Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>"Great, that means we can double production, which will earn me rewards because it will impress my superiors!"

That would be a Marxist-Leninist system (or rather a Marxist-Stalinist one).

Marxism doesn't say anything other than the society en masse and through democratic means has a say on what the level of production is for each sector. They could have just said "that's enough" if they prioritized leisure.

Of course USSR had two problems: it was underdeveloped, and it faced huge dangers from outside ("capitalistic") powers, so it had to ramp-up its production pronto (else, it would have been squashed by Germany in WWII, for example, something which the industrialization prevented). A single country (or even a small alliance) cannot adapt that well to doing what it wants (e.g. emphasize leisure) without falling prey to other powers around it. That was the whole hoopla with the notion of "socialism in one country" btw ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_One_Country ).

For me the issue is that if you're going to pick a model, you're kind of stuck with something like Marxism-Leninism or Maoism if you want to be able to do any serious hypothesizing.

Vanilla Marxism is the abstract base class of political ideologies. You can't actually instantiate it, because Marx left too much unsaid when it came to the nuts and bolts of how he thought a society should function on a day-to-day basis.

that's an interesting analogy, i don't really think of Marxism as an ideology, but a critique of capitalism. people who berate it as an ideology are correct because they are berating Marxist–Leninism, but Marxism as a critique of capitalism is sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

> For the political ideology commonly associated with states governed by Communist parties, see Marxism–Leninism.

As long as we're devolving into argument by dictionary, we might as well cut straight to the root. A Google search for the term gives us:

  ideology (n) a system of ideas and ideals, especially 
               one that forms the basis of economic or 
               political theory and policy

Which I'd say is a pretty darn decent definition, and corresponds very well with vernacular usage.

i suppose you could call a critique or analysis a system of ideas and ideals, but it wouldn't be an "ideal" definition. vernacular refers to marxist-leninism.

Could the people who voted down the above comment please explain why. I too understand Marxism as described above. I might amend it slightly from "people who berate it as an ideology are correct" to "people who berate it as an ideology would be correct if it were one", but otherwise what's the issue?

Don't expect the majority of Hacker News posters to understand anything regarding Marxism.

I didn't downvote (and I wish they'd just remove that silly feature from this site), but if I had to guess it would come down to a few things:

1. Ideology is not a dirty word. It's just a noun that describes any large-scale philosophy that focuses on political or economic issues.

2. Referring back to that definition, Marxism is very much an ideology. Claiming that it isn't is just playing word games.

3. All that aside, focusing in on quibbling over a word like that, to the exclusion of addressing any of the actual content of the statement that was being responded to, doesn't do much to add value to the conversation. Given the current context I don't think it would be unfair to suggest that it amounts to trying to meet a response to a courtier's reply with yet another courtier's reply.

to me, ideology and marxism are loaded terms.

i think the fact that you refer to marxism as a base class and marxist leninism as an instantiation mean that we fundamentally agree on the nature of the distinction between the two.

i think the nub of our disagreement is whether ideology is a loaded term, and whether marxism meets our personal definition of that word.

It's generally considered unsound because it relies on the labour theory of value -- that "true" value comes from the labour expended during creation of a good.

That was the state-of-the-art in classical economics when Marx branched from it. And his argument flows from it.

But the LTV breeds paradoxes. That's why, when the concept of subjective value was introduced, economics left LTV behind.

A thing is only valued according to what it is exchanged for.

So a single good actually has different values, at different points in time and space. The value of the labourer's efforts are a distinct exchange from the value of the good to the manufacturer, which is distinct again from the value when sold to the wholesaler, distinct from the value at the retailer, distinct from the retailer to the consumer, distinct again the value between the buyer and the buyer's son who inherited it, distinct again to the value at a lawn sale, distinct again to the value at a swap meet, distinct again to the value at a recycling centre ...

There was no "real" or "true" value to be expropriated here, so the Marxist critique basically falls to pieces. It continues to be attractive because it makes sense to people who are unaware of more modern economics, because it predicts cyclical behaviour in capitalist economies and because it finishes with some hand-wavy eschatological futurism that sounds really pleasant.

This is just looking all the other problems of the USSR and only focusing on those that can easly be reasoned away by tweaking socialist theory. However there are many other very real problems that are pushed under the table and with clames like "they were underdevloped". While its true, the problem of the USSR was not that they could not get the technology to do things, they did not have a resource problem, nor was it a laber problem. They had a problem of ORGANISATION and INSENTIVES and for those you do not need a head start.

Most of these arguments where developed by people who were disappointed in the soviet union (because it took exactly the course critices had said it would) and made up arguments.

The USSR could have traded with others, there is nothing that says a country can not be internally socialistic and externally trade with capitalists. Thats exactly how some market anarchist schemes work.

>The USSR could have traded with others, there is nothing that says a country can not be internally socialistic and externally trade with capitalists. Thats exactly how some market anarchist schemes work.

In some ideal world yes. In the real world, other countries (well, they ruling classes) wanted to see its demise, not trade with it, for it gave their people the wrong ideas...

I think threw most of its history the USSR did export some stuff. Also Im pretty sure that it was the USSR that did not want to trade, not the capitalist nations.

Also the USSR influnced almost half of the world, the extend of the market is easly big enougth. Its not like the USSR was Hong Kong or Cuba.

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