Marx

Better than you can say for many regimes, including some liberal/capitalist ones.

i'll call it a failure without reservation. the regime stalin created was at least a betrayal of the hopes of the petersburg soviet that seized power in 1917

it should be measured against its own claims, i think, not against some external marker. the form of life that was created was dull and bureacratic at best and, at its worst, marked by like, constant terror and assaults on the truth. it was nothing like a free association of free people

I think that's fair.

It should also be measured against what came before and after - compared to Tsarist Russia and post-Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union was a success. Some of its greatest failings need to also be contextualized in terms of the hostility of Western powers (from the Civil War) and trauma of the world wars. We can criticize their heavy hand in Eastern Europe as quasi-imperialist but it wasn't just an idle conversation among the western powers to immediately launch an attack on the USSR.

Measured against its claims and what a socialist state could be, the Soviet Union was a failure.

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

Yes, there's that whole issue of capitalist interference in socialist and communist countries, which I think is important to recognize, because those countries probably would have been more successful otherwise. But OTOH it is/was a fact of the real world that communism and socialism had to compete with other ideologies. Capitalism out-competed them, at least in the historical short run, probably because it was more productive. That hyper-productivity may not be good for humanity in the long run, but it was certainly good for creating a military superpower that no one could keep up with without going bankrupt.

i think forced collectivization was a failure. a moral failure, and a failure for the socialist project because it blackened the reputation of socialism for generations. so the way stalin tried to establish socialism--if that's what he really wanted to do; i read parts of kotkin's bio and he argues that it indeed was--then he failed in a very serious way.

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

― louise ck (milo z)

do i have a history of defending the united states that i don't know about?

Slow down with the defensiveness, did I say you did?

Stalin isn't the entire story of the Soviet Union, of course.

Ive been listening to Richard Wolff’s talk here this evening, which I quite like, given in Spring 2016. Provides a great overview to history and Marxist theory

http://www.youtube.com/v?=a1WUKahMm1s

hmmm, the link doesn't seem to be working (for me at least), and he has several videos on there. what's the title?

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

thesis 1: marx was german not russian iirc. thesis 2: i love marx but he wasn't perfect. thesis 3: i forget

KM, kingfish might mean this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L33Hhs0zv8

Oops, I formatted the link wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s

jesus fucking christ

qualmsley i hope you were smashed because jesus fucking christ

fanboys itt

Marx' economic theory may have been important and the result of thorough, original work, but surely his political ideas were m/l unfounded?

if anything they've held up better

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

yeah I was more thinking about his ideas abt communism

newtonian mechanics et al can be proven/disproven tbf

great name for a local auto-repair business though!

LOL

thesis 4: you're damn right i was smashed; sundays are for symposia. thesis 5: jesus fucking christ was a socialist in an impoverished traveling commune way before germany was even a thing, who was tortured and killed young for his beliefs, unlike karl, who died in his study at his desk almost twice as old as jesus on golgotha. thesis 6: all philosophy is a footnote to plato*. thesis 7: pass me the bloody mary mix you parcel of euthyphros. thesis 8: pounds table. thesis 9: >burp< thesis 10: impoverished children of the world unite!

*and achilleus was the first class warrior; fuck agamemnon

julius caesar was writing about germania pre jesus

i'm not sure that citing Jesus as a positive force for anti-capitalist values instead of Marx is borne out much by the entire fucking history of the world

marx is a positive force for anti-capitalist values, one of the most dynamic who ever lived! but he wasn't perfect! lost in scapegoating and piling on me for some reason is my original point that growing up as privileged as he did might handicap one rhetorically later on in life in the project of arresting a tide of capitalism that has seen the biggest gap between rich and poor in recorded human history here in the old US of A in the here and now under donald fucking trump and rupert fucking murdoch

I wrote in an essay once* "marxists believe that..." and then quoted something from the communist manifesto. and my tutor scrawled double underlined "marxists do NOT believe this!!" ... so I'm still basically unsure about what Marxism actually is, and the more I read the less clear I get.

(*It was just before I switched from a Social Sciences to a maths degree. )

Wait, how privileged do you think he was?

as a straight white male im not touching that, trevor

way more than anyone i grew up around, frederik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Marx

How was he limited do you think? What part of his analysis would have been different if he was working class?

"this Hegelian philosophy stuff is a reet load of bollox, off t'pub?"

his often obtuse syntax, that experts still struggle with, doesn't seem aimed at the joe six-packs of the 19th century

the condescension is worse in the much more privileged engels. for instance

"Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm

i've known lots of people who don't suffer from 'false consciousness' as engels would understand it so much as a playful nihilistic fatalism about the possibility of change for the better resulting from growing up broke or worse

. . .

medicare / social security for all!

False consciousness in marxist theory isnt just somethinf the working class suffer from that engels, for instance, would say he had broken free from.

It’s not really condescending. The theory is we think according to the terms provided by our age which prevents us from being able to see other ways things could be. They turn to the dialectic because they don’t believe the theorist can simply step “outside” their circumstances and understand things from a god’s-eye view. Insight comes from struggle, from working through the “contradictions” of the age as part of a shared project. It’s the opposite of codescending.

The pre-marxist socialists were more elitist—designing utopias. Marx and Engels brought socialism back to earth by centering it in the class struggle.

yes! definitely! but i would add that sometimes when marxists discuss 'false consciousness' they fail to grasp how much delight fatalistic poor people take in 1) kayfabe antics of crude brazen assholes like trump and 2) playing dumb themselves in the face of seemingly comfortable lefties perplexed by what they (the poor people) experience as a pantomime of false consciousness (perhaps their only sustained act of creativity!) in a world that has been materially crueler to them than it has to many do-gooders. this is not a dismissal of marx or engels! this is monday morning hungover QBing two transcendent philosophers

I don't really see "owning the libs" type shit as being a significantly different formulation from any other "false consciousness"

As we all know, it was only poor people who voted for Trump.

tbf this kind of thing has been extensively thrashed out in adorno vs. kracauer/benjamin and the rich literature following them, all of which depends on having marx as (one) starting point, so we might not really be able to talk about it without marx. but i still think the point stands that the "manifesto" and "capital" are two different works, and if you gripe about the convoluted academic prose in the one that's aimed at a convoluted academic conversation, as evidence that he couldn't relate to the working class, i feel like that needs to be supplemented in the ways that have been asked for upthread: which specific points in the theory would be different if he did not have as much privilege (however much it was)? why?

the language is also convoluted because it's translated from german, of course, but it's fair to say that when he wanted to write in a different register he could. i've been reading marshal berman's /all that is solid melts into air/ and he's otm about the lyricism and rhetorical force of the manifesto, which now sounds like MLK to my ears.

not sure we really need another "soviet union C/D?" discussion but i will go ahead and call any regime that kills tens of millions of people a failure, versus the admittedly external, a priori standard of "murder is bad." that applies whether its initial stated goal is "we will create a socialist utopia" or "we will kill tens of millions of people." we can argue about the causality of that failure as much as any other ("did the electric car fail because of conspiring powerful interests or because the technology wasn't there?") but surely it was a failure. not sure that has much bearing on marx though since the history of the 20th century suggests a range of other common denominators for mass murder at this scale, of which the development of totalitarian bureaucratic states looms largest.

good points Doc

what I meant is that ideas about fx the dictatorship of the proletariat seem free flying fantasy compared to Marx' economic analysis

a relevant point about the style and prose of Capital is that it's actually relatively accessible, despite clearly written for an academic audience. he throws in lots of little witticisms and jokes, some of which i had to read a footnote to understand because they were inside-19th-century-philosopher-jokes, but still. generally it is difficult to read because of the ideas it contains (and the concepts that require defining, at least for me) rather than the way in which he wrote it, and that comes through even via translation.

thesis 11: marx/engels are the lennon/mccartney to hegel's elvis. sober or otherwise i prefer the hits to their deep cuts

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

― difficult listening hour, Monday, September 17, 2018 4:09 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a weird thing to say. newtonian mechanics is as essential as quantum or relativistic mechanics. they apply under different conditions.

This was in the lobby of a chain hotel I stayed in

https://i.imgur.com/Ptoj1XC.jpg

The internet has done so much damage we can never know or measure.