Question for the more marxist posters

Revolutions tend to stem from war, and especially world war. Capitalists want to avoid it for the most part. Since the last big war, theyve mainly busied themselves with colder war and phony threats of a red menace when blackmailing taxpayers into funding the war machines. Proxy wars are still highly profitable and tend to isolate the death toll to brown people in their thirdworld capitalist outposts. Americans who tend to vote Republican, for example, dont mind it when they "kick ass" in other countries, similar to how the average Brit thought about British imperialism. But when the false pretexts for war hit closer to home, then there can be political problems for the warfiteers running out of new ideas for profitable war.

In my mind, they will want to avoid wars fought on our front doorsteps in the richest countries though. Asia is the place to warfiteer with so many people and so many natural resources at stake. Some of those countries have nuclear weapons though, so this most lucrative of capitalist ventures becomes a little trickier now. Growth and expansion is necessary for capitalism to survive, and especially so since debt-driven capitalism is the way since the 1980s and 90s here in the English speaking rich countries. Capitalism is consuming itself at a more rapid pace than ever before, and I think we're on the road to serfdom and eventual war. No time frame for this unless we are able to democratize and re-regulate our monetary system sometime between now and then.

Unionist wrote:

I don't see it that way at all. (And it's not because I have a narrow and dogmatic conception of "the revolt" )

And here in Canada, watch for the NDP to make new inroads as the old line party neoliberal ideology wanes.

RosaL, I'll post this for your return: More than 1/2 of Canadians want Canada out of Afghanistan now, while only about 27% favour the "mission" (according to both Ipsos Reid and EKOS) - despite the fact that none of the four parties in Parliament shares this explicit stand (unfortunately the NDP has backtracked significantly, while the other three were never there). There are many many other examples, but that's a stunning one IMO of the working classes rising up in revolt. Never mind that the physical manifestations aren't evident. In the right circumstances, no one will know what hit them.

What do you think of that?

I guess we talk to the same people and observe the same phenomena and draw different conclusions. I'm not talking about the "working class" or any old dogmas. I'm talking about the thirst for change, for rejection of the old.

What kind of revolution can realistically take place? Marxism has an image problem and most people aspire to private property. Also, I think that for a mass political movement to be successful there has to be a sense of community where people are motivated by unselfish principles and group identity. 

I think that angry young people in the present day are more influenced by Ayn Rand and consumerism than by revolutionary socialist analysis. 

marzo wrote:

What kind of revolution can realistically take place? Marxism has an image problem and most people aspire to private property. Also, I think that for a mass political movement to be successful there has to be a sense of community where people are motivated by unselfish principles and group identity. 

I think that angry young people in the present day are more influenced by Ayn Rand and consumerism than by revolutionary socialist analysis. 

Ayn Rand's books are too big to be influential. And no one actually likes Rush beyond a guilty pleasure. ;)

Oh, and there is a thirst for change - just don't expect it to fall into the comfortable left-right dialogue that dominates current political discourse. Something will come. I just don't hold much faith that it will be coming any time soon. The big international ideological players have been discredited, centrally planned Soviet style communism failed and it seems capitalism's faults are continuing to come more to the light, free of an ideological counter point to use as a system of critical deflection ('well, capitalism has its problems, BUT LOOK AT THAR THEM COMMIES!').

You mean by that young persons who are expecting that the privilege provided by the globalized system of economic and social repression should continue to award them that privilege, at the expense of young persons elsewhere in the world. The anger of young persons elsewhere is motivated by things other than the relization that their privilege is about to be taken away, because they never had it in the first place.

500_Apples wrote:

Do you believe that the working classes are going to revolt anytime soon?

They are in revolt, right at this moment.

Setting aside the highly simplistic construction of your question in the stereotyped jargon used by the right to define Marxist analysis. I will point out that reducing the question to a "national" issue is your first mistake. We no longer live in an economic system which exists in the self-contained bubble of nation states, as fitted the model of 19th century economics as described by Marx and his contemporaries. We live in a globalized economy, where the systems of exploitation extend far beyond the barriers of any one state. In many "western" countries direct militant struggle does not appear because the system of economic exploitation also provides benefits to the "working class", and so dampens the immediate contradictions that cause outright rebellion. However, as we can see globally, there are pretty much constant uprisings against the system of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy on a fairly massive scale.

This is true, regardless of how those uprisings define themselves ideologically. While Hugo Chavez may define his attempt to ween Venuzuela from the international system of corporate exploitation in more traditional socialist and marxist terms, the fact that Hamas defines their struggle as a "national" struggle in a religious ideological framework, does not mean that one of the primary driving forces behind their struggle is the extreme economic deprivation imposed on Palestinians by the system of Israeli Apartheid.

I don't believe that economics are the basis of all social conflict, but likewise believe that issues of class and economics find their way in as a major force in any acute social conflict.

The obvious apathy found among the population is indicative of a widespread and understandable detachment from the alternate political models of the past, and the ones of the present, all of which have demonstrated in one form or another not only an inability to represent the aspirations of the people, but also in preventing the takeover of the respective structures of political representation by megalomaniacs, free market accomplices, snake oil merchants and outright genocidal tyrants.

In contemplating the need for revolution along traditional lines, it would require the harnessing of motivations to a particular ideology that offers a clear blueprint for success, a viable model to replace the rot of the existing structures, one that is unencumbered by the incompetence and sycophancy of both the previously offered and current batch of potions and incantations.  Why would anyone or any group that is genuinely seeking change, who are intelligent enough to recognize the need for it to be all-encompassing, be duped once again into being swept away by the all too familiar melodies of the respective pied pipers.

In the absence hope, which is the current situation for many, apathy itself forms part of the initial stages of revolution.  As more people come to discover they can no longer listen to the charades, the more it will become obvious that the charlatans and their die-hard subjects are vastly outnumbered, performing for their own entertainment, just as they have always done.

500_Apples wrote:

The closest thing to rebellion in the rich countries right now are the sporadic suburb riots near Paris and the teabag protests in the USA, not even close, and neither a conduit to communism.

The teabaggers are following a script written for them by the competing oligarchy.  It is not so much of a rebellion as it is the herding of compliant sheep.  The rioters in Paris and similar disturbances elsewhere make no demands which would result in the supremacy of one form of patriarchy over another.  It seems more evident that they wish to confront and inflict damage on the institutions of society itself.

I think that even capitalists are realizing that industrial capitalism is a dead end for humanity. Deregulated financial capitalism was supposed to be a swan song era for rightwing ideologues. They said during the roaring 90's that capitalist business cycles of boom and bust would be no more. And governments around the world were beginning to be convinced that the "new" Liberal capitalism would create endless prosperity for the whole world.

Money was put to work in order to make more money. But Marxists knew all along that it's not money that works or creates - it's workers who work and create. After 30 years the results are in. Markets fail and especially deregulated markets.

Profit seeking capitalists began noticing their profit margins beginning to fall in the 1970's. Military-Keynesians like Richard Nixon shunned the radical new Liberal capitalism though in favour of populism in the 70's. Tricky Dick actually demonstrated that the new Liberal capitalism was incompatible with democracy when he refused to implement Milton Friedman's policies in America. Instead he and the CIA handed Friedman and his ideologues an entirely different country to experiment on - Chile.

They realized after the energy crises of the 1970's that widget capitalism was in trouble, and that profitablily in future lies with social aspects of economy with: health care, education, daycare being their main interests. This is what GATS and neoliberal free trade deals are all about - abandoning fair trade and widget capitalism in favour of social economy and services economy worth several trillion dollars a year in worldwide public spending.

I don't know about "Marxist" perspectives, but I figure it should include anyone who works for a living and doesn't employ others.

500_Apples wrote:

 

He took the entire embryonic left-infrastructure that had been set up in the USA to oppose the Iraq war, he took whatever collective angst there was, and he funneled into a cult of personality. It's likely these energies have been muted for good.

I don't think so. You can exploit and divert those energies for a while, but you can't eliminate them. They come back to haunt you. And, if you're not careful, destroy you.

The working classes are those masses of people that have to sell their labour to a capitalist in order to receive a payment. Why do they do this? To paraphrase Marx, they do this in order to live and to survive in a capitalist economic system. Everyone that works for a wage, or a variation of a wage, is a working class member. Obviously the unpaid workforce is sometimes forgotten but they are part of what is called 'production' because they directly assist and live among those that receive a wages for their labour. The impoverished are often neglected but they are impoverished due to the drive to create capital thus they become working class in order to survive through some form of unskilled paid labour. Management gets difficult because they receive a wage but, and this is huge, they do the direct bidding of the owner and they usually never question the practices of the owner (capitalist). Management is a difficult area for Marxists to directly pinpoint as "working class." Does management actually work or are they just employed to make sure workers are not wasting paid time? You do not have to be impoverished to be a part of the "working class" and this is a common myth. Middle-classes are completely filled with working class peoples.

In a word - receiving wage-labour from someone that wants to own your work (labour) for a limited period of time and not directly owning the means of production yourself are the criteria for a working class person. The working masses can rally around this criteria and that is exactly the point.

"Thus capital presupposes wage labour (and) wage labour presuppose capital" (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital)

Good point unionist.

Old Karl might have had something to say about the situation facing our species on an increasingly crowded planet. Some thoughts about "nothing to lose but our chains...and a viable climate" might have crept into his formulation a century and a half later.

Not quite all. 

fiidel_castro wrote:

"white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" 

 

That pretty much says it all doesn't it. I like this, I might have to get some of Hooks' books'. It rhymes too, sweet.

It certainly succeeds in making a lot of people uncomfortable, even myself.

Some quotes and footnoting of how what you say is based in reading any Marx, Marxist philosophy, economics or even the communist manifesto, would be nice because even to my undereducated eye that post comes across as the depiction of a beeched whale stuck on some far away island as imagined by landlumber whose closest contact with the water is his own bathtub.

Marx said "I am not a Marxist"

He also said that the way to socialism is through democracy (which he recognizes as based on capital)

He also says that democracy will implode as:

"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."

During Marx's time there were few democracies-- he felt that the road to socialism was through democracy which would lead to socialism.

My recall of Marx and Engels definitely involves revolution rather than spontaneous collapse of capitalism:

Quote:

Mit einem Wort, die Kommunisten unterstützen überall jede revolutionäre Bewegung gegen die bestehenden gesellschaftlichen und politischen Zustände. [...]

Die Kommunisten verschmähen es, ihre Ansichten und Absichten zu verheimlichen. Sie erklären es offen, daß ihre Zwecke nur erreicht werden können durch den gewaltsamen Umsturz aller bisherigen Gesellschaftsordnung. Mögen die herrschenden Klassen vor einer kommunistischen Revolution zittern. Die Proletarier haben nichts in ihr zu verlieren als ihre Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

During Marx's time there were few democracies-- he felt that the road to socialism was through democracy which would lead to socialism.

Perhaps - but it was more like a pitstop than a lengthy stay:

Quote:

In Deutschland kämpft die Kommunistische Partei, sobald die Bourgeoisie revolutionär auftritt, gemeinsam mit der Bourgeoisie gegen die absolute Monarchie, das feudale Grundeigentum und die Kleinbürgerei.

Sie unterläßt aber keinen Augenblick, bei den Arbeitern ein möglichst klares Bewußtsein über den feindlichen Gegensatz zwischen Bourgeoisie und Proletariat herauszuarbeiten, damit die deutschen Arbeiter sogleich die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Bedingungen, welche die Bourgeoisie mit ihrer Herrschaft herbeiführen muß, als ebenso viele Waffen gegen die Bourgeoisie kehren können, damit, nach dem Sturz der reaktionären Klassen in Deutschland, [b]sofort der Kampf gegen die Bourgeoisie selbst beginnt[/b].

[emphasis added]

[url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04... version is here.[/color][/url]

Sorry to hear that, Rosa. Take your time and please come back to this. As you know, your views are taken seriously here.

Owning the means of production is in the future for communities and workers, because science and technology will make it possible. What developing countries have experienced in the recent past are policies for economic and technological imperialism. At some point it becomes difficult to hold back underdeveloped countries from pursuing progress. Socialism is the future.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Marx said "I am not a Marxist"

Marx may indeed have said that. As far as I remember it that was hearsay, or something that appeared as a quip in one of his later letters. Regardless, you can't string together a bunch of stray quotes without fitting them in the larger scheme of his world view. For one thing his thought progressed and changed over the period of his life substantially, so in fact one can discover fairly clear contradictions within it.

Marx's appeal to "democratic means" as tool for social progress appear in the Communist Manifesto, a work that people should remember is a direct statement on affairs in Germany, which at the time of its publishing was going through immense social upheaval resulting in its first democratic reforms and electing members to a parlimentary body. Marx was not some kind of wild eyed idealist, but pragmatist. He definitely identified the democractic process as one of the means through which reform might take place. I don't think that Marx stood hard and fast to any specific process as a means to social revolution, but believed any and all tools should be applied.

He was, to use Malcolm X's phrase, a "by any means necessary" kind of guy, up until and including outright revolution, and the violent overthrow of the capiralist order.

After 1848, it is clear that his position and that of his chief collegue Fredrick Engels hardens somewhat, and it seems to me this has a lot to do with his dissillusion about the potential of German capitalist democracy as a reliable tool for overthrowing the capitalist order.In other words, Marx was not an opponent of "democracy" he just seemed to think that a democratic process in the hands ruling class was not going to simply strip the ruling class of its power.

That said, I think it is fair to say that when we talk about the ways and means of "social revolution" in the Marx/Engels duo, we are much more talking about the perspective the latter, and that Marx himself was much more concerned with evolving his theoretical critique of capitalist social processess, and not "means" of revolution, and certainly not a clear vision of what was to come after, outside of a theoretical and vague "classless society".

For example, the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat", a phrase which seems to have been given much more significance by the latter day inheritors of the Marxist tradition such as V. I. Lenin only appears three or four times over the entire scope of his career as a writer, and in no way constitutes a major part of his theoretical outlook. Moreover, in the "Critique of the Gotha Program" he makes it quite clear that this "dictatorship" is "transitional".

The ramifications of the centralization of the concept of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" as a pivotal idea among the latter day Leninist school are quite clear now that we have had some time to look at them and its collateral damage of millions, but this is not necesarily a direct criticism of Marxism per se, since the Leninist school is largely responsible for how these almost off-hand references to this "Dictatoriship" were interpretted and applied, though they argue they are a necessary and obvious principles deducted from Marx. It is safe to say, it was not a concept that Marx spent much time elucidating.

This is a good example of how cursory study of the work, and a few quotes can distract from Marx's primary object, which was developing an analytical system for understanding social relations, and economics and social progress, not determining the specific means of revolution, or the system of governance thereafter.

It's good to read Marx. He was a smart guy.