Wow! Just what the doctor ordered for those wonderful people who check all your boxes and then call themselves Marxists without really understanding what Marxism really is. It is, to be blunt (in effect if not in intent) not a revolutionary ideology but a counter-revolutionary ideology.
my previous comment was sent by mistake before I'd finished writing it
Wow! Just what the doctor ordered for those wonderful people who check all your boxes and then call them selves Marxists without really understanding what Marxism really is. It is, to be blunt (in effect if not in intent) not a revolkutionary counter-revollutionary ideology
Where does Marx ever say that ordinary people are purely motivated by self interest? Show me the passage where he or any marxist ever said that. Otherwise shut up. Stop creating a canard. Stop the anarchist libeling bullshit.
If anyone actually wants to learn the truth about the marxist view of human nature, reading this bigoted petite bourgeois trash is certainly not the way. Try reading erich fromm's book on the subject instead.
Ordinary working class people are, according to Marx, as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. In his Capital, Volume I, Chapter 14, "Division of Labor and Manufacture," Section 5, Marx, who here quotes Adam Smith approvingly, writes:
[quotation of Marx begins here]
In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers.
“Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.” [45]
As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons. [46]
“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on:
“The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.” [47]
45. A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280.
46. J. D. Tuckett: “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.
47. A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” Bk. v., ch. i, art. ii. Being a pupil of A. Ferguson who showed the disadvantageous effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point. In the introduction to his work, where he ex professo praises division of labour, he indicates only in a cursory manner that it is the source of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my “Misère de la Philosophie,” I have sufficiently explained the historical connexion between Ferguson, A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms of Division of Labour, and have shown, for the first time, that Division of Labour as practised in manufactures, is a specific form of the capitalist mode of production.
[quotation of Marx ends here]
The elitist attitude towards working class people and peasants held by Marx and Engels [7] is also explicitly evident in their Communist Manifesto, as discussed in "The Communist Manifesto is Wrong." The Manifesto believes peasants to be a backward class and declares that the bourgeoisie, by driving peasants off the land and increasing the urban population as compared with the rural, has "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
The Manifesto even describes European imperialism as making "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones," with these exact words:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Marx explicitly praised British imperialism in India as progressive, as I discuss below in the section about the Communist Party of China. Similarly, the Manifesto sees the ruling elites, not the working class, as the source of "enlightenment and progress" with these exact words:
"Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress."
Marxism purports to be a science of social change. It is based on the axiom (i.e., premise) that individuals act in their self interest, and that what is in their self interest depends on the particular nature of the means of production in a given society and the individual's relation to those means of production. Marx explained this key element of Marxism--the materialist conception of history--in his 1867 Preface to the first German edition of A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy, first published in 1859, a work that was the basis for his more famous Das Kapital (volume 1) first published in 1867. In this Preface Marx writes of capitalist production specifically (in the context of comparing it in England and Germany):
"Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future....
"I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."
In the Marxist framework, class conflict is not correctly understood as a conflict between the majority of people who subjectively value equality and mutual aid (a.k.a. solidarity) versus the minority who value inequality and greed and domination of the many by the few. No! The Marxist framework understands class conflict to be a conflict between the self-interest of people who do not own the means of production versus the self-interest of those who do. The Marxist theory is based on the axiom that, insofar as people's behavior is relevant for understanding the "inevitable results" determined with "iron necessity" by "the natural laws of capitalist production," it is "only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests."
While Marx praised the Paris working class's revolutionary actions in the 1871 Paris Commune when he wrote during the event and was no doubt--like many others--excited by it, he later soberly applied his "science" to its analysis and wrote [9] "the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, and could not have been."
"Marxism purports to be a science of social change" Yes, and this is why Marx aspires to observe things as they are, rather than as he would like them to be, like a scientist does. Hence the observation that a lot of people are ignorant and miseducated. You get don't get them out of ignorance without admitting the problem.
And if that sounds hopelessly elitist, allow me to ask: Why is it that the masses haven't all organized to overthrow their oppressors yet, despite their superior numbers?
Successfully sir, successfully. And even if you blame the defeat in Spain on the Marxists, you're going to have to explain all the occasions non-Marxists failed without having Commies to pin it on.
You changed the goal post in order to maintain your negative view of working class people.
Since you want to talk about success, yes the Spanish workers and peasants succeeded for three years and failed because of serious mistakes they made that I discuss at https://www.pdrboston.org/anarchism , but these mistakes were not made because the workers and peasants were the way Marx describes them.
The words you cite from Kapital only further reveal your bigotry. Marx isnt cheering on the capitalist alienatipn of the workers. Duhhhhhhh! Hes critiquing it. Youre a bourbon. You learn nothing and you forget none of your ignorant beliefs: a mind like a steel mouse trap permanently slammed shut to any generous open minded reading if marx. Actually taking his ideas seriously would mandate that you drop off from your lofty perch of omniscence and work with us marxists in a politically disciplined, democratic centralist fashion. Stick with your petty bourgeois willful gnorance and egomania
Suffice it to say at the outset that this popular picture of Marx's "materialism" -- his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination -- is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century.
Instead of positive subjective values in conflict with negative subjective values, Marxists see only self-interest in conflict with self-interest.
Everybody, in the Marxist materialist conception of social change, acts only in their self interest [3] and the changes in society are merely caused by the way changes in the means of production change what is in the self-interest of different parts of the population. As Marx put it, "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist." In the Marxist "science" social change (leading eventually to socialism as a transition to the classless society of communism) happens because of impersonal political/economic [6] laws driven by the material nature of the means of production and the self interests of individuals. The end of capitalism and arrival of communism happen not because this is the subjective conscious explicit aim and desire of flesh and blood working class people, but in spite of the fact that these people are "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
This is why Marxist literature for the masses only appeals to their objective interests, not their subjective values; it assumes their chief value is self-interest. As a result, many people feel insulted by such literature!
Try to find Marxist literature (written today or earlier) that explicitly says (however it is worded) this: That the positive values of ordinary people--the values of equality and mutual aid (solidarity) by which people routinely try to shape the small corners of the world over which they have any real control today--are the values that ought to shape all of society, that the purpose of revolution is to make this happen, and that these positive values of ordinary people conflict with the terrible values--inequality and domination of the many by the few--of the ruling elite. You will not find such a statement made by a person trained in Marxist theory! Marxists don't believe such a statement is true. But it is!
To the extent that the process of going from capitalism to a classless society requires conscious human intervention, it must, according to the science of Marxism, be the intervention of people who are not "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Who would these people be? Obviously, they are a self-selected elite, who constitute a Socialist or Communist Party, and who believe that they, and not ordinary working class people, must hold the real power in society in order to guide it to the desired goal. This is why Socialist and Communist governments are, and must be, strong central governments that demand obedience by ordinary people.
But what kind of obedience does the Marxist science demand of ordinary people in a Socialist nation? It is obedience to laws that aim to increase economic production. [4] The reason why Marxists believe this is because they believe that before a society can be based on "from each according to ability, to each according to need" economic production must be ramped up to eliminate scarcity. Marx expressed it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" [4]
Here's the rub. How does an elite governing class make it so that "the productive forces have also increased"? Given the presumption that people act in their self interest, the ruling elite will need to arrange things so that it is in each worker's self interest to work harder and produce more. Well, the capitalists have invented terrific ways of doing just that. The trick is to make society very unequal and lure people to work harder with the promise that if they do they will be rewarded with greater wealth (and privileges wealth can purchase) than others. Piecework does this by paying the worker only according to how much he/she produces. Another method is Taylorism, which Lenin advocated with enthusiasm. Taylorism is the "science" of breaking the production process into lots of separate tiny actions and making each worker do just one of those actions over and over and over. Taylorism aims to make each worker as unskilled as possible, thus making workers easily replaceable, which is important for a ruling elite that does not want to be bothered by workers making demands and threatening to bring production to a stop by refusing to work until they are satisfied. An article in the International Journal of Social Economics shows how Lenin advocated both methods:
[start excerpt]
"In an Apri1 28, 1918 article in Pravda discussing the “urgent problems of the Soviet rule”, and under the heading “Higher productivity of labor”, Lenin (1965a, p. xxii) wrote:
We should immediately introduce piecework and try it out in practice. We should try out every scientific and progressive suggestion of the Taylor system . . . The Russian is a poor worker in comparison with the advanced nations, and this could not be otherwise under the regime of the Czar and other remnants of feudalism. The last word of capitalism in this respect, the Taylor System, as well as all progressive measures of capitalism, combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific attainments in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt valuable and scientific technical advance in this field. The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organization of management with the latest progressive measures in capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System and its systematic trial and adaptation.
"...In a speech to the Supreme Economic Council he proposed the introduction of piece rates payment based on performance, a scientific management notion that had not found extensive support among trade union officials elsewhere. He also told the Supreme Economic Council that discipline must be more strict, a view that reached English reading audiences through the Bulletin of the Taylor Society which reprinted Lenin’s speech:
“It would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship” (Lenin, 1965a, p. 378).
"No one in a free society could speak with such hubris." [emphasis and italics added]
[end excerpt]
As would have been no surprise to Lord Acton, what actually happens when Socialists or Communists are in power and carrying out their Marxist "science," is that society remains as undemocratic as any capitalist society in terms of ordinary people not having any real say (even if they have the trappings of democracy), and it remains as unequal as any capitalist society. Indeed, from the point of view of ordinary working people, it does not fundamentally differ from capitalism and it gives no indication of ever moving towards a classless egalitarian society at all. And this is true when the Communist or Socialist leaders are genuinely following their Marxist "science."
James H. Romer
Wow! Just what the doctor ordered for those wonderful people who check all your boxes and then call themselves Marxists without really understanding what Marxism really is. It is, to be blunt (in effect if not in intent) not a revolutionary ideology but a counter-revolutionary ideology.
my previous comment was sent by mistake before I'd finished writing it
Wow! Just what the doctor ordered for those wonderful people who check all your boxes and then call them selves Marxists without really understanding what Marxism really is. It is, to be blunt (in effect if not in intent) not a revolkutionary counter-revollutionary ideology
Where does Marx ever say that ordinary people are purely motivated by self interest? Show me the passage where he or any marxist ever said that. Otherwise shut up. Stop creating a canard. Stop the anarchist libeling bullshit.
If anyone actually wants to learn the truth about the marxist view of human nature, reading this bigoted petite bourgeois trash is certainly not the way. Try reading erich fromm's book on the subject instead.
[The following, with live links to the sources, is from my article at https://www.pdrboston.org/communism-no-socialism-no ]
[This is part 1 of 2 of my comment]
Ordinary working class people are, according to Marx, as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. In his Capital, Volume I, Chapter 14, "Division of Labor and Manufacture," Section 5, Marx, who here quotes Adam Smith approvingly, writes:
[quotation of Marx begins here]
In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers.
“Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.” [45]
As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons. [46]
“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on:
“The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.” [47]
45. A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280.
46. J. D. Tuckett: “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.
47. A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” Bk. v., ch. i, art. ii. Being a pupil of A. Ferguson who showed the disadvantageous effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point. In the introduction to his work, where he ex professo praises division of labour, he indicates only in a cursory manner that it is the source of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my “Misère de la Philosophie,” I have sufficiently explained the historical connexion between Ferguson, A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms of Division of Labour, and have shown, for the first time, that Division of Labour as practised in manufactures, is a specific form of the capitalist mode of production.
[quotation of Marx ends here]
The elitist attitude towards working class people and peasants held by Marx and Engels [7] is also explicitly evident in their Communist Manifesto, as discussed in "The Communist Manifesto is Wrong." The Manifesto believes peasants to be a backward class and declares that the bourgeoisie, by driving peasants off the land and increasing the urban population as compared with the rural, has "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."
The Manifesto even describes European imperialism as making "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones," with these exact words:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Marx explicitly praised British imperialism in India as progressive, as I discuss below in the section about the Communist Party of China. Similarly, the Manifesto sees the ruling elites, not the working class, as the source of "enlightenment and progress" with these exact words:
"Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress."
Marxism purports to be a science of social change. It is based on the axiom (i.e., premise) that individuals act in their self interest, and that what is in their self interest depends on the particular nature of the means of production in a given society and the individual's relation to those means of production. Marx explained this key element of Marxism--the materialist conception of history--in his 1867 Preface to the first German edition of A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy, first published in 1859, a work that was the basis for his more famous Das Kapital (volume 1) first published in 1867. In this Preface Marx writes of capitalist production specifically (in the context of comparing it in England and Germany):
"Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future....
"I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."
In the Marxist framework, class conflict is not correctly understood as a conflict between the majority of people who subjectively value equality and mutual aid (a.k.a. solidarity) versus the minority who value inequality and greed and domination of the many by the few. No! The Marxist framework understands class conflict to be a conflict between the self-interest of people who do not own the means of production versus the self-interest of those who do. The Marxist theory is based on the axiom that, insofar as people's behavior is relevant for understanding the "inevitable results" determined with "iron necessity" by "the natural laws of capitalist production," it is "only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests."
While Marx praised the Paris working class's revolutionary actions in the 1871 Paris Commune when he wrote during the event and was no doubt--like many others--excited by it, he later soberly applied his "science" to its analysis and wrote [9] "the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, and could not have been."
"Marxism purports to be a science of social change" Yes, and this is why Marx aspires to observe things as they are, rather than as he would like them to be, like a scientist does. Hence the observation that a lot of people are ignorant and miseducated. You get don't get them out of ignorance without admitting the problem.
And if that sounds hopelessly elitist, allow me to ask: Why is it that the masses haven't all organized to overthrow their oppressors yet, despite their superior numbers?
They do: https://www.pdrboston.org/egalitarianism-in-spain-1936-9
Successfully sir, successfully. And even if you blame the defeat in Spain on the Marxists, you're going to have to explain all the occasions non-Marxists failed without having Commies to pin it on.
You changed the goal post in order to maintain your negative view of working class people.
Since you want to talk about success, yes the Spanish workers and peasants succeeded for three years and failed because of serious mistakes they made that I discuss at https://www.pdrboston.org/anarchism , but these mistakes were not made because the workers and peasants were the way Marx describes them.
And since you want to talk about success, read about life under Marxist regimes at https://www.pdrboston.org/life-under-a-marxist-regime and tell me if THAT is what you mean by "success"?
More petite bourgeois bullshit without any scholarly documentation of your bigoted claims. you aint foolin anybody
I cite Marx's own words.
Using the words "petite bourgeois bullshit" demonstrates you have no substantive argument.
The words you cite from Kapital only further reveal your bigotry. Marx isnt cheering on the capitalist alienatipn of the workers. Duhhhhhhh! Hes critiquing it. Youre a bourbon. You learn nothing and you forget none of your ignorant beliefs: a mind like a steel mouse trap permanently slammed shut to any generous open minded reading if marx. Actually taking his ideas seriously would mandate that you drop off from your lofty perch of omniscence and work with us marxists in a politically disciplined, democratic centralist fashion. Stick with your petty bourgeois willful gnorance and egomania
Everyone else here who is not a dimwitted bigot, please read the following from Erich Fromm's MARX'S CONCEPT OF MAN, Chapter 1, The Falsification of Marx's Concepts, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch01.htm
Suffice it to say at the outset that this popular picture of Marx's "materialism" -- his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination -- is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century.
John Spritzler you are an anti-communist ignoramus who has no idea of what you are talking about.
It's not ordinary people who are self-initerested. It's petite bourgeois schmucks like you
[This is part 2 of my comment]
Instead of positive subjective values in conflict with negative subjective values, Marxists see only self-interest in conflict with self-interest.
Everybody, in the Marxist materialist conception of social change, acts only in their self interest [3] and the changes in society are merely caused by the way changes in the means of production change what is in the self-interest of different parts of the population. As Marx put it, "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist." In the Marxist "science" social change (leading eventually to socialism as a transition to the classless society of communism) happens because of impersonal political/economic [6] laws driven by the material nature of the means of production and the self interests of individuals. The end of capitalism and arrival of communism happen not because this is the subjective conscious explicit aim and desire of flesh and blood working class people, but in spite of the fact that these people are "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."
This is why Marxist literature for the masses only appeals to their objective interests, not their subjective values; it assumes their chief value is self-interest. As a result, many people feel insulted by such literature!
Try to find Marxist literature (written today or earlier) that explicitly says (however it is worded) this: That the positive values of ordinary people--the values of equality and mutual aid (solidarity) by which people routinely try to shape the small corners of the world over which they have any real control today--are the values that ought to shape all of society, that the purpose of revolution is to make this happen, and that these positive values of ordinary people conflict with the terrible values--inequality and domination of the many by the few--of the ruling elite. You will not find such a statement made by a person trained in Marxist theory! Marxists don't believe such a statement is true. But it is!
To the extent that the process of going from capitalism to a classless society requires conscious human intervention, it must, according to the science of Marxism, be the intervention of people who are not "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Who would these people be? Obviously, they are a self-selected elite, who constitute a Socialist or Communist Party, and who believe that they, and not ordinary working class people, must hold the real power in society in order to guide it to the desired goal. This is why Socialist and Communist governments are, and must be, strong central governments that demand obedience by ordinary people.
But what kind of obedience does the Marxist science demand of ordinary people in a Socialist nation? It is obedience to laws that aim to increase economic production. [4] The reason why Marxists believe this is because they believe that before a society can be based on "from each according to ability, to each according to need" economic production must be ramped up to eliminate scarcity. Marx expressed it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" [4]
Here's the rub. How does an elite governing class make it so that "the productive forces have also increased"? Given the presumption that people act in their self interest, the ruling elite will need to arrange things so that it is in each worker's self interest to work harder and produce more. Well, the capitalists have invented terrific ways of doing just that. The trick is to make society very unequal and lure people to work harder with the promise that if they do they will be rewarded with greater wealth (and privileges wealth can purchase) than others. Piecework does this by paying the worker only according to how much he/she produces. Another method is Taylorism, which Lenin advocated with enthusiasm. Taylorism is the "science" of breaking the production process into lots of separate tiny actions and making each worker do just one of those actions over and over and over. Taylorism aims to make each worker as unskilled as possible, thus making workers easily replaceable, which is important for a ruling elite that does not want to be bothered by workers making demands and threatening to bring production to a stop by refusing to work until they are satisfied. An article in the International Journal of Social Economics shows how Lenin advocated both methods:
[start excerpt]
"In an Apri1 28, 1918 article in Pravda discussing the “urgent problems of the Soviet rule”, and under the heading “Higher productivity of labor”, Lenin (1965a, p. xxii) wrote:
We should immediately introduce piecework and try it out in practice. We should try out every scientific and progressive suggestion of the Taylor system . . . The Russian is a poor worker in comparison with the advanced nations, and this could not be otherwise under the regime of the Czar and other remnants of feudalism. The last word of capitalism in this respect, the Taylor System, as well as all progressive measures of capitalism, combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific attainments in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt valuable and scientific technical advance in this field. The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organization of management with the latest progressive measures in capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System and its systematic trial and adaptation.
"...In a speech to the Supreme Economic Council he proposed the introduction of piece rates payment based on performance, a scientific management notion that had not found extensive support among trade union officials elsewhere. He also told the Supreme Economic Council that discipline must be more strict, a view that reached English reading audiences through the Bulletin of the Taylor Society which reprinted Lenin’s speech:
“It would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship” (Lenin, 1965a, p. 378).
"No one in a free society could speak with such hubris." [emphasis and italics added]
[end excerpt]
As would have been no surprise to Lord Acton, what actually happens when Socialists or Communists are in power and carrying out their Marxist "science," is that society remains as undemocratic as any capitalist society in terms of ordinary people not having any real say (even if they have the trappings of democracy), and it remains as unequal as any capitalist society. Indeed, from the point of view of ordinary working people, it does not fundamentally differ from capitalism and it gives no indication of ever moving towards a classless egalitarian society at all. And this is true when the Communist or Socialist leaders are genuinely following their Marxist "science."