07-28-2020, 11:10 PM
(07-28-2020, 08:53 PM)Einzige Wrote:(07-28-2020, 08:46 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-28-2020, 06:49 PM)Einzige Wrote:(07-28-2020, 06:39 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-28-2020, 05:52 PM)Einzige Wrote: Goddammit, Marxism is not simply Industrial Capitalism With Unions.
What it is, above all, is labor abolitionism.
But Industrial Capitalism with Unions and strong benefits may be preferred to Marxism. Lenin, Stalin. Mao. Most people remember. The guy who proves best at organizing power and violence will often care more about power and violence than he does about the people.
The Soviet Union was State capitalist. This was readily admitted to by Lenin himself.
Well he should admit it. But the relevant point is that the master of violence and organizing power too often will use violence and organize the power for himself rather than for the people. That is the big gap between the theory and the practice. No one in the Marxist tradition has ever wielded power in favor of the people. Not Lenin. Not Stalin. Not Mao. Not anyone. Thus people are not likely to walk the Marxist route. They just remember.
Especially if the combination of protest and legislation works. Violence is always an option. The powers that be don't want violence, and yield before that happens. The advocates of violence in the Information Age democracies never get an inning. How are they going to score?
You really don't have a strong grasp on Marxism.
In short, capitalism needs crises to fuel future expansion, e.g. the resumption of American capitalism after the Second World War or the stock market growth we see during Covid. Capital not only profits from crisis, it needs them to overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
But in the process it produces a crisis-proof society. In an age of nuclear weapons, there can be no wars to rebuild from, for example.
It is precisely in its stability that capitalism creates crises endogenous to its operations,because there are increasingly fewer crises exogenous from which it can profit.
Capitalism is no monolith. The profit motive can put one set of capitalists against another -- just think of the American Civil War. Just think of Northern railroad interests against Southern railroad interests. You may dispute whether the slave-owning planter were really capitalists.
It is possible to see the Crisis of 2020 as a crisis in capitalism even without an overt struggle between official Marxist regimes and capitalist regimes. Marx foresaw that ever-increasing productivity would itself create a scenario in which scarcity and poverty need no longer drive human efforts and politics. The end of the line for scarcity and poverty is the Communist stage of human society.
Question: can a society go from capitalism to Communism without undergoing the Marxist-Leninist style of organization?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
