Haven't had a refresher on it since high school, so I might be totally out of the loop, but isn't equality of outcome the point of marxism?
Communism and socialism, which are considered different in modern writing but were the same in Marx's time, are something Marx believes are an inevitable outcome of capitalism.
Marxism suggests that when the workers own the companies, then benefits are distributed to the workers who own/operate the company. Profit doesn't get centered in individuals, it gets spread across the workers of a company.
Folks like Lenin/Stalin took this idea further and created an authoritarian regime out of the ideas, and create what we commonly think of as 'communism' in the states.
Edit: Parent comment asked a question about Marxism, I'm getting downvoted for explaining some high level concepts of Marxism? Do folks want me to dive deeper into the dialectical models Marx discussed? Lol
Not too surprising given the general demographics of HN being quite biased towards startup founders, VC's, and the like.
So a Marxist would want, for example, the employer/employee distinction to be abolished. But there would be no issue with inequality in the employee class, an employee may very well produce 3-4 times more value than another.
This is something that Marx explicitly wrote about - he thought that different people had different needs and abilities and thus should receive sometimes very different amounts of resources. The examples he gave would be someone that works much faster and better that someone else, or someone that has children to raise.
It just so happens that, given the pre-existent distribution of wealth will have followed other rules, the first step of marxist enaction inevitably ends up being "the big reset" where inequality of outcome gets temporarily removed for everyone.
Generally "Marxism" is thrown around as a boogie man term by people with little understanding for something approximating extreme authoritarianism in which the state owns all the means of production and allocates everyone the same resources.
(Source: I grew up in a Marxist country and was taught Marxism by a Marxist teacher.)
Also, no; most prominently, we largely dedicated our resources to pointless heavy industry at the expense of light industry and services.
If you're talking about the USSR, there was actually some dissension after the death of Lenin on whether light industry or heavy industry should be focused on. Lenin wanted to focus especially on neither, with his NEP that would create a temporary market economy to figure that out on it's own.
Eventually, the decision was taken to focus on heavy industry. The decisive arguments for a focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxian economics - those arguments went either way. The main determinant of the Soviet focus on heavy industry was the failure of Stalin to obtain security assurances from Western Europe, leading to a focus on heavy industry for military purposes.
At least in the 20s this was a solid move, because Soviet heavy industry saved tens of millions of lives by stalling the Nazi offensive, whose plan was to kill 50% of the Soviet population (something very bad).
After the end of WW2 however, it was pointless in retrospect to continue the focus on heavy industry. But the Soviet Union did not really calculate the geopolitcal impact of nuclear weapons and built a military that could rival NATO, and this required a lot of heavy industry.
Pretty much, Marxism had nothing to do with Soviet investment in heavy industry. The main reason was to feed the Soviet war machine, from the very beginning.
If this statement were true then the statement above about Marxism being "a method of analyzing history" would be false. So there's an obvious contradiction right there, just like a claim that a human is a head is incompatible with the statement that a leg is a subset of a human.
> The Marxian ideas about stages of societal development for example have no bearing about whether you should focus on light or heavy industries.
I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
I don't see the incompatibility. Lenin used Marxism, a method of analyzing history, to derive a political program for the Russian empire. Not everything that the Soviet Union did was done because of Marxism Leninism - the vast majority was done out of practical considerations, outside of the general guidelines.
>I didn't claim any such thing. You simply asked what did our Marxist government focus on, and I answered. And there's no reason to jump hundreds of kilometers away into the USSR and decades into the past into the NEP period; our economic failures stretched all the way from 1960's onwards all the way to the fall of the Iron Curtain.
You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union. I explained to you why this focus on heavy industry had nothing to do with Marxism, and everything to do with the geopolitics of the Soviet Union. I gave an explanation that was valid from death of Lenin to the end of the Cold War. It seems to me that my thesis that the Soviet government wasn't a "Marxist government" but rather a government whose political program was initially based partly on a Marxist analysis of history, but were many of the fatal decisions and errors had nothing to do with Marxism.
Subsets can't contain elements that their supersets lack. If A is a subset of B, then if x is an element of A, x is also an element of B. So the claim that a state ideology is a subset of a method of analyzing history would necessarily imply that methods of analyzing history habitually contain elements of state ideologies at their core, which I haven't observed. Hence I see a contradiction there.
> You were talking about the focus on heavy industries of the Soviet Union.
I did not grow up in the Soviet Union, hence I wasn't talking about it.
As for a method of understanding history containing and ideology, this is absolutely the case. All methods of analyzing history and social systems at some level rely on an ideology. Marxism as a method of analyzing history also is an ideology. For other methods of analyzing history often the ideology defaults to the current ruling ideology.
Marxism also contains economic theory, and social theory, all in the goal of analyzing history and changing it. Marxism writ large contains all of its sub-tendencies which understandably after 150 years evolved a lot.
As far as my assumption that you were talking about the Soviet Union, often Marxism Leninism refers to the precise ideology of the Soviet Union. If you meant it in a different way, you'll have to specify the country and time period because various different ideologies call themselves Marxism Leninism (and none of them come from Marx or Lenin).
Not quite. According to the original Marxist dogma, Russia couldn't become socialist in 1917, since it had too few proletarians, and too many peasants - i.e. it wasn't capitalist enough for a socialist revolution. Bolsheviks disagreed with that, obviously (and some Marxists even say that this forcible approach in a society that wasn't ready for it is precisely why the USSR turned out like it did).
You might say that marxism is for more equal outcomes than we have under today's system, but that's true of lots of things that aren't marxist (any form of progressive taxation to fund social programs, for example).
But even that's sort of an oversimplification and doesn't do either marxism or "equality of outcomes" justice.