pcalau12i

Yep.

There is a problem I have noticed among western Marxists in transforming Marx’s descriptive claims into normative prescriptions as to how to run a society. In Marx’s Capital, he argues that societies have a centralization tendency as industry develops, and this tendency gradually reduces the scope of money, markets, and small enterprise. Once it reaches a national scale, it becomes a hindrance to production itself, and so Marx argues in the Manifesto in favor of nationalizing these large-scale enterprises.

However, people see the descriptions and how contemporary societies are progressing and then transmute them into prescriptions on how a society should be run. They come to believe that socialism is about outlawing money, markets, and small enterprise, yet if you read the Manifesto Marx never advocates this at any point, and somehow this does not lead them to reconsider that they may be misinterpreting what Marx was saying.

They double-down on this belief that Marx’s writings on money, markets, and small enterprise are all normative prescriptions about we should run a future society, and insist anyone who doesn’t make money, markets, and small enterprise illegal are not TRUE Marxists, but again, Marx never advocated for that, neither did Engels, neither did Kautsky, neither did Hilferding, neither did Lenin; in fact Lenin said it would be “economic suicide” for the party that tried to do so.

I think part of it is that these people don’t read much on the philosophy so they think in black-and-white rather than dialectical terms. They don’t understand that no society is pure and that everything contains internal contradictions, so we only define societies based on their principal aspect, which sublates all other aspects and thus determines the qualitative character of that society. Since they think in black-and-white terms, they assume socialism can only be pure or else it’s not “true” socialism.

Left-communists will unironically argue that if the entire planet has one giant planned economy where everything is owned in common operating according to a common plan, but some kid has a private lemonade stand somewhere, then it’s capitalist. The idea of not defining socialism in absolute puritanical terms does not even occur to them because they don’t read philosophy so they think like a metaphysician seen socialism as only existing in its more pure metaphyiscal definition without any internal contradictions.

If you think it must necessarily be absolutely pure, then of course things like money, markets, and small enterprise will have completely disappeared.

The purpose of the Party is not to make money, markets, and small enterprise illegal. You will notice that Marx never proposes this as a policy suggestion in the Manifesto at all. The purpose of the Party is to (1) nationalize large-scale enterprises, (2) expand participatory democracy in the economic sphere, and (3) rapidly encourage the development of the forces of production.

It is that third point, #3, which brings about the gradual dissolution of money, markets, and small enterprise, not as a law that declares them illegal but as a natural consequence of the development of industry. This is core to Marx’s analysis but seems to be something most western leftists struggle to wrap their head around for some bizarre reason.

thanks I’ll check it out

Most who say China isn’t socialist are just moralists who believe in socialism because they believe “private property is morally wrong.” Scientific arguments are contextual, they depend upon certain economic conditions which justify the economic basis of the policy, and so Marx’s arguments in favor of nationalization requires that the conditions under which he made the argument for are met (primarily that the enterprises are already “socialized,” i.e. very large centralized enterprises).

Moral arguments are non-contextual. If private property should be abolished because it is morally bad, then the concept of a sector of the economy being too underdeveloped for nationalization makes no sense, since for moralists the economic conditions on the ground have nothing to do with it, it is a universal eternal moral principle. They thus equate socialism to the immediate outlawing of all private enterprise regardless of economic conditions and anything that falls short of that is deemed to have abandoned “true” socialism, and so they see the claim that China is capitalist as “obvious” because there still exists private enterprises.

The argument they present regarding the USSR is usually different and is just predicated on their belief that the USSR was not a democracy. Socialism is not just nationalization as nationalization in an undemocratic system is still private enterprise by definition. These people grow up in a propaganda environment that makes the USSR seem like Nazi Germany to them so they have a hard time accepting that the USSR was democratic at all; it’s “obvious” to them that it wasn’t even without researching it or even knowing how its system worked just because it’s what they have always heard.