[danharaj]

That link kind of a shallow criticism of Marx considering it doesn't take into account the evidence of actual physically existing communities that existed and still exist that do not have the capitalist notion of private property.

[civilian]

Marx didn't take those communities into account either, so it seems fair. It was a critique of what he wrote.

What existing communist communities are you thinking of?

[danharaj]

> It was a critique of what he wrote.

To be clear, it's a critique of what someone else wrote about what he wrote.

> What existing communist communities are you thinking of?

I'm thinking of, for example, cultures that are based on gift economics. The most well known example is the practice of Moka exchange in parts of Papua New Guinea [0]. Other examples abound in anthropology. A light read that specifically tries to outline systems of human existence outside of capitalism is Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology [1].

But what Marx would have been very familiar with because it had only recently been abolished is the commons that was used by peasants for thousands of years before the early capitalist states completed the process of enclosure which violently converted those common lands into private holdings. Marx actually does a poor job of describing pre-capitalist economies but he didn't need to-- he only needed to analyze them to determine the origins of capital. The concept he came up with is primitive accumulation, which is the process by which the class structure of capitalism originated [2].

The main point I was making is that human systems outside of capitalism exist. Marx doesn't need to make that case. In particular, he doesn't need to explain how to run a communist society in order to demonstrate that such a development proceeds after capitalism. He does this by examining how capitalism reproduces itself, and then he uncovers the contradictions within that reproductive process to predict what will happen when those contradictions become untenable. The main thrust is that capitalism is founded on a system where surplus value is expropriated by the owning class from the working class, and Marx's work is an analysis of how this determines the dynamics of capitalism. In particular, Marx predicts communism is what succeeds capitalism because he expects the resolution of this class conflict to be the abolition of class as a whole and the democratic management of the means of production.

This is a bold thesis, and certainly one that can be attacked. I just had a conversation at lunch about the ways in which Marx's analysis was incomplete or flawed, though he was impressively prescient considering how much mind-boggling technological and societal transformation that has occurred since then.

One needs to also understand that Marx was trying to explain in a scientific way the social unrest of his time. The history books they use in schools, unsurprisingly, undersell just how tumultuous and violent the rise of capitalism was, and how often it was in crisis.

From your link:

> Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.

This is the same kind of error that is made when people reason about evolution as if it were a volitional process. Marx is describing the long-term behavior of the entire socio-political system. He's not making a deontological argument. His arguments are that the very same mechanisms that reproduce capital day after day lead to its instability and, ultimately, its transformation into a new system that has resolved its inherent contradictions (but it also, that new system will have its own contradictions that are unforeseeable).

> I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”

Well, ok. So, funny enough, the theoretical justifications for the welfare state were based on Marx's theory of historical materialism. Even Marx's critics since his time have had to incorporate historical materialism into their framework, even if they don't admit it in those terms. It's also the case that a historical materialist analysis of society is an epistemological tool which can be used for or against capitalism.

The slatestar dude is pretty decent when he talks about psychology. I think he is an arrogant fool when he so confidently dips his toe into serious philosophy. Like, there are far, far better criticisms of Marx than this. This wouldn't even pass muster for an undergraduate student.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_exchange

[1] https://libcom.org/library/fragments-anarchist-anthropology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capi...

[thaumasiotes]

> I'm thinking of, for example, cultures that are based on gift economics.

In a culture that didn't have the notion of private property, what would a "gift" mean?

[danharaj]

In Marxist analysis, there is a distinction drawn between personal property and private property. The former is one's possessions. The latter is exclusionary ownership over economically active assets, i.e. the means of production. For example, land, factories, machinery. The way private ownership works under capitalism is tangibly different from ownership forms anterior to it, for example feudal titles to land. In many societies, including say England before the industrial revolution, the primary means of production was the land itself which wasn't owned by anyone: It was the commons that commoners are named after. It was enclosure, a generations-long political and violent process which converted the common land into private property. This had two implications:

1) There was now a class of people that owned most of the resources necessary for a human to survive by their own work.

2) There was now a massive class of landless people who could no longer sustain themselves through their own work of the commons that now needed jobs.

This is the sort of system of property that is strongly associated with capitalism that need not exist in other cultures.