Marxism vs Communism

chris: they didn't abolish private property, and they continued to trade w.other countries, so in what sense were they "truly socialist"

Is Cuba a true Socialist state?

any true Marxist who knows his beards knows that the revolution will come AT THE PEAK OF CAPITALISM! LOL!!!!!!ROTFL!!!!!LMAO!!!! ROTFLMAO!!!!! anyway all the "communist" states so far have come from an agricultural economy.

I R knowing marxist theory!

Surely the heart of the matter is the question of where and how the line between government action and private action is drawn. In which case, one authority is substituted for another. I distrust an absolute free market, but an absolutely regulated market seems equally suspect, as both are by default utopias...

Tim currently likes Marx as read by Zizek. Tim dislikes Marx as read by crapulatic economic determinists.

My means of distinction: "globalisation" = economic / institutional, "globalism" = musical / cultural / artistic.

Australian equivalent of Tories (with equivalent of John Major as current PM) being called the Liberal Party = major dud, yes. I believe the New Zealand Tories are called the National Party (with the centre-left party also being Labor), which is much more definitive of a prominent aspect of conservative thinking. Doesn't Australia have a third party roughly equivalent to the Lib Dems? Aren't they called the Social Democrats or something?

re. appropriateness of use of the word "conservative":

British Conservative Party pre-1979 = lived up to their name, on the whole, in that they valued tradition-as-god above almost everything else (ie general support for ancient institutions such as Church of England, public schools etc etc, and benign opposition to Labour schemes for greater social mobility, which they only usually came to support when - as with the NHS - they became embedded in British life).

British Conservative Party 1979 to the early 90s (Thatcher era) = became the most radical UK government ever in terms of overthrow of institutions and trade union power etc. Restructured Britain economically while remaining culturally aloof from what came out of these changes, hence:

British Conservative Party since early 90s = crushed, culturally, by the aftereffects of their own deregulation of UK media and opening UK up to uncontrolled free market (among other factors).

My point was that there is nothing wrong with having deep-rooted, serious objections to the powers of certain massive corporations while being very culturally outward-looking: in other words, there are other globalisms than the economic, and other globalisms than the US-slanted one.

What truth there is in the phrase "economics IS everything" could also be applied to the reasons why free market economics have been so effective in the destruction of the traditional Britain so cherished by the government that unleashed them.

On a serious note: I personally don't understand how anyone on the left or the right can possibly believe that something like the General Agreement on Trade and Services is in any way a good thing.

As a side-note to the real issue lost way up-thread: if you think Marx was on the right track but not quite there, who do you think *has* given the best interpretation of his ideas?

The problem for me is, confused and contradictory — by turns eloquent, thuggish and loony — as his three Nation pieces on the shortcomings of the antiwar left are, I think he hits exactly on a major unspoken fault- line in the left’s attitude, basically to the valid constitution of power itself, firstly in terms of acceptable systems of law and justice (for example, the US state that supplied adequate public housing was with the military-industrial state that bombed Laos back to the stone age), secondly in terms of what constitutes appropriate rhetorical power (not just where politics is publicly contested, but how). I *don’t* think he’s “right” in his proposals: far from it, I think his proposals, insofar as he even makes any, are a unwieldy grab-bag of contradictions. But unfortunately the embarrassed,and in some places extremely slippery and inadequate reaction to his yes unpleasant yes self-indulgent yes highly untimely blow-up just confirms to me that some of the issues he’s raised are actually bot urgent and very hard to answer. And that rather than admit that, hmmm, here are important reaches of our politics which are unthought-through, unformulated, kneejerk, and conflicted, instead, wellanswer came there none, only the telling silences of denial. So am I *really* not entitled to feel let down? Because I really really do.

Look, I wanted Chomsky to articulate a response, not to just exploit my boundless trust that if yes he had a moment he surely could, totally and convincingly of course. He has more important things to do than to persuade me that what’s troubling me here is actually nothing? Yes I’m sure he has, whatever they might be. Except isn’t taking time out to persuade people actually, you know, what he does? Or does he only deign to persuade people who have already passed some political purity test these days?

The unspoken part of the argument here seems to be that there is no real point wasting time disconnecting eg me from my genuine *worries* in re the Hitchens position, because the only reason I can possibly be attracted in the first place is comfortable bourgeois moral delinquency and intellectual flibbertigibbet shallowness. As if he who says “help me” is already a despicable lost cause, y’know?

What I feel is, if the antiwar left were in confident, dynamic mode, if things were actually going well for it, if its strategies and tactics had actually been demonstrably effective in recent times, and it were currently a powerful, growing movement, then it wouldn’t be behaving in such an utterly defensively hostile way towards the very idea of waverers and doubters. Problem is, what I perceive is a huge potential constituency crying out to BE PERSUADED (frightened at and repelled by the thought of the bombing, for example), who nevertheless remain deeply alienated by the inwardness, self-righteousness and tactical-strategic complacency of the various institutions of the left, and the long-established habits and sneers of its too-revered alt.celebrities.

Kerry will perhaps say, if I go and look in the right grass-roots places in the right way, then I will see how wrong I am. Well, part of me says, isn’t it eg Chomsky’s job to induce me to *want* to do this? And another part of me says, actually what *does* induce me to want to, far more anyway than Chomsky’s all-too sneaky emotional manipulativeness, is Kerry’s own contribution to this board, her I think admirable and upright willingness to post and argue in what she plainly considers semi-enemy territory. Her tone is perhaps a mite reactively testy upthread — actually I get riled when I’m reduced to a stereotype, same as anyone (“latent macho”?) or have explained to me why I “really” think such and such — but the fact that *she* takes at least some time to disagree in a civilised fashion is respectful and deserving of respect in turn. It’s a patience that has been conspicuous by its absence, in the antiwar left as I’ve encountered (or “consumed”) it over the last few years.

As for Chomsky -- while I largely respect him and his views, I think that he's lately been on autopilot (American intervention overseas = BAD ALWAYS, even if it's against Osama bin Laden or Slobodan Milosevic). And his comment during the post-election mess in Florida -- "why don't they just flip a coin?" (translation: the people didn't vote for MY candidate, Ralphie the Nadir, so who gives a fuck about finding out WHO they DID vote for?) -- was one of the most flippant, hypocritical and anti-democratic things I've heard a public figure say in a long time.

I'd recommend everyone to watch The Lost World of Communism, the first episode of which was just broadcast on BBC2. Fascinating and sometimes very moving.

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/v/t1.0-9/10178050_10201945933351955_7739862633226552004_n.jpg?oh=18e6e4373480c67ed4a64bf4649f88e7&oe=53CD8A7E

i guess i'll put this here

Even for the LRB, this is quite the classified ad. #dyingmarxists pic.twitter.com/tOgFexioS2

— adam (@AdamWFT) January 29, 2018

lol

I'm getting really into reading really pessimistic contemporary left communist critique despite a long-term distrust of marxism.

good piece in n+1 about endnotes magazine, which is extremely my shit rn

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/the-bleak-left/

I get the impression that marxism as economic theory/critique has weathered time better than marxist revolutionary theory.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cornelius-castoriadis-the-pulverization-of-marxism-leninism

this is one of the greatest analyses of marxism-leninism and its collapse from a left-wing perspective that I've read

Cornelius Castoriadis is a great name

The term “equality” has served as a cover for a regime in which real inequalities were in fact worse than those of capitalism.

lol ok hun.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1966/marxism.htm

This is another good one from old Cornelius

not sure where else to put, but strong marxist tweet imo

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/56407532_2257116511001587_6242974782824906752_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=10a353f8d031ccdaeb626ca27d39cc7f&oe=5D375892

Can I ask a dumb question about the labor theory of value?

If you have two companies that sell widgets, and the widget manufacturing process is mostly identical, so factory workers are doing basically the same thing ... but one company has a better widget design, and makes a lot more money. Factory workers at both companies are making the same wages, but at the company with the better widget design, managers are making much more.

Are factory workers being more exploited in the second case? Are the managers' wages justified, or exploitative? Are managers considered workers here, or capitalists?

(I know this makes me sounds like an Ayn Rand reader, I swear I'm not)

Wouldn't the question better be asked about the designer(s) of the better widget rather than the managers? I don't see what the managers have to do with one company having a better widget design. Also worth asking what you mean by "managers" -- floor supervisors at the factory? The CFO?

And no, those questions don't make you Ayn Rand, they are reasonable questions.

value and price are not related in marxian economics and only labour creates value iirc. I don't believe Marx would view one set of workers as more exploited than the other based on higher profits.

marxist economics have always been the least interesting (or credible) aspect of Marx for me and I haven't been in the weeds of capital since I was a teenager so god knows.

I also eventually throw up my hands any time I try to get too in the weeds on a labor theory of value analysis. I think the genius of the theory is more in enabling people to understand how labor contributes to value, how it is exploited, and the inchoate and unrealized power the laboring classes had a result of those dynamics. It's not the greatest tool in the sense of quantitative economics.

Another aspect to that question is that I don't think Marx's work accounts for IP rights, so in a Marxian world, the "better design" would relatively quickly be adopted by other widget makers.

Yeah I conflated all white-collars workers as "managers" there. Thanks, this is helpful. I suppose "from each according to his abilities" also answers my question about whether Marx thought all workers contributed equally. I wonder what Tolstoy with his theory of infintesimals would have said about this.

The difference between value and price is interesting. It's hard for me to understand value as anything other than value to a specific person, which price seems to capture better than just a measure of raw inputs.

white collar workers are considered petit-bourgeois (alongside small business owners - shopkeepers and the like) in marxist thought. crucially the proliferation of white collar work, technicians, bureaucrats - professional managerial class - hadn't really happened in Marx's time and so trying to do class analysis of contemporary society directly from Marx is tough.