Marx’s Problematic Antisemitism · 6:25pm May 16th, 2021
I recently took an interest in Marx’s more marginal positions: those relating to the philosophy of right(s), the concept of statehood, and, furthermore, that of citizenship. My drive was not pure curiosity, however. It was, in all honesty, because of an apparent resurgence in the idea that Marx was an antisemite. This accusation seems to be flung increasingly from the right in an attempt to smear Marx, the communist project, and, collaterally, all the people who harbor a leftist agenda. And I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
My goal here is not to be inflammatory. It is an attempt at exploring a real issue that still carries its fair share vitriol and hate. As such:
CONTENT WARNING: RACISM, ANTISEMITISM
The Russian Loan
Maybe the most egregious example of Marx’s antisemitism can be found in one of his articles in the New-York Tribune: The Russian Loan. This article is often cited in the press, and by the right wing, as the damning evidence that makes Marx out to be an ideological precursor that led down the line to the Shoah.
There is actually no proof that the article was written by Marx, however.
As the article was published anonymously, the main reason that people still attribute the article to Marx today is mostly due to two factors. The article was included in the earliest posthumous compilation of Marx’ works by Eleanor Marx, his youngest daughter, and her husband Edward B. Aveling, a founding member of the Independent Labour Party that still exists today as the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. This inclusion was later repeated by Saul K. Padover in his Karl Marx Library Volume 5 [KML].
There is, however, overwhelming doubts whether Karl Marx wrote that article. The most definitive result contradicting this usual assumption is provided by Hans Jürgen Bochinski and Martin Hundt in their preamble essay [DMME] to the MEGA: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. Based on lexicographic and comparative analysis of Marx’s public and private correspondences (especially those contemporary to the article), there is little evidence that Marx actually wrote The Russian Loan.
The article is in all likelihood the third installment of a series of three articles (The Standing of European Houses, The Loanmongers of Europe, and The Russian Loan) published in the New-York Tribune and misattributed to Marx along with twelve others during the years 1855-1856 [AAMEGA]. Lexicographically congruent, the three articles were identified as probably coming from a single anonymous author who would paint a target on rural and financial capital while omitting industrial capital. This author would furthermore show a strong disregard for the Proletariat, who he would call a ‘Bewusstlose Masse’ (conscious-less mass). These factors, along with a simplistic view of how capital works and a singling out of Jewish banks specifically, should rule out Marx as an author of The Russian Loan.
This rejection of Marx’s authorship of the article was repeated by scholar Kevin B. Anderson [MATM].
Does that mean Marx wasn’t antisemitic?
Sadly, no.
On The Jewish Question
This is in all likelihood the most [in]famous work from Marx that involves Judaism: a nine thousand words pamphlet he wrote 24 years before Das Kapital when he was 25.
This early work by Marx was a direct answer to The Jewish Question by German philosopher Bruno Bauer [BJQ]. Bauer had a strong, if not virulent, secular outlook on political life, reflected in his treatment of religion as part of society and statehood in Prussia, and thus in how it related to minorities. For Bauer, who was also a theologian, Jewish people formed a state within the state, with its own influence. This conspiratory idea would reach its peak with the publication of the Protocol forgery, and furthermore during the nazi period. We still see the whiff of that conspiracy nowadays with QAnon and other far-right groups.
Despite the bad wording and problematic ideas Marx harbored, and which will be presented below, Marx answered Bauer to take the defense of Jewish people against his analysis of Judaism in the context of the Christian state of Prussia. This must be kept in mind.
Marx mocked him for thinking of Jews as having their own “chimerical nationality.” Indeed, Bauer had a strong distaste for Judaism on a theological basis. It was different from Christianism: an antiquated version of it, moreover. In Bauer’s opinion, religions underwent a developmental process like history. As Prussia’s state religion was Christianism, Bauer framed the question of the emancipation of mankind and thus of Prussian people as first and foremost the emancipation of Christians from Christianism. In this context, Bauer did not consider that Jewish people could be emancipated before Christians could. Jews had to undergo a conversion away from Judaism first. Furthermore, Bauer considered that emancipation meant every man should wear the role of a polished, universal citizen within a secular state. Religion had to be destroyed or rendered powerless, and it ought to start with Christianism first.
This view still echoes in France today with the concept of secular laïcité. Social, interpersonal relationships should restrict themselves to the private sphere, while the public, political life would require each individual to act and be secular, if not identical in a sense: each would be part of a unique public life where they would be able to engage with one another equally, fraternally, freely — as citizens.
Marx rebuked this position, but in so doing showed his own variant of what we would consider today a facet of antisemitism.
In the last part of this pamphlet, titled “The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to Become Free,” Marx brings to the table his own historical materialist analysis of his contemporary age: that of pauperism, Capitalism, and the victory of the bourgeois class on the old, estate-based, feudal world order whose toll was sounded with the violent bell of the French revolution.
To Marx, Jews were victims and actors of this new age. His views highlighted Jewish people had been foisted into the practice of usury during the medieval era by Christian persecution. Forbidden to own land, to own property in a general sense, the Jewish people were relegated to mercantile roles and thus, notably, finance. What Marx saw in Capitalism was the triumph of a mercantile class that commodified nature, animals and fellow men. And that mercantile class included Jews.
Marx uses reductionist and problematic wording here. What he sees — beyond Jewish people forced to engage in the apparatus of Capitalism by centuries of Christian persecutions — are Christians emancipating themselves from the yoke of their religion only to enter this mercantile class, the bourgeoisie. The religiously segregated role given to Jewish people was now the aim of the come-uppers of the Christian world, and thus would lead to the generalization of the exploitation of man: Capitalism, and thus pauperisation and the debasement of mankind as a commodified product [KPSR].
As such to Marx, Capitalism was the quintessence, the triumph, of the role that was forced onto Jewish people by Christian sovereigns during the middle age. That role, the bourgeois capitalist class, is a privilege over other humans, but also a burden to be freed from. Here, though it can be refuted in many ways [MML], we could show hints of the master-slave dialectic developed by Marx’s forefather: Hegel.
To Marx, the revolution, the overthrow of Capitalism, was to bring to an end this relation of control and exploitation between classes, which would free the exploited as well as the exploiting from social roles that were either unnatural, or simply inhumane.
That’s why, then, Marx concludes with the highly problematic and thus scrutinized sentence: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” In Marx’s opinion, the social and historical role of Jews in Christian nations like Prussia had to come to an end, along with Capitalism.
In retrospect, Marx had views we would construe today as antisemitic
So, did Marx have problematic views? Did he harbor antisemitic sentiments that reflected his time? Absolutely.
Marx had antisemitic views not on religious consideration, but because he saw in Jewish people a group that was, despite themselves because of historic reasons, part of what had become the bourgeoisie. That view meant for Marx that, for the world to be emancipated from Capitalism, it also implied to emancipate Jewish people from this historical role they were given in Christian societies. Religion is an opiate to be freed from. Christians from Christianism, Jews from Judaism, and because of the social role it implied, Christians and Jews from Judaism.
This essentialization of Jewish people is deeply problematic. And it ought to be reckoned with. Especially since this essentialization, shared among many intellectuals across Europe and even today to some extent in fringe political discourse, led to vile policies, conflicts, and persecutions.
An academic example can be found in Werner Sombart’s work [JW] who wrote on Judaism’s influence on Capitalism as an answer and add-on to Max Weber’s own work on Protestantism [PE].
This outlook was flawed in many regards, showing limits to the then young analysis of the economic changes that went down during the 19th century. K. B. Anderson would go on to write the following, an apt assessment of the limits of Marx’s early analysis:
“Marx’s references to Judaism and Jews were certainly problematic. They showed the downside of an universalist secular outlook that, by condemning all religion, sometimes failed to distinguish between the impact of such attacks on a dominant religion and those on a persecuted minority.” [MATM, p52]
Where does that leave us?
Marx’s antisemitism matters because it highlights the limits of early Marxist thought, where it failed and ought to be overcome. We have been given the hindsight of time and history and thanks to it, people who wish for social, political, and economic change, away from the current state of Capitalism, can build a better analysis and vision for the future.
But furthermore it matters because people must know about it. Because a lack of knowledge about the grim part of young Marx’s thoughts opens the Left to unwarranted dismissal from detractors who are only too eager to use excerpts and tidbits to reject not just Marx but all leftist thoughts.
Marx is too often seen as the end-all and be-all of Leftism among detractors, whether center- or right-leaning people. This is mostly, in my opinion, a consequence of the basic, low-brow McCarthyism we inherited from the 50s. Marx was a spectre as is communism to many. When you don’t know something, it is an impetus to look for an easy target.
Communism wasn’t born with Marx, however, and it didn’t die with him. Neither was socialism. Neither were any leftist development, really. Authors are merely stepping stones in devising, hoping for, fomenting new developments and progresses for the people of the world. Those many projects have been flawed, and will continue to be flawed. Few leftist thinkers believed they had the perfect answer, only one possible answer for a time and a place.
But the mischaracterization is important to the Right, this idea that one or two great thinkers once built an ideology that was then set in stone. This way of thinking, the Right too often ascribes to itself and thus to others. And to the Right, it leaves everyone with a weakness. An Achilles’ heel. Everyone is open to be marred with an original sin. That’s why, in a very Christian fashion, the sins of giants are believed to be, and thus pointed out as, poison in the groundwater of their creations. Whatever comes up the well must therefore be forever tainted.
To the right, if Marx can be cast as the bearer of an original sin, so does the ensemble of the Left.
That’s why we can see so much backlash from the Right against movements like the 1619 Project, the criticism of the so-called Founding Fathers, the questioning of how history and our corpus of knowledge was built. How we consider the way our laws were shaped. To them, those critiques are shining a limelight on their potential original sins. The existence, and the acknowledgment, of those sins could only lead to one thing. Not the evolution of what they cherish towards a better state for all, but its utter, complete undoing. Criticizing the United States for instance can only lead to its destruction, not the coming of increased fairness. Original sins can’t be possible. Cannot be allowed. Because they show an irremediable failure.
That’s why there is a lot of hope in flagging Marx as an antisemite. He ought to be the source of Leftist thought, says the right-leaning pamphleteers. We only know him and a sliver of his thoughts, say them, and therefore there must only be him to attack. And if he is led bare, him and his flaws, then his sins are the sins of all the Left. And thus the Left can be cast away as one.
That’s the hope. The political hope of the right.
Marx was flawed, but he was not the foundation on which the many Leftist projects were built. He was just an important contributor. One that is studied, wholly criticized, unmade, and built upon. That is a hard fact, one filled with nuance that is often forgotten in political debates, by the Left and Right alike.
What did Marx want? emancipation from exploitation for all. Was he flawed in some of his analyses? Yes, absolutely.
It shouldn’t mean Leftism as a whole is a sham. The Right is too eager to ascribe people original sins for it is itself afraid of them.
Don’t fall into that trap. Know your sources. Be prepared and foremost…
Criticize your idols.
Bibliography
- [AAMEGA] Die Marx-Engels-dubiosa des Jahres 1855, Hans Jürgen Bochinski, Aus der Arbeit am MEGA-Band I/14, 2001
- [BJQ] The Jewish Question, Bruno Bauer, 1843
- [DMME] Die Mitarbeit von Marx und Engels an der ‘New York Tribune’, Hans Jürgen Bochinski, Martin Hundt, Ute Emmrich, Manfred Neuhaus, MEGA I/14, 2001
- [JW] The Jews and Modern Capitalism, Werner Sombart, 1911
- [KPSR] On The King of Prussia and Social Reform, Karl Marx, Vorwarts!, No.63, August 7 1844
- [KML] Karl Marx Library, Volume 5: On Religion, Saul K. Padover - McGraw-Hill, 1974
- [MATM] Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Kevin B. Anderson, University of Chicago Press, 2016
- [MML] Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology, Chris Arthur, New Left Review, November-December 1983, pp. 67–75
- [PE] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, 1905
Who the hell is Marx
5519970
AH! You gave me a hearty chuckle.
5519974
Glad to make you laugh but I’m serious what or who is Marx
5519985
Karl Marx, an influential leftist thinker from the 19th century.
The problems of communism have very little to do with Marx being an antisemite. The proper argument against someone calling Marx an antisemite is a nuanced look at historical figures, and a note that ad hominem being a fallacy has little to do with whether the accusations are true.
The question should never be "was the person who came up with my ideas a bad person", but "do the ideas work?" Now I, and almost all economists, would point out that a command and control economy that many communists theoreticians go for is inherently impossible because of it being impossible to calculate. Also, from a rights based perspective, one could argue that it is immoral because a communist society is built on the foundation of violence and theft.
But arguing that Marx was antisemetic by itself is a stupid argument that goes nowhere. It doesn't attack communism itself, just a (admittedly major) advocate, and crucially, there'd need to be a whole 'nother step added to prove that his antisemitism passed onto his political philosophy in such a crucial way that future adherents were stained by it.
Sure, Marx was bad because of his antisemitism, but most on the right attack him for spawning the bloodiest, most totalitarian ideology of the 20th century, rather than for the commonly held views of his time.
5520117
I think you misunderstood my blog, or may not have read it to the end (I addressed your last paragraph). I am in favour of communism, socialism, any system that would put people before profit. Contrary to what we have today.
The argument that communism is inefficient can also be returned against capitalism. There is no proof capitalism is efficient. The fact that abundance and starvation coexist in the world would actually imply the contrary. The existence of abject poverty next to billionaires, as well.
My point wasn't to "debunk" communism, but to shine a light on a very common defamation tactic from the right.
5520144
I will kindly disagree. The existence of stalinism doesn't imply communism is bad. Furthermore, capitalism could be considered the most bloody as well.
The utter debasement of Africa through colonialism is one among many examples of the consequence of capitalism.
5520170
If it was restricted to JUST Stalinism, and all the other variations on communism had been a success, you might have a point; however, it isn't, so you don't. Capitalism has led to the most prosperous and peaceful era humanity has ever experienced. If you can point to a better system of wealth creation with proven results, I'd like to see it. Given the genocides we can lay at the feet Marx's ideological children, I don't think it is even worth considering as a viable option. As is often said, "it's been tried," and failed to improve the human condition every time.
I'm not saying capitalism is flawless; colonialism is certainly inextricably intertwined with political and economic enterprise of its time (not to mention that colonialism is not simply a characteristic of capitalism; noncapitalist nations have engaged in it as well). However, capitalism is also contributing to numerous African countries growing economies, and is the most free/efficient exchange of labor, wealth, and resources. Capitalism doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than the alternatives. So far, it has been.
5520170
So first, I definitely understood that you were in favor of communism. What I did agree with you on was that the particular argument you were debating was a bad argument that had logical fallacies if one was to apply it to indict communism. Now, I do think that communism is up there with Fascism in terms of evil, but I do agree with you there.
As for you claim about there's no evidence of capitalism being efficient, this is just wrong. Theoretical economics have disproved this with the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, which is basically the 'invisible hand' in mathematical form, with few axioms needing to be taken. Even when those axioms are relaxed, the theorems still mostly hold. Here's a decent start of the explanation (yes, it's wikipedia, but for math or econ proofs that's fine, as the proof is laid out there for one to read themselves).
Effectively, the welfare theorems state that there is a trade off between equity and efficiency, which means that the more equal everyone is forced to be by government intervention, the less wealth the group will have as a whole.
Then empirically, it is backed up by a number of studies as well, along with the greatest study, that of history, which shows how command economies cannot keep up. On top of that, most wealth transfers don't even go where they are targeted to go. For example, take the minimum wage, a classic government intervention . Even a meta study done by a minimum wage proponent found that 80% of min wage studies found an employment loss. And the study finds that this is compounded when looking at low wage jobs and low education workers.
You also haven't addressed the immorality of capitalism. Quite simply, it is wrong to go to someone, and take their stuff at gunpoint. And this is what communism, outside of voluntary communes, demands. If you and your group want to engage in communism, capitalism will even let you do it! Just as long as you don't force others into it.
See, this is the great moral difference between the two. Capitalism is fundamentally about consent. It's fundamental unit is the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and everything builds from that. Communism is based on not asking if the individual consents. It just takes without regard for the individuals consent. And we have a word for people who don't ask consent.
5520334
I hope you don't mind but I'm definitely stealing that.
5520219
In all likelihood you have not read communist theory. Capitalism is considered a phase of history that has had beneficial effects, but also terrible ones. Communist theory stipulates that capitalism has outstayed its welcome.
I'd argue that colonialism is an embedded and necessary part of capitalism because it relies on exploitation of resources (including human resources) at large scales.
Mentioning that capitalism has lifted Africa out of poverty is a lie. There are more people in extreme poverty today than there has ever been. It shows that capitalism is not able to provide equal wealth growth and opportunity for everyone, or able to provide the existing basic demand for decent living. Furthermore, the vast majority of people who have been lifted out of poverty over the past four decades are located in China. I doubt China is the epitome of capitalism however.
5520334
I will argue the opposite. Capitalism is not about consent. The existence of a set of offers does not imply that set is efficient or that there is consent in the choices being offered and made. Someone facing homelessness or a dead-end starvation wage does not appear to me as having a choice that involves a modicum of consent.
There is an issue in economic theory with regards to what constitutes an efficient equilibrium as well as what constitutes scientific thinking. A consensus in the US among economists that a minimum wage would imply a negative impact on jobs seems like a well duh moment. The economics of research shows that what is published is basically what is being funded. Most of economic research in the US happens to be industry-led.
If you go outside of the US, say Europe, the research would imply a different image.
Now, with regards to the use of equilibrium, economics and especially econometrics have strong assumptions that are unscientific. The use of epsilon variables as a portemanteau, or like in your Edgeworth box example, the oversimplification to two goods X and Y.
5520359
It's a poor taste choice of words, especially since it is already used for something else.
5520359
Economics isn't a respectable profession/field. Money is at the end of the day, a made-up idea. You see it as a resource, and this is true to your life. To the owners of capital, however, money is a tool with which to control the people below you in the hierarchy. More money, the more control you have. The overwhelming number of jobs consist of a cryptic spider-web of informal agreements made between capital owners about how to diffuse just enough money to the lower classes and elevate some others to create division. However, as is with the case of greed, they can never be sated. The 11 top billionaires in the world hold more wealth than 3.6 billion people around the world.
I shouldn't have to tell you how unsustainable this is. If you view money as a resource, then its distribution should mirror that of a trophic pyramid. Those who produce the materials that keep society functioning, those who give their labor should hold the most wealth overall. What we have now is an inverted pyramid, and as history shows, it only takes one precipitous event to cause it to crumble.
Our current track record is hurtling past capitalism. Where we're headed is neo-feudalism.
5520219
Colonialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism. It is the accruing of land and resources by mercilessly exploiting, murdering, dislocating the native population, and destroying the land. Your sheer display of ignorance in Africa is astonishing, go tell the children in cobalt mines. 40-50% of the people south of the Sahara don't get enough food. Their wealth has been stripped from the land by colonizers. Western countries are holding them prisoner with debt, the pharmaceutical industry is interested in keeping Africa as a cash cow. I can go on, I have several hundred more examples of the injustices committed to Africans at the hands of capitalists/colonialists
5520366
Ah yes, I disagree with you, therefore I must be ignorant or ill-informed. Very good faith argument. Setting aside the implication that communist theory is worth reading (I have; it isn't), communists consistently try to force the "endstate" before capitalism's usefulness is over. Capitalism is the premier system of wealth creation, which communism consistently fails at, and communism can only operate successfully in a post-scarcity, non- or reduced-hierarchic society, which it is incapable of creating on its own. Communism may be the logical endpoint of capitalism, but communists inevitably try to argue that capitalism is dead before this state has been reached. And, given the nature of humanity to craft hierarchies, likely never will reach, in the utopian sense. But hey, what's a couple hundred million dead weighed against paradise, amirite?
The existence of successful and rising noncolonial capitalist economies disproves this, Nigeria being a decent example. You might argue that the global economy is one of economic colonialism, but redefining mutually beneficial trade between nations as colonialism destroys the value of the term.
Not lifted, is lifting. Present tense, as in, "in the process of." If you've been paying attention to the numbers coming out of Africa, a number of nations are, or at least, were, experiencing significant growth. Much though the west likes to dismiss Africa as a continent of civil war, jungles, and third world living, things are improving, if the west cared to pay attention. And you may not have noticed, but there are also many billions more people alive today than there have ever been; stands to reason that many would be in poverty, given it is the default state of human existence. Further, poverty has been on a consistent decline on the world stage for the last... what? 60 years or so? Regardless, as I've stated, capitalism doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better the alternatives, and when the alternative is communism that's a very low bar to surpass.
Also yes, China is a strange case; they have something that's arguably closer to a fascist system than a communist one, these days, and they've become capitalist in all but name in many respects. But communism and fascism are both totalitarian and abhorrent to anyone who cares for human rights, so I don't think that the distinction matters all that much. Given Tibet and the ongoing Uyghur genocide, if you're going to argue that China remains a communist state I think you're merely adding to my point about the genocidal nature of communism.
Again, no one argues that capitalism is flawless. However, it is demonstrably less flawed than anything communism has given us, and trying to force communism before capitalism achieves a state of post-scarcity as a consequence of its wealth creation mechanisms just results in genocide, starvation, and poverty. Consistently. Where are the successful, non-genocidal communist regimes? I'd love to know. From a pragmatic perspective, capitalism just has better results than communism. I'm sorry, I know that's not what you want to hear, but que sera sera.
5520368
I don't give much credence to the moral preferences of communists, honestly. That said, poor taste or not it's rather accurate.
I get it, you're an idealist, but communism simply isn't capable of functioning on the scales necessary for it not to devolve into a mess of corruption, starvation, and genocide. Communism works on the scale of a family, and it can sometimes work for dedicated communes, but it can't work against the human condition. People are not a perfectible species, we are not geared towards ideals. Capitalism harnesses our demons and bends them to mutually beneficial ends, while communism pretends we don't have them, and so is blind to their effects.
5520369
Something something, communism is to economics what sociology is to the sciences.
No. Just... just no. Next you're going to tell me that the solution to national debt is to just print more money.
Ah yes, I see what you're saying: the world is controlled by the shadowy strings of an elite cabal of the ultrawealthy. And let me guess, next you're going to tell me that they all have Jewish surnames. And that the democrats stole the 2020 election. And that Bush did 9/11. Are the chemtrails are turning the frogs gay, too?
Pull the other leg, dude. If you're going to pull a Super Tramp, at least be honest about your bigotry instead of tiptoeing around it. You're not fooling anyone.
Alexa, what is the Pareto Principle? Jokes aside, the labor theory of value is garbage and always has been garbage. Not even going to touch on the implications of theft here. But, let's say, hypothetically, we were to take ALL the wealth on the planet and divvy it up equally. Want to know how wealthy you're be?
There's what, about $360 trillion of wealth, let's divide that by 7.6 billion... and we get....!
Wow! You'd get a whopping one-time payment of $47,000!
And somehow, that supposed neofeudalism continues to be better than the outcomes of any communist project worth mentioning. HMMMMMMM.
So, care to explain the successful and noncolonial capitalist economies of the world, then? To pick an example I used above, Nigeria, for instance? Or maybe Taiwan? Japan?
Ah yes, Africa only exists as a third world hellhole, and it's entirely the fault of the west. Certainly none of the blame can be laid at the feet of the local warlords and the corrupt institutions! And it's not like Africans are comprised of many different tribes and cultures that clash with each other. I suppose you're going to tell me that the only reason the Tutsi and the Hutu hate each other is because of the secret capitalist cabal? And the warlords of the Congo are just acting out against capitalist oppression?
The colonial powers of Europe are not blameless. But I fail to see how communism, which consistently presents WORSE results than capitalism, could solve the problems of Africa. And, given the violent territorial expansion of communist states, I'm doubtful that a communist Europe would have left Africa any less plundered.
5520376
Supposing you haven't read the content you criticizes is a fair assessment given you're basing your arguments on mischaracterizing them.
Marx for instance never said capitalism was not a system that created wealth. Only that the wealth was the product of exploitation.
Something of note in your arguments is that you are setting capitalism as the "best system." But the question then is, according to whom? according to which metrics?
If you quantify capitalism's success by the amount of billionnaires a country has created, I'd conceed the point. However, capitalism has beyond any doubt led to the exploitation of people and their pauperisation for the benefit of the few.
You mention Nigeria as an example of capitalistic success. You'd be forgetting that their economic growth is due to two factors: demography and oil. Nigeria's development thanks to the petrochemical industry is hardly extensible to Africa, contrary to what you suppute. Furthermore, that development mostly serves a corrupt government sponsored by foreign, western interests, which is often called neoliberalism.
You also mention lifting people out of poverty. That is fairly easy to claim when the world bank has barely updated what they consider the extreme, and metrically artificial, poverty line of $1 a day ($1.9 today). That was set in 1990 and was barely updated since. Keeping it low will help claiming success in achieving poverty reduction. It is, understandably, a controversial measure, and something that shouldn't be waved in triumph.
The CIA has a tendency to coup those countries, ain't it? Chile for instance in the Allende era. Capitalism, though, can fairly consider itself a successful genocidal system: native population slained or enslaved, the destruction of China through the opium wars, the English genocides in India, etc.
5520359
Please do, it's the best argument. Instead of attacking whether Communism works, it attacks the moral basis.
5520366
So a lot of problems here, let's go through them.
First, it definitionally is about consent. Just like if someone is uglier, poorer, or less famous than another, they don't have as many choices about who to have a relationship with (whether this is good or not is up to debate, but it is true), the same holds for wealth and ability to buy. Saying that being poor is non-consensual is much like an incel saying his celibacy is nonconsensual. It might be sad, but to forcibly change this would be very morally wrong.
See, I was a kinkster, and out of that I became an ardent pro-capitalist once I realized how important consent was, and how only capitalism allows for it.
Here, you are denying the science because it disagrees with your politics. First, the theoretical stuff is just true. I can personally walk you through it, and it really doesn't matter who funds a math paper, the proof is right there in the paper (and theoretical econ is basically math). Second, as for the funding question, this was written by a minimum wage proponent.
Episilon variables aren't a portemanteau, and literally cannot be, because that's not what portemanteau means. The variables themselves aren't mixtures of two words (it's from a greek letter), nor are they large suitcases.
Second, the use of episolon variables is just because economists like to hide the calculus, but it works with calculus as well. Now you might argue that discrete quantities make using calculus a problem, but it really doesn't, one just needs a better definition of calculus, which fortunately does have definitions outside of Reimann's definition, including discrete calculus which we can use here.
Second, the oversimplification of goods problem. First, one of the goods is usually money, which is traded for the other good. The other good can actual increase not just in quantity, but also in quality (in econ, quality can be a quantity of its own!).
So neither of these objections actually does away with the problem.
5520368
I mean, that's the thing. That too was economic rape, as the Africans also weren't asked for their consent before they were brutalized and their stuff taken. Which is why that colonialism is not true capitalism, by the way. If consent isn't asked, capitalism cannot occur. Now the products of that evil can be injected into capitalist systems later, and be motivated by capitalism to do so, but the same can be said for the products from communist countries (even ideal communist countries) who export stuff that is used by capitalists. It doesn't make communism's failings the fault of capitalist countries, any more than colonialism.
See, capitalism can encourage bad behavior, this is true. But so can pretty women. But to blame one's behavior on the woman would be both incorrect as well as morally wrong.
Economics doesn't just deal with money though. It is the discipline of science that studies how people respond to incentives. From the edgeworth diagrams I linked to, Economists don't need money to exist to do what they do, it's just useful.
5520376
Unequal trade relationships have always been one of colonialism's strongest tools. This is why colonies are so brutally efficient at establishing the colonizer's currency as the standard, often the one taxes need to be paid in, and then ensuring that trade is the means to acquire that currency. This isn't a historic artefact - look at petrodollars.
This is because it creates a moral language for the extraction that occurs; A paying of debts, of what is owed, that is more effective than outright slavery. It maximizes what can be extracted from a people and minimizes external violent intervention needed.
This is why, citing former OxFam economist Jason Hickel, the amount extracted from the developing world through inequal trade relationships annually is twenty six times the amount that is received through aid and foreign investment. Poor countries are not poor because they are underdeveloped, but because they are being deliberately underdeveloped.
Even if I agree with the premise, and I simply don't, at current economic growth distributions, the world average per-person income would need to be $1.3 million US to lift 95% of its population above the far more accurate $5-per-day poverty line, an absolutely ludicrous amount.
Standards of living in many of these countries was greater in the 1500s than it is today - higher than Western Europe at the time. By the 1800s, China and India's share of global GDP had been cut from 65% to 10%.
No, it is something that has happened in the last five hundred years that has made these countries poor, and it is not a natural or inevitable state of affairs.
Keralas, India. Chiapas, Mexico. Cuba's got an extremely high quality of life relative to its GDP, and it exists without the benefit of "mutually beneficial trade". Most surveyed people in former Soviet states also believe life was better under the USSR, and while I will agree with its problems, your argument is that capitalism is the least bad system. To put it bluntly, it is the worst indictment I can give that the Soviets were better.
The vast majority of people lifted from poverty in the 20th century were Chinese, and while I disagree that it is communist, it is also notably not the liberal capitalism you are championing. Global poverty statistics that do no include China show an increase in absolute poverty, both in real terms and as a percentage.
Anyway, what gets me is that you're really smug about your ignorance in a way that implies other people just haven't done the reading or don't care enough. And like, lol.
5520388
Equating the cringe-inducing people who moan about women independence and people born into intergenerational poverty, and insisting their situation is one of choice is of poor taste. Furthermore, it is not because one was dealt a bad hand in life that they deserve living in abject poverty. This comparison does not stand on its own. In all honesty, it feels more revealing of the contemptuous views you may have.
Thanks for explaining French to me. If I wanted to be as grammatically pedantic as you are, I could point out that it is:
. In general modeling, epsilon is a noise variable. However in econometrics and economy, it is used a portemanteau variable, a blend, a holdall of everything not studied by the model. Statistically, this is wrong and yet it is prevalent in economic modeling. Which is why economic methodology is shoddy at best, partial and political at worse.
First, it's statistics. Second statistical methodology disagrees with econometrics and economy being sound in the way it is practiced today. Furthermore, if economists "hide" behind calculus, shouldn't it mean they try to hide something, meaning they are not practicing their craft earnestly, which would imply a lack of truthfulness like you supposed previously.
Economics is a flawed science in the way it is performed, collected and financed. It doesn't mean it is wrong per se. But it sure means its results ought to be scrutinized and thoroughly critiqued because they have a real world impact on billions.
5520388
You're explaining French to a French person who's using a French word with a French definition. The intended meaning might not exist as a definition in English, but you know, you can try to understand what is meant with a word if you encounter it in an unusual situation.
Here it stands for an amalgamation of different things. You know, almost like you'd put multiple things into one large suitcase! Wow, what a coincidence that this metaphor works out this way, almost as if there was a general linguistic principle at work here…
The usual epsilon in calculus is defined via "let epsilon be arbitrarily small", which is… you know, that's an assumption, and it's an assumption about the real world when you use epsilon to represent things in the real world. This is not a trivial assumption at all, but a rather strong one – and without backing evidence, it's an utterly unscientific assumption.
But the epsilon in econometrics isn't a calculus epsilon either, if I got that right (I studied mathematics, not economics), but a statistics epsilon. Such an epsilon is supposed to be a random variable with normal distribution with expectation 0, which is a pretty strong assumption to make, and which is an unscientific assumption in economics papers, since they just throw everything they're not looking at into this variable, without any evidence backing that the random variables they're throwing in there have normal distribution around 0. The way economists do it, you can add an arbitrary term to any formula and then just have it be correct by also adding epsilon. It is, mathematically speaking, complete and utter bullshit.
Also the math students I know who do economics for their non-mathematical topic all agree that the mathematics in economics is shoddy, bad, bullshit, inaccurate and absolutely and utterly deranged. I've never met a math student who had read an economics paper and thought that, in general, economics papers contain sound proofs. The mathematical quality of economics papers is abysmal. Which is really striking since it's also all on such a low level.
If it's pure math, it can't say anything about the real world. If it says anything about the real world, it's not pure math.
And this kind of overconfidence in your "mathematically pure proofs" is exactly why economics isn't a real science. This has nothing to do with me "disagreeing politically", but all with economics doing extremely bad empirical work. You know, the thing that's not pure mathematics.
So yeah, for empirical work it absolutely matters who funds the paper. And without empiricism you're just playing around with symbols. That's what pure mathematics is: Playing around with symbols. It can't be anything else. If it's anything else, it's not pure math anymore.
The empiricism you find in economics in general has two problems:
1. Confirmation bias when you look at anything regarding the stock market
2. Non-representative groups for experiments that look at economic interactions between people in a laboratory setting. Economists like to think that economics is independent of culture, but you know, people actually did once do economic experiments with people that were not American students, and lo and behold, turns out globally Westerners are outliers, Americans are outliers among Westerners (and in a way that makes them less outliers than the rest of Westerners) and students again are outliers among Americans. So, uh, all of the data you usually get there are extremely representative of one very unusual part of humanity, and a complete outlier for humanity as a whole. And since this is the kind of economics that's enforced all over the world with violence, it kinda feels like… uhm… colonialism.
And this Scotsman is not a True Scotsman!
Dude, what do you think the word was used for when it was coined in the early 19th century? For free market philosophy that didn't exist yet?
5520376
I love how you equate these two things:
1. antisemitism
2. believing that wealth inequality exists and money comes with political power
You're really reaching here, watch out you don't pull a muscle!
Also very astute observation that… uh… Alex Jones fans are sympathetic towards communism? What parallel universe do you live in?
5520388
It's a useful one and delightfully pithy, I'll grant you, though I'm not certain it's the best; communists lose the moral argument the instant they advocate for communism, given what it entails. I'm not sure how effective a moral argument is to the immoral; it might help pop the self-righteous bubble, though. Ah, hell, if it helps them realize theirs isn't the moral position, so much the better.
5520383
And I never said he didn't. But, for the record, he's wrong. Wealth is not a solely product of exploitation. Some of it may be, but a voluntary transaction that benefits both participants and creates wealth isn't. Again, keyword on it being voluntary and consensual. Capitalism has that capacity, communism does not.
It's not even about what's the best system; I'm sure that out there, somewhere over the rainbow, there exists a system that is superior to capitalism morally, economically, etc. etc. However, that fabled better system is not the blood-drenched corpse of communism, shambling along as it is.
It can be, and exploitation is bad, which is why we have regulations and labor laws. Under a capitalist system, the government can enact legislation that curtails the capacity for capitalism's excesses to do harm. Under a communism system, it is the government that sets its boot upon your neck, with the might of its military and the eyes of its gestapo. There are no protections under communism, because the people are its currency, and it is always so happy to spend.
Annnnd this disproves their being a noncolonial capitalistic economy that's doing well enough and improving how? Again, we already know communism doesn't work, while capitalism is consistently proving itself time and time again. Do you think their lot would be better off under a communist system? Do you want to try again? "This time, it'll work for sure! I mean it, guys!" How many lives have to be thrown into the meat grinder before you realize your utopia is hell? Communism and corrupt, totalitarian governments go hand in hand, because communism requires a totalitarian, oppressive regime to function. Capitalism has degrees of separation from government, distributing some of the power to avert or even prevent the abuses that inevitably occur under a communist system. Is it going to be perfect? No, but I never said it would be. But capitalism doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the alternative, and it does that in spades.
You can reform a corrupt government with a capitalist economy. To reform a communist system means revolution and bloody slaughter.
I can understand being skeptical to some degree, but that's still a clear indication that people are moving upward. The bar may be set intentionally low, but people are continuing to rise above the bar, and this is important to note because those people rising out of extreme poverty are those who were in most dire need of help. Is it not as good as it could be? Sure. But I don't see communism doing anything about it, and I don't think communism is capable of it. You can't redistribute a problem like that out of existence. I mean, they could always stick the poor in gulags and work camps, which would certainly give them better employment numbers and hey, if any of them die then that reduces the number of citizens in extreme poverty!
Who knew that
nationalizingstealing nationalizing the assets of American businesses under flimsy pretenses and causing massive inflation for your economy counts as successful communism? Seriously. If you're going to break deals and steal other people's stuff, you can expect that the international community won't play ball, and certainly not America in the middle of the Cold War. Fuck around, find out. That Chile's local economies got propped up by thriving black markets that seem to be a characteristic of communist regimes amuses me to no end. Even when communism is working well, it needs capitalist enterprises to care for its people!So, that's Allende. Do you have any examples that don't involve mass inflation and confiscation of property bolstered by a capitalist black market in the middle of a Cold War between rival superpowers?
Anyways, as far as the CIA and the rest goes, we're muddying the waters between political and economic. That I can even make that distinction is a privilege that capitalism enjoys, that communism does not. The wars of the past are bad, agreed. But we have capitalist economies operating just fine without massive wars and genocides going on now, while every time we've tried communism we end up with genocide and slaughter. With capitalism it's a bug; with communism it's a feature.
5520395
Satire and hyperbole are wasted upon you, I see. But, to be blunt, communism and antisemitism tend to go hand-in-hand, as it happens. UK's Labour party feat. Corbyn, anyone? The Soviets? Our dear, dear friend Super Tramp?
5520414
Are people who have to choose between starvation/minimum wage and homelessness (often due to factors such as intergenerational poverty) in a situation of voluntary transaction?
This is quite a baseless take because the concept of human resources was created by managers in the context of capitalistic enterprise. Your point can be easily dismissed here because you see human lives being priced under capitalism. It even has a name in many respects such as in insurance: actuarial work.
Nigeria is still colonial. Look up who control their oil industry and how corruption works there. The country's GDP doesn't imply per se human development for the nigerians. GDP doesn't mean much when the profit is made and seized by foreign companies.
If the bar is set intentionally low, it also hide that the wages of the poor are not increasing at the inflation rate. That's why there is so much talk about the minimum wage. You can say that more people are earning a wage above $7.5ph today, but it doesn't say anything about 1995 $7.5 being worth 2018 $15. The use of the poverty line statistics is a number game that development economists tend to use to pat each other on the back.
Point is, a country taking back its industries from a colonial power like the United States, which also happened in Cuba or Iran (which the US also couped or tried to coup before and after) for instance, feels like the actual emancipatory and moral action to do. Self determination et al. Also, Chile had a stronger inflation under Pinochet than under Allende, which maybe mean that the economic situation wad maybe less due to the person in place but rather because there was an oil crash at the same time.
You show here that you show profound disregard for the freedom of countries under the boot of neocolonial powers like the US. Fuck around and find out? What is this basis for your geopolitical outlook? It is okay to stomp countries if it is in the interest of the US political aims is what you stand for.
You mention that economics and politics shouldn't be muddied, but history shows the two are indistinguishable.
5520414
I'd say equivocating criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism (and thus claiming that Judaism is accurately and completely represented by Israel and that all that Israel does is inherently ever only motivated by Judaism) is more antisemitic than anything Corbyn ever did or said.
I am not sure whether you realized what this blog post is about. Have you read it?
Are you daft? Are you aware what the gestapo was and who it served? Do you know what unions are? Do you know what the NSDAP did to unions? Do you know the communist position on unions, in comparison?
Is all of your political education coming from alt-right talking points?
Please elaborate what your definition of "communism" is, since what you're blathering here has nothing to do with communist theory or practice. This is Red Scare bullshit you're talking. Pure propaganda. The USSR and other communist countries had a lot of problems, but what you're talking about here is… uh… deranged nonsense.
It's disproving it because most people in Nigeria are not helped by this improvement. Hence the question "What is the measure for improvement and who does it serve?"
We know this how and how does capitalism prove itself time and time again?
Does it prove itself when it destroys ecological habitats and displaces whole ethnic groups from their native land for oil pipelines?
Does it prove itself in destroying the Amazon rain forest so much that it's now a net-positive (which is negative) for CO₂ emissions?
Does it prove itself by surpassing the Communist death toll every few years in India alone, if we apply the same standards that that absurdly idiotic book about the Communist death toll came up with?
I could go on with these questions, but honestly, it's a bit tiresome.
Dude, only because you willingly close your eyes to the running meatgrinder doesn't mean that it's a less horrible meatgrinder than the one you're talking about.
Also, holy shit, communism had about half a century to "prove itself", while capitalism has been running for between two and three centuries now. And you know what? The countries that were exiting the initial horrible period of communism did a lot better on many metrics than capitalist countries do now, after literal centuries of uninterrupted capitalist history.
What do you base this on? Again, what's the definition of communism you're using here? Do you base it on half a century worth of history? Do you even know anything about the end of the GDR? Like, are you basing this off less than even the little bit of communist history we even have?
lol
Again, how does this happen? What's the mechanism you're talking about here?
How does "People control the means of production they operate" => "top-down control" hold true?
Look, I know, your idea of communism is "central planning", but that's bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about. Communism doesn't even presuppose a state. As long as people have control over the things they work with, it's, by definition, communism.
Oh, so you don't know anything about the end of the GDR!
Like, this is just historically false. The GDR was a… well, it was socialist, but it was "socialist" in the same way the USSR was, so you'd have to call it "communist" either way if you're gonna call the USSR "communist". To be fair, the label "socialist" is entirely as inaccurate as "communist" is for both of them.
To get back to the point: The GDR was a "real-existing socialist country", as it called itself. When it failed it was reformed in a pinch, and it could've been reformed further and existed independently of the FRG without any bloodshed. It also would've been less centralized than a normal capitalist country.
But, yeah, even if you disagree with that last bit: The GDR was literally reformed into a capitalist part of the FRG without any bloodshed. Also now almost everyone who back then voted for joining the FRG wishes they hadn't and more than 30 years later Germany still hasn't "healed" while the living standard has been continuously going down for a lot of people, both in the east and west. And by "living standard" I mean "control over your own life".
Wait, to think of it… The reform of the USSR to Russia, what was the bloodshed, there, again?
I think you're kind of misunderstanding something here: Monarchies and capitalist countries will never be reformed into something else without bloodshed. Which is why communist countries usually start out in bloodshed. Because they were under monarchist or capitalist control before.
You know, inflation in poor countries does happen, and it does apply to things such as food and water. So if you don't take inflation into account (or only the generally lower inflation that also includes luxury and high-tech articles), you're lying.
And if you take that inflation of basic necessities into account, more people now aren't able to access them than before, and it's getting worse, not better.
But I guess such a big-brained economics-prodigy as you knows a reason why suddenly inflation isn't real or doesn't matter. Or why people who don't have secure access to food and water are better off because computers are cheaper and much more powerful now and how their capitalist autocratic overlords raking in tons of money benefit their personal well-being.
Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US. And you know what's even funnier? Their life expectancy rose while their GDP was sinking.
Also Cuba did, absolutely, not only relatively, the most work regarding Tchernobyl.
Also Cuba has the highest concentration of medical practitioners. They're also good enough, obviously, because, see life expectancy.
Oh, and Cuba, absolutely, sends the most teachers and medical practitioners abroad into developing countries.
Also I wanted to ask: You claimed communism is inherently tied to genocide. What was Cuba's genocide again?
That's funny that you say that while the US exists. You know, the country that continuously throughout all of its history has stolen land, manpower, resources and whatever else from other countries, even without flimsy pretenses. Well, also sometimes with, but those were more for the US populace than anyone else, really.
Funny how you seem to think that "oh no, people stole my property (which I only did rent-seeking with, also I had slaves)" is a valid excuse for installing a dictator instead of a democratically elected leader.
Also funny is that you seem to think that property is a higher value than democracy. Which is absolutely what you think, otherwise you couldn't reasonable even come up with the idea that it's okay to replace a democratically elected leader with a dictator. You know, because then whether property is valid is a question of democratic control.
Also no, property is not a naturally given right. Nomadic cultures often don't recognize property at all, and cultures that didn't have a conception of property dominate the history of humanity. Most of them got extremely much worse when the concept of property was introduced to them.
You seem to think that a black market must be capitalist in nature.
You are aware that "market" is not the definition of capitalism? The definition of capitalism is the ownership of capital. You know, that people can own tools without also using them themselves. That's capitalism. The idea that you are somehow entitled to what someone else does with your tools.
It amuses me to no end how you support capitalist regimes that often enough impose politically motivated embargoes against communist countries and then turn around and talk about how evil state regulation of markets is.
You know, the black markets usually existed because smuggling wares into a country means that the government there doesn't get any taxes off of it. The markets were black not because communist countries were against trade with capitalist countries, but because they were against people smuggling wares past customs.
Wow, look at you, you little precious naive little bugger, thinking that politics and economics are separate!
What a joke.
Politics is about power, ultimately. You know, the agency to make decisions. What do you think this agency derives from? Do you know you need stuff to do things? Like, are you aware of basic physical principles of preservation of energy and mass?
5520423
There's something that I often notice about leftist arguments. You choose the rare, emotionally charged case as though it was the most common. Under capitalism, you can live off stamps and welfare and unemployment, and seek help from government programs to find work. There exist support systems, even if they are not perfect. And in the end, the choice of what to do is yours, not forced upon you by someone else.
But, to turn it around, would it be better to be forced to work at gunpoint? Sent to the work camps if you object or protest? Left to languish because the centrally planned economy has no use for you, or hasn't scheduled production of enough food, or allocated it properly? And god help you if you try to work to change the Workers' Utopia for the better. Disappeared, or imprisoned? So on.
Communism has no leg to stand on, here.
Sounds like capitalists caring for their workers to me; you take care of and use your workers to their best effort, and they'll take care of you. Meanwhile, how much care was given to the workers in the gulags? In the mines, and in the reactors? How much care was given to the Kulaks and the educated classes? Why are the party leaders so fat, I wonder, while their precious comrades starve in the millions? Why are the dissenters not allowed to speak, and why does the black market need to exist if the communist system is so flawless? And why, I wonder, does capitalism not have this issue? HMMMMMM.
Noncolonial in the sense that they don't have any colonies, silly. If colonialism is so tied to successful capitalist enterprise, why do there exist successful economies that lack or do not engage in colonialism?
You know that they adjust those numbers for inflation, right? But again, I don't see communism doing any good about any of this, meanwhile capitalism has seen life expectancies rising and quality of life improving. Not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Just has to be better than the other guy, and communism's track record is swamped with enough blood that it makes fascists look clean by comparison.
Breaking agreements with a world superpower is generally a dumb idea. If that's the quality of communism's leaders, it explains a lot. There was an agreed upon deal, Allende and company broke that deal and confiscated private property, and the predictable occurred. Cause: Fuck around. Effect: Find out.
We're not talking about Helicopter Pinocchio, we're talking about Allende. You cited him as communism functioning well, and I pointed out that if that's communism functioning well, one shudders to think what poorly functioning communism looks like.
Oh wait, we already know what it looks like: genocide, starvation, forced labor, and totalitarian oppression. Oops.
You make a deal, you should stick to it. You confiscate the private property of foreign powers, especially powerful ones, they're predictably not going to be very happy with you. If everyone else is playing nice with each others' human right to property, taking their toys without agreed upon compensation isn't going to earn you a lot of friends. If you want control of the mines, you can pay for them as agreed.
Entwined, but not indistinguishable.
Regardless, I can pretty much boil this whole thing down to a sentence: You can't defend communism, so you attack capitalism. You can't show me positive good that's come from communism, and certainly nothing on the worldwide scale that capitalism operates under. For all its faults, capitalism is more free, more effective, and less bloody than communism has any hope of being.
5520431
Wait, Tramp, is that you? lol
5520433
Real fucking children are real fucking hungry, which, if you didn't know, is proven to have a direct effect on their education
because you can't fucking concentrate on learning when you're hungry.
You can't also fucking concentrate on learning when your parents are always stressed because they gotta fill out a flood of forms while looking for work while being constantly told how worthless they are for being poor while running 2 jobs in parallel. You know, this stress has real consequences? You know, for your health, your general mood, your outlook on life?
Do you think people are spherical and exist in a vacuum?
It's really lovely how you people always pull out this "people aren't ideal so communism can't work" bullshit, as if communism was assuming ideal people (which it doesn't, that idea is red scare propaganda), and then you turn around as if people were completely divorced from their material conditions and could just decide to just Work Harder™ now and that'd solve all their problems because capitalism is meritocratic, actually (which it isn't, to be entirely clear).
Not even to mention that the term "Meritocracy" was originally intended as a fucking dystopia.
Your equivocation of communism and planned economies really serves to underline your complete lack of knowledge. Even worse, it underscores how entrenched your pseudo-education really is.
Wow, no reading comprehension, either. Recognizing writing styles is not your strong suit, is it?
5520414
Honestly, let's ignore literally everything else here, and realize you're treating economics as if there are two poles - communism and capitalism - and that everything falls on that spectrum. And you're defining anything not capitalism as communist, and you're defining communism as authoritarianism. Huge mess to untangle. I think everyone else is getting tangled up in addressing every wrong detail that spins off from that, instead of addressing the fact that your most fundamental, basic understanding is wrong. You clown.
There are plenty of non-capitalist, non-communist models. And there are a lot of different socialist models. And a lot of other models that are neither. All of the systems you are criticizing claimed communism as an objective, not as a reality - they are simply non-capitalist, much like feudalism was. You fool.
Capitalism is the organization of society around a specific concept of private property ownership: If you own something then you are entitled to all the productive capacity of that thing, and you have the absolute right to deny other people the use of your property. If someone tries to go against this then the state will either enforce those rights for you, or take your side in your enforcement of those rights. You idiot.
So, if I own an oven, I can pay someone to use that oven to bake bread, and I will own all the bread they baked in that oven. They are not allowed to use that oven without my permission. You moron.
If I am not allowed to own an oven, then it's not capitalism, but it's not communism. If the baker owns all the bread they bake with my oven, then it's not capitalism, but it's not communism either. Etc. You cretin.
I am an anti-capitalist leftist, I believe that people should be entitled to the products of their labour, and that as a transitional model it would be more ethical for workers to be paid in shares of their workplaces than in wages. Would you call that communism? Because it isn't capitalism. But it's certainly not what China or the Soviets did, either.
Waged labour has one historical origin, and that is in slavery. The original employment contracts were putting your labour as collateral on loans, to be collected when it defaulted. Some of these loans were intentionally drafted by both parties to be forfeited on, to give a short period of agreed upon slave labour. Moron.
Capitalism is reliant on this organization of labour to function, which is why we can say it's inherently exploitative, even when those contracts are voluntary. Someone who volunteers to be a slave is still a slave, and we must look at what coercion was used to make such a volunteering necessary. You talk about the workers rights under capitalism, but you omit that thousands of people were murdered or died before they were implemented - the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, the coal mine wars, the Pinkertons, the boxer rebellions. Etc. Such rights are not inherent to the framework you're advocating for. It's clear you have no grounding in understanding the frameworks. Idiot.
Which is why you're unable to define communism as a framework except to use historical examples of states which did not describe themselves as communist, and you cannot differentiate between the governmental model and the economic model, and you cannot define what the economic model is, and you cannot differentiate between non-capitalist, socialist-democratic, communist and capitalist models. Dumbass.
5520438
Nah, mostly the account creation date and an alt is totally something he'd do, the rascal.
5520433
Dodging the question doesn't make for a good argument sadly. You may claim capitalism is efficient based on some sordid metrics, but it won't buy the system an allure of morality.
It may sounds like that to your ears, but the meaning is much darker. Especially since human resources involves topic such as accounting that puts a value or worth on a human considered a commodity, or capital (i.e. a robot or dead asset). This conception of humans as goods to be exchanged and bought and accounted for financially has its basis in slavery.
Mr Numbers put it better than I did.
5520487
Pot, kettle.
SOrDid mETriCs! Oh no! That sounds so spooky, so scary! Goodness sakes, dude. At least capitalism isn't predicated on the slaughter of the educated classes and the mass theft and confiscation of property, to the point where it requires work camps and slave labor to function. At least under capitalism the exchanges are negotiated between two consenting actors, rather than by gunpoint. And sure, perhaps pragmatism prompts one party or the other to choose a deal when they'd rather have something better. At least they can choose.
Communism is the bloodiest ideology and system ever invented by man. Hundreds of millions dead. If you want to excuse and downplay that, I think that says more about communism than I ever could. But, hey, points for sticking to your guns, I guess.
Oh, so now human life has value? Infinite and unquantifiable, hmm? So, what does that mean for communism, and its hundreds of millions of innocents murdered?
People have been accounting for their value and abilities for hundreds of years. Not everything that has to do with slapping a number on the value of a person's labor/productive value has to do with slavery. Bloody American-centering silliness.
5520376
Sociology at least has a methodology to it, some inkling of the scientific method. Economics does not, it does not have testable hypothesises, lacks consensus and has extreme political notions (money=control/power).
Money is meaningless. That doesn't mean that the solution to fix the national debt is to just print more of it. The national debt in and of itself is meaningless and only arises as a tool to bludgeon others with. To the layman, debt means poverty and suffering. So it must obviously be true for the country. So conservatives use it whenever they're not in power, and subsequently dont care once they take office.
What? Your assumption of antisemitism is more telling of where you stand. What's more likely? Some shadowy cabal is organizing everything, or that rich people will perform actions that keep them rich at the expense of others. I said the latter. People don't need to organize in little meetings, they control the wealth and act in their own interests. Then pay bribes in the form of lobbying to further their interests as a collective. There's a concept in biology we call Emergence. Our current situation is the emergent actions of a capital class.
Without labor you have no value and no wealth. I would love to hear your explanations on how you can obtain resources and matter without causality.
That 47K is a shitton more than they would normally have, and that's not accounting for the burgeoning wealth of billionaires either. Hell, 47K right now would put me in a great position and would go towards the economy rather than sitting in an offshore account.
Not really. Feudalism sucked, far, far more than Communism. The Russians and the Chinese didn't revolt for nothing, and both had literal serfs at the time of revolution.
Regardless of communism or feudalism or capitalism. The single common denominator behind the atrocities seems to be authoritarianism. Revolutionary movements are frequent victims to authoritarianism, which is what the book Animal Farm was about. It does not imply communism is bad, only that you should be wary of people who take over and lead revolutions.
5520557
You keep going back to consent, but you still haven't answered my much earlier question.
Are people who have to choose between starvation/minimum wage and homelessness (often due to factors such as intergenerational poverty) in a situation of voluntary transaction?
For the rest of your sophistry, MrNumbers addressed you the proper way.
5520899
And you've consistently failed to answer mine, yet here we are. But, sure, I'll throw you a bone.
Yes and no, to be honest. They have the option of not engaging with the minimum wage job they're offered, and choosing something else; after all, you have to APPLY for a job to be OFFERED a job. That right there provides some insulation from the idea that it's wholly exploitative of the person's poor circumstances. However, it is fair that difficult decisions are made in the face of poverty; it could be that searching for another option could be better, or it could be that circumstances dictate what they must do. In either case, it's not the fault of the employer that the applicant is living in such circumstances, so they cannot be held liable for it. It's not the fault of the employer that such situations exist, and so long as a fair*, mutually-agreed upon wage is paid, it's not as though it's a nonconsensual relationship.
Unlike communism, where no consent is even offered for rejection.
As an aside, we already know that extensive government programs are a significant contributor to intergenerational poverty, at least in the African American context: Thomas Sowell and other African American economists and scholars have laid that out quite effectively, to say nothing of the evidence of our eyes. It applies elsewhere as well, but I'm always happy to spread around Sowell's work.
*Fair is obviously up for debate, and I expect you to jump on it, but that's beside the point at the moment.
5520597
You're something of a conundrum, honestly. Of everyone here, you're the least predictable. Rather than take a football and run with it towards the endzone, you exit the stadium, run across town to the local public soccer field, tackle the goalie and then declare a touchdown. I'm not saying it's bad, but you tend to miss the mark and it's the simultaneously the most baffling and entertaining stuff I've seen.
That was a jab at communism and sociology both, incidentally.
Money has meaning, uses, and value; claiming otherwise shows a disturbing lack of understanding from someone who supports a wholesale restructuring of the world's economic systems to suit your preferences. I realize that money is a complicated topic, but if you're going to involve yourself in these discussions you should respect its complexities rather than dismissing it as meaningless or fake. As for national debt... well, if you're in the US I suspect you'll get to enjoy seeing what that means for you and your kids. I agree that it's been disappointing to see it entirely ignoring or turned into a partisan issue, but neither major party really has a leg to stand on, these days.
Oh lord, you're a bio major, are you? Jokes aside, communism and antisemitism go hand in hand for a number of reasons, and it's a contributing factor for my disdain of the system.
Two men are given materials sufficient to make a pie. Both labor for two hours, and you must judge the value of their output. One man produces a pie that is well-crusted and delicious. The other, a pie that is soggy and undercooked. They each labored for two hours to craft these pies; is the soggy pie of the same value as the well-crusted pie? Labor alone does not account for the value of a product. A man can work twenty hours to produce a machine, while another man completes a machine of the same design in ten. The product is the same, but one took twice as long to produce it. Is the one who took longer's labor of the same value as the one who finished it quicker? Labor alone does not decide the value of a product; it can contribute, but the quality of that labor is a more important factor (usually). This is further complicated by automation. Which product is more expensive? The one made by machine in half the time, or the one made by man? Etc. etc. Labor theory of value is garbage.
You'd seriously take a one time payment of $47k redistributed wealth rather than earn however many more thousands over your lifetime under the current system. I suppose you took the one candy immediately instead of the two candies later when you were a kid, too?
This is what I mean when I say you take the ball and run out of the stadium with it. I'm being sarcastic and not accepting the premise that the supposed neofeudalism we're living under is worse than a communist one. I don't accept the premise that our current system is worse than communism, and I'm not really agreeing that our current system IS one of neofeudalism: hence the use of the word "supposed". Not to mention the conflation of feudalism and neofeudalism. They ARE different, believe it or not. And honestly, feudalism and communism are both so awful that I'm not certain I could call one worse than the other; feudalism and communism both trample the human rights of those living under them, but at least feudalism isn't genocidal by nature. Tough call.
Authoritarianism, yes, but more specifically totalitarianism which is most characteristic of communist regimes. Capitalist systems can operate under a variety of governmental systems, thereby allowing for guarantees to human rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, property rights, etc. etc. This is not the case for communist regimes, because they are inherently and by necessity totalitarian in nature. You are not free to establish a business, or do with your property as your human rights would dictate, because communism's centralization cannot compete. Dissent is suppressed, and black markets that do develop are an inherent threat to the system despite the obvious good they present.
A commune-style business can operate in a capitalist system. A capitalist business operating in a communist system will be confiscated, its owners shot or sent to labor camps, and their human rights trampled. And then the communists in charge of the people's business will proceed to run things into the ground, as expected.
Even when the revolution is finished, the communist governments remained genocidal and brutal in nature. The revolution never ends, because there are always dissenters and thought criminals and political enemies of the state to be rooted out. Communism cannot exist without totalitarian control, because it cannot compete successfully on economic or moral grounds with capitalist enterprise. Orwell's Animal Farm was specifically written to decry the evils of communism; there have been volumes of work published exploring this, and to claim otherwise indicates you need to read the book again. That said, I will agree that communist revolutions seem uniquely prone to authoritarian impulses; it's kind of a built in feature.
5520557
Sordid metrics, also known as "unscientific garbage".
Also this quote from the article:
You know, if you use one metric to measure communism and another metric to capitalism to then conclude that capitalism is better, that's called pseudo-science.
Do you have a source for that claim?
Because I have a pretty believable source in David Graeber's Debt. There he claims that almost all societies throughout history, including societies that had slavery, put the value of a human life as incalculable. Every part of their laws and customs that involved payment for a human life in any way also explicitly acknowledged that this price was symbolic and definitely not representative.
Actually, every slaving society except the transatlantic slave trade supposed that slavery was unnatural. You know what the difference is between every other slaving society and the European one in that timeframe? The latter one was [proto-]capitalist.
Also, since Banana brought it up: You know what life was like in Russia before the USSR? They literally hadn't done the industrialization yet. Peasants were starving continuously and the Tsar was a guy who on the one hand was seen as a kind of wishy-washy soft-hearted goody-two-shoes who can't keep the peasantry in check while also habitually having people tortured to death publicly for minor infractions as a symbolic gesture.
Russia was feudalist before it was communist, and if you think it was better before, you're either a fucking idiot or a monster.
5520901
For someone going to bat for capitalism so hard you don't seem to understand a lot about markets and oligopolies. Or rather, you understand the expected amount.
Oh yes, dodging back to individual responsibility. Yeah, we're all aware that the people that profit off of the organization of society are not the ones who made it to be that way.
Lovely how you're pulling out this moralistic argument while rejecting the moral notion of "maybe people shouldn't starve", and even the moral notion of "maybe people shouldn't starve through no fault of their own".
Because, you know, the poor person also is not at fault for them being poor in the first case in the vast majority of cases.
What government programs are you talking about specifically here?
Also, what evidence of our eyes? I don't see governmental programs to alleviate poverty causing intergenerational poverty in general. Or even in the African context.
Also would be nice if you'd give the outline of Sowell's argument here. You know, as I did with Graeber's account of history above.
5520905
Yeah, you're definitely not Tramp, though I still think it'd be funnier if you were.
5520904
Yeah, that was obvious. And the answer was a jab at economics, that you missed, because you can't read.
Or because you're an incredulous asshole.
Probably both.
Care to quote any of the reasons? You know, that would be very on topic, given the fucking topic of the fucking blog post you fucking moron.
You know, this is a general thing you do: Vaguely waving at some kind of conclusion and acting as if the way to reach those conclusions is obvious enough, you smug little shit.
Yeah, you don't understand the argument here
which is that
in all cases, labor absolutely had to be involved, but the tools only influenced the quality, not the existence, of the end product
which is obvious to everyone who has half a brain.
Also: How did the tools come to be? Where they the result of some spontaneous divine genesis?
The assumption that production would just stop without capitalism is seriously mindboggling. What the fuck are you smoking? Did you inhale too much carbon monoxide lately? Maybe you should check in with a doctor?
Dude, if you make an argument in jest, don't blame the other party for taking it seriously. People do make these arguments seriously, and you're just historically illiterate enough in other contexts for it to be entirely believable that you're also enough of an idiot to believe this shit.
Also it's interesting that you think "I didn't actually answer your argument about neo-feudalism, I just rejected it out of hand and didn't address it at all" somehow works in your favor. It'd have been better to just ignore it and not make a dishonest joke at it.
By what definition of communism?
The definition everyone you're arguing with is using is "workers control the tools they work with, no matter who provided the tools".
If this is the definition you're also using, how does this lead to totalitarianism?
Again with the centralization? Can you read? Are you able to comprehend words? Are you just a bot that picks up on keywords and then generates a text based on those keywords?
Where is the genocide in Cuba? If I just missed it, I'd really love to know.
Please, educate me on this matter!
Orwell was a communist, you fucking idiot, and this is public knowledge, you dimwit.
Like, how fucking stupid and uneducated and unread and fucking overconfident despite it all do you have to be to claim this?
Just, I don't know, do a fucking Google search! You don't have to believe me! You just have to do it and realize that other people can use Google too.
Like, seriously, this is embarrassing just by looking at it.
5520907
Wow, fuck you.
Also, what a coward move, doing this instead of admitting you can't keep up because you don't know shit about history or politics.
5520908
No, wait, I've changed my mind, you COULD be Tramp, if you tried hard enough.
5520911
Look, a difference between you and me here is that you have devolved to pure ad hominem in reaction to my arguments
while I only use my ad hominem as additional spice to my arguments, most of which are responses to arguments you put forth.
5520909
In my defense, you were rather rude.
And it was funny. That too.
5520916
Dude, you haven't even told me how you define communism yet, even though I've asked multiple times!
Your whole argument is just undefined terms and unsupported conclusions.
And you never acknowledged the definitions anyone else is using either, which is, you know, extremely rude in a discussion.
5520904
I'm neurodivergent with a scar running from my left frontal lobe back to my partial from an injury I sustained as a child. I have some difficulty with language due to both, albeit it's greatly lessened due to the age at which I sustained said injury and the neuroplasticity associated with that age period. That being said, I do believe I have communicated my points clearly and effectively, and others here would seem to agree. The issue then appears to be you and your binary comprehension of things.
Incorrect. That was a jab at economics, which you would understand if you possessed reading comprehension. That or you're being deliberately obtuse. I can't rule out the combination of both, however.
Of course, money has meaning, uses, and value. We as humans project those ideas onto money. That doesn't change the fact that there's nothing about money that inherently gives it any value. Money will not grow the crops, money will not mine the minerals, money will not keep the lights on.
Here's a thought experiment for you. If the national debt really does matter. Why would people keep giving them US treasury money? It owes 22 trillion dollars, and yet it still gets the money. Clearly, the people giving the US government money aren't worried about defaulting in the slightest. That's also not mentioning how the ten-year yield on treasury notes has fallen greatly in the past few decades. In the worst-case scenario, do you think the world superpower with nuclear weapons that millions of people rely upon for living is going to default everything or do you think they're going to claim repudiation?
Communism and antisemitism are related like oranges and bacteria. They're not even remotely intertwined or related to one another. You can say they are ideas and that's about it. Bless me with this arcane knowledge you possess that is to the contrary of what I've stated.
In all of those events, energy had to be expended by laborers to produce everything present. From the wheat, milk, eggs, sugar, and pie filling. People had to mine the ore, people had to refine said ore, people had to build components and men had to put them together. You don't understand my argument. The quality of the product at the end is a result of the tools used to make them, the labor remains the same. Labor is a constant that is separate from the variables of time and whatever else.
Jeff Bezos having 99% of his fortune taken away isn't going to stop the continued operation of Amazon. I don't know why you think that if some CEO or billionaire loses their stored billions that it will somehow cause everything to implode.
Then make an argument and stop being a sarcastic prick.
Wow, where does it state that in Marx's literature?
In communism there is a distinction between private and personal property. Private property is only owned for the express production of capital. Personal property is consumer goods and anything that's owned not with the production of capital in mind. When they say abolish private property, they're not going to take away your computer or your home or whatever else your red scare propaganda has led you to believe. Also, what centralization? Communism just implies that there is no private property and that laborers own the means to their productions rather than one person. You could easily establish a restaurant with your fellow workers, and you could just as easily take a managerial role if you and others desired.
Care to point out the genocide in Cuba for me?
5520916
Your slurry of badly-shaped points and *hmmm* paint you as someone who has never known hardship, who found his talking points pre-packaged in a PragerU Happy Meal™, and who would rather keep citing from a Von Mises book or repeat Ben Shapiro thug-life oneliners. And yet, you still pontificate on points you likely never got past the first two sections on Wikipedia.
If that's the image you want to cultivate. Godspeed. You're nailing it.