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Communist anon here - Yes to all of them?

@eyeofnewtblog​ said:  I personally would be very interested in hearing an educated opinion on theories and practice

This is going to be a long answer so under a cut it goes. The short answer is no, I do not like either Marxism or communism, to the point where I consider myself anti-communist. The long answer goes under the cut.

First, it’s important to remember where I am coming from, what I am, and what I am not. I’m neither educated in philosophy nor history. I study both, and I have had classes in both, but that doesn’t mean that I’m an expert in either, and my experiences with Marxism have largely been academic, instructors attempting to tell me what Marxism is (fun fact: I once made a lot of these theoretical arguments to a Marxist professor on an exam - I was given an F). So if you’re looking for an educated opinion, depending on what that means, I don’t have one, after all, I got an F on it. Similarly, while I do study some philosophy, it is by no means something I’ve been trained it or seriously articulated; my observations primarily come from observing human nature and studying history and political movements. In that sense, I’m far closer to Eric Hoffer than I am to Hannah Arendt (though both as philosophical scholars far exceed me in every sense that to be compared to them would not be an honor to me but an insult to them). I’m a believer in liberalism and democracy, and a radical individualist, which to me means that people have an inherent dignity, and should be free to determine who they are, what they want to do, and what they value. It’s not a fully-fleshed out philosophy with rules, I’ve already said I’m no philosopher. I just do the best I can and handle situations as they come up.

Those values put me at odds with Marxism from the get-go. Marxism articulates the necessity of a dictatorship, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the government following the revolution seizes the means of production, nationalizing all industries and property, and transition to a communist society, preserving the power of the state to suppress any reactionary or counter-revolutionary activity. I’ve heard this line before; this sounds remarkably similar to authoritarian measures enacted in tinpot dictatorial states meant to preserve order and enforce the power of the government to suppress dissent. The “transitional state” sounds a lot like perpetual “state of emergency” laws enacted to keep the populations in line, a theoretical end-state where such measures are no longer necessary is always on the horizon, but just like the horizon, is never reachable. Call me crazy, but I don’t see how putting people under control of a dictatorship with such unlimited powers is liberating them, save in a metaphorical, dogmatic sense that rationalizes their subjugation as necessary. There’s a broad appeal there, violent mass movements definitely find a lot of support from individuals who see it as a means to finally lord power over those they hate; individuals who want those they despise cowering before them, begging them not to bring the axe down. Such motivations have been an incentive for aspiring foot soldiers to put on their jackboots, so that they eagerly stomp the faces in of the people they despise, and to rationalize it away.

Marxism depends on a lot of things that are untrue, like his assertion that the rate of profit tending to fall, or the labor theory of value which has few serious practitioners and has been widely debunked to the point where Shimshon Bichler was able to criticize the lack of statistical correlation and the degree by which abstract labor must be assumed to see the labor theory of value as purely circular reasoning, hardly compelling for a central tenet of the philosophy to depend on a set of assumptions that rely on others being produced. While I’m no philosopher and reality is impossible to condense into any one singular lens, the degree by which Marxism is riddled with intellectual and logical inconsistencies make it difficult for me as a thinker to take it as seriously as others do. Other matters, while not necessarily untrue, become difficult to function when brought from theory to reality. Take the standard line: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” How are ability and need for each person assessed? What happens if someone is incapable of producing something to the level of ability that is assessed? What happens if someone needs more than is assessed? What happens if need outpaces supply? What happens if ability cannot meet need? What happens if there’s a disaster and there is a temporary shortage? These extend outwards to questions of land use, industrial capacity, training, etc., these centralized economically planned models failed in the 20th century, and again, this turns me off to the model. This is not simply a matter of corrupt Communist Party officials degrading the functioning of the government for personal enrichment, this is a serious information problem that even the most powerful computers of today cannot model and manage, and the idea of a communist state becomes much diminished in appeal to me.

Other stuff in Marxism goes further into what I consider downright repugnant. The idea of “false consciousness” is particularly disgusting to me, where if someone is not motivated by that which the Marxist believes that they should be motivated, these conceptions are deluded and must be corrected. That is such a statement of such monumental arrogance I’m surprised it doesn’t have its own gravity well. It is to say to one person that whatever meaning they have discovered through their own experiences is less valid; it is to say that the Marxist may state that whatever said person values is not in their own benefit. The logical conclusion from this is that non-Marxists cannot be allowed their own judgment, that they must be shaped until they embody the Marxist conception of reality and only then are they truly full people, capable of making judgments of this fashion and assessing what is to their benefit and what is not. For a movement that espouses equality and liberation, sure as hell doesn’t seem very equal to me; only our practitioners are capable, rational beings? No.

Now, most Marxists I know don’t really believe this, but I think this is more of their own conception. Like most practitioners of religions or other philosophies, they pick and choose what tenets to follow.

Communism is practice has been a disaster. Lenin really ran with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat with his vanguard model, making the centralizing dictatorship a core part of his leadership and in charge of everything, to the point where failure to provide the dictatorship with what they demanded was considered treason and grounds for termination, and later communist regimes really ran with this idea, as I’ve mentioned before, Marxism appeals to revolutionary dictatorships because it justifies the dictatorship beyond a naked power grab to better secure it. Similarly, Lenin rationalized ignoring his citizens by simply ignoring elections when he lost; the Leninist model was openly a sham democracy. In the Soviet Union, even Khrushchev, who gave the Secret Speech denouncing Stalin, still sent the tanks into Hungary and forcibly medicated any who disagreed with the principles of communism as mentally ill (my previous paragraph is not jumping to conclusions, this was a documented fact). Mao created the “mass line,” a means to consult the population while mandating interpreting their wishes through the ideology, thus dismissing anything that the dictator doesn’t want, a clever fig leaf. Of course, Mao’s already deeply unworthy with its massive loss of life - the Great Chinese Famine was the largest famine in history and enacted by the ideological dogmas of the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s Cultural Revolution was doubling down on his mistakes, murdering those who opposed him. The brutality though, has been the biggest failure; there’s a reason the European left jumped to the social democrat model with the rise of Keynesian economics in the aftermath of World War II, they felt it was a way to achieve their objectives without the brutality of the Soviet model. The totalitarian conception of power and identity left its mark on the movement, but I don’t see them as inventions by power-mad dictators, they were extensions of the philosophy that saw only its practitioners as fully human. 

Even discounting the brutality, the standard of living and industrial capacity of communist countries has been low comparatively. In 1927, the Soviet Union produced a scant 3 million tons of steel despite massive advantages in natural resources and manpower, compared to Germany’s 16 million tons, Britain’s 9 million, and France’s 8 million. Relatively speaking, more resources were wasted in steel production in the USSR, and this was similar across the board in communist countries. Communism lambasted capitalism for its wastefulness, but the numbers show that communism was the far more wasteful, inefficient method of economic organization. Some defenders of the Soviet Union point to the growth under leaders like Khrushchev, but I counter that the exceptional rate of growth was both temporary and comparatively small compared to non-communist states. Francis Spufford may have tried to sell it with the idea of Red Plenty as a fusion of history and fiction, but history has borne out that it was entirely fiction.

The more anarchist sects of the movement, the ones who reject the transitional state, similarly were failures in practice. In Spain, those who did not wish to join were often brutalized, which seems to me to be violating the principal of anarchism in that forced compliance in an anarchist society is an extension and use of state power. This is relatively common throughout history though, particularly when it comes to ideology. The Soviet Union decried “imperialism” but was incredibly imperialist, just as the United States decried the security state apparatus of the Soviet Union as violating the rights of their own citizens while pursuing COINTELPRO when it came to folks like Fred Hampton. In a more practical sense, the anarchists poor training and suboptimal deployment were unable to stop Franco despite having plenty of clear advantages in the Spanish Civil War. While they are by no means the only reason for the Republican failure, the inability for the anarchist faction to defend their people is a failure of their system of government. A lot of anarchist models run into this problem, it should not be thought of as a failure reserved solely for the anarcho-communist model, and anyone who says it doesn’t is ignoring history.

So to sum up, I consider Marxism to be a philosophy which espouses tenets that I find disgusting, and it’s articulation of government to be illiberal, anti-democratic, and founded on the violation of human rights and dignity.

Thanks for the question, Anons who were waiting.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King