[socmag]

Wow cool top comment!

Which reminds me, I just watched an excellent documentary on Karl Marx which was very timely. It's largely forgotten what he was really about I think.

Really hit home that his concept of the "Surplus Value" of a worker is just as important if not more so today as it was the day he critiqued capitalism in the 1800's.

Shame about how his work was twisted into authoritarian dictatorship by the likes of Stalin. You just can't win :/

You really just nailed it though.

Next week, back to Nietzsche.

[duncan_bayne]

Serious question: how do you think one _could_ implement Marx's solutions to the problems he claims he found, _without_ an authoritarian dictatorship? Not thinking so much small, voluntary communes but at the sort of scale of a modern city or State.

I'm pretty sure it was Marx himself who first used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat".

[charles-salvia]

People talk about Marx as if he wrote some kind of blueprint for a Communist state. But he really didn't. He was basically writing a philosophy of history centering around a problem he observed - he wasn't necessarily writing about ideas for implementing particular solutions beyond vague notions that a Socialist revolution and subsequent Communist society is ultimately inevitable due to built-in flaws of any Capitalist system. The TLDR version of Marx is:

"All of human history is based around class struggles punctuated by revolutions, and in modern times this continues with those who own the means of production (Capitalists) having all the power over the common workers (employees). But don't worry because Capitalism is a self-destructive system, and soon there will be a socialist revolution, which will ultimately evolve into a Communist state, and then everything will be cool."

The only real implementation details he talks about have to do with some kind of transitional "pre-Communist" society, where he talks about nationalization of banks and railroads and other things.

I think Marx is better read as a philosophy of human history rather than as a blueprint for creating a Communist society.

The reality is Marx is right in the sense that the "ownership class" (those who own the means of production) continue to accumulate wealth and project disproportionate power because they own large amounts of corporate stock and by extension have control over the physical (or digital) means to keep making money. However, in the Western World, no revolution was forthcoming due to (I conjecture) rising standards of living and a consumer-oriented society, along with a blurring of the lines between the "ownership" class and everyone else (via things like stock options, entrepreneurship, Unions, employee rights, etc.), which certainly diluted Marx's eternal class-struggle narrative. Still, at the end of the day, we find ourselves in a Capitalist world where the majority of wealth is concentrated in < 0.0001% of the overall population, which seems to be an undesirable situation.

[fratlas]

Has there been studies/hard numbers that would model a world where the top 1% had their wealth more distributed? I'm not talking about pure socialism (equal wealth), I'm suggesting a more bell-curve-like distribution of wealth, and only in western first-world countries. Would the quality of life be (much) higher?

[nickpsecurity]

It was much higher in the U.S. decades ago before the process started where the big companies cut employees and maximize profit for shareholders at the cost of everything else. The layoffs and offshoring alone reduced quality of life for many people. Then there's mega corporations like Walmart that can afford to pay people enough to pay their rent or buy food but intentionally don't. You'd see a bit more competition (and jobs) in mainframes, desktops or mobile if threats to incumbents didn't get hit with their patent or copyright suits. As in, legal monopolies designed to maximize profit of owner at everyone else's expense.

So on and so forth. The centralization of wealth and power into a rich few running a bunch of oligopolies provably harms the many in this country. Directly when there was immediate layoffs, low quality/security, bad services, etc. Then indirectly in long-term and network affects.

[duncan_bayne]

> Still, at the end of the day, we find ourselves in a Capitalist world where the majority of wealth is concentrated in < 0.0001% of the overall population, which seems to be an undesirable situation.

That doesn't necessarily follow, for reasons you allude to. Massive wealth inequality is a lot more tolerable, if the _poor_ people are (by historical standards) incredibly wealthy.

[socmag]

Yes this.

Captitalism as it stands is totally unsustainable. Communism too but that was not Marx's idea that his critique should lead to what it became.

Some form of socialism is important. It should be drummed in to people that societal progress is based on individual choices.

Rand got it backwards, Marx got it forwards.

There is a middle ground, I'm sure of it; at least I hope so.

[kmonsen]

I think size itself is a real problem, moving from Norway to the US politics are so different it is hard to understand.

I don't think a country the size of the US, China or Russia can really be a democracy governed by and for the people.

[duncan_bayne]

Size is definitely a problem. Bertrand Russell touched on some of the issues it creates (e.g. signal - votes from the people effected by an issue - gets swamped by noise - votes from people who don't really care).

Personally, I'm a big fan of a couple of approaches that I think would work well in concert:

* Federalism. Devolve as much power as practical down to the State (or, as I suspect will happen, the City-State, level). Taking the USA as an example (I'm not American myself), you'd pare back all of the unconstitutional three-letter-departments (FCC, FDA, EPA, ...) and leave those up to the States.

* Sortition. Don't select the Government by voting, select it by random poll of the citizenry, in much the same way as jury duty is arranged in many countries.

* Libertarianism. Legislate to protect rights and in the case of collective problems (e.g. atmospheric pollution, which may surprise people by being the go-to example Rand reached for as a case where environmental legislation may be justified by human costs), but nothing else.

[lr4444lr]

Marx''s "solution" was to let Capitalism run its course and entirely crowd out labor with capital, to a point of near-infinite supply and intolerably low demand. Over 100 years later, this has yet to happen. And people generally sympathetic to masdive redistribution call the Laffer Curve "voodoo economics"... Hah!

[socmag]

Right, eat chocolates until you are sick.

I don't think Marx anticipated just how many chocolates Eight Billion people were capable of eating.

[xoroshiro]

>Not thinking so much small, voluntary communes but at the sort of scale of a modern city or State.

Funnily enough, I remember going to some talks about something called "Economy of Communion", to which an audience member asked a similar question.

The response: think globally, act locally. I wish I could remember more about the explanation, and although I remember not being completely satisfied with the answer, I also remember thinking that it made sense and it's probably better than the alternatives.

[socmag]

Hmmm, well as I see it, Marx, like many luminary geniuses forgot about one thing.

Human Nature.

The ideas in and of themselves were profound but the prescription was unfortunately childishly naive.

That given sufficient resources and everyone pulling together we will all get along is great, but it just takes one self-interested outlier to spoil that soup, and there are plenty of those to go around.

Some people can just never have enough.

Personally I believe self interest is pre-programmed at the genetic level in all species. Dawkins wrote a book about that, and it manifests itself in everything we do individually or across species.

So back to your question, that's a good one.

The only way to make it work is probably some kind of authoritarianism, but perhaps authoritarianism comes in many flavors.

I'm highly suspicious that a single individual can do it. Even if they are a benevolent dictator they can be corrupted by the people who surround them. It really doesn't take much to Gaslight someone and it happens a lot more and in more subtle ways than many of us think.

So what is a more pure form of a benevolent dictator. A computer program with hard rules that we agree upon?

At least it would be consistent.

Then again, the program would be written initially by our own genome, and it better be pretty clever to quickly figure out how to ignore that aspect.

But just imagine it ,a logical machine that only does the right thing to maximize outcome... (Already sounds like the Genome)

Planet in jeopardy, insufficient resources, no way to create more resources? Simple answer, kill a percentage of the populace.

Looks pretty Stalinesque already. But I guess you already know that.

It's a problem for sure.

There are radical ideas to sidestep it, but those would take more than a spoonful of sugar I think to get the medicine to go down.

As far as dictatorship of the proletariat...

"In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class itself has control of political power."

The big mistake I see in HN is that the members believe themselves to be elites, which for the time being may well be true, and many here are making hay. Probably a wise move.

The truth is we are also soon to be no more than axle turners in wheel factories, and many of us already are.

I'm not a dystopian, I really am an optimist. Hence the desperation.

[state_less]

Isn't there some middle path? Maybe the reason more and more sound like they want to go in a socialist direction isn't that we are all a bunch of socialist, rather, the pendulum has swung so far in favor of inequity in the USA the reaction has the appearance of socialism.

Many of us are waiting for the day that the wealth is spread to the outer reaches of the populace, those who have not. I suspect, we'd see a huge explosion of wealth for both less and more wealthy people. Here I'm not just talking about dollars on the bank statement, but a happy, enjoyable society to spend you time in. You don't have to step over the homeless person, for example.

Stop concentrating wealth, what does that mean? You're just going to give people stuff? Yep, you get a phone, you get shelter and everyone gets a bed, meal and healthcare.

[socmag]

Well that's how I run my life and I know a lot of other people do that as well.

We used to talk about having "Fuck You" money back in the day.

What was the amount of cash required to get off the system.

Turns out it isn't that much, and it would be even less if the system was geared around that mentality.

I need groceries, some nice olive oil a nice clean bathroom, perhaps a bottle of wine and watch a couple of movies.

Just provide that to everyone and lay out the propaganda to set the bar that this is all you need.

If you want more than that, taxation should go through the roof on an exponential scale, and not to be fed into the military, but fed to others to get them to the same basic standard.

Anyone with billions in their bank account should be very embarrassed by that fact, and I hope they are.

People have to sleep at night, even them.

[vvpan]

What's the name of the documentary?

[socmag]

Genius of the Modern World: Marx

I think it's an Open University production by the BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07gpdbx