Marxism

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Cyrus the Great, Jul 23, 2014.

  1. Cyrus the Great Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    185
    In Marxism the concept of class struggle plays a central role in understanding society's inevitable development from bourgeois oppression under capitalism to a socialist and ultimately classless society .


    I can understand a little bit of this sentence.

    Would you please explain the bold part more readily so that I can understand it well?

    In addition, would you give me an example about such a sentence?


    Thanks in advance
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,051
    Marx considered revolutions to establish Marxism inevitable -- I believe he would have considered the Russian Revolution an example. What he didn't figure on was capitalist societies working to fix their issues without a revolution.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    In either society there will always be 2 classes of citizens and while one is called what it is the other masks itself under a "classless" society. There is no such thing as "classless" in this world and if someone tries to tell you there is they are only trying to fool you. Another thing whenever you hear about a utopian society where everyone is the same that isn't the case for there will always be those who will take advantage of others anyway they can.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,422
    In the capitalist system, workers are necessarily exploited for their labor. Capitalists, the bourgeois class, make their living parasitically: they invest money they have and gain more money through selling the products that workers labor to produce. Capitalists use their money to further their own interests and diminish the power that workers have to control the circumstances of their labor (and through that, inevitably cut into the profits of the bourgeoisie).

    Given that the bourgeoisie can only prosper through the exploitation of the working class, there is a struggle between the two classes as each one fights to secure their own interests.

    For example, the union fights of the early 20th century, where companies literally hired armies of thugs to kill and maim workers trying to organize for better pay and working conditions. Or Wisconsin right now, where wealthy companies pay politicians to enact laws that interfere with workers from organizing.
     
  8. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,285
    Karl Marx took advantage of his housekeeper Helene Demuth (he may have even raped her) and then sickeningly left his own son, he own SON, Frederick Lewis Demuth, with a working class foster home in London to raise him. Even going so far as to lie and suggest he didn't have a son. He never bothered to learn to speak English the entire time he lived in England.
    He was a despicable person.
     
  9. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,285
    This is nonsense.

    Laborer's sell labor-hours and business owners "Capitalists" buy labor-hours. Laborer's try to get the most money per hour they can. Business owners try to get the best labor for the lowest price. And IF they're worth more - then they're free to leave and take a job paying them more. No one is a "parasite". If the laborers think they can run a better business - the solution is simple, put up your assets (houses, property, etc...) and take a loan and do it. I know someone who started a successful business with their Amex card. And later started a different successful business taking a lean out against their house.

    Laborer's are free to quit on a days notice. They have nothing at risk. If they get a better job *poof* they can up and quit. That's their right. They have the freedom to quit and move. If the business goes under (and most do) they don't lose anything other than someone to sell their labor-hours to. All they have to do is walk over and get another job. The capitalist risks everything and can lose everything.

    Secondly, when the laborer get's paid. They generally put some money in a bank. They are, in effect, a Capitalist. They go with the bank who gives them the best interest rate they can find. Suppose they've retired and they're getting 3% on their savings/capital. Along comes some other bank who says they'll give them 10%, so they move their "Capital" to the second bank and live a little better on their fixed income. According to you, they're 'greedy parasites". Because they're 'exploiting' the second bank and all the people who take loans from this second bank who have to pay these 'greedy retired parasites' more interest in order to secure loans.

    Or how about when the farmer sells his blueberries in the Farmers markets? See, according to your logic, now the Laborer (who comes along with money in his pocket / capital) is the 'greedy parasite' as he refuses to buy from the Farmer unless the price is lower. The buyer (in this example, the Laborer) wants the best deal on blueberries that he can get - and walks around to all the stalls looking for the cheapest blueberries he can find. He is JUST like the business person who looks around to buy the cheapest labor-hours he can find. There's no difference.

    Everyone is a buyer and seller.
    Everyone.
     
  10. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,422
    Funny how things don't work out that way.
     
  11. CHRIS.Q Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    147
    zzz+
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    This is the kind of fantasy worldview that dominated socioeconomic theory among the ruling classes of Marx's time, and still to this day has great influence in some significantly powerful circles - including among people who have men with guns to enforce their beliefs.

    He's worth reading merely for his description of how that kind of worldview comes to be established, and the material basis of its support.

    As far as a "classless society", Marxism has no timetable - as a utopian ideal, it can be taken as the direction of revolution rather than the accomplishment.

    Marx was one of the first to set down clearly the origin and basis of industrial society's social classes in manipulated and chance material circumstance, rather than the workings of Deity or merit-rewarding natural order of the Universe. In that line, he presented them as both inevitable and temporary, since nothing would prevent them from first exploiting (hence the wealth), and then destroying, their own resource base (including the cooperation of lower class people). We're still wondering about that - jury's still out.
     
  13. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,285
    Yes it does.

    We do not have a problem with 'Capitalism'. We do have a problem with the capital we're forced to access - that is to say, the Federal Reserves Banking Notes. Why are we forced to use these debt obligations as capital? Because we're forced to pay a transaction tax on our labor-hours. Why is that so? Because the Government needs to bribe the electorate. So it sells debt obligations (on the laborer's children) and then sets up an IRS and prison system to coerce these children to repay the debt their forefathers took out in their name.

    I've lived in countries where labor was expensive. Not because of 'livable wage' laws - but because the labor supply was low. Instantaneously, without ANY interference from the State, laborer's are paid very well. Imagine walking out of a highschool into a 6 figure salary. That kind of well. Simple supply and demand.

    I've also lived in countries where labor was cheap. Where the Government Schools mass produce worker-cogs with no (or very little) valued skills after a full 12 YEARS of Schooling. Where the regulations are so onerous hardly anyone wants to start a business as they'd be shut down by the million + 1 regulatory departments the State uses via regulatory-capture of the markets. Where the people have to pay the State for the permission to work. Where the State uses rent-seeking licencing schemes to lock competition out of the markets. Such as the USA.

    Don't confuse the fiat-currency hyper-regulated markets in the USA for an example of free-market capitalism. It's not. It's an example of 100 years of Progressive Socialism. We've reached the end conclusion of using force against innocent people.

    A story as old as time.
     
  14. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,285
    Maxism resulted in the death of over 100 million people. Freedom, that is to say free-markets, ushered in the post-modern era.

    Imagine there were two societies A and B. Both societies like to drink tea.

    Society A is communist. In this society no one owns anything. So, a group of people try to figure out how much tea each person should receive. They model the amount they think is "required" of each person. They send out the tea. But, this is thing, some people like tea, some don't. One person like this flavor and another likes a different flavor. The people modeling society can't quite figure it out. And, given the whimsical nature of people, they constantly keep changing what tea they want. One minute wanting green tea, the next chai with milk. So, what to do? Well, they spy. They spy on everyone and attempt to increase the efficiency of their models. But, watching human's behavior is only a guess as to their subjective constitution (which is in flux, from minute to minute). So, they need to do more than just spying or they'll never efficiently create and distribute tea to meet the people's wishes (Utopia). So, the next thing they do is restrict civil liberties. People only get a few choices of tea. Then they restrict movement. It's much easier to model distribution routes when people can't leave their village without permission. Of course, by running the schools, they also 'teach' the kids what sorts of teas they 'should' want and when and how much. Because all of this fails as society begins to starve, they come up with 'enemies' and try to get the citizens on a permanent war footing - who has time for tea when there's wars to fight and gruel to eat instead. They also attempt to copy what Society B is doing - that goes a long ways towards helping to keep this farce maintained. In the end, the people are poor, starving, brainwashed dolts. Not due to greed - but to to an unsound 'economic' system.

    Subjective experiences cannot be accurately modeled. They change from second to second.

    Society B is Capitalist. It uses sound money to trade in. By allowing people to trade with sound money, no one anywhere needs to know what a person wants - the 'price' has all the information needed in it. If a particular tea crop failed, then the price 'might' go up - if that tea is in demand. But, perhaps it goes down? So the price stays the same or even drops. Suppose everyone wants Chai (fad). Then the price goes up, signalling to people to make more of this tea. When the fad ends, the price drops, resources are pulled and put into something else. Any capital made is reinvested or spent.

    Freedom, that is to say FREE-TRADING with FREE PEOPLE using SOUND MONEY and LAW and PRIVATE PROPERTY is all that is required to maintain a prosperous society.


    The State is a geopolitical location. An actual physical location. Being born a Citizen OF a State is being born property of the Government that runs said geopolitical location. The Government ONLY delineates itself in one, and ONLY ONE, manner - it has the legal obligation to initiate force against innocent people. This is why it was LIMITED by the US Constitutions. The first 10 amendments are to protect us from the Government.


    A 150 years ago Americans cherished freedom and the #1 goal was to open a business. A 150 years later and Americans hate freedom and the #1 goal is to become a slum-lord.
    A story as old as time.


    Don't worry, our Progressive Socialists will do exactly like the Communists. First the Central Planners/Progressive Socialists attempt to control of the money supply (the Federal Reserve Central Bank, IRS and tax laws used to 'encourage' Progressive behaviors), then they regulate the interactions of people (the USA has more laws and regulations and licencing requirements than any other nation in human history) so we're stuck with regulatory-capture and rent-seeking destroying free voluntary association and manipulating nature behavior towards what the Progressive Socialists thinks is 'good for society'; next they spy (NSA is capturing all of our communications and this is going to be used to attempt to model the economy by the oligarchs who now own our money, our labor, us) and finally they destroy what's left of civil liberty, freedom of association and freedom of movement.
    We become the poor crap-hole that is now the USSA.
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    Michael is a bit of an extremist, don't take him too seriously. Marx's is the first legitimate criticism of capitalism there is, he understood it better than capitalists, and in fact is still studied today in schools of economics. Marxism never killed anyone, but Stalinism sure did. Marxists are also the best critics of what went wrong in the USSR (most of those critics were murdered there). What we need is a new form of Socialism that incorporates democracy and human rights.
     
  16. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    The irony here is that your libertarianism is just the flipside of Marxism as we have previously discussed.
     
  17. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,285
    You are babbling again. It should be noted 'flipside' is meaningless gibberish.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    No, it didn't. Colonial and industrial authoritarian capitalism did, however. As did the various leftwing authoritarian setups.

    150 years ago was 1863, and the #1 goal of half the country was to preserve capitalistic slavery and capitalist slave plantations as the main economic structures in more than half the land area of the US.

    The #1 goal of the rest was to bear children, #2 was probably to own their own house and land. Striking it rich in a gold field was also prominent.

    The extent to which your worldview depends on fantastic delusions of political, social, and economic history is a clue to its usefulness.

    Why "new"? What's wrong with the old libertarian forms?
     
  19. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,910
    Lol, the truth hurts. Both are deeply flawed ideologies because both have naive and notions of human behavior.
     
  20. wellwisher Banned Banned

    Messages:
    5,160
    My biggest concern with socialism, is the leadership or government has no checks and balances, like in free societies. In free societies business and the wealthy, for good or bad, offers checks and balances. In socialism, if you end up with incompetent or cruel leadership, there is no way, beyond citizen violence, to change anything. Like in North Korea, the leader can keep the power in the family no matter how incompetent.

    The Democratic party leadership may preach a utopian movement toward socialism, but none of the people at the top see themselves as being part of the peasant class in the new world order. You become the peasants. To get full power over the peasants, the leaders will need to get rid of business and independent wealth. This gets rid of all the checks and balances, before the final purge of individuals that try to speak out.

    The idea of everyone being the same is nice in theory, but the leaders will not get with this program, but will become a separate class that has all the advantages of the former wealthy, with only the peasants having to be classless, so they are less a threat.

    If you have a professor or teacher who preaches socialism, ask him where he sees himself in that power structure. It is not a peasant. But to get there, they need others to play the role of the classless slave, so they can contrast their position of singular authority.

    Don't get me wrong, if you can get into the power structure in a socialists culture, you will have all the trimmings of higher classes. You tell the clueless there are no classes so they don't see the scam. As a leader, you get to steal from the coffers and accumulate billions. The appeal of socialism not so much in rising above, which takes effort, but in dropping the floor on others, so you appear to rise above without any effort. But this is a dream which becomes a nightmare when leadership appears that is not competent to lead the future. With lack of competence comes paranoia and then cruelty.
     
  21. Ghostwriter Registered Member

    Messages:
    55
    Just out of curiosity, where are the checks and balances in our "free society"?
     
  22. sculptor Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,466
    The checks are what you write to the government for taxes.
    The balances are the net worth of 99 of you needed to counterbalance the net worth of one of the 1 percenters.
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    This is a French word, pronounced boor-ZHWA. It originated around the middle of the 2nd millennium CE (before 1500) and was simply a term for what we now call the "middle class." However, economics in the pre-industrial era were much different than they are today; without industrial technology more than 99% of the population were farmers so the middle class was very small: merchants, physicians, scholars, people who worked for the government, etc.

    By the 1800s, when democracy began to spread, "the bourgeoisie" came to mean the people who owned the tools of production. The Industrial Revolution had just begun, so this included the people who began building railroads, steel mills, factories, etc.

    These projects required enormous quantities of money, and no one had enough to launch them by himself--even in partnership with a few other people with a lot of surplus wealth or "capital" as we now call it. So the governments invented the concept of the corporation, which allows entrepreneurs to sell stock and bonds to a great many investors, thereby gathering the money they need for their project. This is better than taking a loan from a bank, because if the project failed, the "capitalists" did not have to pay back the investors. And it's better than a partnership, because the investors did not participate in making important decisions.

    Like any economic system, capitalism was often used by the wealthy to prevent the poor from becoming wealthier. This even happened in the USA, although it was not as common as in other countries, so our people never rose up in a rebellion against capitalism. Even today, many of us own stock in successful corporations and we earn income that way.

    But not all countries were as successful with capitalism as we were. The reason is that the people who founded the United States had the sheer luck to get a land that had never supported a civilization. So the minerals, topsoil, forests and water were bountiful--and clean. This made it easy to launch an industrial society, and the workers were not exploited as badly as in Europe. They were paid better, housing was not as crowded, and if they didn't like their jobs they could easily move out to the frontier and become highly successful farmers. (We won't talk about the wars with the Native Americans or "Indians" right now.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    ) They simply did not feel oppressed.

    Karl Marx promoted the concept of socialism, in which the tools of production are owned by the government, which manages them for the good of the people. If that sounds like a fairytale in 2014, it is. And it was just as foolish a fairytale 100 years ago. Governments are famous for becoming tyrannical. The USSR was the first large socialist nation, and it quickly turned into communism, in which a permanent government administers all of the production and the citizens have very little freedom, such as changing jobs or moving to another province, much less emigrating to another country that doesn't have communism.

    Marx envisioned a classless society, but the USSR went in the opposite direction. The leaders of the government were the upper class, their subordinates were the middle class, and the entire rest of the population were the lower class. Since the leaders were able to pay themselves out of the citizens' taxes, they didn't care if their industries were efficient, and indeed they generally were not. They typically were not experts in industry or economics so they didn't really know how to run their economy.

    Of course Marx died in 1883, long before his dream turned into a nightmare. There were no major socialist experiments at that time, and certainly it had not been adopted by an entire nation. And of course it had not degraded from socialism into communism.

    Today, Christians in America often call communism an "atheist philosophy" and say that is why it failed. But in fact, Marx was a devout Christian. The slogan that founded socialism is: "To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities." Americans don't understand that this is a quote from the Bible (the Book of Acts) that had been expanded. Socialism and communism are therefore offshoots of Christian philosophy.

    They are based on the belief that a civilization can survive if what a man takes from it does not have to correlate with what he gives back. This is a fairy tale, from the world's most beloved book of fairy tales: the Bible.
     

Share This Page