Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

[boneyard bill]

A timely post. "Kapital" redux is currently the hottest read in political circles. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/28/thomas-piketty-capital-surprise-bestseller

His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Carrying it under your arm has, in certain latitudes of Manhattan, become the newest tool for making a social connection among young progressives.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

It may be a hot read right now, but from what I have read, it is getting a great deal of criticism from both the left and the right.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Marx definitely advocating VIOLENT revolution although I don't think he anticipated anything like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

Shockingly, when you base an economic system on forcing people to behave in a way they are not inclined to behave you tend end up with authoritarians in charge.

Marx may not have anticipated this, but anyone alive today stupid enough to be a Marxist has no excuse.

Marx was not familiar with Stalin or Pol Pot, but he wasn't unfamiliar with revolution. He might not have anticipated Mao, but he surely could, and probably did, anticipate someone like Robespierre. What he should also have been able to see, but failed to consider, is that the cure for a Robespierre was a Napoleon.

Psst, Marx came after Robespierre. He saw the revolutions of 1848, but none of these would show that the patterns of revolution, counter revolution, dictatorship, "revolution eating its children", exhausted society, and despotic leadership that most major revolutions produce.

 

[boneyard bill]

Marx definitely advocating VIOLENT revolution although I don't think he anticipated anything like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

Shockingly, when you base an economic system on forcing people to behave in a way they are not inclined to behave you tend end up with authoritarians in charge.

Marx may not have anticipated this, but anyone alive today stupid enough to be a Marxist has no excuse.

Marx was not familiar with Stalin or Pol Pot, but he wasn't unfamiliar with revolution. He might not have anticipated Mao, but he surely could, and probably did, anticipate someone like Robespierre. What he should also have been able to see, but failed to consider, is that the cure for a Robespierre was a Napoleon.

Psst, Marx came after Robespierre. He saw the revolutions of 1848, but none of these would show that the patterns of revolution, counter revolution, dictatorship, "revolution eating its children", exhausted society, and despotic leadership that most major revolutions produce.

It is precisely because he came after Robespierre that he could, and should, have easily been able to anticipate the rise of someone like Robespierre. The pattern that you noted above is exactly what we saw with the French Revolution and Marx was very familiar with the French Revolution.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Marx definitely advocating VIOLENT revolution although I don't think he anticipated anything like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

Shockingly, when you base an economic system on forcing people to behave in a way they are not inclined to behave you tend end up with authoritarians in charge.

Marx may not have anticipated this, but anyone alive today stupid enough to be a Marxist has no excuse.

Marx was not familiar with Stalin or Pol Pot, but he wasn't unfamiliar with revolution. He might not have anticipated Mao, but he surely could, and probably did, anticipate someone like Robespierre. What he should also have been able to see, but failed to consider, is that the cure for a Robespierre was a Napoleon.

Psst, Marx came after Robespierre. He saw the revolutions of 1848, but none of these would show that the patterns of revolution, counter revolution, dictatorship, "revolution eating its children", exhausted society, and despotic leadership that most major revolutions produce.

The revolutions of 1848 were failures, if I remember my Hobsawm correctly.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Yep.

 

[ksen]

A timely post. "Kapital" redux is currently the hottest read in political circles. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/28/thomas-piketty-capital-surprise-bestseller

His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Carrying it under your arm has, in certain latitudes of Manhattan, become the newest tool for making a social connection among young progressives.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

It may be a hot read right now, but from what I have read, it is getting a great deal of criticism from both the left and the right.

lol, but not valid criticism.

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

 

[bilby]

The 'free market' in the Adam Smith sense is a very good way to balance an economy by providing signals that automatically promote increases in production of goods that are scarce, and decreases in production of goods for which there is a glut; in this kind of economy, cash acts as a kind of universal kanban, triggering orders for those goods that are most needful, without anyone having to have an overarching control of (or even view of) the detailed requirements.

A command economy is able to provide a better overall result if, and ONLY if, the number of products, subassemblies, and commoditiesis sufficiently small to be managed by the tools available. In a factory, there is essentially a microcosm of a simple command economy; modern factories with complex product, component and commodity flows, producing a large number of saleable items, often use a combination of command, kanban, and internal re-charge to manage the various different supply situations they face.

As information technology improves, from the simple pre-industrial systems of the business owner remembering to order some more raw material, through the use of ledgers and paper spreadsheets, to tabulators, and now electronic computers, the ability of large manufacturing concerns to take greater control of the supply chain, and increase efficiency while reducing overhead and inventory, has improved dramatically.

As it is with factories and corporations, so with entire economies; perversely, the command economy of the former Soviet Union collapsed just as the revolution in Information Technology that might have made such an economy viable was beginning to emerge.

The idea that command economies cannot work is demonstrated to be incorrect by the multinational mega-corporations of the modern world; these entities run economies as big as many nation states, and do so largely using a command structure, not cash signals, to adjust the supply of materials internally to meet demand. Internal recharge systems that mimic cash transactions in the outside world tend to be tightly regulated, and are usually less efficient than simple management edicts; they are typically used only where the scale of the corporation becomes too large for a handful of managers to completely control.

Of course, the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor is not a characteristic of such corporate systems; Indeed I suspect that despite the fact that inequality and free markets are often conflated (and are opposed to the equally conflated concepts of equality and command economy), in fact the relationship between them is not fundamentally necessary; it is quite possible to have a cash/free market model that includes redistribution of capital (the Scandinavian model) or a command economy with concentration of wealth (the Banana Republic model) as well as the more traditionally accepted free market/concentrated capital model we see in the US, and command economy/redistributive model suggested by Marx.

Which model is 'best' is, of course, a matter of opinion; I would certainly be interested to see whether a modern Information Economy could run effectively with little or no cash/free trade component - I suspect it would do a lot better than previous attempts, which foundered on the massive overhead costs required to plan a national economy manually. A single modern laptop can replace the work of thousands of soviet GOSPLAN clerks, and won't rig the books in exchange for a bottle of vodka.

On balance though, the Scandinavian model seems to me to be better than most of the other options; it may look like Marxism to American eyes, but really it isn't much different from the current US system, except that people expect only reasonable reward for effort - with the majority of the fruits of people's innovation belonging to all, and only a small fraction being given as a personal reward to the investors and innovators.

It certainly seems to be unhealthy to allow wealth to become too concentrated; regardless of the moral or rational principles behind such systems, if they end in bloody revolution and wanton destruction of property and life, then they cannot be considered a success.

 

[Underseer]

Why would anyone be surprised by this? We just spent the last few decades screwing over everyone except for very rich people and large corporations. Of course nutty crap like Marxism is on the rise again, and just like the previous times this happened, it won't be the only nutty idea to gain credence.

PS -- No, we can't fix this with more tax breaks and deregulation. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, conservolibertarians.

 

[SimpleDon]

A timely post. "Kapital" redux is currently the hottest read in political circles. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/28/thomas-piketty-capital-surprise-bestseller

His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Carrying it under your arm has, in certain latitudes of Manhattan, become the newest tool for making a social connection among young progressives.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

It may be a hot read right now, but from what I have read, it is getting a great deal of criticism from both the left and the right.

And you believe that ideas shouldn't attract criticism in order to be useful or have any validity?

Have you read the book or are you only supplying us with with some other people's opinion? I have read the book and are willing to talk about it with others who have read it.

 

[SimpleDon]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

 

[lpetrich]

There are further similarities:

• They both identify classes of workers and exploiters
• They look forward to the overthrow of the exploiters and the punishment of them
• The expect the workers to create a utopia

 

[Neoprime]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

Communism isn't Anarchist system, Communism/Socialism still has a state but creates a Socialist state and looks to abolish it at some point, Anarchist system start with no state from the get go.

Any system of change is going to have suffering into, and how can you judge the follower as fervent to ideology than reason when most people here in this thread are to lazy to even understand what Communism/Socialism is and clearly only knocking the system because capitalist ideology, some are so dumb/ignorant they think Communism has a state it.

 

[arkirk]

Marx's criticism of Capitalism was spot on. He missed the boat with some of the notions in the post immediately above...namely the eventual abolition of government. To my mind, the problem is not one of any particular system of government being right and always moral. It is quite easy to criticize existing systems of economics and governance and see their flaws. It seems almost impossible to alter even the most harmful of governments without totally overthrowing them. It seems we need a new concept of government as a temporal thing that alters its functions in line with humanistic values...that strives to serve all the people all the time...a nearly impossible task. But that is really what government's task is, and as such, government needs to be subject to constant modification. Our current systems in nearly all countries seem little more than public cock fights for power and wealth. Our current systems relegate many to non participation in the benefits government could bring. I read a book by a guy named John Rawls, A Theory of Justice which, while not an absolute solution to our problems, represented great possibilities for humanistic values in government. I recommend it as good reading.

The actual structure of a government is never spelled out in the book. It is more a cookbook for a government structure that is capable of modifying itself in the face of human needs. It is a lot better as a guide for democratic governance than anything Marx came up with. Marx's system relied on certain pivotal leaders "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the dictators who were supposed to create utopia were from the start betrayers and power seekers and also under constant attack from the West. There was no way a dictatorship could ever stop being one....especially with constant external military threats. Stalin and his people got a free pass because they could justify anything they did with "NATIONAL SECURITY." You recognize that anywhere else in the world today? Try the good old U.S.A.

 

[boneyard bill]

Marx definitely advocating VIOLENT revolution although I don't think he anticipated anything like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

Shockingly, when you base an economic system on forcing people to behave in a way they are not inclined to behave you tend end up with authoritarians in charge.

Marx may not have anticipated this, but anyone alive today stupid enough to be a Marxist has no excuse.

Marx was not familiar with Stalin or Pol Pot, but he wasn't unfamiliar with revolution. He might not have anticipated Mao, but he surely could, and probably did, anticipate someone like Robespierre. What he should also have been able to see, but failed to consider, is that the cure for a Robespierre was a Napoleon.

Psst, Marx came after Robespierre. He saw the revolutions of 1848, but none of these would show that the patterns of revolution, counter revolution, dictatorship, "revolution eating its children", exhausted society, and despotic leadership that most major revolutions produce.

The revolutions of 1848 were failures, if I remember my Hobsawm correctly.

I'm not sure what you would call failures. Metternich was forced to flee Austria and Louis Phillipe was overthrown in France and a republic took its place.

 

[boneyard bill]

The 'free market' in the Adam Smith sense is a very good way to balance an economy by providing signals that automatically promote increases in production of goods that are scarce, and decreases in production of goods for which there is a glut; in this kind of economy, cash acts as a kind of universal kanban, triggering orders for those goods that are most needful, without anyone having to have an overarching control of (or even view of) the detailed requirements.

A command economy is able to provide a better overall result if, and ONLY if, the number of products, subassemblies, and commoditiesis sufficiently small to be managed by the tools available. In a factory, there is essentially a microcosm of a simple command economy; modern factories with complex product, component and commodity flows, producing a large number of saleable items, often use a combination of command, kanban, and internal re-charge to manage the various different supply situations they face.

As information technology improves, from the simple pre-industrial systems of the business owner remembering to order some more raw material, through the use of ledgers and paper spreadsheets, to tabulators, and now electronic computers, the ability of large manufacturing concerns to take greater control of the supply chain, and increase efficiency while reducing overhead and inventory, has improved dramatically.

As it is with factories and corporations, so with entire economies; perversely, the command economy of the former Soviet Union collapsed just as the revolution in Information Technology that might have made such an economy viable was beginning to emerge.

The idea that command economies cannot work is demonstrated to be incorrect by the multinational mega-corporations of the modern world; these entities run economies as big as many nation states, and do so largely using a command structure, not cash signals, to adjust the supply of materials internally to meet demand. Internal recharge systems that mimic cash transactions in the outside world tend to be tightly regulated, and are usually less efficient than simple management edicts; they are typically used only where the scale of the corporation becomes too large for a handful of managers to completely control.

Of course, the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor is not a characteristic of such corporate systems; Indeed I suspect that despite the fact that inequality and free markets are often conflated (and are opposed to the equally conflated concepts of equality and command economy), in fact the relationship between them is not fundamentally necessary; it is quite possible to have a cash/free market model that includes redistribution of capital (the Scandinavian model) or a command economy with concentration of wealth (the Banana Republic model) as well as the more traditionally accepted free market/concentrated capital model we see in the US, and command economy/redistributive model suggested by Marx.

Which model is 'best' is, of course, a matter of opinion; I would certainly be interested to see whether a modern Information Economy could run effectively with little or no cash/free trade component - I suspect it would do a lot better than previous attempts, which foundered on the massive overhead costs required to plan a national economy manually. A single modern laptop can replace the work of thousands of soviet GOSPLAN clerks, and won't rig the books in exchange for a bottle of vodka.

On balance though, the Scandinavian model seems to me to be better than most of the other options; it may look like Marxism to American eyes, but really it isn't much different from the current US system, except that people expect only reasonable reward for effort - with the majority of the fruits of people's innovation belonging to all, and only a small fraction being given as a personal reward to the investors and innovators.

It certainly seems to be unhealthy to allow wealth to become too concentrated; regardless of the moral or rational principles behind such systems, if they end in bloody revolution and wanton destruction of property and life, then they cannot be considered a success.

An efficient economy MUST be decentralized. A centralized economy can only be "efficient" if you think efficiency means meeting the demands of the elite. Value is subjective. That is the fundamental reality of why the law of supply and demand works. Since value is subjective, you need a market for the people to express what the values are. No amount of information technology can replace the market. Without a market, information technology can only tell the managerial elite what is available and the elites must then decide what the people shall receive as in Cuba where the common people get their routine ration of beans and rice.

Information technology will never replace the market (at least not without the sacrifice of efficiency). That's what Scandinavia realized. Those countries are actually less regulated than the US. Sweden has no minimum wage law, but they do have vouchers for people who want to send their kids to private schools. Likewise China realized this as well which is why they created their system of "market socialism" (otherwise known as crony capitalism).

 

[boneyard bill]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

I might go along with the last point, but all of the others are completely wrong. Capitalism is not, and never claimed to be, an anarchist system. Yes, you have Murray Rothbard and his so-called anarcho-capitalism, but Rothbard was nuts when it came to political theory, and anyway, capitalism preceded Rothbard by at least several centuries.

Nor is capitalism an ideology. The free market is simply a description of how people behave when they are free to do so and when private property is an accepted part of the social system. If you deprive them of some of that freedom, they will behave differently, and how they will behave differently is often unpredictable which makes it impossible to "fine tune" the economy as some modern day economists have failed to understand so they keep digging us in deeper and deeper.

 

[SimpleDon]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

Communism isn't Anarchist system, Communism/Socialism still has a state but creates a Socialist state and looks to abolish it at some point, Anarchist system start with no state from the get go.

Any system of change is going to have suffering into, and how can you judge the follower as fervent to ideology than reason when most people here in this thread are to lazy to even understand what Communism/Socialism is and clearly only knocking the system because capitalist ideology, some are so dumb/ignorant they think Communism has a state it.

No than I expect someone who doesn't understand the difference between the theory of Marxism, the subject of this thread, and Communism as practiced by the Socialist states of the 20th century.

The entire point of my post was that the theory of Marxism is to the practical implementation of Communism, as the theory of the self-regulating free market is to practical capitalism. It is impossible to realize either theories in practice.

To go further, that we can expect no more success in trying to implement the self-regulating free market than the Marxists had when their idealistic states degenerated into the horrors of the USSR and its satellites and Maoist China.

Marxism theory is an anarchist theory. There was to be no central state.

 

[SimpleDon]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

I might go along with the last point, but all of the others are completely wrong. Capitalism is not, and never claimed to be, an anarchist system. Yes, you have Murray Rothbard and his so-called anarcho-capitalism, but Rothbard was nuts when it came to political theory, and anyway, capitalism preceded Rothbard by at least several centuries.

Nor is capitalism an ideology. The free market is simply a description of how people behave when they are free to do so and when private property is an accepted part of the social system. If you deprive them of some of that freedom, they will behave differently, and how they will behave differently is often unpredictable which makes it impossible to "fine tune" the economy as some modern day economists have failed to understand so they keep digging us in deeper and deeper.

Yes, Rothbard and the anarcho-capitalists are nuts. They try to extend an economic system to the political sphere.

Read my post to Neo. This thread is about Marxism and economic theory. Capitalism is not what I was comparing to Marxism. Capitalism is the broad theory in which the means of production is largely in private hands. It is the basis of our current mixed market system that has evolved over two hundred years and has grown up with the industrial revolution.

What I was talking about is the free market theory of capitalism that the market mechanism can take over most of the functions in the economy that fall to the government in our current system. Your theory of economics.

It is an ideology, it depends on belief, faith. It has no historical support. There has never been an economy run independently from a government. In fact it is the demands that the economy puts on government that has largely shaped government and which defines about 70% what governments do today.

The theoretical basis of the theory of the free market is rather fragile too. Say's law, loanable funds, general equilibrium theory, the quantity theory of money, rational expectations, efficient market hypothesis, microfoundations, DSGE models, marginal productivity, the natural rate of unemployment, comparative advantage and a lot more that I can't think of right now, none of these stand up to close examination. And all are needed in varying degrees for the theory to operate, for the simple mechanism of supply and demand setting prices to be able to regulate the complex and quickly changing economies of today and to suppress the bad behavior of the few.

Lacking support the theory becomes a article of faith, a self-reinforcing tautology.

And predictably attempts to impose the tenets of the theory on the economy have been disastrous, the failure to regulate the financial markets by free marketers caused the pain of the Great Recession of 2008 and the near collapse of the banking sector.

Capitalism is not the same as the free market. Capitalism not only doesn't require a free market it has markedly freely chosen the mixed market capitalism that we have today. We don't have a free market, prices are generally set as administrated prices, not by supply and demand. The mixed market system has freely chosen stability over the instability of the free market.

 

[Canard DuJour]

If Marx is making a comeback, it isn't because anyone's suddenly convinced of the 'historic inevitability' of a classless, stateless society.

Rather, circumstances are forcing people to ask why, despite nearly doubled productivity, they're worse or no better off than their parents were. And being told that even that is living beyond their means. Marginal revenue product my arse, something doesn't stack up. This is not the capitalism we were sold.

Marxism, if there is such a thing, is a description of capitalism (not a blueprint for socialism). Whether or not people buy the Marxist explanation wholesale, it at least bears some resemblance to reality and gives people tools to analyse what's going on.

Also, any Marxist comeback is a largely American phenomenon. The idea that Marx was somehow fatally discredited by the horseshit that now passes for economics has been largely American.

 

[boneyard bill]

Trausti, that individualism argument does not explain big businesses. Where is the big business that is run like an anarchist free-for-all? Despite many Randroids' chest-thumping, many businesses strongly resemble right-wing caricatures of collectivism, especially big ones. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that many right-wingers get their caricatures of collectivism from their experiences with big businesses.

As to Karl Marx, I think that he got it right about many of the problems of capitalism. But his proposed solutions, and especially the solutions of many of his followers, were not very good. They degenerated into a system that's sometimes been criticized as capitalism where the State is the sole capitalist. George Orwell got it right in his animal allegory about Soviet Communism, Animal Farm. A new ruling class had emerged, one with as much taste for exploitation as the original one.

Big business is a highly centralized model. Lots of businessmen like the business model and think that a modern economy should be run like a corporation. This was roughly Herbert Hoover's idea. He was not out of step with his fellow businessmen on this point and many big businesses still think that way. It is also the progressive economic model. Hoover bragged about being a progressive and condemned "laissez-faire." Modern progressivism was started by big business.

But the whole point of the science of economics, going back even before Adam Smith, is that an economy is a de-centralized way of operating. The science of economics is basically a description of how people operate in accordance with the incentives and disincentives put before them. Marx was surely aware of this, but he never came to grips with it. He never explained how the economy of a worker's government would actually function. But once you eliminate private property, you have to have a centralized system because without private property, no one has anything to buy or sell.

Marxism is an anarchist system, the government would wither away after the communes were set up. The only government would be the local commune committees, hence communism. It is one of the many things that the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable Marxist economic system has with the idealistic, unrealistic, totally unobtainable self-regulating free market economy.

They are similar in more ways.

• They are both anarchist systems.
• Both are "rollback the clock to simpler times" systems.
• Attempts to establish both have caused a tremendous amount of damage and suffering.
• Both rely on fervent followers fed an ideology rather then those that rely on reason.
• Both rely on a theoretical basis established in the first half of the 1800's long before the industrial revolution was established.
• Neither come fully to grips with the industrial revolution much less our current post industrial reality.
• Both propose radical changes to the existing economic status quo.
• The proponents of each devote their research to defending the fantasy of their systems rather than trying to understand the economic system that exists.
• Both were appropriated and perverted into unrecognizable shape by those seeking power and wealth above all else.

And neither has established any firm benefit to adopting their systems other than getting rid of government, a rather dubious and counter intuitive one.

I might go along with the last point, but all of the others are completely wrong. Capitalism is not, and never claimed to be, an anarchist system. Yes, you have Murray Rothbard and his so-called anarcho-capitalism, but Rothbard was nuts when it came to political theory, and anyway, capitalism preceded Rothbard by at least several centuries.

Nor is capitalism an ideology. The free market is simply a description of how people behave when they are free to do so and when private property is an accepted part of the social system. If you deprive them of some of that freedom, they will behave differently, and how they will behave differently is often unpredictable which makes it impossible to "fine tune" the economy as some modern day economists have failed to understand so they keep digging us in deeper and deeper.

Yes, Rothbard and the anarcho-capitalists are nuts. They try to extend an economic system to the political sphere.

Read my post to Neo. This thread is about Marxism and economic theory. Capitalism is not what I was comparing to Marxism. Capitalism is the broad theory in which the means of production is largely in private hands. It is the basis of our current mixed market system that has evolved over two hundred years and has grown up with the industrial revolution.

What I was talking about is the free market theory of capitalism that the market mechanism can take over most of the functions in the economy that fall to the government in our current system. Your theory of economics.

It is an ideology, it depends on belief, faith. It has no historical support. There has never been an economy run independently from a government. In fact it is the demands that the economy puts on government that has largely shaped government and which defines about 70% what governments do today.

The theoretical basis of the theory of the free market is rather fragile too. Say's law, loanable funds, general equilibrium theory, the quantity theory of money, rational expectations, efficient market hypothesis, microfoundations, DSGE models, marginal productivity, the natural rate of unemployment, comparative advantage and a lot more that I can't think of right now, none of these stand up to close examination. And all are needed in varying degrees for the theory to operate, for the simple mechanism of supply and demand setting prices to be able to regulate the complex and quickly changing economies of today and to suppress the bad behavior of the few.

Lacking support the theory becomes a article of faith, a self-reinforcing tautology.

And predictably attempts to impose the tenets of the theory on the economy have been disastrous, the failure to regulate the financial markets by free marketers caused the pain of the Great Recession of 2008 and the near collapse of the banking sector.

Capitalism is not the same as the free market. Capitalism not only doesn't require a free market it has markedly freely chosen the mixed market capitalism that we have today. We don't have a free market, prices are generally set as administrated prices, not by supply and demand. The mixed market system has freely chosen stability over the instability of the free market.

It would help if you distinguished more clearly what you mean by capitalism as you sometimes claim it as an ideology and sometimes claim that it as the prevailing system of economics as it is practiced today. However, I really can't make much sense of the latter as the "capitalism" of Japan is certainly very different from what is practiced in the US and not terribly different from the "socialism" of China. Likewise, Britain and Sweden both have what you would call "mixed" systems, but they are very different.

I would question your claim that the quantity theory of money or marginal productivity are much in dispute but most of the remaining points that you raise are in dispute even among people who call themselves free market economists. This doesn't support your claim, it refutes it. Free market economics is not an ideology. It is a description. To what what extent and in what ways should the free market be understood as a self-regulating mechanism and to what preconditions are necessary for a free market to exist? Virtually all free market economists, except for Rothbard, would agree that the state is necessary for free markets to exist. You need legal protection for private property. You need enforcement of contracts. You need bankruptcy laws, etc. These are the necessary ground rules. But there is no universal agreement on proper ground rules even among free market economists.

What violates free markets? Does social security violate free market economics? Friedmanites say yes. Randians say yes. But Austrians (except for Rothbard) say no. Austrians favor a gold standard, but Friedmanites oppose it. The law of supply and demand, the subjective theory of value, and the quantity theory of money are accepted by all free market schools, but they are accepted by most other schools as well. The quantity theory of money can be violated in the short term, but the long term is nothing but a series of short terms so this ability to violate it can not be sustained and therefore has very little usefulness.

Yet the non-free market schools insist on violating these basic principles time and time again and it has failed every time they have tried it. This is especially true of the quantity theory of money whose violation has ruined the economies of Britian, Argentina, Brazil, Zimbabwe, and the US itself in recent times and of Weimar Germany, Hungary and various banana republics in the past. Excessive credit always leads to far worse problems that it was intended to solve.