As many of you might know, or soon will, I’m Canadian. And I’m going to let you in on a little secret:
I like my healthcare system.
*GASP!* A conservative libertarian that likes social government programs?!? What is this? It’s a recognition of reality. There are some things that benefit from economies of scale that no one can provide quite like the government, there are some things that the government does, in fact, do with more efficiency than the market at large. Having social systems within the network of a capitalist frame work is not only a good thing, it’s going to be a necessary thing, particularly as automation picks up steam. I’m not turning in my libertarian card any time soon, I still think we need to do a better job identifying what should and should not be a social system, and we need to do a better job at embracing risk.
What Does That Have to Do With Anything?
Perhaps very little. I think it was supposed to highlight that politics can be more nuanced than the bumper stickers we attach to people would immediately suggest. That’s not a concrete principle… I haven’t had discussions with many people who are really excited about socialism that I would consider particularly deep thinkers.
Take today as an example, I responded to this:
With this:
(That’s my Twitter, by the way, if anyone cares).
Following that, I was told by no fewer than three people that I thought that Marxists couldn’t have iPhones. And also that I don’t understand Marxism, and that I don’t know the tenets of Marxism, and that I get my information from the Babylon Bee. Read the entire exchange and follow the threads, they went a couple of interesting places.
So let’s talk about Marxism, The Communism Spectrum, and Corruption.
What is Marxism?
Marxism is one of those terms, kind of like feminism, where the label is so vague as to be meaningless. Both Marxists and Feminists would raise their hackles at that, but get a dozen Marxists into a room and ask them to define the difference between a Communist, Socialist and Democratic Socialist government, and the tankie will probably end up punching someone. Get a dozen Feminists in the room and ask them about trans rights, and they’ll eventually mean-girl the TERF.
Without all The Baggage, What do Marxists Generally Have In Common?
They’ve never read a thing by Karl Marx (ba-dum-tsss).
Seriously though, it’s hard to try to understand Marxism without touching on Dialectical Materialism; The idea is that everything is material, and that everything has opposing and/or opposite materials, and that those opposites struggle against eachother, and that struggle creates… stuff. Growth, Change, Development. During the codification of communism, thinkers were instructed to mold theory around Dialectical Materialism, and that was the basis for a lot of the language on class structure and how those classes interacted with eachother.
Speaking of which, they also generally agree that there are classes, and that they struggle. “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” is a relatively famous Marx quote from the Communist Manifesto, and he presented a two-class model for a capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Those classes are often misinterpreted into “rich” and “poor” in 2021 jargon, but that’s not quite right, it’s perhaps better understood as “the powerful few” and the “powerless but legion”.
Building off that were a couple of ideas:
-Marx thought that a unit of labor was the basic unit of value, and therefore should confer value primarily on laborers (which is kind of ironic seeing as Marx never worked a day in his life).
-Marx thought that the working class should rise up and seize control of society, which they had the power to do because they were many, and the mandate to do it because they were the ones that created value. This is where “seizing the means of production” usually comes in.
-Following that seizure, Marx thought that society should order itself as a communist/socialist system, and as the system gained traction, government would phase out.
Most Marxists can’t even conceptualize what that last point looks like, so you lose a good chunk of the believers long before then, and there are all kinds of interpretations as to what some of those steps look like…. But that is a REALLY abridged guide to Marxism.
You Mentioned a Spectrum?
Yeah. Just like how most libertarians don’t talk about how taxation is theft, or wear an ANCAP buttons, most Marxists aren’t actually raving lunatics. Most of them want social systems within the framework of a capitalist system. I find it both interesting and helpful to ask someone “to define the difference between a Communist, Socialist and Democratic Socialist government”. I’ve never in my life gotten a duplicate answer. The better answers will focus on accountability to the citizenry. Regardless of the answer, it gives you an Overton Window on what they think is acceptable, and most people will define historical communism out of existence, which… Yes… Isn’t great because they’re displaying a historical naïveté, but I like to think is actually probably good because they don’t ACTUALLY want communism. Don’t spend too much time on the Semantics of labels, discuss the ideas.
What does any of that have to do with your Twitter spat?
Not a God-Damned thing. I don’t need to understand Marxism in order to recognize a grift or corruption, unless you think that an understanding of Marxism would make this something other than a grift…
Fact of the matter is that Patrisse Cullors, who self identifies as a “Trained Marxist” has undergone a multi-million dollar real estate binge in the last couple of weeks, using money that came from the BLM charity organization. Now, I made the mistake of calling that “embezzlement” at one point: That’s inaccurate and hyperbolic. Because she and co-founder Alicia Garzia could set financial policy for the BLM organization, it’s MUCH more likely they simply gave themselves seven figure salaries, or bonus plans. Regardless on the legality of those remuneration packages, there is approximately a zero percent chance that the people donating to BLM did it so that the founders could become millionaire real estate moguls.
My point was that Marxism seems, for whatever reason (and I have opinions on why, but they aren’t relevant), to be particularly susceptible to corruption. Reality is that every time someone attempts to actually follow through on a Marx-based system, human corruption takes root and you end up with some of the shittiest despotic systems in modern recorded history. you end up with Gulags, bread lines, economic and intellectual stagnation and loss of human life. Communism has approximately a zero percent success rate. (Approximately only because I used to talk to a guy named Dave who asserted that following WW2, governments were so broken that parts of Europe basically skipped the corruption part of Communism and just operated as communities out of a sense of self-preservation, and the experiment ended with governments re-asserting control, as opposed to failure. Take that for what you will, I see where he was trying to go, but that seems like a really long reach.)
Great post, HT. I grew up among Cuban refugees in Miami, Florida. (Venezuelan expat joke about Cubans: 'You know why Cubans like South Florida so much? It's so close to the U.S.')
My explanation for why Communism always immediately leads to the enrichment of the guys in control and the impoverishment of "the proletariat" is kind of backwards. It's based on my belief that capitalism is the only economic system unabashedly based upon self-interest being the sole motivator and determinant of human behavior. (Which simply means I'm a cynic, which is a word that is grossly misunderstood and used as a smear by people who don't know what it means.) To the extent Communism is based on the terribly wrong belief that people will act in the best interests of anyone else or some vaguely defined "community" or proletariat, it is doomed to abject failure. Because, the elect who invariably end up controlling the levers of power are acting in their best interests, and not in those of anyone else. See, eg., Bernie Sanders' wife having a no responsibility but highly compensated job at a college (and running it into the ground) and buying a house on Lake Champlain with somebody's money, maybe her parents' for all I know. But in any event, she purchased the house with ... wait for it ... CAPITAL. The house is not made available to any members of any local workers' committees. It's that simple.