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I'm someone familiar with 20th c. and 21st c. Marxist literature. Academic Marxists today do not, in general, view the fall of Communism as an abomination, and

I'm someone familiar with 20th c. and 21st c. Marxist literature. Academic Marxists today do not, in general, view the fall of Communism as an abomination, and in fact many of them celebrate it - and use it as a learning guide for avoiding such collapse. Peter Hudis, for example, speaks of the irony of the USSR falling into what Marx himself described as a situation in which the equality of wages creates an "abstract capitalist" of society. Moishe Postone, perhaps one of the most influential Marxists critical of the Soviet (and Soviet inspired systems) chastises "traditional Marxism" for similar reasons. The Japanese Marxist schools have their own criticisms in turn, as does the Frankfurt School (focusing on the similarity between forms of domination in the West and the USSR in the 60s). The fact that the USSR and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism are associated so strongly with Marx himself is in my view an intellectual tragedy. But you won't find such associations made by professional modern theoreticians. The author writes, >But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. But this is wrong. The figures I have named above actually use a Marxist lens to explain the fall of communism and its fall in global history. Herbert Marcuse goes further in investigating the role of the Nazis is history in Hegel's idea of progressive development of freedom. Why was the USSR not a socialist state? What lead to it being the way it was? Why did Stalin effectively admit as such in Economic Problems of the USSR? There are papers by Marxist historians, philosophers and value-theoreticians alike. Here[0] is one by Chattopadhyay, a respected figure in Marxist philosophy. From Peter Hudis: >This is in many respects a remarkable passage, for it anticipates the problems with many of the social experiments that will be carried out (ironically enough) in Marx’s name in the twentieth century. Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labor. To ignore alienated labor while altering wage and property relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labor on the workers. Society has a whole now becomes the “abstract capitalist.”One form of oppression is ended by instituting an ever more egregious form of oppression. Second, if everyone is paid the same wage, labor becomes treated as a uniform abstraction. Treating labor as an abstraction, however, is precisely the problem with alienated labor. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
What would it take for you personally to say that Marx was wrong (not about his critique of capitalism, but about his solution)? What are you waiting to see tried before you are willing to say that Marxism failed? You have replied with strong knowledge of the literature, but it still sounds a great deal like "No True Scotsman" to me. For every approach, you can find a scholar who says that approach is wrong, so it can never be definitively disproven, because there's always a great Marxist scholar who says "No, that approach was wrong". But from where I sit, the following things seem to be true: 1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. 2. Vanguardism has been tried, but produced something that was worse than capitalism - worse both economically and in terms of freedom. That leaves... what? What are you, personally, looking for that you think would work? If it is tried and fails, will you say "they didn't do it right", or "I was wrong, but Marx wasn't; this other approach is the answer"? Or will you say that Marx does not give a viable answer on how to fix capitalism in a way that actually makes things better?
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. On the same token, no nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted with vanguardism. They never claimed to bring about Communism, only that they were "socialist states". Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Leninism as incorporating ideas from Lenin from Marxism-Leninism, an ideology created around Stalin's systematizing as a state ideology. The truth is that I don't know what it would take, especially in today's world. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of workers as a whole uprising, and in the case that they did, succeeding. As David Schweickart wrote on his essay on Sartre's Marxism: >Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part, to the fact that, since the mid-70s, there has been a coordinated, beneath-the-radar, well-financed, largely-successful, ongoing effort, not only to keep “Democracy in Chains,” but to tighten those chains more and more so as to shield the wealthy from democratic discontent. Not good news for Marxists hoping to “win the battle of democracy.” At the same time the prospects for a violent revolution by progressive forces (as opposed to a right-wing military coup) are essentially zero. (A successful storming of the White House? A guerilla army swooping down from the Appalachian Mountains?) But the point is this: by going through an intellectually lazy route to say that Marxism died with the collapse of 20th c. Communism, we are already shutting down discussion of what Communism could be. The hypothesis, from my point of view, has not been refuted. It is less a matter of teasing out Marx's vision of a future society (which is lacking, because of his philosophical commitments) but rather trying to see what a future society would look like based on the critique. Unlike the diagnosis from a doctor, the features of a socialist society flow from the critique of capitalism, indeed, I would say they are already within it. I am no dogmatist. If we find that Marx's critique must be reformulated or even abandoned, then so be it. But I think this is less and less the case when Marx's framework is being fruitfully used today for apparently modern phenomena, from McDonaldsisation to the neoliberal state. So to answer your question: For Marx to be wrong on the solution to capitalism would, for me, necessarily entail that his critique is lacking or wrong. Since we are more able to access the latter than the former, we can sort things out from there. This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique. A stronger, dogmatic, claim would be that even if Marx was wrong about capitalism then his socialism would still be the answer. I don't think that's defensible.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

What would it take for you personally to say that Marx was wrong (not about his critique of capitalism, but about his solution)? What are you waiting to see tried before you are willing to say that Marxism failed? You have replied with strong knowledge of the literature, but it still sounds a great deal like "No True Scotsman" to me. For every approach, you can find a scholar who says that approach is wrong, so it can never be definitively disproven, because there's always a great Marxist scholar who says "No, that approach was wrong". But from where I sit, the following things seem to be true: 1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. 2. Vanguardism has been tried, but produced something that was worse than capitalism - worse both economically and in terms of freedom. That leaves... what? What are you, personally, looking for that you think would work? If it is tried and fails, will you say "they didn't do it right", or "I was wrong, but Marx wasn't; this other approach is the answer"? Or will you say that Marx does not give a viable answer on how to fix capitalism in a way that actually makes things better?

claudiawerner 7y ago
>1. No nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted organically, that is, without vanguardism. On the same token, no nation-level Communist regime has ever been instituted with vanguardism. They never claimed to bring about Communism, only that they were "socialist states". Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Leninism as incorporating ideas from Lenin from Marxism-Leninism, an ideology created around Stalin's systematizing as a state ideology. The truth is that I don't know what it would take, especially in today's world. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of workers as a whole uprising, and in the case that they did, succeeding. As David Schweickart wrote on his essay on Sartre's Marxism: >Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, increasingly dysfunctional, due in no small part, to the fact that, since the mid-70s, there has been a coordinated, beneath-the-radar, well-financed, largely-successful, ongoing effort, not only to keep “Democracy in Chains,” but to tighten those chains more and more so as to shield the wealthy from democratic discontent. Not good news for Marxists hoping to “win the battle of democracy.” At the same time the prospects for a violent revolution by progressive forces (as opposed to a right-wing military coup) are essentially zero. (A successful storming of the White House? A guerilla army swooping down from the Appalachian Mountains?) But the point is this: by going through an intellectually lazy route to say that Marxism died with the collapse of 20th c. Communism, we are already shutting down discussion of what Communism could be. The hypothesis, from my point of view, has not been refuted. It is less a matter of teasing out Marx's vision of a future society (which is lacking, because of his philosophical commitments) but rather trying to see what a future society would look like based on the critique. Unlike the diagnosis from a doctor, the features of a socialist society flow from the critique of capitalism, indeed, I would say they are already within it. I am no dogmatist. If we find that Marx's critique must be reformulated or even abandoned, then so be it. But I think this is less and less the case when Marx's framework is being fruitfully used today for apparently modern phenomena, from McDonaldsisation to the neoliberal state. So to answer your question: For Marx to be wrong on the solution to capitalism would, for me, necessarily entail that his critique is lacking or wrong. Since we are more able to access the latter than the former, we can sort things out from there. This is actually a weak claim - because I admit that Marx's vision of socialism depends on his critique. A stronger, dogmatic, claim would be that even if Marx was wrong about capitalism then his socialism would still be the answer. I don't think that's defensible.