Reading "The Gulag Archipelego", cured several misconceptions I had about communism.
"If only Lenin had survived" is a very pervasive idea I believed, but it falls apart when you realize that Stalin's policies were almost all started under Lenin.
Likewise, "They didn't implement it right" falls apart when you realize that they actually had huge buy-in within the country. They started with the ground-level groups and organized up -- just like "real" communists should.
Many other claimed "imperfections" of Soviet Communism seem to be nothing more than fake propaganda to promote a failed, non-theistic religion. The problem is that humans are human. They will do illogical things due to lust, anger, greed, envy, pride, laziness, and gluttony even if those things will lead to destruction on a personal or group level.
A great example was workers being envious of engineers. Those engineers had everything taken not just from them, but even their children were punished for their "success". They were turned into a subservient underclass with the sole purpose of serving the workers (despite the fact that most engineers from pre-Soviet Russia came up from poverty themselves). Adding insult to injury, a completely fake "conspiracy" was generated out of thin air as an excuse to torture and work most of them to death resulting in decades of stagnation and death.
Capitalism at least acknowledges greed and seeks to create checks and balances to power rather than creating new all-powerful entities that become monopolies using "the will of the people" to satisfy their deadly sins.
Communism founds its revolution on promoting envy and greed promoting perceived (or even real) slights until they break out into theft and violence. It should be little wonder that the culture that accompanies this revolution also promotes these attributes to the devolution of society as a whole.
Last I checked, his wife actually helped write the abridged version.
More importantly, Russians by the tens of thousands who survived or lived in those times attest to its accuracy. It's not like this is ancient history. People who lived through the latter part of the system are still alive today and still agree with the contents.
First, distinguish from crony capitalism and capitalism.
Copyright is not a capitalist idea nor are patents. Government choosing winners and losers via regulations is also not capitalist. Every so-called capitalist monopoly in history has either been vastly beneficial to society or was enforced by the government.
Could Microsoft create a non-beneficial monopoly without copyright? Their licensing scheme is entirely dependent on government enforcement. If pricing go too high, another company would move in, reverse the source code, and sell their own. In fact, this motive is so strong that people do this anyway despite the illegal nature of the operation.
Standard Oil is probably the go-to monopoly example, but it lacks intent. Oil prices dropped precipitously due to the economies of scale to the point that profit margins were (and still are) fractions of a cent per gallon (most of the "profit" from the cost of fuel is government taxation). This is a monopoly, but one of convenience and mutual benefit. If they started raising oil prices, another company could form.
The only sound argument to the contrary is exploiting human ignorance. A knowledgeable person can take advantage of a less knowledgeable person, but this issue isn't solved in any other economic system and in fact, becomes worse historically in Communist countries.
The whole reason government intervention into the economy was introduced (creating your "crony capitalism") was that falling profit margins meant the only way to maintain or grow overall profit levels was to increase production, which led to periodic overproduction and market crises. This happened repeatedly and created (at the very least) massive amounts of unemployment and waste. Nothing intrinsic about free market competition or pursuit of private profit checked or balanced it.
The result was the creation of the Federal Reserve. All of the biggest market crisis in US history (either by total or percentage) have happened under the watch of the Fed. In fact, most of them could not have happened without express intervention by the Fed incentivizing bad behavior.
If anything, it seems like crashes are inevitable and government intervention has simply made the crashes bigger and longer-lasting.
So if crises happened both before and after efforts at intervention it almost seems like the tendency is endemic to capitalism itself. Which is one of the many things Marx was right about.
The author of the tweet also has some excellent advice on learning the history of economics, which is to start from the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. Then follow that up with Das Kapital (which I know is an unpopular stance here on HN) and some Keynes (who is credited with coming up with the economic theory that helped bring the UK and US out of the Great Depression). Here's a snippet of Prof. DeLong's advice:
> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.
> Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.
I would recommend reading David Ricardo between Smith and Marx. A lot of ideas get attributed to Smith that are really Ricardo's, or were substantially fleshed out by Ricardo. A lot of Marx's response to free-market capitalism relies on his reading of Ricardo. Ricardo does a lot of steelmanning of Smith's work.
A lot of popular accounts of Smith oversimplify his work past the point of usefulness (in addition to mashing up Ricardo and Smith). There's a lot in Smith's original account that contradicts naive laissez-faire capitalism, but you rarely hear that from people who cite "Wealth of Nations".
The appeal and any truthful aspect of Marx’s ideas seem to be inextricable from its exploitation to justify a cornucopia of violent ideologies and disgusting culture wars.
Even a fully-sane intellectual Marxist cannot escape the communities around them that will twist every word to support their preferred derangements. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what Marx may have thought. His name is now synonymous with anything destructive of civilization by its malcontents.
Consider also, at risk of the above, that this situation, applied to both ‘sides’, is probably the best way to prevent a population from engaging in any meaningful consideration of their condition, and especially any discovery of common ground.
It's inextricably linked because that's what he advocated for in his more famous political tract. Yes, gulags weren't mentioned by name. However, mass industrialized revolution was a seen as a requirement to any pursuit of Communism.
Marx was right about the way that a population stratifies into classes being a useful lens to study history through. His conclusion that communism/socialism was both inevitable and desirable has been thoroughly disproven of course, but that doesn't mean that you can't use class conflict to understand things that happen. Brexit for example didn't fit neatly into a left-vs-right model but it does fit into working-class-vs-bourgeoisie.
That just means that economics is a useful lens, which it is. The stratified model of classes, however, is absurd. I work as a developer, with some developers under me, with some stock in the company I work at. Am I labor, managerial, or capital class? I also bought a house and rent it out, but myself pay rent to live in my current apartment. Am I landlord class or tenant? Am I exploiting my tenants or being exploited? Why would I rent if I considered my relationship with my landlord to be exploitative? I don't think I know a single person who cleanly fits into the Marxist conception of class boundaries, because the world isn't made up of factory owning fat cats and lowly factory workers.
The stratified model of classes, however, is absurd. I work as a developer, with some developers under me, with some stock in the company I work at. Am I labor, managerial, or capital class?
If you have to ask then you are, like me, middle class. The working class and the upper class know quite clearly what class they are in and what class others are. In Marxist terminology you would be one of the petit-bourgeoisie, so you do actually fit into his model.
I would recommend reading some Marx, don't worry, you won't turn Communist, just to understand a) where some of these ideas originally come from and b) how what passes for Marxism these days differs and how few self-proclaimed Marxists have ever read it themselves
Marxism is not about fixed ontological categories like you're describing, it's about understanding the universe and society as a processes which develops according to interrelated dynamic forces.
My understanding of class in Marxism is that there are only two polarities or tendencies in modern society: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The former lives off private profit and the latter lives off selling their basic labor. No one fits cleanly into either, but as history unfolds people's relationships to the economy will tend to develop toward one of those poles.
With stocks, a rental property, and a salaried job in a specialized technical field, you are essentially the modern equivalent of a pre-industrial peasant because you have a certain amount of economic security and guaranteed livelihood. As the rate of profit continues to fall, however, this kind of security will necessarily become inaccessible to the majority of people under the established order, especially on a multi-generational time-scale. This process is called "proletarianization" and the best example of it in our time is the development of the gig economy.
Marx was right about almost everything except one critical detail. His theory doesn't scale. It works great at the family level. It does not work great at the town level and is a disaster at any larger level where most people do not know the rest of the people.
This is why I hate the notion that communism could be state-less. It is a prescriptive ideology that is concerned with describing systems and ensuring outcomes. Any mechanism that enforces that will be an authoritarian state, regardless of what you call it. Any absence of that mechanism would just immediately result in a market economy.
Capitalism make no such prescriptions. It doesn't care how you structure your economic relationships, and it doesn't care to manage the outcomes of those economic relationships. Which is why communes exist in capitalist systems. What I don't understand is why more communists don't just collective resources and go live in communes; land is incredibly cheap with pooled resources. Instead we have to have our entire societies constantly bombarded with attempts to restructure them into these dystopian models.
Most people like the idea of communes more than the reality.
Take a middle class kid who’s never done a real day’s work in their life into a commune and they’ll generally be wanting to go home within a couple days.
Bernie talked about the evil millionaires until he became one and now he’s all about the evil billionaires. He’s fine keeping his own money because “he earned it”, while still advocating for taking money from others. People generally only favor redistribution of the kind that involves stealing from someone else.
Our programmer community is exceedingly well off and could easily solve a large portion of the countries poverty if were redistributed our wealth. If we gave 10-20% to charity like fundamentalist Christians, the 4 million programmers could lift at least 4 million families above the poverty line. Instead, we blame the billionaires and do little to nothing despite our Twitter claims to want to help the disenfranchised.
> If we gave 10-20% to charity like fundamentalist Christians, the 4 million programmers could lift at least 4 million families above the poverty line. Instead, we blame the billionaires and do little to nothing despite our Twitter claims to want to help the disenfranchised.
Yes, but we give 40% to the Federal government who spends trillions to take care of poverty, more so than the 10% tithe ever would amount to, and the problem never gets better. Donate money to the poor? Great idea, but we're _already_ doing that via taxation and wealth redistribution, and no matter how much we do, we're told it's never enough.
Marx was right about how we metabolize forms our conscious reflexes. Someone raised working class will have working class perceptions, eg goals, which are different than someone born with more calorie affordances. But he denied that humans are spiritual creatures. So it is an absurdity to believe that religious activity - which, say, requires “material patronage” including transportation costs, apparel, etc. - only serves a metabolic function in relation to the activity involved; be it a house of worship celebration or other spiritual activities such as the performing arts. Everything can be considered from a “materialist” consumption standpoint - and following his logic, your spiritual life is a form of domination by those who can consume more than you.
Doing something for the love of it, say raising a family, is dismissed in his doctrine which is utterly hell-bent. Or what Arthur Schopenhauer opined:
“ To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors, the fundamental blunder, the real perversity of mind and temper; and, at bottom, it is doubtless the tendency which faith personifies as Anti-Christ.”
-On Human Nature (https://www.tititudorancea.com/z/arthur_schopenhauer_on_huma...)
"...With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought."" -Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I of Capital.
"The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism." (Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329.)"
Materialism within Marxism is more similar to the unitive worldview of eastern philosophy than the dead mechanistic sense we associate with the term. It doesn’t deny spirituality. It just asserts that human meaning and spirit exist within an undivided whole.
"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."" ibid
I am quoting directly from the same source and I have firm understanding of the Master-Slave dialectic and draw a very clear connection to Marx's Superstructure.
Are you familiar with Locke or Berkeley? Marxism, quoting verbatim from the Marxist Archive - and from Marx himself - is in direct opposition to an immaterial world which humans occupy. Spirit, by categorical definition in the Western Philosophical Tradition, exists beyond matter. To Marx, man is enslaved to his material conditions which obligates revolution.
I’m not interested in the categorical definition of spirituality in the Western philosophical tradition. I don’t think Western definitions have anything to do with the spirituality humans have participated in for tens of thousands of years. That spirituality is about an unfolding and reintegration of personal, social, and natural meaning and mystery, not metaphysical assertions.
I asked where Marx denied spirituality, and you misinterpreted quotes based on the assumption that spirituality as humans experience it is the same as Western metaphysical idealism. The long history of mystic and traditional practices refute this assumption.
I am not speaking about "The long history of mystic and traditional practices". I am responding to your query: "where did Marx deny spirituality?" I answered with sufficient sources. In response you tell me spirituality is different than Western metaphysical idealism. But your query is specifically about Karl Marx and his judgment of spirit. I quote his judgment of spirit as secondary to matter. You say I misinterpret the quotes. I am applying it directly to support my judgment of his "philosophy." You claim I make an "assumption that spirituality as humans experience it is the same as Western metaphysical idealism". I am speaking in direct reference to dialectical materialism which rejects idealism - as I have quoted.
Can you understand why I quote dialectical materialism in regards to spirituality?
Dialectical materialism isn’t in conflict with spirituality. It doesn’t deny that humans are spiritual creatures. It is in conflict with metaphysical idealism. If that’s what you’re trying to say then I agree, but I’m simply making the point that metaphysical idealism does not represent the sum total of human spirituality throughout history. Marx no more denies that humans are spiritual creatures than Taoism does, e.g. He certainly never says that all human meaning is reducible to domination and metabolic function.
"Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
"But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other."
-Chapter II, Proletarians and Communists, Communist Manifesto
I cannot help you reach the intuitive judgment of "class antagonism", "ruling class", "class exploitation", etc. vis-a-vis labor being metabolic and ideas being a function of material ergo calorie affordances. It is demonstrative based on the sources I have provided.
I'm not sure what you think you're proving, but to me it seems like you have a restrictive conception of human meaning and spirituality that you're trying to forcefully ascribe to Marx.
But you haven’t proven how Marx understood the term, simply that he rejected certain ideas from his time.
Does spirituality mean denying struggle and conflict in human history?
I’m not going to attempt to prove a negative with regards to dialectical materialism. Show me who says it means all human meaning is reducible to metabolic activity and domination.
40 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] thread"If only Lenin had survived" is a very pervasive idea I believed, but it falls apart when you realize that Stalin's policies were almost all started under Lenin.
Likewise, "They didn't implement it right" falls apart when you realize that they actually had huge buy-in within the country. They started with the ground-level groups and organized up -- just like "real" communists should.
Many other claimed "imperfections" of Soviet Communism seem to be nothing more than fake propaganda to promote a failed, non-theistic religion. The problem is that humans are human. They will do illogical things due to lust, anger, greed, envy, pride, laziness, and gluttony even if those things will lead to destruction on a personal or group level.
A great example was workers being envious of engineers. Those engineers had everything taken not just from them, but even their children were punished for their "success". They were turned into a subservient underclass with the sole purpose of serving the workers (despite the fact that most engineers from pre-Soviet Russia came up from poverty themselves). Adding insult to injury, a completely fake "conspiracy" was generated out of thin air as an excuse to torture and work most of them to death resulting in decades of stagnation and death.
Capitalism at least acknowledges greed and seeks to create checks and balances to power rather than creating new all-powerful entities that become monopolies using "the will of the people" to satisfy their deadly sins.
Communism founds its revolution on promoting envy and greed promoting perceived (or even real) slights until they break out into theft and violence. It should be little wonder that the culture that accompanies this revolution also promotes these attributes to the devolution of society as a whole.
Last I checked, his wife actually helped write the abridged version.
More importantly, Russians by the tens of thousands who survived or lived in those times attest to its accuracy. It's not like this is ancient history. People who lived through the latter part of the system are still alive today and still agree with the contents.
If only Marx hadn't been so against utopian socialism.
Why someone should think that ML communism equals all communism?
Copyright is not a capitalist idea nor are patents. Government choosing winners and losers via regulations is also not capitalist. Every so-called capitalist monopoly in history has either been vastly beneficial to society or was enforced by the government.
Could Microsoft create a non-beneficial monopoly without copyright? Their licensing scheme is entirely dependent on government enforcement. If pricing go too high, another company would move in, reverse the source code, and sell their own. In fact, this motive is so strong that people do this anyway despite the illegal nature of the operation.
Standard Oil is probably the go-to monopoly example, but it lacks intent. Oil prices dropped precipitously due to the economies of scale to the point that profit margins were (and still are) fractions of a cent per gallon (most of the "profit" from the cost of fuel is government taxation). This is a monopoly, but one of convenience and mutual benefit. If they started raising oil prices, another company could form.
The only sound argument to the contrary is exploiting human ignorance. A knowledgeable person can take advantage of a less knowledgeable person, but this issue isn't solved in any other economic system and in fact, becomes worse historically in Communist countries.
If anything, it seems like crashes are inevitable and government intervention has simply made the crashes bigger and longer-lasting.
> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.
> Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.
Link: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/a-note-on-reading-bi...
A lot of popular accounts of Smith oversimplify his work past the point of usefulness (in addition to mashing up Ricardo and Smith). There's a lot in Smith's original account that contradicts naive laissez-faire capitalism, but you rarely hear that from people who cite "Wealth of Nations".
Even a fully-sane intellectual Marxist cannot escape the communities around them that will twist every word to support their preferred derangements. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what Marx may have thought. His name is now synonymous with anything destructive of civilization by its malcontents.
Consider also, at risk of the above, that this situation, applied to both ‘sides’, is probably the best way to prevent a population from engaging in any meaningful consideration of their condition, and especially any discovery of common ground.
If you have to ask then you are, like me, middle class. The working class and the upper class know quite clearly what class they are in and what class others are. In Marxist terminology you would be one of the petit-bourgeoisie, so you do actually fit into his model.
I would recommend reading some Marx, don't worry, you won't turn Communist, just to understand a) where some of these ideas originally come from and b) how what passes for Marxism these days differs and how few self-proclaimed Marxists have ever read it themselves
My understanding of class in Marxism is that there are only two polarities or tendencies in modern society: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The former lives off private profit and the latter lives off selling their basic labor. No one fits cleanly into either, but as history unfolds people's relationships to the economy will tend to develop toward one of those poles.
With stocks, a rental property, and a salaried job in a specialized technical field, you are essentially the modern equivalent of a pre-industrial peasant because you have a certain amount of economic security and guaranteed livelihood. As the rate of profit continues to fall, however, this kind of security will necessarily become inaccessible to the majority of people under the established order, especially on a multi-generational time-scale. This process is called "proletarianization" and the best example of it in our time is the development of the gig economy.
Capitalism make no such prescriptions. It doesn't care how you structure your economic relationships, and it doesn't care to manage the outcomes of those economic relationships. Which is why communes exist in capitalist systems. What I don't understand is why more communists don't just collective resources and go live in communes; land is incredibly cheap with pooled resources. Instead we have to have our entire societies constantly bombarded with attempts to restructure them into these dystopian models.
Take a middle class kid who’s never done a real day’s work in their life into a commune and they’ll generally be wanting to go home within a couple days.
Bernie talked about the evil millionaires until he became one and now he’s all about the evil billionaires. He’s fine keeping his own money because “he earned it”, while still advocating for taking money from others. People generally only favor redistribution of the kind that involves stealing from someone else.
Our programmer community is exceedingly well off and could easily solve a large portion of the countries poverty if were redistributed our wealth. If we gave 10-20% to charity like fundamentalist Christians, the 4 million programmers could lift at least 4 million families above the poverty line. Instead, we blame the billionaires and do little to nothing despite our Twitter claims to want to help the disenfranchised.
Yes, but we give 40% to the Federal government who spends trillions to take care of poverty, more so than the 10% tithe ever would amount to, and the problem never gets better. Donate money to the poor? Great idea, but we're _already_ doing that via taxation and wealth redistribution, and no matter how much we do, we're told it's never enough.
Doing something for the love of it, say raising a family, is dismissed in his doctrine which is utterly hell-bent. Or what Arthur Schopenhauer opined:
“ To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors, the fundamental blunder, the real perversity of mind and temper; and, at bottom, it is doubtless the tendency which faith personifies as Anti-Christ.” -On Human Nature (https://www.tititudorancea.com/z/arthur_schopenhauer_on_huma...)
"The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism." (Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329.)"
-https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938....
I am quoting directly from the same source and I have firm understanding of the Master-Slave dialectic and draw a very clear connection to Marx's Superstructure.
Are you familiar with Locke or Berkeley? Marxism, quoting verbatim from the Marxist Archive - and from Marx himself - is in direct opposition to an immaterial world which humans occupy. Spirit, by categorical definition in the Western Philosophical Tradition, exists beyond matter. To Marx, man is enslaved to his material conditions which obligates revolution.
Can you understand why I quote dialectical materialism in regards to spirituality?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."
"But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other."
-Chapter II, Proletarians and Communists, Communist Manifesto
And please watch the first five minutes of this video, where "labor" is understood to be necessarily metabolic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2hhrUHSD6o
I cannot help you reach the intuitive judgment of "class antagonism", "ruling class", "class exploitation", etc. vis-a-vis labor being metabolic and ideas being a function of material ergo calorie affordances. It is demonstrative based on the sources I have provided.
And prey tell, who said this as it pertains to dialectic materialism?
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
"struggle", "conflict", etc. is not exactly harmonious, is it?
Does spirituality mean denying struggle and conflict in human history?
I’m not going to attempt to prove a negative with regards to dialectical materialism. Show me who says it means all human meaning is reducible to metabolic activity and domination.