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More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the i

More and more i find myself thinking back to a claim that Lenin asked Marx about the latters thoughts about turning Russia communist, and Marx scoffing at the idea. This because Marx envisioned the transition happening after capitalism hit a crisis, where upon the workers would take over and continue to operate the factories within the existing supply network (more coops, less central planning). In the USSR however it seemed one got more akin to the old Ford factory, where raw iron and coal came in at one end, and finished Model Ts rolled out the other. Thus there were no independent sub-suppliers of parts, everything was made internally as needed, and nothing more.

burntrelish1273 10y ago
For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.
smacktoward 10y ago
Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted. In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell. What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.
timdierks 10y ago
Red Plenty (by Francis Spufford), a novel about economic planning in the USSR, is an excellent read and characterizes the information problems at the core of the failure of central planning.

burntrelish1273 10y ago

For some reason, at first, I thought it was a comedy bit.

smacktoward 10y ago

Yes, this was one of the places where Lenin diverged from classical Marxist thought. Marx argued that society would slowly and naturally evolve towards socialism as workers gained experience and "class consciousness" from struggling with their capitalist bosses. Lenin argued that the slow evolution Marx had predicted was not actually happening, so a "vanguard party" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism) of highly committed activists and intellectuals was needed to drag the workers into the socialist future they stubbornly refused to realize they wanted. In retrospect this can be seen as a turning point in the process by which communism, a philosophy devoted to letting the masses rule themselves, turned into Soviet communism, a system in which the masses were bossed by party elites as hard or harder as they had been by the old czars and capitalists.

digi_owl 10y ago
Ah yes, vanguards. Worked so wonderfully in France, Russia, and Egypt. Yep, that's sarcasm if you can't tell. What i am referring to in each instance is the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the various fundamentalist groups around the middle east that follow some interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's philosophy.

timdierks 10y ago

Red Plenty (by Francis Spufford), a novel about economic planning in the USSR, is an excellent read and characterizes the information problems at the core of the failure of central planning.