The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Has Communism Happened Yet?

Marx was probably the most important intellectual of the 19th century, based on impact, but it’s generally believed he was wrong about his major predictions, and thus his theories are largely garbage. I have some sympathy for this view, but let’s look at the counter-argument.

Marx said that Communism would develop from industrial nations, with the proletariat, finally realizing they were producing all the value, taking control. What happened instead is that the two major “communist” revolutions happened in agrarian societies: Russia and China, and while China’s hard communist period (pre-Deng) advanced China significantly, they didn’t become a massive surplus society until market reform took place.

If you call a dog a duck, it’s still a dog.

The correct response is simply that they weren’t Communist nations: they called themselves that, and China still does, but that’s ridiculous. They couldn’t be, because the proletariat wasn’t in charge. (One might make an argument that it was, briefly, in Russia, but if so it didn’t last.) The proletariat couldn’t be in charge, in agrarian societies they hardly exist.

Central to Marx’s argument is that over time the global rate of profit under capitalism will fall. That argument has been dismissed, but there’s a good case that it is, it’s just taking quite a while. Michael Roberts makes the case, and I’ve included some of the key graphs below.

Global Rate of Profit:

x

US profit rate.

Now it’s fair to say that technical arguments can be made against these charts, but they support the general idea of lower profit over time. The crisis of capitalism is expected to occur when surplus produced by the system falls to catastrophic levels.

Again, I could argue against this, but the simplest argument is that Marx didn’t foresee climate change and ecological collapse and they’re going to hit first.

Arguing that communism hasn’t failed because those who claimed to be communist does smack a little of neoliberals and other ideologues screaming that their system has never really been implemented, so their ideas are still fine, but Marx was clear about the process of how Communism would occur and it didn’t include revolutions in agricultural states. By Marx’s dialectic, that wasn’t possible: you have to go through capitalism first.

I don’t, personally, expect real communism to happen any time soon. Even if Marx was right, the timer is running out. Perhaps in collapse, workers will, indeed, unite and take over. The problem is primarily what Marxists call “class consciousness”: the realization of shared interests and that the people running the system are both evil and stupid—they produce terrible results, over and over again. They are sociopath & psychopaths or people who might as well be, because the decisions they make are psychopathic.

They aren’t needed. Oh, the scientists and engineers are, certainly, but the capitalists? No. We just need another system of allocating capital which doesn’t make it accumulate in the hands of the worst people.

If that happens, we’ll have something better, whether or not it’s communism.


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35 Comments

  1. Eric Anderson

    One could say the same thing about Malthus, Ehrlich, and hell, the Club of Rome among many many others. “Oh, your prediction didn’t happen yesterday? Must be wrong.” Shouted into the ears of everyone through the billionaire free speech bullhorn.

    Malthus was right. Intervening tech has just pushed the timeline back. In any relevant timeline, less than a blink of history has passed since his predictions. If only we could hear people giggle from their graves.

  2. Daniil Adamov

    “The correct response is simply that they weren’t Communist nations: they called themselves that, and China still does, but that’s ridiculous. They couldn’t be, because the proletariat wasn’t in charge. (One might make an argument that it was, briefly, in Russia, but if so it didn’t last.)”

    They were Communist (and China is still Communist) insofar as they were ruled by parties that officially identified as Communist, i.e. aiming to eventually somehow create a Communist society. They never claimed to have accomplished this goal (we only got as far as “advanced socialism” officially in the USSR). The sense I mention is the only one in which those could ever have been considered Communist countries; but that much is a legitimate sense. There is, of course, no economic or political system that is absolutely incompatible with this aim (though a party dictatorship with a planned or semi-planned economy does seem like the most obvious approach).

    (But I have no idea when our nonexistent proletariat was supposed to be in charge of Russia. It was a “bourgeois” democracy after the February Revolution; the Bolsheviks immediately established a dictatorship afterwards; worker councils existed, and mattered at least somewhat on the ground, but were never in charge of the country and very quickly beaten into line, long before the civil war was over.)

    “The proletariat couldn’t be in charge, in agrarian societies they hardly exist.”

    Indeed, which is why Russian Marxists, including Plekhanov and Lenin, wrote at length about the need to create a proletariat – by dispossessing peasants, whether by capitalist or by socialist means.

  3. Jefferson Hamilton

    Better than 99% of people who decry “Marxism” or even worse “communism” have absolutely zero idea of what Marx actually thought or wrote, perhaps it would be fair to say less than zero, given the absolute torrent of propaganda that has flooded the English-speaking brain over the last hundred years or so. The most important bit to my mind is the part you highlight: not predictions of what will come after capitalism but simply the analysis that capitalism is doomed to fail by its own internal logic, a process we are probably in the middle of watching unfold right now, as imperialism begins to reach its limits. Michael Roberts is an excellent resource and his book “Marx 200” an excellent place to start.

  4. Daniel Lynch

    Communism existed and worked for many centuries — in North America before the European invasion. Native tribes owned land in common, had common gardens, shared food freely, sometimes lived in common shelters, etc.. There was some personal private property — clothing, small shelters, and later horses. It worked, and worked well — no Marx required. Marx did not invent communism, which had been in existence for thousands of years prior.

    But Native American communism only existed at the tribal level, and not in an industrialized society. Most people are willing to share with their tribe, but few are willing to share with the “other.” That is the basic problem of communism or even the welfare state.

  5. Marx’s most prevalent writings (Das Capital and the Communist manifesto) had less to do with communism and more about how a country develops and how Capitalism functions. In this he was for the most part accurate.
    It’s revealing that pretty much every country that has industrialized in the last 80 years or so were heavily influenced by Marx. The USSR, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and China had leaders who had read Marx, called themselves Marxists at some point, or were once members of some type of Marxist group.

    Marx predicted that one group would use the proletariat to overthrow the current ruling class and then behave just like the old ruling class. But since people who hate Marx never actually read him the irony of this is lost on them.

    If someone thinks equality –in a Marxist sense– is about money instead of power then they haven’t read Marx. Income inequality is primary a product of power inequality.
    If someone thinks “property” –in a Marxist sense– is your clothes, and home instead of capital then they haven’t read Marx. “Property is theft” because in Marxism “property” is the accumulated wealth confiscated from the workers by the powerful.
    Government control of the economy is how Marx viewed the typical course of economic development. To Marx the government isn’t a separate entity from Capitalists. He flat out states that the government is the “managing arm” of the capitalist class. If someone doesn’t understand that they haven’t read Marx.

    If you remove the mention of Marx and communism, and don’t use any terms or word choices that are associated with the two you can easily get people to agree with Marx.

  6. but few are willing to share with the “other.” That is the basic problem of communism or even the welfare state.
    ———-
    The basic problem with the welfare state is that it leaves the causes untouched. Instead it addresses the symptoms in a way that generates animosity towards the weakest people.

  7. Feral Finster

    The rulers are very good at distract, divide and rule. That is how they got to be rulers in the first place.

  8. Dan Kelly

    Communism and Capitalism are opposite sides of the same coin. These’ isms’ are ideologies that seem designed to prevent nuanced thought and to supercede all previous human endeavors of any and all variety.

    Chaim Herschel Mordechai – Karl Marx – was one man in history whose thoughts on life – past, present, and future- were an amalgam of everything that shaped him to that point as well as the ideologies that he and ilk wanted to instill in the pysche of the masses.

    Marx was descended from a long line of very well-off Jewish rabbis , merchants and lawyers, although he himself evidently lived ‘in squalor’ some of the time. There is the by-now typical story that says that they were a ‘non-relgious’ family of Jews. There have evidently been a lot of ‘non-religious Jews’ who are nevertheless quite tied in to the Jewish religious community – apparently rabbis can be secular or something.

    Karl Marx was descended from the very prominent Barent-Cohen family of Amsterdam and his relation to the infamous Rothschild European Jewish banking dynasty is much closer than his fans would have you believe. Marx was utterly delighted when ‘his work’ was well-received by Lionel Rothschild in the city of London.

    https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f3fb167eab7f80555bf342878746f479-pjlq

    As an aside, Karl Marx seems to me to have always been a very nasty person. I don’t like to psychoanalyze too much, but it’s rather evident that this springs from his upbringing and the environment and people he chooses to associate with. He and his have a smug, better-and-smarter-than-you attitude towards everyone and everything that don’t agree with their own views. See Michael Hudson and Lambert Strether as modern examples of what happens to a beautiful untarnished mind ruined by this sick ideology.

    While it would be stupid to entirely ignore Marx, it’s every bit as stupid to pay as much attention to him as the hard ‘commie’ left does. And it’s the height of all stupidity to worship the man. “The bearded one” is a god to many without their even being aware of it. Frightening. And thoroughly unintelligent.

    Yes, Marx and Marxism (and all ‘isms’) never fail to turn otherwise intelligent people into absolute imbeciles. As I said, it’s almost as if they’re designed to. Take obvious social ‘wrongs’ and turn them into self-absorbed wordy ideologies that easily descend into navel-gazing individual narcississm. Just like feminism.**

    Marx and his acolytes outright stole a lot of ‘socialist’ and other ideas from those who came before and then when those people wouldn’t join Marx et al in their disgusting plan for the world, Marx et al smugly ignored them and acted like they didn’t even exist. Then they would set about subtly character-assassinating them. Just like that arrogant prick Michael Hudson does today. And Jimmy Dore. And so, so many people on the utterly off-putting ‘real left’ or ‘hard left’ ‘commie left’ or whatever stupid terminology one wants to use.

    Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grün, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin were all much better human beings than Karl Marx.

    Das Kapital contains no criticism of non-Jewish bankers. None.

    And “On the Jewish Question” clearly shows that Mordechai-Marx felt quite viscerally that the ‘Jewish perspective’ on society – the one that says and acts as if pure pragmatic econonics is all that matters – is far superior to what he called the ‘Christian perspective’ – that only spiritual and theoretical equality matter.

    Now, we could delve into the fact that these two seeming dichotomies are not as rigidly opposed as Marx et al make them out to be, nor should they be – though it seems that Marx and his ilk want them to be so rigidly defined. And this in and of itself is a major problem with their view of life, and again is why they are so off-putting to so many people who would otherwise be ‘on their side.’

    “In order that the true meaning of things may not strike before the proper time we shall mask it under an alleged ardent desire to serve the working classes and the great principles of political economy about which our economic theories are carrying on an energetic propaganda

    **So, for example, if you were to read Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church and State, first printed in 1893, you will see that it’s a much more straightforward and powerful work than any of the Marxisty-type stuff from the likes of Friedan, Andrea Dworkin (all heterosexual sex is rape) and CIA-adjacent Gloria Steinem.
    ———-
    Just a final couple points: There is no firm divide between workers and owners, between capital and labor. This is an absolutely hairbrained way to look at/perceive the world and our relationships with each other, and the most fascinating thing you will find if you dare to unpack some of the nonsense that ‘they’ have inundated you with your entire life – you will see that this way of dividing the world is in fact IN THE INTEREST OF CREATING A WORLD OF JUST WORKERS AND ‘CAPITALISTS’ – OR ‘COMMUNISTS’ – IT DOESN’T MATTER, AS BOTH IDEOLOGIES ARE EASILY MAINTAINED AND CONTROLLED FROM ‘ABOVE.’

    They aren’t needed. Oh, the scientists and engineers are, certainly, but the capitalists? No. We just need another system of allocating capital which doesn’t make it accumulate in the hands of the worst people.

    Scientists and engineers will always fall in line and end up doing the bidding of the powerful psychopaths – whether those psychopaths are putting on a ‘capitalist’ or a ‘communist’ show.

  9. Dan Kelly

    Das Kapital contains no criticism of non-Jewish bankers. None.

    Big mistake here that destroys the entire meaning of what I’m illustrating.

    Das Kapital contains no criticism of Jewish bankers. None. All criticism is reserved for ‘wealth and power’ that Marx et al wanted to see broken up IN THEIR OWN INTEREST. They could have cared less about the suffering masses. Again, this becomes rather obvious if you dare to read Marx et al without ‘Michael Hudson et al’ blinders on.

    That smart, sly, and mischievous squirrel who just dug something up in ‘our yard’ that he left previously – that squirrel IS A GOD THAT WALKS THE EARTH to me. In a manner of speaking, of course.

    Michael Hiudson and Karl Marx, not so much. Not even in a manner of speaking. Nope.

    The time has come to put old Marx – and ‘commnism’ and ‘capitalism’ – in their proper place. He and his have created a lot more misery in the world without solving a fucking thing. Nothing in the world has been made any better because of Marx and his bullshit. Nothing.

    I am of course not saying this from a spot within the ‘hard right’ white Aryan’ sphere, much of which is itself created and controlled and used to foment hatreds. Just as one quick example: the infamous ‘David Duke’ is in fact funded and controlled by the ADL and its hierarchy. So, Duke would say some stupid shit and then the SPLC, itself a creature of the ADL et al, will be there to condemn him. It’s a synthesis.

    But I won’t hold my breath waiting for any of his fans to begin thinking clearly – as bad as things are, I’d like to go on living.

    Was it Kuhn who said that ‘science’ moves forward when the old guard dies? Same here. These people all need to die. Just go away. Unfortunately, they’ve inundated the children with their toxic pseudo-caring BS.

  10. Dan Kelly

    Native tribes owned land in common

    Nope. No concept of ‘ownership.’ And ‘private property’ was very limited. But it was not ‘communal’ the way many Jewish communities lived historically and the way ‘commnism’ is used by the powerful in their interest. The ‘communization’ of Russia was in actuality a hard and fast ‘scientific’ industrialization thrust on the population of Russia at gunpoint by outside forces against their – and their leaders – wishes. Land, resources and their accompanying political power were obviously coveted, and were the primary motivators of the ‘communist revolution.’

    We really need new words and connotations.

    A modern person renting an apartment, with debt to pay and no assets, nevertheless has more of a feeling of ‘ownership’ in many respects than an ‘indigenous’ person living the way we all lived for the better part of human history.

    The feeling you have when you lose your wallet or ID? That sinking feeling that you just won’t be able to prove who you are? Never felt for the vast majoirty of human history.

    Just think about that. That is a massive, massive regression in human eneavors already – that we’ve been living in (this regression) for millenia.

    Your papers please…

    Just who the f*ck ARE you?

    Well, my parents f*cked, and apparently it worked, so I came out and they named me Dan. That’s about all I know.

    Into this house I’m born
    Unto this world I’m thrown
    Like a dog without a bone
    Riders on the Storm (of life)

    We should also talk about the concept to time, the ‘passing’ of which has a lot do with our sense of self, freedom , etc. Being tied to the clock is perhaps the greatest control mechanism, greater even then a monotheistic god. But that’s for another thread.

  11. Soredemos

    I would say that the ‘true communism has never been tried’ argument is greatly bolstered by the fact that no ‘communist’ country has ever actually claimed to be communist. They’ve always been ‘striving for true communism’, with that state of affairs being some vague eventual goal. That’s what things like Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot’s Year Zero were all about, always self-evidently to disastrous effect.

    Mao in particular managed to kill more Chinese than the Japanese did (the true number will never be known for sure, but it’s somewhere in the tens of millions), largely due to a combination of ideological fantacism and pure cowardly bureaucraticism; the most charitable possible interpretation of events is that senior leadership genuinely didn’t know for as much as a couple years how bad things were because lower cadres concealed facts. Which is still utterly damning of Mao and the system of government he had errected, and reveals him and his followers as unqualified to run even a lemonade stand. Whatever the problems of the current Chinese system, it’s vastly more effective than Mao was.

    Marx was correct in his analysis of many, many things. Shockingly so, how the overwhelming majority of his writings hold up (I particularly love his letter to Lincoln where he correctly summarizes the root causes of the American Civil War. It’s taken American historiography a century and a half to circle back around, through a cloud of Lost Cause obscurantism, to where Marx was from the start).

    But it’s when he and Engels started making predictions about the ‘inevitable’ future that they lose me. They’re describing a possible future, but it’s not inevitable. Perhaps things will be cycle and regress to some other stage. To make firm claims about the future of social development, however logically and systematically you arrive at them, isn’t actually doing rigorous scientific analysis. It’s engaging in mystical future seering. At some point you’ve switched from the ‘science of historical materialism’ to ‘the prophecy shall be fulfilled’.

  12. Purple Library Guy

    I’ve always had a lot more respect for Marx as an analyst and critic of Capitalism than as a predictor or even advocate of what will or should happen next. But as far as I can tell, most of what Marx did was analysis and criticism of capitalism, so that still leaves him a pretty major, important thinker.

    I don’t believe in his stages of history thing, and I don’t think Marx had an as it were institutional answer to the problem of how to create an actually classless society, and I think his notion that after the dictatorship of the Proletariat the state would just “wither away” is total bunk.

    But in terms of what he said about capitalism and how it works, he was pretty dashed good . . . and a lot of the things about how capitalism has worked in history that don’t seem to look quite like Marx’s ideas about capitalism, like the temporary existence of fairly prosperous middle classes in various capitalist countries, have actually been the direct result of somewhat-successful popular struggles to limit the power and scope of capitalism, so they don’t really contradict his points.

    As to the rate of profit, it should be noted that Marx talked about the “TENDENCY” for the rate of profit to fall. I believe he was fairly clear that capitalists could and almost certainly would do various fixes to temporarily avoid this, but that the tendency would creep back in over time. And I think the story of the last few decades is precisely about capitalists facing falls in the rate of profit, and coming up with various temporary schemes to counteract that and juice profits, such as increasing the amount of debt the working class can be pushed into, and lots of financial speculation, money creation (but only for the rich) schemes, moving production to the third world, and so on. All these schemes fairly quickly showed limits beyond which they tended to crash the economy, and one question in our time is how many more one-trick ponies can the capitalists come up with before they run out and the underlying problems, which probably include a fall in the before-it’s-papered-over rate of profit, really assert themselves. And I think a lot of people have the instinctive feeling that the quick fixes are running out. So, Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall might be surprisingly relevant today.

  13. Willy

    Communism works well if the greed of all members is kept disciplined. I achieved that simplistic world view by comparing each small group of which I’ve been a part, with each other, then extrapolated and scaled upwards.

    Sociopathy rationalizes that their bad behavior is good for the group, or, that group dysfunction is inevitable and it might as well be them in power. Psychopathy just plain doesn’t care because it’s not physically capable of caring. In all my better functioning small groups, neither condition was tolerated, neither condition was allowed to gain a foothold to power over that small group, no matter what strategies they used.

    I think of the Commanche, for centuries a peaceful communistic group happy to coexist with their dry savanna environment and their neighboring groups. When the horses arrived they could’ve been content to use them as mechanical work advantage, just like all their neighboring groups did. But some sociopathy or psychopathy which saw the potential of using horses to get the sociopathic jump on their neighbors, to overpower them, gained control of the Commanche tribe and the rest is history. Same old history actually, as everywhere else and in a great many social ways, scaled downwards or upwards.

    Marx ignored who it is that human power games always reward. Power does change people, but that pales in comparison to what power reveals. History keeps repeating because there are just too many dupes.

  14. Eric Anderson

    Daniel Lynch —

    I’m really not qualified to quibble, but I think the closest analog to the native american tribes is anarchism.

    “Most people are willing to share with their tribe, but few are willing to share with the “other.” That is the basic problem of communism or even the welfare state.”

    Yup. Anarchism too. Thus, other tribes, outside any given tribe’s informal voluntary system were fair game for pillage and plunder.

  15. StewartM

    Daniil Adamov

    They were Communist (and China is still Communist) insofar as they were ruled by parties that officially identified as Communist, i.e. aiming to eventually somehow create a Communist society.

    As Ian says, that never keeps the Randies or Austrian economic school fanboys from saying that “Oh, this isn’t real capitalism!!” or even “This is crony capitalism” when crony capitalism is the logical result of their policies.

    Everything I see in Ian’s post about Marx and his positions is factually correct. Communist China or Soviet Russia is not a rebuttal of Marxism, when they came to being under conditions that Marx say wouldn’t result in a communist states.

    Daniel Lynch

    In hunter-gatherer societies, it’s in your best self-interest to share. After all, we all come into the world helpless and dependent, and we’ll probably return to being helpless and dependent near the end of our lives. Ergo, establishing reciprocity and building strong social bonds is akin to putting money into your bank account, even though there’s no ledger, so to speak, of how much good will you’ve created by self-sacrifice.

    Historical Native Americans aren’t the best example, as they had already passed through the Neolithic revolution and most were farmers. As Wittfogel’s theory predicted, however, they did not form stable states in North America (the Mississippian cultures may have formed states but they didn’t survive) because that agriculture wasn’t irrigation-dependent so no power could seize control over the water supply. But the idea of hunter-gatherers is, that it’s absurd to think of things that pre-existed before you and continue to exist after you, as something you “own”; which I think is an entirely reasonable belief system.

  16. Bukko Boomeranger

    To expand upon what Daniel said above, a form of communism also existed in Australian aboriginal societies before whitefellas arrived. “Communalism” might be a better word for it. They shared what they had, which wasn’t much, because they lacked the technology to make sophisticated products and were often on the move to follow rainfall, growing seasons for the plants they ate or the spiritual meanings of their songline trails. It was a pre-materialist communism, because the bands of people who lived on the continent had little in terms of permanent material goods. If you have to carry it, you’re not going to have so much of it that it bogs you down. Especially when you can easily make another spear out of wood you find along the way, or cure a kangaroo skin for a new cloak after you ate the rest of the animal. It wasn’t what we modern materialist types would consider an idyllic State of Nature because women were second-class, there was sometimes conflict between different bands, and just like in every group of organisms, some people “were more equal than others.” (h/t “Animal Farm)

    It couldn’t have been all bad, though, because that form of communalist social organisation allowed First Peoples (“aboriginal” is now considered as un-P.C. as “Indian” is in North America) to survive for more than 50,000 years. They didn’t go extinct or conversely, evolve technologically so they created jet airplanes. Just ticked along with stability through some dramatic climate change events including massive sea level rise. No doubt they were living with the same sort of rustic communism that had existed since the earliest proto-humans discovered that you could do great things with that sharp-edged rock if you banged on it JUST the right way to chip it off the rest of the boulder. But no Australopithecapitalist ever said “I’m going to hire Grunk and Ork to be my stone-bangers, and Zok will sell the sharp ones to that mob we meet along the creek, so I can use the profits to build a two-story lean-to.”

    Our species has hundreds of thousands of years of communism built into our sociobiological survival instincts. We’ll get back to it someday, the few of our descendants who remain alive, after everything collapses and we ditch all this materialist stuff that the capitalists have bless/cursed us with.

  17. Jefferson Hamilton

    >“Property is theft” because in Marxism

    That was Proudhon, not Marx, and he was decidedly not a Marxist.

  18. StewartM

    Dan Kelly

    Nope. No concept of ‘ownership

    I’m afraid Dan Lynch was mostly correct. For one thing, most Native people were post-Neolithic, they farmed and lived in towns. These did have notions of both communal and individual ownership, just not taken to absurd degrees by Europeans. (Most Native American societies were matrilocal and matrilineal, so the wife owned the property). How can you not have a notion of at least communal ownership if you farm and live in a town?

    Even the plains people, while being less tied to specific land, were post-Neolithic, they once farmed and lived in towns. The Cheyenne, for instance, at the time of European contact were northern woodlands Indians living in towns and farming, then got pushed west along with many other Native peoples to become riverine agriculturalists living in towns, before being pushed West again and becoming plains Indians living in mobile Tipis (tents). Their culture and way of life changed three times in recorded history.

  19. Ian Welsh

    Stewart,

    a longer piece on that would be of interest.

  20. mago

    Wow Dan Kelly. Guess you could write a book if you haven’t already.
    I can’t parse communism, although I’ve studied some on the Bolshevik revolution and the murder of the czar and his family and who was behind it and what it led to, but I’m still unqualified to comment, even though I just did.
    Not gonna get into China.

  21. Willy

    I’m not familiar with the influence of Darwin upon Marx, but I vaguely recall Marx(?) reasoning that human temperamental genetics evolved during hundreds of communistic millennia and was well set and barely unchangeable during our most previous capitalistic centuries. This implies that humans would naturally revert back to their social animal genetics which allowed the species to succeed, after some unnatural capitalistic power center reality became too unnaturally much for the masses.

    But again, he didn’t seem to consider the influence which technology with population would have on human power dynamics.

    Where in small tribal units psychopathy would be spotted quickly and disposed of as valueless genetics, as human “technology with population” grew, the ability to ‘spot and dispose’ of counterproductive power and control freaks would decline and the power struggles situation gradually grow to become so pathological, that capitalism and major warfare would result. At least that’s my take.

    They say warfare was unknown before the neolithic. There’s little evidence of Hatfield and McOg cave clan feuds. I had a history professor once tell me that base jealousy was a big deal behind ancient warfare, and that social stratification was one way to manage that inside of a large tribe. He also said geography had a major influence on things.

    For example, in south plains North America, scouting parties for one tribe could travel hundreds of miles and only observe lifestyles so similar to their own, that it’d be pointless to expend lives and treasure to try and conquer anybody. But in Mesoamerica, impoverished tribes didn’t have to travel far to observe great wealth. Plains, desert and jungle civilizations: little major warfare. River civilizations, especially with rich lands juxtapositioned right next to poor lands: much major warfare.

    But then in a previous job, I knew many Section 8s living humbly, quietly, and peacefully in impoverished buildings near wealthy neighborhoods. Maybe a few broke into those homes, but I never heard anyone speaking of conquering them. Or of Marxist revolutions so full of angry angst. Not a peep. There have to be other factors involved.

    I may have digressed. My point was that Marx believed that communism is a natural human condition. I tend to agree, but I think he might have missed a variable, or two.

  22. StewartM

    Ian

    a longer piece on that would be of interest.

    I can see what I can come up with on the anthropology section of my bookshelf. Alas, my best human reference (herself enough Cherokee to look it) died in 2012. I have gone to local powows, and there is a local professor who specializes in the Southeastern Native peoples who frequently shows up, so maybe I can run things by him.

    But yeah, most of the Native peoples lived in towns, especially here in the East. And what DeSoto’s expedition described in 1539-42 is quite unlike what later explorers or later records of Native peoples indicate….DeSoto may have encountered the last vestiges of Native states from the Mississippian period—like a ruler carried on something like a throne who commoners could not directly address, very much unlike the non-centralized confederations of later history. And in fact, some legends (like the Cherokee) say that there was once an “emperor” and a “priest” class, and that there was a revolt against these.

    So yeah, it’s interesting, and especially so given Wittfogel’s thesis on how states form. None of these locales ever met his criteria for obtaining a stable state, and moreover the food staple (corn) depletes the soil (which may have factored in the decline of Cahokia (a major city near St. Louis). So these “kings” may never had a reliable way of rewarding or paying followers and maintaining their state.

  23. Willy

    “barely changeable”, and “not barely unchangeable”. Sorry about that. I dont usually sweat grammatical or spell check errors since nobody seems to either. But that one stuck out a bit too far for me.

  24. Mao in particular managed to kill more Chinese
    ….and reveals him and his followers as unqualified to run even a lemonade stand.
    —-
    I don’t dispute that Mao and company killed a shit ton of people and made a lot of disastrous discussions, but for giggles let’s compare and contrast.

    China with India. In 1950 they both had similar life expectancies and living standards.
    China today with Latin America. In 1950 Latin America was 3-5 times richer.

    The death toll from China’s industrialization process with the West.
    The UK killed 100 million people in India alone. 3 entire continents of people were wiped out.

    —-
    >“Property is theft” because in Marxism “property” is the accumulated wealth confiscated from the workers by the powerful.

    That was Proudhon, not Marx, and he was decidedly not a Marxist.
    —–
    If content from Marx’s most prevalent books aren’t “Marxist” then nothing is.
    I don’t really care to quibble about who came up with it first, or if socialists who argued for worker ownership are Marxists or not.

  25. bruce wilder

    I was impressed years ago when I read some of Marx’s New York Tribune journalism. He wrote clearly and with great insight. I can well imagine that some of his contemporaries were impressed and mildly curious about how he did it — that is how he thought about things, his method of analysis. I found Capital: A Critique of Political Economy tedious. Even the first volume by itself seems to me too long and I didn’t read anywhere near all of it. He could have profited from a strong editor and stronger critics, if he could have listened to either.

    The labor theory of value in Adam Smith’s gentle hands doesn’t require much and doesn’t do much. In Ricardo’s more abstract mind, it slices and dices but is scarcely believable. In Marx’s thinking, it becomes a moral grounding, but makes no operational sense. Is that because, as a critic of political economy, he’s running with the ball the economists have given him to see how their game is played? The Marginal Revolution took neoclassical economics in a different direction on value and Keynes would take Smith’s labor theory of value and reinvent it as aggregate demand.

    Marx was very impressed by the achievements of capitalism in planning and organizing production without being willing to credit the capitalist with creating value ab novo. Curious. Marx died just as capitalism was taking off in the Second Industrial Revolution, which would give the world a new idea of the modern. The awesome multinational industrial corporation was just beginning to come into being when he passed away. Curiously, neoclassical economics never seemed interested in that phenomenon though it was born in that same era of the 1880s.

    For Marx, capitalism was something new that required an analytic understanding. Marx had been young in the heady days of the “revolutions” of 1848, when modernity, liberalism and the potato famine promised to upend a status quo dominated by cruel reactionary politics. Capitalism in that era promised a lot but was manifestly delivering immiseration to millions.

  26. Soredemos

    @Oakchair

    “The UK killed 100 million people in India alone.”

    No, it didn’t. Yes, I know there’s an Al Jazeera article that claims that. But it isn’t true.

    Or rather, for the sake of argument, maybe it is true, but the evidence doesn’t support it. Even Mike Davis in his book on ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’ doesn’t actually make such a bold claim. Millions yes, doubtless. But not hundreds of millions.

  27. Soredemos

    @Dan Kelly

    What a strange set of posts. I’m actually a bit surprised they got through moderation.

    By this point modern Israel has completely destroyed the notion of antisemitism, and the accusation of such, but it is actually a thing. Your harping on for paragraph after paragraph about the ‘Jewish’ nature of Marx and his ideas is bizarre, to say the least.

    I’m also not sure where you’re getting ‘Chaim Herschel Mordechai’ from. I can find no reputable source (or much of any source at all) that claims this was Karl Marx’s original name. His father did indeed change his name, from Herschel Levi (not Mordechai) to Heinrich Marx. This really seems like you’re either making it up, or parroting someone else who ultimately just made it up.

    I note that you’re not actually countering any of Marx’s views. You just say they’re stupid. You’re engaging in both the genetic fallacy and, I think, some sort of association fallacy (provided your asserted associations are even real, which I very much doubt) but not engaging with anything he actually said.

    As for the ‘Marx was a bad person’ thing, irrelevant, but also kind of funny. I’ve seen this used on Charles Darwin as well, and the funny part is that both of these guys (though Darwin especially) seem to have been fundamentally pretty nice family men (Marx may have had an illegitimate child with his housekeeper, but the documentary evidence isn’t actually firm on that, and I wouldn’t say that alone makes Marx into some sort of arch-villain anyway).

    I’ve read and listened to a bunch of both Michael Hudson and Lambert Strether over the years. Neither of them have a “smug, better-and-smarter-than-you attitude towards everyone and everything that don’t agree with their own views”. Hudson a bit less so perhaps, and he has a bad tendency when speaking off the cuff to just assert things that sometimes can’t be fully backed up, but his academic work is much more thoughtful. Strether generally goes out of his way to understand (usually by dissecting to a tedious degree) other’s views.

    Feminism is ultimately a Liberal ideology. It comes from a completely different intellectual lineage from anything Marxist ‘feminists’ like Alexandra Kollontai thought or said. Their ideas rested firmly on issues of labor and ownership, and went back probably to Engel’s ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’, where he literally talks about the “the world-historic defeat of the female sex” which he attributes to sedentary farming. Whereas Liberal feminists, like most Liberals almost by definition, absolutely refuse to talk substantively about who owns what.

  28. shagggz

    @Dan Kelly

    What do you have against Michael Hudson?

  29. “The UK killed 100 million people in India alone.”

    No, it didn’t. Yes, I know there’s an Al Jazeera article that claims that. But it isn’t true.
    ——-

    “censuses reveal that the death rate increased from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s.”

    “we used census data to estimate the number of people killed
    some 50 million excess deaths occurred from 1891 to 1920. Yet this is a conservative estimate.
    real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.”
    if we assume (death rates were) similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.”
    https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians

    What exactly isn’t true?
    Is the census, wage, life expectancy, and death data fabricated? If so explain what leads you to that conclusion.
    Or is it that you disagree with attributing those deaths to the UK which if that is the case attributing similar deaths in China to Mao and company is a double standard.

  30. somecomputerguy

    More than 90% of Marxism is a critique of Capitalism. That critique overwhelmingly stands.

    If anything, Marx wasn’t harsh enough;
    I don’t recall Marx anticipating Amartya Sen; Does Marx ever associate famines with market corrections?
    Marx says that the lowest possible wage is the replacement cost of labor; There are many examples of populations being simply worked to death; i.e., being ‘paid’ less than their replacement cost.
    I don’t think Marx anticipated that Capitalism would happily fry the planet;
    that Capitalism’s endpoint would be human extinction, as it currently appears on-track to be.

    It seems to be a law of physics that unsafe products are more profitable than safe ones; From railroads to nuclear power plants, any activity that carries catastrophic risk, when run by capitalism, risk becomes inevitability.

    I would appreciate someone pointing me to Marx’s exposition of Communism–his detailed, comprehensive guide, because my understanding is that Marx only talks about Communism in terms of what it isn’t.

    I happen to think this is a major problem; Marxism is the ultimate argument for overthrowing a system, but it has almost nothing about what you do afterwards.

    Worker exploitation never ceased in the various “Communist” systems; instead of surplus value accruing to capitalists, it was harvested by the state. In Marxist terms, the Soviet Union was state capitalism.

  31. somecomputerguy

    Your local police and fire departments are socialism. The United States Army is socialism.

    There are many reasons to opt for a publicly funded, publicly administered army, instead of hiring mercenaries. The principle one is the historical tendency of private sector armies to turn their guns on their employers, who are easier targets than other armies they are hired to fight. Other armies have guns too, you see.

  32. Swamp Yankee

    I just want to second Soredemos’s comments above. The harping by one commenter above on Marx’s Jewishness is troubling.

    And while I sometimes disagree with Lambert, I don’t think it’s warranted or helpful to go down ad hominem road with respect to either him or Michael Hudson.

  33. Purple Library Guy

    Isn’t Michael Hudson basically a Keynesian anyway? What does he have to do with an argument rubbishing Marx?

  34. Soredemos

    @Oakchair

    ‘If we assume death rates…’

    In others words they’re making up a number.

    This is a decent one stop shop with additional links on the problems with the claim. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18o2lbj/british_colonialism_killed_100_million_indians/the

    Yes, I know, reddit, but the claim is built on sand. The evidence for the extreme end of it is nonexistent to flimsy at best. It seems people most pushing it desperately want it to be true to prove an ideological point.

    @Purple Library Guy

    Hudsons solutions are ultimately periodic debt forgiveness and state deficit spending as needed. He has a lot that is positive to say about Marx, whom he frames not as the first Marxist economist, but as the last (and greatest) of the classical economists.

  35. somecomputerguy

    David Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything” has many potential, likely examples. That is practically the whole point of the book; if humans can conceive of a way to live with each other they can and have; stages of development is simply and invalid mental model; societies go from dictatorship to democracy and back with the seasons. The utility of his examples is severely limited; e.g., palaces nonexistent or plowed under while the society endured. That kind of thing.

    The middle ages. Maybe. Over the course of my life I have heard several allusions to middle ages communes. That nobles would try in vain to persuade them a dictator was a much better deal as a ruler than ruling themselves.
    I think this was the period when many long-standing common property arrangements were designed; like the ones destroyed by the english enclosure laws.

    Hope this helps

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