Look, I can come across as an ahole about this; mainly because I studied this a lot and briefly taught it. I get annoyed when people misrepresent something. I also have this firm belief that you should have an open mind and study things you disagree with. I'm an agnostic but I've read the Bible, significant parts of the Koran, and some other religious stuff. I'm left of center but I probably read more conservative thinkers than most, and have also read "right wing" thinkers (they ain't the same btw, right wing and conservative). Anyways... I will do this from memory since I do not have much time.
First thing's first. Marxism ain't communism. Communism is what Marx prescribed or thought would happen in the future, based on his understanding of how society works, which is Marxist. This gets to a key point:
1. You can be Marxist and think Communism is incorrect. In fact, you can be Marxist and be for generally free markets.
I would go as far as to say you can be Communist and believe in Capitalism! Google "new economic plan" from the early days of the Soviet Union. Marx believed that just as society transitioned from feudalism to industrial capitalism, society would transform to communism. So if you believed this, then if your society was pre industrial, you would want to encourage capitalism. This was the "new economic plan" of the early years of the Soviet Union. Stalin came in and squashed it.
2. If you think the rich have more power in society than the common person - congrats you are a Marxist.
Fundamental to Marxism is the "Marxist Pyramid." At the top of society is called the "super structure." The super structure are things like governments, courts - but it can also be things like media and religion. Noam Chomsky wrote a book basically applying Marxist thinking to media called "Manufacture of Consent." Read it. It's accurate.
At the bottom are the productive workers. In the middle is the relationships of the workers with the superstructure and the productive factors. That is easier to explain in a bit.
Control of the superstructure is by the people who own the means of production - not the people who work the means of production.
In Feudal society, the bottom was agriculture production, worked by serfs. The superstructure was the nobility and the Catholic Church. The relationships of production to the superstructure was "you work our land in exchange for protection."
Because the nobility owned the means of production, they controlled the superstructure. What that means in practice is that society actively resists any change and the things like the laws and relationships of the workers with the owners get warped to the owners' advantage.
We see this in the Catholic Church's concept of the "Divine Right of Kings." If you are against the King/Queen - you are against God! The superstructure also controls information - try getting a book printed that went against the King!
We also see evidence in the asymmetry of criminal punishments. A commoner could not kill a noble without getting death - whereas nobility could kill a commoner and pay a fine.
What Marxism says that if you drop down into any society, if you want to understand it the first thing you want to know is "who owns the means of production?" From there you can guess that the rules of society would be "warped" to propagate the status quo.
Is that really that crazy?
Now, lets get to how society changes. The current status quo was called the "thesis," and faced risk from the "antithesis." For Feudalism/Nobility, the antithesis was the drastic change in the means of production brought about by industrial capitalism.
Suddenly land wasn't the main source of wealth - or least the main source of huge wealth. Now someone who owned a mill that made clothes had economic power that exceeded someone who only got their wealth from working the land.
Evidence of resistance to change is in the widespread delay tactics that the landed wealth used to prevent the new rich from having any political power - in other words they did not want them controlling any elements of the super structure.
The French Revolution is the ultimate Marxist example - occurring decades before Marx and Engles wrote. By the late 1700s the wealth of the merchant class and the rising middle classes were real rivals to the wealth produced simply by owning land and having it worked. But the superstructure of societies in Europe tended to favor the landed wealth. None of that mattered until the rising merchant and middle classes got actual economic wealth.
But when the non aristocrats did gain wealth, they demanded more power and say in government (part of the superstructure). Predictably, the status quo resisted. Result? BAM - off with their heads. In fact, the entire nobility of Europe reacted just as Marx would have predicted in the future - the nobility of Europe more or less banded together to suppress the French Revolution because what they feared was commoners having power.
To this day, alignment with the Catholic Church is tied with aristocracy in Europe mainly due to the Catholic Church siding with aristocracy during the French Revolution.
Marxism doesn't necessarily call for armed revolt. What it says is that often those in power will cling on to it and resist any attempts to relinquish it by doing violence on their threats. If that happens - yeah you got yourself a violent insurrection.
The alternative model is Edmund Burke and Conservatism. This is the UK. In the UK, the aristocrats slowly and gradually relinquished power until you get to the point today where the monarchy is a figurehead - and they've learned to market themselves to the masses to remain in their position. They know whats up - they know if they piss off the bulk of the citizens of the UK, they will be out because they have no real economic power anymore.
Either way you look at it - French Revolution model or Edmund Burke - the Superstructure is going to change when faced with a new antithesis. Whether its violent or not depends a lot on country specific patterns. If those in charge give the middle finger, well you can expect violence. Slavery in the US was not ended peacefully - weather it could have is another topic but the US Civil War is very definitely a Marxist type challenge to the superstructure. The slave states couldn't handle slowly going away - they demanded expansion.
So now to communism. Well this is where Marx goes away from talking about how society works and into where he thought it would/should go. He saw his duty as to inform the workers of the situation - he really believed it would progress naturally to communism.
His major flaw was he believed in the "Labor Theory of Value." In this view, the only thing that adds to the value of an item is the labor produced to get it. This was a popular view amongst social scientists at the time (1830s). In fact, the guy who came up with it was David Ricardo, who was probably the most important economist until the 1930s. David Ricardo came up with "comparative advantage," which was the main model of international trade until none other than Paul Krugman overturned about 150 years later.
If you believed the only source of value was the labor, then you neglected to understand the role of the capitalist/entrepreneur. If you believed they had added no value, then you might see that the next iteration of society was for the workers to own the means of production. If you believed that the capitalists would resist any efforts to change with violence, then violent overthrow becomes a possible outcome.
Here's the thing though - you should not look at Marx's views on communism from today's point of view. When he wrote about communism, it was at a particularly bleak period in industrialization. In the 1840s people were packing into cities before people knew about public health care. I'm not talking about socialized medicine, I'm talking "don't drink water where you dump sewage." The germ theory of disease hadn't been come up with yet. So life expectancies plunged in the new factory cities. People were drinking raw sewage and there were no public sanitation methods.
I would argue that from what Marx saw as the future, the modern day wealthy democracies would be pretty close to what he would have wanted. Instead of violent overthrow, many societies became more democratic and enacted public health measures like sewer systems and eventually public vaccination efforts.
Marx severely discounted the idea of democracy - probably because at the time very few societies had anything like what we would call a democracy today. His discount of the value of the entrepreneur was effectively fatal to any idea that communism could be economically efficient.
Was he a good person? Well, by all accounts he was a good husband and father. What we do know about him when it comes to communist revolts comes from the Paris Commune in 1870. He did seemed to support the idea that the aristocrats sometimes needed to be shot for progress to be made. But he died before Russia became communist - and he never envisioned Russia being the place where Communism would take hold. I should mention, the guy who executed the Czar and his family had his brother killed by the Czars years earlier. It was personal. The Russian Nobility was not going to go peacefully.
Its easy to look back in hindsight and judge him, but I think if you walked around the factory cities of the time you might feel moved to shoot the capitalists as well. People were living in sewage. The new factories required workers to dig more coal, and digging coal was deadly. We can easily go, "oh he wanted to kill people!" while discounting that the industrialists at the time were more than willing to kill workers to make a profit.
How many people died from the time Tobacco companies knew it was killing people to today? We don't count that as "deaths from capitalism" but it most definitely is. How many people died in WW1 - to me the ultimate example of a war that Marxism explains?
I encourage you to spend some time look up the Socialist Party Platform of the USA in 1912:
http://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm
By many measures, we have more or less become many things that they saw as socialist:
- unemployment insurance
- they demanded a 1.5 day weekend, we got 2.
- shortening the work day (they were working 12+ hour shifts, now we standardized 8 + 1 hour lunch).
- minimum wage
- old age pensions
- income tax
- women can vote
In Marx's utopian society, people would pursue their passions. Is this not possible today? I have a full time job but also a passion project - that would not have been possible in Marx's day.
The key takeaways from Marxism is that in any society, the owners of the means of production will continue to try to warp society and the "relationships of production" (the middle part) to their benefit.
What the rich want to do is turn what used to be a public service into a private profit center for themselves. We used to fund higher education more generously - now students are paying interest on student loans. Who do you think the interest goes to? Same with our national debt. We used to tax the wealthy at much higher rates - now we borrow money from them and guess who gets the interest on that?
Without pushback from the rest of us, the owners of the means of production will walk over us. It doesn't need to be armed insurrection - we have a voting system.
By the way, if you don't start out any reply to this with "BANANA" I will ignore you. Both on this thread and on this site.
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So what about when someone says "We are a Marxist academic department?"
It doesn't mean they are communist. It generally means they believe that the existing power structures will use their available power to keep the status quo. So when it comes to gender studies, it means that if men are in power, men will use their available power to keep it - maybe by only hiring men for jobs, by firing women when they get pregnant, or only hiring women and then pressuring them for sex.
When it comes to Marxism interpretations of race power, it means that if a race has power in society, it will use that power to maintain its dominance. Have you looked into what it would take to immigrate to Japan? That's Marxism and race in action. It isn't controversial because, well they've been pretty damn successful at keeping non Japanese out. But when non Japanese do live in Japan, they treat them like garbage and more or less get away with it. Look up how immigrants are treated in Dubai. That's Marxist racial theory in action.
In America we get upset about it because it's us and we are sensitive about it. It's easy to look at other countries' examples and go, "oh yeah thats obvious," but then when we look at our own we go, "no, it can't be! not me! not us!"
For the record, I think America is the greatest place for racial minorities on the planet. Not even being sarcastic. But Marxist racial analysis definitely applies how "things tend to go" over most human societies and even our own if we are not careful.
Last edited by stratozyck on 08 Apr 2023, 12:05 am, edited 3 times in total.
07 Apr 2023, 11:32 pm
I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man ! 
