Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Come on, ladies and gentlemen, the fine submitted article is about stark conditions in India, where "Western capitalism" was specifically rejected, and socialism embraced, as an economic model after independence in 1947. The comparison with Taiwan (where I have lived, twice) is instructive. Taiwan too, under the China Nationalist Party (KMT) dictatorship, had a period of governance that accepted Sun Yat-sen thought and dabbled with a lot of socialism. (That the field of Taiwan's flag, formally the flag of the Republic of China, is red is no accident. The KMT was very much part of a worldwide socialist movement when it was founded.) Meanwhile, as the mainland fell to the Commmunist Party of China and then Stalin's invasion of South Korea from the north began, the United States felt constrained to prop up Taiwan, and one way it did so was by promoting land reform in Taiwan and local free and fair elections. Gradually, Taiwan became more "capitalist," and it went from stark poverty (being poorer in my wife's birth year than some newly independent countries in Africa) to prosperity. Taiwan hasn't had a garment industry like that described in the submitted article for a long, long time. Essentially everyone who gets online to discuss issues on Hacker News probably uses an Internet device with multiple components made in Taiwan and traded in international trade.

Trade is the foundation of capitalism, not exploitation. (The references for this, of course, are the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.) India (and also much of South America) specifically rejected this wisdom during much of my lifetime, and now those countries have to play catch-up. They still have time. They won't have stark poverty forever if they learn from the examples of other countries, just as Taiwan did.

Thank you for being a voice of reason and empiricism in this thread. Seems like too many people took a class in marxist sociology and all of a sudden see the whole world in terms of The Capitalists and The Exploited Class.

EDIT: Taking a class in economics and thinking everything has a monetary value attached to it, or that homo economicus actually exists would obviously be just as bad.

Personally I don't agree with Marx a lot (I'm more of a Groucho Marxist and am therefore not allowed to join any club that would have me as a member), but I do have Marxist family members and know a fair amount of what it is and what it is not. India is definitely not an example of a Marxist state.

edit - Folk keep framing stuff in the economic dogma-battles of the superpowers in the 19th and 20th century, but to me the problem is 14th century economics combined with 21st century logistics. Retaining a caste system in a world of global networks can give you a fucking big pyramid and systemise abuse on an unprecedented scale with the money that flows in from those outside the structure.

Groucho Marxism is the best kind of ideology. I didn't mean to imply that India is in any way a marxist state. I was referring to the unreflected usage of words like exploitation in this thread (not in the article) - a usage that I could easily see being picked up after taking a class or two. Pre-packaged vocabulary has a certain smell, just like bad code.

Actually Marx chose to resign from the Friars Club, citing its low standards in allowing "people like me as a member", rather than not being allowed to join.

Not only that, if I recall correctly there's actually a few Maoist groups in India that are trying to start a revolution as well... They certainly don't see India as anything but capitalist.

Indeed, the communist party in India is about as militant as they come. You're probably referring to the naxalites[0], they're not shy about targeted violence[1], especially since they're active in a lot of poor, "backward" [2] areas that go ignored by the central government until there is an industrial resource to exploit.

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insur...

[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-09-27/news...

Edited to include a reference to "backward" - a term used in official language.

Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking of, thank you.

What's wrong in taking a class in anything including Marxist sociology? Are there some domains of knowledge which should be intentionally left unexplored, lest we corrupt all our precious bodily fluids? What is this--Texas Board of Education?

Seems to me too few people take classes in anything these days, let alone Marxist sociology.

The Popperian argument would be that Marxism is not a domain of knowledge, because it is not very good at making testable predictions about the world.

Popper compared Marx to Freud, in that both people spawned a theory of knowledge that is very good at explaining what has already happened but horrifyingly bad at telling you how things will be tomorrow, and how to change those things. Almost sixty years after this observation nothing has changed. We now recognize Freud as pseudoscience, but Marxism remains unfortunately persistent. Marxists like to talk about how well Marx predicted the nature of the class struggle and stuff like that, but in a theory which sees everything in terms of class struggle, this is not a scientific prediction at all.

Marxists like to talk about how well Marx predicted the nature of the class struggle and stuff like that, but in a theory which sees everything in terms of class struggle, this is not a scientific prediction at all.

And they typically do him a dis-service. I find when "Marxists" speak of such things, "bad" is synonymous with capitalism just as "capitalism" is synonymous with bad.

Popper does not have a monopoly on the definition of 'science.' For example, quantum mechanics is not exactly falsifiable... And the general idea of falsifiability has been criticized by many, including non-Marxists.

When Marxists talk about it being 'scientific socialism,' they are contrasting with 'utopian socialism.' Scientific socialism takes the approach of examining the world, making changes, seeing how those work out, and then re-examining the theory. You can see how that relates to the scientific method.

Quantum mechanics certainly is falsifiable. If the electron two-slit experiment produces a pair of humps, it is falsified to extremely high confidence. (Also, we'd have a hard time dealing with the Pauli exclusion principle, and therefore solid matter, without quantum mechanics.)

Marxism is not scientific, as it does not attempt to falsify one of its core axioms—that the class struggle is over a local optimization game. A central committee can actually do a pretty good job of adjusting the ratio of copper tubing to copper wiring, but the actual challenge turns out to be making people want to invent things like graphene.

My physics knowledge is pretty limited, but I was under the impression that it's at least controversial.

Regardless, you're not engaging with my core point, which is that 'scientific' in this context means something specific, not whatever you happen to think scientific means. Nobody is claiming Marxism is falsifiable, that's a red herring.

> [Marx theory] is very good at explaining what has already happened [...]

And that's exactly why you should learn about it, Marx analysis of economic conditions is pretty much spot on. What conclusions you draw from that analysis is a different topic. And of course all the work is interesting for historic purposes, it's pretty much impossible to understand the history of the 20th century without (at least some of) it.

I also haven't met (or read) anybody for a long time who actually believed Marx' idea of class struggle by force of nature leading to a communist society, where do you still find those people?

The comparison is deeply flawed. Psychoanalysis is not good at explaining what has already happened. It only seems good if you don't know that those "explanations" have no actual basis in reality. Psychoanalysis is mostly based on completely made up "facts", not just on badly interpreted facts. This is a big difference if we're talking about philosophy of science (which we are if we're discussing Popper's views on what is science). By the way, Marxism can make testable statements about the world ("prediction" is a too strong requirement for this domain of reality, it's too complex; fluid mechanics can't make any predictions about turbulent flows, but that doesn't mean it's not science).

This is why my stomach turns when Popper is mentioned. The idea of falsifiability and testable statements being the essence of science is the best known guiding principle in scientific methodology. Having articulated this wonderful idea, he just couldn't help but muddy the water and misuse it to peddle his political and social views.

EDIT: I forgot to give an example of a falsifiable prediction in Marxism: the outcome of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the transitional socialist state leading to communism. It was actually falsified successfully by Soviet Union et al.

tl;dr: Psychoanalysis is not good at anything, so it is unfair to compare Marxism to that since Marxism has at least some merit.

> I forgot to give an example of a falsifiable prediction in Marxism: the outcome of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the transitional socialist state leading to communism. It was actually falsified successfully by Soviet Union et al.

That's debatable, given the modifications to Marxism made in Leninism -- the actual "Communist" states all were based on Leninism, rather than Marxism. The advanced democratic capitalist states that had the foundations which Marx saw as essential for the transition to socialism on the way to communism have generally transitioned in the direction of socialism since Marx's time, though in a rather gradual way. At least in the direction of the natural progression beyond the model of political-economic system that Marx and other 19th century socialists critiqued under the name "capitalism", Marx seems to have been very broadly correct -- as to whether that eventually leads to communism is, well, something that we're probably several generations away from seeing.

I think that its a lot more likely that something like the modern mixed economy -- evolving with productivity in a way that increasing has a greater domain of social support and responsiveness -- will be dominant for a very long term. OTOH, I can envision that happening in a way where the social support is delivered in a way based on private property (e.g., through a mechanism like basic income) with social goods delivered more through the market than directly by the state. With sufficient productivity (and hence, goods being less scarce) this would in many ways resemble communism (while still having features of socialism and capitalism.)

I agree it's debatable in terms of relationship of Leninism to "vanilla" Marxism. It is much less debatable, I think, that Leninism is an honest (in the sense of not being intentionally wrong or deceptive) continuation of the original Marxist sociology and economy (at least the "late Marx" version of it). So in that sense I took the term Marxism to encompass all those strains of social and economic theory based on late Marx.

> It is much less debatable, I think, that Leninism is an honest (in the sense of not being intentionally wrong or deceptive) continuation of the original Marxist sociology and economy

Whether it is "honest" or not is largely beside the point, which is that it is a deliberate attempt to short-circuit what in Marx's theory was an essential step on the road from feudalism through developed capitalism and then socialism and finally to communism, and that a such a short-circuiting effort cannot be an empirical test -- whether it succeeds or fails -- of Marx's theory (well, except insofar as its success would refute at least one element of Marx's theory.)

Do note that I'm making a distinction between Marxism and Marx's theory (in the sense that he was just one, although first, Marxist philosopher/sociologist/economist). So, it may be that USSR was not a test of Marx's own ideas on transition, but it was certainly a test of one, very much dominant for the most part of the last century, strand of Marxist thought. And they didn't decide they wanted to short-circuit the process "just because", or because they were lazy; they did have a theoretical analysis and rationale behind the idea.

The problem is not "taking the class." The problem is "taking the class and presuming it makes one an expert." After a single facet of study, it's certainly not possible to be an expert.

Your thesis assumes that Marxist sociology is a domain of knowledge. Apparently the parent hinted it is not. There is some controversy here, certainly. However people who have lived in, or learned about, the societies where the Marxist ideology was (supposedly?) placed in the foundation, can be excused if they have strong opinions about it, and mostly negative.

Perhaps Marxism could be studied as a specimen of a certain mindset, like intellectual design: "learn about it", not "learn it". One problem is so many people (millions!) have had Marxism shoved in the throats. No wonder it tends to go out the other way. (Sorry for the graphic image.)

"Western capitalism" was specifically rejected, and socialism embraced

That must be why it has such strong labour laws and enormous social safety net supported by a tax and spend government then. Or possibly the economy ditched socialism in 1991 when it carried out a series of free market reforms at the behest of global trade organisations. Who can possibly say.

That must be why it has such strong labour laws and enormous social safety net supported by a tax and spend government then.

We can't have good labor conditions without the capital and productive capacity in place to offer good labor conditions.

I agree with this.

But you have to realize that most people on hacker news who want socialism never had first-hand experience with it. People have to learn their lessons the hard way. :(

Just an added thought re: ROC, when I was in Taiwan some local coworkers were concerned about manufacturing getting outsourced to mainland China, because Taiwan's prosperity and standard of living started to make it less competitive. Imagine that!

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