Marx was right.(Not about Roublini)

[white_wolf]

I just reread the Communist Manifesto last night and a lot of interesting things stuck out at me,and I thought I'd share my thoughts with you all here. I'm going to be quoting long sections of the Manefestio so bare with me, and I'd welcome your all's thoughts on what is being said. Once I get done, I may share my thoughts on Smith as I'm planning on starting him. On that note, where should I start? Wealth of Nations or Theory on Moral Sentiment?


The inevitable boom and bust cycles of capitalism and the spread of capitalism to third world countries which results in suppression of wages for the workers in the U.S. and Europe.

"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. 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, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. 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; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; 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."

The decline of the middle-class. We hear a lot in America about how our middle-class is dying and those who used to be middle-class find themselves amongst the ranks of the poor. This is nothing new, however. It is a common problem with capitalism and will always be a problem with it. The bourgeois stifle competition and force small businesses out and often times small business owners are forced to work for the companies that destroyed their jobs. The "Wal-Mart effect" is prime example of this.

"The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population."


Some things never change. I read this and I felt like Obama and the Democrats could sympathize.

"Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? "

[deaniac21]

1. yep

http://images8.cpcache.com/product/republicans-quotes-politics+-+government/261491378v6_225x225_Front.jpg

[indurancevile]

2. happening now:

"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."

gotta extract that profit.

[white_wolf]

3. First and last bump just because I posted thist early in the morning.

[econoclast]

4. Sorry, but Marx is just plain wrong

The real meat of Marx is not in the Manifesto but rather in a slim volume called Value, Price and Profit where he details the Labor Theory of Value. ALL of the rest of Marx is contingent upon prices being determined by the Labor Theory of Value. All of it. Without LTofV Marx is just a fairy tale. And guess what? Labor Theory of Value is demonstrably WRONG. 15 minutes in the mall will convince you.

[struggle4progress]

6. No, the real meat of Marx is his outrage at the conditions of the working class in the

early industrial revolution, his attempts to wring useful information from dry statistics, the enormous energy he spent attending to the politics of his time, and his dedication to organizing people for change. His economic tracts were intended to help produce clear analyses of actual socio-economic mechanisms, to further the work of organizing productively

Since he tried simultaneously to be philosopher, political analyst, propagandist, prophet, economist, and organizer, it isn't surprising if he got some stuff wrong. But the economic tracts were intended to buttress his political organizing agenda: they were not the primary goal -- so his various insights don't all stand or fall with his economic theories

[econoclast]

11. Unfortunately. Marx's ENTIRE analysis is completely dependent on LTofV

And Labor Theory of Value is just flat wrong.

Which is why most Marxists don't read Value Proce and Profit. It is the ugly fact that spoils a lovely theory.

[blindpig]

13. Explain.

I do not see how that can be said, the LTV is as clear as glass.

So then, where does value come from?

[econoclast]

18. Value comes frim supply & demand

Easy counterexample to invalidate LTV

Why does Alex Rodriguez make more than Michael Phelps? Because it takes more labor to be a gold glove third baseman than an Olympic swimmer? No. It probably takes more labor to rise to Phelps' level. But there us simply more demand ny paying customers to see play baseball (even if it's to boo him) than to watch Phelps swim. Ergo LTV is false. QED.

Such examples are easy to find.

[blindpig]

22. Apples & oranges

The LTV has nothing to do with relative wage earnings. It has to do with where does profit come from.

[white_wolf]

23. The LTV isn't about wages.

It's about where profits come from.Labor is the only thing that can create value. How valuable is a diamond lying in the earth? It's worth nothing. However, once you apply the labor to mine it, cut it, and set it, it is worth a lot of money.

[struggle4progress]

20. No: Marx has a number of interesting ideas which can be informative --

There is, for example, the notion of class analysis: the economic organization of a society always divides the population into different sectors, with different roles. In modern America, low-wage service workers fill a different structural role than managers of industrial-scale farms, and IT engineers play a different structural role than either of the foregoing. Members of different sectors have different material interests because of their different roles: if they were aware of their own interests, their political aims will therefore differ -- one sector might profit in some ways if the economic power of a second sector decreased: large farmers, for example, might benefit if migrant wages fall

These different interests invariably produce conflicts, called class struggle. For example, some sectors gain an advantage when there is a surplus of labor and when laborers are in an economically-weak position: this can be effected in some labor markets by importing a flood of easily-deportable laborers who will work for low wages and can be quickly removed if they become somehow inconvenient. The imported laborers, the laborers they displace, and those who profit directly from lowered wages created by this surplus of labor, do not have exactly the same material interests. But the imported laborers and the laborers they displace serve one structural role, while those, who profit directly from lowered wages, serve a different structural role

Participants in these conflicts view the conflicts through complicated lenses: traditional myths about our national histories, abstract ideological ideas, religious notions, and other ingredients combine to provide "explanations." Trying to understand the politics of his own time, Marx is willing to consider various ingredients. But at this point, he also sees something important: our tendency to wander away from reality into idealizations and disembodied abstractions. Humans in distress naturally imagine a better world, for example, but that imagination might be projected into a merely religious hope in some infinitely-removed heaven. Marx wants to avoid this inversion, by which our material concern is replaced by ideas alone; his major step, in this regard, is to take the then-influential Hegelian philosophy and to insist on reading it as a material theory, rather than as an abstract system. So Hegel thought history progressed because ideas clashed, forcing the formation of new ideas, but Marx regarded the ideas as products of particular socio-economic sectors, pointed out that the sectors were always in conflict, and indicated that these conflicts produced social reorganizations

Thus Marx wants a materialist analysis of society, as opposed to a merely abstract intellectual analysis of society. More importantly, he wants a "scientific" analysis of society -- which means, an analysis that involves not only social theory but social experiment. "Philosophers have solved the world, but the point is to change it." So Marx sets out to overthrow the existing power structures, not just in theory but in practice. As part of this project, he does political analysis; as part of the project, he engages in working class organizing; as part of the project, he attempts to lay out an economic theory (which seems to me largely drawn from the early capitalist theoreticians)

There's an enormous body of work here, and one could defensibly take a variety of different stances regarding it. One need not be an ideologue to find some of it insightful; nor need one be a revolutionist to find some parts of the analysis convincing; nor would Marx's errors, in parts of it, completely negate it all

[Hissyspit]

7. Marx was right about some things and wrong about others.

Absolutes don't work in the real world most of the time.

[Major Hogwash]

8. Bingo! And Thorstein Veblen continued the study

He was the economist that coined the phrase, "conspicuous consumption", the habit that the rich had for buying more expensive stuff, like 12-cylinder Duesenburgs.

The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was his life's work.

From Wikipedia ---
Although Veblen was sympathetic to state ownership of industry, he had a low opinion of workers and the labor movement and there is disagreement about the extent to which his views are compatible with Marxism. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, his sweeping attack on production for profit and his stress on the wasteful role of consumption for status greatly influenced socialist thinkers and engineers seeking a non-Marxist critique of capitalism.

[alcibiades_mystery]

14. The Labor Theory of Value is demonstrably correct

And is the only theory - when paired with concepts of productive and unproductive labor, and the tendency toward the falling rate of profit (together with the countervailing tendencies) - that explains what has happened in capitalist economies over the last 160 years.

The "mall" can, in fact, teach you about a labor theory of value, but only when it is put in the right context as the sphere of circulation, and only when the crucial concepts of productive and unproductive labor are understood.

You are, however, correct that the Manifesto (which is usually the only parts of Marx anybody reads) is not a particularly good place to look for why Marx was correct. The Manifesto is an exhortation toward political action, not an analysis of the dynamics of capital. For a complete understanding of Marx's argument, however, you would have to move beyond the Economic Manuscripts (V,P, and P - though certainly grounding the analysis in Capital in important ways - was mostly composed in the 1860's) and toward the fuller account of the system's dynamics in Capital itself.

[struggle4progress]

5. The Communist Manifesto is a political organizing tract from the early industrial revolution:

it's more than 150 years old now, and there's no reason to think its analysis remains immediately cogent to our time

Some his ideas remain suggestive for more modern politico-economic analysis, but technology and culture have changed enormously: he's writing before the gatling gun was invented; he's writing before photos were transmitted by wire; he's writing before the germ theory of disease was widely accepted

World industrial economic organization has changed in important ways. So has the technology of state terror. And so has machinery for production of mass communication or mass propaganda

When middle-class Americans now lose their jobs due to cheaper manufacturing, they will not today sink into the industrial proletariat, because the industrial proletariat is off-shore: instead, they fall into the service economy

In Marx's day, electric utilities did not exist, nor did the gasoline engine. Today, in much of America, the lack access to electricity and a gas-powered car puts one in the most wretched of social classes

[tavalon]

9. We are in the confused state and I think we will have better luck with

organizing under socialism first, because communism expects certain values from people that have been selectively bred out and left at the entrance to the many, many malls at which is practiced thoughtless hoarding under the capatilism flag.

But really, nothing will work until enough people get clarity and a willingness to work together to fight, not the two party system but the oligarchs. There really aren't that many of them and there are more and more of us by the day. How does one still industry at this point, for we will need to? Who will organize this, for we will have to? We have certainly noted the danger of looking to one poster person for our strength, we need to coalesce and the oligarchy has no desire to see that and every desire for us to continue our circular and confused firing squads - how do we stop that and get the proletariat and those who would believe themselves part of the increasingly less common middle class or even steps away from the oligarchy - thiiiiiis clooooooose to accept their place as Proles and fight as Proles? How do we effectively rally people? Sure, education is a part of it, but the time for inaction and ineffective squabbling is fast slipping away.

[quaker bill]

10. It is worse than that

a generation has been trained in the notion that "they" (government, liberals, socialists, minorities, parasites, the takers, the poor, the immigrant....) "are after your stuff". They have been trained that wealth = productivity and the most wealthy are "the most productive members of society". They have been trained to not see the oligarchs as oligarchs but rather as champions of "freedom" and industry.

You cannot organize this because they have been taught to believe in the zero sum game, in short, "anything you have is something less that I can get". This was an intentional and critical part of right wing social engineering. You cannot engineer a massive shift of wealth away from the masses unless you at the same time destroy any notion of trade unionism, collective bargaining, or community where we are all helped when no one among us suffers. This was the point in making us all petty investors with 401Ks, we are all on our own and each in a small way "just like" the CEO. It is total BS and always was, but the illusion had to be created to support the social re-engineering of our country.

It is a damn long way back from here to something sane.

[blindpig]

12. The Manifesto is as fresh as today's newspaper.

In their triumph the capitalists have revived Marxism, not what they had in mind but inevitible.

[socialist_n_TN]

15. Yep. The best recruiter for Marxism

is the capitalist system.

[hifiguy]

17. Amen to that.

And I think Marx got his prescriptions wrong, but he did the best he could with the available knowledge. I am not going to hammer Marx for his inability to predict the rise of the Social Democratic system seen in much of Europe, especially Scandinavia. The SD system seems to me the best and only practical system over the long term.

[socialist_n_TN]

16. In general terms, Marx's greatest contribution

was not anything specific, although the specifics remain EXTREMELY valuable. His greatest contribution was putting together and publicizing the FACT that politics, power, and economics are interconnected for ALL OF THE CLASSES.

You can't do JUST economics without the politics and you can't do politics without the economics. And you can't do EITHER politics or economics without grappling with social power.

[tavalon]

19. What does you way back look like.?

[Starry Messenger]

21. Those are two of my favorite passages as well.

"Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? "

Sympathize or capitulate? Our modern Dems sometimes remind me of this passage in 18th Brumaire: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch04.htm

The peasants, disappointed in all their hopes, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to bestir themselves in the departments. They were answered by a drive against the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, by a drive against the mayors, made subject to the prefects, and by a system of espionage to which all were made subject. In Paris and the large towns reaction itself has the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more than it strikes down. In the countryside it becomes dull, coarse, petty, tiresome, and vexatious, in a word, the gendarme. One comprehends how three years of the regime of the gendarme, consecrated by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralize immature masses.

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organized, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes likewise could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw "tranquillity" imperiled, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion, how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and the bistros; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.