XPost: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, alt.philosophy.debate, al
.politics.socialism
[Followup-To: alt.politics.socialism]
Liam wrote:
>Hello,
>There's a blog I read that makes some very interesting libertarian
>posts that make a lot of sense.
>But sometimes, like this one post in particular, I think he's
>misrepresenting Marxism and ignoring the ills of capitalism.
>I'm a huge Marxism newbie. I've only just begun studying it, and a lot
>of it makes sense to me--I see the negative effects of capitalist
>ideology all around me.
>But I'm having a very hard time expressing these observations and how
>they apply to Marxism, and how the examples the blog author brings up
>of how Marxism got things wrong, is simply a part of the ideology.
[...]
>Thanks for any help or feedback!
Marx got some things right like how Capitalism destroys society, other
things he got wrong or didn't solve.
He didn't understand that trade is good. When one company competes
against another for favor of the consumer, this can be a positive
race to build the best product. When one person trades an hour
work for a couple of bananas harvested by someone else, both get
direct compensation for their effort. Trade works, a protection
mechanism. Marx failed to realize the importance of trade, and
that it is a socialist/communist friend. This error probably set
up the communist revolutions for a lot of trouble. They couldn't
get a working economy running, because they thought they had to do
away with its essential ingredient: swapping, trade.
Competition between Capital is something different, and claims from
Capital that they were "trading" might have set Communists up against
trade. But it was just something the Capitalists tried to hide behind.
Gambling (private investing) is not productive (like product building
and then swapping). The problem isn't the gambling itself (if it fun
it is good), the problem is that it stimulates companies that can
return most money to the gambler. It is more then a little obvious
that more profitable companies, given a choice, will be slave abusing
dictatorships rather then democratic fair trade groups. The reason
is simple: the workers in the end have to pay the gambler, so the
less money the workers get from profit the more there is to share
between the gambler and company owner. Because the gambler wants to
trade part of the company profit for the right of the company to use
his Capital, the gambler wants to talk to as few people as possible,
who have as much power as possible. It is much easier to give away
what others are going to produce, to put the burden on others, workers
without power. This part Marx got right. Because the gamblers who win
are the ones getting more money/power, and the ones who invest in bad
working conditions, everything including politics goes wrong over time.
The part that Marx also got wrong was ownership. He proposed to in
principle do away with it, which is not only practically impossible
(if not absurd), and proven (now) not to work, it only transfers
ownership to the leadership. That is a lot of concentrated power,
power not in the hands of the people. Marx couldn't see that, he
thought all workers were angles. Angles do no wrong, so all was
supposedly right when the angles have power. But it wasn't that simple.
Marx lived in a time when the economy was much more a plan economy
under direction of the "nobility" (scum), as opposed to a "free for
all" trade system (like now, currently still under pressure from
private finance). It was rather natural to think that you would
only need (to go back to) the plan-economy, but now with a democratic
leadership on top. A simple solution: remove the scum, put democracy in
power, done. People will order what they want and it be produced, simple.
Simplistic perhaps. But indeed, why not, especially when production
wasn't yet such a complicated activity as today, on a smaller scale. I
figure that was what Marx wanted to do. But the window for that has
long closed now, perhaps even before the communist revolutions really
started. The trade system developed (people reverting to the simple and
effective swapping method of self organization), which has its own
progressive properties (in principle). Marx didn't separate trade
from capitalism, or not enough.
Don't waste your time studying Marx. You'll just end up repeating their
mistakes and the Marxists erroneous view on how democracy developed.
They ascribe the development of democracy (absurdly IMHO) to the
ruling class (!), helping to plead their case (!). Maybe they got so
many things wrong, because they weren't actually workers. It
didn't directly concern them (past or future), so they didn't view
things from the inside, and were vulnerable to romanticize the working
class. They were "going to help *them*", maybe they extrapolated their
caring nature to include all workers. Another reason is that people
didn't have the time to study it all, working conditions were too
bad, there was no time and energy for study.
Enough people studied Marx already, why don't you study my proposals
instead. Nobody has yet come up with why it is wrong, maybe you can ?
If so, I'd like to hear so I can correct/remove.
Here is the short version: Equalizing individual trading power,
democratizing companies, from anti-Capitalism to democratic finance. It
may be a lot of text, but it is almost all solutions, or things that
need analysis (sorry). Society is reasonably complicated, can't be
solved in a few slogans.
--
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joshb/democracy.html (socialist theory)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joshb/constitution.html (laws)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joshb/sede (democracy technology)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joshb/DAVID.html (template action material :-)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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