/lit/ - Literature

>>19496750
That's my man Greenwald: Tucker be a socialist and Trump and Batman too!

>>19496750
Marx considered capitalism a necessary stage in civilization, which would be followed by a general proletarian strike that would result in the fruits of capitalism being distributed equally.

All this was thrown out the window when the only revolutions took place in undeveloped countries that immediately tried to use central planning to develop their own industry to compete with Western capitalist nations.

>>19496863
Except Russia wasn't precisely undeveloped and became incomparably more developed under Communism and won WWII. If Mexico had been Russia it would never have stood a chance, even with billions being poured in by its allies, against the German juggernaut. Russia had more population, more resources, and eventually more sufficient war industry than all of Western Europe combined: communism was the organizing force behind this. It beat Nazi racism; it was less mad, it was not genocidally racist--in short, the spirit of history was on its side.

>>19496897
Communism wasn't the organizing force behind that, totalitarianism was. Stalinism was just "red fascism," which if you are a Marxist is just red capitalism in autism mode. Soviet communism died with Lenin.

>>19496750
>haha ya man we need to go through capitalism to get to communism
>communism is inevitable
>dude the more we promote capitalism the faster it will collapse and we can live in paradise!!!
Marx was the original accelerationist; accelerationism of course being the biggest cope ideology other than Christianity. "Even when we're losing we're actually winning!" Massive cope.

>>19496930
One of the ironies of Marxism is that politically speaking it has no incentive to make the lives of workers better incrementally. It's all or nothing. It thrives on agitation, anger, envy. It was always a kind of collaborator with capitalism, because it needed a satanic enemy to justify grabbing so much power.

>>19497024
That's not strictly true, Marx was not in favor of immiserating the proletariat. It's just that his primary concern was revolution, so any improvement of the conditions of the proletariat ought to be tactical (increase solidarity, give the proletariat a sense that it can win victories as a corporate entity and that its interests are best served via further solidarity etc.). Marx would certainly not be in favor of a bourgeois welfare state that "medicates" (narcotizes) worker discontent, while keeping the actual condition of the workers as proletarianized wageslaves, since the latter is just irrational in Marx's view.

So it's sort of ambiguous. But he at least wasn't in favor of pressurizing the proletariat into a lumpenproletariat until it freaked out. That's how you get botched revolutions (like France in 1848) that the bourgeoisie can easily steer into dead ends, ultimately serving their own interests. The revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat regardless of its moral and intellectual state was more of an anarchist (Bakunin, Proudhon) and pre-Marxian French communist (Blanqui) thing. It was crucial for Marx NOT to have a lumpenproletariat, but an organized self-conscious proletariat. Marx and Engels actually despised the lumpen.

In keeping with the strictly tactical goal of waking proletariat up to its own objectively real (for Marx) revolutionary potential, Marx's goal was to "make the insult (of bourgeois domination) even more insulting," i.e., the insult is already objectively there, what we need to do as organizers of the proletariat is make people react to it the way they always already should react to such degradation, by organizing against it.

Again, this leaves Marxism in an ambiguous position of pure tactics with relation to the bourgeois state and ideology, a position that is hard to maintain. Marxism is not really a theory of the state in this respect, it's a theory of how the current, irrational oligarch-state is imprisoning the sleeping majority of non-oligarchs who should wake up, kill or at least overthrow the masters, and constitute a new "state" (whatever that would then mean) organically from themselves. Marx has much more in common with blanquism than most Marxists usually admit, and Lenin is arguably a blanquist (and has been accused of such). This is also why many Marxist socialists went syndicalist, national syndicalist, and fascist after 1910, including Mussolini.

National syndicalism / fascism are really just Marxist socialism leaning into the "so are we going to overthrow the bourgeoisie or not?" side of Marx's own ambiguous position.

>>19496897
>It beat Nazi racism; it was less mad, it was not genocidally racist--in short, the spirit of history was on its side.

>>19496914
>it wasn't real communism

>>19496897
>in short, the spirit of history was on its side.
I see you took nothing from my lessons.