Open Questions For A Marxist/communist

[John Ryan]

It is no secret for those who know me that I am a staunch Marxist/Communist. I pretty much agree with Marx's philosophy minus his atheistic worldview. I am open and honest about the fact that I think capitalism is an evil system which alienates and impoverishes humankind — that we are living in a collective neurosis. With all of the rhetoric out there circling nowadays, claiming that President Obama is a Marxist, or that Europe is socialist, I thought it might be fun to have members ask me questions about Marxism/Communism and I will try my best to answer them from an authentic perspective. 

 

Marxists such as myself are quite offended when people label President Obama a Marxist, because for us, he is merely a more humanitarian and sly representative of the bourgeois-capitalist order. The modern social democracy present in Europe would not historically have been considered socialism. V.I. Lenin railed against social democrats (such as Eduard Bernstein) for merely trying to tame the beast of capitalism instead of negating it. 

 

So if anybody has any questions about Marxism/Communism, I would be more than happy to answer them. 

Edited September 13, 2013 by John Ryan

[CatholicsAreKewl]

It is no secret for those who know me that I am a staunch Marxist/Communist. I pretty much agree with Marx's philosophy minus his atheistic worldview. I am open and honest about the fact that I think capitalism is an evil system which alienates and impoverishes humankind — that we are living in a collective neurosis. With all of the rhetoric out there circling nowadays, claiming that President Obama is a Marxist, or that Europe is socialist, I thought it might be fun to have members ask me questions about Marxism/Communism and I will try my best to answer them from an authentic perspective. 

 

Marxists such as myself are quite offended when people label President Obama a Marxist, because for us, he is merely a more humanitarian and sly representative of the bourgeois-capitalist order. The modern social democracy present in Europe would not historically have been considered socialism. V.I. Lenin railed against social democrats (such as Eduard Bernstein) for merely trying to tame the beast of capitalism instead of negating it. 

 

So if anybody has any questions about Marxism/Communism, I would be more than happy to answer them. 

Why do you believe capitalism is immoral? How do you respond to people who say that a fully communist/marxist system isn't possible? 

[Era Might]

Would you agree that Leninism / Bolshevism is not synonymous with Marxism.

Edited September 13, 2013 by Era Might

[havok579257]

It is no secret for those who know me that I am a staunch Marxist/Communist. I pretty much agree with Marx's philosophy minus his atheistic worldview. I am open and honest about the fact that I think capitalism is an evil system which alienates and impoverishes humankind — that we are living in a collective neurosis. With all of the rhetoric out there circling nowadays, claiming that President Obama is a Marxist, or that Europe is socialist, I thought it might be fun to have members ask me questions about Marxism/Communism and I will try my best to answer them from an authentic perspective. 

 

Marxists such as myself are quite offended when people label President Obama a Marxist, because for us, he is merely a more humanitarian and sly representative of the bourgeois-capitalist order. The modern social democracy present in Europe would not historically have been considered socialism. V.I. Lenin railed against social democrats (such as Eduard Bernstein) for merely trying to tame the beast of capitalism instead of negating it. 

 

So if anybody has any questions about Marxism/Communism, I would be more than happy to answer them. 

 

 

How do you reconcile your support of communism with what the church teaches about how evil communism is?  It goes against the church teachings.

[CatholicsAreKewl]

How do you reconcile your support of communism with what the church teaches about how evil communism is?  It goes against the church teachings.

Whoa. Why is that the case?

[homeschoolmom]

nm

Edited September 14, 2013 by homeschoolmom

[Era Might]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vZ9myHhpS9s

[Selah]

Are you a pure Marxist? What are your views on Libertarianism/Anarchism? 

[havok579257]

Whoa. Why is that the case?

 

 

cause that what the church says.  I don't know what kind of answer you wanted.

[John Ryan]

Why do you believe capitalism is immoral? How do you respond to people who say that a fully communist/marxist system isn't possible? 

 

If you don't mind, I am going to answer the first question now and get back to the second question later on, since the first question requires quite a large response. 

• In a capitalist system, the value of things is determined by the price set in the market. Bourgeois economists call this efficiency, because in a sense people can create price signals and consumers can democratically decide their choices. In this way, the market economy is said to satisfy human wants. This is the neoclassical argument against price ceilings. The problem is that "want" and "demand" are not equivocal. Demand is want plus the ability to pay, and since wealth is highly unequal. If the market is a democracy for consumers, then certain individuals get to vote many times more than others. The market mentality of supply/demand is a sharp break from previous society in which most sales/barters were based upon some notion of the just price. The notion that merely because a good was in high demand, was not considered to be a good reason to raise prices through the roof. 
• Capitalism is an insanely wasteful system. Ad spending alone in the United States is 140 billion dollars per annum. That is 140 billion USD that is merely used to compete over already existing monies; hence, waste. The private property system wastes resources that could be going to satisfy real human needs. Capitalism is the only system which suffers from overproduction. So when the Global Financial Crisis hit the world, there was a superabundance of homes available and very large number of homeless families. A fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that produces abundance and poverty at the same time. And it is the wage-labor system that has so much construction employees becoming idle, when they could be working and creating to satisfy real human needs — the only reason they are not is because their is no demand to justify their labor in the monetary system of capitalism. 
• While all these inequalities are terrible, what separates classical Marxism from other forms of socialism is that its stress is not upon equality. Marx actually scoffed at socialists who thought everything could be solved by merely equalizing all wages. Capitalism generates an alienation/estrangement of humankind from productive activity. For Marxists such as myself, what separates humankind from the animals (our human essence) is our ability to consciously create and re-create the objective world around us. Marx calls Nature our inorganic body. We manifest our subjective essence in the objective world by laboring upon it. Yet, capitalism creates a social world in which most people confront their labor as something alien. This is most people look forward to the weekend. We are not at home in our labor, and therefore not fully within our own humanity. 

Would you agree that Leninism / Bolshevism is not synonymous with Marxism.

 

Leninism/Bolshevism, as I understand it, is the the belief that a revolutionary vanguard party is necessary in order to wage the class struggle on behalf of the disorganized proletariat. It is what V.I. Lenin called "democratic centralism". While I do not believe Leninism is invalid, it is not what Marx wrote about. I am not aware of Marx every addressing the issue of a vanguard party. It is my opinion that Marx's own views were closer to those of Rosa Luxemburg and her idea of spontaneous revolution. 

 

How do you reconcile your support of communism with what the church teaches about how evil communism is?  It goes against the church teachings.

 

I think that Pope Pious XI had a poor understand of Marxist philosophy, to be quite blunt about it. He failed to distinguish between Soviet Communism (which Marx denounced in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and the actualized communism Marx envisioned. So, for example, Pope Pious XI says that Communism denies individual rights for the good of the collective. Marx always saw the freedom of the collective and the individual as intimately intertwined. Communism is a socio-economic order in which the individual is free to realize him/herself while at the same time realizing him/herself in the other. The primarily objection on the part of the Vatican appears to be Marx's atheism. However, I think his atheism is inconsequential to his general philosophy. Hegelian dialectics, which most definitely posits God, is perfectly compatible with Communism in my humble opinion. So long as religion is humanist, I find no reason why it should oppose Communism. Marx's atheism was an unfortunate prejudice of his that I do not think was necessary to his overall philosophical project. His objects against religion apply more to Protestantism than Catholicism, actually.

 

Are you a pure Marxist? What are your views on Libertarianism/Anarchism? 

 

I am not sure what you mean by "pure Marxist"? If you mean that I read Marx as Gospel and pay attention to nothing else then my answer would be a definite "no". I am rather fond of Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Emile Durkheim, Edmund Burke and Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis, in fact, represents the skeptical aspect of my mind on the Marxian project. However, if by "pure Marxist" you mean somebody who believe in a society created around the idea of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," then I answer an emphatic "yes". 

 

And, I am assuming by "libertarianism" you mean "left-libertarianism". To be truthful, I think that the terms such as left-libertarianism and anarchism become very convoluted and confused. I am not sure there is much of a difference between socialism and anarchism. In much of the classical literature "anarchism" seems to merely be the belief that the state has to be destroyed without a transitionary period (without a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat), and that is its only distinction from communism. People use the terms left-libertarian and anarchist often to distinguish themselves from Soviet, state-centric socialism. I guess you could say that left-libertarianism stresses individualism, whereas Marxism stresses the social nature of human beings, but I am not sure how true that is. 

 

I will say that Marx's idea of communism looks infinitely more like anarchism than the Soviet economic system. So, I identify as a Marxist or a Communist, but I could equally say I am an anarcho-communist, and I do sometimes to distinguish myself from Sovietism.

Edited September 14, 2013 by John Ryan

[CatholicsAreKewl]

cause that what the church says.  I don't know what kind of answer you wanted.

 

Lol I wasn't expecting an evangelical styled answer to a question about Catholicism.

[havok579257]

Lol I wasn't expecting an evangelical styled answer to a question about Catholicism.

 

 

ok, well you can read about what the Pope said about it.  It shouldn't be hard to find.

[John Ryan]

ok, well you can read about what the Pope said about it.  It shouldn't be hard to find.

 

Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I remember, the Popes mostly talked about Soviet Communism, not the highly theoretical ideas of Karl Marx.

[Ice_nine]

Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I remember, the Popes mostly talked about Soviet Communism, not the highly theoretical ideas of Karl Marx.

 

You're probably wrong. Unfortunately I am too stoopid to prove this but, I'm almost pretty sure you're way off.

[Lilllabettt]

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"

 -- the most terrifying words in the English language, followed closely by:

"I'm a political scientist, and I'm here to help."

 

Too bad, Marxist guy, you already got your chance and slaughtered your millions. Let the other political ideologies have a turn.

Edited September 14, 2013 by Lilllabettt