So...as you guys know, I'm a fan of Kyle Kulinski. His segments have inspired several posts I've written on here, and I'm always transparent about that. Why do I like Kyle? Well, because he's the dude in left wing youtube space who I generally agree with most. Some shows like David Pakman are too centrist, neolib, and dem establishment friendly. Other shows like Jimmy Dore sound like psycho unhinged to me these days. Shows like Vaush are too obsessed with "social justice" and blah blah blah. And kyle just seems to keep it real. He's a straight up social democrat, he doesn't lean into the woke nonsense, he kinda sorta liked Yang, but cooled on him as he's shifted away from UBI, and while I can't say I agree with him on everything, he's the person who generally irritates me least and he's generally not hostile to my views like other left wing hosts can be when they really get purity testy and crap.
But, I notice when I hang out in his online communities, that they're often infested with "leftists". Ya know, the "capitalism can't be saved, we need to sieze the means of production" types. And that's where I get most of my issues with a lot of the online left. A lot of the communities I'm naturally attracted to these days, given my stance of being politically homeless, but Bernie Progressive adjacent, are generally Bernie favored communities. But a lot of these communities are full of these weirdo leftists at times who are super dogmatic and evangelical with their "theory" and dogmas.
And recently, one of these leftists posted this video called "Teaching Marxism to Kyle Kulinski" in a secular talk oriented forum. And I just have to roll my eyes. I mean, the person themselves even conceded that Kyle said he looked into Marxism before, and he wasn't impressed by it. And this guy is generally just...circlejerking about Marxism, acting like "dude I liked Kyle back in the day but now I'm so much further left and more enlightened than him". Reminds me of a lot of my debate bro friends from the mid 2010s. Around 2014-2015, they were super impressed when I came out here trotting out UBI as a solution to our problems and were like "holy crap this is such an amazing concept." By 2017, they were screaming about how we need to have a violent revolution and overthrow the capitalists and I was just like....yeah...no, I'm out. I stopped talking to a lot of them for a variety of reasons, but between the wokeism and the Marxism, they just got to the point that they were looking down on me for...holding the same views I always had, while acting like they were so much more enlightened because they were "woke" or "marxists" now. I've beaten wokeism to death, so this post isn't really about that, what I want to discuss is why I don't view Marxism as the solution to our problems, and how I'm not just unenlightened and if only I read and understood theory, I would see the light and blah blah blah. Nah dawg, I'm just NOT interested in Marxism. I don't see the solution to the problems, and I've already written many articles discussing my skepticism toward socialism. This isn't intended to be a retread of those, I'm just trying to point out that no, we can understand Marxism just fine and not see it as the solution to all problems.
The fact is, Marxism is, much like other worldviews discussed by "Understanding the Times", like Christianity, postmodernism, etc., something that works akin to a religion, if not being a literal religion. And Marxists tend to treat Marx's works as if they are these dogmas that if only you truly understood them you'd be one of them, bruh. And, I guess, for the less enlightened, I get it. If you are pretty new to politics, maybe a new liberal, and you have a period of disillusionment (such as that caused by the crapshow that was 2016) and you suddenly discuss all of this marxism stuff, maybe it offers you all of the answers. And people who adhere to his beliefs and philosophies seem to treat this stuff with almost a religious devotion. Everything wrong with the world is due to capitalism, capitalism can't be saved. We tried to save capitalism with FDR and the neoliberal era rolled that back. The only way to fix our problems is to have a revolution and overthrow capitalism and enact socialism, blah blah blah. Like, that's the super condensed summary of this viewpoint, but that's basically it. It offers explanations for everything wrong with the world, and offers solutions. And man, people do like easy solutions. I just discussed Trumpism in relation to dead malls and the "war on normal people" last night, and now I'm discussing marxism.
And before I start, given i cited the war on normal people, I do want to explain something. I'm not an adherent to yang's philosophy, so much that Yang basically created my philosophy in a parallel fashion for me. I've been advocating for UBI and what amounts to human centered capitalism since 2014ish or so. This was my own custom philosophy I grew out of secular humanist principles between 2012-2014ish or so, and it was very new and very unheard of at the time. Actual influences on me are actually other UBI activists like Scott Santens, and scholars like Phillipe Van parijs and Karl Widerquist So yeah, before anyone accuses me of just following what Yang proposes in a similar fashion to marxists following marx, I want to make known that I supported this stuff before it was cool, and I have my own custom takes on this. You can go back to stuff I wrote in 2016 and see me pushing this stuff before Yang even thought about running for president. So yeah. Just getting that out there.
But yeah, Marxism though? Im not sure marxists really do have a unique thought in their mindset that they developed themselves. Most people aren't lucky enough to design their own philosophy, they're attracted to other peoples' philosophies because they provide easy answers to their problems, but ever since leaving christianity, I've understood there's no easy solutions to everything. The world is complicated the solutions are often complicated, and I went in the direction I did because I understood that these are the solutions we can do, that would help millions of people. And my ideas are more about breaking down other peoples' ideas, rather than developing a rigid belief system people must adhere to. It comes from the secular humanist mindset of questioning everything and being a free thinker. I've questioned dogmas and my answers are...my answers. Most people dont accept them, most people dont believe in them. It's the huge reason i consider myself politically homeless.
So yeah, what answers does Marxism offer people? Well, it provides a very detailed account of the flaws of capitalism, and is one of the first to support overthrowing the system in favor of something else. And don't get me wrong. Marxism...has intellectual value. It's a valid philosophy, and it's had a massive impact both on political theory, economic theory, and sociology. But, Karl Marx isn't a prophet, he isn't the word of god, and he isn't infallible. Like I always say with the SJWs, Marx's philosophy is like a lens through which to view the world. But it isn't the only lens, and it isn't worth keeping that lens on all the time and using it as a one size fits all way of looking at the problems and solving them. Much like with SJWs, Marxists tend to forget this and marxism becomes their whole world.
Explaining Marxism in a nutshell
Marxism basically comes down to this. Capitalism is an inherently flawed system. It basically forces people to work for rich people who through ownership of the means of production, exploits people to maximize their profits. It isn't anti work, if anything, as I've argued before, Marxism cant be divorced from the concept of work. Because the labor theory of value is central to marxism. Basically, in the labor theory of value, what defines the value of a product is the labor through which is used to make it. And workers are entitled to the value of their labor. Those who own the means of production, the capitalists, are parasites, who siphon much of that value to themselves, and become rich through other peoples' work. In a sense, Marxism believes the problem with work under capitalism is alienation, the fact that because workers arent working for themselves but for other people who take their profits and dictate the terms of employment to them, that people are in a sense "alienated" from their work.
The solution to everything marxism is that capitalism needs to be ended, and the workers need to sieze the means of production. He believed this would take the form of a violent revolution, which would lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat, a temporary state of affairs in which the workers would control the means of production, and that eventually the state would wither away and we would have communism.
It gets more complex than that, you go into any specific topic with capitalism and marxists will often respond to the same talking points. But long story short, they find capitalism, and private ownership of the means of production, and often times the concept of markets, to be so disagreeable, that only abolishing such things is the correct course of action. And they see every aspect of society as controlled by capitalists. The guy I linked above wanting to school Kyle Kulinski on it loved to go on about how in liberal democracy the capitalists control the whole system so fighting within it is useless. Only organizing people to become marxists and overthrow the system can solve the problem in their minds.
Marx even wrote about what I point out with the economy, and how there are never enough jobs for people, he talked about a "reserve army of labor", a bunch of poor and miserable people kept poor and miserable to keep the workers in line. He saw unemployment as a product of capitalism, and how if we had socialism, we would have a full employment utopia and blah blah blah.
Again, Marxists offer easy explanations to our problems, and easy solutions to all of them. And Marxists online LOVE to act like they're so smart believing this stuff, and if only we "read theory" and understood marx better and people like him, like lenin, engels, mao, etc., that we would also be enlightened marxists and not something like liberals or social democrats.
But here's the thing, going back to the article at hand...I'm not interested in marxism and its policy prescriptions and solutions. Im not interested in leftist saber rattling about how they're more leftist than thou. Heck when they try this crap with me, I start doubling down in my indepentarianism and tell these guys that socialism doesnt solve the problem of forced labor. And then they literally treat me like an uneducated idiots for not understanding the awesomeness of *spongebob rainbow* "Marxism" and blah blah blah. No, really. I did my own little ideological saber rattling to a marxist lately and their responses were extremely unhinged about how im stupid and dont understand anything. In reality, I was just trying to pull the crap they do all the time back to them and start going into my own "theory" and blah blah blah. But yeah, now I want to go into much of what I discussed above and why exactly I don't consider marxism that interesting of an ideology.
Objections to Marxism
First of all, the concept of the labor theory of value. I don't find this super convincing. I get the point that this is trying to make, that the capitalists, through ownership, are stealing surplus value that could otherwise be going to the workers. But, I don't necessarily believe that all value should go to workers. This is conservatism in a nutshell. Conservatives and right libs are always going on about being entitled to the full product of their labor, and often oppose safety nets, and think taxation is theft and oppose any wealth redistribution on the basis that those who work are entitled to the full product of their labor. Honestly, if you think this through, this concept just leads to a world in which we all have to work. As Bob Black has said, all old ideologies are conservative because they all believe in work. Marxists more fiercely believe in work because they believe so little in anything else. I get it, it's a nice analogy, rich people explaining the poor against their will and stealing value they should get. BUT...if you accept this dogmatically, you will get a society in which everyone is still forced to work. Which is one reasons why communism was so obsessed with job guarantees and forcing people to work and having three clerks to sell a single piece of meat. Rather than see work as a means to an end, work is a central tenet of marxism, just as it is for right wing ideologies.
Second of all, I'm not sure that there is a solid line of who is deserved what under socialism. Okay, so say a chair is sold for $50. Who gets what? How much does the person who rang up the chair at the furniture store get? What about the person who unloaded it off of the truck it was delivered on? What about the person who drove the truck to the store? What about the person who loaded it onto the truck? What about the person who assembled it? What about the person who manufactured the screws and carved the wood? What about the person who forged the steel for the screws and cut the trees down for the wood? And so on and so forth. Markets...have answers. It's supply and demand. People cut down trees and sell the wood and make a profit off of it. People carve and assemble the wood and make a profit off of it. It gets transported to a store, the transporters get paid. And then the people at the store sell the chair at a mark up and make a profit off of it. All of these people are motivated to work by profit. And while yes, we can argue capitalism is coercive, and we've looked at reasons for that on here, ultimately, markets are somewhat self correcting. As long as you allow people to make money, people will generally do things in line with supply and demand. And while yes, we can argue owners, and those who assemble the supply chain and organize the work to be done, take too big of a cut because of how unilateral their power is within the market system, I do think that there are ways to fix this. Unions, regulations, UBI, etc. Even under socialism some guy needs to be there organizing things. That itself is work, coordinating the factors of production to ensure that at the end of the day we get a system that works...is work. And as such those people do deserve to get paid. We can argue that LTV is valid in that yes these people through their ownership and the relative level of powerlessness of the workers themselves, that the workers are getting shafted, and that they deserve more money. But again, there are ways to solve that under capitalism. I mean, to go into the "reserve army of labor" argument Marx makes with capitalism, one of the reasons you need a reserve army of labor is because without it you would get runaway inflation as workers would demand ever higher sums of money, and the market wouldnt be able to keep up with that, so prices would just increase as a response. And this would drive wages higher as workers would demand more money, and its a vicious cycle. Yes, Marx can go on all day about how the poor are kept in line by the reserve army of labor. But under a system of markets, to some extent this is a necessary evil. If we employed everyone, the system would lead to that wage price spiral. So there is a functionalist explanation for that system existing.
Which is why in my ideal system, I just ask...well why force people to work? I mean, the core problem with capitalism FOR ME is we force everyone to work through propertylessness, and we need to distribute property on some level independent of work, to ensure that everyone has enough to get by, and that no one is forced into the system. From there, who cares what the market does. Just let the market do its thing.
Which leads to another place of contention I don't agree with marxism, and that is alienation. Marxists cant separate their theory from labor. From their perspective, work isnt the problem, it's the process of alienation under capitalism where workplaces are like dictatorships and people dont have a say in what is produced and how. While Im not opposed to worker empowerment, marxists tend to ignore that, in my philosophy at least, the problem is coerced labor in the first place. The greatest freedom we can give workers IMO is the option to say no. No one is forced to work for another, and everyone is free. For me, work itself is the problem. I dont value work itself. I'm a capitalist in the sense that I value efficiency. I just want to get stuff done in the most efficient way possible, and yeah, i dont value work and jobs and blah blah blah. Marxists romanticize work and jobs in ways that I find disgusting. it's like, if only work were organized under the principles of *Spongebob rainbow* "socialism", everything would be utopia. No, not really. And given we had socialism tried and how it just led to people being forced to work under their system too, I think that socialists just misdiagnosed the problems there.
Another problem I have with socialism. How do you achieve it? I believe any socialist should have a plan for how to get from point A to point B. Heck, thats why i spend a lot of time getting from point A to point B on this blog. I propose funding and tax plans to fund my proposals, I outlined how we can transition to a society with less reliance on work, and one thing i dont mess with is the market system. Non market socialists need to offer serious consideration for how to achieve their goals. And often they fail. It's just "lets have a violent revolution and worry about what comes later". And that's how you get bloodthirsty idiots like Stalin, Mao, and the Kim family in charge.
Of course, marxists, if they don't just full on face plant and do apologia for these psycho dictators, will claim 'well that isn't real communism, it's state capitalism." Okay, well how do we achieve real communism? They dont have answers. Funny how everything they dont like is capitalism and everything would be solved by communism or socialism. Ie, "real socialism has never been tried."
I could go on and on. Leftists love to go on about how the system is controlled by capitalists and how we need socialism, but most socialist systems were also oligarchical. Socialists will talk about how capitalism engages in imperialism, acting like the iron curtain in the USSR didn't exist, or that China doesnt wanna invade Taiwan, or that North Korea doesnt wanna invade South Korea. Again, it just attributes everything wrong with the world to capitalism without outlining how socialism actually solves these problems effectively.
The fact is, socialism just doesn't have a set of robust solutions to fix the problems. It's nothing more than an ideological circlejerk that oversimplifies the problems of capitalism, blames everything in the world on capitalism (tankies will even blame their own failures on capitalism, the reason those dictatorships were so repressive was to stop the evil capitalists after all, communism cant fail it can only be failed). Everything bad is capitalism, everything would be puppies and rainbows under socialism, and if you dont get it, I aint gonna explain it to you effectively I'm just gonna tell you to read more theory.
Look, capitalism is flawed. I get it. I just dont have faith that *spongebob rainbow* SOCIALISM will cure all ills. I just dont see it. These guys talk crap about capitalism all day, sometimes with validity, but sometimes overstating their case, and act like we need this extreme system change to solve the problems, without understanding how to accomplish said system change, and often not having any mechanisms in place to stop the failures of...well...literally every authoritarian communist state to ever exist. Replacing capitalism with socialism just leads to other forms of tyranny which are often worse. People wre still forced to work and are forced to an even greater extent because marxism combines a work fetish so insane it resembles that of the far right bootlickers with repressive means, because unlike the right they just eliminated market systems as an incentive system to encourage people to join the market, leaving a literal gun to the head as an alternative. Since they replace markets it leads to a less effiicent system prone to shortages and a relative lack of variety of goods and services. And you still have all the tyranny, repression, and imperialism that capitalism has at the end of the day, since this whole socialist circlejerk just completely misses the point, misdiagnoses the problems to some extent, and even worse, offers solutions so extreme and so bad that the cure is worse than the disease.
So yeah. My honest opinion? Screw marxism. Say no to marxism.
I'm not saying Marx doesnt have valid critiques of capitalism at times. But this ideological rigidity and treating this stuff as a religion needs to stop. Marxism is not the end all be all, and no, the problem isn't that we just dont understand theory enough, we understand the theory fine, we just dont see your ideas or your solutions as particularly compelling.
While I'm not opposed to ALL forms of socialism, as I've said, I've been kind of a lukewarm supporter of some variations of market socialism in the past that tends to stick with a market system and tries to avoid the pitfalls of hardline marxism, I'm just not super enthused about that either. Quite frankly, I dont think who owns the means of production is particularly important or meaningful, and I think we can do better than what some dude in the 19th century thought, when many of his ideas were tried in the 20th and largely were such disasters I dont think they should ever be tried again.
We need a solution to capitalism that recognizes its strengths and its weaknesses, and that works to expand on those strengths while solving its weaknesses. And quite frankly, social democracy just has a better track record than marxism does. ANd honestly, I think my social libertarianism has more compelling analyses of the problems of capitalism than marx does. Because I recognize the validity of some of marx's complains while also avoiding the obvious pitfalls with that ideology.
There is no doubt that capitalism, and liberal democracy in general, needs a general facelift in the 21st century. But the solutions to those things are closer to stuff proposed by people like Andrew yang and the modern progressive (not outright marxist) movement, than anything marxists propose themselves. Marxism is a 19th century ideology, and should stay in the 19th century. We need a 21st century analysis of our problems with 21st century solutions.
No comments:
Post a Comment