Marxists?

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Are there any Marxists (or genuine socialists of any persuasion) on the forum?

how could any one still be a Marxist. Marxism has been thoroughly debunked, discredited and refuted by any practical test. It simply does not work.

ruveyn

There are Marxist parties in almost every country. With the possible exception of North Korea where the only permitted ideology is Juche. There is even a communist party in the United States. China and Vietnam meanwhile, are Marxist in name only.

I myself have some Marxist sympathies, but they are married with an intellectually honest analysis of the 'human nature' question and a desire to eradicate the evil that is scientific management (taylorism) and human menial toll. Something which neither Marx nor Lenin specifically opposed.

My overall view is that Marxism has neither been debunked and discredited. On the contrary, its been proven that capitalism is not working; look at the state of the southern hemisphere and the impending financial doom in the west. As for Marxism The only thing that has been proved is that it cannot exist in co-operation alongside contemporary capitalist nations, as per Lenin and Leon Trotsky's theory on permanent revolution.

However the other obstacle to a classless society is the heirarchy of skill. You cant eradicate classes while you have people working as both doctors and as binmen. All menial jobs must be automated and the unskilled afforded the opportunity to reskill. This in turn must be met with a sustainable mode of economics to replace the arbitrary currency based price system. Then, and only then, communism should be workable.

So communism will work just fine when capitalism has been purged and there's nothing to compare it to? Even as closed countries trading among themselves they couldn't make it work. If a socialist revolution goes on long enough it has no place to turn but in on itself, as at least 120 million people can attest to.


On other words, resolving the main obstacle to a classless society is an exercise in mental masturbation...and that's not even factoring in how to stop those with a little bit of power from taking extra for themselves and how to resolve grievances and morale problems.

Post revolution Russia was in a state of war. Not only was it fighting a domestic war on the home front against the White Russian movement it was having to deal with political subterfuge by aggressive nations on its borders. It was hardly a fair or fertile scientific ground on which to test the feasibility of the ideology.


Its not mental masturbation, the purpose is to remove the rationale for classes in the first place ie. "I had to study longer than you so I deserve more". In a society of abundancy distribution there would be no motive to steal because goods and services would be available upon demand. People will work for works sake, not to pay bills. Unproductivity ceases to be an issue when you remove the sorts of jobs that people dont want to go to. Machines can do the rest.

Okay, your argument is that Marxism is a failed ideology. I assume you hold this view because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Am I correct?

Personally I believe that to be correct. And don't forget that China is a closet capitalist (albeit authoritarian) and the remaining true communist countries are in a state of extreme poverty and disrepair. Some former Warsaw pact countries still haven't recovered even 20 years after the fact.

To be precise, most Warsaw Pact countries were backwards before communism took over (especially Russia). Now, most of them are just somewhat poorer than the rest of Europe. + in many cases, the current problems are a failed transition to capitalism, not the scar of communism.

Marx isn't wrong because of failure of the USSR. First, once one dispels the rhetoric, the Soviet Union was hardly marxist or communism. Second, marxism started to fail in the late 19th century when pauperization of the petty bourgeoisie failed to happen -- in fact, as industrialisation went on, the urban middle classes expanded rather than shrink. Then it continued to fail when the world revolution took place in the least industrialised European country. Then it failed utterly when that revolution did not expand, and was shown to be a strictly Russian phenomenon.

Since you hold that belief, I will gladly have this discussion with you. The debate to discredit or credit Marxism has temporarily become a discussion revolving around the reason for the Soviet Union's collapse. I would like you to present your belief in the USSR’s fall after I present mine.

All right, to begin, let’s examine the materialist conception of history. It’s a complicated concept but, for our purposes, let’s just say that historical materialism is dialectical materialism applied to human history. Human history has evolved through three epochs, is now in the fourth, and is awaiting a fifth. Each epoch has drastically different property relations, modes of production. The five basic (very basic) epochs are primitivism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism/communism. Because the materialist conception of history is, well, materialist, it assumes that each epoch must base itself upon the material conditions of its predecessor.

Let’s view society as having an economic base and an ideological superstructure. The superstructure, though it does have some limited ability to influence to base, is ultimately determined by the base; it rests upon the base. The base and the superstructure are themselves divided into levels which rest upon one another. The levels of the superstructure aren’t relevant right now. The two levels of the base, which are relevant right now, are the means of production and the mode of production, which rests upon the means. The means of production are the very material things by which society produces goods and services. They are grains, animals, factories, metals, etc. The mode of production is the method by which society utilizes the means of production. The mode of production of each epoch has been its defining characteristic.

Where were we? Right, we were discussing the necessity of an epoch basing itself off its predecessor. Each epoch develops the means of production to the point where, coupled with the internal contradictions of the current epoch, creates a totally new mode of production and then a new epoch. In short, a society cannot jump epochs; it cannot be a slave society and then a capitalist society by transcending feudalism. A slave society needs feudalism to develop its means of production before it can become a capitalist society. On that note, a feudal society cannot transcend capitalism and become a socialist society immediately. Capitalism is a very necessary mode of production.

Okay now that we’ve established the basics, let’s take on a specific example: Russia. By the Revolution of 1917, Russia was what might be described as a backward country; it was a semi-feudal society with a weak bourgeoisie, a small proletariat, and a population of mostly peasants, petite-bourgeois, and aristocrats. This would be an okay thing but for the fact that the United States and western European countries were already advanced industrial capitalist and imperialist powers. Russia was feudal past its time. In this sense, it was backward. In the feudal societies of the past, the task of leading the liberal democratic revolution, the task of establishing capitalism, fell to the bourgeoisie. Orthodox Marxist doctrine would then hold that Russia’s proletariat could not even think about the socialist revolution until they had allied themselves with the bourgeoisies to overthrow feudalism and establish a capitalist economic order and a bourgeois state. Indeed, this was the position of the first Marxist political party in Russia, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, founded in 1883. The Bolsheviki and Mensheviki factions of the party, which emerged in 1903, didn’t agree on a lot of things but, on this point, they did agree. All Russian Marxists held that a socialist society could not be constructed until feudalism had been overthrown and capitalism had developed the means of production. This was true until the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1905 when a younger member of the party, who had not yet taken a side in the Menshevik-Bolshevik debates developed a new idea which challenged Marxian orthodoxy.

[I’m tired now because it’s 23:54 here. I will continue when I get then chance. That might not be tomorrow. Good night!]

There's more:

Compare the two halves of Germany during the cold war. The western part had three times as much GDP per capita as the Eastern one. Ultimately, you could compare North and South Korea.

Socialist here, and what I've heard/read of Marx has made sense to me.

A country's GDP is a flawed measure of development. It is highly unreliable when there is a massively skewed distribution of the country's wealth.

There was a recent survey in what used to be East Germany. 52% of East Germans said they would like the DDR back.

What age group? Were those surveyed old enough to remember what the the DDR was like?

A homeless American Veteran



A billboard in inner city Havana. It translates "tonight, 200 million children will sleep on the streets...none of them are Cuban"

Actually, i got my figures wrong. Turns out it was 57%.


http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 34122.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 122-2.html

Homesick for a Dictatorship Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism

By Julia Bonstein

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
Info

The life of Birger, a native of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in northeastern Germany, could read as an all-German success story. The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10. After graduating from high school, he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg, lived in India and South Africa, and eventually got a job with a company in the western German city of Duisburg. Today Birger, 30, is planning a sailing trip in the Mediterranean. He isn't using his real name for this story, because he doesn't want it to be associated with the former East Germany, which he sees as "a label with negative connotations."

And yet Birger is sitting in a Hamburg cafe, defending the former communist country. "Most East German citizens had a nice life," he says. "I certainly don't think that it's better here." By "here," he means reunified Germany, which he subjects to questionable comparisons. "In the past there was the Stasi, and today (German Interior Minister Wolfgang) Schäuble -- or the GEZ (the fee collection center of Germany's public broadcasting institutions) -- are collecting information about us." In Birger's opinion, there is no fundamental difference between dictatorship and freedom. "The people who live on the poverty line today also lack the freedom to travel."

Birger is by no means an uneducated young man. He is aware of the spying and repression that went on in the former East Germany, and, as he says, it was "not a good thing that people couldn't leave the country and many were oppressed." He is no fan of what he characterizes as contemptible nostalgia for the former East Germany. "I haven't erected a shrine to Spreewald pickles in my house," he says, referring to a snack that was part of a the East German identity. Nevertheless, he is quick to argue with those who would criticize the place his parents called home: "You can't say that the GDR was an illegitimate state, and that everything is fine today."


As an apologist for the former East German dictatorship, the young Mecklenburg native shares a majority view of people from eastern Germany. Today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 57 percent, or an absolute majority, of eastern Germans defend the former East Germany. "The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there," say 49 percent of those polled. Eight percent of eastern Germans flatly oppose all criticism of their former home and agree with the statement: "The GDR had, for the most part, good sides. Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany today."

These poll results, released last Friday in Berlin, reveal that glorification of the former East Germany has reached the center of society. Today, it is no longer merely the eternally nostalgic who mourn the loss of the GDR. "A new form of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former GDR) has taken shape," says historian Stefan Wolle. "The yearning for the ideal world of the dictatorship goes well beyond former government officials." Even young people who had almost no experiences with the GDR are idealizing it today. "The value of their own history is at stake," says Wolle.

People are whitewashing the dictatorship, as if reproaching the state meant calling their own past into question. "Many eastern Germans perceive all criticism of the system as a personal attack," says political scientist Klaus Schroeder, 59, director of an institute at Berlin's Free University that studies the former communist state. He warns against efforts to downplay the SED dictatorship by young people whose knowledge about the GDR is derived mainly from family conversations, and not as much from what they have learned in school. "Not even half of young people in eastern Germany describe the GDR as a dictatorship, and a majority believe the Stasi was a normal intelligence service," Schroeder concluded in a 2008 study of school students. "These young people cannot, and in fact have no desire to, recognize the dark sides of the GDR."

"Driven Out of Paradise"

Schroeder has made enemies with statements like these. He received more than 4,000 letters, some of them furious, in reaction to reporting on his study. The 30-year-old Birger also sent an e-mail to Schroeder. The political scientist has now compiled a selection of typical letters to document the climate of opinion in which the GDR and unified Germany are discussed in eastern Germany. Some of the material gives a shocking insight into the thoughts of disappointed and angry citizens. "From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people.

Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic. Schroeder finds such statements alarming. "I am afraid that a majority of eastern Germans do not identify with the current sociopolitical system."

Many of the letter writers are either people who did not benefit from German reunification or those who prefer to live in the past. But they also include people like Thorsten Schön.

After 1989 Schön, a master craftsman from Stralsund, a city on the Baltic Sea, initially racked up one success after the next. Although he no longer owns the Porsche he bought after reunification, the lion skin rug he bought on a vacation trip to South Africa -- one of many overseas trips he has made in the past 20 years -- is still lying on his living room floor. "There's no doubt it: I've been fortunate," says the 51-year-old today. A major contract he scored during the period following reunification made it easier for Schön to start his own business. Today he has a clear view of the Strelasund sound from the window of his terraced house.

Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism

By Julia Bonstein

Part 2: 'People Lie and Cheat Everywhere Today'

Wall decorations from Bali decorate his living room, and a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty stands next to the DVD player. All the same, Schön sits on his sofa and rhapsodizes about the good old days in East Germany. "In the past, a campground was a place where people enjoyed their freedom together," he says. What he misses most today is "that feeling of companionship and solidarity." The economy of scarcity, complete with barter transactions, was "more like a hobby." Does he have a Stasi file? "I'm not interested in that," says Schön. "Besides, it would be too disappointing."

His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."

Schön's reasoning is less about cool logic than it is about settling scores. What makes him particularly dissatisfied is "the false picture of the East that the West is painting today." The GDR, he says, was "not an unjust state," but "my home, where my achievements were recognized." Schön doggedly repeats the story of how it took him years of hard work before starting his own business in 1989 -- before reunification, he is quick to add. "Those who worked hard were also able to do well for themselves in the GDR." This, he says, is one of the truths that are persistently denied on talk shows, when western Germans act "as if eastern Germans were all a little stupid and should still be falling to their knees today in gratitude for reunification." What exactly is there to celebrate, Schön asks himself?

"Rose-tinted memories are stronger than the statistics about people trying to escape and applications for exit visas, and even stronger than the files about killings at the Wall and unjust political sentences," says historian Wolle.

These are memories of people whose families were not persecuted and victimized in East Germany, of people like 30-year-old Birger, who says today: "If reunification hadn't happened, I would also have had a good life."

Life as a GDR Citizen

After completing his university degree, he says, he would undoubtedly have accepted a "management position in some business enterprise," perhaps not unlike his father, who was the chairman of a farmers' collective. "The GDR played no role in the life of a GDR citizen," Birger concludes. This view is shared by his friends, all of them college-educated children of the former East Germany who were born in 1978. "Reunification or not," the group of friends recently concluded, it really makes no difference to them. Without reunification, their travel destinations simply would have been Moscow and Prague, instead of London and Brussels. And the friend who is a government official in Mecklenburg today would probably have been a loyal party official in the GDR.

The young man expresses his views levelheadedly and with few words, although he looks slightly defiant at times, like when he says: "I know, what I'm telling you isn't all that interesting. The stories of victims are easier to tell."

Birger doesn't usually mention his origins. In Duisburg, where he works, hardly anyone knows that he is originally from East Germany. But on this afternoon, Birger is adamant about contradicting the "victors' writing of history." "In the public's perception, there are only victims and perpetrators. But the masses fall by the wayside."

This is someone who feels personally affected when Stasi terror and repression are mentioned. He is an academic who knows "that one cannot sanction the killings at the Berlin Wall." However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."

This brings up an old question once again: Did a real life exist in the midst of a sham? Downplaying the dictatorship is seen as the price people pay to preserve their self-respect. "People are defending their own lives," writes political scientist Schroeder, describing the tragedy of a divided country.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

Marx's theories have never worked anywhere. Not once.

ruveyn