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Marx May Have Had a Point
Hitting the mainpage for the first time, Black Sabbath writes "While communism has been declared dead and buried (with a few stubborn exceptions), Karl Marx's diagnosis of capitalism's ills seem quite bang on the money. Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque lists where Marx may have been right."
It's a pretty good read once you get past the author's three paragraph disclaimer that he is not a communist. The MIT news also ran a short interview discussing the economic trends in August this morning.
Actually, as the article shows, he had several. However, the people who most loudly proclaimed to be acting out "Marxist ideals" generally had no idea what his points were. One point that was crucial to Marxism - and not mentioned in the article - is that Marx was specifically laying out the communist manifesto for smaller countries (no larger than Germany or the UK) as he did not expect it to be applicable to larger countries like Russia or China.
While he never outwardly admitted it, he likely realized on some level that an idealistic approach such as his communism would not be able to stand up to the crushing weight of human want and corruption in a large country. Which is, of course, exactly what happened in Russia and China; neither of which ever accomplished true communism on a national scale.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I don't think everyone agreed that they were acceptable, I think that the wealthy agreed that it was more profitable.
In the United States: The abolition of slavery, taxation, social security, child labor laws, welfare, the interstate highway system, eminent domain, anti-trust laws (Sherman Act), minimum wage, the draft, the inability to sell your organs, pollution laws, laws against exploiting poor people, the list is endless really. We started out as a very Capitalist nation and have slowly migrated to a better middle ground with some Socialist programs and laws. Conversely, China started out fairly Socialist and everyday move toward more Capitalist tendencies. You can argue all day which is the better way but the truth is that 1) for every country it's different and 2) the best solution is always somewhere in between the spectrum of capitalism and socialism. So you can shut up about demanding "pure capitalism" and "truly free markets" just as well as you can stop branding someone a "socialist" for merely proposing or exploring or investigating movements toward the middle.
My work here is dung.
But there needs to be some way to prevent capital from influencing politics, especially in a democracy. Our representatives are owned wholly by the people that give them the most money, and until we definitively block money from being a driving force in politics we will be ruled by the richest.
Barring direct financial contribution to political candidates and forcing them to run on equal funds would help. Barring the movement between high public office and private business, especially government contractors, would help as well. Good luck on any of this every coming to pass. Our elected representatives directly benefit off the system the way it is now, and as they're the only ones who can legally change it, we're pretty much effed...at least, until the general public breaks out the torches and pitchforks and goes all French Revolution on their asses.
Banks fail, then they are bailed out like socialism so you retroactively apply socialism to the reason they are a failure?
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail which resulted in making the financial crisis much worst. It was a test of pure capitalism that failed.
In Capitalism, Man exploits Man.
In Communism, it's the other way around.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's because communism has never been tried. A communist regime in the model that Marx was pushing hasn't ever been implemented. Marx wanted a state like the US, except where the people owned all of the shares of the companies they worked for rather than random investors. And where there was only one class.
To date there has been precisely zero countries where they did away with class and where the workers truly owned the means of production.
The level of ignorance that people express about how it's been tried and failed just boggles my mind, when it hasn't even been tried once.
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Corruption is corruption, no matter what "wrapper" we put around it. Greed (whether personal or financial) always has been and always will be the Achilles heel of ANY model. Every model will fail if greed and corruption are left unchecked. Again, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
It's been tried and failed because Marx made the critical mistake of assuming you could remove greed from the human condition, it can't be done.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Regulations, schmegulations. The reason small businesses can't compete is because big business has rigged the game to their favor, and the playing field is no longer level.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Pardon my french, but that's horseshit. Look at housing prices compared to household incomes (which considers that many more households have two wage-earners in them than in the past). Even for modest, smaller homes the cost is several times higher than it was 30 years ago (in terms of wages).
That's part of the problem -- it feeds into the exploitation issue. But in many ways, it's an excuse given for profit-taking by capital. The workers have been conditioned to lick capital's boots, for fear of losing their jobs. Household debt plays into this, since it's one of the anchors that keeps people from rejecting low wages.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It has been tried but not under the term Communism. There was a form of primitive Communism in the Bible read the book of Acts. So yes Christianity and socialism are very compatible.
Acts 2
44: And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45: And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.
Acts 4
32: And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. 33: And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all. 34: Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, 35: And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. 36: And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, 37: Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
I wish I could mod you up right now...
I'm so sick and fucking tired of the Communist bashing that goes on even to this damn day in the US. Communism hasn't failed mankind, mankind has always failed Communism. The true question is whether or not a society will mature enough that it's people do not constantly want to posses more of whatever goddamn thing they see than their neighbor. As long as there is that one selfish dickface that just has to hoard bread, or money, or whatever else he gets his hands on, Communism fails. It depends on people acting honorably.
I have faith in humanity that eventually we will get to that point, but I'm not gonna sit here and say it will never happen as a justification for my own greed. We get enough of that as it is. Enough with the Randian bullshit. Just say "I want more than your neighbor because fuck him" and be honest with yourself and others. At least we'll know who not to piss on when they're on fire...
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition. Someone will always take advantage of their position and grab more than they deserve leaving the less able or unfortunate with less than they deserve. The downside to communism appears to be stagnation/reduced competitiveness which in a global society is less of an issue than it used to be when states used to compete with each other.
The flaws in Marxism were all figured out in the 1920s. Here, let me explain:
If you have goods that are directly consumable like bread or cheese you can divide them up among people evenly. That works. What doesn't work and is essentially an NP hard problem without money is how goods that are used to make other goods are used. Let's take an example of a freight railroad. What do you ship on the railroad? Shoes, fuel, tiny sub-assemblies of combine harvesters? If you have a piece of construction equipment, what do you build with it? A school, a factory, a playground, a road? In a modern economy all this creates an astonishing amount of complexity that is intractable from a central planning point of view.
How does this work in a capitalist system? Simple : Prices. The price of everything determines what the railroad ships, what the construction equipment builds, etc. In a complex investment decision, such as where to build a factory and what to produce in it, the managers use estimations based on prices of the factors of production and how much they can get for the goods produced to determine whether to build a factory, and where to build it. Prices are a distributed highly multi-threaded information system that tells people what is scarce and what is plentiful from moment to moment and thus directs production.
Prices are somewhat distorted by bank credit money creation and the associated credit cycles, which is what causes the booms and busts in capitalism. That can be fixed, but that's a topic for another day.
The history of the Soviet Union is full of massive planning errors. They built many towns in the middle of Siberia that they abandoned once the Soviet Union fell because the production output was minimal, they cost an enormous amount to heat and deliver supplies to and nobody wanted to live there. They didn't know this until they knew the real prices for running these cities. No communist government, except for the psychopathic regieme of Pol Pot ever dared to completely get rid of money, and even he admitted it was his biggest mistake!
If you want to dig into the theory of the planning problem in capitalism, I'd recommend Mises "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"
http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=71e20725-ee72-4adb-ade2-34dfdabf7755
I wish I could mod you up right now...
I'm so sick and fucking tired of the Communist bashing that goes on even to this damn day in the US. Communism hasn't failed mankind, mankind has always failed Communism. The true question is whether or not a society will mature enough that it's people do not constantly want to posses more of whatever goddamn thing they see than their neighbor. As long as there is that one selfish dickface that just has to hoard bread, or money, or whatever else he gets his hands on, Communism fails. It depends on people acting honorably.
An economic system that only works if every person acts ideally at all times is a recipe for mass graves.
Capitalism, for all its imperfections, is built on self-interest. It expects people to be people, not ants. So it works.
Communism doesn't; never has, never will.
There is no class structure in America
There may not be a codified class structure, but if you're making the assertion that the United States is a lovely fairly-land filled with elves and unicorns that live without any class whatsoever then you are woefully incorrect. There is a massive differential in income between the haves and the have-nots with the bottom 50% controlling 2% of the wealth. We may not have the same rigid caste rules that India used to (for example only) but class mobility is becoming more and more difficult and wealth is becoming more of a legacy passed from generation to generation (new technology notwithstanding).
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I wouldn't go so far as to say that. The problem in Marx's case was that none of the states he thought were ready for a Communist revolution did in fact tip over. There were failed revolutions in some European countries, but the rulers got smart and began instituting relatively liberal constitutions, increasing worker protections and other various cries from classical 19th century Liberals and Socialists. The industrialized nations all got the hint pretty fast that if they didn't at least increase standards of living and rebalance the social equation, they would end up with revolutions.
The places that actually fell to Communism, at least in the first wave, were countries that Marx distinctly said were not ready, and that was the largely agrarian societies of Russia and China. In both cases, the revolutionaries literally had to lift up their economies and carry them through to industrialization, which was what the capitalist epoch in classical Marxism was supposed to be for. In essence, Marxism is an industrialized political and economic theory.
There are other problems with Marxism, but I think Marx himself was proven to be a pretty smart guy, even if there were some substantial flaws in his theory. Certainly the Marxist view of history as class struggles has a lot of adherents in the historical and scholarly community, and it's very clear that he did a rather good job of dissecting Capitalism's major flaws. I wouldn't go out and suggest we all adopt Marxist Communism, I don't think it would work at all, but at the same time I think we can take the warnings of out of control capitalism and see the truth in them.
I don't think any particular political or economic theory should exist solely for its means. The idea that we should pursue Capitalism simply for Capitalism's sake is absurd, and I think underlies the flaws in tossing out pragmatism. In certain circles, Capitalism seems almost a religion, much as Leninist Communism and its descendants did in their day. But clearly by allowing vast sums of money, and almost more importantly, vast amounts of economic influence, to accrue to large commercial and corporate interests has lead us down a dark dark path. The whole notion of too big to fail suggests to me that the time has come to perhaps put caps on just how big any given commercial interest, whether it be a corporation, consortium, co-operative or whatever formulation you can imagine can get. Maybe we shouldn't consider mergers or buy-outs beyond a certain size, maybe when companies reach whatever size seems dangerous they should be cut into pieces, in part to foster competition, but also to assure that the collapse of any one entity doesn't become so dangerous as to threaten the underlying economy.
The success of post-War Capitalism was in no small part due to the embedding of what could only be called socialist principles. Yes, we would allow free enterprise, but with controls, and just as importantly we would create a welfare apparatus to assure that those who would inevitably be harmed by the economic system could at least be guaranteed a certain minimum lifestyle. Different nations took this mix in different degrees; in Europe the welfare state took on a larger role, whereas in the United States, it was less overarching, though I would argue every bit as present, though implementation much less even due to constitutional and political constraints. Regardless of how it was instituted, the goal was to create a balance.
What I think we've seen from the wave of deregulation beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s is a tipping of that balance. We've allowed commercial interests to accrue a vast amount of economic influence, to the point where their success or failure substantially impacts the success or failure of whole economies, even the global economy. Suddenly we've been plunged into a whole new form of welfare, nations literally printing or borrowing vast amounts of money just to keep these sputtering engines from dying and taking everything with them. Now we
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It expects people to be people, not ants.
No. It expects people to be able to act rationally and in their long-term best interest. That's still not how people work.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
In capitalism the greed is meant to be used as a balancing factor. Sure one man is a greedy fucker who will abuse all of his workers to death ... but ... there are 1000 greedy workers with less 'power' but just as much greed, and they'll do things to balance it out ... like vote.
Communism pretends humans aren't humans.
Capitalism uses human nature against human nature as a moderator.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I think this isn't quite right. Marx believed that you could transform man's greed for material wealth into greed for something else, not that it could be eliminated.
Marx, being a Hegelian, believed that man's psychology could be altered through social changes; he thought that changes in social structure could create corresponding in the peoples' incentive structure. Thus, in a successful Marxist state as Marx envisioned it, peoples' greed for gold would be replaced with a zeal for contributing to society (and, perhaps, greed for the social recognition that would come from those contributions). So, in a way, a successful communist system would be as much driven by greed as a capitalist one.
It may not be possible, of course, to modify peoples' incentives in this way, though it's never truly been tested since the prerequisite social structure has never actually been created (and I don't think it's accurate to say he "assumed" that they could; it was certainly something he explicitly argued for). It doesn't seem crazy on its face, though, that people can be conditioned socially to value something other than material wealth.
caritj.org
You're trying to argue that gravity falls up. It's a nice attempt, but ultimately moot, because employee owned companies do exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
Perhaps you should consider that the challenges you mention are not insurmountable.
Yeah right. The US is one of the most classist states remaining in the world. If you doubt it, run down to Martha's Vinyard sometime.
The only difference is that class in the US is based on money, and how long your family has had it instead of strict hereditity as it was in the old world.
Please don't invent new definitions for socialism. There is absolutely nothing in that economic structure that requires it to be a democracy. You're blending and confusing economic systems with political systems. The USSR's economic system was quite socialist, even if their government system was a totalitarian, single-party limited republic. The key hallmarks of socialism are a command economy in which the government owns the means of production.
Actually, capitalism, in the laissez-faire austrian school, has never been tried either. Everything we have today that approximates or is considered capitalist is actually the bastard child mixed economy with both socialist and capitalist features. I posit that either extreme is complete fantasy and the fanboys of both have elevated their respective economic hypothesis' to religion.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yes, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
And the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to pay lower taxes on stock income vs.a paycheck, deduct the use of any business jet, and have the police show up and actually investigate when a $100,000 piece of art is stolen.
We are all equal under the law.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Marx also breathed air.
Our congress breathes air.
Communist percentage: 100%.
I agree with this and will add a bit. The failing of capitalism is not in accounting for greed. For capitalism to work you need an educated consumer base. This is where capitalism fails in reality. Marketers intentionally deceive consumers which wouldn't be a problem with an educated consumer base (they would be able to catch the deception). The problem is that it's literally impossible to be educated about all products on the market so you simply can't have the educated consumer base necessary for free markets to operate as theories would indicate.
Sounds like some kind of cult.
Yep. In fact many modern intentional communities work this way. It can work because you aren't going to screw your neighbors when you live, work and sleep all within a few blocks. Many of these communities are also run by consensus instead of having a hierarchy or authority figure. The problems you see with "communism" at the state level don't emerge until you have a community large enough so that there are "strangers". People will willingly screw a stranger. I've heard that this starts to happen when you get 150 people in the community. In other words, communism doesn't scale.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Everyone who wants to discuss Marx should read this first: http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
The author identifies the fundamental flaw with Marx's theory--he used a false premise. The author here starts a corrected premise and proceeds to give a very interesting history lesson, one which applies quite strongly to today's economic environment.
It was voluntary, not state mandated. Communes and Kibbutz in Israel also function well, and are "communistic". However people are kicked out for not doing what they are able, and everyone is responsible for everyone else. The problem with state mandated communism is that it necessarily is abusive of power, or sufficiently weak that it doesn't work.
Expectations of work, and the condition of expulsion of those that are able, but refuse to work allow for Communes and Kibbutzes to function. A large state cannot function in that manner.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Why do you assume he is white?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Marx's analysis of the flaws of capitalism is generally considered to be reasonable. His solutions are now known not to work too well. (On the other hand, in the last century Russia has tried monarchy, democratic communism, dictatorial communism, democratic anarchy, capitalist oligarchy, and the current capitalist semi-dictatorship. None worked all that well for them.)
Marx was quite right about a key point - if capitalism is allowed to use competition between workers to drive wages down, buying power drops and the system stalls, or stabilizes with most people just above some minimum survival level. That's where we are now. (Wal-Mart has a useful way to measure this. They look at weekly store-to-store sales over each month, and observe that their customer base is presently running out of money before the end of each month, and they then stop buying until their next paycheck.)
Unions were developed to beat that problem. The purpose of unions is to force employers to pay employees more than they are economically worth. This helps both union and non-union workers; in a society where a sizable fraction of workers belong to unions, non-union employers have to pay wages competitive with union shops to avoid unionization. This was well understood in the 1930s through the 1970s. The phrase used back then was "labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce." That sounds strange today. Which is part of the problem.
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
Government is not neutral in this. Deregulation, free trade, weak antitrust and labor law enforcement, anti-union state policies, and tax cuts for the rich all helped to reduce US wages.
The point here is that the economy has more than one stable state. One stable state looks like a third-world country - wages are at poverty levels, a few people have most of the money, disposable income is low, and production is limited by available disposable income. Another stable state has much higher wages and consumption levels. The US has seen both, and has chosen the former.
That blog post has one rather glaring flaw: it fails to analyse why there are debtors and savers in the first place and who actually gets the opportunity to become a saver. In particular, it fails to account for some quite significant economic reasons why some people would be financially unable to save money. TFA has, in my opinion, a better explanation of why debt explosions are inevitable.
This is technically true, but scale matters. A lot. For someone earning minimum wage, how long will it take them to save enough money to, say, open their own business? Compare that to someone who is earning millions each year.
Even your examples of how to save money reveal your flaws. You mention living with your parents, but what about people whose parents are absent from their lives? You mention giving up some free time to collect cans, but what about those who are already working multiple, minimum wage jobs and don't have any free time to give up? From the sounds of it, you come from a place of privilege (as do I - my family helped pay for college, among other things), and I think that it would do you well to remember that there are some places in the US where people live in abject poverty and have very minimal options.
The blog that you reference makes some interesting points about the merits of spending vs. saving, but trying to cram all of history and economics into this simple divide is naive at best and dangerously foolish at worst. The danger comes from the inherent assumption that all people in poverty are there through their own laziness and "debtor" mentality.
BS. Anyone who has cash flow can save money. Or they are dying of starvation. The likelihood of someone having literally only exactly enough to "survive" is practically zero. One can ALWAYS sacrifice current consumption for future gain. Whether that means eating rice instead of bread, or living with your parents instead of your own apartment, or making extra effort to pick up discarded cans for recycling (sacrificing leisure time).
Do a little experiment. Get the minimum wage figures, and figure out how much you get per month. Assume you pay no taxes, since theoretically you're getting all of that back anyway at the end of the year. Find out what it costs to rent a really, really cheap place in your area. In a horrible neighborhood. I'm talking about what it requires for you to have basic shelter, where the only requirements are electricity (need to store food in a refrigerator), and indoor plumbing (you can't hold a job if you can't shower). Determine how much it would cost to pay for that electricity and water. Assume bare minimums here, just take a non-zero value. Determine how much food costs, and for the sake of argument, this person lives on ramen alone. Eats nothing else. You may also assume that this person lives within walking distance of where they work, so they will have no transportation costs. This person never spends any money on entertainment, they will never become unemployed, they will never become sick (otherwise we'd have to factor in health insurance, and that'd definitely break the budget).
Turns out that depending on where you live, minimum wage won't even cover the rent for that shack in a bad neighborhood. In other places, you might be able to determine that there's some money left over after my minimum living requirements stated above. If that's the case, I want you to calculate how much they will have saved after 50 years of working (you can assume their salary follows inflation, so keep all costs the same for all 50 years). That means they started working at 20 and retired at 70. Assume they've invested in the stock market and got a steady 10% growth every single year. You might be surprised to find that investments don't yield as much as you think they do.
Even assuming these ideal conditions, I guarantee you that the result will be that they won't have enough money saved over to last them and 20 years of life, living in the same poor conditions. I know this from experience. I'm not a debtor, but I lived my childhood as one. My parents weren't skilled enough to get high paying jobs, and there wasn't enough left over to save. We weren't starving, but that doesn't mean that sometimes we wouldn't have to do that 1-2 day fast until payday came along and we could buy food again. My parents were, however, smart enough to explain to me the value of an education, so that I wouldn't be in the same situation. With what I earn today, I find that it's rather easy to save for retirement, even as I send my parents some extra money every month to help out since they had a grand total of 20k saved in a 401k and social security isn't enough to fill in the gap.
I find that people who believe what you do have always been in the same situation as I am, where it's always easy to save some extra money by not buying that new iPad thingy. You see other people who earn the same as you do being financially irresponsible and you assume that's the reason EVERYONE has for not doing as well as you do. Financial irresponsibility can ruin you regardless of your income, I agree. However, a minimum income is required before financial responsibility is even an option.
The thing is, if you read Marx's Das Kapital (which it certainly sounds like you haven't) you'll discover that the major thrust of Marx's argument is that under a capitalist economy with completely unfettered markets, wealth gets concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists by effectively stealing value from workers. The reason for this is that if a worker has no money and nothing of value to sell except their own labor, then that worker has 2 choices:
1. Work at a wage that is below the true value of their labor, but no less than the minimum amount needed to keep that worker alive, or
2. Die of starvation, illness, or exposure.
Now, here's the question: Is the worker making the choice to take that below-value wage really making a free choice?
I am officially gone from
Will get you kicked out of that 270 square foot apartment - not to mention that there's barely room for the beds.
Dead, only child, parents lived in an apartment.
4 USD in 1980 equals 10.44 USD in 2010. By comparison the Federal minimum wage is 7.25 USD, and Washington has the highest minimum wage of 8.67. In other words, in 2010 dollars, you made between 20 and 44 percent more than minimum wage.
Now cut that paycheck between the aforementioned 20 and 44. Assuming you only worked 40 hours a week back then, you'd now have to work between 48 and 58 hours a week to make the same paycheck, which would cut significantly into your available time for self-improvement.