/lit/ - Literature

he was a bitch ass nigger digger

>>11517521

Thanks

>>11517521
fpbp

>>11517521
Best post on /lit/ right now

Post-capitalist materialist

>>11517518
he was engels' kept man
and engels was a capitalist swine (came from industrialist family, fucked working-class girls and was a businessman)
that's only thing that matters

>>11517518
Marx and Marxists support capitalism for all the good it can do, e.g. industrialise, bring about better quality of life, technology...

However, they point out that capitalism is not the democracy it purports to be. It still has classes, even if the first liberals thought they were doing away with it.

Capitalism is just one step in history, and it makes no sense why we should keep it forever. Probably, we will see a massive shift in political and economical organisation once the entire world is industrialised and 'advanced capitalist' like it is in the west.

>>11517829

Thanks!

>>11517829
Aren’t most industrial countries of Marx’s time post-industrial now? And many of the pre-industrial, now industrial? Do any Marxists of today address this? Genuinely curious for something to read.

>>11517518
he was the chapo trap house of the 1830s

>>11517914
I actually don't know about "post-industrial" stuff. I'm kind of only in the know of antiquated shit like Marx and Lenin. But take Soviet Russia, it's often pointed out that Russia was a backwards feudal society and it really was the last place any Marxist would think could harbour socialist potential. It simply had little proletarians, except for in the major western cities. This is why Stalin said he had to have the Five Year Plan, to artificially industrialise Russia (Mao's Great Leap Forward is similar). Before FYP, there was a period of capitalisation or industrialisation in Russia called the New Economic Policy. Lenin and others wanted this kind of policy of allowing kulaks (rich peasants, who were at first tolerated but obviously outside of the dictatorship of the proletariat) to sell their grain, etc., to make Russia function more like a properly capitalist country. Land reforms were brought in, I think, and this alleviated much of the peasant tax or tributes that were in feudal Russia for centuries. It was kind of working according to most old Bolsheviks, I think Bukharin discusses it is best. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/07/08.htm

Stalin is famously a bad theorist to most people, even his friends. One can speculate on whether he really wanted it gone, or if he just wanted to impose his own vision of Socialism in One Country - which is criticised by a bunch of people. Most of what we see to be communist atrocities (apart from Red Terror) is a result of this weird shift from Marxists, e.g. "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism" or "Maoism".

We could say that China and Russia were always going to fail as socialist states, they were really only there to hold things together until other countries had revolutions, which nearly happened in France but no where else really. But yes, most communists are always talking about exploited third-world countries. You just have to read nearly any communist.

>>11517950

I also read that Russia was considered to be ideal for these kind of revolutions, due to it's backwardness and class differences.

Also a reason why nihilism/terrorism flourished

>>11517977
Sounds interesting but many historians blame the widespread dissent with the Russo-Sino war and WWI, as well as Nicholas' incompetence more than anything. But these historians will usually shun economic analysis because it's fallen out of favour. So, the class differences does sound more plausible.

Nihilistic terror in America was quite large, but I think killing a president probably helped the state to find support to clamp down on it.

>>11517995

Thanks for your insightful and profound comments

>>11518046
:/

>>11517521
Based

Test

>Was Marx a capitalist and
No, being a capitalist is not an ideological position it's a relationship to the MoP wherein you control it and so have authority over the proletariat that use it.

>or was he against capitalism?
Ehhh, yes and no.
Marx, obviously, didn't think capitalism was particularly great to live in and he hoped that some day it would no longer exist. But at the same time communism isn't an antithetical opposite to capitalism so much as an evolution of it and also believed that capitalism was a massive improvement on feudalism. He believed it was necessary for the capitalist economy to grow and expand worldwide in order for socialism to develop. Capitalism is only "bad" when it's the counter-revolutionary force resisting socialism.

So Britain bringing capitalism to tribal nigs at gunpoint is desirable. France crushing the Paris commune is undesirable.

>>11518096

So he he saw universal capitalism as a prerequisite for the communist revolution? Though the universal thing was only meant to pursued by communism

>>11518113
Not him but socialism, which is a transitional phase, where the proletariat makes their own "dictatorship" over the other class(es) succeeds capitalism, or bourgeois-controlled democracy.

Communism is the point at which socialist democracy "withers" because everyone can sustain themselves and no longer needs a state (which exists for a 'democracy').

>>11518128

So in theory socialism (hierarchy with proletariat on top) was a tansitional phase to communism, which would mean a 'one-ness' of the world/equality?

>>11518113
Forgot to add: communism would only occur after an international socialist phase. That's why lots of socialists (like Trotskyites, not Stalinists) say that socialism is always internationalist, and not able to occur in any 'country'.

Capitalist countries will try to destroy a revolutionary country in what is called a counter-revolution, or it would happen by itself (Napoleon is seen as the liberal counter-rev). The Nordic model is merely reformist capitalism, not a socialist transition.

>>11518141

Can you explain what you mean with the Napoleon stuff?

>>11518137
Yeah pretty much

>>11518113
>Though the universal thing was only meant to pursued by communism
Not at all, capitalism as a system depends on perpetual economic growth. The second the economy stops growing, or worse still shrinks, the system promptly starts to deteriorate.

In the pursuit of growth it would have done no good for the bourgeoisie had capitalism stayed confined to north-western Europe. It was (and continues to be) necessary to expand it globally in the pursuit of resources, markets and labourers. Notice this process hasn't quite finished even in the 21st century, the capitalist great powers of the world are still hell bent on opening every market available by any means necessary.

Also consider that when capitalism was very young and feudalism was still the dominant system on the planet the feudal powers of Europe spent a lot of time and energy trying to stifle the ascendant bourgeoisie and crush any liberal nationalist movements as they emerged. For a time it was necessary for capitalism to enforce itself on the world out of self-preservation, because if it didn't then the aristocracy would have tried to overturn the bourgeois revolution. See the wars of the coalition.

>>11518148
Read State and Revolution if you can, all this stuff is explained far better.

Napoleon is the gravedigger of the French Revolution since he takes away lots of its democratic, equalising potential of the revolution. He reinforces the classes, does away with lots of the radical demands of the Third Estate. He puts in the first standing army to begin France's imperialism. (This is contentious, there have been other standing armies that Lenin ignores; but it certainly is a massive shift from levies).

Basically Napoleon and others are 'undoing' the revolution to make a stronger, even worse state than existed before. There's all this stuff in Marxism about dialectics, and this is probably an example of showing how revolutions always lead to great freedom, then violence (peek image), then counter-revolution and repression.

This is, of course, unless you mitigate counter-revolution with a DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT and other things. It's got a long history of arguments, all this stuff, and I'm only now getting acquainted after years of never knowing. So well done on your curiosity.

>>11518137
No, socialism and communism are the same thing and any "socialist" telling you otherwise is a leftoid.

The words you're looking for are lower-stage communism and higher-stage communism.

>>11518184
>No, socialism and communism are the same thing and any "socialist" telling you otherwise is a leftoid.
>The words you're looking for are lower-stage communism and higher-stage communism.

According to whom?

>>11518193
According to Karl Marx in Critique of the Gotha Program.

>>11518174

Thanks!

I'm a graduated historian, but since graduating I have been in a continual process of realizing how little I actually know still (in detail or context).

I'm planning on becoming a teacher, so I want to know 'the bit processes' more in-depth, amongst which communism and it's origins and larger context

>>11518203
My leftcom (of the Italian variety) friend did say that communism and socialism is interchangeable in Marx but I have really only read Lenin properly. Do you think he wrote about a transition phase because of Russia's context, or is it revision?

>>11517518
Marx studied capitalism and wrote a critique of it. Saying he was a capitalist has some sense to it in background way but doing so is a massive misrepresentation of his writings.

>>11518233
Make no mistake, the DoTP is a transitional phase. But the October revolution had the unique problem of being a socialist revolution in a society that had just about barely discovered capitalism and was still dominated by the feudal aristocracy with a relatively weak bourgeoisie. It couldn't even go from revolution to lower-stage communism, it would have to go from revolution to capitalism first.

"Socialism" and "communism" being used to mean lower and higher stage communism by Lenin isn't overly revisionist but this terminology has been absolutely abused by ML's (and SocDems but for different reasons) to justify transparently counter-revolutionary states as socialist.

>>11517521
shameful that theres anything in this thread besides people replying to this with stuff like "based" or "i love you anon"

>>11518278
Sorry that not everyone is regurgitating M-L platitudes along with you.

>>11518312

What's ML?

>>11518339
Marxist Leninist. Or militant leftist. I meant the former.

>>11518339
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism–Leninism

I think he was calling me one but I'm really not... baka, I do need to read moar Marx though

>>11518312
no but when you get a god-tier shitpost right at the start of a thread its a terrible sin to ruin it with actual discussion

>>11518349
You may not be, but the tableaux that you're concocting is.

If he wasn't, he was a fool. And if he was, he was a fool.

>>11518374
fart on my balls tripnigger

>>11518365
Where do I start by uncucking myself from the ML hivemind? Does one need only read Marx and Engels?

>>11518374

You sound like a retarded Churchill

>>11518365

> I like to use words to make me feel superior

>>11518399
>xhe says on a literature board

>>11518390
I got the man for you.

>>11518404

>literature is about fancy words

>>11518407
Yeah, as I said, I have a leftcom mate lol. Xe reads way more than me so I'll just ask xim for the shit.

>>11518390
Dude, I'm the last person you want to ask about finding "true Marxism." However, you could always read Kołakowski.