Marxism started by the replacing of Spirit with Matter in Hegel's system. What's the difference? Don't know. Fine lines

What kind of music do Marxists like? Do they ever truly meditate? Just wondering

1) I don't think you want to understand being

2) because you, perhaps rightly, feel that action is greater

3) you get no help that way

Mao was a devout Marxist who sought to bring about communism. It’s right there in everything he wrote. No need for the revisionism. He and his revolutionaries stole land, often by murder, struggle session or by sending them to labor camps, for this stated purpose: “to eliminate feudal, exploitative land ownership by landlords and implement peasant land ownership, so as to free the rural labor force, develop agricultural production, and open the way for the industrialization of New China.”. What is this but one example of “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”? the “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie”?

But mostly I’m speaking about the concept of one class appropriating the land of another, the euphemism “nationalization”, which always brings about the contrary to Marx’s predictions.

Mao was a devout Marxist — NOS4A2

I wouldn't be so sure. "He claimed to be a Marxist", it would be more correct.

But mostly I’m speaking about the concept of one class appropriating the land of another, the euphemism “nationalization”, which always brings about the contrary to Marx’s predictions. — NOS4A2

Liberal policies, too, have always led to the opposite of what they intended: destructive welfare for some and exploitation and war for others.

It seems that perversion is the fate of political theories on the road between them and their practices.

The problem is why and how.

About forcing something out of the bourgeoisie I would see no problem if what is taken out of it is its greed and power to exploit, its control of the instruments of justice and the perversion of democracy for the benefit of a minority.

True, that's not easy.

"...life consists before all in this: that a living creature is at each moment itself, and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction, present in process, continually occurring and solving itself. And as soon as the contradiction ceases, life ceases.." Engels

We have wave-particle duality theory and Douglas Hofstadter, and yet we can't find a way out of contradiction? Maybe atomist were right and there isn't real physical change. Just rearrangments. This is why I recommend Heidegger, just as a philosopher, and his views on pre-Socratics to Marxists. But eh yes Lenin had many philosophical texts to tempt them

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I'm not sure what you mean by "perversion" here. What violent overthrow of authority leaves in its wake is a violent regime. — whollyrolling

Do you mean George Washington or David Ben Gurion (I guess)?

You can't peaceably murder authority, peaceably rob a hundred million people of home and livelihood, and then peaceably persuade them into productivity on behalf of a state which just murdered their leaders and robbed them of all their possessions. — whollyrolling

As a description of what happened in China before and during the revolution I find it a bit simplistic and confusing.
Are you talking about the big landowners and warlords as innocent victims of communism? Or of the big international corporations that kept the Shanghai proletariat in misery?
Isn't it true that some layers of Chinese society benefited from collective ownership that they never had before?
These questions should be discussed at length.

I think the issue is Marx, not your stereotypes about communist revolution in China.

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NOS4A2
3.6k
↪JerseyFlight

Mao was a devout Marxist who sought to bring about communism. It’s right there in everything he wrote. No need for the revisionism. He and his revolutionaries stole land, often by murder, struggle session or by sending them to labor camps, for this stated purpose: “to eliminate feudal, exploitative land ownership by landlords and implement peasant land ownership, so as to free the rural labor force, develop agricultural production, and open the way for the industrialization of New China.”. What is this but one example of “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”? the “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie”?

But mostly I’m speaking about the concept of one class appropriating the land of another, the euphemism “nationalization”, which always brings about the contrary to Marx’s predictions. — NOS4A2

Ummm...just about every acre of land in America is stolen land. It has been fenced from person to person through the generations to the present.

Without land that was stolen...where would most Americans be?

I wouldn't be so sure. "He claimed to be a Marxist", it would be more correct.

I’ll take him at his word.

About forcing something out of the bourgeoisie I would see no problem if what is taken out of it is its greed and power to exploit, its control of the instruments of justice and the perversion of democracy for the benefit of a minority.

I think it’s better to bring people up than to pull people down. Perhaps it’s not the bourgeoisie that needs our attention.

an economy that can only be held in place by threats and in turn acts of violence. — whollyrolling

Like how the employees of a business can’t just keep the profits of it for themselves and not give any to the owners without the owners showing up with armed police to do something about that? Or better still, how a tenant can’t just keep living where they are and not pay any money to the landlord without the landlord showing up with armed police to do something about that?

To clarify what I said above: we have great minds like the ones working of quantum mechanisms and people like Douglas Hofstadter, yet the issue of the world is so complex they conclude the world and is a "strange loop". This is partial to the Marxist tradition, which takes over from Hegel who took over from Heraclitus. Their internal contradictions are obvious, and I get where the Marxist comes from.

(My ideas of late have been getting bigger and bigger such that I struggle to put it all together. I have schizoaffective disorder and a smart friend of mine once said he thinks I got it from a botched attempt to be a genuis. Perhaps...)

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Both of these can easily be avoided by not stealing or illegally occupying someone else's property. — whollyrolling

The point is that what rightfully belongs to who may be questioned, and whatever answer is settled on is then enforced by violence, in any system.

Communists believe that the means of production are not in fact the rightful property of the people falsely called their owners, but rather of the people who live and work there, and that forcing people at gun point to pay business owners and land owners is a criminal theft in itself. They see their violence as justified defense against the crimes perpetrated by capitalists, just like you see the aforementioned police violence against workers and tenants who don’t pay up as justified defense against those supposed crimes.

Capital owners can easily avoid the violence of communist revolutionaries by just not extorting money from their workers and tenants, after all.

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If communism adheres to those tenets, then why does the state take everything for itself and leave common people destitute, and why are the state and its closest affiliates, for example organized crime syndicates and puppet CEO's, the only ones who benefit, and only as long as they are in total ideological alignment with the regime. — whollyrolling

Because states are not communist. Communism is definitionally stateless. The states you’re talking about called their system “state capitalism”, which is elsewhere a synonym for fascism. They claimed to be using it as a steppingstone to create communism, but that clearly never happened.

All of these exchanges are optional — whollyrolling

You may have a choice who you rent from, but you don’t have a choice to not rent at all — unless you’re already wealthy enough to own your own home. (Interest is just rent on money, so saying “you can always buy instead”, when you mean get a mortgage, is no rebuttal; you still have to pay someone else or GTFO, until you get rich enough).

anyone can become wealthy based on merit, popularity, hard work and good fortune — whollyrolling

I’m glad you included that last point, but it undermines the “anyone” part entirely. Lots of people of merit work hard their whole lives and never escape poverty because they never got a lucky break, whilst others by luck of birth can screw up and slack off their whole lives and never worry about going broke.

What you're calling extortion is feeding and clothing a large portion of the world — whollyrolling

Rent-seeking and profit-seeking don’t feed or clothe anyone. Hard working people do. Rent and profit are just siphoned off the top of that value they create.

That's the world you're promoting — whollyrolling

I think you don’t understand at all what I’m promoting. It’s absolutely not Mao or Stalin.

Where in the West do police kill someone for not paying rent — whollyrolling

Try not paying rent and refusing to leave when evicted and resisting the eventual attempt to arrest you for refusing to leave. Try just continuing to live where you live without paying someone for that, and see if no violence ever comes to you. Why would anyone ever pay rent if they could just choose not to and face no consequences?

or for not going to work — whollyrolling

I never said “not going to work”, I talked about not paying the business owner “his share”, the workers just keeping all the money they, the business, make for themselves. You said that’s theft. You think nobody’s going to get arrested for that “theft“, and that they can just ignore the attempts to arrest them without it coming to violence, from the police?

Mao was a devout Marxist who sought to bring about communism. — NOS4A2

Answer my questions. All you are doing is asserting the same narrative over and over again. Please provide citations to back up your assertions. Please stop blaming Marx for Right Wing dictators and totalitarian political parties.

Bother, if I don't soon find intelligent life on this Forum I am departing to greener shores.

but the alternative seems to me to be socialism or barbarism. Or worse, socialism or extinction. That's where we're going, I'm afraid. — David Mo

Tragically this seems true. It is also common sense: humans cannot exist without society. We can either approach this intelligently or play the private property game.

I thank you for your reply because it's in line with the original post. The question is, will the needs of humans actually force sanity and intelligence on the earth, or will tyranny lead to even greater extinction and suffering?

Those who think it's a matter of an American system versus the tyranny of the world... my god, what can one even say to such people, they are swimming in the coolaid. The common, uneducated man or woman, totally lacking class awareness, doesn't even have the tools to comprehend the status of their plight. Everything they think about reality is filtered through the culture that has administered it. They mistake these beliefs for original thoughts, they are no such thing. What's perhaps most frightening is that these are the very people who will usher in the next great catastrophe of Nationalist violence. Of course, they will not see it this way, they will see it as the good guys killing the bad guys, as the most righteous Nation defending itself from the error of all the rest, including its own citizens. As Adorno so aptly said, the world is always in danger of lapsing into barbarism, and this is something every intellectual must be concerned with.

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Answer my questions. All you are doing is asserting the same narrative over and over again. Please provide citations to back up your assertions. Please stop blaming Marx for Right Wing dictators and totalitarian political parties.

Bother, if I don't soon find intelligent life on this Forum I am departing to greener shores.

Mao was a Marxist-Leninist communist by his own admission. Article one of the Chinese constitution clearly states that “The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” I’m not sure where you get this right-wing stuff, but it’s purely ahistorical.

“We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm

“We Communists never conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum program is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor. ”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm

The answer to the question “to whom was the land nationalized”, it was stolen from landlords and “rich peasants” and redistributed to the peasantry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Land_Reform

NOS4A2 — NOS4A2

Unto whom was the land nationalized in the examples you cite? Were these democratic nationalizations?

Please give a citation where Marx's political theory validates the actions of Mao?

North Korea also claims to be a Marxist country, but where is the democracy of the workers?

Does every country who claims to be Marxist, does this prove the country is Marxist?

Please give a citation from Marx where he says dictators should have authority over the people, where he says society should be ruled by dictators? Is that how communism works?

Can you tell me what this has to do with Marx? — JerseyFlight

Oh, how about starting with the theories of Marx that makes him different from social democrats?

Like class struggle, the dictatorship of the Proletariat etc.

. When Marx speaks of nationalizing land, he is not speaking of putting it in the hands of a dictator, but in the democratic hands of the workers, not in the hands of a political party, but in the hands of the workers. — JerseyFlight

And how does that dictatorship work then? Seems historically that it has gone to one man to decide what the proletariat thinks.

And how does that dictatorship work then? — ssu

It is a democratic system of workers. There is going to be power in any system, the question for Marx (and it is indeed an intelligent question) was which class would bring about the greatest emancipation of the species? Sadly, we have never had this kind of system in the history of the world. I for one do not believe a worker's revolution will bring about utopia, but this neither exhausts Marx or negates his value. You might actually try reading him and thinking about what he says.

Unto whom was the land nationalized in the examples you cite? Were these democratic nationalizations?

Like I already said, it was given to the peasantry. No, they were not “democratic nationalizations”, which I think is a nonsense phrase. Since we’re asking for citations, whereabouts did Marx speak of “democratic nationalizations”?

Please give a citation where Marx's political theory validates the actions of Mao?

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, 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 productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

“ The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm

“ The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm

It is a democratic system of workers. — JerseyFlight

And when has that democracy happened in reality?

Sadly, we have never had this kind of system in the history of the world. — JerseyFlight

Well, a lot of us who don't believe in communism and before didn't believe in marxism-leninism have had this as the genuine problem in the whole endeavour. NIce idea on paper, too bad you have human beings implementing these things. Once you give power of a dictatorship to anyone, the outcome is really bad. It simply changes people. In the end, killing your fellow human beings comes so easy.

There's a conflation of producer and innovator, as creator of new goods and new markets, entrepreneur, as trader in goods from here to there, and rentier, as pure exploiter of 'possession'. The rentier likes to claim the virtue of the entrepreneur who provides a service of distribution, and the entrepreneur likes to claim the virtue of the innovator/producer.

In principle, it seems to me the world belongs to everyman, and everyman belongs to the world. So my private property deprives you and everyman of a portion of that "natural" heritage, and a debt is incurred by that privation. Let us call that debt "property tax". Property tax should bear some relation to rental value, such that there is little profit in depriving everyman of a property in order to rent the property to some man.

Once you give power of a dictatorship to anyone, the outcome is really bad. It simply changes people. In the end, killing your fellow human beings comes so easy. — ssu

You misunderstand the way democracy works. However, one can sabotage democracy, exactly as we have done in America, by impoverishing and depriving the masses of education. One's vote is only as good as their ability to comprehend, to not be duped.

The rentier likes to claim the virtue of the entrepreneur who provides a service of distribution, and the entrepreneur likes to claim the virtue of the innovator/producer — unenlightened

:up:

Like I already said, it was given to the peasantry. — NOS4A2

There is so much error and confusion here I do not think I can address all of it. This is the tragic fate of our time. Misinformation cannot be countered because it's easier and swifter to assert distortions than it is to refute them.

The land was controlled by the party and the supreme leader in every case you have cited. These were not democratic movements. The workers were neither free or in power. This is a serious point because it refutes your false, straw man, poisoning of the well, example. You are of course, free to deny it and believe what you want, but this will not make your belief accurate.

Since we’re asking for citations, whereabouts did Marx speak of “democratic nationalizations”? — NOS4A2

With all due respect, the fact that you would even ask such a question can only prove that you haven't read Marx. His entire program was about the worker's emancipating themselves from a class system of oppression. This had nothing to do with dictators or new ruling class parties.

"The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association." Marx, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, D. Proletarians and Communism

"...the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State." ibid.

What you are doing is cherry picking from Marx. Such a procedure is not in line with intellectual honesty.

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, 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 productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.” — NOS4A2

You have here cited a quote you don't even comprehend. Marx was specifically asked about violence, I can't remember where exactly, there are 50 volumes, but his reply was, (paraphrase) "of course, we don't advocate violence, but the ruling class will not let us have democracy." And this is indeed the tragic truth of revolution. The rulers are desperate to hold onto power and will use violence to crush dissent. They will not allow democracy!

“ The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” — NOS4A2

Again another quote you don't understand, seriously taken out of context!

I cannot interact with you anymore on this topic. You are simply trying to validate what you already believe, this is known as confirmation bias. What you should be doing, if you were serious, is trying to learn what Marx actually said and taught, not simply trying to find cherry picked quotes to justify your position. I wish you all the best.