Comment by ehudla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ehudla | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:

"In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness."

So in order to prevent these evil capitalists from ... (god forbid) fulfilling people's wishes ... we should give full power over everything ("the economy" which is everything) to person/committee X (Marx and Engels both saw that democracy and communism are incompatible) who will then "make everyone happy".

Ok ... that sounds like an excellent idea, so long of course, as your wishes and happiness are perfectly served by X.

Also: no thank you.

1. Marx did not really have a substantive first-order normative theory. He would not use the moralising - or indeed, the religious - language of 'evil'. His early humanist writings make clear that the capitalist, as much as the proletariat, is hidebound by the structural constraints of capitalism.

2. It is not at all obvious that capitalism is simply and straightforwardly a system for satisfying people's wishes. For one thing, what people's wishes, interests and desires are, is not independent of the socio-historical system in and through which they have become a person in the first place. It is not something fixed. More generally, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of 'wishing' independent of the material conditions that shape, as a matter of fact, what one can and cannot wish for. I can wish for economic democracy, but that does not make it so; a destitute proletariat, in Marx's view, can wish for something more than wage labour, but that does not make it so; someone could wish for a society founded on something other than the profit-motive, but that does not make it so. That is not to dismiss the awesome creative power of capitalist modernity - but you have a very naive view if you believe it is merely a mirror-image of the natural wishes of human beings.

3. Marx did not see 'democracy and communism' as 'incompatible'. Marx's view of democracy is significantly more complicated than that. One can find a perfect antidote to your claim in his 1871 essay on the Paris Commune. He defends a system of decentralised, self-governing communes under universal suffrage.

4. Most of the socialist Left since 1956 - when Krushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin to the Party Congress, and when he crushed the Hungary Revolution - has conceived of itself in opposition to the Soviet Union. The New Left (or 'Western Marxism') is highly anti-authoritarian.

Why does the western new left intelligentsia always back authoritarian governments? Castro, Chavez, Maduro, to cite a few, not to mention those who studied under these “highly anti-authoritarian” “intellectuals” like Pol Pot.

That ironic feeling when crony statist capitalists already have complete and total control over the economy

It's just socialism by another name, and with different recipients (namely corporate execs instead of the median human being)

Corporate execs organize companies that deliver value to society ... or they won't be execs for long.

Socialist bureaucrats ... they "justify" their place in society the way the people at the DMV do.

On the contrary, such companies don't deliver value. Their sole purpose is to extract value.

Right? Like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Comcast, Raytheon, just deliver soooooooo much value to the American taxpayer!

Those executive bonuses are hard-earned!

Which means it is comparable to most other forms of socialism as those also tend to have a limited group of privileged individuals versus the unwashed masses who get to be equal in relative poverty, especially compared to the former group.

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