/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19554577]

What's a good book that critiques Socialism in a non-ethical/non-ideological way?

[Anonymous No.19554589]

Das Kapital is a materialist critique of idealist socialism.

[Anonymous No.19554598]

>>19554577
Yeah, I'd recommend looking into Marx. His critiques of utopian socialism are second to none.

[Anonymous No.19554631]

>>19554589
>>19554598
I meant what's a capitalist critique on socialism in a non-ethical/non-ideological way.

[Anonymous No.19554634]

>>19554631
If it's a capitalist critique then it's by definition ideological.

[Anonymous No.19554646]

Pretty much anything by von Hayek.
In particular I would recommend
> The Use of Knowledge in Society
which is a very short read; and
> The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Although there is controversy around it's authorship

[Anonymous No.19554655]

>>19554646
He critiques socialism in both an ethical and ideological way though.

[Anonymous No.19554661]

You're a dumbass. Read Marx

[Anonymous No.19554667]

>>19554577
Janos Kornai. Empirical economic critique of actually existing socialism written by a Soviet bloc economist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage_economy

[Anonymous No.19554697]

You're looking for Main Currents of Marxism.

[Anonymous No.19554698]

>>19554577
Read Marx/Engels and make up your own mind

[Anonymous No.19554743]

>>19554577
Marx's scientific socialism has been eternally btfo by philosophers of science(Popper). Most other claims have been so thoroughly debunked by Austrian economists that classical economists have adopted their arguments as their own(Mises). Joseph Schumpeter also provides amazing critiques of classic socialism, and in general it has had an embarrassing history.

Other forms of "socialism" like market socialism, or social democracies where you have generous property rights and markets are not actually socialism. You might think that's odd, but it becomes clear when you realize that socialism is anti-capitalism, and capitalism is whatever the socialist doesn't like.

Link me your pet socialist variation.

[Anonymous No.19554754]

>>19554631
For whatever it’s worth, nothing in Marx’s writing is ethical or ideological. It’s a common misconception that there is. But if you want something more scholarly that deals critically with socialism and is not by or wholly sympathetic to Marx, then Schumpeter’s “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” and Kolakowsi’s “Main Currents of Marxism” would be worthwhile places to start. But your topic is so broad that most of what you’ll find if looking for generally anti-socialist works will be extremely ideological and unbalanced.

[Anonymous No.19554783]

>>19554754
there’s nothing Marx’s writing that is*

[Anonymous No.19554785]

>>19554655
The use of knowledge in society, price signals, spontaneous order, and economic calculation are all theoretical arguments which, if they are true, must always be true without reference to ideology or ethics. These are literally arguments founded on reasoning from systems, information, and chaos theory before those fields really existed.

[Anonymous No.19554788]

>>19554754
there’s nothing in Marx’s writing that is*

[Anonymous No.19554806]

"if i say it isn't ideological then it isn't ideological"

[Anonymous No.19554833]

>>19554785
But you said “pretty much anything written by Hayek.” And we both know he goes into much more than the calculation problem in his criticisms of socialism.

Also, if OP wants to explore the calculation problem in depth, studying the Viennese context would be advisable: the world of Red Vienna, Lange, Neurath, Carnap, etc. As someone completely annoyed by and alienated from the left and unconvinced by a lot of ethical and ideological attempts at persuasion, I went from being basically a Hayekian to a socialist from that reading. Not trying to convince OP of anything, but just suggesting one read both sides of the debate.

[Anonymous No.19554864]

>>19554577

[Anonymous No.19554870]

>>19554661
He doesn't want to lose IQ points anon

[Anonymous No.19554945]

>>19554864
Interesting book, anon. Where’d you find it?

[Anonymous No.19554954]

>>19554945
Looking for some specific criticism on Hegel.

[Anonymous No.19555043]

>>19554833
If you think any of those Vienna folks solved the calculation problem then you are mistaken. No, you can't just use computers.

[Anonymous No.19555546]

>>19554631
Not possible.

[Anonymous No.19555611]

>>19554833
>But you said “pretty much anything written by Hayek.” And we both know he goes into much more than the calculation problem in his criticisms of socialism.
Most of his literature is very theoretical, spontaneous order, price signals, knowledge and information, denationalization (and therefor the decentralization) of currency, etc. sure, it's not all about the econ-calc problem.
>studying the Viennese context would be advisable: the world of Red Vienna, Lange, Neurath, Carnap, etc.
Why would reading a bunch of histories and biographies be better than actually reading theory? how did this convert you? what did you even read?

[Anonymous No.19555650]

>>19555611
>spontaneous order, price signals
>denationalization (and therefor the decentralization) of currency
All highly spooky and not nearly as scientific as neolibs like to pretend they are.

[Anonymous No.19555750]

>>19555650
>All highly spooky
???
>not nearly as scientific as neolibs like to pretend they are.
It's not meant to be super-"scientific", it's just meant to give an accurate explanation of how the economy and society work. For a lot of the reason why socialism is hard to make work, economics is hard to make a "real" science. Reproducibility, predictive power, etc. are just out of it's scope. Read von Hayek's work on Scientism.
Besides, Marxists are the ones who claim to be "scientific" despite having no real claim to it.
>neolibs
meaningless term

[Anonymous No.19556174]

There is none. Marx outlines the structures of capitalism and its scientifically correct.

[Anonymous No.19556186]

>>19554577
The refutation section of picrel

[Anonymous No.19556193]

>>19556174
There is nothing scientific about marxism beyond the fact it is the most failed ideology in existence

[Anonymous No.19556248]

>>19554697
this
Anyone who decides to tackle marxism I feel he should read before anything else this book. Just finished the 2nd volume and can not wait to start the 3rd and last

[Anonymous No.19556255]

>>19556193
this is the most failed post in existence

[Anonymous No.19556272]

>>19554577
Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged. Gratuitous? Yes. But a good critique against communitivism nonetheless. Here's a rundown, through an example:

In no other field than economics do we claim it moral to handicap men for their success. A runner wins gold in the Olympics, comes around the next year. Do we shoot him in the foot? No. But, you ask, did his success not earn him more means to train with? Of course, but that means nothing if he refused to train in arrogance, and the other man had trained harder. Or if the other man trained more efficiently. For you see, the resources do not make the man. They are shaped by him, be it to his detriment or benefit. It is in this we see capitalism's greatest trait: a self-correcting system, for stagnation's worst enemy is competition. Competition for workers and for consumers. Don't like a product? Buy another brand. Don't like an employer? Quit. And this system of competition all wrought of men's natural ambition, that which the weak can only see as greed.

[Anonymous No.19556279]

>>19556272
You have to go back.

[Anonymous No.19556283]

>>19556255
based and dubspilled

[Anonymous No.19556291]

>>19556279
Projection, much? Reckon they wouldn't even want you back in whatever rat-pile you scuttled from.

[Anonymous No.19556340]

>>19556291
>Projection, much?

[Anonymous No.19556405]

>>19554577
Karl Marx and the Close of his System is the classical one, recommend getting the Mises Institute version of it cause it has socialists like Paul Sweezy and Rudolf Hilferding attempting to prove Bohm-Bawerk wrong.
>>19556272
Objectivists need to be shot

[Anonymous No.19556431]

>>19556405
classic one*, my bad
Also Mises' essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and Hoppe's A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism are good.

[Anonymous No.19556463]

>>19556405
>>19556431
He said non-ethical/non-ideological.

An appeal to a transcendent category of "human" is…? You can phone Althusser on this one…go on.

[Anonymous No.19556512]

>>19554577
Read Hayek and ignore the low IQ leftists above

[Anonymous No.19556586]

>>19554631
Marx:
>The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.
the bourgeois subject of necessity sees the world in the form of a religious-like false reflection, not transparently. i.e. he's necessarily ideological.
>>19554667
this is a critique of capitalism, and probably a poor one at that since it's written by someone who can't even distinguish capitalism from socialism

[Anonymous No.19556591]

Kolakowski because he wasn't a midwit.

He also wrote this:

<----------------

And this:

>"The kind of conservative anthropological pessimism which led to the astonishing belief that a progressive income tax was an inhuman abomination is just as suspect as the kind of historical optimism on which the Gulag Archipelago was based."

And this:

>"We cannot get rid of the spectre [of communism] by saying it was just 'human stupidity' or 'human corruptibility'. The spectre is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life."

Yeah, about that...

https://youtu.be/3v5FW84m69w?t=511

[Anonymous No.19556604]

>>19556586
Kornai was a famous critique of actually-existing socialism, that being capitalism. He also crushed a workers revolution in Hungary in 1956.

>>19556591
Ko¬lakowski wasn't a midwit, but he was an observant catholic.

[Anonymous No.19556752]

>>19554577
Any standard microeconomics textbook should do the trick.

[Anonymous No.19556777]

>>19556591
Is he implying "The Left" has never used lies to gain power, or is he really that blinded by his own belief in his own correctness? Or perhaps he is insinuating that if one really believes a lie then it is no longer a lie?

[Anonymous No.19556885]

Any poetry by pic related.

[Anonymous No.19557107]

>>19554577

[Anonymous No.19557311]

It's really a shame that the main opponents to marxism are ancap retards, it gives legitimacy to it.

[Anonymous No.19557395]

>>19554754
wasn't Kołakowski a marxist himself, at least at the time when he wrote that monography? I haven't read it, but I thought that the "main currents" where rather affirmative/ambivalent than critical in regards to marxism

[Anonymous No.19557829]

>>19557311
>It's really a shame that the main opponents to marxism are ancap retards, it gives legitimacy to it.

[Anonymous No.19558802]

>>19557395
no he had dropped marxism when he wrote it but he is as impartial as it gets about it and critisizes it objectively

[Anonymous No.19558860]

>>19557395
Kolakowski’s method in main currents is Marxist but his ideological position is a kind of scholastic Catholicism where veracity to the world as it is is valued to expose sin for what it is. So main currents is fucking useful because he’s an honest historian of ideas with a clear bias.

Volume 3 is fucking useless on left coms and post 56 though.

[Anonymous No.19559070]

>>19554754
>For whatever it’s worth, nothing in Marx’s writing is ethical or ideological.
So tired of this dumb meme. Just straight up false. If you read Alienated Labor you can clearly hear a sense of moral outrage permeating the text. "it's not ideological bros ..... ITS SCIENCE". No it's not. It's an ideology like any others. There's nothing wrong with that but be honest about the fact. This is why I despise Marxists. You're the most dishonest weasels on the planet.

[Anonymous No.19559174]

>>19555650
Economics does not pretend to be scientific like marxism. They are fully aware of its limitations. They don't pretend to have prescience like Marx
>>19555750
This

[Anonymous No.19559190]

>>19556186
>viking age iceland
I never understood the libertarian fascination. We all know how it ended. And don't forget the vendetta laws

[Anonymous No.19559216]

I think Marx's theory of the state is beyond retarded.

[Anonymous No.19560373]

>>19559174
The price proxy is pure ideology mate. Economics is foundationally ideological.

[Anonymous No.19560407]

>>19554589
Its really not. All forms of socialism are idealistic - even Marx. Marxism is just talmudism larping as a science.

[Anonymous No.19560810]

>>19554577
I don't think that's possible. Michael Parenti is a marxist and very ideological, but there is a chapter in Blackshirts and Reds that outlines the inefficiencies of communist states but reading that in isolation would really be doing the book a disservice.

[Anonymous No.19561135]

>>19554646
>Hayek in year of the Lord 2021

[Anonymous No.19561138]

>>19557107
t. has no common sense nor knows economics

[Anonymous No.19562491]

>>19556248
It's all worthwhile but I've heard the third is the weakest one.

[Anonymous No.19562501]

>>19561135
not an argument

[Anonymous No.19562509]

>>19562491
It was harder for a dissident Polish catholic using marxist methodology to critique 20th century Marxism from Communist Poland for some reason Lenin Trotsky KAPD Stalin.