i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.
i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.
edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense
You mean, people who say things like “Planned Economies always fail” or that “How will anyone do anything without money?”, or “Marx’s Labor Theory of Value doesn’t work in the real world”, like those kinds of “Facts and Logic” types?
Pretty much yeah, basically if you can use solely “facts-and-logic” to get to socialism, you can use it to go the total opposite direction and it’ll be considered equally “valid” in general public opinion.
i’m starting to think I’m looking for some definitive, unmmovable thing that I can point to rhetorically to say “socialism aligns with this known universal thing”. but history is constant flux! maybe I’m putting moral rhetoric up on a pedestal, because in my mind that’s like the definitive argumentation.
Ironically, you just described that “unmovable” things, which is constant change and progress. Marxism is a movement which is more advanced to capitalism, which removes the capitalist precisely because he himself has become a “fetter to production” as Marx himself says. Just as capitalism at one point defeated feudalism by advancing the forces of production, so is socialism supposed to do that exact thing and supersede capitalism.
Exactly. One thing that can be easy to gloss over is that Marxism shows us the next stage of human social development. This stage will be far more productive then any other previous mode of production, just like capitalism was for all other previous modes of production.
The key here is in the socialization of labor. It is the key innovation of capitalism and what makes it so productive. The problem, like you pointed out, is that capitalism socialized the labor BUT retained the private ownership of the means of production. Instead of the laborer owning those tools like how it was generally under feudalism, the Capitalist owns those tools. They own the factory, the land, the machines, and raw materials required for production and as such can direct how they are used.
Under Communism, that role will be in the hands of the laborers again except owned and operated socially, which will eliminate the distinction between classes and thus abolish classes and class society.
Which is all well and good, except for that sticky issue of the global network of capital. Socialism therefore exists as the intermediary stage between Capitalism and Communism. Socialism, under the Leninist strategy, aims to destroy the capitalist state and replaced it with the workers state. The workers state aims to manage the contradictions of the national and global markets, while developing the productive capacity of the means of production. It’s ultimate goal is to aid in the global productive capacity until the contradictions of this new productive force shatters the global network of capital and replace it with a socialist network of assets and productive capacity that can be reorganized around the needs of all humans, reducing the socially necessary labor time to create all assets to its bare minimum, freeing workers from the extraction of surplus labor (capitalist exploitation) and only ever needing to work enough to reproduce our collective labor plower.
How that world is organized is not set in stone, and between then and now lay two paths of history, Socialism or Barbarism. It is not a prophecy, in the same way that the development of capitalism wasn’t a prophecy, but the result of hundreds of years of persistent development and achievement. Understanding the contradictions of capitalism and how it impacts workers from the local scale to the global scale informs how we might organize that world. The morality lies in the knowledge that the conditions of today will be looked on by history in the same way that we look back at the era of slavery and feudalism.
Fighting for a workers state is in service of building towards that future, affording us some opportunity to alleviate the horrors of the contradictions of capital even if we can’t yet eliminate them entirely.
One thing that I am wary of with this sort of description of Marx is that is a leaning towards being teleological. That is, progress towards more “advanced” states presupposes a direction for advancement, which dialectical materialism specifically requires is not a thing. There is no “arrow of progress” - this is an idealist and moral argument, essentially.
It’s not teleological to simply observe that all modes of production that commanded over the political economy thus far have improved the forces of production, and socialism aspires toward the same thing. Of course, humanity could just go extinct in the case of nuclear war, so it may not happen, but taking the presupposed continued development of the forces of production, it will be a stage towards further socialization and centralization.
I guess I disagree that “progress” towards more production can be defined as a more “advanced” state of the world, which feels like a moral and idealist view. I don’t disagree that Marx discusses increasing production, but we don’t live in the same world as Marx - historical materialistically why “should” we keep the same views on productive increases. Degrowth has a place, and maybe that’s the end goal?
An increase in productive forces doesn’t mean an increase in human labor and as such an increase in what is required to reproduce the worker.
Marx made it clear that the advancement of automation reduces the required amount of human labor necessary to produce any commodity. This is what results in the reserve army of labor. However, the problem becomes that automation doesn’t create new value, and under capitalism that is a problem.
Under communism however, that isn’t a problem. The only metric that is of any interest is the use value of a given commodity. Without the constraints of capitalism you can strive to drive the socially necessary labor time Into the floor, since by this stage of development it would require only a fraction of the laborers necessary to supply the world with food, shelter, and medical care.
This naturally halts the capitalist imperative for endless quantitative accumulation. Production stabilizes around actual human needs, shifting from expanding output to improving quality and reducing unnecessary waste. With the working day drastically shortened, the population (now freed from economic coercion) can make conscious, democratic decisions about reproduction and resource use, reaching a sustainable steady-state through social planning. You must remember just how wasteful capitalism is, and how under Communism that waste can be eliminated through collective planning.
Yeah, great point
that makes a lot of sense, thank you!