Sure, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Centralized (Marxism and its descendants) societies tend to have those things happens the majority of the time. In decentralized capitalist societies, they happened once a long time ago and we took steps for them to not happen again. Seems like a flaw in those societies is that when these problems happen so infrequently people forget and then you get takes like this.
I think that Marxism is not centralized - Capitalism is centralized and some communist implementations are centralized. Marxism, if anything, is distributed or communal.
It's not "nobody owns anything", it's "everybody owns everything". Maybe those mean the same thing to some people, but that's the idea.
It’s your position that we just don’t get how genius Marxism is and that it just hasn’t been tried? Why did it not work out so well for the USSR? When was that state going to “dissolve” into a utopia where everyone owns everything? Why was China a poor agrarian society when they followed Marxism better, and has become relatively wealthy since abandoning a great deal of those ideas and participating in a form of capitalism?
I think it's not exactly a fair comparison, because capitalism and communism are both very new economic systems. And, in the time communist systems existed, they were existentially threatened by high GDP nations.
I think, it's clear to me, that capitalists feel extremely threatened by the mere concept of Marxism and what it could mean for them. Even if it's happening on the other side of the world. They will deploy bombs, soldiers, develop nukes.
I'm not saying that it works and it's good. But, consider: most capitalist nations are abject failures as well. There's only a handful of capitalist nations that are developed, and they stay developed because they imperialisticly siphon wealth from the global periphery. We don't know if this system is sustainable. Really, we don't.
Since WWII, the US has just been riding the waves of having 50% of the global GDP. It's not that we're doing good - it's that everyone else was bombed to shreds and we weren't. We've sort of been winning by default. I don't think that's enough to just call it quits.
Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.
In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.
If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.
The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.
Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.
Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.
So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.
I don’t agree with it for more fundamental reasons than you describe
Namely that he was trying to apply Hegelian dialectic with political philosophy when the dialectic is an empirical dead end mathematically so could never even theoretically solve the problems he was pressing on
> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though
What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.
They can laugh all they want, I understand their resentment from being oppressed into a failed experiment which misused the "marxist" label to propagandise itself. Still doesn't mean that Marxism is about centralised planning though.
Sure, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Centralized (Marxism and its descendants) societies tend to have those things happens the majority of the time. In decentralized capitalist societies, they happened once a long time ago and we took steps for them to not happen again. Seems like a flaw in those societies is that when these problems happen so infrequently people forget and then you get takes like this.
I think that Marxism is not centralized - Capitalism is centralized and some communist implementations are centralized. Marxism, if anything, is distributed or communal.
It's not "nobody owns anything", it's "everybody owns everything". Maybe those mean the same thing to some people, but that's the idea.
Exactly this. Lenin's whole thing was to reach a point where the sate dissolves!
It drives me crazy how like 95% of HN is too scared or lazy to read a 10min wikipedia article on Marxism.
It’s your position that we just don’t get how genius Marxism is and that it just hasn’t been tried? Why did it not work out so well for the USSR? When was that state going to “dissolve” into a utopia where everyone owns everything? Why was China a poor agrarian society when they followed Marxism better, and has become relatively wealthy since abandoning a great deal of those ideas and participating in a form of capitalism?
I think it's not exactly a fair comparison, because capitalism and communism are both very new economic systems. And, in the time communist systems existed, they were existentially threatened by high GDP nations.
I think, it's clear to me, that capitalists feel extremely threatened by the mere concept of Marxism and what it could mean for them. Even if it's happening on the other side of the world. They will deploy bombs, soldiers, develop nukes.
I'm not saying that it works and it's good. But, consider: most capitalist nations are abject failures as well. There's only a handful of capitalist nations that are developed, and they stay developed because they imperialisticly siphon wealth from the global periphery. We don't know if this system is sustainable. Really, we don't.
Since WWII, the US has just been riding the waves of having 50% of the global GDP. It's not that we're doing good - it's that everyone else was bombed to shreds and we weren't. We've sort of been winning by default. I don't think that's enough to just call it quits.
Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.
In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.
If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.
The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.
Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.
Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.
Unfortunately you’re taking to the void here
People can’t differentiate between what Marx wrote and what classic dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao) did under some retcon “Marxist” banner
So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.
I understand it perfectly
I don’t agree with it for more fundamental reasons than you describe
Namely that he was trying to apply Hegelian dialectic with political philosophy when the dialectic is an empirical dead end mathematically so could never even theoretically solve the problems he was pressing on
Don’t confuse understanding with agreement
> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though
What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.
They can laugh all they want, I understand their resentment from being oppressed into a failed experiment which misused the "marxist" label to propagandise itself. Still doesn't mean that Marxism is about centralised planning though.