Marxism, a highly destructive ideology, which is known to have killed 100 million people in the 20th century. Is still well and alive today. I wanted to understand the ideas behind Marx as I keep bumping into more and more people who are either Marxists themselves or sympathize with his ideas.
I believe the core ideology of Marxism is coveting the success of others and the desire or thinking that everyone be the same; hence the reason they try to stop people from standing out from one another. The outcome of this ideology is a regression to the mean or really below the mean. Rather than have some who are wealthy we end up with a society where all are poor (the poor become destitute) even the wealthy.
Marxism is a religion. It has the "True World" idea that there will be some utopian end but there must be hardship and war first. It believes that its adherents must all think the same and be the same. Which is totalitarianism as it needs to be enforced; which reminds me of the early puritans which required everyone to go to church and pay tithes by rule of law. In practice it has the picture of the dear leader up on a wall of every house. Its adherents don't mind creating myths for the greater cause. Feelings (like the Holy Ghost) are more important than actual facts. Remember that people can be atheists but still religious. A belief in a deity isn't requisite of religion.
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
It is true that capitalism pushes for the whole world to embrace free markets and historically countries have used force to open up markets for trade. But he leaves out that typically those people have been left better off (including the poor) after they embrace free trade. Unlike Marxism which leaves the people worse off (including the poor) than they originally were.
Also, note that capitalism is an economic system described by little to no interference by the government. Typically, it is the governments who are waging this wars (or at least allowing them). Therefore, much of what he attributes to capitalism might be better described as mercantilism (where capitalists use government to gain market share).
the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class
I.e., mercantilism.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
Sure, there can be disruptions with capitalism. But without it there would be even more (like famines, war, poverty). Without capitalism most people wouldn't even be alive today. Disruptions can suck. But when there are true free markets people should be able to get back on their feet quickly. I would argue overall capitalism makes the world more resilient to disruption since there are many more opportunities for people to pivot to.
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
Notice how he is a bit of a Luddite here? Creative destruction is necessary for progress. Why should I continue using old technology when something better comes along? Just so people can keep their jobs? No! I lost my first engineering job to creative destruction and it was a good thing!
This idea that you are exploiting workers in a mutually agreed contract is ridiculous. Yes, as a worker I may want more than what my employer is willing to give. What I need to do is increase my skills so that I can bring in more money. Some people might not want to increase their skills or work ethic. That is their choice. Or they might not be able to increase their skills because of a mental or physical deficiency - for these people yes, it sucks, the world isn't fair - but they will still be better off in the capitalist system as they will be wealthier than in the alternative.
There are circumstances where the employers are treating the employees wrong. We have many historical incidences of this. But we need to realize as more capital is accumulated the conditions of the employee/worker get better and better. I do agree there are times when non-government back unions can be necessary to help move this process along.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Both are susceptible to swings in the market and creative destruction and both can limit these swings by building capital or creating associations with others. Like insurance or other societies which watch out for one another in times of transition. In fact, labourers can now become capitalists themselves by investing in the stock market and companies. The US government does limit this capability to a certain extent though.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.
And lifted more people out off poverty than ever before including the workers and the children. As the world has embraced even a little bit of capitalism we have seen the poverty rate around the world cut in half in the last 20 years alone. Also, companies like Amazon, Shopify, etc. have made it so more and more people can have their own little companies. I see just the opposite. Yes, larger companies which have accumulated wealth over time can be difficult to compete with but they are not unstoppable. Look at Intel. A company you would think would be around forever is actually seeing rivals outpace them.
This quote is actually inconsistent with his other idea of companies going under. As we can see they become large and bureaucratic and then after a time go under unless they learn to compete better.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
Capitalism has allowed the worker to become the capitalist himself and gain complete freedom of his own life; if the worker decides. The idea that people shouldn't pay for their possessions and a place to live is to say that people should be slaves one to another (there is a bible verse about this - I'll add it if I can find it.).
Also, I think the employee/employer relationship should be viewed in a better light instead of the "oppressed" and the "oppressor" I think a more apt view would be employee (entrepreneur) and employer (customer). Since that is all it is really, as an employee and am offering my services to my customer the employer.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat
Just the opposite. We see the historical proof and this has not been the case.
The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Oh, so funny, now he is saying that the bourgeoisie whom he hates works on making the life of the poor better!
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class.
Marxism is a violent ideology.
In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital,
Is this the definition of proletariat?
The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
AKA, become the rulers and the new bourgeoisie.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In practice nobody really gets property, or very little. As we saw in the previous quote just having property like a home is against Marxism. In Russia they would throw you in prison or kill you if you were producing your own food. Not the type of world I would like to live in where you can't even feed yourself.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
With the consequences of impoverishing everyone.
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour.
Wage-labour does not create capital for the worker. What it does is it creates a work ethic, a sense or morality of right and wrong. Depending on the job the worker can learn skills to start their own businesses if he so decides. Or can use that mental capital to request more money from his employer or future employer. Also, everyone has access to the stock market now days. The worker can put the money earned into the stock market and become part of the bourgeois himself. And they can buy a home - which Marxism does not allow.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Well, not everyone. Just a portion of those in society need to work. There are people who decide to not even work any more (financial independence) who come from impoverished backgrounds.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
Depending on the job that is true. But the vast majority of people work for much more than the minimum wage (granted with the minimum wage increasing that might not be true any more - and some people might be losing their jobs or getting lower hours because of it).
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
Yes, we all want to accumulate capital. In a Communist society the opposite occurs, no one is enriched. How many times does it need to be tried - 45? Here's a list of the places it has been tried
Russia, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, Yemen, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Mozambique.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
In communist societies we actually see the opposite. The individual is stamped out. Since everyone is required to think and behave the same.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
Exactly. Stamping out individuality.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
So, he would like to do away of property for everyone to make up for it? There is a reason that Marxism didn't work out and that they had to start going towards a new neo-Marxism path. Because it doesn't work and even the workers started to become fabulously wealthy.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.
Right.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
No, everyone can have individuality in a free society. In a Marxist society any deviation from group think is distinguished. As Ludwig von Mises mentioned in his lecture Mind, Materialism, and the Fate of Man (from the book Marxism Unmasked) a man who lost his individuality:
Nikolai Bukharin [1888–1938], a Communist author who lived in a Communist country, wrote a pamphlet in 1917, in which he said, we asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties. [Bukharin was tried and condemned to death in the Moscow Purge Trial of March 1938.] If Mr. Bukharin had been an American Communist, he would probably still be alive and free to write more pamphlets about why freedom is not necessary.
It also removes the individuality of everyone since there will be no products to meet everyone's specific needs.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. ...The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Yes, you read that right, the Communists think the nuclear family is a bad thing. The nuclear family has actually been shown to be a good thing.
Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
Sounds like his ideal for womanhood would be more exploitive than capitalists! Furthermore in the current society women don't even need to be married!
National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
...the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. ...In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
That would be nice. I would think free trade between nations would lead to that more though. Typically it is tariffs and trade barriers which bring strife between nations.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Woke ideology in colleges? I'm scared. We need to abolish public colleges.
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
As Ludwig von Mises says. Society is a fragile thing and Law is built bit by bit on each other. Overthrowing everything at once is dangerous - as we have seen where it has happened.
raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
Why can't we just not have rulers instead?
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
As we have seen over and over again. The incentives of the State to manage property properly doesn't exist and, hence, destroys said property and impoverishes everyone.
To say that the Marxists don't want a government is untrue. We see here that they do want Statism, they just want to be the ones ruling others.
are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
Fantasy. Without people who know how to run businesses and without incentive for upkeep and without free markets to get feedback from consumers and competition to keep businesses motivated - to keep at bay the bureaucracy. Instead use force, yeah right.
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
- Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- Abolition of all right of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
- Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
So, many of the Marxist ideas already exist in the US. Like the income tax, an attack on inheritance, a central bank, and government schools (government schools have ruined our society).
Note that #8 means everyone will need to work. No more financial independence :-( except for the new elite that is.
class distinctions have disappeared,
sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
Marxism can be summed up as envy where everyone is supposed to be the same. And that voluntary interactions are exploitive.
CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM ... Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois She exploitation of on ocialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.
The last sections were critiques of other types of Socialism. This one was basically talking about private charity as I understand it.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win
Well, they have a lot to lose. Like their livelihoods and be put into a worse poverty.