/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17723072]

What can I read challenge the Marxist beliefs that I have? In my view, socialism/communism just seems inevitable just like how capitalism was the natural step after feudalism. I hear a lot of people say that Marxism is just a meme now, and that the past century has proven that. Is my entire process of thinking broken?

[Anonymous No.17723075]

>>17723072
*to challenge
further proof that i am, in fact, retarded

[Anonymous No.17723082]

[Anonymous No.17723093]

Perhaps start paying attention to the way people around you behave.

[Anonymous No.17723114]

>>17723072
I wouldn't say communism is inevitable, because people will always assemble in things resembling companies for specific purposes and so long and central planning IS bad for a lot of things that end up being just unworkable if you insist on sticking to it. However, some kind of social democracy is definitely on its way and it's capitalism's own faults that enable to even conceive of it. Marxism as an ideology might be dead, but it doesn't need to do more than inspire the next more-or-less workable one. Every pundit and demagogue on the left and the right accuses their opponents of being exactly what Marx denounced.

[Anonymous No.17723115]

what challenged my marxist beliefs most of all was reading Nietzsche and Deleuze, and particularly the thought that the sort of dialectical form of thinking marxism is based upon is rooted in ressentiment and reactive forces. I certainly like Marx still and think he makes important insights, but I can't, with any good conscience, side with todays insufferable slave moralist leftists

also, starting to get into spirituality via guenon made me realise just how much the materalism of marxism cannot meet the needs of humanity. its kind of a mix of all the worst stuff - materialism, atheism, and slave morality, a pretty insidious collection

[Anonymous No.17723116]

>>17723082
xDDD

[Anonymous No.17723118]

>>17723114
>social democracy
Full or partial?

[Anonymous No.17723138]

Dont listen to Sowellfags, he's such a god damned hack that's nothing but a meme by conservatives because he's a polemicist against socialism, and he's black so he's shielded from being called a privileged ass cracka. Just read the real libertarian theorists like Hayek, Von Mises, etc.

There's so many god damning coping hacks on here when it comes to communism and socialism because they're literally always just lumpen morons that think they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires whose non-existent property is going to get stolen by kikes or something. It's all just a huge cope, if you look for two seconds at what happened to poor people in places like Cuba, Russia, and China you'll notice they get upgraded from dirt farming peasants owned by lords and dictators to workers with far better material conditions.

Just read the real theorists who actually pose economic problems to state run economies, real socialism and communism has always been having a new government run the economy so that they can accumulate enough productive forces to give everyone the stuff they need without having to work too much, forget all these retarded strawmans about how "communist heaven = utopia = fantasy" - no one who ever wrote about communism never said anything about that shit, not proudhon, not Marx, not Engels, not Lenin, not Mao, not fucking anyone.

[Anonymous No.17723142]

>>17723072
Let's put it this way put this way Marx predicted that socialism would inevitably follow as the stage after a full development of industrial capitalism but every successful marxist revolution that took place in the 20th century happened in societies that are predominantly feudal agricultural. Combine that with the fact that marxian class analysis made less and less sense overtime has capitalist countries developed in the lines between proletarian and bourgeoisie became blurrier and blurrier.

[Anonymous No.17723160]

>>17723072
Read historians of the medieval period, especially social and economic history. Not only did "feudalism" never exist as Marx imagined it, but "capitalism" existed in the medieval period. If the basic premises upon which Marx's argument rests are completely wrong, how can his projections of the future possibly be accurate?

[Anonymous No.17723163]

>>17723142
Marx's most sophisticated class analysis, The 18th Brumaire, was not just Boug v Proles. There's a multitude of competing classes; lumpens, petit bourgeois, proles, peasants, and more. Marx just thought that the conflict between capital and the labour that is used to actually accumulate it was the most important conflict in history, and it's obviously still the case that there is such a thing as class, some of which are dominant owners, and some of which own nothing and have to work to eat.

[Anonymous No.17723174]

>>17723118
Gradual, but always moving asymptotically toward full. Capitalism's own logic demands that it either collapses into a kind of modern feudalism like people like Peter Thiel already hint at as a desirable state (for themselves, anyway), or it's kept in check by a stronger overseer of corporations like the state. Populism itself is a sign this is what is more likely to happen, as even the most dishonest authoritarians claim to derive their power from the common individual, who is in danger of being trampled on by big companies that just happen to support whatever the leader's against.

[Anonymous No.17723175]

>>17723163
>it's obviously
When you consider how many middle class people own stocks I don't think it's obvious at all

[Anonymous No.17723194]

>>17723163
Think about it this way. LeBron James according to Marxist analysis is a proletariat, but the guy who owns an independent restaurant with 1/1000 the income is a bourgeoisie

[Anonymous No.17723208]

>>17723194
Literally wrong.

[Anonymous No.17723216]

>>17723208
Explain why

[Anonymous No.17723220]

>>17723142
>Combine that with the fact that marxian class analysis made less and less sense overtime has capitalist countries developed in the lines between proletarian and bourgeoisie became blurrier and blurrier.
Would you say those aren't sharply defined in today's America and China?

[Anonymous No.17723229]

>>17723174
>even the most dishonest authoritarians claim to derive their power from the common individual
Maybe if all you know about history goes to the 20th century

[Anonymous No.17723231]

>>17723220
Not sharply defined in America
Don't know enough about China but I suspect probably more so

[Anonymous No.17723244]

>>17723072
Realize that Hegel was a sheltered intellectual, try read Robert Filmer and other authors that have been expunged from the memmory of man.

[Anonymous No.17723266]

>Ctrl+F "Bohm Bawerk"
>no results
Stay Marxist desu.

[Anonymous No.17723273]

Kojeve said that capitalism in the 20th century found a way to address the contradiction of capitalist-worker relations through welfare policy redistributing a portion of capitalist wealth gains to increase working class living standards in order to stave off the threat of communist revolution by keeping them moderately secure

>Like Marx, Kojève believed that capitalism had unleashed productive forces, generating heretofore unimagined wealth. Moreover, like Marx he believed that the expansion of capitalism was an homogenising force, producing a globalising cultural standard that laid waste to local attachments, traditions and boundaries, replacing them with bourgeoisie values. Kojève departs from Marxism (and its variants such as Leninism) by rejecting the notion that capitalism contained inherent contradictions that would inevitably bring about its demise and supercession by communism. Marx thought that the immiseration of workers under 19th century capitalism would worsen as the pressure of market competition would lead to ever-more brutal extraction of surplus from workers’ labor, in attempt to offset the falling rate of profit. This would result in the pauperization of the proletariat, and capitalism’s inability to avoid such crisis would necessitate the overthrow of its relations by a proletariat raised up to class consciousness under the conditions of its immiseration.

> Kojève, in contrast, believed that 20th century capitalism had found a way out of these contradictions, finding ways to yoke the market system to a redistributive arrangement that managed to spread the wealth it produced. Far from becoming increasingly impoverished, the working class was coming to enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This is why Kojève, as early as 1948, was proclaiming the United States as the economic model for the ‘post-historical’ world, the most efficient and successful in conquering nature in order to provide for human material needs. Hence he asserted, long before the final collapse of the Soviet empire, that the Cold War would end in the triumph of the capitalist West, achieved through economic rather than military means.

[Anonymous No.17723293]

>>17723072
I discovered that most of my beliefs are first and foremost emotional and it is only posteriori that I try to find arguments that justify them, I find it is more or less the same with most people. A quick look at ex-communist intellectuals shows the same evidence, what made them change position was not any theoretical inconsistency (although they may find a justification in that), but a disbelief in the party, in the socialist experiences and the sudden realization that the revolution that was promised will never arrive, not in their lifetime at least, and that the bodies piled up in the name of that promise was just a vain sacrifice.

[Anonymous No.17723301]

yes your entire process of thinking is broken. your problem is that communism sounds nice so people become obsessed with thinking about how communism would work in a vacuum, and it does obviously, there's no logical reason a private business cannot be run democratically by the people with its profits split fairly side from some potential dysfunction and infighting that comes with democracy. the problem is in real life it does not exist in a vacuum, you already have established industry that needs to be restructured, and you have mouths to feed and cant just magically restructuring society while keeping the ball rolling and food in everyone stomach. on top of this, fairly restructuring society is something that requires extreme authority, you cant just have an every man for themselves scenario where everyone seizes as much capital as they can, someone has to have the power to seize the means of production and do just about anything they want with property. all of this is why leftism failed, and the 20th century did indeed prove it. every single leftist revolution devolved into authoritarian state capitalism while the revolutionary government seized the means of production and did their "Best" to maintain a functioning society. at best you might have had a scenario where there was a few scattered communes within the borders of a greater authority but such examples were usually integrated or the nations fell apart from in-fighting

[Anonymous No.17723353]

>>17723301
The soviet union didn't collapse because of economics reasons, tho it didn't help it. It fell because because of lack of will to maintain it from the politicians. you can have a shitty country like north Korea keep chugging along, only because of the will to maintain it from the ruling class still exists

[Anonymous No.17723360]

>>17723160
Capitalism cannot exist without certain ideas and technologies that were developed in the middle ages. Artisans used to only craft based on the orders that they would receive. At some point, the bourgeoisie, which comes from the title "burgher", which just meant a townsfolk merchant - realized, perhaps spontaneously, that if you just produce things without any order, people will buy them, and so they can just produce things continuously to get rich. Production, as if there will always be a demand, had to be invented, and it happened in the middle ages, not before it.

Technologies, such as fractional reserve banking, double entry booking, and other sophisticated abstract contracts like stock holdings, and markets to trade them were also invented around the very late middle ages, the year ~1300. Capitalism doesn't exist without these ideas, and they certainly did not exist beforehand.

[Anonymous No.17723380]

>>17723072
>socialism/communism just seems inevitable

Yeah bro any day now

[Anonymous No.17723385]

>>17723353
yes but the soviet union and north Korea are exactly what i described, communist revolutions naturally turned hyper authoritarian state capitalism. im assuming OP wants "real communism" where society is classless and egalitarian with workers directly owning the means of production. im saying that will never happen because the process is self defeating. communism is a dead end and its supports are backwards retards

[Anonymous No.17723395]

>>17723380
said the feudal lord upon hearing of the steam engine

[Anonymous No.17723418]

>>17723072
Turn 18, actually read actual books before posting.

[Anonymous No.17723424]

>>17723273
>Kojève, in contrast, believed that 20th century capitalism had found a way out of these contradictions, finding ways to yoke the market system to a redistributive arrangement that managed to spread the wealth it produced.
This is right in retrospect. Even though Keynes ultimately lost, there are deep parallels between his ideology and MMT/UBI/COVID helicopter money/central banks printing billions of trillions of cash last year.
Keynes and then fiat money solved the contradictions of capitalism from now on. WIll it be eternal? I don't know, where can I learn more about this Kojève guy who perverted the whole 20th-century French academia? Anything shorter than the "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel"?

[Anonymous No.17723433]

>>17723360
"Capitalism" doesn't exist at all, the same way feudalism didn't actually exist. There are people trading goods, services, and currency with one another, and this can be more sophisticated or less, but the idea that this is not natural human behavior engaged in by everyone in every society is utterly barbaric. This idea is what leads to death squads rounding up and murdering farmers for the crime of "speculation," for daring to sell their produce to anyone but the gangster state. There is no such thing as a "mode of production," and "bourgeois," in practice, always refers to anyone the gangster state wants to murder to maintain is grip on power.

[Anonymous No.17723436]

>>17723385
I agree with you there, human nature defeats these kind of ideologies. they should read Charles Murry, he gets vilified because he goes against basic assumptions that people are taught today

[Anonymous No.17723441]

>>17723138
You don't know shit about marxism.
When will leftypolfags fuck off? They don't even know their own ideology. Fucking embarrassing.

[Anonymous No.17723456]

>>17723138
>everyone who is critical of communism OBVIOUSLY fits into my reddit strawman

[Anonymous No.17723466]

>>17723138
>give everyone the stuff they need without having to work
>not utopian tho lol

[Anonymous No.17723472]

>>17723072
Try this and realize that all Marxian philosophers are bourgeoisie academics who don't understand anything about working or economics.

[Anonymous No.17723477]

The Strange Death of Marxism by Paul Edward Gottfried
Marxism by Sowell -- his ending remarks
Marx's Capital and One Free World by Tadao Horie

Those are three amongst many.

[Anonymous No.17723531]

>>17723072
Hayek

[Anonymous No.17723533]

Marx is a kike and wants you to believe that it's some shadowy vague capitalist that is ruining your life instead of kike capitalists.

There is nothing even remotely radical or challenging to the status quo about his ideas at all. If this was the case, he would not be allowed to be taught in schools. He is as safe as they come.
Read Bakunin instead. He is a superior version of Marx because he understands the big picture and why things are actually bad.

[Anonymous No.17723567]

>>17723353
>The soviet union didn't collapse because of economics reasons
It did, it collapsed due to low oil prices.

[Anonymous No.17723575]

>>17723093
what book is he even talking about?

[Anonymous No.17723588]

>>17723072
Socialism/communism are inevitable. However, the forms they take and the way they’re reached are untellable. The tendency towards monopoly and the tendency towards surplus of capitalism will naturally lead to socialist economic organization.

[Anonymous No.17723596]

>>17723142
protip: this is because Communism is a misguided attempt to reconcile precapitalist social organization with industrial production. Note that Communism was weakest n the societies which never had a feudal peasantry or abolished it far before Communism was ever relevant (US/UK), and strongest in societies that were effectively still feudal.

[Anonymous No.17723603]

>>17723293
so they're just "doomer leftists" to put it in zoomer terms? They want a revolution but they're certain there won't be any in their life time?

[Anonymous No.17723607]

>>17723433
In a Capitalist economy, private companies are in competition with each other in a globalized market where all of their products exist in parallel. This means that the company which does not reinvest their gains into continually increasing their market share (by marketing, reducing labour costs so that they can sell for cheaper, innovating new designs), or, is securing their market share by bullying and buying out competition, will be displaced. This is what makes the difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist markets. Before capitalism, producers had local territories where they didn't really have to compete with other producers. The idea of "capital" is that it is something valuable, productive, and to be reinvested - there is no such thing as capital to a middle aged craftsman or feudal lord who has ownership of food production, because, they have no need to reinvest, because they are in no danger of going out of business.

If every kind of possible exchange is capitalist, then no kind of exchange is capitalism. It encompasses everything, so it says nothing about what it actually is, it's a vacuous tautology. If I have a friend, and I do them a favour (a service), this is an exchange, because I know I've built up some kind of credit with them that they will later pay me back for (they will give me a good, service, or perhaps some currency later). If I live in a socialist society, and I go to work (a service), on the trust that the government will put my work back into the society in the form of better conditions (services and goods), that's an exchange, so it must be capitalist, right?

[Anonymous No.17723627]

>>17723472
>nyt approved
>"no ideology bro I swear"
I'll pass on that
>>17723477
the third one has no ratings on goodreads whatsoever, just 3 people who put it on their to-read list. Did you write it yourself or what's up with that? The first seems interesting though

[Anonymous No.17723637]

>>17723433
you very much seem like someone who'd benefit from reading marx, or any economist theorist really. Why don't you actually start doing that?

[Anonymous No.17723654]

>It’s kind of a mix of all the worst stuff - materialism, atheism, and slave morality, a pretty insidious collection

[Anonymous No.17723666]

>>17723115
you went from based to cringe real quick

[Anonymous No.17723698]

>>17723466
Don't think any socialist or communist theorist ever posited that. Obviously labour is necessary to produce what is necessary. How are you going to have housing, food, water, heat, etc without working? A communist society is one where the work is done to produce necessities (socially necessary labour), and any surplus is reinvested towards reducing the future necessary labour time, so we have to work less. That's it, that's all communism is, it's working less. Not none, just less. And we already have the technology to do this, farming, construction, and infrastructure doesn't require the entire population to work 40 hours a week. In a communist or socialist society, there would be more workers, and they would all work far less, probably only a few days a week. Maybe there is a stretch goal of eventually "fully automating" the economy with technology, but that's just a side project.

[Anonymous No.17723704]

>>17723082
Based

[Anonymous No.17723728]

>>17723273
Pretty much this. Marx thought communism would be the end of history but liberalism is the end of history, and we’re literally living in it. As for how long this hegemony will last I’m not sure but I can’t possibly see revolution and world wars for socialism happening again in our lifetime, especially when leftists have become so liberalized and intertwined with urban degeneracy

[Anonymous No.17723745]

>>17723588
>Socialism/communism are inevitable
Yeah when you're constantly gaslighting and murdering the opposition who's going to say no? retard, and let's not forget you faggots can get into power without relaying on a coup because you get so butt hurt at no one liking your centuries old kool-aid.

[Anonymous No.17723938]

>>17723072
Read Hoppe and the other Austrians.

[Anonymous No.17723955]

>>17723093
Very based

[Anonymous No.17723989]

>>17723072
read the managerial revolution

[Anonymous No.17724006]

>>17723229
We're talking about the current world.

[Anonymous No.17724013]

Marx was pure evil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V884yUEXI3A

[Anonymous No.17724023]

>>17723698
>That's it, that's all communism is
no? why would you make such a blatantly incorrect assertion? communism includes a specific structure of society and industry and isn't "we just work less lol", thats the problem

[Anonymous No.17724038]

>>17723115
>dialectical form of thinking
The what now? I'm no Marx super expert but "dialectics" is such a lame buzzword. It is neither necessary nor shows up even a fraction as much as the amount people talk about it.

[Anonymous No.17724042]

>>17723072
Why don't you look in the archives instead of posting another edition of the same daily thread please and after you do that post in every thread telling people to stop making shit threads

[Anonymous No.17724126]

>>17724042
Why don't you answer the question, if you can. I'm interested too. I've been waiting for years to see an actual intelligent and informed criticism of Marxism. It's a big part of why I'm a Marxist. For one of the most controversial theories in existence with an army of PhDs in economics denouncing it you'd think there would be a ready made one for all at this point.

This thread shows more of the same. People who obviously don't understand Marxism but think they hate it trotting out their personal hot takes. Occasional citations of ideological hacks who also don't understand the arguments and are only beloved by other choir members e.g. Sowell or Hayek.

[Anonymous No.17724139]

>>17724038
based retard

[Anonymous No.17724146]

>>17723666
Digits say otherwise

[Anonymous No.17724175]

>>17724126
I mean, there are pretty legitimate deconstructions of the end goals of marxist thought in this very thread. it seems a whole lot to me like the reason you dont see any legitimate faults pointed out is that you actively chose not to

>everyone says my shit stinks! of course it doesn't, its all a big conspiracy!

[Anonymous No.17724277]

>>17723072
Reject the notion that it's either what we have now or Communism. That somehow these are the only two options.
This idea that under Socialism/Communism that everyone's suddenly going to be super awesome because "people were only mean greedy beanies because of capitalism/the system or whatever" is really naive.

[Anonymous No.17724287]

>>17724126
On the flip side I've never heard any good arguments in support of Marxism. Maybe we're both victims of bias.

[Anonymous No.17724359]

>>17724287
the only "good arguments for marxism" anyone can produce is spouting about utopian end goals where everything works out and everyone lives happily ever after, I dont think ive ever seen a single marxist or any sort of leftist actually dive into the nitty gritty details of a viable plan to get to that point.
the only honest leftists ive seen are tankies because they basically just embrace the glitches as features instead of trying to side step them and pretend they dont exist or matter lol

[Anonymous No.17724413]

>>17724126
Marxists denounce any actual economists as writing bourgeois fictions while being unable to do the math needed to understand mainstream econ lel

[Anonymous No.17724446]

[Anonymous No.17724543]

>>17723637
I'm actually currently in one of the best economics programs in the world. All I do is read economics. No actual economist gives a fuck what Marx thought, because it is a big fat load of horse shit. Reading Kapital is a waste of your time. It is all founded on faulty assumptions, bad history, and demonstrably wrong reasoning. Garbage in, garbage out. There is nothing to "refute." Do you ask chemistry students why they don't read the alchemists?

>>17723607
>In a Capitalist economy, private companies are in competition with each other in a globalized market where all of their products exist in parallel.
What is a private company? Do all societies view the distinction between the public and private spheres identically?
>This means that the company which does not reinvest their gains into continually increasing their market share (by marketing, reducing labour costs so that they can sell for cheaper, innovating new designs), or, is securing their market share by bullying and buying out competition, will be displaced.
This is not a facet of some "capitalist mode of production," this is the meta-Darwinian reality of the universe. This is as true of "companies" as it is of any organization. The socialist dictatorship can only survive by "bullying" out their "competition," and when I say bullying I mean rounding up innocents for execution or enslavement in concentration camps.
>Before capitalism, producers had local territories where they didn't really have to compete with other producers.
Are you asserting this kind of arrangement exists in no place today, and that it existed in all places in some "feudal system" in the past? This is a gross oversimplification that would earn you the rightful mockery of any medievalist.
>The idea of "capital" is that it is something valuable, productive, and to be reinvested - there is no such thing as capital to a middle aged craftsman or feudal lord who has ownership of food production, because, they have no need to reinvest, because they are in no danger of going out of business.
You are either unlearned or deliberately lying.
>If every kind of possible exchange is capitalist, then no kind of exchange is capitalism.
It was the Bolshevik dictatorship that defined any exchange outside of the state as capitalist "speculation," not me.

[Anonymous No.17724572]

>>17724038
>gets in a thread about Marx
>doesn't know what dialectics is
Why do people even do this

[Anonymous No.17724609]

>>17724543
Addendum: you want a little example of how fuckin useless Marx is? His whole theory that there are "modes of production" is so full of holes that he had to invent an entire new one when he realized that (as ignorant as his conception of European social-economic history was) societies outside of Europe do not remotely resemble any part of his primitive/ancient/feudal/capitalist/socialist/communist. He looked at all the rest of the world, and, entirely unread and ignorant of the histories and societies of these peoples, painted them all in with a broad brush called the "Asiatic mode," to give it a place in his deluded theory, and he trusted that his reader would be as ignorant of China, Japan, India, Iran, and the Arab world as he was.

[Anonymous No.17724613]

>>17723728
Sad reality

[Anonymous No.17724628]

>>17723395
Kek