marxism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ovguv1BSA

It's also available as a podcast for those like me who hate youtube.

I'm maybe about halfway through this interview. Early on, Hudson (a Trotskyist), claims that the Soviets never understood or cared about Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, and that they weren't doing real socialism. He also says that this is behind the real estate crisis in China, but doesn't really elaborate as to why. Wolff sort of agrees with him because to him, it's not socialism unless there's democracy at work. He hasn't mentioned Mondragon yet, although I assume that this is what he means since he's talked about it before, even though Mondragon itself has issues of its own, notably that you have to "buy in" in order to work there. To me it seems more like a shitload of business partners rather than a socialist enterprise. (I think Destiny, forgive me for mentioning him, criticized Wolff regarding Mondragon because Mondragon itself also purchases its materials from capitalist enterprises.) I was also thinking that Wolff's democracy at work has actually been tried here and there. I feel like Orwell of all people describes this in his account of the Spanish Civil War. I felt a little frustrated as I was listening to this because if I had been present at the interview, I would have said that AES countries want to do democracy at work, but can't actually do it yet because they are constantly under siege. I was also thinking of how Chinese people consistently say that their government does a good job and they live in a democracy. Chinese workplaces are not paradise but I suspect that it's generally better to work for capitalists in China than in the USA.

Just some thoughts on this podcast that I wanted to share, in case anyone else wanted to comment.

I was watching this interview with Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, and Hudson said something that I completely accepted at first, but mulling it over now it seems contradictory. He says that the IMF and World Bank, as neo-colonial powers, arrest the development of capitalism within the colonized countries, by enforcing austerity and making them privatize everything. He says that the purpose of doing this is to prevent the saturation that happens naturally as local finance capital develops and begins to deindustrialize the economy, which grinds industrial development to a halt as finance capitalists only exist as leeches that make their money by creating rents.

Now, where I take issue with this analysis, is that a great deal of what the IMF and World Bank do is steer countries into privatizing public healthcare, education, and other natural monopolies. When these services are public, they don't hold industry back from booming because they take care of a significant social cost, so if the state takes care of them the state is subsidizing industry to keep developing. Yet when they're private, they hold a monopoly position and exploit it to charge rent on everyone else because of the obvious necessity for these services. This keeps industry from developing.

If imperialists need the industrial capacity of the periphery, why kneecap it with privatization?

I know Engels coined the term in Conditions of the Working Class but I guess I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a good essay or expansion on the concept.

I feel like it's such a powerful concept with a ton of revolutionary potential but I feel like I don't see or hear many people use it. I've been thinking about it a lot since the US election.

I know someone who is reading it, and I’m trying to gauge how reliable it is. From my initial research, it seems to be a decent overview of socialist thought. But I am unsure about the author’s motivations. He was intensely critical of the Soviet Union but seems to have more or less supported socialism in theory.

I've been reading Capital off and on for months and this is a seemingly pretty important difference that I don't understand. Is there a difference between surplus labor and profit, and if so, what is it? Any explanations, links, or chapters in Capital I should check out are appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/19674913

https://www.ft.com/content/1e2584d6-65ef-46de-bfb2-28811be65600

Published earlier this year, but it's an interesting and short read engaging with the degrowth debate

continuation of arguments about healthcare

some good fucking food (despite endnotes)

Weak support for the title and "no labor aristocracy in the west" can get fucked, but otherwise i'm close to agreeing with greek comrade with general sense of unease

Why did Marx believe in Communism?

Marx had argued that capitalism is initially founded on private labor and private appropriation. In other words, capitalism is founded on small enterprise. People labor within their own businesses (private labor), and they then appropriate the wealth of their own business for themselves (private appropriation).

Over time, Marx argued that capitalism has a natural tendency for the scale of enterprises to grow. This leads to small enterprises to be replaced by big enterprises, or, in other words, private labor being replaced by socialized labor. Dozens, hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of workers cease to work in isolation and begin working co-operatively in larger and larger enterprises.

Despite private labor being gradually replaced with socialized labor, appropriation of the fruits of that labor remains private. A bigger and bigger part of the population labors collectively, but a portion of the population separated from them, that is continually growing smaller and smaller, decides what is done with all the wealth they produced.

Marx saw this as a societal contradiction, and only sustainable when it’s not at a very large scale. If society becomes too “polarized,” if the contradiction between socialized labor and private appropriation grows too large, then it would no longer be sustainable, there would be a break, and the only way to resolve it would be to replace private appropriation with socialized appropriation, in other words, to nationalize enterprises so that the collective laborers also control what is done with the fruits of their own labor.

Marx believed that capitalism, as it develops, has an inherent tendency for enterprises to grow larger all the time due to technological advancements. So he did not see this as a question of “if” it would happen, but “when.”

Why did the Soviets Implement Communism the way they did?

Marx’s argument inherently implies that there is a relation between the amount of enterprises that could be nationalized and the size of those enterprises, which is also related to the total amount of development of the economy. It would actually contradict Marxism to nationalize all enterprises immediately, because the purpose of nationalization is to resolve the contradiction between socialized labor and private appropriation. Nationalizing a small enterprise would only introduce a new contradiction, between that of private labor and socialized appropriation.

However, the problem is that the separation between a “small” and “big” enterprise is not clearly defined and there is not agreement between Marxists. While Marxists tend to argue that we should have a scientific approach to political economy, it is very difficult, and probably not even possible, to entirely abandoned moral viewpoints as well.

A lot of communists become communist not solely because of economic arguments but also moral ones. Utopian socialists even prior to Marx focused their arguments on criticism of the bourgeoisie and their exploitation of working people. In fact, because it is difficult to actually explain to people Marxian political economy as it is quite a lengthy and complex subject, a lot of Marxists often have adopted these moralistic slogans as an easier way to rally people.

These moralistic slogans, however, have an impact on people. Because the line between “small” and “big” is somewhat vague, people who are heavily influenced by the moralistic rhetoric may be inclined to exaggerate what counts as a “big” enterprise to include as much as possible, without really trying to analyze the question in a scientific way.

Personally, I see the Soviets since Stalin as having done exactly this. They nationalized almost everything in the economy, and were clear in their writings that they were trying to “abolish the exploitation of man by man.” They never once tried to present any sort of scientific arguments to why they thought this was actually economically achievable, but were largely moralistically motivated.

The only thing they did not nationalize was the kolkhoz sector, and that was because it was so underdeveloped, so isolated and dispersed, that they could not even figure out a plausible way to achieve it. Even then, in their quest to abolition “exploitation of man by man,” they still intervened to collectivize them into farming co-operatives.

Why did the Chinese abandon this model?

Initially, when Mao came to power, he adopted market economic policies, and in fact criticized the USSR for not using the markets enough.

However, the USSR’s rapid collectivization seemed to be having initial positive impact on their growth, which was partially true but also partially exaggerated as the USSR tried to hide some of the problems that came with it.

Ultimately, this led Mao to change his mind and adopt Soviet policies towards rapid collectivization, embracing a sort of “communist wind” that communism could be fully completed in a short amount of time.

When this led to economic hardship, this caused communists in China to split into two camps.

The first camp is Mao’s camp. He argued the problem was a “cultural” one. The political system, the shared social ideology, the culture, etc, all these things he viewed as having been corrupted by capitalist elements. Hence, he believed China’s adoption of the Stalin Model from the USSR could be made to work if they had a “cultural revolution,” a radical transformation of the country’s culture.

The second camp, Deng’s camp, instead did not believe the Stalin Model could work at all. China was even less developed and more poor than the USSR, in fact when Mao took power initially they were basically the poorest country on earth. The idea they had developed enough to achieve the full abolition of private property was just an absurdity beyond words.

The first camp initially had an advantage because all the moralistic rhetoric was on their side. They could condemn anyone who talked about China having to maintain some private economy as “betraying the revolution,” of “supporting exploitation of the workers,” of being a “capitalist roader,” etc. The second camp was seen initially as the killjoys.

However, the first camp gradually fell out of favor when their Cultural Revolution failed to make the Stalin Model work, and the Cultural Revolution itself was a disaster, leading to a lot of chaos, which caused mass death, and ultimately towards the end and caused the economy to start to decline.

This culminated in the Gang of Four declaring that they didn’t even care about development, they it was “better to be poor under socialism than to be rich under capitalism”! This really shows the moralistic bent to Mao’s factions, they were more interested in the morality of abolishing all aspects of capitalism rather than just building a system that actually works.

Eventually, people got tired of the chaos and instability and this lead to Deng Xiaoping’s faction gaining power, and they implemented the policy of “grasping the large, letting go of the small.” In other words, to privatize all the small-to-medium sized enterprises that Mao had nationalized, but to maintain public control over the large enterprises.

This does create a conundrum, though, because most of China’s enterprises are small enterprises. If they privatized them, they’d privatize most their economy. Some would conclude that means socialism is impossible for China, which is actually a position some Marxists even to this day hold, some Marxists think China is just too poor to have socialism and that only western countries are developed enough for socialism.

However, the argument against this actually goes back to Rudolf Hilferding’s writings back in 1910. Hilferding argued that enterprises are not equal. If you nationalize, let’s say, a bouncy ball factory, this will give you less influence in the economy than if you nationalize, let’s say, a rubber factory. Why? Because the bouncy ball factory, as well as millions of other factories, depend on the rubber factory, but almost nothing depends on the bouncy ball factory.

Hilferding thus argued that nationalizing large enterprises at the “heights” of the economy like a rubber factory gives you far more authority and influence in the economy than nationalizing the small bouncy ball factory, and hence, he did not think you actually need to even have the majority of enterprises nationalized to control the economy, only the overwhelmingly majority of large enterprises, because everything else depends on those enterprises and thus would be “indirectly socialized.”

That’s how China still is to this day. People will often point out the fact that 60% of China’s GDP output is from the private sector and conclude that means China “abandoned Marxism.” What they don’t also realize that is 60% of China’s GDP output also comes from small-to-medium sized enterprises, meaning that the overwhelming majority of large enterprises are public.

Why Do Some Communists Love China in Mao’s time But Attack Everything Else?

The Stalin Model even in the USSR was showing cracks pretty early on, leading to the Soviets to try and reform it and change it after Stalin’s death. Mao was still alive at this time, and he saw how the Soviets were gradually moving away from the model that he had come to believe in, and so that’s why he started to formulate the idea about the Cultural Revolution to prevent that from happening in China.

Mao did more than this, though, he also accused the USSR of having abandoned socialism, of being overtaken in a bourgeois counter-revolution. In fact, under Khrushchev, Mao described the USSR as a “Hiterlite dictatorship” of “the big bourgeoisie” and said it had become a “socialist imperialist” and “capitalist state.”

If the USSR had become a capitalist state equivalent to Nazi Germany, then what did that make its allies? It made its allies aligned with Nazism, it made them horrible and worthy of condemnation. Vietnam and Cuba both sided with the USSR, which made them fall other this very same condemnation.

This also meant the USSR was something worth combating, and this led China under Mao to begin supporting Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia because they were opposed to the USSR.

After Mao died and his faction lost control, the PRC gradually adopted a non-interventionist approach in order to focus on economic construction rather than ideological dissemination. While they still even supported the Cambodia guerrillas for a short period of time, this too gradually died down, eventually causing the Cambodian guerrillas movement to wither.

Some communist guerrilla groups in various countries, such as Peru, India, and the Philippines, did not like this idea that China stopped supporting guerrilla movements, because they are guerrilla movements and want support from China. So they started to argue that China had undergone the same transition Mao said the USSR underwent, that China today must be an imperialist capitalist regime, and that’s why it’s not lending support to them.

This makes these guerrilla groups, the modern day “Maoists,” view themselves a direct continuation of Mao Zedong and the Sino- side of the Sino-Soviet Split. They see the USSR as having been overthrown in a bourgeois counter-revolution, and that Mao tried to stop it in China but China was overthrown in a bourgeois counter-revolution as well.

Since the USSR was supposed equivalent to Nazi Germany back then, they also condemn its allied, they claim Cuba isn’t a socialist country, and they claim Vietnam isn’t a socialist country, still to this day. But they will then turn around and defend the Khmer Rouge as “genuine” communist revolution.

So, in their mind, the only “true” communist revolution was USSR until Stalin died, and China until Mao died, and then everything else has been a bourgeoisie Hitlerite dictatorship. (To my knowledge, there is no group that says they like Mao’s China but not the USSR at any point in time, they usually say they like the USSR up until the death of Stalin.)

They don’t actually acknowledge that the reason every socialist country abandoned the Stalin Model was because they couldn’t actually get it to be long-term sustainable, and instead insist that Mao’s Cultural Revolution could’ve “saved” it if only they “had done it early enough.” They think Mao’s only flaw was that he “discovered” the Cultural Revolution too late, and if it was implemented for a much longer time, then at some point, the Stalin Model would actually start to work… somehow.

There was a Maoist revolution in Nepal but just like China, they ended up abandoning that model very quickly. I would presume if the “Maoists” in the Philippines or in India ever take state power, they would abandon it fairly quickly as well. They refuse to acknowledge why it was abandoned and delude themselves into thinking it was just a cultural failure.

from this quora post

Juche was inspired by Marxism-Leninism but not the same.

From what I understand from reading a few books on the subject, Juche seems to be an ideology that is supposed to be specific to socialism in the same way liberal ideology is specific to capitalism.

The fact is, most people don’t deeply care about economics and philosophy, most people aren’t going to sit around for hours and hours each day reading through hundreds of philosophical and socioeconomic textbooks to gain a deep understanding of these subjects.

Most people instead just form very general opinions. Capitalist societies thus focus on not propagating a very deep and complex philosophical and socioeconomic ideology, but a very simple one, liberalism, which talks vaguely about “individual freedom” and is easily understandable by the general public without having to read a single book on the subject.

Marxism is very very complex, and even in societies that try to teach in public schools, most people still don’t fully end up grasping it. It’s sort of like how people regularly say that they have forgotten all the mathematics or the foreign language they were taught to speak in public school, they only memorize certain phrases to pass their exams and then entirely stop caring to remember it once they graduate, because ultimately most people just don’t care.

Juche is supposed to a simpler ideology specific to socialism in the same way liberalism is a simpler ideology specific to capitalism, that is supposed to promote socialism not in terms of some deep complex socioeconomic and scientific theory, but in terms of a much simpler ideological formulation based on a few key principles which everyone can understand.

The main takeaway Juche has from Marxism is the idea of humanity “making their own history.” This was a term Friedrich Engels used to compare capitalist society to the potential future human society.

Before humanity came to harness fire, they could only react to fire. If they encountered fire in nature, they might run from it, but they could not control it. Over time, humanity has learned what causes fire, how to create it, and how to utilize it for human purposes.

You can think of electricity as well. Humanity used to just see lightning and run, or get a static shock and not be sure what caused it, and ignore it. They could only react to it. But as we’ve developed a greater understanding of electricity, we can now control it, to utilize it for the benefit of human civilization.

Engels had pointed out that there is a similarity between natural phenomena and social phenomena in this regard. In the same way that when humanity had lacked an understanding of natural phenomena and could thus only react to them, humankind does not fully understand its own social structure.

Take, for example, the laws of supply and demand. Capitalist societies do not fully grasp all the causes to supply and demand, and they thus are incapable of actually predicting them. As a result, individual businesses can only react to market forces. They do not control the market but instead react to changes in the social system that are far beyond their personal comprehension or control.

Things like this cause human societies to be somewhat “anarchistic.” Even the central government in capitalist societies cannot fully understand or predict what is going on capitalist societies, it instead just reacts to changes in the economic system and tries to make general corrections, but it does not control the economic system. As Engels once put it, "What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed."

The “anarchy of production,” in some sense, takes on a mind of its own. If you build a capitalist society, you cannot fully predict the outcome. It may sometimes grow, may sometimes crash, may lead to rapid industrialization, and may even lead to rapid de-industrialization. You just have to hope it turns out well.

A socialist system attempts to overcome this anarchy of production by making human economies deliberate. The whole socioeconomic sphere would be meticulously and scientifically planned from the ground up.

If, for example, you see a potato with a specific price in a store, the potato producer may say they set that price as a reaction to the market. The potato business themselves may have no idea why the market price of potatoes is what it is, but they don’t really even need to know, they just have to make sure they can sell at or below market price and balance their internal budgets, and they’ll be fine.

In a planned economy and socialist system, if you wanted to know the price of potatoes, you could pull up a spreadsheet of potato production that goes down its entire supply chain and all the resources that went into it and the algorithm used to compute all those resources and understand exactly why the potato was priced the way it is.

There would be no market it was reacting to, rather, the price would be deliberate, and there would be a full accounting of why the price is set to what it is.

The entire socioeconomic system would be deliberate, it would all be meticulously scientifically and rationally planned. The political system would not just be a body that reacts to changes in the economic system that are largely outside of its control, trying to nudge them in the right direction, but instead everything that occurs in the economic system would be a deliberate and intentional plan carried out by the political system.

This is what Engels meant when he talked about, in socialism, humankind would “make their own history.” The development of human societies would become something entirely deliberately carried out by the conscious will of humanity, rather than much of it being the result of unintentional developments outside of anyone’s control.

Korean communists particularly liked this notion because it fit in well with their strong beliefs of national liberation. Korea was colonized by Japan, and as Japan was falling, the USA invaded Korea and outlawed any attempt at forming a grassroots democratic government in Korea and began to carry out massacres against pro-democracy protestors (e.g. the Autumn Uprising), then established a puppet autocratic regime that would only increase the massacres against those who wanted democracy (see Bodo League Massacre, Jeju Uprising Massacre).

Korean communists did not want to be subjected to foreign powers outside of their control, they wanted the Korean people to, well, “make their own history,” and not have it made by foreign powers.

Even if the Korean communists managed to kick out the foreign imperialists, if they established a capitalist system, there is no guarantee the foreign imperialists could not take over the country through economic means, through buying up Korean means of production and subjugating the country through economic dominance.

This led to the “self-reliance” aspect of Juche, which is really just a rephrasing of the idea of the Korean people “making their own history.” Marxists see political power as ultimately resting in control over production, so the only way to make sure the Korean people, as a whole, can “make their own history,” is if the Korean people as a whole control their own economic base, i.e. the economy is controlled by the Korean public and not foreign countries or some elite faction of the Korean public, but the Korean people as a whole.

Juche basically takes all the complex ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the thousands of books about philosophical and socioeconomic writings, and puts these aside. The general public does not need to fully understand this, because from their point of view, if Marxism-Leninism is correct and correctly predicts that socialism is the next stage of human history, then rallying people around certain basic principles of socialism should be enough.

They instead take the idea of building an economy where the people are the creator’s of their own history, the “masters of their own destiny,” and make this the central point to rally upon. It simplifies socialism down to just the liberation of humankind, with the abolition of one class exploiting another, with one country exploiting another, and the replacement of all of this with a system in which everyone participates in creating their own future, in writing their own history.

The Juche idea is, in a word, an ideology that the masses of the people are the master of the revolution and construction and they have the strength to push them. In other words, it is an ideology that man is the master of his destiny and he has the power to carve out his destiny.

While it is inspired from Marxism, it is not Marxist, but its own independent ideology. It does not necessarily fully replace Marxism either, as people in Korea still study Marxism. However, Marxism is more-so relegated to the social sciences, it becomes not the ideological center of the state but instead something people study who are particularly interested in the social sciences, it becomes relegated to academia so to speak, while Juche instead has replaced Marxism as the ideological center of the revolution in Korea.

We have seen something pretty similar show up in many Marxist-Leninist states. Marxism-Leninism is so complex and so academic that it’s often supplemented with other ideologies because it is difficult to get the general population to fully grasp it. In Cuba for example, they ended up merging Marxism with “humanism,” where humanistic rhetoric tends to play a supplementary role in the state’s messaging in order to appeal to people in general. The Cuban constitution both describes the Cuban state as one working towards the construction of both “socialism” and “humanism” and that it follows “humanistic principles.”

Lenin himself in his book What is to be Done? had made it clear he didn’t believe the general public could come to easily understand the deep complexity of Marxist ideas because they were developed through academics who had spent their life researching the social sciences. He thus advocated that the socialist revolution would have to be led by a “vanguard party” where the people in the Party are compromised of those who have the deepest understanding of these ideas.

This inherently implies that there are gradations in society of how well people understand Marxism, with some people understanding it well, and some people not all, and many people in between, and that somehow the “vanguard party” has to appeal to the masses which, if the vanguard party is defined as those who understand Marxism well, then by definition the masses outside the party they are trying to appeal to don’t understand Marxism well.

This has lead every Marxist revolution to seek some way to resolve this contradiction, some way to build a socialist system with broad population support, where by definition only a subsection of the population even understandings the ideology the whole revolution is centered around.

Different socialist and communist parties have tackled this problem in different ways. In Korea, it has been tackled by replacing Marxism with a more general ideology that ultimately calls for the same end-goal but without all the complex academic baggage and that appeals to broad sentiments of the Korean people for national liberation and autonomy. In Cuba, they have tackled it by merging Marxism with other philosophical ideas so that they have a broader pool of rhetoric to pull from depending on who they’re talking to.

from this quora post

https://invidious.reallyaweso.me/watch?v=YqIAF8uXhRA&listen=1

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3265315

Fun little biography of Marx

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5342816

Do you think that you can help bring about the revolution or do you just want a minor less risky role? What kind of role can you participate on and die with a smile in your death bed when you think about how you lived your life?

podcast well established with lots of good episodes

book in progress

interested to hear your thoughts....

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3082851

excerpt:

Due to its interconnections with imperialism, racism, and capitalism, international development needed to be thoroughly transformed. Sankara discontinued the United States Peace Corps program in Burkina Faso in 1987. A Mexican American agroecologist invited to visit rural villages at the time recalled that a small group of American volunteers had driven a 4×4 vehicle over a meticulously dug irrigation canal, destroying hours of labour. Sankara was reportedly furious. The episode revealed the duplicities embedded in the Peace Corp programme during the Cold War years: naïve, inexperienced American youth sent to various destinations across the world for personal skills and career development and a fair bit of soft power diplomacy as ‘good will’ from the anti-communist US government. But too often good intentions devolve to dangerous outcomes, and often with little accountability. Sankara requested that the Peace Corps funds be channelled into an account overseen by a Burkinabé group or collective. This suggestion was rejected, and Sankara discontinued the programme in Burkina Faso. He was convinced that “Aid must go in the direction of strengthening our sovereignty, not undermining it. Aid should go in the direction of destroying aid. All aid that kills aid is welcome in Burkina Faso. But we will be compelled to abandon all aid that creates a welfare mentality” (Sankara, “One Color: African Unity,” August 1984).