this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Reforms are great, but ultimately a doomed bandaid over real problems. Quoth Lenin:
"Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital.
The liberal bourgeoisie grant reforms with one hand, and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery. For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.
And conversely, workers who have assimilated Marx’s theory, i.e., realised the inevitability of wage-slavery so long as capitalist rule remains, will not be fooled by any bourgeois reforms. Understanding that where capitalism continued to exist reforms cannot be either enduring or far-reaching, the workers fight for better conditions and use them to intensify the fight against wage-slavery. The reformists try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions. But the workers, having seen through the falsity of reformism, utilise reforms to develop and broaden their class struggle."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/12b.htm
Karl Marx was an idiot. Let me explain...no there's too much. Let me sum up. Replacing a whole system just because some parts of it don't work is stupid. How do you know the system you put in as a replacement won't also be broken.
Some people tried to replace capitalism with a totally different system and it went real bad real fast. This wasn't an isolated incident. They tried it in a bunch of places and in none of them did it work. Marxism has been debunked in the field.
Marxism is the idea that you can fix problems with an ism. Got poor people? Try communism or socialism or half-cocked-ism. If your solution to a problem can fit on a bumper sticker it's wrong.
You're an engineer. There are absolutely scenarios where so much of a system is broken that you have to redesign the whole system. You can't turn a steam engine into an electric motor piece by piece.
40% of the population is one missed paycheck away from poverty while a handful of people have rocket ships and megayachts and buy-a-few-politicians money. That is not a bug, that is the central operating principle, the Carnot cycle of capitalism. If you're one of the millions who are in the "wage labor" part of the cycle instead of the "extract profit" part of the cycle, capitalism has already gotten real bad.
You're an engineer. Don't be so reductionist. You sound like a kid who invented a perpetual motion machine with an overbalanced wheel and magnets. You should know better.
I can absolutely draw you a line from the development of the steam engine to the electric motor to NASA. Every little thing that was wrong with steam engines led to better and better technology. Marxism is like saying, "the steam engine has problems, obviously mechanical engineering is doomed, lets breed better horses."
Really? Please, what linear, incremental changes can you make to a pressurized piston driven engine that will turn it gradually into an induction motor? Certainly, they both turn a wheel eventually, but the fundamental principle of operation is totally different. The things that were wrong with steam engines led to incremental improvements up until a point, when a total redesign was necessary.
Your analogical thinking needs improvement. Capitalism isn't like mechanical engineering, it's like external combustion. Socialism is like replacing it with internal combustion, communism is like replacing that with electric induction.
Steam engines literally led to the development of electric motors. Steam engines led to steam turbines which led to dynamos which led to electric motors, each invention building off the knowledge gained at the previous step.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Algernon_Parsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo
Your analogy is doubly flawed. Each type of engine you mention has strengths and weaknesses that depend on external variables. Internal combustion isn't better at producing electricity for instance, which is why we mostly use external combustion to do that. Electric motors aren't better than internal combustion, except that internal combustion is causing climate change. It's also flawed because history has shown that Socialism doesn't work better than Capitalism. I could see, if this were purely theoretical, someone arguing the benefits of Marxist ideas, but it's been tried. In several places around the world, people tried to put in place the kind of changes you're advocating. In every case it led to authoritarianism, brutal repression, and starvation. Does it suck that poor kids don't have enough to eat, while Bezos builds space yachts? Yeah it sucks, but it's not millions-starving-to-death levels of suck like we actually, not theoretically, got every time we tried Communism or Socialism or any kind of take-their-stuff-and-give-it-to-me-ism.
Right, but you wanna keep using steam engines to power cars.
History shows that capitalism has one exemplary use case: siphoning value from workers to capitalists. Full stop. It's an outright failure at other things, or at least worse than most alternatives.
There are, in fact, millions starving to death under capitalism, and have been every time it's been tried. Sure, they're brown people in countries capitalists call "shit holes" so you personally can't see them, but they're there. Lots of them are working in dangerous conditions for negligible wages in order to prop up capitalism, because capitalism boils down to one equation:
(Revenue) - (Expenses) = Profit
Guess where wages fall in that equation?
Poverty and exploitation aren't coincidental, occasional consequences of capitalism. They are the mathematically inevitable conclusion every single time. It's almost impossible to find a mass-market product that didn't involve child or slave (or child slave) labor somewhere in the supply chain. After all, the fewer pennies you pay for labor, the more space yachts you can buy.
The only times capitalist economies do anything other than exploit and cause poverty are when armed revolt is imminent and the government steps in to take-the-capitalists'-stuff-and-give-it-to-everyone.
Social democratic economies are thriving around the world. Every unregulated capitalist economy has devolved into space yachts and starving millions almost immediately.
Sure, there have been authoritarian governments that said they were socialist for PR. You can call a hammer a socket wrench. The failure of the hammer to turn a nut doesn't mean socket wrenches don't work, it means you're pretending a hammer is something it isn't. No one has tried communism, or large scale socialism. They've tried authoritarian centrally planned economies, which isn't what either of those things are. Hammers marketed as wrenches. No one you're talking about has ever tried the wrench.
Except worker co-ops.
Right, but I'm not arguing for unregulated capitalism. I think capitalism should be highly regulated. I'm arguing for fair markets that reward good actors and punish bad. I'm arguing for continually refining capitalism and fixing the problems. Which is why I keep having this argument. You're obviously an intelligent person, motivated to change society for the better, with a good moral compass. I want you on my side. I want people to want to work on the actual problems, and not pin their hopes on some big idea that will fix everything, because that doesn't exist.
This is the cognitive dissonance about Marxism that bugs me the most. You believe that a system such as Capitalism is so flawed that it must be replaced with something else, but you are unwilling to see that Socialism is also flawed in different ways. If you adhered to the principles of pure Marxism, you would see that Socialism as well must be discarded for a better alternative. Instead of seeing that, you will label every failed Socialist state as a fake. We need something else.
The core issue here is that you don't have accurate or consistent definitions for your terms, so you wind up making inaccurate and inconsistent straw men. Like I said, hammers and wrenches. This is the cognitive dissonance about capitalism that bugs me most.
If you want to have a valuable discussion on the topic, you need proper definitions of "capitalism", "Marxism", "socialism", and "communism".
You're very clearly using "capitalism" to mean the same thing as "market economy", as opposed to "centrally planned economy", which is not accurate.
You seem to be lumping "Marxism ", "socialism", and "communism" into the same thing, which you seem to define by "wealth redistribution" and "centrally planned economy". Such, I assure you, is not the case.
Capitalism is an economic system which operates by the formula I provided above, where investors (who themselves do not contribute labor to a company) extract profit by paying the workers (who do all the labor to generate value in the company) less than the value that they contribute.
Marxism is, at its core, simply a critique of capitalism and the general search for an alternative. Marx analyzed capitalism, most famously in Das Kapital, and revealed the inherently exploitative nature of the core mechanic of the system; that it will always, by virtue of it's fundamental principle, always result in the emergence of a wealthy investor class (bourgeoisie) and increasingly impoverished labor class (proletariat).
Marx's only principle was one you seem to agree with: systems naturally beget the systems that replace them, and capitalism is one such link in the chain. To return to the steam engine analogy, someone develops a dynamo to turn rotary motion into electricity, then eventually someone realizes you can run the dynamo in reverse, turning electricity into rotary motion. I agree with Marx that the change is inevitable, eventually, when the conditions are right. We're not quite there yet, so obviously any attempt is going to fail.
Socialism is simply an economic system that takes the wealthy investor out of the above equation: the workers themselves own the company, and instead of being paid in wages, the profits are divided between them. That's it. The most straightforward example is a worker co-op, which simply takes the familiar capitalist concept of investor and worker, and combines them into the same group. This still operates quite nicely in a market economy, with all the benefits thereof, and without needing nearly as much labor regulation as capitalism.
The most extreme version, and the one you seem to think is representative of the concept, is State socialism, where all companies are (in theory) absorbed by a democratic state so that every worker is an owner of every company. Personally, I think that could be possible in several decades if co-ops saturated the market and then iteratively federated, but jumping straight to central planning results in the failures with which I'm sure you're duly familiar.
Communism is a hypothetical, post-scarcity, stateless, classless, and moneyless society organized by spontaneous voluntary cooperation. Marx theorized that the fundamental pressures of capitalism would eventually concentrate so much wealth (and cause so much class divide) that the workers would topple the bourgeoisie and "loot the palace", as it were. In theory, if the concentration was great enough, the system previously established could support everyone by voluntary contribution and the resulting society would be sustainable without hierarchy.
Personally, I have my doubts we're anywhere close to that, but if current trends in automation and AI continue, we could very well find ourselves with no other option in a century or two. As it stands, communism has never been tried above the very small scale. Certainly, some attempts at a transitory system with the stated goal of communism have been proposed in good faith, and certainly some ambitious dictators have used that banner to con people into supporting them. But a hammer is not a wrench, and diligent propaganda doesn't change that fact.
Capitalism is irredeemable. It's mathematically certain to widen the class divide. The "regulated capitalism" you mention is just periodic spurts of state-socialism to bleed off a bit of the pressure. The success of that mixed economy speaks equally to the successes of capitalism and state-socialism, and honestly it's still not great. Why cobble two failed systems together to clumsily balance each other, when you can learn from both and synthesize them into a functioning system: Market Socialism.
The problem with capitalism isn't markets and competition, it's the extraction of value from labor in the form of profit, and concentration of that value into the self-perpetuating generational wealth of non-working investors. Divide equity of every company between its workers. Then you still have markets, you still have competition, and you still have socialism (the workers own the means of production).
I really like that you defined all these terms. It makes it much easier to discuss the ideas when the language doesn't get in the way. Thank you.
Would it be correct to state that every attempt at bringing about communism has failed thus far? From the Bolsheviks to Mao to Castro, none of them have succeeded. Is communism not what those movements were attempting to accomplish? Yes, things went badly, and the end result was not communism, but that doesn't change the fact that those movements had the aim of ending capitalism, in favor of communism.
Let's use another analogy:
Before the Wright Brothers, heavier-than-air flight was considered impossible. There were many failed attempts, going back centuries, at implementing various designs with the aim of heavier-than-air flight. Despite the many, many failed attempts, it was not the goal itself that was impossible; the attempts were poorly constructed. Once the Wrights got it right, the principle took off.
It is correct to say that each of those attempts at a pre-communist system, while the initial developers of those systems did aim to eventually secure the conditions necessary for communism to succeed, did not in fact materialize into actual communism. The reasons for that vary from implementation to implementation. Frequently they relied on a powerful central state, to attempt to expedite the process faster than the more gradual grassroots development Marx foresaw.
Personally, I think they were all bound to fail by virtue of the fact that we were, and are, not yet at a technological state (that is, when industrial automation has supplanted virtually all workers in providing all the conditions necessary for survival) necessary for communism to succeed.
They were the equivalent of grabbing two big fans and flapping your arms. The fact that flapping big fans does not allow for sustainable heavier-than-air flight does not make 747s impossible. It's just an insufficient attempt. Personally, I think Market Socialism is a much more robust foundation which does in fact incrementally improve on the benefits of market economies (which are frequently confused with benefits of capitalism itself).
I think centrally planned economies, which comprise most of the failed pre-communist approaches, are not only poor implementations, they're not even really communism, and are barely even socialism except by the most degenerate definitions. However, confusing failed attempts at a concept for the impossibility of the concept itself is intellectually disingenuous.
“We’ll never survive!” “Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
I really want to believe that a communist world is possible. Maybe I'm like the pessimists that doubted humans could ever fly. I just don't see it ever working.
If it's possible, it's a long way down the road. It certainly has its difficulties, which deserve to be discussed. Like I said, it's probably a century or two away. Right now the closest we can get is market socialism.
The thing I get miffed at is when people misrepresent the concept, then argue against that unrelated concept (that and arguing for an inversely misrepresented capitalism). It's possible that no topic has been more frequently and fervently straw-manned in the last century than communism. That kind of behavior doesn't help anyone but billionaires.
I don't think using terms that you disagree with is necessarily a straw man. If we had been arguing about the possibility of flight and my position was that all previous attempts had failed, you'd come back and say, "those weren't attempts at flight, those were bad bird impersonations."
On a separate note, I've got a question for you. If capitalism inevitably leads to people being poorer, why does this graph show that over the last 200 years the number of people in poverty has steadily declined?