this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Communism
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If we are to take Marx's word for it, the advancement of industry necessitates its increasing scale, which necessitates increasing complexity and planning. Markets in every economy gradually centralize themselves over time, and since we cannot "freeze" an economy in time, we can't expect the cooperatives to remain small forever.
Rather than fight centralization, we should study how it works and how we can best make it work in the favor of all.
The “small scale” part of my comment is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps I should have said “smallest practical scale”.
I believe mostly in letting people make choices for themselves, which I think is best served by having organisations at a size where an individual voice has the opportunity to make a difference.
This can be achieved in many different ways, including having partially independent subdivisions within large scale organizations.
One of the (many) failings of the USSR was, at least for a long time at the start, insufficient flexibility and reactivity to local issues. But thinking about it, maybe this isn’t a good reason to think ill of centralized planning. The USSR had incompetent centralized planning (especially in the agricultural sector in the earlier days), the failures and famines could be argued to me more due to the incompetence than to core attributes of centralized planning.
In that case, I don't really think we disagree. Many Socialist states have smaller cells for decision-making that doesn't necessarily benefit from having more information or cooperation between cells. The Soviet model functioned much in the same way, though it had its own share of issues such as planning by hand, rather than computer, and trying to abolish market forces before they outlived their usefulness.
China presently does a good job juggling all of these complicated nuances, and their party structure plays a large part in that. Central planning works best in highly developed firms, and markets do a good job of reaching those levels of development.
Marx never had a computer.
His world view was based on the world he saw, a world that has vanished.
Marx predicted the invention of increasingly complex tools invented to facilitate the incredible complexity of production, which computers ended up playing a massive part in. Rather than going against Marx's general observations, the invention of computers affirms them.
You are correct in that Marx observed his world and not ours. That's why Marxists have continued to build on Marx's observations as they grew and changed, such as when Lenin analyzed how Capitalism turns to Imperialism when there's no more domestic markets to exploit.
Far from being rigid and outdated, Marxism is designed to be flexible, keeping what works and tossing what doesn't.
No psychiatrist today calls themselves a 'Freudian' and no scientist calls themselves 'Newtonian.'
Besides tradition, there's no reason to stick with antiquated terms.
There's a pretty big difference between those fields. Freud has been proven almost entirely wrong, while Marx has been proven almost entirely correct, as an example. Further, Marxists now have adopted different camps, by far the largest being Marxism-Leninism, but all consider themselves Socialists and Communists. Marx still forms the base of all Marxist branches of economics, unlike the realm of psychology, and further, Marxism refers to a stance within the broader field of Political Economy.
Have you actually engaged with Marx's material? A huge portion of economists globally are Marxists of some sort, less common in Western countries but absolutely the norm in economies like China.
You haven't given an actual reason to stick with the antiquated terms.
Most Americans hate Marxism and Communism.
If you want to get anything done in America, you'd do well to learn to read the room.
Again, give me one good reason to stick with the antiquated terms.
I'm not talking about program; I'm talking about presentation. Americans aren't going to rally around a Red Flag, so why bother with it?
You're changing the argument now, I feel. Either way, we can't hide from being Communists or try to "trick" people into becoming Marxists, we should be honest rather than duplicitous so as to gain genuine support. Parties like PSL are doing just that, and their numbers are gradually swelling over time.
Scientist would absolutely consider themselves newtonians, as his theories have been so thoroughly proven and tested, as to be accepted as fact.
The scientific outlook is exactly the opposite of what you describe, which is to build on and extend previous terminology as becomes necessary.
That's a lot of work to avoid dealing the actual issue at hand.
It looks like a lot of bloviating about nomenclature instead of practical matters.