If my reading of Capital strikes you as weird, that's because it assumes that we aren't hell bent on burning the whole thing to the ground. Neither are we content to murder the bourgeoisie (whoever they are) and become the ruling class as a middle step toward utopia.
Communism as a political philosophy entails doing away with the market altogether, removing the system that creates a capitalist mentality. But, as i've showed you, his complaints are quite valid. He doesn't like child labor, the inability to have and use what you produce, the trophy wife oppression of women, the way that the exploited class revolts only to become the new bourgeoisie, in short exploitation.
The biggest problem with reading the theory is that it's very easy to just walk away and call it nonsense. But it's not nonsense. If there's enough food being produced for everyone to eat, let everyone eat it. If there isn't, produce more food. If there's too much food over there and not enough here, spread it out. Does that pretty shade of green come with a side of arsenic poisoning? Stop making it.
Am i a Communist? No. Am i angry about a lot of the same things all of you and Marx are angry about? Yes.
The biggest difficulty in all of this is that we get so wrapped up in the ideology that we lose the meaningful dialog about the actual problems. We forget that people argued with Marx on certain points, and agreed with him on others.
We are constantly bickering about theories of how people will react in a given situation, but making no effort to plan for those situations. I'm willing to work hard for the rewards of that hard work, i'm not willing to grind away at a stupid task just so you can have a mcmansion in a gated community and tell me i'm a loser.
There has to be some meaningful compromise.
---
Ok, so we've read volume 1 of Capital (and possibly revisited the Communist Manifesto in the process). Obviously we could keep going in the understanding that Marx the person isn't there anymore. He spent the last few years of his life doing exactly what i do. Writing notes, essays, doing more research, but he died and Engels did all the assembling. Marx isn't there to debate his ideas, debate other Communists with different ideas, change his mind, watch the US do all sorts of terrible things all over the world, privatize prisons and throw drug addicts in there then capitalize on their free labor. Sure, he was alive and reading about our civil war as it happened, but he would have had a field day over the last hundred years.
The popular sentiment now is that we are in "late stage capitalism," that information dump i mentioned where it's all wildly uncontrollable and everyone overreacts and we burn it all to the ground. Some people think Trump was trying to prevent that, others (like me) think that he was bafoonishly going on national television and unknowingly reciting Communist talking points. He inherited a capitalist fortune with absolutely no understanding of how he himself had been exploited to create it.
Regardless, we should be able to come to some explanation of what is or isn't Marxism with regard to his narrow definition of Capitalism in general. Remember, Marx has told us that capitalism develops on top of market based economics through the manipulation of capital (obtained by draining the market of money by continually devaluing labor). Even though his theory is that this development is inevitable, we can see that the two things are quite different in his mind, and we know that his larger idea is preventing the exploitation. Marx the self-taught economic theorist has no idea how to do that, so Marx the Communist says unless you have a better idea, throw the whole thing in the dumpster and light it on fire.
Is Marx the Communist actually saying "kill Barry the Boss anyway, make airplanes to your heart's content, and fly them wherever you want," or is he simply telling us Barry doesn't own the labor of his employees and we should refuse to work for him without adequate compensation? We can't answer those questions.
What we can do is compare the blatant idealism of Communism to the blatant greed of Exceptionalist Capitalism as Marx might understand it. I call it exceptionalist because America (the idealized nation) believes itself to be unique, devoid of similarity to past cultures and nations, the exception to every theory of everything. Obviously i think that's absurd, but that's not the point. The point is that Marx was simply building an opposite idea to the forms of Western Capitalism he himself experienced. Those forms are not exactly what we call capitalism in daily conversation, but more closely resemble what we call Crony Capitalism (not happy go lucky market risk, but political favoritism for certain businesses over others through lobbying or straight up bribery).
Arguing for a stateless society is actually a Marxist idea. The state before Marxism is the regulator of the commodity of money, the state after Marxism is the absense of the need for money because we collectively make what we all agree we want. Words are tricky little things, remember. "The State" can and does refer to very different ideas because it actually applies to the rule book not the referee. The conflict manifests between the participants inside the market and the regulators controlling the commodity of money. Marx says Capitalism creates a world economy in its own image; wealthy nations exploiting poorer nations for cheap labor and political power. That certainly seems to be what we are doing, and it's making the problem worse. And as for private property, grazing cattle on public land is only possible if it's "public land" after all.
Having the working class be the ruling class makes no sense, it is merely the closest analogy Marx could use to describe it. Saying that a heavily regulated market is Marxist makes no sense because there is no market. The whole thing is nonsensical because it has been defined as an irreconcilable binary opposition with pure greed on one hand and complete satiation on the other. Reality lives somewhere in the middle.
What i'm trying to get at is that defining your position in terms of this bizarre Capitalism v Communism thing is nonsense from both sides. The actual Marxist view of capitalism focuses on the common sense things that we pretty much all agree are terrible, and the capitalist view of communism defends those terrible things while blaming communists for forcing them to do it. Regular everyday people can't tell the difference anymore, so we get anti-capitalist conspiracy theories from ardent capitalists claiming that communists want everyone to be homeless and steal your car to drive to their tax funded abortion appointment.
Too much Bottle on that one? Sorry, i just don't want to go back to being exploited, i mean work tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment