Marx was wrong?

[Hannah Bell]

"It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly...In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production.

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism...industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.

The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

[Boojatta]

1. Jehovah's Witnesses argue that the Bible has been shown to be correct...

because there have been earthquakes and wars since it was written.

[Hardrada]

2. Yeah but they didn't write the Bible. So there.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

6. Yeah, but they have no proof that would stand up in a court of law nt

[peruban]

90. There's really not any proof that there is a God in the first place. n/t

[Hannah Bell]

12. Let's see.

Marx said capitalist economic relations lead to periodic economic crises characterized by too much production relative to people's (financial) ability to consume.

Jehovah's Witnesses say God sends earthquakes & wars to punish people.

Relation between the two propositions? None.

[peruban]

91. Entirely uninformed statement.

It was Pat Robertson who said natural disasters are punishment from God for our sins.

Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe that earthquakes and wars are punishment from God. They are very academic in their approach to scripture and believe that natural disasters are not the work of God, nor is war a sign of anything but the imperfection of the governments of man.

If you really want to know what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe check out this link:

http://www.watchtower.org/

[peruban]

89. That's a shallow and uninformed statement.

Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe that earthquakes and wars prove the validity of the bible. They are very academic in their approach to scripture and believe that natural disasters are not the work of God, nor is war a sign of anything but the imperfection of the governments of man.

If you really want to know what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe check out this link:

http://www.watchtower.org/

[Boojatta]

93. Sorry. I should have written "at least one Jehovah's Witness..."

A Jehovah's Witness told me that the Bible is correct and, when I asked for evidence, I was simply told to note that many wars and earthquakes have occurred.

[rwenos]

3. Marx Overstates and Misdiagnoses

The most perceptive thing I ever heard about Marx was from a professor of mine, who once said "Karl Marx was wildly optomistic about the rationality of human beings." I try to keep that in mind when Marx's ideas are advanced seriously.

The problem with the passage you quoted comes in the final paragraph. Marx hypothesizes that the bourgeoisie will always "destroy a mass of productive forces," and then inevitably "conquer new markets, and by the more thorought exploitation of the old ones . . . paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises."

Marx has left three gigantic things out of this seemingly-logical analysis. First, markets (even our semi-regulated ones) will generally favor good ideas over bad ones, thus sorting entrepreneurs into winners and losers. Second, new markets result when technology advances -- and boy do we live in an age of technology advances creating new markets! And third, his prediction that the failures of one or another economic enterprise will "pave the way for more extensive and destructive crises" -- although it fits with his mantra of historical materialism (this is the part that makes too much of our human rationality) -- is simply a shot in the dark, based on no evidence.

If you buy Marx's idea of historical materialism, his argument makes sense. But since the world has shown that idea pretty much to be nonesense, the rest of his analysis falls.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

8. Definitely, but the U.S. has spent like 6 decades now lying about Marx and frankly....

It's getting really irritating.

[Bucky]

106. Have those durn Americans been lying about Marx's illegitimate son again?

As you certainly know, Karl Marx had a fling with his family's (unpaid) household maid servant, Helene Demuth, which produced his only son to live to maturity--Freddy Demuth. Of course Marx did the decent thing and hid the truth from his wife, convincing the gamey Fred Engels to claim the child as his own (altho young Freddy was a dead ringer for his biological father and no one was fooled) and then sending young Miss Demuth out of their house.

Both MArx and Engels even went so far as to leave Freddy Demuth out of their respective wills. Always sparing the feelings of the poor oppressed women of the working class, that Karl, particularly his wife. So it's really kind of ironic how his two daughters to live to middle age both ended up killing themselves.


page 78-79 http://books.google.com/books?id=18w8JtsMRIcC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=karl+marx+illegitimate+son&source=web&ots=OgSQu9qEVX&sig=-KpDe00eI8z0MhOQxtOe6pXnbhI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA79,M1

http://marx.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1898/07/death-eleanor.htm

http://marxmyths.org/terrell-carver/article.htm

[readmoreoften]

9. "but since the world has shown that idea pretty much to be nonesense"

Yes Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama make much more sense. Or behaviorism. Or idealism. :crazy:

"The world" has hardly disproved Marx's ideas.

[rwenos]

13. You Overstate and Ignore My Points

You have overstated. I said nothing about conservative economists (whom I suspect I despise as much as you). I only said Marx saw the world deterministically, and that the only way he could be right would be if human beings were both 100% rational and their paths were 100% predictable.

I'm not making an inductive argument, which you have done. I'm making a deductive argument that Marx' logic was flawed and based on an erroneous premise about human behavior -- erroneous because it runs contrary to human history and cannot in any sense be proved.

[readmoreoften]

20. That's a really short deductive argument made on a tenuous premise.

Proletarian revolution would certainly be a lot easier if human beings were 100% rational and their paths were 100% predictable, but I'm not sure success of a Marxist model is dependent on those two factors. Capitalism does have an innate advantage in an exceedingly irrational system--hence its advantage in the postindustrial, postmodern, postliterate West. And I'd agree that US Marxists tend to conflate irrationality with reactionary habits. But Leninist rifts on Marx--and many varieties of 20th century Marxism--(French Maoists, for one example, and early Chinese Maoists for sure) don't put too much stake in rigid and rationally progressing Marxism.

Capitalism is also depending on predicting that the working class will always stay "self-interested" and avoid the repercussions of rising up against the ruling class. This idea may not be sustainable, particularly outside the US.

[rwenos]

23. Admitted, But Wise State Intervention Is Preferable

You're right that capitalism screws the workers. The most provocative idea in Marx (and the most undeniably-correct idea) is that of "injected surplus value" -- i.e., the idea that the capitalist must pay the laborers LESS than they contribute to the value of their output goods, to fund the capitalist's profits and expansion. This always screws the workers, and always rewards the capitalists.

To me, it's a question of balance between government regulation of capitalists, a legal system that enforces BOTH the private rights of corporations and the rights of workers and just plain folks, and a RELATIVELY free economy. The balance goes wrong, too many people lose and too many corporations win. See my remarks above about the "German model" of state-activist liberal socialist democracy.

[readmoreoften]

31. Yes even classical economists agreed with surplus value. It's kind of an economic fact.

(If there is such a thing.) Smith and Ricardo just said that surplus value is fantastic. Marxists critique of the idea of government regulation of capitalists is that it was utopian: its trajectory will always be plutocracy since the rich will buy government officials and rule despotically. I'd say that its even worse under current postmodern conditions. The Victorian plutocrats didn't have a voice like FOXNEWS and the State didn't have the sort of surveillance currently used to bust unions and workers. The perfect example of this to me is Holder. Here we have a president-elect who wants to "balance" the interests of the corporation and the working class, but part of that balance is appointing someone who advocating for Colombian paramilitary death squads on behalf of Chiquita Corp. Ah, if only the rich wanted to screw the working class just a little... Unfortunately, its like

Corporate profit comes from stealing from those who make products, invent products, and design products. And what is the great contribution of the corporation? Why, it can fund new ideas from the wealth it extracts from those who create it!

Now here is the only real argument against Marxism: a lot of social disruption would have to happen to make things right. There might be more bloodshed caused by disrupting global capital than keeping it in the short run. Particularly, state-sponsored global capital has an unmatched capacity for violence--if you provoke the beast, you'll get et. I think that's why we're always dreaming about "compromises" between multinationals and workers, between the plutocracy and democracy. It just won't work though, I'm afraid. As the old saying goes, liberals think the system is broken and socialists think its working exactly as intended.

But it's nice having an intelligent discussion with someone well-read on the topic. :hi:

[struggle4progress]

56. If Marx were the determinist you claim he was, why did he spend so much time and energy

on practical political organizing? And if he had thought history were completely deterministic, what was his point in saying Philosophers have solved the world; the goal, however, is to change it?

Like him or not, Marx was an extremely complicated figure. He was an avid student of history. He was bitterly offended by exploitation but often expressed his disgust by marshalling statistics. He was a bitingly nasty political polemicist, capable of the most vicious snark: when Proudhon wrote his The Philosophy of Poverty, Marx's disagreement was titled The Poverty of Philosophy. His political works are extremely difficult to read, because they rely on his analyses of contemporary splinter parties and of local cultural effects of events decades earlier. His tediously careful economic theorizing is based on classical capitalist authors, but he throws in an overlay of psychological effects depending on various different influences. These psychological effects would be controlled by class interest, except that people often have no clear concept of what their actual class interest is -- and the matter is complicated further by the fact that people often hide the real material meanings of their attitudes by mystifying their actual beliefs, hiding the true nature of what they believe

[Hannah Bell]

14. Hmmm....

1. "destroy a mass of productive forces":

Corporations gone bankrupt, plants closed down & consolidated, workers laid off, unsaleable cars shredded.

War capitalism, the purpose of which is to create profits through making stuff to destroy & be destroyed.

No, gosh, never happens.

[rwenos]

19. Everything You List Happens, but You Imply . . .

Everything you list does, of course, happen. Both a Marxist and a conservative functionalist could observe that -- and anyone who tried to deny corporations implode, products fail and people get thrown out of work would be denying reality. You are right -- those things happen every day.

The place Marx errs, in my book, is in positing that the logical consequence of those failures is a path to MORE failures. While this can and does happen phenomologically, large economies can and do rebound. Especially when governments strike the right balance between market regulation and market participation -- as the U.S. government SHOULD be doing with the financial markets and the Big 3 automakers.

The so-called "German model" decried by contemporary American conservatives seems to strike the right balance -- i.e., regulation of capital markets and economic activity (aggressively at times), combined with a legal system that allows the enforcement of private rights. Marx would call that "half measures" or "bourgeois tokenism," but at least in my view Marx is the unrealistic one.

[Hannah Bell]

24. There's no opposition between "rebounding," as you say, &

"paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises".

For example, Marx says finding new markets is one of the ways crises are ameliorated.

But when you enlarge the market, subsequent failures will necessarily affect more people.

For example, consider the modern global market with widely sourced goods & labor, "just-in-time" production, etc. All these things developed to reduce costs & increase profits.

But they also increase vulnerability.

A breakdown in supply chains (e.g. via credit failures) can result in more business failures, unemployment & outright suffering for more people than it would where there were lots of smaller, more local market structures, or less capitalistic markets (i.e. more production for individual use, as when people grow & make some of the things they use with their own labor & resources).

[Warpy]

16. I put it a slightly different way

and say that Marx suffers from the same fatal flaw that Rand does, that both their prescriptions for the social and economic ills of mankind will work only when mankind has been perfected.

What Marx left out of this analysis is the forces of production taking more and more wealth to themselves (supply side) and starving the very thing (the demand side) which kept their money pump functioning. The picture in the OP is the inevitable result of supply side economics: an overabundance of supply with no demand for it.

Opening other markets is easier said than done in a world where the demand side has been beggared for decades.

[Hannah Bell]

18. "forces of production taking more and more wealth to themselves (supply side) and starving the

very thing (the demand side) which kept their money pump functioning."


??? Why do you think M. "leaves this out"? Reread the quote. The "overproduction" is precisely in relation to workers (financial) ability to consume it - thus low or no profits for capitalists, thus sending some producers out of business, unemployment & wage reductions.

In fact, Marx & some of the other classical economists were the first to describe the phenomenon.

[Duende azul]

65. His diagnosis is on point

If dismissing Marx based on his optimism on human nature was the essence of your professors take on it, perhaps he should not be the ultimate authority on the matter.
(Hope I don´t come across to snarky. But if in the current situation someone wants to dismiss Marx`findings he should come up with something more substantial.)

As someone downthread said, Marx was about analyzing how capitalism works.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=4518309&mesg_id=4518904|Post 35]

Marx has left three gigantic things out of this seemingly-logical analysis.

I don´t think he left much out. "seemingly logical"? Please!

First, markets (even our semi-regulated ones) will generally favor good ideas over bad ones, thus sorting entrepreneurs into winners and losers. Second, new markets result when technology advances -- and boy do we live in an age of technology advances creating new markets!

The "good ideas" only work on the microeconomic level. Giving one company the advantage against all others. Thus enhancing competition, speeding the race. The bottom line in an environment of competition always is profit maximizing. Companies who don´t follow will perish. Under capitalist premises it never works for society/world as a whole.

The great advantage of capitalism - the speeding of technological advance resulting from competition - is just what´s causing its final crisis - or at least a crisis on a level never seen before. As capital sucks the surplus value out of work - where will it suck from, when microelectronic revolution constantly diminishes the need for labor?

In the past one emergency exit for capitalism was geographical extension of markets (by what means ever). Today the market is global.
Where will the new markets pop up? On Mars?
Another exit was intensification/densification of work. The "intrepid entrepreneur" sucking every minute out of labor, shortening the breaks, enhancing control and other Taylorism crap.
Today you have a lot of folks working more than one job, working beyond their abilities without getting sufficient means for a decent living out of it. And you have a lot of folks that have already been completely kicked out of the game. They are no longer needed.
So nowadays this exit out of crisis does not seem to work either.
And if one should think of new products, new wants as "markets" - good luck with that, with no buying ability remaining.

And third, his prediction that the failures of one or another economic enterprise will "pave the way for more extensive and destructive crises" -- although it fits with his mantra of historical materialism (this is the part that makes too much of our human rationality) -- is simply a shot in the dark, based on no evidence.

No shot in the dark here, the history of capitalism postmarx (western individual style or eastern state style) proofs him right.
No evidence? Hell, he witnessed some of the crisis´ in his lifetime, besides that he made predictions based on the inherit "logic" of the capitalist belief system.
Some astonishingly precise predictions at that.

On the final verdict on capitalism the jury is still out. But it seems they will soon be back in court. And it will not be pretty.



To discuss Marx with Americans is a tricky thing for me. Not only for my lack of language skills (non American here) also for the complexity of the matter that I´m just starting to find my way through.


Besides that, the mere mention of "Marx" seems to scare the bee-jesus out of most Americans.

[mentalslavery]

78. you dont understand marx

stop reading what is written about him and start reading him. None of what you have written is very accurate.

[alcibiades_mystery]

98. Hmmm

1) Marx definitively moved away (supposing he ever held) the position that people would respond in a "rational" way to conditions after the failure of the 1848 revolution. At best, your professor 9who is definitively wrong, by the way) could be said to be describing Marx's very early writings, maybe up to The German Ideology (and Engels was always much more guilty of such a thing than Marx ever was).

2) What you're calling "historical materialism" sounds a lot more like "dialectical materialism," which was really developed as a concept in the wake of Marx. For Marx, materialism is both simple and complex: it involves action in the world, period. Now, we can certainly upbraid Marx for failing to see contemplative thought and speech acts as action (we could upbraid all of 19th century philosophy, with the exception, perhaps, of Nietzsche, for THAT), but materialism just means that the when people interact, they produce various conflicts. The notion that this is "unproven by history" is just fucking stupid. There is no "meaning" for history, to be sure (the concept of a unitary meaning for history was considered imbecilic for Marx as well, hence historical), and Marx identified ONE conflict as driving all others (the conflict over resources, grounded in a theory of nature and anthropology), to be sure, but materialism - in Marx's sense - has far from been disproven. You bump into it everyday, in fact.

3) The idea that markets tend to pick good ideas is pure Hayekian drivel, as the markets that selected CDO's as a "good idea" should surely demonstrate. Markets are as self-destructive as they are creative. Indeed, you end up turning the charge of excessive rationality back on to yourself, since the Hayekian standard (and the whole history of this neo-liberal notion) assumes a sort of perfect rationality driving the market as an aggregate, packaged, of course, with the occasional "exuberances" and "panics" and "information cascades" and other nonsenses that serve as ex post "explanations" of irrationality every time the so-called "markets" fuck it up, again.

You sound like a guy that heard a lot about Marx as a negative comparison, without ever having read much Marx. Marx failed to foresee a number of things, and the Marxist tradition is certainly laden with as many bad ideas as the capitalist tradition (they have both been horrors and utter failures in actual political practice, in any case). But Marx wasn't particularly in the business of "foreseeing." This is the great lie told by the capitalists. See!, they say. Marx was wrong. meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal assumes a labor theory of value as if it were an economic certainty. There was a saying that went around in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the arrival of gangster capitalism, which was really the capitalist system in its purest form:

Everything the communists told us about communism was false. But everything they told us about capitalism was true.

[readmoreoften]

4. The arc of economics is long, but hopefully it'll bend towards socialism.

Thanks for the post.

[rug]

5. We'll see. It took 800 years to pass through feudalism. Capitalism's barely 200.

[readmoreoften]

10. Exactly. "Capitalism is the end of history" is no less utopian.

[zeemike]

7. He was right in his analysis but wrong with the solution.

The solution is a sustainable civilization where the ruthless and greedy cannot call the shots.

[readmoreoften]

11. How is that different than Marx's ideas? Other than the idea of sustainability...

which was just not on the horizon in the 19th century. Marx was not really thinking about Stalin when he described proletarian rule. Lenin sure as hell wasn't.

[zeemike]

15. Well I have a saying that I think I came up with myself

But I can't be sure
It is that people are poor because they have no land.
If there are no jobs in the city you starve and get thrown out of your home, but if you have land you can at least eat and have a place to be, and so you will never be as poor as the landless.
Marx thought in terms of land holders and peasant farmers and he wanted the state to control the land.
The real solution is agrarian reform where everyone has a piece of land that can never be taken from them and that will pass to their children forever.

[readmoreoften]

25. That was the anarchist position at the time actually.

There is definitely some merit in the issue of land poverty. The book Sundown Towns addresses this. The problem with a solution of "can never be taken" is that it is utopian in the sense that (at least from a Marxist perspective, and actually I think it's common sense if you look at history) Thieves and con artists will band together to steal the land. They will usurp power, much like Bush did. Bourgeois democracy always ends with a ruling plutocracy that does what it wants. The Marxist tradition is actually not utopian in the sense that it believes that human nature will never change; there will always be thieves who want to live off the labor of others; there will always be despotic characters and only a society ruled by workers can stop the cycle of despotism. Of course when all the despots are deposed, then the workers will have to police themselves for ascending despots. This is where every revolution has failed--and the fact that it was never international doomed it because powerful greedy states could easily infiltrate and corrupt members of workers states and turn them against one another, turn them into paranoid psychotic states. The only way the working class can overthrow its masters is through an international movement.

My guess is that we in the US would be the last to know. Or 2nd to last. Maybe the Swiss would be the last to know.

[zeemike]

29. Well there is a solution but you will not like it.

Because it comes from a part of history that most people know little about.
I am referring to the history of Israel as told in the bible.
And in fact there economic system was based on the fourth commandment in the bible...Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holey"
In this system land that was sold returned to it's owner every 49 years and all debt was forgiven,
So while a man may sell his land he could not sell his children's inheritance and poverty was confined ot one generation.
This was known as the Jubilee year and there were other economic elements in it which prevent this takeover by the ruthless and greedy but I will not go into now.

I say you will not like it because as soon as some people hear the word bible they immediately reject the idea and will not consider any of it...I guess for fear of lending credit to it.

[readmoreoften]

32. It sounds good to me. I just wonder if it is possible to implement without a theocracy.

If it is, I'd love to hear it.

[zeemike]

37. A theocracy is not necessary

But It would be hard to implement now with 300 million people.
It would have been easy in 1776.
But still it could be done.

[Hannah Bell]

36. I think a Jubilee year would be great. But who will enforce it?

Again, you come back to the question of the State.

Now, if everyone was filled with religious belief, that wouldn't be a problem, because in theory, everyone would act decently & generously. But it's not like that now, so how does that happen?

One of the (for me) strong points of Marx's work is the idea of dialectic, how change happens - changes in consciousness & changes in material conditions, & the interrelation between the two.

[zeemike]

38. The state of course.

Government itself is not the enemy when it is by and for the people.

[Hannah Bell]

42. Then what's the problem with a "communist" state - so long as it's

"by & for the people," of course?

I mean, why would it even matter who "owned" what, if we were ruled "by & for the people"?

What if some people didn't want to give up their gain in the Jubilee Year?

What if those people were running the government?

Why would your Jubilee State be any more just than any other?

I'm not understanding your thinking here.

[zeemike]

51. Well it is past my bedtime now but

I will say that in ether case, communism or capitalism there is a path to power for the ruthless and greedy.
In the capitalist it is control of property and in communism it is in control of the committee that decides things.
When men own the land and no one can take it from them or decide what they do with it there is little chance of control.

I can go into more detail tomorrow if you like.

[Hannah Bell]

55. Please do. I am not seeing how your Jubilee State has any advantage over

any other kind of state (or non-state) in keeping a rein on greediness.

And I don't see how your state is more effective than others in guaranteeing & protecting ownership that "no one can take".

[Hannah Bell]

60. To be more specific: The law of Jubilee sounds like a good law,

But I can think of lots of good laws.

What I'm not seeing is:

1. How would the law be brought into being, & by whom, when it would mean taking power & possessions from those who presently rule?

2. How would a state run "by, for & of the people" come into being, when there has never been such a state (& presumably, if it were easy to create one, there would be previous examples)?

3. How would that state avoid becoming despotic or unjust, given that it would face resistance from those who'd lost power or possessions, or others who just plain disagreed with its aims?

4. If it would have been easier to institute in smaller populations, why didn't it succeed in Biblical times?

5. If the point of the Jubilee Law is to maintain rough equality in power & possessions, why not just make *that* the law? Why allow people to buy & sell for 50 years - then return it all to its original owners, some of whom would be dead at that point? If I die, do my descendants get my former property? What if I have no descendants? What if I have 15?

6. If I use my amassed power & wealth in those 50 years to build something new, like a factory - who gets it in the Jubilee?

7. What if I lose everything 10 years into the program - who will take care of me?


The more I think about it, maybe it's not that great of a law. Fifty years is pretty much a productive lifetime.

[zeemike]

64. Those are all very good questions.

But let me say that it is not my idea.
I got it from a Newish Rabi that wrote a piece on the economic part of the state of Israel as formed when the tribes entered into the land of Canna as recorded in the bible.
And I am sorry I can't remember his name because it has been more than 30 years ago.
so after reading it I did what few do, and actually read the old testament to confirm what he said, and there it was.
And what few know is that this system did thrive for something like 400 years and by the time of King Solomon had made Israel a rich nattion..

But to answer why it worked you must understand that the Ten Commandments to the 12 tribes was the equivalent of our constitution. The tribes could make their own laws so long as they stayed in the framework of the commandments.
And the key commandment as far as the economy was concerned wat the "Remember the Sabbath and keep it holey"
And again what most people don't know is that this is the only commandment that was expanded on in it's definition in great detail, and virtually every question about how it worked was answered in Leviticus.
It must be understood that the Sabbath was not as we think now, just about going to church on Sunday...in fact it had noting to do with going to church at all.
What it did was first establish that no man or beast could be worked more than 6 days without a rest day.
And secondly the land had a year of rest every 7 years so that no one could take anything from nature in that 7th year. If you had a vineyard you could not harvest the grapes but they would be left for the birds and creatures to eat, and fields could not be cultivated but the weeds would be allowed to grow.
This year of rest for the land had obvious ecological benefits which I will not go into but it also had economic impact because if required that people save up a two year supply of grain and other resources to make it through the Sabbatical year. Thus each farmer had to build and maintain storage for his crop which made them able to sell on the market when it was good for them to do so.
And that Sabbatical year was then used to build the infrastructure on their land that improved their lot.
And every 7x7 year was the Jubilee where all debt was forgiven and this is covered in great detail in Leviticus, right down to how much land was worth at sale in the year before the Jubilee.
But it must be noted that this only applied to property in the land not the city...land in the city could be sold and possessed by the owner forever, just like it is today. So in that respect it was still a capitalist society which did not allow capitalism to consume the peoples resources.

So there is your historical model which lasted for 400 years or so.
So what went wrong? that is also told in the Old Testament.
For that 400 years or so Israel was ruled by judges, who were charged with keeping the constitutional law ( the commandments) But As told in the Bible the people wanted a king and the Prophets warned them not to do it but they did not listen and a kingdom was formed and it started the destruction of the Law and the Sabbath.
The Kingdom started out OK because the Kings respected the Sabbath but that soon changed when the kings successors stopped obeying the Sabbath.


Now I know it will probably not happen in my lifetime but I still feel that it is a model for a sustainable society that one day will happen.
But until then we will have to endure endless war and conflict until the world wakes up to reality and is willing to change.

I know I have not answered every question but this is a long post for me, but the answers are there if we can look beyond our own personal prejudice.

[cali]

61. sorry to be a cynic in informative and thoughtful thread

but I can only reiterate what Warpy said: It's human nature that's the fly in the ointment in any system. There will always be individuals who corrupt and manipulate the system- no matter what it is.

[DUlover2909]

59. Doesn't dialectic mean something about arguments?

I could never really get my head around Hegel's theory of dialectical matrialism even though I read every last bit of Reason in History. I was stoned the whole time, so maybe you could enlighten me?

[Hannah Bell]

63. Well, I've only read summaries of Hegel, so I can't help you there.

My understanding of Marx's dialectic is as a method of investigation that starts from systems rather than pieces, processes & relationships rather than essences.

In this thread, several people stated Marx was "wrong about human nature".

To explain systems, they start from the assumption of individuals with a certain kind of fixed "nature" whose interactions produce social relations expressing that nature.

It's trivially true. Humans can only produce the social relationships & material forms humans are capable of producing (rather than, e.g. the ones zebras or Martians are capable of.)

But it doesn't really explain anything important, or lead to anything beyond its first assumption: human nature is X, so humans produce X.

i.e. it doesn't explain change.

If you're really interested in the more theoretical aspects, e.g. the concept of contradiction, this guy helped me get enough of a clue to be able to get something out of Marx:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/dd_ch01.php

[ellisonz]

71. Fuck Hegel

[Hannah Bell]

17. What was his solution, according to your understanding?

[zeemike]

22. State ownership and control of the land. and means of production

Which is the same as Oligarchical ownership and control. Just a different set of people in charge.

[readmoreoften]

27. Marx was not for state ownership whatsoever. He identified the State as a Capitalist institution

He does this clearly. Marx never advocated for 'state control'. That would (as you correctly assess) be nothing more than state capitalism or as its commonly called 'a degraded worker state'.

Marx called for the withering away of the State and said that it would happen after the working class rose up against its masters. How exactly the withering away would happen he did not make clear. Lenin was the first to take a stab at this. He prescribed (in State and Revolution) that after the Revolution, workers councils would develop. Everyone would make a fair wage. There would be some bureaucrats necessary to keep trains running but they would be servants of the people and paid no more than "an average workman" and given no special pats on the back. The idea was that eventually, once the former ruling class accepted that it was equal to working people--in other words, when there were no 'classes' of people anymore--then even the bureaucratic functions of the State wouldn't be necessary.

But the idea that Marx believed the State should control everything is incorrect. The public should control the means of production, not the State.

[zeemike]

30. But Marx forgot that there is another class of people

And that is the ruthless power hungry.
And Stalin is the prime example of this, and so no system run by comity is safe from them and that kind..
But that is the function of a intelligent society's government, to assure fairness and justice and guard the rights of the individual
Our own constitution has that element of government, but it's failure was not having an amendment that every 80 years we would have a Jubilee year where all property would return to it's owner thus thwarting the takeover by the Oligarchs..

[readmoreoften]

33. Actually, he didn't. He called them reactionaries.

Almost all socialists agree that Stalin betrayed the Russian revolution.

[zeemike]

41. Well he never believed in it to begin with

He just saw it as a way to power and control.
That is what the ruthless do. Sociopaths have no feeling for people but they make you think that they do to achieve control.

[JVS]

44. The state isn't a capitalist institution, it's an institution of whatever class holds power.

[Crunchy Frog]

77. How exactly does the public control anything

in the absence of some sort of state aparatus? How would direct public control of anything work, other than through mob rule? Large populations generally require some sort of organized public structures to get things done, don't they?

[SoCalDem]

108. Localism works quite well for most societies

until there's an "attack" from other "localists" who may have had problems in their locale, and suddenly want yours:(

[Hannah Bell]

35. So it is, in capitalist mythology. But in fact, that wasn't Marx's position.

First, most of his work was devoted to analyzing how capitalism works, not how life after capitalism would work. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the cook-shops of the future."

But second, since he considered the State to be an expression of the domination of one class over another, it was his position that there could be no State, in the sense we have of it currently, in the absence of class.

He debated Bakunin on precisely this question. Bakunin made the same charge as you do, & Marx refuted it.

[AngryAmish]

21. You realize that arguing with a marxist is impossible

Marxism is unfalsifiable so it is a matter of faith. Like matters of faith it is useless to argue them.

[Hannah Bell]

26. No different from arguing with a supporter of capitalism, you mean?

But in fact, Marxism proper is just an analysis of the weaknesses of capitalism.

[readmoreoften]

28. Wow, just like capitalists. Totally unfalsifiable like "the invisible hand of the market."

If you pray to the invisible hand, everything just works out.

[GeneCosta]

68. The same could be said about liberalism,

or conservatism, or centralism, or any political ideology.

[otherlander]

34. He was wrong about human nature.

He was right about capitalism, though. And he wanted to replace it with something better. So he came up with theories about what would be better than capitalism, using the best information available to him at the time. Problem was, at the time, what we now know of psychology had not yet been discovered. So the kind of human that he envisioned running the equitable society wasn't actually the kind of human that existed. People aren't tabula rasas; they aren't blank at birth. Raising a human in a society without greed doesn't guarantee that that human will not become greedy on his/her own. People aren't "inherently good until capitalism corrupts them". People, inherently, will do what is in their own best interests. You might look at tribal societies, with equal distribution of resources, as altruistic, but the people aren't looking out for each other out of altruism. They're looking out for each other because what's in their own best interest is to have a strong tribe to support them. And that's what Marx was missing from his theories: People won't just be "good" because the society around them is good. It has to be in their own best interest to be "good".

Funny story, though: Once, in my first year of high school, we were studying, in history class, about the industrial revolution, and the different theorists who wrote their ideas about it. So our teacher gave us a quiz, consisting of twenty quotes. And for each quote, we had to write whether it was from the Communist Manifesto or the Declaration of Independence. But in the end, he decided not to count it as part of our final grade. Why? Because NOBODY passed.
I've told that story to a few people, but nobody ever seems to get it. They just go, "Oh, huh. How... interesting. SO?" But I just thought it was the most mind-blowing thing, like: He KNEW that nobody would pass, but he gave us the quiz to make a point, that point being that high schoolers, in one of the ten best high schools in the state, could not distinguish between the writings of Jefferson and Marx. Pretty brilliant slap in the face of the old, tired meme of "Communist theories are ANTI-AMERICAN!!!1":evilgrin:

Yeah. I know Marx knew what was wrong with capitalism. And I know that his goal was just to make the world more livable. And sometimes I do feel like being a Marxist, but in the end I can't call myself one, just because I don't think the man had any understanding of human psychology. Again, not his fault. What's now known about the human mind just wasn't known when he was alive.

[Hannah Bell]

39. You're saying M's conception of human nature was "people are inherently good

until capitalism corrupts them"?

Where do you get that?

[otherlander]

45. He thought that people

raised in a communist society would not be greedy. He thought that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be neccesarry at first, to make sure that wealth was fairly distributed, but as the people raised under capitalism died out, the new generation wouldn't need a state to rule over it, because the people who had only experienced the workings of an equitable society wouldn't be inclined to do the things that the capitalists before them had done. This isn't the case, though, because 1. People raised in a fair society won't neccesarilly treat others fairly and 2. Even if most people did act that way, the state wouldn't wither away, because once people get a taste of having power over others, they're not going to let go of it unless they're overthrown.

[Hannah Bell]

48. So, I asked, where did you find this information about Marx's conception of

"human nature"?

[Hannah Bell]

40. People seem to look at the OP & go off on tangents about human nature, despotism, etc.

Plain as the nose on your face, we're in the midst of a classic capitalist economic crisis.

Look at all those cars. How come there's no customers?

Is this not craziness?

[Boojatta]

46. What's the connection with capitalism?

Suppose a company prints a copy of a book only after it receives payment for a copy of the book. Then is the company operating contrary to principles of capitalism?

If a factory manufactures products that the factory is later unable to sell, then is the factory necessarily a capitalist factory?

[Hannah Bell]

47. hmm, i thought people would be familiar with the picture. it's been highlighted in the news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/business/economy/19ports.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

"A Sea of Unwanted Imports"

The picture is of a 150 acre parking lot full of cars that have been imported but not moved because dealers haven't been able to sell the inventory they've already got.

The quote in the OP: Marx said capitalism, for various reasons, periodically goes into crisis. In earlier forms of economic production (e.g. feudalism), economic crisis was the result of UNDERPRODUCTION: the crops failed, there was a plague, etc.

Under capitalism, it's the opposite. Crises = overproduction: too much productive capacity in relation to too few $$ to buy it or profits to be made from it.

Thus, acres of cars that can't be sold, food dumped because there's no profit to be made by transporting it to markets - & meanwhile, people go hungry.

Your questions seem beside the point. Maybe you could explain why you think they're relevant?

[Boojatta]

49. "event B is caused by situation A"

seems doubtful if

1. sometimes situation A arises, but B fails to occur; and
2. sometimes B occurs even though situation A didn't arise

In this case,
B is
production of lots of goods that later cannot be sold; and

A is
something to do with capitalism, but I'm not even sure what is meant by "capitalism."

[Hannah Bell]

54. Is this what you mean?

Sometimes there's overproduction but no capitalism, & sometimes capitalism but no overproduction, therefore there's no relation between overproduction, capitalism, & Marx's overproduction crises?

[Boojatta]

92. No, that's not what I mean.

Sometimes there's overproduction but no capitalism, & sometimes capitalism but no overproduction, therefore there's no relation between overproduction, capitalism, & Marx's overproduction crises?

By using the words "no relation between", you have claimed more than I would have claimed.

Let's go back to your words that I was responding to. Let's start with what we may refer to for convenience as "the first point":

In earlier forms of economic production (e.g. feudalism), economic crisis was the result of UNDERPRODUCTION: the crops failed, there was a plague, etc.

I observe that you used the words "was the result of."

Under capitalism, it's the opposite.

At this point, I'm expecting something that is in some respects parallel to the first point, but that contrasts with the first point.

Under capitalism, it's the opposite. Crises = overproduction: too much productive capacity in relation to too few $$ to buy it or profits to be made from it.

This conflicts with my expectations. I wasn't expecting an equals sign. I figured that the right thing to do was to use the parallel structure to interpret your equals sign as a sloppy way of writing "are the result of." However, now that you have accused me of being incoherent, maybe it would be best if I avoided jumping to conclusions and instead waited for clarification from you.

[Crunchy Frog]

79. Boojata, I think you're the only person here

who could effectively argue with a Marxist. :rofl:

[Hannah Bell]

84. ActuAlly, she's not arguing with me, but with the phantom in her head.

Her responses have pretty much nothing to do with the meaning of the OP.

So if you find the argument "effective," perhaps you're possessed by the same phantoms. ;>)

[Boojatta]

101. Why not post the Original Post again as a new thread?

Other than the Original Post, it seems that nothing in this thread is more substantive than a phantom. Thus, there's nothing besides the Original Post that is worth questioning or commenting on.

[Hannah Bell]

85. erased dupe post

[Boojatta]

53. When was there underproduction of everything or overproduction of everything?

In earlier forms of economic production (e.g. feudalism), economic crisis was the result of UNDERPRODUCTION: the crops failed, there was a plague, etc.

Even when there were crop failures, people may have printed copies of a particular book that remained unsold, such as because the importance or quality of the book was not yet recognized, the author was not yet famous, or the book was simply not good.

Under capitalism, it's the opposite. Crises = overproduction: too much productive capacity in relation to too few $$ to buy it or profits to be made from it.

Is the problem overproduction or is the problem a sudden drop in aggregate demand? In any case, you're not going to see exact matching of production and sales for every product. However, even if exact matching were to occur, a shopper might regret having bought two units of product P1 and two units of product P2 and may wish that he or she had bought zero of P1 and four of P2. Maybe the shopper will rush out and buy another two of P2. However, if the shopper cannot return or sell the two units of product P1, then the shopper faces a problem very much like what you call "overproduction."

The general idea is opportunity cost. If you have more money than you can ever spend, then you don't face a serious problem merely because you spent one of your dollars without obtaining any satisfaction. There's a problem if you cannot buy what you need or want. Inevitably, you will then regret having used some of your money to buy what you didn't need and don't want.

[Hannah Bell]

57. Hmmm...

>>Even when there were crop failures, people may have printed copies of a particular book that remained unsold, such as because the importance or quality of the book was not yet recognized, the author was not yet famous, or the book was simply not good.<<

But your 'rebuttal' is couched in capitalist economics: it assumes a businessperson (mass?)-producing books that may or may not sell (for money) in some consumer market.

I specified "earlier forms of economic production, e.g. feudalism".

In a feudal economy, everything (including the population) "belongs" to the ruler. The people are attached to the ruler's land & are obliged to give service to him.

They grow food & make things, not for money, but for their own use & as their obligation to their ruler.

So they don't make more than they or their ruler "need." They don't try to make lots of extra stuff to sell it to someone.

And if it turns out they made a bit too much, no big deal. No one loses money if they make too much, no one becomes unemployed, no one goes hungry, no one loses their home. Just some of their free time.

It's only when they can't produce enough, or their ruler takes too much, that they go hungry.


Whereas in a capitalist economy, if goods can't be sold, businesses fail, people lose their jobs & their homes.

Paradoxically, these bad things happen - yet there's plenty of "stuff," plenty of machinery & labor to make more stuff, & plenty of people who want the stuff.

To make it clear:

I'm not saying feudalism is "better" or that my description completely describes feudal economies.

I'm just saying capitalism has different dynamics than earlier economic forms, & trying to get you to see the difference.

I'll try responding to the rest of your comments in another post.

I think we're coming from vastly different perspectives, & I'd like to see if it's possible to bridge the gap.

[Boojatta]

72. Were indigenous people of North American practicing capitalist economics...

when they traded with each other and when they traded with Europeans?

But your 'rebuttal' is couched in capitalist economics: it assumes a businessperson (mass?)-producing books that may or may not sell (for money) in some consumer market.

Why must it be a businessperson? What if the writer, who has not yet earned anything by writing, pays a printer to print a few thousand copies? Also, why does it matter whether money is used or whether there is a series of barter transactions?

The only assumptions I see are:
1. The printing press had already been invented when copies of the book were printed; and
2. The copies of the book were owned by someone who hoped to directly or indirectly obtain valuable goods or services in exchange for copies of the book.

[Hannah Bell]

81. No. Most Americans think any kind of exchange is "capitalism".

But it's not the case.

Capitalism has features that distinguish it from earlier economic forms.

Simple trade, for either goods or "money," is done to realize use values, not to accumulate profits for reinvestment with the purpose of realizing yet more profits.

It need be a "businessman" because 1) your example assumes a division of labor, an entrepreneurial writer/seller & a market for books where buyers choose among offerings they "like" or "don't like," & 2) if you know anything of the history of printing & "books," such came into being when capitalism did.

Prior to that "books" were produced by artisans in patronage relationships, i.e. with the church or the nobility/ruling class - the relationship wasn't one of capitalist exchange, except in small, limited cases like the Greek demos.

But this is rather far afield from the original point.

And since your responses show me that you don't understand why that sea of cars has significance, I'll try to follow up on the post I started last night.

[Boojatta]

95. Why define a term that you don't later use?

Capitalism has features that distinguish it from earlier economic forms.

Simple trade, for either goods or "money," is done to realize use values, not to accumulate profits for reinvestment with the purpose of realizing yet more profits.

I cannot imagine why you would introduce the term "simple trade" unless either you plan to use the term "simple trade" in this thread or you are insinuating that capitalism has some particular features that distinguish it from "simple trade." However, you haven't asserted anything about what you mean by the word "capitalism", so I have no basis for drawing any conclusions.

It need be a "businessman" because 1) your example assumes a division of labor, an entrepreneurial writer/seller & a market for books where buyers choose among offerings they "like" or "don't like," & 2) if you know anything of the history of printing & "books," such came into being when capitalism did.

If I may deal with the point you label as "2)" first, are you suggesting that, when capitalism came into being, every person who wasn't a businessman and who was selling books immediately stopped selling books?

Also, is there some connection between the concept "businessman" and the concept "capitalism"?

In what sense of the word "market" does my example assume the existence of a market for books? For example, suppose that in some country the public library has hundreds of branches. Suppose all book purchase decisions are made at the branch level and not at any higher level. (Note that there's a difference between purchase decisions and implementation of purchase decisions. Perhaps implementation of purchase decisions occurs at a higher level to obtain bulk rates for some book titles.) Then do you have enough information to conclude that the collection of public library branches fulfills all requirements necessary for it to be officially a "market"?

Would you say that biographies of Gogol are incomplete and misleading if they list his occupations as government clerk, teacher in a girls' school, adjunct professor at the University of St. Petersburg, and writer? In particular, what if they omit his stint as a businessman? Apparently he spent about 300 rubles to have copies of his book Hans Kuchelgarten printed. Does it matter if only two reviews were published, both reviews were unfavorable, three copies were sold, and Gogol burned the remaining copies?

[Hannah Bell]

86. Back to that 150 acres of unsaleable cars...

The rest of your post, all the stuff about drops in aggregate demand, matching S & D, shoppers & their opportunity cost....

is irrelevant to the OP.

So far as I understand your reason for writing all that, you want to explain why those unsaleable cars are sitting in that parking lot.

But it's incoherent. How do those factors fit together? Or are they offered as alternatives, as if each crisis were completely unique, with a universe of possible causes?

What in the heck does some individual shopper's regret at buying an extra pair of panties or something have to do with a business making goods for profit in competition with other corporations doing the same?

I posted the photo & the quote from Marx because he laid out a theory of capitalist crisis that included an understanding of why masses of unsaleable goods might accompany crisis, as well as why periodic crisis was inherent in the process of capitalist production & competition.

Since we're presently in the middle of one of those crises, & since it wasn't so many years ago I was hearing how the fall of the USSR & the economic boom showed "Marx was wrong" - the picture + quote seemed timely.

[Recursion]

43. Marx wrote before game/decision theory

Contested systems were assumed to be zero-sum (not that they had that word), but most real-world systems are non-zero sum and so not strictly competitive.

Still, his analysis of utility and value are profound and well worth reading.

[anigbrowl]

50. Yup. Marx thought it was about capitalism, but it's actually the result of technology

If it wasn't for technological innovation, markets would eventually find equilibrium. Marx assumes that all new economic activity is the result of rapacious capitalism in search of new markets to conquer, when in fact it's man's nature to invest things and refine things already invested - sometimes for profit, sometimes through laziness, sometimes for the sheer pleasure of doing so. As knowledge expands, so has the growth of knowledge accelerated and with it the development of technology. Our institutions are always playing catch-up with our innovations, whether they are capitalistic or socialistic. Capitalism has proved somewhat better at assimilating technological change insofar as it enshrines competition at the expense of consensus.

[Hannah Bell]

58. I'm not seeing, in your discussion, how "technology" -

which has always existed - or "man's inventive nature" - explains that 150-acre parking lot of cars that people made, & desire, but can't have.

In other words, over-production side by side with want.

[anigbrowl]

73. That's not a function of capitalism particularly

Just poor planning. Surpluses of one thing simultaneous with shortages of another happened in places like Soviet union as well. There's no perfectly efficient system for the allocation of resources, all you can do is attempt to minimize inefficiency, which is how nature works.

[Hannah Bell]

82. There is no shortage of production or goods in the present case.

There's a shortage of people with the means to buy the production.

[mentalslavery]

80. This is also not accurate, Marx wrote extensively about Tech

Marx identified three main factors in das Kapital-consolidation-centralization-movement- that lead to crisis. Sound familiar. Additionally, he spoke of multinationals and the ability of technology to produce rapidly changing employment shifts that would impoverish many. He spoke of the use of foreign labor through migration to a country and the outflow of jobs to other countries. He even described the dangers of electronic transfer of information that would speed purchases to a degree that market shifts up and down would become increasingly impossible to deal with.

[Hannah Bell]

87. Thanks for adding that. Always easy to tell who's not read anything by the

Reader's Digest boilerplate:

"He had the wrong idea about human nature."

"He didn't account for technological change."

"He didn't anticipate how we'd develop a big middle class."

"He didn't anticipate anti-poverty programs."

"He didn't know about (psychology, game theory, Buddhism, space travel, wtf-ever)."

[leftstreet]

52. K&R for an interesting thread

:thumbsup:

[eridani]

62. Wrong with the diagnosis, or wrong with the prescription?

I'd say right diagnosis and wrong prescription myself. Or maybe the problem with implementation of the prescription was single party states with force and information monopolies. That would get any prescription into serious trouble.

I have a problem with the notion that there is just one "scientific" answer to the question "What is to be done?" I prefer Chomsky's approach myself.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare03.htm

The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still, (really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them), is, It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer. The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, Get to work on it.

There are a thousand different ways of getting to work on it. For one thing, there's no 'it'. There's lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that's what you're focused on, you're going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment's in serious danger. There's no one thing that's the right thing to do.

Everything. Everything is a step to take. You organise people; you get them to go on demonstrations; you get them to form political clubs; you get them to beat on the doors of their legislators and the editorial offices; to set up their own newspapers; to make a third party if that's necessary...you form unions. It's all the right thing to do. All of it is right. There are questions of tactics, where you put your efforts. That you just decide. That I can't tell you. But all of these efforts are the right ones.

Noam Chomsky – "There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future."

[BlooInBloo]

75. What's wrong is the conceit that one could answer any of his questions.....

Simply by sitting in a chair and thinking about it hard enough.

[starroute]

66. Risk, profit, and innovation

The problem I see with capitalism is that it was invented for a very specific set of circumstances and then applied across the board.

The first corporations were things like the British East India Company. They were created to undertake highly speculative enterprises -- like trading with the other side of the world -- where you could lose your shirt but might also become fabulously wealthy. The idea was to entice investors into the deal by promising that their risk was limited to the amount of their investment, while their potential gain was unlimited.

Later, this model was extended to building major projects, like canals or railroads, where substantial capital investment was needed up front but whoever got there first would have an effective monopoly on something that had never exited before and would be able to rake in the profits.

The people who got in on those kinds of deals early were the original 19th century robber barons. That created problems of its own -- but those aren't our problems. Our problems are the result of trying to apply the robber-baron model to things like toothpaste or magazine publishing -- or to the continuing production of automobiles once everybody already has an automobile -- where the basic risk/profit model no longer applies.

Yeah, it's true that capitalism needs to seek new markets to keep replicating that risk/profit model -- and that our own capitalism society was only saved from falling back into the Great Depression after World War II by the invention around 1950 of (1) the permanent wartime economy and (2) consumerism, advertising, and planned obsolescence.

And it's equally true that as long as capitalists are making their profits off of innovation and the creation of new markets they can afford to share some of them with the workers -- but that when growth stagnates, as it has for the past 35 years, they turn to exploiting and underpaying the workers instead.

But I can't help feeling there's something more at work in the current economic crisis than just those factors. The truth may be that the global economy has outgrown capitalism -- just as it was in the process of outgrowing land-based feudalism when capitalist economies started emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The current crisis, as we keep being told, is essentially not a crisis of production but a financial crisis, in which the risk/profit model has run out of actually physical objects -- like houses or factories -- to invest in and has therefore turned to side-bets on other people's success or failure as a substitute.

I don't know enough to be able to tell what's actually going on here in a historical sense. It seems conceivable to me that the emerging 21st century economy may need a greatly expanded level of on-paper wealth to operate and can no longer be tied to actual physical objects -- any more than the 20th century economy could be tied to the existing physical supply of gold. But if that's the case, we need some really smart people to figure that out and determine how to make it work for the common good.

On the other hand, it could be also that the last two centuries have marked a kind of fever-dream of unsustainable profits, triggered by the exploitation of fossil fuels, and that as we learn to live within our means again we're going to have to substitute a sustainable society built on broadly-based equality, with only modest opportunities for relative wealth.

(Or -- who knows -- maybe all the greed and wealth-seeking will get transferred to virtual reality, and it will be possible to be a billionaire in Half-Life while you're just Joe Ordinary in the physical world.)

I do know that the unrestrained fears of the right are often a more accurate guide to the future than the more tempered and ambivalent hopes of the left -- and that the right wouldn't be harping quite as hard on "redistribution" if the actual redistribution of wealth weren't going to be at the center of things for the next 30 years.

Marx probably was naive if he believed that humans could give up being greedy just be being educated in equality and sharing. (See, for example, the case of post-Maoist China.) But on the other hand, everything I read suggests that the peasant-level societies which have been most egalitarian have gotten there not through some kind of natural absence of greed but as the result of a well-developed system of redistribution -- which at that economic level is generally based on gift-giving, potlatches, and so forth.

That degree of spreading-the-wealth became impossible once humans started getting into building irrigation works, highways, and other massive projects requiring a high level of concentrated wealth. Instead, kings emerged, and the early kings built pyramids just to show they could. And the world has been struggling ever since with the tricky problem of allowing a few super-rich and/or super-powerful people to exist, while also forcing them to devote some meaningful part of their wealth and power to the common good instead of to self-aggrandizing display and looking good for the folks back home.

I don't know what the answer is -- especially given that wealth and power tend to enable people to avoid any constraints that the rest of us might want to set on the use of wealth and power. But I do know that one good place to start is by rolling back the whole set of warped philosophies -- greed is good / Social Darwinism / wealth is a sign of God's favor / creating wealth is the closest humans can get to God -- that have arisen to justify the lack of any constraints on the accumulation and application of wealth.

As a philosophical alternative, I'd suggest something like the following: Societies are living organisms. Societies that allow the accumulation of wealth and power do so to serve the goals of the society as a whole. The people in whose hands this wealth and power are placed are bidden to be servants of society. They must recognize that their positions owe almost nothing to their own efforts and everything to the society which creates them for its own purposes.

In short, rather than self-indulgence, those positions of prominence call for an almost super-human level of self-sacrifice -- or perhaps more aptly, something equivalent to Asimov's three laws of robotics. They must do no harm. They must serve the bidding of the larger society. And, only tertiarily, they are allowed to perpetuate their own existence.

[GeneCosta]

67. He wasn't.

"Marx probably was naive if he believed that humans could give up being greedy just be being educated in equality and sharing."

Marx didn't believe that at all. He's more materialistic than most capitalists.

[Odin2005]

70. I like your analysis. Here are my 2 cents...

IMO the "Capitalism" idealized by Conservatives and Libertarians only works in pre-industrial societies with economies dominated by lots of small enterprises. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the emergence of large businesses that were powerful enough to manipulate governments and create monopolistic cartels and cabals, these large businesses themselves became totalitarian states in miniature. Basically the post-Industrial Revolution global economy is not compatible with capitalism, therefore capitalism must go. I would suggest as an alternative a free enterprise market economy based on co-ops. The Market is a tool of society that is to serve society, it is not the idol the Right thinks it is.

[Odin2005]

69. I was a Marxist in high school, then I read Karl Popper in college.

As far as I'm concerned Popper's famous book The Open Society and It's Enemies eviscerated Marxism.

It is Marxism's stranglehold of left-wing thought that is hurting the Left. If us socialists want to succeed Marx must go.

[readmoreoften]

88. And Popper has been made irrelevant by the moral failure of positivism.

Popper is pretty much a minor figure since the positivist "open society" he advocated ended up committing horrible behaviorist experimental atrocities in the West throughout the mid-century (and of course even today) in the name of 'freedom'. Popper's "open society" is as much of a brutal failure as any other sort. He's largely been abandoned for Straussian neoconservatism by his former followers from what I can see. Popper just doesn't make sense anymore in the wake of 70 years of black operations, torture science and experimentation/the kubark manual.

Even anti-Marxists know that industrial and post-industrial bourgeois democracy is just the facade of an "open society."

[Odin2005]

94. You are full of crap. Popper isn't even a positivist, the criticized the positivists.

You don't even know WTF you are talking about. Popper's views are very similar to those of American liberals. "Behaviorist experimental atrocities"? WTF does that come from? that's not the Popper I know. Straussianism is exactly the kind of thing Popper attacked in the first volume of The Open Society

[BlooInBloo]

74. Generalized bitching is satisfying, but it's really no substitute for detailed case-analysis....

A precis of which can conveniently be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-Financial-Investment/dp/0471467146/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227481661&sr=8-1

"Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Fifth Edition is an engaging and entertaining account of the way that mismanagement of money and credit has led to financial explosions over the centuries. Covering such topics as the history and anatomy of crises, speculative manias, and the lender of last resort, this book puts the turbulence of the financial world in perspective. The updated fifth edition expands upon each chapter, and includes two new chapters focusing on significant financial crises of the last fifteen years."

[Hannah Bell]

76. Generalized bitching?

Detailed case-by-case analysis?

non-seq?

[anaxarchos]

83. By all means...

... let us dismiss old man Marx with a couple of stupid platitudes: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush..." or "a stitch in time saves nine..."

Why then does all other economic theory go out the window in times of crisis? Where are our Austrians? Where is Hayek? Where is Walras and Marshall? Where is even the optimistic Keynes? We have only the classical, fire and brimstone, Keynes - "overproduction of Capital". It is Marx for polite society. Even Paulson subscribes.

But, don't let that stop us. We can make shit up all day long.

"All people are greedy and have arms that are too short."

[HamdenRice]

96. Marx was right about almost everything

except his math, which was dodgy.

Most people don't have a clue about what Marx actually said, so I can see why this debate is going nowhere.

[Boojatta]

97. What did Marx say about life in the year 2008?

[Bucky]

107. Flyer cars, silvery jumpsuits, personal rocket backpacks revolutionizing soccer,

And his final treatise, he left only the cryptic message, "2009: Ben Affleck washes out". Frankly I can't decypher that one.

[slackmaster]

99. Marx was an insightful genius with an uncommonly keen wit

[Boojatta]

100. When you say that Marx's math was dodgy, are you referring to

mathematical claims or arithmetical computations that he relied upon in his economics? Are you referring to Marx's ideas with respect to the theoretical foundations of the area of mathematics that is known as "calculus" or "analysis"?

[gravity]

102. Laissez-faire capitalism is wrong along with Marx

All ideological driven economies are seriously flawed.

Mixed economies have been the most successful throughout history.

[Bucky]

105. "Mutts like me"

The Greeks (or maybe Shakespeare) called it the middle way or the divine medium, or something like that.

I should thumb through my old college books more often.

[Boojatta]

103. Kick

[Bucky]

104. Marx's prediction of collapse by overproduction was correct, for 1929. But he failed to predict...

how the rise of industrial unionism would work to maintain a balance of wealth between the capitalist classes and the working classes. By achieving a greater efficiency in distributing wealth, a capitalistic society with organized workers is able to outcompete the direct redistribution and punishment of wealth in a centralized, command economy--such as in Marx's Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

What's more, by replacing the economic cycles of expansion and contraction with an unmoving, static model of industrialization and production by quota, Marxist societies inevitably fell behind the capitalist economies in technology & innovation (not to mention product variety that helps to enhance quality of life).

He was right that in Dickensian Britain, where he lived & wrote, "The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them." What he failed to account for was how the expansion of the suffrage to the working class (in part out of a fear of his predicted revolutions), the industrialized world was able to bring the laboring class into the middle class and build a new groundswell of prosperity that could more efficiently enjoy the wealth of its production.

Marx's predictions failed because the democracies unionized--and really that moderate course was pretty much inevitable. After all, what nation ever stayed Marxist but at the point of a gun?

[blindpig]

110. So where are the unions now?

They are broken or compromised. The capitalists put off the next cycle by off shoring union and other jobs, thereby maintaining an acceptable profit level. Then, with large scale consumer production glutting the market and driving down price the money looked for new places to go. Thus we've had Tech, Housing and now Finance bubbles. Not surprising, wealth disparity has again grown to a level familiar to Marx.

The middle course is worthless, it is standing in the stream waiting to be swept away by the next wave of capitalist machination. Regulate all you wish, they will erode all such just as they have halted and now reversed the New Deal.

As per that gun business, well 70 years of your society being on war footing is exhausting for governments and public alike. And now we hear that a majority of the Russian populace yearns for the good old days of socialism. And be assured, Cuba remains socialists by the will of the people.

[Hannah Bell]

111. "The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

What he failed to account for was how the expansion of the suffrage to the working class (in part out of a fear of his predicted revolutions), the industrialized world was able to bring the laboring class into the middle class and build a new groundswell of prosperity that could more efficiently enjoy the wealth of its production.<<


How's that "middle class" doing, btw?

[Boojatta]

109. Kick because a lot of questions remain unanswered.