Ok, I guess I would agree with you that Marxism is more rational than religion. But I hope you realize when you are religious, religion is substantiated by any number of miracles and historical events, the same is true of essentially any number of internally consistent belief systems.
I mean, if Marx's predictions have came true then you might have a point: but the simple truth is that even when it comes to stuff that's pretty much purely economical his predictions have being pretty wrong. His predictions in general (ok, outside of the ones like "there will be resource wars") have had a slightly better record than Nostradamus at coming true. To the point where Marxists end up reinterpreting Marx over and over again until it's not something which is outright wrong, and ends up claiming that his predictions will come true at some point in the indefinite future.
And this is where the similarity to religion comes in "All the other prophets (revolutions) who have came before have being false and did not adhere to the doctrine in this book closely enough". "The previous prophets (revolutions) of this have being heretical, one day in the future the true prophet (revolution) will emerge and lead us into the promised land (Socialism)". Because you really sort of are riding on "well, you can't prove our internally consistent system wrong so how do you know it won't happen in the indefinite future"?
Indeed. This might concern me, if I were a Marxist. I spend as much time, when I'm around other socialists, critiquing Marx and Marxism as I do around non-socialists defending the good parts of Marx's sociology.
Please, elaborate about which specific predictions he made that didn't come true. Because, as it stands, Marxian historical materialism has long predicted the trend towards the internationalization of capital, and the development of oligopoly and cartelization within capitalist economies.
The growth of welfare states and dirigisme to manage the excesses and destabilizing elements of the capitalist economic system have happened for purely Marxist reasons. In fact, modern Marxists and fellow travellers tend to criticize Marx for underestimating the flexibility of capitalist ideology, and the tendency for the system to make considerable concessions to perpetuate itself. And in this way, many socialists, even self-described Marxists, have been historically complicit in sustaining and perpetuating the capitalist socio-economic system.
The "endlessly reinterpreting Marx" phase of Marxism started dying with the collapse of the Comintern Third Period. It ended in 1956, with the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev's "Secret Speech". Far from trying to reinterpret Marx, most modern Marxists and fellow travellers have been critics of Marx, Engels, and other classical period Marxists.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand Marxism. Because it's not a matter of "getting the book right" or having the right prophet. A Marxist revolution will happen if and only if the economic conditions make all other options impossible. And the simple fact of the matter is that regardless of how many Marxists love to refight the old battles, they were simply mistaken about the prospects for revolution. Not only did the classical Marxist revolts, like the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, happen for entirely non-Marxist reasons, they occurred in epochs where the technological and economic base for building a viable socialist economy simply didn't exist.
Not all revolutions led by Marxists are proper Marxist revolutions. In fact, so far none of them have been. These revolutions have been driven, for good or ill, by conditions and forces that had nothing to do with capitalism reaching a moribund stage, uniting the proletarians against the system and dispelling the ideological "truths" that sustained it. Instead, the destruction and brutality of war, along with the backwards autocracy of the aristocratic political systems, had instead driven people towards socialist political groups, because the liberals had proven incapable of reforming the system.
Actually it doesn't , greedy (animals that grab the most food) and lazy (animals that waste energy running around for no reason) animals outlive animals that do as they don't starve as quickly. Also some forms of Socialism might not depend on alaturism but Marxism sure does! "From each according to his abilitry and to each according to his need" can be roughly translated in real life terms "Do as little as you can get away with and grab as much as you can. ".
No. For one, altruism never once entered into Marxism. Not even in the higher stage of communism, when goods are distributed based on need.
Norms of justice are simply conditioned responses, and they're enforced by far more than just by simple material rewards and punishments. There's a reason why capitalist firms have long since abandoned docking people's pay as a means of enforcing the division of labor. It's simply inefficient. Shaming by coworkers, and the formal shaming process of write-ups and compulsory "retraining" when shirking or screwups occur, has proven to be more efficient and effective at keeping productivity up.
In existing communes, or collectively owned workplaces, much the same occurs, and it still has proven to be effective at preventing free-riding, even without resort to material punishments and rewards. But beyond that, the maxim of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is the remunerative of maxim of the higher-stage of communism. In otherwords, a post-scarcity society where the commodities required to meet basic human needs are superabundant.
Please don't rewrite history. In the 60s, life rating was higher in the USSR than in the US. In the 80s, most people feared the USSR was winning, as the screams of horror of the french rightist could confirm when Mitterand was elected. The USSR collapsed due to internal political problems (dictatorship and bureaucracy), not due to economical problems.
You mean dealing with shortages by starving some populations, dealing with surpluses by subsidising your production to destroy someone else poorer than you's production ?
Edit : Also, on the altruism thing : people are not socialist by altruism, they are by realism, as they see they can have a greater share of the production than under capitalism. Only rightists think it's about altruism.
Edit 2 : Oh and free riding ! People were shot in the USSR under Stalin for that. So anyone citing USSR as truly socialist and free riding in the same argument just don't know what they talk about.
Under capitalist theory you don't have to plan everything 5 years in advance. You can more easily deal with surpluses and shortages by various means. Adaption is key in the real world.
The five-year plan, a hallmark of the Stalinist system, was something of an adaptation. Before that, Lenin shifted the economy over to "state-capitalism" during the N.E.P. Period of Soviet history, just after the civil war. That too was adaptation, as a response to the realities of a shattered post-war economy.
Lenin wrote in his "Report To The Second All-Russia Congress Of Political Education Departments:" "...Our previous economic policy, if we cannot say counted on (in the situation then prevailing we did little counting in general), then to a certain degree assumed—we may say uncalculatingly assumed—that there would be a direct transition from the old Russian economy to state production and distribution on communist lines."
As Russia moved from a capitalist society into a socialist one, the realities of governance forced the Bolsheviks into making concessions to capitalism, both foreign and domestic.
Russia of 1918 was much different from Russia of 1921 when this report was written. History is fluid. Like capitalism, socialism adapts too, only for different reasons as the battlefield of history changes. This time, history did not smile on the nascent Soviet state.
"From each according to his abilitry and to each according to his need" can be roughly translated in real life terms "Do as little as you can get away with and grab as much as you can. ".
It comes from The Critique of the Gotha Program, which gave us that wonderful phrase. In no way does such a statement imply laziness.
In another work by Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he outlines his view of a "rich" human society. It would be a society based on socialized production, owned by the workers, and operated according to society's needs. he spelled out in this work his theory of alienation, which states that man is divorced from the fruits of his labor as long as he doesn't truly own the means of production, and in effect cannot reap any benefit from the finished product.
Essentially he called for end to exploitation of man-by-man through such a social process, which he argued was rooted in man's basis in nature.
Capitalism, in effect, is not natural. By that logic, to become one with nature, man must end capitalism.
Communism, for him, was to be the end of history.
As for a "true" Marxist revolution, there can never be pure Marxism, as can there never be pure Capitalism. The Bolsheviks, at least early on, were implementing a version of radical socialism applicable to a backwards nation(at the time) as Russia.
Please, elaborate about which specific predictions he made that didn't come true. Because, as it stands, Marxian historical materialism has long predicted the trend towards the internationalization of capital, and the development of oligopoly and cartelization within capitalist economies.
The growth of welfare states and dirigisme to manage the excesses and destabilizing elements of the capitalist economic system have happened for purely Marxist reasons. In fact, modern Marxists and fellow travellers tend to criticize Marx for underestimating the flexibility of capitalist ideology, and the tendency for the system to make considerable concessions to perpetuate itself. And in this way, many socialists, even self-described Marxists, have been historically complicit in sustaining and perpetuating the capitalist socio-economic system.
Your second paragraph in this pretty much answers you in general: in the sense that Capitalism have reformed, and will continue to reform itself to the point of not self-destructing indefinitely (and by indefinitely I mean I'm pretty sure Swedish Capitalism isn't going to collapse in the next 2-3 generations) to the point where to me proclamation of the imminent collapse of Capitalism sounds frankly pretty unrealistic. And proclamation that Capitalism is going to collapse at some point is well.....sure I guess but not particularly useful.
If you want to go on about specifics; stuff about how labour is going to be substituted by capital until everybody is unemployed: despite the fact that employment rate today have -not- dropped compare to 1850. Or the perpetual increase of the wealth gap (despite the fact that as of today, the Canadian wealth gap is smaller than 1850).
The "endlessly reinterpreting Marx" phase of Marxism started dying with the collapse of the Comintern Third Period. It ended in 1956, with the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev's "Secret Speech". Far from trying to reinterpret Marx, most modern Marxists and fellow travellers have been critics of Marx, Engels, and other classical period Marxists.
I'm pretty sure the reinterpretation of Marxism have continued way past 1956 dude. (Ok, unless you want to start discounting people as Heretics/revisionists/Maoists/trots w/e)
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand Marxism. Because it's not a matter of "getting the book right" or having the right prophet. A Marxist revolution will happen if and only if the economic conditions make all other options impossible. And the simple fact of the matter is that regardless of how many Marxists love to refight the old battles, they were simply mistaken about the prospects for revolution. Not only did the classical Marxist revolts, like the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, happen for entirely non-Marxist reasons, they occurred in epochs where the technological and economic base for building a viable socialist economy simply didn't exist.
Not all revolutions led by Marxists are proper Marxist revolutions. In fact, so far none of them have been. These revolutions have been driven, for good or ill, by conditions and forces that had nothing to do with capitalism reaching a moribund stage, uniting the proletarians against the system and dispelling the ideological "truths" that sustained it. Instead, the destruction and brutality of war, along with the backwards autocracy of the aristocratic political systems, had instead driven people towards socialist political groups, because the liberals had proven incapable of reforming the system.
And what constitutes "economic conditions make all other options impossible" and " proper Marxist revolutions" are pretty subjective. This is where "All the previous prophets (revolutionaries) have misinterpreted their visions (Marxism): their dogmas have being heretical because of it" comes in: because every single Socialist revolutionary in the last 17 iterations of RevSoc have proclaimed that they understood what it was about and have successes in obtaining some levels of public support for their actions.
With all due respect: you are one of the best Socialist posters on this board, but you are no Lenin: who wrote more pages on Marxism than Marx himself and who 85 years ago proclaimed his revolution to be a proper Marxist one. There is no reason for me to believe that you or any other Socialists are any better at than he or any number of the other Socialist revolutionaries were at figuring out how or when to make a revolution that's not a complete failure. Or to defines what constitutes an Orthodox Marxist revolution as oppose to a Heretical one when it comes to practice. Especially when the proclamations made today seems eerily similar to the ones made in yesteryear's, and base on basically the same premise that seems as untrue today as it was back then, and even on the same methods. And is willing to ignore that the fact that many arguments being made by Socialists today not only seem the same as but was also more relevant last time than today.
Perhaps you could have a true Marxist revolution, one that actually tries to create a Communist society and doesn't end in Socialist/State/Capitalist/Bête noir du jour society.
However, I can't see it coming from Communist Parties. Most of them carry an ideological momentum that turned from pragmatism to outright apologism of current "Marxist" regimes.
I'm basing this on the truly wonderful people of the Communist Party of Chile, whose leader sent condolences to Kim Jong-il, calling him a "Comrade", and whose rising star, Vallejo, returned from Cuba praising its democratic institutions.
If other Communist Parties are anything like that, then Communist Revolutions won't end differently from those in the past.
Looking other CP, like the one from Cuba, or the Chinese one, I can't see that they represent or adhere to Marx's thoughts.
Ehhhh its theoretically requires certain conditions that I'm sure that someone else would be able to better explain. "True Marxists" (Extreme quotation Marx, seewatididthere ) would argue that those conditions haven't happened yet (some claim it's close with the recession but we've had like four of them and society isn't really falling apart at the seams) and I persoanlly doubt they will anytime soon (based on the writings of MArx and his critics). The one flaw I believe that Marxist ideaology has, is that it was a prediction of the future of something which are almost always wrong. Many can claim that the day might be coming but I've always found that to be a little arrogant, it's so hard to try and predict something with such clarity becasue people (being the unpredictable shites that we are) are involved. While I guess you can't dismiss it as never going to happen (as per my point about arrogance) you can't claim it ever will with such fervor. In hindsight, nio there can't be a true Marxist revolution, because there has never been the right sort of economic conditions for it to happen. It will almost always dissolve into some sort of dictatorship ala China, Cuba or the USSR.
The other thing is what a true Marxist revolution is EXTREMELY subjective. It's not unified ideaology it has factions who would claim they are "True" Marxists. Kinda of like saying which nation has "true humans" it gets messy.
If you want to go on about specifics; stuff about how labour is going to be substituted by capital until everybody is unemployed: despite the fact that employment rate today have -not- dropped compare to 1850. Or the perpetual increase of the wealth gap (despite the fact that as of today, the Canadian wealth gap is smaller than 1850).
That's not Marx, though. That's Lasalle and his followers who made that claim, and attributed it to Karl Marx. But Marx explicitly criticized that "iron law of wages" argument, not only in his economic manuscripts, but also in more direct polemics like Critique of the Gotha Programme. Basically, his criticism was that there was no "law of wages" in capitalism, whether it was made of sponge or iron. Wages did improve for industrial workers during Marx's lifetime, after all.
His point simply was that as production became more capital intensive, the level of exploitation increased. The "reserve army of unemployed" simply enabled negative pressure on working class wages, and weakened their bargaining power. In the modern world, most nations have full employment policies and welfare systems to enable people to stay out of the labor market, and prevent abject poverty among those who are in between jobs.
I'm pretty sure the reinterpretation of Marxism have continued way past 1956 dude. (Ok, unless you want to start discounting people as Heretics/revisionists/Maoists/trots w/e)
In my experience, those who are still "reinterpreting" Marx are simply restating old "reinterpretations" in new forms. Even the Maoists, and other "anti-revisionists" acknowledge Lenin, Mao, et al. as extending and revising classic Marxism, not simply reinterpreting it.
And what constitutes "economic conditions make all other options impossible" and " proper Marxist revolutions" are pretty subjective. This is where "All the previous prophets (revolutionaries) have misinterpreted their visions (Marxism): their dogmas have being heretical because of it" comes in: because every single Socialist revolutionary in the last 17 iterations of RevSoc have proclaimed that they understood what it was about and have successes in obtaining some levels of public support for their actions.
I already spelled it out for you. In Marxian historical materialism, a mode of production is in its moribund state when it is no longer capable of permitting increases in productivity, and realizing economic gains for the ruling class, let alone subject classes. For example, feudal manorial economies after the renaissance and enlightenment eras, hindered technological innovation, and implementing new means of producing and distributing goods. As a result the system died a slow death, as more and more production left the manor, and become concentrated in towns and cities, where capitalist property instead of feudalist vassalage was the means of organization.
Lenin, for example, never had any illusions about what the Bolsheviks were accomplishing in Russia. Capitalism, for him, wasn't moribund in Russia, it was stillborn. His judgment was that it was reaching its terminal phase in the more advanced capitalist countries in Europe and North America, sustained only by imperialism. So by revolting in Russia, they could spark the final conflict between labor and capital in the advanced capitalist countries, who were under the grips of false consciousness and nationalism, and convince them that there was another way.
The actual Marxist revolution would occur in Britain or Germany, and would then presumably bail their Russian comrades out.
Obviously, that did not pan, even though the initial results were promising. It wasn't until 1924 that the Comintern shifted to the "second period", arguing that the opportunity had been missed or was premature, and there was a new reactionary period blah blah blah.
With all due respect: you are one of the best Socialist posters on this board, but you are no Lenin: who wrote more pages on Marxism than Marx himself and who 85 years ago proclaimed his revolution to be a proper Marxist one. There is no reason for me to believe that you or any other Socialists are any better at than he or any number of the other Socialist revolutionaries were at figuring out how or when to make a revolution that's not a complete failure. Or to defines what constitutes an Orthodox Marxist revolution as oppose to a Heretical one when it comes to practice. Especially when the proclamations made today seems eerily similar to the ones made in yesteryear's, and base on basically the same premise that seems as untrue today as it was back then, and even on the same methods. And is willing to ignore that the fact that many arguments being made by Socialists today not only seem the same as but was also more relevant last time than today.
I don't claim to be more intelligent or learned than Lenin. I do, however, happen to have the advantage of 85 years of hindsight. Lenin, as I previously noted, never proclaimed that Russia was supposed to be a true Marxist revolution. For one, he was working with conditions that were entirely separate from the conditions Marx dealt with.
What defined Bolshevism from Menshevism is that the Bolsheviks disagreed with the traditional look-out model of "educate, agitate, organize" that previous Marxist groups had adopted in preparation for future revolutionary struggles. Capitalism, they argued, was stillborn in Russia, and Russia had missed the boat so to speak. The autocracy and the feudal remnants were too powerful, and the reform impulse wasn't strong enough to accomplish the bourgeois liberal revolutions that had occurred in the rest of Europe. The Bolsheviks felt it would be necessary in Russia for socialists to be the ones to step into the breach, and destroy the autocracy, and build capitalism and socialism all at once. This was entirely uncharted territory for Marxists.
But the success of the project was always predicated on revolution occurring elsewhere, to prevent the isolation of Russia. What doomed the Soviets more than anything else in the long run was autarky.
The Soviet Union was not strong enough, economically or politically, to go-it-alone against the rest of the world with only its dysfunctional puppets (all hell-bent on their own economic autarky) as allies and trading partners, yet they were too strong to be integrated into the global capitalist market. Going Deng simply isn't an option for a superpower. They're simply too dangerous and threatening. And after the Second World War, the Soviets could be nothing but a superpower.
Marx didn't leave strictures about party forms. We know from his political activity that he favoured parties dominated by the working class, on a multitendential basis, where he could be a sectarian idiot. We also know that he favoured reality as it was over fantasising (see his strong support for the very mixed Chartist movement).
Given the very "loose" definition here, it is no wonder that the appropriate nature of revolutionary activity has been at the forefront of the debates and thoughts of Marx influenced leftist revolutionaries for a hundred and fifty years.
As such, there is no definitional "category" regarding the nature of revolutions themselves.
As far as outcomes, the overthrow of the value form, mass participatory democracy, a society where necessity and self-actualisation are in harmony, and the elimination of social class are a reasonable (though not _definitional_) guide to evaluating outcomes.
Now, OTL Communism claims this (of course, this is untrue- revolution was not worker-based, relied on a party-bourgeois culture, established the state as opposed to corporate power and generally ignored the industrial origins of the revolution in favor of agrarian basis and reform with disastrous results).
Yes, iOTL Bolsheviks, Leninists and Stalinists claimed that their revolutions were Marxist. I think you confuse the concept of "petit-bourgeois" ("little bourgeois," shop keepers and such) with "The Revolutionary Party"[tm].
Your summary of the early repression of working class revolution in the Soviet Union doesn't really come up to the par, I recommend Simon Pirani on this.
Finally, your depiction doesn't represent the actuality of nomenklatura seizure of power in Central Europe.
I was wondering what would be, and what would happen, with a true Marxist revolution? I hope the more educated Reds could help me out with this, such as the ever-knowledgeable Jello_Biafra or his, so to speak, "comrades".
Exactly what happened to the Paris Communards, or the Workers of Petrograd/Kronstadt, or the POUM and later CNT/FAI, or to the Hungarians in '56, or the Czechoslovaks in '68. (This is a Western biased summary, aimed at instances of systematic improvement in workers control at the factory level). If your interest is in rural proletarians, I'd suggest you look at what happened to the self-administering villages in the PRG liberated areas post 1975.
While many instances of periodic revolt have occurred, with notable instances involving the replacement of bourgeois apparatus with new worker controlled forms, none so far has managed to fight off old or new ruling classes.
No. For one, altruism never once entered into Marxism. Not even in the higher stage of communism, when goods are distributed based on need.
Norms of justice are simply conditioned responses, and they're enforced by far more than just by simple material rewards and punishments. There's a reason why capitalist firms have long since abandoned docking people's pay as a means of enforcing the division of labor. It's simply inefficient. Shaming by coworkers, and the formal shaming process of write-ups and compulsory "retraining" when shirking or screwups occur, has proven to be more efficient and effective at keeping productivity up.
In existing communes, or collectively owned workplaces, much the same occurs, and it still has proven to be effective at preventing free-riding, even without resort to material punishments and rewards. But beyond that, the maxim of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is the remunerative of maxim of the higher-stage of communism. In otherwords, a post-scarcity society where the commodities required to meet basic human needs are superabundant.
True Marxism is impossible. It makes the same flaw as pure Capitalism. It assumes all people are good.
As history has shown, all Communist revolutions either fall apart or turn over to authoritarian dictatorships shortly after their inception. You can debate hypotheticals about this, but the reality is that there has been no true Marxist revolution and there probably never will be. Marx was an idealist and idealism does not work in the real world.
Dude you sound like your 'experience' comes from hanging around with Ayn Rand villains. I mean no offense but I'm not a Marxist, but I have had alot of experience with Marxists, and not once have I ever (online or in real life) heard someone say that.
The difference is that you don't have to push for me to admit that all economic theories have their shortcomings in the real world. Pure capitalism doesn't work in the real world either. I am NOT a disciple of Ron Paul! The real world is a messy place. However, capitalism as a whole has proven more adaptable than socialism. Under capitalist theory you don't have to plan everything 5 years in advance. You can more easily deal with surpluses and shortages by various means. Adaption is key in the real world.
Dude you sound like your 'experience' comes from hanging around with Ayn Rand villains. I mean no offense but I'm not a Marxist, but I have had alot of experience with Marxists, and not once have I ever (online or in real life) heard someone say that.
Not at all, but a LOT of people tend to talk about sports, what date they are going on, their kids and everything but their job during work hours. Now they don't come out and say "You work too hard and don't spend enough time socializing" but they do tend to do things that slow down the tempo and make it clear they don't like it. Of course most of these were low ranking jobs such as working in factories and the like when I was in high school/ collage. The higher ranking jobs tend to have higher expectations but Marxism is less popular there unless you work for the government.
A Marxist revolution would be one driven by an internal crisis of capitalism that could not be resolved within the existing state superstructure. The rate of profit falls so low, and the economy becomes so capital intensive, that it becomes impossible for capitalists, even in the system of cartelized oligopoly, to realize much gain for themselves, let alone economic growth that benefits other classes. In otherwords, it would be a crisis of a terminal stage of the economic system, just like the crises of the previous feudal order, that enabled a decisive rupture in extant social and economic relations.
The growth, and then eventual stagnation of the capitalist economy, would unite workers against the system. When the alienation and degradation inherent in the division of labor reaches is no longer outweighed by the prospect of continued prosperity and hope for tomorrow, "false consciousness" can no longer be sustained, and so either one of two things occurs: reactionaries entrench the system, and it degenerates, or there is a revolutionary transformation.
...One might argue the 99% vs 1% and Occupy Movements last year might be a sign of the "alienation and degradation inherent in the division of labor reaches is no longer outweighed by the prospect of continued prosperity and hope for tomorrow".
I'm no a Marxist, or Communist, or in any way trying to support or deny such philosophical interpretations of economics. If anything I might support fascist '3rd way' economics on philosophical principle over free-market capitalism.
However the way I see things is that human civilisation does correspond very well to generational Zeitgeist; that different generations embody different political stances in a cyclical manner.
In the 20thC the post-WWII baby boomer phase (particularly in America) can be likened to a second population explosion that coincided with a population reduction in Europe and the Soviet Union (loss of potential population due to casualties during the war), that allowed a consumerist explosion in the so called 'victorious powers' of the the Cold War.
America having left the second world war with a mobilised industrial economy with a common feeling to repopulate the losses of the second world war created the 'Baby Boomer' generation that provided capitalist business just the consumers (demand) it needed to supply all manner of materialist goods (supply). Given the ideological nature of the US regime this worked particularly well at generating huge quantities of wealth for venture capitalists and the last echelon of industrialists.
Growing wealth created a stratification of the population with the 'last echelon' being able to consolidate their empires based on the wealth sapped from the babyboomer generation, and overall increased the costs of living for the middle class with the stretching of the wealth structure and the American Dream expanding the middle classes.
By the late 70s and 80s the 'baby bubble', if I can call it that, was ending, and so with it an increase in the growth of potential consumers within America.
This spurred the last echelon to look to the rest of the world to 'grow its consumer base', and this is why we end up with the export of Americanism and Free-market Capitalism that was designed to open up the American consumerism to these as of yet 'virgin markets'.
Again this generated great wealth for America in the wake of the collapsing British Empire that had once dominated this 'consumer market' (although Britain did the opposite of creating a consumer market in their empire, they created trade triangles).
This is what allowed the second economic explosion in American Capitalism up until the end of the Cold War (fall of the Berlin wall; 1989);
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet again free-market capitalism had another consumer market in the post-soviet states. Furthermore the new trends in 'globalism' and the 'global market place' as a concept allowed them to take Free-market capitalism from Central America and the West Coast of Africa right into Europe and the Middle East.
Cynically creating the 'clash of cultures' that went on to cause Al Quidea into being, and the unfortunate events of 11/9/2001, creating T.W.A.T. as an ongoing concept.
However globalism exsits within a finite world and with the economic centres of the 'Tiger Economies' in Asia reaching their industrial potential, American free market capitalism has been reaching total saturation. Thus with supply beginning to outstrip demand on an consumerist level of basic goods we are finding that the 'last echelon' companies in order to retain profit margins have to increase prices, since they cannot increase the population base any more than it already is.
Note: That while the initial 'last echelon' was made of industrialists 'concerned with everybody owning', the 'last echelon companies' are the generation who grew up with the wealth generated by the Baby Boomers and Generation X and so rather than everybody owning, they are concerned with themselves owning; owning the markets that is, and the wealth it generates.
Hence we get fed the 'money standard' as a method for judging an economies worth. i.e. how much has the economy grown in ability to generate wealth.
What we don't tend to look at is the growth in modal earnings and the general 'proletariat wealth', normally this is because we assume in the west that poverty is almost completely eradicated and implicitly sweep the trickle down of wealth under the rug as 'it must work, since we won the Cold War' and the loobying from businesses in the 'last echelon'.
Hence by the time of the credit crunch we are left with an economic system 'too big to be allowed to fail'. Since the 'last echelon companies are the supplies of our markets and without our markets we have to start again from new venture capitalists.
But who would these new capitalists be? In a world dominated by the last echelon companies they don't want new capitalists around, and Generation Y are too interested in their 'digital domain' of the internet and globalisation to think about protecting their markets, they are looking to support the global market. The global market system itself if allowed to fail spells a fall in living standards globally and so will have everything done in its power to prevent its 'bust'.
With 'booms' being artificially inflated by trying to keep profit margins high in the 'last echelon', to prevent the 'bust', they we break the methodology by which capitalism is allowed to work.
i.e. that supply and demand are to balance, indeed we under supply to keep the economicmoney standard to keep growing. Since this is the indicator we use, rather than modal standard of living.
All of this is in effect a pyramid scheme, because 'Economic Growth' is not a linear process.
Question to everybody here;
I have a business producing £100 from a population of 100 people. My target is 4% growth, how much more profitable must my business be after 10 years?
Got your answer yet?
Now look in the spoiler;
You did do the calculation above? If you don't there is no point in reading the below because you won't understand my point clearly if you didn't*;
4% is a multiplier of 1.04
Compound interest is worked out by taking the multipler and raising it
to the number of times it is iterated, N;
1.04^N
£100 x 1.04^10 = £148
Now consider those 100 people you were gaining wealth from, 10 years ago each one of them payed you £1 each, now each one of them must pay you £1.48, an increase of cost to them of almost 50% over 10 years.
Such exponential growth can be extrapolated to the future; how much more must my business be after 20yrs, 30yrs and 50yrs and the cost to my consumer populations?
20yrs, £219 in business, a per capita cost of; £2.19 per person
30yrs, £324 in business, ...; £3.24
50yrs, £710 in business, ...; £7.10
In 50yrs time, your consumer pays 700% more for your 4% growth target. Unless his own personal wealth increases in line with your growth, then he shall be worst off 5, 10, 50, ... years in the future.
Thus unless the modal standard of economic growth increases in line with the money standard, the labour force will progressively we worse off in a form of neo-indenture by the last echelon companies.
Sounds sustainable yes? We just need to insure both standards of growth continue in lock-step, right?
Well remember how I talked about the way the American Free-market capitalism had to expand by looking for more consumers in the rest of the world. What happens when we run out of 'the rest of the world markets'? i.e. total globalisation.
Now where is the wealth going to come from to supply the 'proletariat classes' since they can't 'grow' more than the world can supply.
Another Question:
My business uses a specific mineral called 'Norecyclableium', the entire planet only have 100tonnes of this material, initially 10 years ago my company used 1 tonne of Norecyclableium a year, and use must increase by 4% each year.
How long before it is all gone? When is half of it all used up?
The total used U, is the sum of the years, N, used, and those before it;
U = SUM_N{ 1.04^N }
The remainder is the total initial T take this sum;
T - U
I used my calculator because it has a programmable function for itterative sums rather than rearrage for the general formula.
Giving;
It takes 41 years to deplete the resources.
Half of the resources are used only 13 years before they are all used up (28 years after I began my growth process).
This illustrates how we can go from only using 1% of all the resources initial out there and deplete all of the resources out there in less than 50yrs with a tiny nominal growth rate of 4%.
Scary thought eh?
Now let's put the mathematics in context, how long ago was the end of WWII, what growth rates do the economists try and aim for? Ever heard of peak oil, rare earth minerals etc. ?
It is at this point that technologists commonly step in and say that they can actually increase the amount of 'Norecyclableium' we can extract from the wider world, or they say they have found a way to recycle some of that 'Norecyclableium' or have found a suitable replacement. So its not a huge doomsday prediction of doom a la Malthus, still its an eye opener as we go from national scale economic models where there are always resource reserves elsewhere to a totally globalised model, where once we have discovered and begun to extract all the remaining resources/markets we can, we have to make them sustainable.
It is at this point either the last echelon companies will have to dissolve their profit motivated outlook into a Marxist/Communist model, or find 21stC technological solutions to keep resources in perpetual rotation siphoning wealth off manhours of work of a still expanding human workforce. Or finally they entrench themselves and the global bust will come, followed by the peoples liberation as prophetised.
In practice I personally believe the 21stC shall see a mixture of the 2nd and 3rd scenarios. With several of the worlds leading economies semi imploding but because of globalisation the last echelon companies will have the flexibility to invest in the high tech solutions to transform a consumerist 'use & throw away' society into one of a sustainable resource circulation.
This will entrench the last echelons companies into the far future as institutions of econ-cultural significance, much like Virgin, or any of the other transnational conglomerates. Because these are the businesses with the current economic potential for technological investment in the future, and because they have the transnational status to weather individual nation collapses while still maintaining their markets.
Where individual markets collapse we get a return to radical socialist movements, this may create second tier 'Co-operative' economic model markets just as envisaged 120 years ago, but generally these will lack global scope and while they may work very well for those nations set to industrialise in the mid 21stC they are unlikely to transform the global economy in my opinion and will stay on the periphery.
I believe this is the closest humanity will get to 'true Marxism' at least within the scope of foreseeable history.
*I don't mean to offend but the illustrative purpose would otherwise be lost if not done personally.