this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Unfortunately, this is ahistorical. Failures of pre-Marx Socialists such as Robert Owen came from the idea that you could convince Capitalists to do the right thing if you proved it with logic and reason. Marx developed upon this and learned that Mode of Production largely determines what ideas are acceptable, rather than the Utopian idea that Socialists had to wait for a "Great Man" privy to universal truths to defeat everyone in some grand Marketplace of Ideas.
To expand: Robert Owen ran semi-Socialist company towns with large expansions in protections, lower working hours, and high rates of profit. When he took his model to the other bourgeoisie, he was cast out of high society and publicly humiliated. The problem with Utopians like Owen is that they became obsessed with imagining some grand model that needed to be thought of and started, that a perfect system existed and simply needed to be discovered in the mind of Great Men to exist in Reality.
There have, of course, been Capitalists who have made concessions, but these were won through conflict and struggle, not logic and reason. Instead, Marxists take the stance that development drives what's acceptable discourse, and that the next system in development emerges from the current system. Ie, Socialism is brought about from solving the contradictions within Capitalism, as made necessary from the progression of Capitalism. Monopolies and large armies of industrial workers equips the Proletariat with the Means and Knowledge necessary to bring about Socislism.
Engels writes about this in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, I highly recommend this for those uninformed about Marxism. Engels is flowery in prose, but it's an essay that takes roughly an hour to get through.
Owens built a practical model for socialist economics, which reverberates into the modern day. He was living proof that these policies could create prosperous surplus over time, and his methods did get adopted in subsequent socialist governments.
But it's true. Simply proving out the mathematics of socialist economics isn't enough, because the practice still overly democratized political influence. For authoritarian capitalists, this wasn't seen as beneficial. Better to Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven.
This feels like a big nut of it
Not enough to be efficient. You need to be the guy doing the firing when the downturn comes, rather than the guy who is getting fired.
That struggle for power is what Capitalists cling to.
Exactly, it isn't merely enough to create as close to a win-win situation as possible, control must be retained and the ability to further exploit retained.
I hate how Marx has become synonymous with Socialist thought despite the fact that Marx represents only the Bureaucratic side of Socialism and Proudhon and other Anarchist thinkers are ignored. Proudhon literally wrote Property is Theft.
Marx became mostly synonymous because Marxism is the only form of Socialism that has long-lasting historical relevance. Additionally, Marx built on Proudhon, as he did Smith, Saint-Simon, Owen, Hegel, Decartes, and more. Marxism was merely a culmination of Human development, not a grand revelation for a Great Man (as previously discussed with Owen and other Utopians). This is the kernal of why Marx denied calling himself or contemporary Marxists "Marxists," though with substantial time difference and common nomenclature we nevertheless call ourselves as such for the sake of common language.
The same goes for Lenin and other Marxists post-Marx himself, like Franz Fanon, Mao, Fred Hampton, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Luxembourg, Einstein, Parenti, and so forth. None were magically imbued with Grander Knowledge, all were working with what had been discovered and learned up to their point of relevance.
There have been individual Anarchist movements, like Revolutionary Catalonia or the EZLN, but when it comes to making real impact Marxism has actually been implemented at scale.
I sympathize with Anarchists, of course, there are many great comrades among their ranks. However, it is undeniable that Marxism has played much the grander role in historical development, hence the greater importance and relevance to discussing said topics.
Sorry to spam you with nitpicks, but I do feel obliged to say that while Einstein was certainly a socialist and spoke very well of Lenin and even Stalin, I don't think we have evidence of him having a specific and cultivated political ideology that fit a label like "Marxism." I think he was more of a generic humanist who appreciated what his Marxist contemporaries were doing.
Incidentally, how did Marx borrow from Proudhon? I fully only know of Proudhon through Discourse about concerning material he wrote and that quote about, ironically, wishing for a future where he would be executed as a conservative.
He read Proudhon and using his work as the base of critique he worked his own theory up. Poverty of Philosophy was a major milestone in Marx theory and one of the predecessors of Capital.
This could be a stretch in your opinion, but the way Einstein describes wishing for central planning in Why Socialism? it's evident to me that he is working off of Marxist ideas, even if we don't consider him to be a "true believer" or anything.
Less borrow, more influence and shape. Marx was as much influenced by good thought as thought he disagreed with, which he elaborates on in The Poverty of Philosophy, just like he was with Adam Smith.
I think that what fucked over Owen, according to Engels, was not his coops but his assessment that they were inadequate and more fundamental changes to society were required, concerning marriage, religion, and something else that I forget. For just the coops, he was celebrated in a way that isn't even that different from the OP, because he didn't really shatter the existing paradigm, but produce an extremely productive version of it that just happened to be relatively pro-social.
That's a fair point, but Engels does elaborate that Owen's thinking was flawed from the start, Socialism isn't randomly beamed into people's heads but developed as a course of Historical Development, hence the development of Historical Materialism.
Oh sure, Owen was mistaken from the outset because his genuinely more-efficient way of running things isn't going to be as profitable to the owning class, meaning that no amount of advocacy can escape the gravitational pull of the profit motive dragging it down into the mire of human misery. I was just talking about what he did that ruined his career from a practical standpoint by drawing the ire of the bourgeoisie, which was not his company town model alone.
Not entirely true, however his method empowered proletarians to take more control and eventually bargain for more, or accumulate enough to compete eventually, which would go against long-term profit.
Fair enough!