14 ms·

You are a Marxist – but don't worry

• shornlacuna 13y ago
  > [Marx] thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. At certain moments one can sympathise. But it's like wanting to ban gossip or forbid watching television. It's going to war with human behaviour. A common misconception is that 'private property' here is to be equated with 'personal property'. Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished, or indeed that it makes sense to try and do so. Generally speaking, the private property that Marx advocated abolishing was private ownership of land and the 'means of production', the latter being a category akin to 'fixed assets'.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • GuiA 13y ago
    Reading that paragraph made me cringe, as it's such a basic misunderstanding of Marxism that it's the kind of thing you'd expect to read in a freshman essay written the night before after the student skimmed the first 10 lines of the Wikipedia article for "marxism" in a drunken stupor. Fortunately the rest of the article is pretty good, and shows that the author has actually read Marx a tiny bit. Which makes the presence of the first paragraph even more confusing.
    • DavidAdams 13y ago
      I get the impression that the author wanted to dispense with all of the usual preconceptions about Marxism right at the beginning, to inoculate the essay against the reflexive prejudice people tend to have about Marx.
    • nhaehnle 13y ago
      The first paragraph is probably intended to establish the author as somebody who isn't crazy. The disconnect between the majority beliefs about Marxism and its actual contents (as well as the beliefs of those who actually follow in Marx's footsteps today) is gigantic. I perfectly understand that the author felt they needed some way to bridge that gap without turning the vast majority of readers away at first sight.
    • sanderjd 13y ago
      Ridiculing the parts of Marxism that are thought ridiculous by people who only know the popular view of Marxism was a very purposeful technique the author used to convince such people that the author is just as skeptical as they are, so that they could get people to read their (really great, I think) article about the parts of Marx' ideas that fewer people (at least Americans) are aware of. It worked really well on me!
    • firstOrder 13y ago
      You're certainly correct, he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth, then knocks them down.
      • notahacker 13y ago
        Then for good measure he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth and builds them up. When Marx wrote about alienation he was writing about having no choice but to spend seventy hours a week performing repetitive tasks to order in a factory owned and run for someone else's benefit, not the existential angst generated by musing over whether it would be more fun being an architect than designing ads for garden furniture.
    • rmc 13y ago
      It's probably wise to head off the common misconceptions and deal with common rebuttals up front. Otherwise the first comment on this would be "Oh yeah! Well we can't be happy if we don't even own our own wedding rings (for example)"
  • atom-morgan 13y ago
    I've never been able to find a consistent definition of "means of production" or the distinction between "personal" and "private" property. At what point does my laptop go from a piece of machinery that gives me access to HN to a mean of production that could make something like HN?
    • Jtsummers 13y ago
      A way to look at it may be: Is there one community laptop or are their many laptops? A mainframe setup and limited internet constrained to university and business campuses, it becomes more like the "means of production". If there are enough laptops (or near enough) to go around, it's personal property.
      • atom-morgan 13y ago
        But this is exactly what I'm talking about. I've never been able to get a clear answer because so many people in this camp have to take it on a case by case basis. So if laptops are plentiful, it’s personal property. I feel it’s safe to say that most developers probably have their own laptop. So if I hire a developer to write code on my laptop (which was previously personal property) is it now private property since it’s being used as a means of production? If so, the true distinction between personal and private property is intent which is far from satisfactory if we're defining property. So many things I own today would constantly be switching between personal and private property based on what I was trying to accomplish at that moment in time.
        • shornlacuna 13y ago
          The difference is not intent but use. This is the same with real estate: if I own a building to live in it, that's personal property, but if I own a building to rent it out or run a business in it then it becomes private property.
          • humanrebar 13y ago
            What if it's my personal property is valuable as a commodity? As in, what if I want to sell my home? I'm not sure the lines are so distinct. Even if they were theoretically distinct, I doubt that a legal system would fairly make the necessary distinctions.
  • snorkel 13y ago
    But this is still the crucial flaw in Marxism, be because some greedy bastard will control means of production either way to their own benefit, and I'd rather that be owned by a professed capitalist who is regulated by the government rather than owned by the government that then regulates itself thus accountable to no one. This was really the major flaw in Marxist systems, the fat cats were given authority to govern both the public and private sector to their own benefit, no counterweight.
    • Shamanmuni 13y ago
      That's a major point of the article. In his work you have a part in which he identifies the problems (eg Das Kapital) and another part which proposes a solution (eg The Communist Manifesto). In medical terms Marx made a good diagnosis, but a bad prognosis (as demonstrated by history). I think it's important to differentiate them. Marx wasn't a religious prophet, you can take the good stuff and leave out the bad. Even he said in his later life that his goals could be achieved by democratic means.
  • voyou 13y ago
    It's true that when Marx talks about abolishing private property, he has in mind means of production, but I think it's a mistake to try and explain that by making a distinction between "private" and "personal" property (a distinction which Marx himself didn't make, FWIW). The distinction ends up being a distraction, because its hard to make clearly (for reasons people in this thread have given), and, in any case, it's not really important to what Marx is saying; if you abolish ownership of the means of production (private property) there's no real point in ownership of consumption goods either (personal property). In a society in which I can only gain access to consumption goods by subordinating myself to the people who own the means of production, it matters that I have a firm hold on the consumption goods I need. But, if we were able to abolish private ownership of the means of production, I would be able to access consumption goods in some non-alienated way, so there would be no need to own them. So I don't think it's quite right to say that "Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished"; although the important thing is to abolish private property, the natural result of that would also be that personal property as we understand it would cease to exist.
• _delirium 13y ago
  An aside from the article's subject, but where I thought it was going from the title is another way in which many people (esp. technologists) are Marxist in a sense: methodologically viewing society and history as constructed in large part through the interplay of material 'systems', like technologies, the natural world, trade patterns, etc. It's since become a common enough view that it's no longer exclusively Marxist, but it was one of the big departures of Marxist historiography from classic historiographies (aristocratic ones, romantic-nationalist ones, etc.), which focused on the role of people and culture, especially leaders (and other Great Men) and nations, in shaping history. The idea that you could explain things about how a society is organized by investigating the development of steel mills, tracing money flows, and looking at employment relationships (the "base"), rather than only looking at what happens in a society's parliament or culture (the "superstructure"), was pretty unusual.
• tdees40 13y ago
  This is why it's important to differentiate between Marx's preferred political system (Communism) and the ideas of Marx more holistically (Marxism). Many of Marx's ideas remain compelling ways to explain our modern world (alienation, false consciousness, just to cite two), even if Marx's political ideas turned out to be a disaster.
  • mseebach 13y ago
    The idea of false consciousness is one of the most misanthropic and illiberal ideas of the 20th century. It "explains" why the masses disagree with your "analysis" and thus shields you from having to confront the frightening prospect that maybe the masses actually are better equipped for knowing what they want and setting priorities for their own lives than you are.
• foobarqux 13y ago
  Chomsky on Marxism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8GMidDRn2k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8GMidDRn2k
• sharkweek 13y ago
  He also observed how in the modern world, fewer and fewer jobs have this characteristic of allowing us to see the best of ourselves in what we do. Reminds me of my favorite quote from The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country; build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket"
  • yukichan 13y ago
    We build shit. We like make snapchats, twitters and flappy birds.
    • bananas 13y ago
      The word shit is particularly poignant in that comment!
  • icambron 13y ago
    A little OT, but I distinctly remember rolling my eyes when I watched that, mostly because I hear this sentiment all the time. Only the creation of physical things apparently counts as real productivity, and all of this service economy crap is somehow wishy washy or even illusory. It's a fetish for manufacturing, with this back-when-men-were-real-men ring to it. But economic growth can't plausibly come from creating ever more things, and the obsession with stuff is crazy talk. Delivering services is definitely the thing a modern economy should aspire to. Leave the making of shit to the robots and other countries, with whom you shouldn't even want to compete. It's just nostalgia.
    • clarry 13y ago
      It's not necessarily a fetish for manufacturing as much as it is an aversion towards the service economy which we didn't need so much in the past but now have to work in because we don't have much choice. It's either that or unemployment. If you feel we have the means to produce all the tangible things we need, but don't feel the need for all these services... it feels very artificial and forced. EDIT: To elaborate on my point, the article mentions the desire for meaningful work. I would guess in the past most physical objects are created to serve a very concrete, real human need. But many services seem to be about coming up with ways to convince people to part with their money, often just creating and then "servicing random desires." So such work might not feel very meaningful at all. Hence, having to work such a job in order to get money for the things we actually need (and are already capable of producing for everyone) feels very artificial. Of course this is not strictly a property of services. Today we also produce lots of gadgets and widgets and nonsense that aren't in any way relevant to our needs.
• pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
  I thought this was going to be about free software.
• michaelsbradley 13y ago
  The article reminded me of Pope Benedict XVI's short commentary on Marx in his 2007 encyclical letter Spe Salvi[1]: "Together with the victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also became evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realized. Then, indeed, all contradictions would be resolved, man and the world would finally sort themselves out. Then everything would be able to proceed by itself along the right path, because everything would belong to everyone and all would desire the best for one another. Thus, having accomplished the revolution, Lenin must have realized that the writings of the master gave no indication as to how to proceed. True, Marx had spoken of the interim phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessity which in time would automatically become redundant. This 'intermediate phase' we know all too well, and we also know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction. Marx not only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized—which should, of course, have been unnecessary. His silence on this matter follows logically from his chosen approach. His error lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment." [1] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/d...
  • yukichan 13y ago
    I was with this until this part: > His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment." That's going to segue (thanks for the spelling check davidw) obviously into some religions thing about the soul or something. And I take issue with having to be redeemed. I do not need to be redeemed.
• gatehouse 13y ago
  I can't tell if this is a parody site or not: http://www.philosophersmail.com/310114-relationships-stewart.php http://www.philosophersmail.com/310114-relationships-stewart... The superficial resemblance to the daily mail leads me to instantly discredit the whole site.
  • cschmidt 13y ago
    It is one of the weirdest sites I've been to recently. I'm not sure if they're making fun of the Daily Mail, or trying to be like it to get hits, or what. The stories just seem off.
    • fiatpandas 13y ago
      I spent a couple of minutes scanning through their content, and I think the theme of the site is pretty clear: they analyze popular culture (people, media, consumption, and so on) in order to tease out philosophical questions and theories. The reference to the Daily Mail is relatively simple. This website obsesses over the same culture, but for an entirely different purpose. As far as I can tell, it's not supposed to be an ironic publication, like the Onion or something. And I don't think they are making fun of the daily mail necessarily
  • oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
    It's not out-and-out parody, more like halfway between parody and straight-out serious. The idea is 'what if we presented serious topics in an accessible way, with a tongue-in-cheek delivery'. It's Alain de Botton's latest project.
    • igravious 13y ago
      I should have guessed. Hence the prominent advertisment to buy his latest philosophical offering, "The News, A User's Manual".
  • zipdog 13y ago
    Its not a parody, but it deliberately uses the form of the Daily Mail. However, instead of delivering the ephemeral and trivial content of the DM, it uses that form to deliver content (intended to be) more potent. I think one reason for using the DM's form is to highlight how empty the content of a online newspaper is, when compared to something thoughtful dressed up in the same design.
• irremediable 13y ago
  > Frankly, the remedies Marx proposed for the ills of the world now sound a bit demented. He thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. I was given to understand he didn't believe this at all! He believed that people should not be allowed to own the means of production. He was fine with people owning e.g. toothbrushes.
  • ely-s 13y ago
    Marxists, Anarchists, etc. often draw a line between ownership and possession. e.g. You would own a factory or a piece of land, but you would possess a toothbrush and your clothes. There is a subtle difference between them. I think his idea is that if private property were abolished, the means of production would not be owned.
    • irremediable 13y ago
      Well said. But I believe what you said validates my criticism. Marx didn't plan to take away everyone's everything.
  • atmosx 13y ago
    Nice, Platoo said basically the same: A perfect society should be one where everyone can vote, hence everyone is a philosopher. Philosopher should own no property, the state should take care of their needs. Is Platoo demented too??? And if Platoo is demented, who is not demented? Von Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Thatcher?
• glenra 13y ago
  > Why are we all so anxious all the time? Marx had a diagnosis. Because capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable... I'm sorry, but that's just nuts unless you can point to a society - of any sort anywhere - that contains no anxious people. People are (sometimes) anxious for the same reason deer and mice and all other animals on the planet are anxious: being anxious has survival value. Suppose we completely solved the need to pay for food and housing; people would be anxious about health care. Suppose we solved that too? People would be anxious about the need for pet health care. Or better housing. Or social validation. Or we'd start inventing brand new threats to be anxious about, like catastrophic global warming or nuclear meltdowns or economic collapse or being hit by a meteor. We worry because worrying is part of being human.
  • pkinsky 13y ago
    >We worry because worrying is part of being human. Worry isn't a binary state. Not being able to pay for your child's health care is more anxiety-inducing than not being able to pay for your gerbil's health care, for the vast majority of people.
    • humanrebar 13y ago
      Regardless of being able to pay, waiting for lab results of a tumor biopsy is stressful, which is the point.
  • MarkTee 13y ago
    > unless you can point to a society - of any sort anywhere - that contains no anxious people Ok, the Pirahã people of Brazil.
  • atmosx 13y ago
    > I'm sorry, but that's just nuts unless you can point to a society - of any sort anywhere - that contains no anxious people. Tibet. That said, the level of anxiety in western society if the no-1 reason of aging. > Suppose we completely solved the need to pay for food and housing; people would be anxious about health care. Suppose we solved that too? People would be anxious about the need for pet health care. Hm, you have too many assumptions there. Not that I'm very fond of social sciences but do you have at least one study to support your claim? Otherwise, Newton might get displeased[2]. What you're saying that Maslow[1] was wrong? Maybe his hierarchy should be a square since physiological and self-actualization is one and the same according to your approach. > We worry because worrying is part of being human. Of course if my parent is not at home at 23:00 o'clock, I worry. When my parent comes back I stop being worried. It's transitory. I think that in Ethiopia, in Ukraine and large parts of 21'st century world, most people are worried 24/7 though. It's NOT the same. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
• maxjones1 13y ago
  ok, so can we now no longer expect comments on the internets from semi-educated types whose every other word is socialist or marxist?
• veganarchocap 13y ago
  I felt slightly sick when I read that title.
  • hepek 13y ago
    You are being ignorant.
    • sxtxixtxcxh 13y ago
      i think we can assume "veganarchocap" talking about getting physically ill being called a marxist is trolling.
      • veganarchocap 13y ago
        Yeah I was kinda trolling to be fair!
    • veganarchocap 13y ago
      No I'm not, I was making a joke. Though no, I don't agree with Marxism.
• fiatpandas 13y ago
  Is "maker" culture Marxist?
  • dkuntz2 13y ago
    In some ways. There are also some anarchistic tendencies in "maker" culture, like the idea of a Do-ocracy. The maker culture seems more a composite of several different sources. Unless you're trying to test the statement "because they make things they're Marxists", in which case I have no answer.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      It's a peaceful, cooperative reassertion of the workers of their rights to the means of production. I think there are clearly some strains of Marxism it is very well aligned with.
• bcoates 13y ago
  This article takes some pretty big liberties with the present to make Marx look more prescient than he was. The idea that people are being forced out of inherently fulfilling object-manufacturing jobs into inherently unsatisfying service jobs isn't particularly true, and even if it were, that's not what alienation means. While many service jobs suck in ways Marx can be applied to, mass production was the original alienating job. It's the lack of agency that's alienating, not the transitory nature of the produced work, or even the job being inherently pointless (people cheerfully do non-productive things all day) The part about specialization is questionable as well. While there's not much use for a casual architect, the modern, deep-specialization economy means it's impossible to hire if you limit your search to people who made the life decision at 12 that they wanted to be an packaging technology specialist. This creates a system where it is not just acceptable but expected that individuals will have various careers throughout life: What we do for a living can't be a fundamental characteristic of our identity if it isn't what we were doing a decade ago and isn't what we're likely to be doing a decade from now. This is kind of a problem for the article author's defense of Marx because it's the alienating, interchangeable nature of 21st century work that allows the individual to increasingly have an existence outside of their job. Just look at all the weirdos over at tumblr: many of these people have jobs that are so non-identifying that they have to get together and brainstorm new identities to label themselves with.
  • humanrebar 13y ago
    > the modern, deep-specialization economy means it's impossible to hire if you limit your search to people who made the life decision at 12 that they wanted to be an packaging technology specialist. Cherry-picking that example, no, but I can cherry-pick counterexamples that at least practically require early specialization: professional athlete, medical doctor, admiral, and politician. Many of these specialized professions are not coincidentally highly compensated. Without getting caught up in details, I think it's fair to say some career paths are also lifestyles and the result of years (or decades even) of goal-oriented career choices. But you're right that there's more choice than the article lets on. If career variety is important to you, there are career paths that allow a lot of it (like entrepreneurship, software engineering, and business management).
  • 13y ago
• atmosx 13y ago
  "The biggest crime the 60's and 70's European socialist movement, was the failure to severely limit the average working hours" - TechieChan I know most people, especially in a neo-liberal western society, would never give this a chance, but IMHO it's really life-changing. As scarcity is a virtue and many people still believe that worker's productivity in the secondary and primary economy sector is still of importance. ps. I'm all for free-lancers working 24/7 if they choose too. But for things housing/food/clothes/energy/internet/etc. 3 hours per 5 days a week should be enough all over our planet.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    ps. I'm all for free-lancers working 24/7 if they choose too. But for things housing/food/clothes/energy/internet/etc. 3 hours per 5 days a week should be enough all over our planet. At my market wage rate, I absolutely could get housing/food/clothes/energy/internet working 15 hours a week. But: - What I could get would not be nearly as nice as what I get for working anywhere between 2-4x that per week, which is a tradeoff I am happy to make. - If culture or law made it impossible for me to work more than 15 hours a week, my contributions to society would be immensely curtailed. I do what I do because I'm damned good at it, and what I produce is of value to others (who pay a fair price for it). If I started writing poetry or running more marathons, I might produce some things for society I would not have produced otherwise, but in the aggregate society would lose out. If a 15 hour work week became mandatory, unemployment might drop, and wages for those limited hours would likely rise, but the overall size of the productive economy would be horrifyingly reduced.
    • atmosx 13y ago
      > If a 15 hour work week became mandatory, unemployment might drop, and wages for those limited hours would likely rise, but the overall size of the productive economy would be horrifyingly reduced. Nope. It's 3 hours per day, per worker. And when I saw worker I mean the lowest paid salary in an economy. So if you wanna keep an shop open 24/7 you might want to employ more workers or pay the long hours. I get you are in the IT sector which pays above the lowest established salary. However, my reasoning above, was about whoever choses to do so. Today you don't get that choice, you're either up or down. I'm with, doesn't cut for me... But I reckon that a society which doesn't give that choice to the 90% of it's population will have to face some level of social unrest. So since, we have the technology, and work equals food, we need to at least make sure that people have food with a minimal effort. ps. Think about a mother with 2 children that needs only to round up the house income. Three hours per day is good, while the husband could work for more...
• giantrobothead 13y ago
  I was never worried about being a Marxist.
• firstOrder 13y ago
  > He thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. Marx had very little interest in discussing property or things. He called focus on property and things "commodity fetishism". Marx talked about relations of production - relations between people. > It's going to war with human behaviour. All humans lived communistically from the time of cave paintings, Venus figurines, advanced tools etc. of 50,000 years ago, to 10,000 years ago. Go back to the time of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE - Japan, Australia, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa etc. are all still communistic hunter-gatherer tribes. People in New Guinea were living in a more "advanced" mode of production then people living 200 kilometers north of modern Stockholm. If there was some genetic component of humans which made the recognition of rented property, interest-lended money, profit-extracting capital etc. some innate human feature, then we wouldn't have to be repeatedly told that how production and relations of production organized themselves in the past two centuries is normal, and any changes to that are "against human nature". Unquestionable, repeated, "accepted wisdom" of man's nature has been part of propaganda models for millennia - centuries ago priests and reverends would be telling us it is obvious man is depraved, man is sinful, only saved by the grace of god etc. When considered, it's obviously nonsense.
  • bcoates 13y ago
    Do we actually know anything about social structures in prehistory or is it just an assumption that people behaved like modern-day isolated tribes?
    • firstOrder 13y ago
      The important concept is surplus. People do the work to feed themselves, plus extra surplus effort to feed others. Obviously the tribe nurses children who can not feed themselves, and perhaps older parents too weak to feed themselves. Many class structures and relations of production possible in farming societies are not possible in a band of 50 or so continually travelling hunter-gatherers. We know some things about prehistoric bands, especially what things were impossible for them to do.
• coldtea 13y ago
  >Few ideas have been more thoroughly discredited and rejected by history than those of Karl Marx. Actually no. USSR and the "really existing socialism" states had little to do with the theories of Karl Marx (besides the basic lip service paid to it). If you want to discredit Marx's theories do it based on what HE wrote (that's his theories), not what others did afterwards. And arguments from economists that work as policy makers (instead of as objective scientists) and whose models and proposed policies have failed historically in every single case they were enforced do not count much.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > USSR and the "really existing socialism" states had little to do with the theories of Karl Marx (besides the basic lip service paid to it). Even in theory (leaving aside practice) there is a pretty big divergence both in the approach prescribed by and prerequisites/target environment addressed by Leninism from that of Marxism. Leninism was by its own terms, a system that sought to acheive the goals of Marxism, but adapted the means to an environment which had not yet met the conditions Marx saw as essential. Marx wrote about problems in the developed world of his time, and approaches to correct them that built on the present condition of society in those developed countries. Lenin sought to adapt that to address the conditions in a far less developed country bypassing the kind of economic and social development which Marx saw as setting the stage for the change he proposed. You can't fairly criticize Marxist theory based on Leninist theory or practice.
• threepipeproblm 13y ago
  As someone who has read most everything Marx has written... no, I am not a Marxist. And the fact that some of Marx's points about alienation and such have become memes does not make me, or anyone else, Marxist.
  • captainmuon 13y ago
    Marx himself said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist".
• johngalt 13y ago
  I'm a marxist as much as I'm an astrologist. It's easy to make broad statements like 'work should be meaningful'. Who would disagree with that? #4 might as well say "As a Libra you believe that specialization deadens the soul". What a laughable article.
• michaelochurch 13y ago
  I think I'm a neo-Marxist. Marxist materialism gives us the most accurate lens into what human societies actually are: people either cooperating or competing for resources. Culture and religion and politics mostly derive from that. On the small scale, there is much about us as humans that is extra-economic; but, on the larger scale, our operations and fluid mechanics come from economic causes. Like the OP, I don't buy into Marx's solution. I don't claim to know how to build the perfect society, because the feedback cycle takes too long and the costs of experimentation are very high. He diagnosed the problem perfectly. Greed is what is (at least, at risk of) killing us and the planet. Artificial scarcity is also a cause of much misery, and I agree that it must be struck down. The modern, technological world has no place for these artificial scarcities. I probably sound repetitive when I rail against closed allocation, but that's a perfect example of an artificial scarcity (in that case, of ways for a person to distinguish herself and succeed) in all its moronic and evil glory.
  • bokonist 13y ago
    "Greed is what is (at least, at risk of) killing us and the planet." If you are going to get that general, why not say the core problem is that we live in a universe where the core biological law is natural selection/survival of the fittest? Ultimately, every biological entity survives and reproduces by either growing the pie or stealing more of the pie. Human beings became dominant in part because the big brains allowed for cooperation in growing the pie, rather than just fighting each other for resources. Unfortunately, our brains are limited and this did not scale beyond the Dunbar number. The invention of rule or law and market economies helped scale this even further, as these innovations made it so that you had to create some value to exchange, rather than just stealing. But the success of those innovations just allowed the species to grow even more numerous, and the systems far, far more complex, and so market economies have broken down as so many people have found it more profitable to game the system than to create real value (gaming the system meaning everything from exploiting arcane financial structures, lobbying for government favors, building web apps to exploit natural monopoly opportunities, etc.) What is the solution? My best take is that we need to refactor our laws, legal system, and financial system in order to eliminate the opportunities for complexity exploitation, and to re-incentivize value creating activities (such as basic R&D).
• FD3SA 13y ago
  There are many local maximums between pure socialism and pure capitalism. Capitalism, in its purest form, is winner take all no holds barred competition. Ruthless, dirty and vicious. Pure socialism is stagnation, with no rewards for additional efforts beyond the bare minimum. There are many countries that have realized this, and have implemented capitalism's competitive force in a controlled, positive sum manner while simultaneously leaving a generous safety net for those getting started or recovering from failure. However, I believe that in the past few decades, modern nations have had no guiding principles other than economic growth. This begets a huge host of problems, mainly resulting from parasitic and wasteful economic practices which tend to be zero or negative sum when all externalities are accounted for. If we look closely at history, our guiding principles have always been based on fear in the form of massive wars, whether waged or theoretical (WWI, WWII, Cold War, etc.). Increasingly I've become convinced that in order to address all of the failings of modern societies, we need to have national principles based upon something other than pure economic performance and/or war. I sincerely hope that someday, modern nations will adopt scientific research as their guiding principle, and structure society around the continuous quest for knowledge. Research would be the economic engine that drives growth, and national spending would be based upon catalyzing scientific and technological progress. Professional science would be the developed world's biggest industry, which would facilitate implementations in private industry when technologies mature. Universities, hacker spaces, and all academic institutions would provide a plethora of training opportunities that would be sponsored by national spending, ensuring a citizenry that would be incredibly educated and willing to engage in research at all levels, from lab technicians to principal investigators. As such, there would always be a job available in the nation's scientific infrastructure for every citizen at some level. The state would be the employer of last resort, but would also allow opportunities for incredible advancement. Furthermore, this would result in an extremely informed voter base, with the time to participate in direct and/or representative democracy. I see this as being an incredible opportunity going forward. As automation proceeds to rapidly destroy middle and low class jobs, the entire concept of employment will have to be reevaluated. Capital will eclipse labor in the economic factors of production, leading to a necessity for people to find another meaning in life other than just "jobs" for the sake of survival. We'll need a guiding principle to structure our society around. Thus, I humbly nominate the pursuit of science as our prime directive.
• crusso 13y ago
  The author makes a lot of excuses for Marx's philosophy based upon the times in which he existed, ignoring the fact that The Age of Enlightenment had already occurred. The Founding Fathers of the USA had already set the USA experiment in motion, based upon the thoughts of Locke and Montesquieu - among others. There were already abundant answers to the problems that Marx was witnessing, but rather than celebrate the liberty of the individual, Marx subjugated every individual to the limitless needs and exigencies of the "masses". Great, so a few of Marx's tenets out of context of his larger theme made some sense. His context, though, was completely screwed up.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > There were already abundant answers to the problems that Marx was witnessing No, there weren't then and there aren't now. And, the answers that were later adopted, in the US and the rest of the developed West, to partially mitigate the problems Marx was witnessing were, in large part, a subset of those Marx and Engels recommended in the Communist Manifesto as first steps. (And the Enlightenment preceded the development of the economic system that Marx was criticizing -- and contributed to it -- it didn't solve it.)
    • crusso 13y ago
      Sorry, by "answers" I didn't mean final solutions to every problem. I don't assume that there are answers to existence... not in the certainty of death and taxes sense. I meant that there was a direction to go in that was far superior to where they were. In programming terms, a superior local optimum was already evident. To what "first steps" are you referring?
• alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  What the author describes are not the defining features of Marxism. Marxism is a political philosophy the details of which we are all familiar. Marx also had many insights into modern society, human psychology, and history. Not all of his insights were incorrect - indeed there are precious few humans who are cursed with uniformly incorrect insights. However, agreeing with some of Marx's insights does not make you a Marxist. This is the converse of "Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarianism is evil" fallacy.
• ctdavies 13y ago
  Wow it's like no one has actually read Marx.
• captainmuon 13y ago
  Marx != Marxism... There is a huge gap between Marx' writings and what Marxists made of it. I guess most people agree that Marxism was bad. Not just that it didn't work economically, but that it led to undesirable, authoritarian societies. Problem is, Marx didn't advocate what was later called Marxism. In fact, he famously said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist!". That article is misleading and tendentious in many ways. I was going to write a post debunking it, but I honestly didn't manage to get to the end. I found it's just not worth getting worked up ("Someone's wrong on the Internet!"). Just some short ideas: - The author seems hung up on one aspect of Marx's thinking, the concept of alienation. While it is an important concept for Marx, I think if you just single out one aspect, you risk making a similar mistake to the Marxists (who emphasized the expropriation of workers' surplus value, and the need to get control over that surplus through class war). - People who most vocally criticize Marx usually haven't read him. I'm no fan of the Soviet Union, but Marx doesn't advocate a state like that. His main opus, the Kapital, is a theory of Captialism, not of Communism. Most economists and many other academics don't use Marx nowadays, but not because he is wrong per se, but rather because his work-value theory does not have much quantitative predictive power. You can't use it to calculate much, but that wasn't his goal anyway. Rather, (as I'd describe it in modern terms) he shows how from simple axioms you automatically get all the injustice and crisis-proneness he criticizes in capitalism (a la: Assume there's a society where most people work, get paid wages, and buy the products of their labor on a open market.... BAM people who own the means of production get richer, etc.). I personally was really surprised how relevant his writings still are today.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Problem is, Marx didn't advocate what was later called Marxism. There are many things that were later called Marxism, some of which Marx did advocate, some of which he didn't (and, in the latter case, some of them are arguably well-grounded in what Marx did specifically advocate and many of them are directly opposed to what Marx advocated.) > In fact, he famously said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist!". Actually, he wrote to a particular set of French "marxists" who had diverged from his approach on a program for the particular situation in France on which he had collaborated with them, that if their view was "Marxism", then "what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist". The context and condition are almost invariably left off by people who want to claim that Marx rejected Marxism generally.
• zeteo 13y ago
  > [Marx] thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things. I don't think that's accurate. Marxists want to abolish private property of the means of production. So it's OK to have a house and car for your own use, but not a factory where others work for you - because in such circumstances, Marx thought, exploitation and dehumanization become inevitable. I'm not saying I agree with this analysis, but in a world where Silicon Valley executives conspire to depress wages and many people are stuck in "bullshit jobs" it can't be completely disregarded either.
  • mason240 13y ago
    It's clear that a factory is a "means of production to be owned by the state," but everything is unclear. A car, a hammer - even the computer you are reading this on can all be used as capital and lent to workers to apply their labor to. Would all home computers be controlled the Marxists? Marxism is system that only makes sense at the very highest of levels (like the factory), but completely breaks down when looking at any kind of real implementation. Unlike computer science, where all levels of abstraction ultimately derive from a solid base of boolean logic, there simply is no base to Marxism/Socialism/Communism/Anarchism.
    • zeteo 13y ago
      >everything is unclear. A car, a hammer - even the computer you are reading this on can all be used as capital and lent to workers to apply their labor to. Yes, many means of production can be used by the owner as well but I don't think that makes the concept unclear. Marx only objects when you benefit from other people working for you and using it.
      • mason240 13y ago
        So what would happen in a Marxist society when I hire someone to do work with that hammer, computer, or car? Is someone going to arrest me? The proponents of it claim it would be a stateless society, but that clearly isn't true if they have the power to stop me.
• EthanHeilman 13y ago
  This article doesn't understand what Marxism is, many of the ideas represented as "Marxism" were shared by many philosophers prior to, during and after Marx's life. They don't in anyway define Marxism. Why some people insist on referring to all leftist critiques of the status quo/capitalism as Marxism and then complain about the intellectual babbage attached to that term is beyond me.
• bayesianhorse 13y ago
  I think the most detrimental thing in communism (or socialism or whatever the local variety) versus most other forms of government was the lack of risk management. Wealth is alwas the end result of an exponential growth process. But there is no growth without risk, and especially Mao has been guilty of all sorts of bad ideas "tried out" on a grand scale, ignoring risks and just aiming for the newest get-wealthy-quick scheme. That's why China today is extremely conscious about their growth. Not too high, not too low. The only way to achieve this risk-managed growth is through a large and lucrative financial sector.
• BrainInAJar 13y ago
  "He thought we should abolish private property. People should not be allowed to own things." No. that's just straight wrong. Property is revenue generating, it's not the stuff you own. Marx wanted to abolish private ownership of the means of production (ie, factories)