Critique of Marxism

[martins name]

I haven't read Marx so if you have, tell me if I'm wrong here.

Firstly I like Marx's methodology of class analysis. It looks at relationships between different groups of people to try to find structural exploitation/parasitism between them. I just disagree with his economic analysis of capitalism.

How I understand Marx's economic analysis is like this:
Image a company being a group of chefs(the workers, proletariat), a recipe that they are following(the company with its organizational structures and intellectual property) and a person that owns the recipe(the bourgeoisie).

According to Marx's analysis, since the chefs are doing all the work they are the only ones of value in the process of cooking the food, and therefore the recipe has no value, and thus the person who owns the recipe is parasitical. This is just plain false, the truth is that both the chefs and the recipe are necessary parts of the cooking process and thus, they both have value. And since the recipe has value the owner of the recipe has value.

The question to me is how much value do the chefs, the recipe and the recipe creator have for the greater whole and how do we balance the power dynamics between them to reflect their value. Their value is dependent on their effect on the greater whole. The greater whole can never be fully understood, we can only do our best in trying to understand as much of it as best we can. Therefore the workers don't have some objective "real value" that we should perfectly embody.
 

I instead think a proper balance is struck in social democracy.
Lots of rights for workers and strong unions.
Low taxes for company operations, which lets companies grow and become internationally competitive.
Steep progressive tax system for company owners' salaries, incentivizing money to stay in companies. This lets companies grow without capital owners sucking out too much of the value from it.

 

[Danioover9000]

@martins name

7 minutes ago, martins name said:

I haven't read Marx so if you have, tell me if I'm wrong here.

Firstly I like Marx's methodology of class analysis. It looks at relationships between different groups of people to try to find structural exploitation/parasitism between them. I just disagree with his economic analysis of capitalism.

How I understand Marx's economic analysis is like this:
Image a company being a group of chefs(the workers, proletariat), a recipe that they are following(the company with its organizational structures and intellectual property) and a person that owns the recipe(the bourgeoisie).

According to Marx's analysis, since the chefs are doing all the work they are the only ones of value in the process of cooking the food, and therefore the recipe has no value, and thus the person who owns the recipe is parasitical. This is just plain false, the truth is that both the chefs and the recipe are necessary parts of the cooking process and thus, they both have value. And since the recipe has value the owner of the recipe has value.

The question to me is how much value do the chefs, the recipe and the recipe creator have for the greater whole and how do we balance the power dynamics between them to reflect their value. Their value is dependent on their effect on the greater whole. The greater whole can never be fully understood, we can only do our best in trying to understand as much of it as best we can. Therefore the workers don't have some objective "real value" that we should perfectly embody.
 

I instead think a proper balance is struck in social democracy.
Lots of rights for workers and strong unions.
Low taxes for company operations, which lets companies grow and become internationally competitive.
Steep progressive tax system for company owners' salaries, incentivizing money to stay in companies. This lets companies grow without capital owners sucking out too much of the value from it.

 

   You're mostly right with the hypothetical. Just watch out for egalitarianism, feminism, and the capitalism/neoliberalism ideology, when it starts to negatively effect the flourishing of society.

[Leo Gura]

Proper allocation of capital is itself very valuable.

This is what socialists don't appreciate.

It is NOT easy to make good investments. Most people are terrible investors.

Edited December 1, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Breakingthewall]

Marxism made sense in an era where workers worked like slaves and the class that owned land and factories lived like kings without doing anything. The economic reality has been restructuring and increasing enormously in volume and complexity. A specialized worker today earns a lot of money, in the world there is still an enormous volume of poverty but they see how wealth extends little by little to them. There are hundreds of job categories and anyone with the will can make their way. There are no closed doors, you can be a street guy from a poor country and end up on top, a millionaire. It is very difficult, but possible.  

Now the only thing is to maintain the rhythm. Nobody knows what the economy will be like in 50 years, the challenges are presenting themselves, we will see how they are addressed, what is the class of humans today. Not long ago, revolutions took place in Russia and China where a level of atrocity was committed that is completely impossible to imagine now. like Rwanda but organized and more than one hundred million dead, not in war, murdered by the government. This happened very recently, we will see what the future brings

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, Breakingthewall said:

Marxism made sense in an era where workers worked like slaves

Check your privelege.

Edited December 1, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Breakingthewall]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Check your privelege.

My only privilege is to have been born in a European country. It is a very serious privilege, being born in Syria makes your life much more difficult by many orders of magnitude, but I am not exploiting them.

Maybe I'm exploiting guys in Indian factories who make cheap clothes, they work like slaves for little, but I'm really doing them a favor, we're giving them the push to take off,.some of their sons are going to the university. Otherwise they would stay in the 19th century forever. There is no revolution they should make, just be smart and get on the money train. This is what they try, it is not an easy path but it is the only one.

Edited December 1, 2023 by Breakingthewall

[martins name]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

Marxism made sense in an era where workers worked like slaves

Also a time with less complexity and little automation. Try making a computer and all its components without the responsiveness and self-organization of capitalism.

[martins name]

2 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

egalitarianism, feminism, and the capitalism/neoliberalism ideology

All things in balance

[Danioover9000]

@martins name

6 minutes ago, martins name said:

All things in balance

   Sure, especially when they contribute to the birthrate crisis in westernized countries.

[martins name]

@Danioover9000 Any idea how to deal with that?

[Danioover9000]

@martins name

12 minutes ago, martins name said:

@Danioover9000 Any idea how to deal with that?

   I propose a limited democracy similar to the Roman republic, with way more senators and congressmen than today's standards of government and federal government. I propose restrictions onto feminism and egalitarianism, and the unification of some church with state, not all the church but some church and theocracy/orthodoxy with state. Reasoning is that the declining birthrate crisis, single parent homes and single mom households, and high divorce rates are caused by egalitarianism and feminism run amok in the majority of the westernized countries like Japan, South Korea, Canada, the USA, some of the UK as it's mainly secularist, and some European countries. Even China and Russia, heavy secularist countries suffer from the decline in birthrates, and when a nation cannot reproduce it's own numbers above threshold replacement numbers, mainly secularist egalitarian countries with some capitalisms/neoliberalism ideology, they have to outsource from countries with a theocratic/autocratic rulership, staunch stage blue/red countries, and have them immigrate to countries with these birthrate declines. Also a revision on the no fault divorce brought by state marriages as that also plays a net negative in breaking the nuclear family, and causing single parent households.

Edited December 1, 2023 by Danioover9000

[martins name]

@Danioover9000 Very interesting. I'll start a new thread about this tomorrow. I want to see a lot of different perspectives on this. 

Edited December 1, 2023 by martins name

[DocWatts]

The primary flaw of Marxism is that it makes an analytical rather than a moral mistake, in that it fails to adequately account for how its proposed alternative to capitalism could also develop its own coercive power hierarchies which consolidate power into a small, unaccountable elite.

Which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, and just about everywhere else Communism has been tried. In practice, what happened is that private capitalism was simply swapped out for a version of state capitalism, with worker ownership over the means of production never materializing.

The root of why this happened is that this proposed alternative to capitalism was mired in a form of Game Denial, which is to say a denial of the ways that aspects of society are a zero sum game, and a denial of how human beings are in competition with one another in unavoidable ways. That doesn't just magically go away in a post-capitalist society where everyone is meant to be working for the common good of all. Failing to account for this and build safeguards inevitably leads to abuses of power, which is exactly what we see in societies which tried this experiment.

Note that all of this is a separate issue from the largely valid critiques that Marxism makes of Capitalism. One can be correct in the diagnosis of a problem and mistaken in how that problem should be addressed.

Edited December 1, 2023 by DocWatts

[martins name]

@DocWatts have you read Marx?

[DocWatts]

5 hours ago, martins name said:

@DocWatts have you read Marx?

I'll fully admit that most of my reading on Marx comes from contemporary sources who translate his ideas into a format that's understandable for someone living in our modern era, rather than banging my head against something like Das Kapital directly. (By this I mean people who attempt to give a good faith interpretation of his work, rather than someone like Jordan Peterson).

As someone who's read lots of philosophy (including some very difficult primary sources), I'll almost always recommend that people get the gist of a philosopher from contemporary sources, rather than trying to decipher highly difficult texts that were written in a different era.

For instance %99 of people are better off getting the gist of someone like Immanuel Kant from contemporary scholars, rather than trying to wade one's way through Critique of Pure Reason. 

As for your analysis of Marx in your original post (apologies for not addressing this directly), I'd argue that his Labor theory of Value, along with his depiction of the Alienation of Labor, are generally true, at least in a broad sense (especially so under unregulated Capitalism). I won't go as far as Marx as to say that the CEO of a company adds nothing, but the vast majority of the value that's created by a company like Tesla comes from the actual workers who engineer and build the electric cars, not from Musk or it's board of directors.

Which why I say that his critiques of capitalism are largely valid, even if his idea of a classless and stateless society isn't a realistic or workable solution.

Edited December 2, 2023 by DocWatts

[martins name]

@DocWatts Any particular summary of Marxism that you'd recommend?

[DocWatts]

1 minute ago, martins name said:

@DocWatts Any particular summary of Marxism that you'd recommend?

Understanding Marxism by Richard Wolfe is a good starting place, as he does a good job of taking Marx's theory and updating it for our modern era. Might be a bit basic if you're already very well versed in Marxism, but I found it to be highly helpful.

Marxism A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer is also a good summation of some of Marx's texts.

[martins name]

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

Understanding Marxism by Richard Wolfe is a good starting place, as he does a good job of taking Marx's theory and updating it for our modern era. Might be a bit basic if you're already very well versed in Marxism, but I found it to be highly helpful.

Marxism A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer is also a good summation of some of Marx's texts.

tnx

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

As for your analysis of Marx in your original post (apologies for not addressing this directly), I'd argue that his Labor theory of Value, along with his depiction of the Alienation of Labor, are generally true, at least in a broad sense (especially so under unregulated Capitalism). I won't go as far as Marx as to say that the CEO of a company adds nothing, but the vast majority of the value that's created by a company like Tesla comes from the actual workers who engineer and build the electric cars, not from Musk or it's board of directors.

I differentiate between the value of a corporation and the value of the CEO. The corporation has value because it's a valuable pattern of production(a recipe in my example) that should spread. The CEO should not be allowed to slurp up all the value that the company generates. That's why I think it's good to have steep progressive taxes on the money when it leaves the company and goes into the CEO's wallet.

I think Marx doesn't differentiate between capital and its owners. He probably didn't know that they could be separated to the extent they actually could.
 

15 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Game Denial

Love this concept tnx! Was game denial baked into his philosophy or just an unfortunate consequence of how his philosophy was used? From what I've heard, Marx never proposed a political system but just pointed out a problem(in his mind) and that it's inevitably solved. Tho, he didn't say how it will be solved.

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

I won't go as far as Marx as to say that the CEO of a company adds nothing, but the vast majority of the value that's created by a company like Tesla comes from the actual workers who engineer and build the electric cars, not from Musk or it's board of directors.

This is not true today. In Marx's time could  true, the owner of a factory, a mine, or land, was more or less a rentier, but today, in a hyper-competitive world, the head of the company is the most important. Without the extremely difficult task of finding a market niche and maintaining it, the workforce is worthless.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Breakingthewall

[martins name]

4 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

This is not true today. In Marx's time there was part of the truth, the owner of a factory, a mine, or land, was more or less a rentier, but today, in a hyper-competitive world, the head of the company is the most important. Without the extremely difficult task of finding a market niche and maintaining it, the workforce is worthless.

Well said. I wonder what Marx would say if he saw the world today.