Marxists believe in dialectics. In essence, contridictions are inherent and change comes about as the contridictions are resolved.
As the contridictions are resolved, as has happened in past systems, we expect a widening of democracy and better conditions.
Will there be a point where all contridictions are resolved? We don’t know for certain, but the path toward that point improves peoples lives and liberates people from their current state of exploitation and oppression
But I find it less a contradiction and more a complete ignoring of how humans create political structures.
Even after economic inequality is solved, there will likely also be issues with political inequality and it will require more attention than just trusting the leaders to make an equal system. There may also be a perverse incentive of political leadership to delay economic equality to prevent them having to implement political equality.
The socialist project is not to just solve economic inequality and then call it a day. In fact, and once again because or ideology is based on dialectics, we understand that to work toward economic equality you must also work toward political equality. Working out these things is a process of “resolving the contridictions” within our class relationships. The aim of this is a classless society, which would mean all contridictions have been resolved and class struggle ends
All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
I disagree that The Revolution will create this. It isn’t going to be a singular revolution to create this, so the barriers to prevent a transfer is power to the next revolutionaries need to be lowered to keep a push of permanent revolution and prevent the calcification of the government to become trapped by those wishing to create a less equal society.
The Revolution is not an event. It is an ongoing process. Its is not a singular event exactly like you say. We already believe that. “The witheting away of the state” is component of Marxist-Leninidt thought. The Revolution is the ongoing process where as i said earlier, we contnue to resolve the contridictions
But if it isn’t an event but a process, you need to build within the body politic a way to overthrow those who have wandered away from the goals of The Revolution. Having to resort to violence only creates a perverse incentive for those who stray from The Revolution to harden the state from overthrow rather than continue the reforms needed.
The beginnings of capitalism may go back as far as the 1300s. The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, which documents this new semi global mercantile system goes to 1533. There was encirclements that began shortly after until much of the land in europe had become private property.
The English capitalists had their revolution/civil war from 1640-1660, supplanting the power of the monarchy, the French and the american revolutions near the end of the 1700s. These were the big capitalist revolutions. They happened at the end of hundreds of years of development, struggle, change, etc.,
When we talk about socialist revolution we aren’t talking about a war, we are talking about the replacement of a whole system of social relations. There are wars fought, and uprisings and all sorts of historic struggle and conflict. But those aren’t the revolution we are referring to.
A socialist society widens democracy to accommodate for this.
The following is from a Marxist Leninist perspective - other socialist tendencies are available:
For MLs we want to maintain state power in order to defend against hostile capitalist states and internal counter revolutionaries. Lenin describes this as a state, but not a state. He views the state as smashed as power transfers from the bourgeois to the proletariat.
The class enemy being put down, state power no longer is used to oppress the proletariat. The democractic process can be used after this point to deal with the remaining/new contridictions that exist/arise.
The reason why liberal democracy cannot provide the same thing for the proletariat is because liberal democracy is designed for and controled by the bourgeois to enact their oppression upon the proletariat.
The revolution isn’t a singular event, but its also not a succession of violent conflicts. The class enemy being eradicated means true democratic process can exist
One of the biggest historical arguments on the left from all sides is against the idea of Utopianism. There are huge, obvious problems with capitalism that can be fixed, but they’re not the end of it. Where we go from there is almost anyone’s guess.
The immediate problem we have is that the 1% own everything and control everything. And, if they own everything and control everything we don’t really have democracy, do we. That’s what people are saying about contradictions. If we can somehow make it so the people own everything and control everything, we’ll be several steps ahead.
Because Communism is an actual scientific economic theory that works so well that even capitalists study it to learn how to do capitalism better and not easily disproven, pseudoscientific, social Darwinist nonsense like fascism.
Off topic but, I’ve seen you posting a few times here and wanted to say that you’ve got a great screen name and Woody Guthrie would almost definitely be on a platform like this, were he online (and alive).
Almost every socialist party in the world focuses on things they’ll do right now, not in some hypothetical future. I’m a communist because I want improvements to the conditions of the working class immediately, even if it doesn’t create some utopia. That’s why in Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto there’s a list of immediate demands once a socialist party takes power, things like abolition of rent-seeking and inheritance.
Because they look at the contradictions and blame them on things like some ethnic group ruining everything. Labor movements have actually traditionally done a lot of that, but fascists solely want to blame regular working class people for the issues that capitalism wrought. (And exterminate them.) And again, we try to avoid talks of utopia. We just want to move on from capitalism.
And while you may say something that sounds rational, it may not sound as rational to everyone, especially if they are seeped in a lot of racist propaganda.
How do you deprogram someone who has been told their entire life that Jews and immigrants are the real problem that Jews and immigrants aren’t?
The goal isn’t to “end politics” but to improve people’s lives. If we abolish the existing power structures, new ones will arise to take their place, yes, but those new ones don’t need to be the same as our current ones, just as a capitalist liberal government isn’t the same as a feudal monarchy.
All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.
public functions will lose their political character
That doesn’t mean politics will end, just that administrative functions like constructing and maintaining sewage systems, electrical grids, hospitals, will be cleansed of politics.
But those activities include non-economic politics. For instance, a hospital being allowed to conduct abortions is not within the realm of Marxist theory, but it is a part of politics.
If intersectional liberation is necessary, then can you judge communist nations for not abiding by that? If a communist nation doesn’t offer gay marriage or the ability to choose ones gender, by what rights is there to critique this? Can I say a country isn’t truly communist if I can’t get married to someone of my gender?
Some AES do and some don’t. Some haven’t resolved those contradictions yet and they should be criticized for it. That’s why we use the the term Actual Existing Socialism and not True Perfect Socialism.
These countries are socialist projects, projects that fall within the social revolution, to use Engels term. All AES have broadened democracy comparative to before their projects began and work toward the resolving of contradictions. Just because they haven’t been resolved doesn’t mean those projects arent socialist.
Criticism is the beginning for formulating beneficial change. The first step in the scientific method is defining the problem.
Communism advertises itself as being rational, so I expect it to be able to try to address these problems.
And I haven’t said anything about Communism in general to mean it can’t get implemented, but that there has to be an understanding of what may be deficient as a way to strive towards something greater.
If a political or economic system can’t address and change potential issues, should it be a system that continues to be adopted?
Engels wasn’t a prophet, we don’t worship at the altar of Engels and Marx. They had good ideas, but they weren’t infallible.
This is why most Marxists today are Marxist-Leninists. Because while Marx and Engels wrote a lot of theory, it was just that, theoretical. With the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks were able to put their theory into practice, some stuff turned out the way they thought it would, other stuff they predicted didn’t happen at all. So the important thing isn’t just theory, but putting that theory into practice and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. It’s always important to exist in the real world, not in an idealistic fantasy. If our ideal system doesn’t work in reality, we must alter it so it does, even if that means it is no longer the hypothetical perfect utopia it once was. “People living better lives” is still “better” even if it isn’t “perfect.”
No, but I’ve got a lot of experience with retired people on pensions that like to rule their HOA’s with an iron fist. I’ve also got enough experience with people who don’t want people to choose their own pronouns, which isn’t an economic decision.
Fascism isn’t an economic system, but a political system that was one of the first political systems of the modern era to attempt to create an unequal society without a unifying monarch. Inherently, it is the ruling class giving rights and privileges to a minority to allow them greater standing over the rest of the population, usually through the trappings of conservatism.
Feel free to correct me where I’m wrong with that understanding.
Facism is essentially capital abandoning liberalism to defend itself in violent reaction to socialism/threat of socialism.
Fascism is an anti-intellectual movement so there’s not much real “theory” but anti-communism is its bedrock belief.
It terms of economics theres really no difference between it and modern neoliberal capitalism
I don’t actually follow your definition at all. I would say that while fascism is not an econimic system itself, that there is no fascism without capitalism
Fascism isn’t just capital abandoning liberalism, but free market capitalism as well.
The fascist state will destroy capitalist enterprises in the name of the state; a lot of Nazi’s initial expansion was caused by Nazis destroying Jewish capitalist businesses.
If the state is picking the winners of capitalism, it isn’t just capitalism.
No, but it would look fundamentally different than what it does right now. One of the core premises is that culture & politics are inextricably formed out of property relations & the distribution of economic surpluses.
It is a premise, but there are cases seen in governments where a people will choose to a act against their absolute economic interests for relative sociopolitical interests. Hell, a major underpinning of fascism or apartheid states is that a part of the social working class will get an elevated social position by allying with an oppressive state as long as they get some privileges for doing so.
You’re not wrong, the entire point of Marxist Internationalism & Solidarity is precisely to combat that tendency. In short, this is not really a counter-argument to Marxism, precisely because the vast majority of Marxist theory (that written between the Revolutions of 1848, and the revolutions in Russia & China) are written in exactly that context, and exists to address & make the argument to workers why that’s a bad idea for them to do.
Of course getting people to accept & understand that is harder than just saying it; but the point is that this isn’t something Marxists are unawares of. If you are interested in further (digestable) info on the topic I would suggest the youtube channels Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, Hakim, Yugopnik & Second Thought.
I’m not presenting an argument against Marxism, just its implementation as described by its founding thinkers.
It gets sold as you only need to do it once, but it is something that needs constant attention and requires a review of those who say they follow The Revolution to make sure they still continue to do so.
It gets sold as you only need to do it once, but it is something that needs constant attention and requires a review of those who say they follow The Revolution to make sure they still continue to do so.
Absolutely, no disagreement on that position.
I think that’s kind of true of all political programs though, to some extent. Everything is of course subject to entropy.
Those are still good channels to check out though, if you’re interested. :3
I only bring it up as a part of communism over other systems seems to encourage a political system resistant to political change. The requisites that you need to join a certain political party and that only that one party seems to create a political monoculture that will calcify into something that doesn’t serve the people.
I’m not judging it as being bad, just without the political experience of the 20th and 21st centuries.
It is like George Washington saying that political parties are bad because it wasn’t thought of when writing the Constitution even though that was obviously what was going to happen.
George Washington didn’t like the idea of political parties because he was scared shitless by the then current French Revolution. He didn’t want a situation where Americans made their own Jacobin party, took advantage of divisions within the newly formed American state, and then put James Madison’s head in a guillotine. He was terrified of abolitionists too. He was also talking more specifically about what were then called “Democratic-Republican Societies” which by and large were critical of Washington, favored France, and some abolitionists were involved. They were politically motivated to prevent aristocracy from reappearing in the new USA. Washington was on the side that believed the Democratic-Republicans were a scheme by France to weaken the central American government, which is an honestly funny parallel to the 20th century Red Scare.
Washington didn’t like these parties because he viewed himself as part of a New World aristocracy and he correctly knew that to maintain a genocidal, slave-trading empire, there needed to be a singular unity of interests in the state. Namely, ensuring everyone was on board with slavery. His belief that political parties would eventually split the country was proven correct when around 60 years after his death, the USA had a civil war over slavery, and support for either side was 100% partisan with Republicans in the north and Democrats in the south.
It’s possible to look at Washington’s views not as some universal claim but rather the position he held at the time because of his specific interests and class position. He was speaking to his own interest when he said political parties were bad, because they eventually provided representation to abolitionists who eventually abolished chattel slavery.
So do people really think politics will be over once people’s economic needs are met?
Marxists believe in dialectics. In essence, contridictions are inherent and change comes about as the contridictions are resolved.
As the contridictions are resolved, as has happened in past systems, we expect a widening of democracy and better conditions.
Will there be a point where all contridictions are resolved? We don’t know for certain, but the path toward that point improves peoples lives and liberates people from their current state of exploitation and oppression
But I find it less a contradiction and more a complete ignoring of how humans create political structures.
Even after economic inequality is solved, there will likely also be issues with political inequality and it will require more attention than just trusting the leaders to make an equal system. There may also be a perverse incentive of political leadership to delay economic equality to prevent them having to implement political equality.
The socialist project is not to just solve economic inequality and then call it a day. In fact, and once again because or ideology is based on dialectics, we understand that to work toward economic equality you must also work toward political equality. Working out these things is a process of “resolving the contridictions” within our class relationships. The aim of this is a classless society, which would mean all contridictions have been resolved and class struggle ends
And the struggle is good, but…
I disagree that The Revolution will create this. It isn’t going to be a singular revolution to create this, so the barriers to prevent a transfer is power to the next revolutionaries need to be lowered to keep a push of permanent revolution and prevent the calcification of the government to become trapped by those wishing to create a less equal society.
The Revolution is not an event. It is an ongoing process. Its is not a singular event exactly like you say. We already believe that. “The witheting away of the state” is component of Marxist-Leninidt thought. The Revolution is the ongoing process where as i said earlier, we contnue to resolve the contridictions
But if it isn’t an event but a process, you need to build within the body politic a way to overthrow those who have wandered away from the goals of The Revolution. Having to resort to violence only creates a perverse incentive for those who stray from The Revolution to harden the state from overthrow rather than continue the reforms needed.
The beginnings of capitalism may go back as far as the 1300s. The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, which documents this new semi global mercantile system goes to 1533. There was encirclements that began shortly after until much of the land in europe had become private property.
The English capitalists had their revolution/civil war from 1640-1660, supplanting the power of the monarchy, the French and the american revolutions near the end of the 1700s. These were the big capitalist revolutions. They happened at the end of hundreds of years of development, struggle, change, etc.,
When we talk about socialist revolution we aren’t talking about a war, we are talking about the replacement of a whole system of social relations. There are wars fought, and uprisings and all sorts of historic struggle and conflict. But those aren’t the revolution we are referring to.
You can you aren’t talking about a war, but the output of this instance says otherwise.
And I’m not commenting about that, just what gets proposed in the violent overthrow when capitalists are taken out to “have a good time”.
A socialist society widens democracy to accommodate for this.
The following is from a Marxist Leninist perspective - other socialist tendencies are available:
For MLs we want to maintain state power in order to defend against hostile capitalist states and internal counter revolutionaries. Lenin describes this as a state, but not a state. He views the state as smashed as power transfers from the bourgeois to the proletariat.
The class enemy being put down, state power no longer is used to oppress the proletariat. The democractic process can be used after this point to deal with the remaining/new contridictions that exist/arise.
The reason why liberal democracy cannot provide the same thing for the proletariat is because liberal democracy is designed for and controled by the bourgeois to enact their oppression upon the proletariat.
The revolution isn’t a singular event, but its also not a succession of violent conflicts. The class enemy being eradicated means true democratic process can exist
I agree. We need a significant, worker led, social, uprising. A Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution if you will.
I am not memeing here. Read some Maoist stuff, you might actually tend towards that
One of the biggest historical arguments on the left from all sides is against the idea of Utopianism. There are huge, obvious problems with capitalism that can be fixed, but they’re not the end of it. Where we go from there is almost anyone’s guess.
The immediate problem we have is that the 1% own everything and control everything. And, if they own everything and control everything we don’t really have democracy, do we. That’s what people are saying about contradictions. If we can somehow make it so the people own everything and control everything, we’ll be several steps ahead.
But why trust a system that says “don’t worry, we’ll get there eventually” when other systems say the exact same thing?
Fascists talk of utopia, why not believe them?
Because Communism is an actual scientific economic theory that works so well that even capitalists study it to learn how to do capitalism better and not easily disproven, pseudoscientific, social Darwinist nonsense like fascism.
Off topic but, I’ve seen you posting a few times here and wanted to say that you’ve got a great screen name and Woody Guthrie would almost definitely be on a platform like this, were he online (and alive).
👍🎸
Almost every socialist party in the world focuses on things they’ll do right now, not in some hypothetical future. I’m a communist because I want improvements to the conditions of the working class immediately, even if it doesn’t create some utopia. That’s why in Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto there’s a list of immediate demands once a socialist party takes power, things like abolition of rent-seeking and inheritance.
Because they look at the contradictions and blame them on things like some ethnic group ruining everything. Labor movements have actually traditionally done a lot of that, but fascists solely want to blame regular working class people for the issues that capitalism wrought. (And exterminate them.) And again, we try to avoid talks of utopia. We just want to move on from capitalism.
And while you may say something that sounds rational, it may not sound as rational to everyone, especially if they are seeped in a lot of racist propaganda.
How do you deprogram someone who has been told their entire life that Jews and immigrants are the real problem that Jews and immigrants aren’t?
If you want to see some of the most disturbing shit ever recorded about that. CW I don’t have all the Hexbear features, it’s the act of killing. It’s a doc where they interview people who murdered about a million suspected communists in Indonesia and then had some of the people who did it put on a stage production about it: https://www.nipissingu.ca/library/video-streaming-nipissing/humanities-and-social-sciences-videos/act-killing
Also, these guys are still walking around and are deeply embedded into local politics.
I got halfway through this. Never finished it…
You take power and start fixing the problems, and you ban people who thinks Jews and immigrants are the problem from saying that or holding any power.
Hell if I know.
The goal isn’t to “end politics” but to improve people’s lives. If we abolish the existing power structures, new ones will arise to take their place, yes, but those new ones don’t need to be the same as our current ones, just as a capitalist liberal government isn’t the same as a feudal monarchy.
I’m just listening to Engels when I say that.
That doesn’t mean politics will end, just that administrative functions like constructing and maintaining sewage systems, electrical grids, hospitals, will be cleansed of politics.
But those activities include non-economic politics. For instance, a hospital being allowed to conduct abortions is not within the realm of Marxist theory, but it is a part of politics.
intersectional liberation is necessary to communism, which is itself “the doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat”
This is some “Marx never considered X” shit at this point. Its a 200 year long intellectual tradition - it has been considered
If intersectional liberation is necessary, then can you judge communist nations for not abiding by that? If a communist nation doesn’t offer gay marriage or the ability to choose ones gender, by what rights is there to critique this? Can I say a country isn’t truly communist if I can’t get married to someone of my gender?
Some AES do and some don’t. Some haven’t resolved those contradictions yet and they should be criticized for it. That’s why we use the the term Actual Existing Socialism and not True Perfect Socialism.
These countries are socialist projects, projects that fall within the social revolution, to use Engels term. All AES have broadened democracy comparative to before their projects began and work toward the resolving of contradictions. Just because they haven’t been resolved doesn’t mean those projects arent socialist.
Criticism is the beginning for formulating beneficial change. The first step in the scientific method is defining the problem.
Communism advertises itself as being rational, so I expect it to be able to try to address these problems.
And I haven’t said anything about Communism in general to mean it can’t get implemented, but that there has to be an understanding of what may be deficient as a way to strive towards something greater.
If a political or economic system can’t address and change potential issues, should it be a system that continues to be adopted?
Engels wasn’t a prophet, we don’t worship at the altar of Engels and Marx. They had good ideas, but they weren’t infallible.
This is why most Marxists today are Marxist-Leninists. Because while Marx and Engels wrote a lot of theory, it was just that, theoretical. With the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks were able to put their theory into practice, some stuff turned out the way they thought it would, other stuff they predicted didn’t happen at all. So the important thing isn’t just theory, but putting that theory into practice and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. It’s always important to exist in the real world, not in an idealistic fantasy. If our ideal system doesn’t work in reality, we must alter it so it does, even if that means it is no longer the hypothetical perfect utopia it once was. “People living better lives” is still “better” even if it isn’t “perfect.”
Do you have a lot of experience with life in a world where everyone’s “economic needs” are met
No, but I’ve got a lot of experience with retired people on pensions that like to rule their HOA’s with an iron fist. I’ve also got enough experience with people who don’t want people to choose their own pronouns, which isn’t an economic decision.
those people are still living within a capitalist society
But do you think fascists won’t fasch just because there isn’t money in it?
i don’t think you understand how either capitalism or fascism works
It seems that no they don’t know how capitalism or fascism works, but they like it
Fascism isn’t an economic system, but a political system that was one of the first political systems of the modern era to attempt to create an unequal society without a unifying monarch. Inherently, it is the ruling class giving rights and privileges to a minority to allow them greater standing over the rest of the population, usually through the trappings of conservatism.
Feel free to correct me where I’m wrong with that understanding.
Facism is essentially capital abandoning liberalism to defend itself in violent reaction to socialism/threat of socialism.
Fascism is an anti-intellectual movement so there’s not much real “theory” but anti-communism is its bedrock belief.
It terms of economics theres really no difference between it and modern neoliberal capitalism
I don’t actually follow your definition at all. I would say that while fascism is not an econimic system itself, that there is no fascism without capitalism
Fascism isn’t just capital abandoning liberalism, but free market capitalism as well.
The fascist state will destroy capitalist enterprises in the name of the state; a lot of Nazi’s initial expansion was caused by Nazis destroying Jewish capitalist businesses.
If the state is picking the winners of capitalism, it isn’t just capitalism.
politics and economics are just two faces of the same thing. all power relations originate in production.
that’s why it was called “political economy” before liberalism came up with the scam of separating them
No, but it would look fundamentally different than what it does right now. One of the core premises is that culture & politics are inextricably formed out of property relations & the distribution of economic surpluses.
It is a premise, but there are cases seen in governments where a people will choose to a act against their absolute economic interests for relative sociopolitical interests. Hell, a major underpinning of fascism or apartheid states is that a part of the social working class will get an elevated social position by allying with an oppressive state as long as they get some privileges for doing so.
You’re not wrong, the entire point of Marxist Internationalism & Solidarity is precisely to combat that tendency. In short, this is not really a counter-argument to Marxism, precisely because the vast majority of Marxist theory (that written between the Revolutions of 1848, and the revolutions in Russia & China) are written in exactly that context, and exists to address & make the argument to workers why that’s a bad idea for them to do.
Of course getting people to accept & understand that is harder than just saying it; but the point is that this isn’t something Marxists are unawares of. If you are interested in further (digestable) info on the topic I would suggest the youtube channels Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, Hakim, Yugopnik & Second Thought.
I’m not presenting an argument against Marxism, just its implementation as described by its founding thinkers.
It gets sold as you only need to do it once, but it is something that needs constant attention and requires a review of those who say they follow The Revolution to make sure they still continue to do so.
Absolutely, no disagreement on that position.
I think that’s kind of true of all political programs though, to some extent. Everything is of course subject to entropy.
Those are still good channels to check out though, if you’re interested. :3
I only bring it up as a part of communism over other systems seems to encourage a political system resistant to political change. The requisites that you need to join a certain political party and that only that one party seems to create a political monoculture that will calcify into something that doesn’t serve the people.
The opposite is observed in practice. In both the USSR and even moreso in the PRC, the single-party state encompassed wild swings in economic policy.
The joke goes, in the US you can change the party but not the policy, in China you can’t change the party but you can change the policy.
keep in mind its 1800s language and vernacular
I’m not judging it as being bad, just without the political experience of the 20th and 21st centuries.
It is like George Washington saying that political parties are bad because it wasn’t thought of when writing the Constitution even though that was obviously what was going to happen.
George Washington didn’t like the idea of political parties because he was scared shitless by the then current French Revolution. He didn’t want a situation where Americans made their own Jacobin party, took advantage of divisions within the newly formed American state, and then put James Madison’s head in a guillotine. He was terrified of abolitionists too. He was also talking more specifically about what were then called “Democratic-Republican Societies” which by and large were critical of Washington, favored France, and some abolitionists were involved. They were politically motivated to prevent aristocracy from reappearing in the new USA. Washington was on the side that believed the Democratic-Republicans were a scheme by France to weaken the central American government, which is an honestly funny parallel to the 20th century Red Scare.
Washington didn’t like these parties because he viewed himself as part of a New World aristocracy and he correctly knew that to maintain a genocidal, slave-trading empire, there needed to be a singular unity of interests in the state. Namely, ensuring everyone was on board with slavery. His belief that political parties would eventually split the country was proven correct when around 60 years after his death, the USA had a civil war over slavery, and support for either side was 100% partisan with Republicans in the north and Democrats in the south.
It’s possible to look at Washington’s views not as some universal claim but rather the position he held at the time because of his specific interests and class position. He was speaking to his own interest when he said political parties were bad, because they eventually provided representation to abolitionists who eventually abolished chattel slavery.