Ben_No3 wrote:Hello. 
So, generally I find the idea of communism very attractive, and Marx to be right on many things. But I have a few questions...
1. Why overthrow a system that is, according to Marx, doomed to fail anyway?
2. Critical theory says trade is the core of society, Marx says labour. So, which is it?
3. History has proven that planned economy can easily go wrong. So how is the economy to be run? Democracy at the workplace?
Thanks for any answers
I'm pretty new into all the stuff and am yet to properly digest much of the material to get a handle on Communism and Marxism, but I'll take a crack.
1. The idea of some form of determinism that implies inevitability/fate isn't something that I identify as held within Marx's world view nor in Marxist theory. This interpretation is the a selective misinterpretation of Marx's work. I take it that part of this misunderstanding is reading too literally into texts like the Communist Manifesto ("What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.") which is largely a piece of propaganda set in a context of strong expectations of revolutions across Europe shared by many of the time period. It isn't a text that summarizes the nuances of Marx's dialectical view in great detail as other texts.
I like using this blog post to better frame the point that Marx's emphasis on the material relations, is only to speak to what is possible because we are based within a concrete world and can't simply plow through any obstacles simply because we wish.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.htmlPraxis as the interaction of subject and object
But, of course, Marx is neither a humanist idealist nor a postmodernist avant la lettre. For the point of his first Thesis on Feuerbach is exactly that the truth lies in the middle: between idealism and materialism, between humanism and postmodernism. That elusive middle is captured by Marx’s claim that the external object, on which humanity depends, is in turn dependent on the formative power of human activity. In other words: nature determines (causes, affects) man, who in turn determines (works upon) nature. Thus man is indirectly self-determining, mediated by nature. This reciprocal determination of man and nature is what Marx means by “praxis". In the first Thesis, therefore, Marx reproaches traditional materialism for not seeing this fundamental importance of praxis, since it (materialism) sees man one-sidedly as subjected to nature and thus it forgets man’s active intervention in nature – a point repeated by Marx in the third Thesis, where he focuses on the consequences of materialism for social theory: “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing [by which men are changed, PS] forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.”
So material conditions set the limit to what is actually possible, but Marx recognizes the necessity of human agency in order to enact things, human history hasn't been simply determined by material conditions but material conditions in conjunction with the actions of mankind. Man is not simply passive to the world, he actively shapes it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htmMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Though not Marxist to my knowledge, I think MLK Jr. makes a point in his speech that emphasizes this agency of humanity as fundamental to change.
http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/BlackHistoryMonth/MLK/CommAddress.htmlLet nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth, and it is a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I'm absolutely convinced that the people of ill will in our nation - the extreme rightists - the forces committed to negative ends - have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time." Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
But man can only do so much within the limitations of the concrete reality, to not understand the limits of the concrete is to fall into idealism, because one loses sight of how to actualize one's ideals and goes so far beyond them that they may be seen as impossible. Perhaps only temporarily impossible as many things once impossible are now possible, but has to be figured out within one's context. And then there's the issue of ideology/class consciousness, where Marxism requires that the workers be conscious and thus free to act from the approximate knowledge of their class position and the necessity in abolishing capitalism to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. That workers who aren't class conscious can be led astray into Utopian solutions by others who advocate their own class position over that of the workers.
A great example of the necessity of human agency can be seen within any revolution, things don't simply fall into place, people acted to implement a new order. But even within this, there is always a risk of simply destroying everything and not necessarily taking control and taking society to a new level of economic development. Because if mans ability is limited by material conditions such as within limits of economic development, then its possible one can
destroy all the infrastructure that makes one so economically prosperous and in a sense, send one backwards.
2. I'm not familiar enough with the critical theorists, though I am suspect to what things they retain from Marxism and don't.
http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Marxism/Marxism%20As%20Science.pdfCritical theory would all but discount these orthodox residues in Lukacs's writing. Thus, the response of the Frankfurt School to the rise of fascism, coming on the heels of a failed workers' revolution, was to retain and develop Lukacs's analysis of reification but often at the expense of historical materialism (Arato and Breines, 1979; Jay 1984). Pollock ([I9411 1978) developed theories of organized and state capitalism which demonstrated capitalism's durability. The turn to philosophy traced how reason had become "unreason," how as the potential for emancipation became greater, prospects for its realization receded; and how remnants of resistance to capitalism were being destroyed as the family, and thus the human psyche itself, was invaded by agencies of mass socialization (Horkheimer [1936]1972, pp. 47-128; Horkheimer and Adorno [I9441 1972). Turning orthodox Marxism on its head, the Frankfurt School saw no emancipatory aspects to the domination of nature. Unless humans could develop a more balanced relationship to nature the expansion of the forces of production could only intensify human subjugation.
Amidst despair, there were flashes of utopianism such as Marcuse's (1955, 1964, 1969) great refusal, or his glimpses of emancipation in art and philosophy. Certainly, critical theory would lose any confidence in the revolutionary agency of the working class which was irrevocably tainted by capitalism. Lukacs's totality had become totalitarian, trapping everyone in a onedimensional society that had lost sight of any vision or project for a different world. The Frankfurt School abandoned the substantive postulates of Marx's preface to embrace only his most general critique of domination, an elaboration of PI. In their hands adherence to P7 became less a commitment to the inevitability of communism and more a critique of the irrationality of all hitherto existing history.
Jiirgen Habermas (1984, 1987) has undertaken the heroic task of saving critical theory from degenerating into nihilism by reuniting it with sociology and historical materialism. On the one hand he extended the Marxian analysis of reification from the economic system to the political system, while on the other hand he drew on Durkheim and Mead to constitute potentially autonomous realms of communicative action. that is self-determining public and private institutions where domination is limited. The struggle between system and lifeworld rather than the struggle between classes supplies the dynamic of modem society. However, Habermas's rescue of critical theory comes at the expense of the emancipatory vision of P7: The best we can hope for is to control the system-world and to prevent it from colonizing the lifeworld.
However illuminating and fecund critical theory was, its systematic critique of "positivism" restricted the development of sufficiently specific theories that would stand up to Lakatos's criteria of scientific growth. Habermas's brilliant synthesis remains. like that of Talcott Parsons, at the level of meta-theory, of an orienting framework, rather than scientific theory. Only Gramsci was able to both reconstruct the Marxist framework and also deliver the rudiments of a scientific theory of superstructures.
So I don't know what the lays behind the assertion that Critical theorists posit trade as the core of society.
With Marx, he makes great emphasis on the mode of production I think, because it relates to the earlier point about the limits of what is concretely possible. And I also hear reiterations of his idea that only living labor, that of people, actually produces value, we are the ones that are able to turn one thing into another out of our own labor upon it. Turning wood into a table, turning many minerals into a mobile phone. Though I don't have a good grasp on the economics to lucidly explain why one would be mistaken to believe that the expansion of productive capacities (machines producing more than any person) doesn't create more value. But overall, think it links back to a historical view of history not based on the ideas people expressed through history but the economies of the past. That man began social organization based on their mode of production and we see through history how everything has changed as the mode of production has expanded and evolved.
3. I certainly can't adequately answer this question, but I would ask that the idea of the planned economy being conclusively proven to easily go wrong seems to be without explicit defense. Other than what I take is an implied reference that the countries with communist ideologies like the USSR stagnated and failed, but I believe their collapse and the famines both PRC and USSR underwent are a lot more complicated than having a planned economy.
There are some discussions somewhere on this site, I have a faint memory of someone making extensive points about East Germany's economy. But it should also be noted, its not as if there isn't a shit load of planning within a capitalist economy, things don't magically flow into one another, there's a shit load of logistics in any economy the larger and more complex it is.
There's basically a lot to
debate about whether a planned economy is fundamentally flawed or inferior and in what way.
To which I see some argue against the idea that the planned economy can't accurately assess the needs of the populations well as a capitalist economy by stating that capitalism doesn't prove itself much superior when it simply ignores the needs of many because providing them with shelter, food, medicine and so on isn't profitable. So people the world over starve, die of preventable diseases and live out on the streets whilst there is already plenty to satisfy the basic needs of all of humanity.
Hopefully the more well read can contribute and welcome.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By starman2003
- By Tainari88
- By ingliz
- By Unthinking Majority