LOL Alan Plz "Refudiate"

[Despanan]

An idiot on a forum posted this, it's a rambling essay about how Marxism is a worm gnawing @ the Tree of Liberty. I don't really know anything about Marxism, so I can't really respond.

Anyway, here is the argument:

Originally Posted by An idiot

In ancient Norse myth the universe was a tree at whose roots a worm gnawed. When the worm brought the tree down, the ultimate battle between good and evil would happen.

Lately I’ve been wondering if they were mostly right.

Our own civilization is a sort of tree, with its roots in property rights and the rule of law, and its branches lifting the rarefied heights of science, technology, arts, and literature.

For the last forty years in the U.S. — longer in other places – a worm has been gnawing at the roots and sickening the tree. That worm is the philosophy of Karl Marx.

Karl Marx is described as a nineteenth century philosopher (which is true) but also as an economist, a historian, and a sociologist (which are only true if prefaced with “very bad.”)

Marxist theory is now applied to all those fields and more. (In the 70s, in Portugal, I studied it in history, sociology, economics, literature, art, and philosophy. They were only waiting for the proper choreography to teach Marxist interpretive dance in Phys Ed). Because of its many permutations, and how it has been interpreted, it would take me a small tome to take Marx to the woodshed properly and cut through the Gordian knot Marxists have woven around his thought. (These disciples now, like a restaurant changing its name after a case of food poisoning, call themselves Marxian, instead of Marxist.)

I don’t have a small tome, so I’ll have to be brutally simplistic. At his most basic, Marx believed history could be described as a struggle between classes, in which each class rose to the top with each new change in the means of production and ownership of said means. He believed in the future the proletariat — urban workers — would seize the means of production and thereby institute a dictatorship. After that a miracle would occur, the state would naturally wither away, and this would lead to a utopian, classless society, where everything worked on the basis of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” (I’ve always suspected this last step involved unicorn flatulence and, possibly, skittles.)

We were never told how this miracle would occur, though at least in the Soviet interpretation, it entailed the appearance of a new creature, a Homo Sovieticus, devoid of greed and egoism. Which shows you that even those trying to bring Marxist paradise to fruition realized that it required every man to be a combination saint and ant.

But it is worse than that. Even if the Homo Sovieticus had issued forth from Lenin’s laboring over Marx, neither this fabled creature nor its minions could make a Marxist society work.

Marx’s problems extend to the whole definition of “class.” He might have seen it as a purely economic concept, which is how it was taught to me in economics in Portugal. It might be he thought those who labored for others were always proletarians. But in the real world, things have become a lot more complex. Are farmers proletarian or not? What about tenant farmers? How about tenant farmers who own a cow? (Marx, the blood of the Kulaks is on your hands.)

More importantly — more damagingly — though, Marx managed to be an economist who did not understand the most fundamental concept of economics: value.

It is thought he based his theory of value on David Ricardo, who was already considered erroneous and out of date when Marx used it. Which is no wonder, because no functional economy can be built on Marx.

Marx believed that raw materials + labor = value. The more the raw materials were worth or the more labor put into transforming them, the more the end product would be worth. No other considerations applied.

Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away. This disproves his theory, which is not exactly hard as it’s a very silly theory. It doesn’t take into account such things as distribution. Because to Marx, value is value is value. Marx thought an Appalachian quilt would be worth the exact same thing in the small town where it was made as in the most artsy areas of New York City — and no monetary reward should go to anyone who transports and resells the thing. More importantly, since no one should resell, if a NYC resident wants a quilt, he’d best intuit they exist and travel to the Appalachians to buy it. At least, according to Uncle Karl.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where people don’t often wander the countryside looking for products they never heard of, value is based on what someone is willing to pay. Therefore, a quilt might be worth time and materials in the Appalachian, combined with its value as something to keep warm under. But it will be worth that plus a sizable premium for craft collectors in NYC. This means the middle-man who serves that market deserves the fee he pockets and — if he’s smart — goes back to the Appalachians and offers more money for better quilts so he can make more money.

Again in the real world, someone can invent a process that takes raw materials, up till then considered useless, and turns them into something valuable. (Gas powered engines. Various kinds of cosmetic mud. For that matter, going back far enough in history, pottery-clay and metal.)

In the Marxist world this makes no sense. First, his predictions for the future never took into account the possibility of technological innovation beyond his own era. Manufacturing would always be massive and labor-intensive, and the only way to make life more equitable was for the workers to own the means of production. Second, it never occurred to him that something valueless can be made valuable through innovation and invention.

This is why societies driven by Marxist principles only produce an abundance of turnips and, perhaps, size 52 shoes for the left foot — because value is value and what people want doesn’t matter.

But famines and the abject poverty of Marxian paradises notwithstanding, the damage is yet deeper.

His world was a closed economy of limited value. If raw materials + labor = value, then there is a finite amount of both and therefore a finite amount of value in the world and all we can do is slice it into ever thinner slices.

This lead Marx and his followers to believe that old prophet of doom, Malthus, and therefore view humans as a net drain on society. No matter how much they labored, after all, there was an upper limit to how productive they could be and besides they’d all have to use the same, dwindling, raw materials. It also lead them to believe anyone who had more than the bare necessities had “stolen” the wealth from others. Also, since value was viewed as raw materials + labor, his theory now leaves all those who work in non-material products, like software, or books, or music, or movies (now that they’re divorced of the physical object) feeling like thieves who don’t do anything and yet get compensation.

Of course this is nonsense, but Marxist precepts are so imbued in society they’ve become the unexamined basis of many people’s thought. So, this explains the left’s twin obsessions with ridding the Earth of surplus humans (and in its ultimate iteration of all humans save for a chosen few living in harmony or something, aka Homus Avataricus) and the guilt of intellectuals over getting goods they didn’t “produce.”

But no one can live with guilt forever. Or at least no one – except for a few monks — can live in guilt and holy poverty for very long. So our university indoctrinated/educated intellectuals eventually turn it around.

It goes like this — if all excess wealth is theft, then of course we should all have only the bare minimum. But in this corrupt modern society, with so many people, there’s always going to be theft. So, if someone is going to steal, why shouldn’t I? At least I feel guilty about it. And I’m a good person and — insert proof of “goodness” here — donate to progressive causes or eat organic food or volunteer at the homeless shelter or drive a Prius or…

People who perform acts of Marxian “atonement” feel like they have a license to steal. Everyone is doing it. And besides, they deserve it. And furthermore, ALL wealth is theft.

This attitude has corrupted both our government and our business to the point where capitalism works only by fits and starts and in the spaces between. People who believe they are in a world of thieves try to steal before they’re stolen from, to backstab before they’re stabbed in the back. And the government tries to oversee the theft in the serene belief its job is to distribute to those who have less and, of course, favor themselves and their friends, who look out for the “little people.”

Respect for private property erodes. Wealth is seen as evil and humans as drains on the system. Our finances lurch from crisis to bubble to crisis under the aegis of crony capitalism. Movies and books demonize business people and extol “selfless” bureaucrats.

Forget Ragnarok and the great battle between good and evil after the fall of the world tree. The battle is now and we’re in it.

I believe wealth can be created. I believe this is best facilitated by removing the Marxians from any power over the economy. I believe each human brings within himself the possibility of making an invention which can give us infinite wealth.

Who is with me?

[PortraitOfSanity]

Not knowledgeable to give you a response, waiting for Alan to do that which you must post of course, and post their response to it. Massive lulz shall result.

But holy christwagons Batman, isn't that analogy a bit of a stretch?

[Despanan]

Karl Marx is the worm eating Yagdrisill?

NAW.

[Despanan]

I don't know much about Marxism, but just a cursory googling of the article reveals that it's pretty much Trollbait.

For instance, the term Homo Sovieticus is a derisive label used to refer to the New Soviet Man Which is really just a disingenuous attempt to rhetorically tie Marx to the soviets and ascribe negative "utopian" qualities to Marxism. (Also, he has the gall to accuse Marxists of being Utopian while talking about how he "believes" humans can "create infinite wealth". WTF?)

Basically his logic goes:

Marx Says X, Soviets Say Y about X, Conservative Critics say Z about Y therefore Z = X. Z is wrong therefore X is wrong.

I could go further, but why bother? This man is clearly not interested in making an honest argument, he's interested in purposely misleading his reader in order to create more convincing propaganda. Therefore his opinions and critiques on Marxism cannot be trusted to be correct.

Edit: Did some more googling

This is an article published by the free republic, The author is a "She" a woman named Sarah Hoyt, and surprise surprise, she is not an economist, she's a small press FANTASY AUTHOR with a really crappy website. Very clearly, not an authority on economics, nor political philosophy, but instead a storyteller skilled in painting nostalgic, child-like Good vs. Evil struggles.

It's really no surprise that she'd write something as ignorant and disingenuous as this.

[CptSternn]

Where to begin! The biggest mistake I see, there are many, is that he says Stalinism is Leninism and is Marxism. The issues Russia experienced in its history were not experiences by Lenin, but by Stalin. Stalin was to socialism what GW Bush was to democracy. If you are in charge you can call it whatever you want, but the reality is what Stalin put into practice wasn't Marxism or Bolshevic Leninism, but his own dictatorship which never once followed any of the practices associated with socialism.

The right-wing like to point to Stalin and his failed polices as proof socialism doesn't work, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

There also seems to be a lot of rambling about nonsense that has no bearing on the teachings of Marx or Stalin.

He is right about class struggle, but he then says the workers would start a dictatorship. Again, this is not a principle from any school of thought but an obvious observation of Stalin which he is trying to credit to Marxism. Marxism teaches that the working class will rise and control production, yes, but it will be governed by the workers in a democratic manner where everyone gets a voice. Why would anyone rise up and replace one dictator with another?

His views then on distribution and costs related to manufacturing are just ludicris. Marx never says anything about forgoing these sorts of costs, in fact, I can't think of many places in his writings where he goes nto that specific sort of detail about transporting goods, so I have no idea where yer man is getting all of this from.

He then blathers on about finite wealth and how Marxism teaches we should be living on the bare minimum. Again, he obviously has no idea about this and is pulling this out of the air as none of it is relevant to the basic core principles or ideals of Marxism.

Whoever posted this has no clue about Marxism, Leninism, or what any of it means at all.

[Alan]

Man, it's my birthday weekend, I don't wanna write an essay about this, but like always I'll still give you some pointers:

First of all, the biggest attack you could possibly give him is that he says Karl Marxis outdated only because HIS perception of Karl Marx is outdated. Ask him why he's stuck in the 1860's when every Marxist in the world has moved past Das Kapital.

Ask him why he's the one being dogmatic about what Karl Marx said when dialectical and by extension historical materialism by definition evolve through time according to context and thus Marxism has to evolve past Marx's own writings.
Not only does this account for why Marx never really tried to describe a communist society (LONG PARENTHESES: it's not that he couldn't; it's that he knew he shouldn't, or he would become an arbitrary prophet for a utopian future, which was precisely his biggest contention with utopian socialists such as the Saint Simonists, and yet ironically he is condemned of this by anti-Marxists. So note the hypocrisy in which Karl Marx is condemned for just 'fantasizing a Utopia' and then condemning him again to not detailing this 'utopia'. Isn't it clear that he never fantasized a utopia then? How can such a stupid allegation simply go unquestioned for over a hundred years? How can Marxists be attacked as being utopian and yet the very next move by antimarxists is to demand us marxists to prove their accusation by speculating a future utopia, a stupid endeavor there's no evidence in our writing saying we marxist should be doing.)
To go back I'm putting the first sentence of the above paragraph here again
Not only does this account for why Marx never really tried to describe a communist society but this was also a major paradigm shift in the way of doing economics regardless of political affiliation. Up to that point, economics were a-historical, and to many if not most liberal economists it still is a-historical. The law of supply and demand lives somewhere separate from the historical development of society, so it does not explain how is it possible that there has been currency for thousands of years but supply-and-demand markets only hundreds, even crude capitalist markets.
The actual innovative economists like Georgescu-Roegen and Joseph Schumpeter (a direct spiritual student of Menger, whose theory of marginal utility is the single most important argument against both Adam Smith and Karl Marx in regards to their labor theory of value, but such an argument has been accepted and accounted by marxists since the 1940's as exemplified by the book The Economic Theory of a Socialist Economy by Burnham P. Beckwith) have made their ideas around the simple fact that the economy never goes back to the same point of stability; that every crisis is not a contingent error that is eventually accounted for and negated by the market and we go back to a working society without history in which nothing changes except for the products which enter this market, but that these crisis are rather an intrinsic part of a system which is historically linear, which evolves with time, and in Schumpeter's mind (Schumpeter being a famous anti-marxist) they do inevitably lead to socialism. Even those economists who don't reach the same conclusion (and remember that Schumpeter has been one of the most important economists of the 20th century and reached this conclusion out of observation, not out of desire for that future, while the single most important economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, accounted for the historic evolution to socialism by embracing a considerable amount of public intervention in the market) but still KNOW that economics are a historically contextual field owe that paradigm shift to Hegel and Marx, the same way we owe the paradigm shift that triggered the scientific revolution to Copernicus despite the fact that Copernicus' heliocentric model is but a crude approximation of the actual elliptical orbit of the planets. That is really all anti-marxists are arguing.

[Alan]

Oh yeah, and about class struggle. As Sternn says, he is right, but teach him just how right he is.
The criticism that Marx only thought a socialist revolution can be actualized by the industrial proletariat is a criticism from the left wing and has been argued against since Marx's own time by, uh, I don't know:

Bakunin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Lenin, Mao, Guevara, Trotsky, Habermas, Adorno, Zizek, Gramsci, and Nergi.
In fact Marx's discrimination to the rural proletariat is the biggest single defining point of Maoist theory against orthodox Marxism. I bet he'll love it when you tell him who his ally is in this criticism.*
And in the present moment, Antonio Negri is not only one of the biggest sources of marxist theory but also the biggest critic of the emphasis in the urban proletariat, yet he didn't mention him once, again showing how attached and ironically dogmatic HIS (the idiot's) Marxism is. Negri, like every poststructural marxist since the second half of the 20th century, argues that every minority is oppressed by the imposed and illusory Grand Metanarrative of the West (this is what Zizek was talking about in regards to Hollywood by the way) and thus they are all fighting the same fight. But then again, this is nothing new - for this exact reason Lenin changed the socialist motto from "Workers of the world unite!" to "Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!"

[Alan]

Damn you're good looking.

[Alan]

I totally forgot to write what that asterisk above was for:


* Now, the fact that Mao criticized orthodox marxists by putting too much emphasis on the industrial proletariat is a fucking awesome criticism. It followed through with Lenin's own amendments to Marxism which placed emphasis on all oppressed people. Basically Marx was Europe-centered and it shows. The oppressed people in Europe were the proletariat. Lenin saw that countries as entities are also on unequal bases and extended the criticisms of capitalism and imperialism. And Mao in a dialectic turn that both reverts and goes beyond Lenin's amendments went back into the oppression within a state, even a socialist state, which if Marx's thoughts wouldn't be changed at all to a third-world context, would completely ignore the peasants, who not only are also oppressed, but compose the bulk of the population and thus the hegemonic labor force of the country.*
Mao was a fucking kickass theorist, but he was a horrible person. Just as well Lenin's ideas are pretty much dead-on, but there's a reason Kropotkin accused Lenin of being a hypocrite in not following his own philosophy. Mao is just Lenin turned to the eleven in both good and bad. It's damn well that you condemn Mao, he was a fucker of genocidal proportions, but you have to also know his philosophy and see if there were some things he might have said that would actually be beneficial. It's like, the fact that Martin Luther was a motherfucker doesn't change the fact that he raised some of the most excellent points of criticism to the Church.
This is all in asterisk because rhetorically speaking, you don't want to show even an ounce of impartiality towards Mao or the guy will never listen to you despite how objective your argument might be. But in here we're exploring marxist theory as a whole and there's something to be learned from even Mao.


*and yes, there was another asterisk within the asterisk. We must remember that Marx was trying to create a 'scientific socialism' not a utopian one. He didn't just see the oppression in the world and said "I don't like that, we should be better." He saw the oppression in the world and said "This cannot stay like that, it is unsustainable, we should help bring the next paradigm shift as soon as possible"
Thus it's very easy, especially among Americans, to talk about Marx's emphasis on the industrial proletariat because he saw them as living in terrible conditions. But the emphasis on them is much more objective.
The urban proletariat is the hegemonic labor force of industrial capitalism.
This is why he didn't care about peasants and even disparaged them. Marx saw them as inherently conservative (and in the developed world they really tend to be conservative) because the new labor shift to industrialism threatens their own mode of labor. This is of course a condition brought on by capitalism but most people will not analyze society to such an extent.
Thus Marx saw that the urban proletariat was the 'only' class that could bring about a socialist revolution not because they were the most oppressed, but because they were the foundation of the economy. If the urban proletariat united, they could halt the entire industrial capitalist market in a matter of weeks.

Lenin amended to this not by making an a-historical proclamation that other people are oppressed, but rather on the contextual claim that capitalism depends on imperialism and imperialism depends on the exploitation of other types of people, not just the urban proletariat. Thus a third world country could have a socialist revolution, against Marx's ideas that only an industrial country could, and just as well if all third world countries (of course the term third-world country hadn't been invented yet, but saying colonial countries wouldn't account for nations like the slavic nations or the already liberated latin american nations) would unite, they could bring imperialism to its knees in a matter of weeks.

The logical and historical next step from this is clear. We already live in a stage marxists call "late capitalism" or "postmodern capitalism", most of you know it as the era of information.
THAT is the new hegemonic form of labor: Information. Just as the industrial proletariat replaced the feudal peasantry as the hegemonic form of labor (which does not mean they became the most numerous, but that the economy mainly depended on their type of work) now precarious laborers in the service industry and information industry are the basis of the market.
Antonio Negri makes a living out of explaining this new development of capitalism and proletarian consciousness to account for the new labor hegemony. I recommend you people to read the book Empire.
A lot of you have said you have recently read or are planning to read the Communist Manifesto because you're genuinely interested in this stuff. But those who have read it know that you found it to be too anachronistic. I bet most of you felt something like "that's it?"
Instead, Empire, which has been called the Communist Manifesto of the 21st century, will apply more to your present living conditions, especially if you guys have worked in a workplace where you manufacture networking and human interaction itself, such as being a server that must have a smile on your face or answering phones or any type of job in something media related.

[Alan]

Imagine if I actually had the time to write about this?

[HumanePain]

Like Des I was going to suggest pointing out to him his strawman arguments and outright bullshit, but it would be a superior response to ignore his crappy "debate" (more like propagandist diatribe) and present Alan's counterargument addressing the thrust of his attack, as this accomplishes two things (maybe more):

1) It teaches him, and more importantly those following the thread what the facts are about Marx and his thinking, and
2) it shows him up to be ill informed, incorrect and a fool. The lack of debate integrity and reason can be the icing on the cake.

[Saya]

You know she's trolling when she's like "Well I studied in Portugal IN THE SEVENTIES". Did she even finish a degree?

[Still Jack]

Alan's birthday present.
trolololol

[Grausamkeit]

Birthday Trolls!