Monopoly Capital vs. the base, then and now

[Vittorio]

An instructive look at how Capital deals with right-wing ideologues. This article says everything that e.g. North Carolina Yankee wants to say, but which he cannot give the honest reasons for, needing as he does to maintain the fiction that ideology is the operative force in the modern world.

The transformation of Ronald Reagan from a candidate who, in 1976, was unacceptable to the key sectors of finance capital into a contender in 1980 who has become acceptable to those same sectors has come about as the result of two closely connected developments: a consensus in the ruling class concerning the policy options it presently deems most desirable which more closely approximates the general ideological image projected by Reagan; and candidate Reagan’s conscious repositioning of himself in such a way as to make clear that while he maintained obligations to his political base on the right, his relationship to that political base (and its ideology) would henceforth be tactical and his relationship to finance capital would be strategic.

Reagan, like Barry Goldwater before him, has never been a favorite of the dominant sector of finance capital–sometimes known as “the Eastern Establishment.” The titanic battles within the Republican Party over the past 40 years have all essentially revolved around the conflict between finance capital’s desire for a “responsible” presidential candidate capable of political flexibility in serving the interests of monopoly and conservative ideologues more concerned with “principle” than results. Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford–these have been the preferred choices of finance capital in the maelstrom of Republican Party politics while the likes of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan have always been viewed as outsiders of somewhat dubious reliability–even when their platforms were in no way distinguishable from the favorites of Wall Street.

The reason is simple. Ideologues–even of the right–tend to lose sight of the political realities, especially when the times call for bold initiatives and tactical retreats. Would a Goldwater or a Reagan have been able to wind down the Vietnam War or make the opening to China? Probably not, but Nixon could. Finance capital cannot always prevent some ideologue from capturing a party’s presidential nomination; but then it has other means at its disposal, as witness the overwhelming election victories of Lyndon Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 and Nixon over George McGovern in 1972.

Until recently, Reagan was considered unacceptable to the mainstream of finance capital. When the former governor of California decided to make one last try for the presidency in 1980, finance capital once again sought an acceptable alternative. A number of politicians, anyone of whom would have been preferable to Reagan, put themselves on display, among them Howard Baker, George Bush, John Connally and John Anderson. In the end, after each had faltered, a last desperate effort was made to revive the hopes of former President Gerald Ford, but by then it was too late.

The Reagan of 1980, however, had learned something from the past. From the beginning he artfully began to position himself away from his right wing political base. The process required considerable delicacy, because Reagan needed the right to win the primaries, but he also needed to demonstrate his pragmatism to the real power brokers on Wall Street.

By March it seemed as though Reagan’s march to the nomination could not be stopped. It was at this time that the investment banking establishment opened a fascinating public dialogue with him, the burden of which was to inform Reagan what it would take to win their approval. Particularly revealing was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (March 13,1980), aptly entitled “Learning to Love Ronnie,” itself a clear signal that if he played his cards right, Reagan could get the endorsement of the party’s center this time around.

...

From that point on, there was a noticeable although subtle shift in the Reagan campaign. The simple-minded one-liners so much adored by Reagan’s rightwing base were still there–(“I don’t believe that freedom of religion means freedom from religion”; “the U.S. government’s present definition of a family is ’any two persons living together’”)–but now there was a new tone indicating that ideology wasn’t policy and that the concerns of capital might well require other than simplistic answers. To indicate that he recognized the complexities of maintaining social peace, Reagan began more and more to establish his personal affinity with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Increasingly his attack was on governmental waste in the managing of social programs, not on the programs themselves. The Panama Canal receded into the background, to be replaced by the call for renewed military strength. The attacks on the Trilateral Commission were quietly dropped.

...

While these words were being weighed in the centers of finance capital, a parade of “Eastern Establishment” luminaries mounted the rostrum in Detroit to signify that Reagan had passed the test. One after another, Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and George Bush–much to the apparent discomfort of Reagan’s rightwing base–came to formalize the annointment. And Reagan did his part in return, accepting Bush as his vice-presidential running mate, an offering to finance capital that takes on added significance in light of Reagan’s age and the definite possibility that, if elected he would be a one-term president.

But while Reagan has thus become acceptable to finance capital, it cannot be said that the most powerful sectors of the ruling class are particularly enthusiastic about this candidate. There still exists a certain uneasiness about Reagan in the ranks of capital, nowhere more evident than in the delicate negotiations which almost brought Gerald Ford onto the Republican ticket. For the ”demands” made by Ford’s supporters in the heady hours of trying to formulate the “dream ticket” were principally a probing action by finance capital’s most responsible representatives (only Kissinger could have played so central a role in such a process) to see how much Reagan’s actual political power might be curbed and placed in more reliable hands. In the end, the scheme failed; but the effort itself was the most revealing part of the episode.

The significance of Reagan’s candidacy, however, does not end there. For Reagan’s triumphal march through the primaries, along with the political platform adopted by the Republican convention, indicates that the rightwing has expanded its beachhead in the Republican Party and has probably become the dominant political force within it. In light of the extent to which the particular political form that suits U.S. monopoly capital the best is the two-party system, this development means that fascism has now secured a more advanced base in U.S. politics than ever before.

Here let us pause for a moment to counter the prevailing prejudice on the left which sees fascism simply as the creature of monopoly capital. Ultimately, the turn to fascism is dependent on the acquiescence of capital. It is likewise true that sectors of monopoly capital are constantly financing fascist-like political groups. But politically, mass fascist movements most often develop somewhat independently of–and sometimes in direct opposition to–the mainstream of capital. In fact, their initial appeal is principally populist, attributing the felt anxieties of the masses to an unlikely combination of communists and bankers. Fascist movements come into being precisely at those historical moments when the crisis of capitalist economics gives rise to a general political, social and moral disorder in society. While this is a period in which the working class becomes most capable of developing its revolutionary consciousness, other sectors of the population–the petit bourgeoisie, backward sectors of the working class and groupings within the ruling class–yearn for a return to stability. Freedom becomes less important than order. Stability is associated with former days of glory when all people knew their place; racial and national minorities “accepted” their lesser status; women were not ony subordinate to men, but all acknowledge that this was the proper order of things; hard work was its own reward; and all decent folks loved their country.

Exploiting these anxieties, fascist movements develop a political base which is not dependent on the approval of monopoly capital, but then make themselves available to capital at a certain moment when the class struggle brings the system to the edge of a political crisis and the dominant sector of capital is then prepared to abandon its own “best political shell” of bourgeois democracy in favor of the more naked repression of fascism.

In this sense, the positioning of U.S. neo-fascists in the heart of one of the two major political parties is an event of considerable historic significance. For under such circumstances, the turn to fascism in the U.S.–if and when it occurs–can be effected with less of a rupture in bourgeois legality and therefore will be aided by the hold that bourgeois ideology has over the working class.

At this stage, U.S. fascism does not yet express itself in an all-sided political program which would entail the dismantling of bourgeois democracy. All this means is that the crisis of U.S. capitalism has not yet matured to the point where the bourgeois political system is unable to contain it. For the moment, the growth of fascism in the U.S. is more an ideological than a political process. (The fascist-like activity of the police, frequently cited as the indicator of the rise of fascism, is actually no more than the “normal” operation of the bourgeoisie’s repressive apparatus. To hold otherwise is to encourage illusions about the real nature of bourgeois democracy. From Haymarket to Joe Hill to Sacco and Vanzetti and police assaults on the Black liberation movement in the sixties, the bourgeoisie has never hesitated to use its police power in the most arbitrary and “illegal” fashion while still not abandoning bourgeois democracy as a whole.)

The success of the “new right” in capturing the Republican Party-even though this success has not yet been fully consolidated politically and organizationally–has thus provided U.S. fascism with its most substantial vantage point. It is urgent that this new political and organizational gain of neo-fascism be properly registered by communists. Monopoly capital may not yet be ready to abandon its bourgeois democratic shell and turn to fascism; but it is more aware than ever before that a not unlikely combination of circumstances–the need for armed counter-revolutionary activity somewhere in the world combined with an upsurge in class struggle at home–could mandate a sharp political turn to the right, especially as the bourgeoisie’s traditional option of buying social peace through material concessions increasingly comes up against the hard facts of diminished economic options for capital.

...

legal segregation in the sixties has not changed the objective situation of minority peoples; it has merely made more glaring the actual institutionalization of racism in non-legal forms. In fact, the racist counter-offensive has developed precisely in conjunction with the near-complete realization of bourgeois legal equality for minority peoples. The upsurge of the Ku Klux Klan and the noticeable rise in police brutality toward minority peoples represent a resentment at the gains in the legal arena as well as a pointed reminder that racism is protected and reinforced by the police and “private” paramilitary forces.

In the political arena, the racist counter-offensive has surfaced under the banner of “reverse discrimination” and the demogogic appeal to “white rights.” Within this framework, the attacks on social spending (disguised as “tax revolts”), abortion rights, and welfare recipients has had an unmistakable racist content. It is far from coincidence that the neo-fascists have been the leading agitators around these questions. What must be noted with considerable gravity is that in exploiting these issues the fascist right has been able to extend its periphery significantly beyond its own relatively small political base.

Ideologically, we have witnessed a spate of new pseudo-scientific research–in both the biological and sociological fields– which attempts to legitimize racism by breathing new life into long since discredited theories of “racial inferiority.”

Accompanying the neo-fascist, racist upsurge has been a sexist ideological offensive. Just as the slogan “Kuche, Kinder, Kirche” (Kitchen, Children, Church) was advanced by the Nazis as the statement of woman’s appointed domain, so the U.S. fascists have essentially adopted the same outlook in calling for “a return to traditional moral values” largely based on racist and sexist social arrangements.

The opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment–itself a harmless enough constitutional statement which the principal sectors of monopoly capital have no compunctions about endorsing–is thus not based on any illusion that the ERA would actually bring about women’s emancipation. Rather it is, along with the crusade against abortion rights, the reassertion of the legitimacy of traditional modes of authority. Those who see the hand of monopoly capital behind the anti-feminist upsurge miss the point, for under the conditions in which women have become increasingly part of the public labor force, capital does not on principle oppose formal equality between the sexes or the legalization of abortion. The Republican Party, as has been noted by many, had a plank in favor of the ERA in every one of its election platforms for the past 40 years up until this year, and no one would seriously argue that the plank was adopted in defiance of the dictates of monopoly. It was a Nixon-dominated Supreme Court which held anti-abortion statutes to be unconstitutional. (Even the finding that the Hyde amendment forbidding the use of government funds for most abortions was constitutional was managed by the closest of margins, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.)

...

But these twin developments–Reagan’s turn toward the center of monopoly capital and the development of a neo-fascist base in the Republican Party–will remain somewhat in contradiction to each other so long as the dominant sectors of L’.S. finance capital are not yet ready to turn toward fascism. On specific questions–increased military spending, a reassertion of “patriotic” values, etc.–the “new right” and monopoly capital are in tune with each other. But the most responsible sectors of capital are not so ready to jeopardize the social peace by a reckless dismantling of social services. Nor are they ready simply to accept the imposition of an ideological conformity based on Christian fundamentalism which is bound to repel the bourgeois intellectual establishment.

Thus, every move by Reagan to reassure capital of his “responsibility” on these matters is bound to create a measure of dismay in his political base. Likewise, every move by Reagan to reassure his right wing base of his continuing ideological purity is bound to promote a measure of anxiety in the ranks of capital. In fact, such contradictions have already emerged.

The Republican election platform, for instance, is a grand hodgepodge of right wing passions that the bourgeoisie would just as soon do without–ranging from the institutionalization of school prayer to a repeal of the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. Particularly troubling was the platform plank that reads: “We will work for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” This attempt to tamper with the principle of an “independent” judiciary cannot sit well at the center of capital, which is not about to permit its political options to be held hostage to such moral absolutism.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

An instructive look at how Capital deals with right-wing ideologues. This article says everything that e.g. North Carolina Yankee wants to say, but which he cannot give the honest reasons for, needing as he does to maintain the fiction that ideology is the operative force in the modern world.

And here we have on display the folly of a poster presuming to speak for me and yet in the process revealing his stunning lack of awareness as to regards to my previous statements on the matters in question.

I have repeatedly made posts discussing how ideology as it exists today is merely a collection of cultural tropes, motivated to unite behind a laundry list of often conflicting or irrelevant positions, primarily to maintain the front of opposition against the other side which is likewise composed, even if not necessarily to the same degree.

Unlike you, I will not presume to imply what you mean by "honest reasons", but such is not being avoided for the sake of "preserving the fiction of ideology".

The main thing you have to understand, is that 1) I value our freedom and our constitutional system for itself as a matter of my personal belief system and 2) my criticism of people on both sides, often relates to their inability to see beyond themselves to the harm done to either or both. That includes the excesses of capital, but it also includes partisan inflexibility, and extremism on both the left and the right, both Marxism and Fascism.

Power must be restrained and balanced. That includes not just gov't power but also power generated from concentrated wealth. Also when people are desperate, they resort to crazies and extremists to restore stability. Therefore it is necessary for "responsible" leaders to create polices that 1) don't leave people that desperate and 2) don't cause such desperation to be focused on a critical government institution or principle.

I don't support class revolution, nor do I think everything is defined by class. To say that would be to engage in historical revisionism to suit one's ideology. Class is a factor, along with many others, in dictating actions taken and the opposed factions that develop at points, but a myopic tunnel vision on class neglects the whole picture.

I am very much against radicalism, regardless of motivation because it is dangerous and the disruptive effects lead to desperation and that desperation leads to tyranny. I am also one who thinks that people are imperfect and subject to falling victim to greed and selfishness and merely eliminating class divisions will not rewrite human nature/history or instinct, which are developed through millions of years of evolution, this is why every attempt to do so has failed miserably and left people in misery. New categories of haves and have not's arise only by this point the options for recourse have been eliminated.

Right now we have a decent system, which give or take a few reforms is suitable to our needs, risking that through class upheaval is neither necessary, nor desirable. What is desirable is that the policy set be shifted to one that recognizes the need for balance, for reason and for reducing such desperation as I have termed it, and thereby improve the lot of the masses in the process. This will inevitably require restrictions on capital and business to suit the needs of the nation and the people.  

To the extent that Marxist thought has emphasized the need to consider class when examining political and historical questions, is indeed something for which I will give credit where credit is due. A realistic picture requires class to be a consideration and to be examined in such questions and matters. But it ends there, because to the extent to which Marxist thought also emphasizes class to the exclusion of, all other considerations, renders it just another group of dogmatic extremists, seeking to warp the real picture in favor one that suits their world view and thus enables their desired policy set.

[Vittorio]

nor do I think everything is defined by class.

Neither does Marx.

By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if possessed by the devil.

- Capital Vol. I

Toay that would be to engage in historical revisionism to suit one's ideology. Class is a factor, along with many others, in dictating actions taken and the opposed factions that develop at points, but a myopic tunnel vision on class neglects the whole picture.

Once again: neither does Marx

Capital in this general form, although belonging to individual capitalists, in its elemental form of capital, forms the capital which accumulates in the banks or is distributed through them . . . while the general is therefore on the one hand only a mental mark of distinction it is at the same time a particular real form alongside the form of the particular and individual.

Grundrisse pp. 449-50

I am very much against radicalism, regardless of motivation because it is dangerous and the disruptive effects lead to desperation and that desperation leads to tyranny.

Yes; we've heard this song and dance before.

I am also one who thinks that people are imperfect and subject to falling victim to greed and selfishness and merely eliminating class divisions will not rewrite human nature/history or instinct, which are developed through millions of years of evolution, this is why every attempt to do so has failed miserably and left people in misery.

"To avoid the problem of 'human nature', we had to give free vent to its expression.."

This rephrasing of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin is sleepy

Right now we have a decent system, which give or take a few reforms is suitable to our needs, risking that through class upheaval is neither necessary, nor desirable. What is desirable is that the policy set that recognizes the need for balance, for reason and for reducing such desperation as I have termed it, and thereby improve the lot of the masses in the process. This will inevitably require restrictions on capital and business to suit the needs of the nation and the people.

Right now you have a system which actively produces its own alternative , and cannot do otherwise. Communism is implicit in capitalism.

To the extent that Marxist thought has emphasized the need to consider class when examining political and historical questions, is indeed something for which I will give credit where credit is due. A realistic picture requires class to be a consideration and to be examined in such questions and matters. But it ends there, because to the extent to which Marxist thought also emphasizes class to the exclusion of, all other considerations,

Gonna stop you there. Marxism does not "emphasize  class... to the exclusion of all other considerations". Indeed, the extent to which Marxism is not class reductionist - understanding Capital as a social force which determines the capitalist as well as the working-class - is precisely what separated it from the vulgar Left.

The struggle against Capital is not primarily a struggle against a ruling class, but against an animated, abstract force produced by capitalist social relations.

Capital as a whole, then, exists simultaneously, spatially side by side, in its different phases. But every part passes constantly and successively from one phase, from one functional form, into the next and thus functions in all of them in turn. Its forms are hence fluid and their simultaneousness is brought about by their succession. Every form follows another and precedes it, so that the return of one capital part to a certain form is necessitated by the return of the other part to some other form. Every part describes continuously its own cycle, but it is always another part of capital which exists in this form, and these special cycles form only simultaneous and successive elements of the aggregate process.

- Capital Vol. II

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

nor do I think everything is defined by class.

Neither does Marx.

By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if possessed by the devil.

Is that suppose to help your argument?

Toay that would be to engage in historical revisionism to suit one's ideology. Class is a factor, along with many others, in dictating actions taken and the opposed factions that develop at points, but a myopic tunnel vision on class neglects the whole picture.

Once again: neither does Marx

In your obviously unvarnished analysis at least.

I am very much against radicalism, regardless of motivation because it is dangerous and the disruptive effects lead to desperation and that desperation leads to tyranny.

Yes; we've heard this song and dance before.

Human nature kills people, the fact that Marxism the world over has failed to override human nature illustrates profoundly that it is deeply flawed at the behavior level and also explains why applied Communism deviated so far from the Marx's original intent, because the concept itself is fatally flawed at the basic level. Rather then overcome nationalistic rivalries for instance, it became hijacked itself by such, something that was not suppose to happen and because of the supposed "temporary transition phase" it becomes inescapable. Marxist is riddled with exploits and vulnerabilities and I am afraid, that software is beyond patching.

I am also one who thinks that people are imperfect and subject to falling victim to greed and selfishness and merely eliminating class divisions will not rewrite human nature/history or instinct, which are developed through millions of years of evolution, this is why every attempt to do so has failed miserably and left people in misery.

"To avoid the problem of 'human nature', we had to give free vent to its expression.."

One does not avoid the problem of human nature.

Right now we have a decent system, which give or take a few reforms is suitable to our needs, risking that through class upheaval is neither necessary, nor desirable. What is desirable is that the policy set that recognizes the need for balance, for reason and for reducing such desperation as I have termed it, and thereby improve the lot of the masses in the process. This will inevitably require restrictions on capital and business to suit the needs of the nation and the people.

Right now you have a system which actively produces its own alternative , and cannot do otherwise. Communism is implicit in capitalism.

The view that communism is implicit in capitalism, must invariably derive from the suppose not existent myopic focus on class to exclusion of all other factors. If what you said had been true, then this concept would not be possible, because the two ideas are not consistent with each other.

To the extent that Marxist thought has emphasized the need to consider class when examining political and historical questions, is indeed something for which I will give credit where credit is due. A realistic picture requires class to be a consideration and to be examined in such questions and matters. But it ends there, because to the extent to which Marxist thought also emphasizes class to the exclusion of, all other considerations,

Gonna stop you there. Marxism does not "emphasize  class... to the exclusion of all other considerations". Indeed, the extent to which Marxism is not class reductionist - understanding Capital as a social force which determines the capitalist as well as the working-class - is precisely what separated it from the vulgar Left.

And yet it arrogantly presumes itself to be Capitalism's own goal.

Fundamentally, Capitalism is very compatible with freedom of choice. Granted when monopolies take power that freedom of choice can be restricted, but there is at its root a conceptualization that understands that the freedom to buy and sell as you please is closely tied to being free politically, and thus capitalism or at least the concept of a free market is going to be perpetually tied to democracy as long as democracy exists. There is need to reform and reign it in obviously and there are rolls for things like non-profits and cooperatives to play in that process.

But Marxism, Communism (you have shifted the utilized term throughout your post while I carefully avoided that) is based on too many flawed presumptions, too much rewriting of history to fit the narrative and far too much botched application to ever displace capitalism. The only way to presume that to be the case is to discount non-class considerations of market freedom and its intrinsic value to society, identity, religion, nationalism, resistance to authority and many other factors that have flared up throughout history. You can say x isn't y, as many times as you desire, but if your fundamental premise depends on upon x being y, its hard to give such statements credence. Marxism, perhaps without realizing it, emphasizes class to the exclusion of all other considerations via its own conclusions, it is self-indicting.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

You edited your first response post, to include yet two more quoted passages, but none of them refute my points.

Its like you reject the notion that it focuses exclusively on class and then turn around with proof that focuses exclusively on class.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

"To avoid the problem of 'human nature', we had to give free vent to its expression.."

This rephrasing of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin is sleepy

You know, Marxists love to use a no true Scotsman fallacy to deflect away from applied marxism in action, but in so doing miss the obvious question, "why have so many self described 'Marxists' to the tune of virtually every country where it was applied got it so wrong"?

Because it is blind to the reality of human nature and it creates a system that is vulnerable to being exploited by such flawed human nature.

[Vittorio]

Is that suppose to help your argument?

If you were capable of reading comprehension beyond a high school level, you'd see how Marx ascribes to Capital an existence independent of the class relations which produce it, and that accordingly describing Marxism as "class reductionist" says more about your having never read Marx than Marx himself.

In your obviously unvarnished analysis at least.

Why yes, I have read Marx.

Human nature kills people,

Guns don't kill people. Neither do people. The fault in our stars does.

the fact that Marxism the world over has failed to override human nature illustrates profoundly that it is deeply flawed at the behavior level

Quite the opposite: even if humans are every bit the selfish, self-interested individualists you pretend them to be, that in  no way invalidates the Marxist conception of men.

Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or ‘it its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him (for which Saint Max calls him “an unusually cunning and politic mind”, Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.

Indeed, I appreciate bourgeois propagandists preaching the "virtues of selfishness", and I hope they do so more loudly in the future, for they will find that the egoism of my class manifests quite differently from that of their own.

and so explains why applied Communism deviated so far from the Marx's original intent

Marx had no 'original intent', neither being the founder of Communism nor the proponent of a definite Communist system.

, because the concept itself is fatally flawed at the basic level.

Lel

rather then overcome nationalistic rivalries for instance, it became hijacked itself by such, something that was not suppose to happen and because of the supposed "temporary transition phase" it becomes inescapable. Marxist is riddled with exploits and vulnerabilities and I am afraid, that software is beyond patching.

"Human nature is flawed. Also, capitalism perfectly realizes human nature."

One does not avoid the problem of human nature.

If you genuinely believed in your conception of human nature, it seems highly unlikely you would plump for capitalism as you do.

The view that communism is implicit in capitalism, must invariably derive from the suppose not existent myopic focus on class to exclusion of all other factors. If what you said had been true, then this concept would not be possible, because the two ideas are not consistent with each other.

I'm certain this is English, but I cannot for the life of me parse what actually is being said here.

And yet it arrogantly presumes itself to be Capitalism's own goal.

Social systems do not have 'goals', not being individual organisms capable of conscious forethought. This is a bizarre bit of anthropomorphic mythmaking that belongs in the dust bin, together with other fetishisms (just as the 'goal' of capitalism is not some nebulous conception of'freedom', but is rather the further propagation of commodity production).

What they have is outcomes. And the outcome of capitalism is, and will be, Communism.

Fundamentally, Capitalism is very compatible with freedom of choice.

As defined by capitalism,  absolutely. Just as slave society is very compatible with stability... as defined by the slave system.

Grantedies take power that freedom of choice can be restricted, but there is at its root a conceptualization that understands that the freedom to buy and sell as you please is closely tied to being free politically, and thus capitalism or at least the concept of a free market is going to be perpetually tied to democracy as long as democracy exists

And here we fall back into the last redoubt of the idealist - "democracy", "freedom", etc., absolutely untethered from their concrete development and expression in history as objective incarnations of definite social arrangements.

You function on the level of a child

. There is need to reform and reign it in obviously and there are rolls for things like non-profits and cooperatives to play in that process.

All such reform only serves the long-term interest of Capital. Everyone knows this.

But Marxism, Communism (you have shifted the utilized term throughout your post while I carefully avoided that)

Because the two things are not synonymous. Communism is a process intrinsic to the development of capitalism; Marxism is a method of analysis.

based on too many flawed presumptions, too much rewriting of history to fit the narrative and far too much botched application to ever displace capitalism.

Ideologies do not displace other ideologies. Communism as a real force is constantly being produced, can its active agents will never have read Marx.

Theway to presume that to be the case is to discount non-class considerations of market freedom

Doesn't exist

nd its intrinsic value

Neither does this.

to society, identity, religion, nationalism,

Empty categories with no content.

resistance to authority

And yet you yourself are utterly servile.

and many other factors that have flared up throughout history. You can say x isn't y, as many times as you desire, but if your fundamental premise depends on upon x being y, its hard to give such statements credence. Marxism, perhaps without realizing it, emphasizes class to the exclusion of all other considerations via its own conclusions, it is self-indicting.

Perhaps you ought to actually read.

[Vittorio]

You edited your first response post, to include yet two more quoted passages, but none of them refute my points.

They absolutely refute your 'point', rooted as it is in having conspicuously avoided reading Marx, that Marxism is class reductionist.

Its like you reject the notion that it focuses exclusively on class and then turn around with proof that focuses exclusively on class.

Once again, with feeling: Marxism is an analysis of Capital , which is understood to exist independently of the classes whose existence it conditions.

The conspiratorial view of class reductionism - that all things which occur occur according to the conscious wills of capitalist agents - belongs firmly to the Right, and is analogous to right-wing conspiracy mongering.

[Vittorio]

You know, Marxists love to use a no true Scotsman fallacy to deflect away from applied marxism in action

Marxism isn't a thing to be 'applied in action'.

,

but in so doing miss the obvious question, "why have so many self described 'Marxists' to the tune of virtually every country where it was applied got it so wrong"?

Because, again, Marxism isn't a thing to be applied. This is some kind of bizarre empiricist formulation in which the world and history are sterile laboratories upon which experiments can be conducted by ideologues in white coats.

The revolutions of the 20th century were, overwhelmingly, capitalist revolutions, including that which brought the Soviet Union into existence.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Is that suppose to help your argument?

If you were capable of reading comprehension beyond a high school level, you'd see how Marx ascribes to Capital an existence independent of the class relations which produce it, and that accordingly describing Marxism as "class reductionist" says more about your having never read Marx than Marx himself.

Insults will not win you this debate.

In your obviously unvarnished analysis at least.

Why yes, I have read Marx.

"No one understands what we truly believe in, not even thousands of Marxists who actually tried to implement it, understood it."

Human nature kills people,

Guns don't kill people. Neither do people. The fault in our Stars does.

Guns aren't the only means of killing, especially on a mass scale.

the fact that Marxism the world over has failed to override human nature illustrates profoundly that it is deeply flawed at the behavior level

Quite the opposite: even if humans are every bit the selfish, self-interested individualists you pretend them to be, that in  no way invalidates the Marxist conception of men.

History says otherwise.

Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or ‘it its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him (for which Saint Max calls him “an unusually cunning and politic mind”, Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.

Indeed, I appreciate bourgeois propagandists preaching the "virtues of selfishness", and I hope they do so more loudly in the future, for they will find that the egoism of my class manifests quite differently from that of their own.

Then a classless society is impossible and Marxism loses any value it may have had.

andso explains why applied Communism deviated so far from the Marx's original intent

Marx had no 'original intent', neither being the founder of Communism nor the proponent of a definite Communist system.

, because the concept itself is fatally flawed at the basic level.

Lel

Oh yes, the famed moving target. You attack this nonsense and it morphs like a blob to skirt the blow. Most people have seen through the snake oil at this point though.

The point made that this whole conversation hinged around, was literally in relation to Marx and I went out of my way to avoid calling it "communism" for a reason. As I recall, you interjected that term into the discussion, not I.

ather then overcome nationalistic rivalries for instance, it became hijacked itself by such, something that was not suppose to happen and because of the supposed "temporary transition phase" it becomes inescapable. Marxist is riddled with exploits and vulnerabilities and I am afraid, that software is beyond patching.

"Human nature is flawed. Also, capitalism perfectly realizes human nature."

Capitalism is the least problematic, but has problems that need to be addressed. Just like Democracy is the system that fails the least.

One does not avoid the problem of human nature.

If you genuinely believed in your conception of human nature, it seems highly unlikely you would plump for capitalism as you do.

I am not in favor unrestrained capitalism, but a mixed-market economy is preferable to almost all alternatives.

The view that communism is implicit in capitalism, must invariably derive from the suppose not existent myopic focus on class to exclusion of all other factors. If what you said had been true, then this concept would not be possible, because the two ideas are not consistent with each other.

I'm certain this is English, but I cannot for the life of me parse what actually is being said here.

I said your religion is inconsistent with reality.

And yet it arrogantly presumes itself to be Capitalism's own goal.

Social systems do not have 'goals'. This is a bizarre bit of anthropomorphic mythmaking that belongs in the dust bin, together with other fetishisms.

What they have is outcomes. And the outcome of capitalism is, and will be, Communism.

So one minute you saying that a system bringing about its own end is myth and a fetish and now you are saying again, it is happening which is what I was responding to by calling such an own goal, only to have you challenge it in own instance and embrace it the next line down.

Fundamentally, Capitalism is very compatible with freedom of choice.

As defined by capitalism,  absolutely. Just as slave society
is very compatible with stability... as defined by the slave system.

Slave societies are not compatible with stability even as defined by a slave system. Hence the constant fear of slave revolts in the pre-Civil War period and the political extremism that generated in the South, as well as repression to try and maintain it.

And since you brought it up, there have been a disturbing number of slave societies erected in the name of Marx, and while one can cry deviant at these actors, it still happened so many times, too many to be ignored when judging the value of Marxism.

Grantedies take power that freedom of choice can be restricted, but there is at its root a conceptualization that understands that the freedom to buy and sell as you please is closely tied to being free politically, and thus capitalism or at least the concept of a free market is going to be perpetually tied to democracy as long as democracy exists

And here we fall back into the last redoubt of the idealist - "democracy", "freedom", etc., absolutely untethered from their concrete development and expression in history as objective incarnations of definite social arrangements.

You function on the level of a child.

Again insults will not win you these arguments.

I am not an idealist, I leave that for dogmatic ideologues and extremists. No I am rather more a realist and I like to think I call things as I see it. Capitalism as applied has problems and those requires solutions obviously. Marxism as applied or as the abstract bullsh**tting of nutcase theoreticians that never could exist in reality, has much bigger problems.

. There is need to reform and reign it in obviously and there are rolls for things like non-profits and cooperatives to play in that process.

All such reform only serves the long-term interest of Capital. Everyone knows this.

And we are back to the class myopic.

But Marxism, Communism (you have shifted the utilized term throughout your post while I carefully avoided that)

Because the two things are not synonymous. Communism is a process intrinsic to the development of capitalism; Marxism is a method of analysis.

And I was talking about Marxism as a method of analysis until you shifted the conversation when it wasn't going your damn way and then tried to pin it back on me with insults and bs.

based on too many flawed presumptions, too much rewriting of history to fit the narrative and far too much botched application to ever displace capitalism.

Ideologies do not displace other ideologies. Communism as a real force is constantly being produced, can its active agents will never have read Marx.

Lots of things get produced on the back alleys of the internet in this day and age, but its agents aren't exactly going to accomplish much for all the reasons I have stated.

Theway to presume that to be the case is to discount non-class considerations of market freedom

Doesn't exist

nd its intrinsic value

Neither does this.

to society, identity, religion, nationalism,

Empty categories with no content.

resistance to authority

And yet you yourself are utterly servile.

and many other factors that have flared up throughout history. You can say x isn't y, as many times as you desire, but if your fundamental premise depends on upon x being y, its hard to give such statements credence. Marxism, perhaps without realizing it, emphasizes class to the exclusion of all other considerations via its own conclusions, it is self-indicting.

Perhaps you ought to actually read.

That my friends, is how he rejects all other considerations, just like that and thus is blind to reality and human nature.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I would say as a note, if you could be more careful with the use of your quote boxes it would be appreciated, it is rather annoying having to fix all your formatting problems since of course you are so concerned about reading comprehension.

[Vittorio]

Insults will not win you this debate.

What makes you think I care about 'winning' this 'debate'?

"No one understands what we truly believe in, not even thousands of Marxists who actually tried to implement it, understood it."

If they understood it at all, they'd have understood that Marxism isn't an inert thing to be implemented, but that Communism is a historical trajectory latent within capitalism.

Guns aren't the only means of killing, especially on a mass scale.

My point




Your head


"Human nature" is responsible for precisely zero deaths throughout history (and it is telling that this essentially medieval construct is the fallback position of the apologist for Capital, who in every other instance wants to center Personal Responsibility as the driving motive of human action).

History says otherwise.

History also "says" nothing, not being an independent agent capable of saying anything.

Then a classless society is impossible and Marxism loses any value it may have had.

Another bizarre claim: that it is the selfish nature of the working-class which leads to... their being subjected as a class.

If the working-class were as selfish as we ought to be, capitalism would have been annihilated a century ago.

Oh yes, the famed moving target. You attack this nonsense and it morphs like a blob to skirt the blow

Unlike your mystical understanding of human nature, the essence of Man, with which you alone are in enlightened communion.

The point made that this whole conversation hinged around, was literally in relation to Marx and I went out of my way to avoid calling it "communism" for a reason. As I recall, you interjected that term into the discussion, not I.

And my point has been that Marxism =/= Communism, and that Communism will be realized quite independently of anything Marx wrote.

Capitalism is the least problematic, but has problems that need to be addressed.

"Addressing" these problems simply kicks the can further down the road. It strengthens the capitalist structure, with all its "flaws".

Democracy is the system that fails the least.

History says otherwise. ;-)

I am not in favor unrestrained capitalism, but a mixed-market economy is preferable to almost all alternatives.

The division between a 'mixed-market economy' and 'unrestrained capitalism' is an artificial one. Capital does not cease to be Capital or to function capitalistically simply because its factions are spread out between State and private actors.

I said your religion is inconsistent with reality.

An excuse to post one of my favorite essays!

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/09/08/demonology-of-the-working-class/

One of the most common charges leveled at Marxists is that, for all their atheistic pretensions, they retain a quasi-religious faith in the revolutionary dispensation of working class dictatorship. “It’s become an almost compulsory figure of speech to refer to Marxism as a Church,” observed the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1951. Barthes was reviewing a book by the surrealist author Roger Caillois, which had just been released, but if anything the use of this lazy metaphor has grown more frequent over time. Just a few years after Barthes’ review was published, the public intellectual Raymond Aron came out with a polemic cuttingly titled The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). He’d lifted the title from a bon mot by the philosopher Simone Weil, who despite her youthful Bolshevism in the twenties had gone on to publicly debate Leon Trotsky during the thirties. Repeating this old anticommunist jibe, Aron quipped that “in Marxist eschatology, the proletariat is cast in the role of collective savior… that is, the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” Evidently, in Aron’s understanding, workers were held up as an object of mythic exaltation among the socialists.

To be sure, some of the language adopted by Marxists — e.g., heresies, dogma, sects, orthodoxy, schisms — is clearly borrowed from theological disputes. Furthermore, the recantations made by ex-communists at times seems to lend credence to this view. You need look no further than the famous 1949 essay collection The God that Failed for proof of this fact. Wolfgang Eckhardt’s newly-translated study of The First Socialist Schism (2016), on the split between Bakunin and Marx in the Workingmen’s International, is only the latest in a very long line of examples. André Gorz opened his Farewell to the Working Class (1980) with a chapter on “The Working Class According to Saint Marx,” riffing on the section of The German Ideology dedicated to a critique of “German socialism according to its prophets.” Gorz thus concluded that “orthodoxy, dogmatism, and religiosity are not accidental features of Marxism, since the philosophy of the proletariat is a religion.” More recently, the former Situationist TJ Clark confessed that his own Farewell to an Idea (1999) will likely be seen “as a vestige of early twentieth-century messianism.” Clark sardonically added that “if I can’t have the proletariat as my chosen people any longer, at least capitalism remains my Satan” (though he got this last part a bit mixed up, as we shall see).

Socialism, however, is not about worshiping but rather abolishing the worker. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, perhaps the two most prominent theorists of proletarian revolution during the nineteenth century, by no means deified the class they felt might lead to the socialization of humanity. In their first written collaboration, from 1845, the young firebrands maintained:

When socialist writers ascribe [a] world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all… because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. In the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, and even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete. The conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, and at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life, and cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation.

Expanding on this passage, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted on the terrestrial foundations of the Marxist hypothesis. “If [Marxism] accords a privilege to the proletariat, it does so because on the basis of the internal logic of its condition… apart from any messianic illusion,” he claimed in Humanism and Terror(1947). “Proletarians, ‘who are not gods,’ are the only ones in a position to realize humanity. Marxists discern a mission in the proletariat — not a providential, but an historical one — and this means that, if we take the proletariat’s role in the present social constellation, it moves toward the recognition of man by man…” Nevertheless, in the meantime workers are hardly godlike; indeed, they’re barely even human, if Marx and Engels are to be believed. As the former would later explain in Capital (1867), “manufacture proper not only subjects the previously independent worker to the discipline and command of capital, but converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity.” His description is reminiscent of the lyrics to that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons,” written about a Kentucky coal miner in 1947: “Some people say a man is made outta’ mud / A poor man’s made outta’ muscle and blood / Muscle and blood and skin and bones / A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong / You load sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt / Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company store.”

Over and above the image of the proletariat as divine redeemer, here emerges a picture of the proletariat as beyond redemption. Workers have sold their souls to the company store. Consider the following lines from Marx’s Capital on the topic of automation: “An organized system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic center, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, instead of the isolated machine, a vast mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power [dämonische Kraft], at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.” Little wonder that the Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga drew upon these words in elaborating his own “Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil,” from 1951. Quoting Marx, who in turn was quoting Goethe, Bordiga explained how, “by incorporating living labor into capital’s lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labor in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if possessed by the devil’.” The dispossessed (which is, after all, just another word for “proletariat”) are thus demonically possessed by the alienated products of their labor. For Marx, this was all part of “the magic and necromancy [der Zauber und Spuk] that surrounds the products of labor on the basis of commodity production.”

So one minute you saying that a system bringing about its own end is myth and a fetish and now you are saying again, it is happening which is what I was responding to by calling such an own goal, only to have you challenge it in own instance and embrace it the next line down.

What I've said is that describing this operation as a goal is profoundly stupid, as is typical of bourgeois ideologists.

Capitalism has no 'goal' - not Communism, not 'freedom', not 'democracy' - beyond its own reproduction. But it incidentally creates a working-class with the capacity to act as an agent outside of this system, and to imperil its continued existence as such. Describing this as a 'goal' is Christian-teleological rubbish.

Slave societies are not compatible with stability even as defined by a slave system. Hence the constant fear of slave revolts in the pre-Civil War period and the political extremism that generated in the South, as well as repression to try and maintain it.

Egypt, Rome, Greece, etc. beg to disagree. These systems appear more stable than capitalism has ever been.

And since you brought it up, there have been a disturbing number of slave societies erected in the name of Marx, and while one can cry deviant at these actors, it still happened so many times, too many to be ignored when judging the value of Marxism.

No society has ever been erected in the name of a single man. Societies are not 'erected' like this at all.

Again insults will not win you these arguments.

Who is insulting you? I'm simply Telling It Like It Is.

I am not an idealist, I leave that for dogmatic ideologues and extremists.

You are an idealist in the most literal sense possible: you believe that abstract nothing's  like 'freedom', 'unfreedom', 'choice', etc. are more determinative in human relations than actual material functions

No rather more a realist

The furthest thing from it

And I like to think I call things as I see it.

"As you see it" is something incredibly conditioned by the requirements of the society around you.

capitalism as applied has problems and those requires solutions obviously. Marxism as applied or as the abstract bullsh**tting of nutcase theoreticians that never could exist in reality, has much bigger problems.

Marx hated "nutcase theoreticians" too, and wrote his entire life against them.

And we are back to the class myopic.

Once again: you have never read Marx.

and I was talking about Marxism as a method of analysis until you shifted the conversation when it wasn't going your damn way and then tried to pin it back on me with insults and bs.

If you think this conversation hasn't "gone my way", I'd hate to see what your idea of a conversation where you lose is like.

All you've done is retreated behind the mystifying fog of religious concepts - Human Nature, Original Sin, Freedom. I have demonstrated that these are the products of the material world, and that they change with it.

[pbrower2a]

Except to give Marx credit for changing political or economic thought and its expression, it is not a good idea to make Marx an authority on all things. Much of what he said is obsolete. He had no idea that technologies that were appearing toward the end of his life and were about to emerge would themselves change the relationship between the manufacturer and the proletariat. Capitalism saved itself by transforming the proletariat into a reliable market.

Market power remains a reality, and the temptation remains to consolidate business because such is easier and more lucrative than genuine innovation in products and service. Pricing people into destitution and exploiting economic fear imply higher profit margins than in competitive business.

Electoral politics is not so much about economic ideology as it is about cultural identity. We do not see a random scattering of electoral results between the states in Presidential elections.  It is clear what cultures approve of Trump in 2016 (and this might not be the same in 2019) and which ones don't, and that has little connection to class. Well-off minorities such as the black bourgeoisie seem to distrust Donald Trump while struggling white people seem to see him as wish-fulfillment.

[Vittorio]

Except to give Marx credit for changing political or economic thought and its expression, it is not a good idea to make Marx an authority on all things. Much of what he said is obsolete.

No, it isn't.

He had no idea that technologies that were appearing toward the end of his life and were about to emerge would themselves change the relationship between the manufacturer and the proletariat. Capitalism saved itself by transforming the proletariat into a reliable market.

Marx anticipated the Goddamned Internet.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

The fact of the matter is that you, yourself, pbrower, put more faith in the mystical religion of cliodynamics, Strauss and Howe, than in a material analysis of reality.

Capitalism saved itself by transforming the proletariat into a reliable market.

... Exactly as Marx anticipated, then?

*snip*

Electoral politics is not so much about economic ideology as it is about cultural identity.

Precisely because bourgeois electoralism offers, and definitionally cannot offer, any meaningful economic alternative. (E.g. Herbert Hoover's anti-Depression  programmes anticipating the New Deal, or Jimmy Carter's deregulatory efforts anticipating Reaganomics). Barack Obama was known as the 'Deporter-in-Chief' for a reason.

What will be will be", regardless of the outcome of a given election. This is because the questions of political power decided by elections are almost - not quite - irrelevant to the capitalist process of production.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Holy f#ck this thread is unreadable.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Holy f#ck this thread is unreadable.

As is Tradition with Marxism.

[HillGoose]

cool story bro

[PSOL]

Vittorio, you may want to incorporate more modern works of analysis in your evidence. Going back to the late 1800s is not entirely applicable to the situation we have today. Including modern pieces supporting your argument, like in your first post here, would be more helpful in getting people to see your point.

Either way, this is surprisingly the most of a quality discussion that Atlas has in the cumulative year I’ve been here. Good job for staying civil.

[HillGoose]

Vittorio, you may want to incorporate more modern works of analysis in your evidence. Going back to the late 1800s is not entirely applicable to the situation we have today. Including modern pieces supporting your argument, like in your first post here, would be more helpful in getting people to see your point.

Either way, this is surprisingly the most of a quality discussion that Atlas has in the cumulative year I’ve been here. Good job for staying civil.

idk man i think this stuff is all just speculation and like his opinion and stuff or something idk

[Cassandra]

Holy f#ck this thread is unreadable.

It is tragic how poorly written so much left content is, but I do appreciate Vittorio's effort.

[Vittorio]

Vittorio, you may want to incorporate more modern works of analysis in your evidence. Going back to the late 1800s is not entirely applicable to the situation we have today. Including modern pieces supporting your argument, like in your first post here, would be more helpful in getting people to see your point.

If one is arguing about what Marxism is, it only makes sense to go back to the source material. Nobody in the intervening years since 1883 has improved on Marx (indeed, attempts to 'update' Marxism typically end up in Keynesian underconsumptionist pablum) and capitalism itself does not change structurally whether its predominant social manifestation is that of small burghers playing their wares or a 20th century Fordist plant producing automobiles or Internet developers selling code today. The M-C-M' formula holds good wherever the law of value operates.

[Cassandra]

Vittorio, you may want to incorporate more modern works of analysis in your evidence. Going back to the late 1800s is not entirely applicable to the situation we have today. Including modern pieces supporting your argument, like in your first post here, would be more helpful in getting people to see your point.

If one is arguing about what Marxism is, it only makes sense to go back to the source material. Nobody in the intervening years since 1883 has improved on Marx (indeed, attempts to 'update' Marxism typically end up in Keynesian underconsumptionist pablum) and capitalism itself does not change structurally whether its predominant social manifestation is that of small burghers playing their wares or a 20th century Fordist plant producing automobiles or Internet developers selling code today. The M-C-M' formula holds good wherever the law of value operates.

Yes yes, but I have a tiny brain and no attention span. And I might be representative of a fair amount of posters on Atlas. If you're here to proselytize, you might want to mix in quotes from contemporary interpreters. David Harvey, for example, is someone I've found useful in understanding Marx.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Holy f#ck this thread is unreadable.

It is tragic how poorly written so much left content is, but I do appreciate Vittorio's effort.

One would prefer use of empirical data or rational argument over simply quote-puking the works of a bunch of dead white men.

[pbrower2a]

Except to give Marx credit for changing political or economic thought and its expression, it is not a good idea to make Marx an authority on all things. Much of what he said is obsolete.

No, it isn't.

Some of it is obsolete. Marx had no idea of the significance of intellectual property as a store and source of wealth. Heck, Darwin got much right about evolution but never found the code in genetics.   

He had no idea that technologies that were appearing toward the end of his life and were about to emerge would themselves change the relationship between the manufacturer and the proletariat. Capitalism saved itself by transforming the proletariat into a reliable market.

Marx anticipated the Goddamned Internet.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.[/quote]

Murky... nobody says that Marx is easy reading, except for the Communist Manifesto.  "General social knowledge" makes less sense as an idea than personal knowledge. Little could be more personal than knowledge, the art of disseminating such is pedagogy at a lower level and university teaching at a higher level of difficulty. "Social production" is almost mystical as a concept; all production is a consequence of personal choice except for some fortuitous events -- and then the gain is individual. 

The fact of the matter is that you, yourself, pbrower, put more faith in the mystical religion of cliodynamics, Strauss and Howe, than in a material analysis of reality.

At the least Howe and Strauss have found something that explains things from mass culture to social stresses. I see cause in a biological reality, to wit the extinction of childhood memories of people in their eighties as they die off or go senile and thus offer no further counsel to younger people who then do exactly what they want to do but are frustrated from doing. The Panic of 1857, the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the dangerous meltdown of financial markets in 2008 happened after 71 and 79 years, respectively after corrupt speculative booms that devoured capital instead of putting it into plant and equipment that can generate real activity. Howe and Strauss explain many things that used to make little sense. So history prepares people for roles in which they make more history.

And when the speculative bubbles implode? What people thought was profit and marketable assets  has become worthless, and there is no quick and easy means in which to recover the losses. Howe and Strauss could tell when the greatest stresses make extremist ideologies much more attractive to masses (just think of the Antichrist taking over in Germany in 1933 in a narrow window of opportunity) and when people are more likely to work within the system to solve their own problems, like the 1950's.

If there is ever a time in which a proletarian revolution is possible, it is a Crisis era in which everything seems to implode all at once.            

[

Quote] Capitalism saved itself by transforming the proletariat into a reliable market.

... Exactly as Marx anticipated, then?

*snip*[/quote]

I give Marx no credit for predicting such. He predicted the overthrow of the capitalism that he knew in violent revolutions after which people would give the State control of all productive assets and oust the tycoons and bring about greater prosperity through Socialism because the tycoons would no longer be taking their huge cuts out of productivity by a combination of sweating the proletariat and gouging those who purchase capitalist output.  

Electoral politics is not so much about economic ideology as it is about cultural identity.

Precisely because bourgeois electoralism offers, and definitionally cannot offer, any meaningful economic alternative. (E.g. Herbert Hoover's anti-Depression  programmes anticipating the New Deal, or Jimmy Carter's deregulatory efforts anticipating Reaganomics). Barack Obama was known as the 'Deporter-in-Chief' for a reason.

What will be will be", regardless of the outcome of a given election. This is because the questions of political power decided by elections are almost - not quite - irrelevant to the capitalist process of production.[/quote]

The alternatives to bourgeois electoral practice include

(1) no elections, as in Chile under Pinochet, Uganda under Amin, Saudi Arabia, Imperial Russia before 1906, and Libya under Qaddafi in which the absolute ruler achieves his policies by decree

(2) sham elections in which people ratify a picked list of the dictator, as in most fascist (including Ba'athist states in Syria and Iraq) and Commie-ruled states... and the appointed Parliament simply does what it is told to do because it is full of the flunkies of the Leader

(3) sham expressions of pluralism in which the Leadership has some show of an impotent opposition doomed to irrelevancy and impotence (East Germany was and China is like that)

(4) elections limited to the people that the Leadership trusts, as with whites-only electorates in Apartheid-era South Africa and in "Kukluxistan", or political practice distorted with the "rotten boroughs" of Britain around the time of the American Revolution.

(5) A monarch who can veto any parliamentary result or some unelected council as in Iran.

Flawed as the result that got us Donald Trump is, I can imagine far worse, as in any of the five above. The same process that got us Donald Trump can oust him -- unless it fails.

Electoral process in a democracy is no better than the collective wisdom and moral substance of the electorate... it is up to the People to reject demagogues who promise what they cannot deliver, bigots who seethe with rage against innocent people, and people of personal depravity. I see Donald Trump as a freakish result in America, and one likely to serve as a warning until people forget him. Based on the generational cycle the most likely time for another scoundrel like Trump is about a ten-year window centering around 2096...

[Vittorio]

Holy f#ck this thread is unreadable.

It is tragic how poorly written so much left content is, but I do appreciate Vittorio's effort.

One would prefer use of empirical data or rational argument over simply quote-puking the works of a bunch of dead white men.

There are posters here whose entire stock-in-trade consists of quote-puking dead Semitic men (RI, shua, etc.). You ought to be used to it.

Murky... nobody says that Marx is easy reading, except for the Communist Manifesto

The quote is pretty concise and self-explanatory.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production,

Translation: 'fixed Capital', Marx's term for productive technological capital, develops alongside the concretization of social knowledge.

and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

Translation: this 'general intellect' comes to become more and more dominant within the system and begins to transformation the society alongside its growth.

To degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

The 'immediate organs of social practice' imply a direct form of transmission of this general intellect - something very much like the Internet.

At the least Howe and Strauss have found something that explains things from mass culture to social stresses.

They have found absolutely no such thing, which is why none of you over on their forum can agree just when the Fourth Turning began, or even if we're in one.

Cliodynamics is idealistic mythmaking.