[piva00]

Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.

In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.

If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.

The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.

[Retric]

Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.

Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.

[AndrewKemendo]

Unfortunately you’re taking to the void here

People can’t differentiate between what Marx wrote and what classic dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao) did under some retcon “Marxist” banner

[hunterpayne]

So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.

[AndrewKemendo]

I understand it perfectly

I don’t agree with it for more fundamental reasons than you describe

Namely that he was trying to apply Hegelian dialectic with political philosophy when the dialectic is an empirical dead end mathematically so could never even theoretically solve the problems he was pressing on

Don’t confuse understanding with agreement

[hunterpayne]

> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though

What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.

[piva00]

They can laugh all they want, I understand their resentment from being oppressed into a failed experiment which misused the "marxist" label to propagandise itself. Still doesn't mean that Marxism is about centralised planning though.