and their crappy life, and fill them wtih impossible dreams that maybe some great future is awaiting them. All the while you exploit the fuck out of them. That's what humanity is. It's grown remarkably more complex over the years, but its basic function hasn't changed.

Marxism tries to hand wave base human behavior away. That's why it can never work.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

dbb at [unixtime wrote:1120155659[/unixtime]]I don't understand your argument here. Girls (and for that matter boys) are not always impressed by bigger houses or better Ferraris, and this holds especially true if the way you get a bigger house is essentially just by reprogramming your nanobots or whatever to build you a bigger house.

But yes -- if one assumes infinite resources, people will still compete to impress members of the opposite sex -- just with other characteristics (they're smarter? They're stronger? They're taller? They're better athletes? They're more fun to be around?). I am not clear on how that bears on Marxism, exactly; as Frank says, Marxism does not require people not to compete. It just requires them not to compete on the level of "my bankroll is bigger than yours". What you are talking about probably is an inherent characteristic of humans -- but saying it prevents Marxism is like saying that the existence of water precludes the existence of hair dryers. One doesn't have anything to do with the other.


It has quite a lot to deal with it. Marxism is entirely based on cooperation and equality. Basically people have to stop competing to make it work. You have to be willing to share what you have and you have to accept the fact that you are just as entitled to goods as everyone else. And you have to actually believe that. And when you need to change people's beliefs like that, this isn't just about an economic system, it's a totalitarian philosohpy that has to invade people on the deepest basic levels.

And you simply cannot have comptetion and Marxism. The very nature of competetion leads to the next step, namely "I'm better than you." And if you believe that you're better than someone else, they therefore are not worthy of an even share of the resources. Humans have a need to feel superior to others, and when you feel superior you want to have more than they do. Until you can quash the competetive urge, humans will never believe they're equal to each other.

To have Marxism actually happen you need to have some weird situation where the meek inherit the earth. But that's just not going to happen. Power indeed corrupts, and expecting the people in power to ever want to evenly distribute resources with the lower dregs of society is expecting way too much. It is by no means any kind of natural evolution process as Marx would like us to believe. It is the role of the worker to be exploited, since they're usually too stupid to have exploited others, so natural selection places them on the bottom of the food chain.

Getting someone like Bill Gates or George W. Bush to believe that he's equal to the middle aged guy with no education who works at McDonalds isn't going to happen. But to evolve a government into Marxism that belief must be adopted by the people of the country. You have to end all forms of elitism.

Marxism is based on something humanity cannot truly comprehend. Equality.

Remember we are the same race who created racial and national pride demonstrations, religious wars and exclusive social circles. We know absolutely nothing about equality. We look for reasons to declare ourselves unequal. If they don't exist we will make up some religion, or some new club that we can be a member to, solely for the purpose of discriminating against non-members.

To adopt Marxism we need to actually believe that all humans are equal. That's something pretty much nobody believes right now. I don't. You don't. In fact, we believe the opposite. We get our daily bits of motivation from the fact that we are 'better' than someone else. Equality among all of humanity is something that we simply cannot and will not ever understand.

And why does someone beneath you deserve as many resources as you have? Just doesn't make sense.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by dbb »

You keep talking about dividing up resources, to the point where I am confused about whether you read the "infinite resources" part or not. If you have infinite resources, it doesn't matter how much you give to whatever it is you think of as "the lower dregs of society" -- you still have as much to give to yourself as you want!

We don't compete over oxygen. If other resources were even as abundant as oxygen is -- I don't know why you would expect people to compete over them. They might (and probably would) still compete over things that aren't that abundant -- like members of the opposite sex -- but there's no guarantee that they'll compete over them in a way antithetical to Marxism.

Now, there's also no guarantee that they won't compete over them in a way antithetical to Marxism. And there is definitely no guarantee that we will ever have infinite resources. So to those extents, I can understand why you might feel that we will not ever create a truly Marxist society -- but I don't think I agree that we could not.

I personally am not a Marxist, so I will forbear from getting into exactly what characteristics a society must or must not have to meet that label -- but I will observe that as a society we have already accepted the proposition that all people can be equal before the law; there are many different aspects in which one can be "equal" or "unequal", and while I am not an expert on the subject, I'm pretty sure Marxists do not demand that everyone be absolutely equal in all of them.

--d.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by fbmf »

RC, I think what dbb is suggesting is that technology will one day get to the point that even if we all individually amassed all the resources that we could possibly individually amass, that there would still be some left over.

I don't know that I agree with that, but I think that is what he is saying.

Game On,
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by RandomCasualty »

Yeah, assuming we ever had infinite resources, including infinite property, infinite energy and infinite material goods. Marxism might be possible. Basically it would take extradimensional property spaces or instantaneous transportation and Star Trek style replicators to create whatever people need. Of course, if any of these things were invented now it would be by a capitalist corporation and I really don't see them giving away replicators for free.


I'm not saying Marxism is completely impossible, I'm just saying I can't forsee it happening in even the far future given human nature. The main thing that I have trouble comprehending is the shift of public opinion where people in power actually start caring about the poor.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

As my dad used to say, shit in one hand and wish in the other, see which one fills up first.
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
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Re: Modern Day Marxism

Post by dbb »

fbmf is more or less correct -- or maybe more to the point, that it will one day reach the point where amassing resources is sufficiently trivial that we don't bother amassing them past what we happen to desire at the moment. Whether this is any different depends mostly on exactly how one defines "amassing".

I think it's very likely that a nanobot assembler or something like it would be invented by private interests. I also think it's very likely that, once such a thing was invented, it would not be very long in cultural time before someone other than the initial inventors duplicated its functionality -- and something like that doesn't require more than one altruistic inventor to get it out into the world.

I don't honestly know if 'true' Marxism is possible or not absent that kind of high technology. My feelings on the subject are, to paraphrase those of Chesterton on Christianity, not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried. I also suspect that it depends heavily on exactly how you define 'Marxism', and finding a definition everyone agrees on is not exactly an easy task, considering that even Marx is supposed to have once joked that he wasn't a Marxist.

--d.
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