Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Why It's Cool To Talk About Marxism Again" video.

  1. There are a couple things there. I'll try to be concise, but it's not my strong point. The first is that capitalism has been 10 years from ending poverty for the last 200 years. There are a lot of things to discuss here that I just can't for the sake of space, but one thing to consider is that recently, I think if you read some of the literature over time, there's a shift in emphasis from ending poverty to ending "extreme poverty," or some variation of that. That itself is telling, a contraction of ambition. There's a recent book by Alan Mayne called Slums. In it he talks a bit about the UN's project to end global poverty (extreme poverty) by 2030. One of the things Mayne and others have pointed out is that 1) such a project is a victim of its categories. If the UN or other organization defines poverty a specific way and then abolishes it but leaves behind other kinds of poverty, has it really ended poverty? 2) part of the success of the UN's program, just to stick with that example, has come from methods that remove the appearance of poverty—bulldozing a slum and redeveloping—without actually improving the lives of the former slum-dwellers. They're still basically where they were before, only now they don't even have substandard housing; they can't afford to live in the new houses. So while these neoliberal/capitalist attempts have produced some results and improved some lives, they've also resulted in negative results for many many others while enriching the corporations and entities responsible for securing development contracts. There are other ways to rebuild disadvantaged communities, ones that involve the community and don't exploit it. The second thing is that the main reason why I think capitalism is unable to ultimately vanquish poverty is that poverty is a critical part of capitalism. Capital requires that some people are under threat of starvation and homelessness in order to coerce them to work. What sane person would work 15 hours in a sweatshop making overpriced NIkes for 10 cents a day unless they had to just to barely survive? While the situation in the developed world is not as extreme, it has been, and the fact that it isn't now is possible only because of the immoral exploitation of the third world. Take that away, and the world economy is in turmoil. Moreover, every capitalist is constantly trying not to raise wages but to reduce them through more efficient production and through automation. They don't want everyone to be poor, of course, because then no one can buy their products, but they also need a class of the poor or very poor to exploit, whether domestically or internationally. The problem of employment and automation is just going to get worse in the coming decades, and the capitalist solutions to it so far are so far unconvincing. Rather than being something separate from capitalism, that can be extirpated and eradicated, poverty is part of the capitalist system. But supposing that capitalism can end "extreme" poverty, won't that mean that capitalism is a fine system? Did ending some of the toils and uncertainties of hunter-gatherer life make feudalism a just system? Even imagining that feudalism had itself solved the issue of scarcity and poverty, would it be a just system, a system of royalty, aristocracy, stratified social classes? It's a curious thing to judge the merits of a system by the bad things that it is not. Marx has this line in the Grundrisse I think about how one form of wage labor can ameliorate the faults of another, but no wage labor can ameliorate the evils of the wage system itself. I think something similar applies here. Even if capitalism manages to end poverty (it won't, though), there will still exist inequality such as we see in the United States. Currently the eight wealthiest people own as much wealth as the bottom ½ of the world's population. That's unprecedented as far as I know. There's good evidence to believe that such gross inequality leads to more social turmoil, a weakening of democractic institutions, and conflict. It is not a stable situation, but it is one that capitalism reprises over and again. One hopes that a socialist society would not only provide for the necessities of life as a guarantee, but also allow for a more equal, more just society in which individuals and communities can develop their sense of identity.
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  2. So your complaint is that the people you agree with took over a term and then made it their own? While Marxism is not coextensive with big S Socialism, it is part of the socialist tradition and critique. That's a historical fact. Marx and Engels were socialists. They participated in socialist organizations. Those are also indisputable facts. Political labels can be fraught, especially in America, where no Republican is loathe to remind us that they are the party of Lincoln, despite bearing virtually no resemblance to the early Republican party. It is often expedient to use the common meanings of labels, but it can be important to resurrect their original meaning. Socialism was never a unified ideology—it encompassed utopian socialists, historical materialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists. Eventually one branch of socialists thought that, rather than overthrowing capital, it would be a better idea to get elected into office, push some reforms, and assume that in the event that capitalism wouldn't destroy itself (or the world; increasingly likely) maybe a mix of the two would be okay. Those are the Social Democrats, whose legacy we see in the welfare states of Europe. They are the least socialist of the socialists. The radical tradition of Marx has a much better claim to the word "socialism" than that fraud, Social Democracy. Despite the assertions of Lenin and Stalin etc. etc. it's not clear to me that the USSR was "Marxist" in any particular way. Marxism is a critique of capitalism; it isn't a prescription for the structure of socialist society. The closest Marx came to providing any kind of theory of socialism is a few scattered remarks about how to transform the existing (19th century) society into socialism, and his one significant contribution there is the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," an idea the Soviets abandoned almost instantly in all but rhetoric. The single most Marxist thing I find in the actual practices of the USSR, is the Stalin-era assertion that all societies must pass through stages of economic development, which is why the Stalinists deplored left communism, deplored peasant movements, and advocated in many instances—China, Vietnam, etc.—aiding pro-nationalist, pro-capital, anti-colonial insurgents.
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