03-23-2021, 10:48 AM
(03-23-2021, 09:22 AM)David Horn Wrote:(03-22-2021, 04:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It has been 173 years since Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Name one nation where capital has been abolished and your version of Marxism has been implemented and established.
As you know, the truly committed are never deterred by inconvenient facts. Even worse, the CM is now so out of date it needs a good refresh just to be marginally relevant. Maybe we need to switch to that more prescient Marx: Groucho
Marxism is itself obsolete. It applies well to countries in the earliest phases of industrial development in which peasants are becoming industrial workers and making the difficult transition from the village to the urban slum. Early capitalism produces egregious wealth but also great hardship, and some countries have done better than others in making the transition much less severe. India may have retarded its emergence into an industrial power because it cleaved as long as it could to the cottage-industry stage (which is good for dispersal of opportunity and not disrupting rural life as much) and may have avoided a proletarian revolution for that. Not concentrating industrial activity in a few giant cities (with giant slum areas and large numbers of semi-literate proletarians susceptible to demagogic appeals from radicals) is one way to ensure:
1. an emphasis on consumer goods to which workers can relate (clothing, shoes, housewares) as opposed to luxury exports and 'producer goods' or raw materials.
2. fewer examples of highly-visible, self0indulgent plutocrats that get publicity that satisfies them (Here is my palace and my yacht) but offensive to people working to exhaustion on meagre pay and living in disease-ridden, firetrap slums.
3. less potential for the concentration of political powers in an elite that has no clue about its unpopularity.
India may be poor, but its Gini coefficients (measures of economic inequality, whether in wealth or income) are some of the better in the Third World.
Obviously, formal democracy, a rarity at any time in Marx' life, is far better than despotic and dictatorial styles of governance in resolving economic and other distress.
Once societies leave the era of early industrialization they enter the consumer society, a necessity if a social order is to find a market. Henry Ford may have been a vile man, but he knew enough that he had to make cheap cars for the masses. Workers who have automobiles, furniture, ovens, refrigerators, radios, phonographs, and livable flats have something to lose other than their chains.
Today the problem of economics is not under-production that creates shortages that allow easy profits by meeting them. Shortages now come almost exclusively from disruptions in the supply chain (although global warming could make a gigantic mess of the food supply, which could make all the consumer goodies that we can now get cheaply moot). Surfeit is no more of the menace than is shortage. Maybe it is possible to enhance profits by depressing wages and inflating the costs of necessities, but that eventually becomes an obvious sham.
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.