Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013)

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist

by zhte415 • 11 years ago

129 136 11 years ago

theguardian.com

unicornporn4• 11 years ago

This made me think of a reddit comment[1] about an article I read recently.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...

dandare2• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

(Spoiler: I am from the former communist block.)

EDIT: (I hope you don't mind if I reply to everyone here in my original comment.)

Philosophizing on what Marx meant by what he said is lot like Bible-reading study. It is nice to speculate on what God meant when he said "You must kill those who worship another god [Exodus 22:20]" but it is more important to know how those killing in His name understood it. In our context, one look at Syriza's economic programme should end all discussions on what Marx really meant with the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Raising wages, employing more people in the state sector, subventions, subsidies, free healthcare and education along with stiffening the labour market, nationalisation of industries and raising taxes up to 75%. That all obviously sponsored by new loans once they successfully ditch their current debt.

That brings us bak to my original point: there is not a single example of successful Marxist economy, regardless of what part of the Marxist wish-thinking you embrace.

masklinn2• 11 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar... is probably a good start.

hurin2• 11 years ago

Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary, his ideas laid the basis for the later historical movements - but they shouldn't be conflated with them, of course the actual historical events are much stronger in cultural memory.

As for prosperity: I think quality of life is significantly worse now (25 years later) in all post-soviet bloc countries outside the EU. Although yes, planned economies are very stifling towards innovation and individual enterprise and apparently cannot compete very well with capitalist economies.

pfortuny• 11 years ago

I do not have real data but I guess (and I am being too candid here, this being HN) that those where quality of life is significantly worse have not got a good stance on the importance of the rule of law (i.e. they are mostly dictatorships in disguise, like Russia).

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

So there is no example of Marxism working.

pinaceae• 11 years ago

"outside the EU" which rules out the majority of Eastern Europe. nice slight of hand. Those countries had developed economies and education systems to begin with.

This leaves countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyztan and similars who are barely industrialized yet alone modern. The Soviet empire was all but a thin veil of progress over a third world expanse. This includes Russia, outside of a few metro areas it is as if time stood still.

dragonwriter7• 11 years ago

Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary,

Marx was very much a political activist (if not a revolutionary in the violent sense), and pretending he wasn't isn't particularly helpful.

Of course, its also not helpful to conflate his political activism with that (including the violent revolutionary aspects) of Leninists and others who sought to use association with Marx's name to sell radically different programs which even rejected the basic required preconditions of Marx's proposed program, even where they adopted some of Marx's language about the basic struggle and desired end state.

superflit• 11 years ago

Because a lie repeated 100's time MAY be believed as truth. (former socialist country too and fed with all this new socialism)

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

Probably because humans don't like to sacrifice that much for others, and such a system could never work on humans without total control of those within the system - which is a democracy destroyer and also doesn't work because pesky humans tend to love their freedoms quite a bit, too.

vidarh6• 11 years ago

I find this argument odd. Marx did not argue for most people to sacrifice. On the contrary: He argued for the majority to recognise that the minority would not willingly lift them up, and instead to rise up and take their share.

If you don't believe humans are willing to "sacrifice that much" for others, capitalism would not survive: The vast majority willingly accept that there are people with vast amounts of more wealth than them.

drapper• 11 years ago

I think most common way of thinking about Marx' work today is that he was often right in describing what's wrong with the capitalism, but he was mostly wrong at the solutions.

Marx' apologists point out, not without a reason, that one of the problems with the attempts of bringing his theories to life is that those attempts were done in countries not well suited to do it. Marxism, according to Marx, was supposed to be another step in the evolution of capitalism, yet it was tried in countries that didn't yet have any capitalism or had it in some very immature form, e.g. in post-tzar, soviet Russia.

On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself and that didn't happen either.

jcrei• 11 years ago

"On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself and that didn't happen either" yet...

felipeerias2• 11 years ago

One issue with the more traditional marxist point of view is that it tends to treat "capitalism" as a permanent, monolithic entity. The capitalism that Marx observed in places like Manchester in the XIX century effectively fell a long time ago, along with the British empire and the steam machine. If one wants to translate Marx's principles to the modern world, a very critical eye is needed. I believe that is what Varoufakis is trying to do here.

dragonwriter7• 11 years ago

Marx' apologists point out, not without a reason, that one of the problems with the attempts of bringing his theories to life is that those attempts were done in countries not well suited to do it.

Or, more to the point, that an entirely different theory was created (Leninist vanguardism), associated itself with Marxism ("Marxism-Leninism") despite the fact that it rejected the basic foundation of Marxism, and that most of the criticism of "Marx's" solutions that is done focusses on criticism of the actions of Leninist vanguardism and further developments of that theory, which not only isn't applied in the situation to Marx's solutions expressly apply, but also aren't Marx's solutions.

On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself

The 19th Century system Marx was criticizing as "Capitalism" largely has been replaced with a very different one, the modern mixed economy (which often gets called capitalism, but isn't the system Marx criticized) distinguished from capitalism in a number of ways, some of which come straight out of the Communist Manifesto (centralization of control of credit through central banks, universal public education, significant progressive taxation on income.)

If the Communist Revolution is looked at as something more like the Industrial Revolution than, say, the French Revolution, one could argue that something not altogether unlike it has been going on since the time of Marx, and that all the places that treated "Marxism-Leninism" as a state religion just distract from it.

spain• 11 years ago

China?

peterfirefly5• 11 years ago

The Communist Party of China is not exactly Communist anymore, is it?

China could have had its current prosperity (and more) much earlier if not for the Communists :(

dandare2• 11 years ago

not sure if trolling....

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/apr/23/ch...

unicornporn4• 11 years ago

It's definitely capitalist. It's sometimes referred to as "capitalism with asian values" or more correctly "authoritarian capitalism". It's happening right now and it's sadly more effective than western liberal capitalism.

felipeerias2• 11 years ago

The problem with Marx is that he usually provides insightful diagnostics but lousy solutions. As Varoufakis says, social-democracy was very influenced by a subset of Marx's ideas. There have been plenty of prosperous social-democratic countries.

RodericDay3• 11 years ago

Of the tens of thousands of pages and approximately 50 volumes of collected works of Marx, at most 5 pages spell out what socialist society should or ought to look like.

http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...

tormeh4• 11 years ago

All those northern European social democratic parties started out as parties devoted to bringing about communism through democratic means. The countries governed by those have done pretty well.

peterfirefly5• 11 years ago

They were kept in check by the other parties -- and the smartest of the smartest amongst the Social Democrats understood that the state didn't actually work and that they needed a free private sector to tax so they could afford to buy votes.

(The Scandinavian countries have more economic freedom in their private sectors than almost all the rest of the world, including the US. That's why they can, sorta, kinda, afford those bloated States and all that Socialism. Plus Norway has the oil, of course.)

kryptiskt• 11 years ago

They were never utopic, so communism wasn't on the agenda. They wanted socialism to varying degrees.

vidarh6• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor ever was - a single country built on Marxist principles?

The answer was quite simply stated by Marx as early as 1845, in The German Ideology, chapter one, part A [1], section 5:

"And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced"

"This development of productive forces" refers to the development of advanced capitalism, which Marx saw as an essential precondition for a successful socialist revolution.

This key principle was something Marx was clear on through his entire life, and many socialist movements stuck to it. In Russia it was one of several aspects that triggered the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - Lenin was not willing to wait. And so the Bolsheviks carried out their little coup d'etat: The October "revolution" was not a popular uprising against the old regime, but a coup against the socialist government elected after the old regime had collapsed in the spring.

Marx advocated popular revolutions in developed capitalism countries. Instead you had a series of civil wars, coup d'etats, and the occasional misguided revolution, in undeveloped, mostly agrarian and feudal or near-feudal countries.

Doomed to failure from day one according to Marxist principles.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideo...

jerf3• 11 years ago

But why should I care about that analysis in the slightest? From whence does Marx's authority to pontificate about the "proper" way to transition to communism come from? Did he have some sort of extensive experience with the process such that he could identify the differences between the successful efforts and the failed ones? Had he tested it multiple times and learned which ones worked and which did not? Did he successfully create Psychohistory, prove its efficaciousness in a wide variety of circumstances, and then derive from this successful model the optimal governmental organization and path to get there, a 19th century Hari Seldon?

Or was he frankly just the 19th century equivalent of an Internet commenter pontificating? Because goodness knows that anybody that seems to actually listen to him experiences just about the results I'd expect from trying to organize your life around a random Internet commenter's blatherings. (Said the random Internet commenter. To which I'd say, look to history and tell me that my summary is wrong.)

In mathematical terms, it is meaningless to use one impossible statement to prove another one true. If the "proper" way to transition to a communist society is itself humanly impossible with real-world humans, is itself already a flight of fancy, then it completely doesn't matter where that flight of fancy is supposed to land. You're never going to experience the problem that my flying unicorn that I promised would land you in London instead landed you in Tokyo, because you've got a more fundamental problem in front of that one.

grey-area• 11 years ago

That brings us bak to my original point: there is not a single example of successful Marxist economy, regardless of what part of the Marxist wish-thinking you embrace.

There is also no example of a successful free market economy, because no such thing exists.

The abstract concepts of socialism and capitalism tend to be polluted very quickly by the humans who inhabit and implement these systems. This means both types of system collapse without regulation - in the west these regulations are an extensive set of laws against monopolies, manipulating markets, insider information etc. and yet we still see regular very destructive whole-market crashes and speculative bubbles which devastate our economies. It's just the least worst system we know.

I can see how coming from a former communist block country where Marx was treated almost as a deity along with the likes of Lenin and Stalin would give you a healthy disrespect for him. However, Marx is a useful critique of capitalist dogma, even if you don't agree with his prescriptions for a solution, or the solutions people made up in his name. When he was writing capitalism in the west was in one of its most brutal and pure states and was an obviously flawed and exploitative system with little hope of improvement in life for the majority - as recorded by Engels for example at around the same time [1]. So don't mistake those who take his critique of capitalism seriously (like Varoufakis) for those who embrace every aspect of his thought or would support leninism or stalinism.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17306/17306-h/17306-h.htm

aaronchall• 11 years ago

"There is also no example of a successful free market economy, because no such thing exists."

That's like saying there's no such thing as a blue sky or green grass because the whole thing isn't #0000FF or #008000.

pbhjpbhj3• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? //

I think it relies on people being supporters of the ideal and not being greedy. You can't impose it on people.

In contrast in a capitalist system the capitalists can prosper from the communists desire not to exploit their fellow men; whilst in a communist system those who want to satisfy their own greed at the expense of others tear the system apart.

Those who act contrary to capitalist ideals actually help to maintain it - run a food bank, run a homeless charity and you're helping to dissolve hostility to the system that forces people in to situations where such things are necessary. Personal charity maintains the system in which those who don't exercise charity can prosper and more readily exploit others to that end.

Thoughts?

emiliobumachar2• 11 years ago

I don't think giving money to the poor is "contrary to capitalist ideals" if it's voluntary.

Htsthbjig• 11 years ago

"In contrast in a capitalist system the capitalists can prosper from the communists desire not to exploit their fellow men"

Why do you give Intellectual or personal superiority to communist?

Part of my family comes from a former communist country. The were slaves of a communist elite that of course wanted to exploit fellow men on a level that a person living on a Western society could not understand(like rapist and murderers controlling the police).

Some of them(people at the party) could barely read and write, let alone sum and substract. Chosen incompetents because they served the party better. Thinking on your own was a bad habit there.

Personal charity does not make you communist or contrary to capitalism. Communist forces OTHERS to work for free for the community(and specially for those who control the community).

Zigurd• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles?

China. China's leaders claim to be Marxists. If they are not Marxists, neither have they accepted Western liberal capitalism as the End of History. China still has a planned economy. So... What is China?

dragonwriter7• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles?

Other than the mixed economies of the modern West, whose changes from the 19th Century capitalism Marx critiqued are almost all in the direction Marx advocated, for pretty much the reasons Marx advocated, and often directly as a result of actions by Marxists and other socialists?

Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

Its possible, but the rich mixed economies of the modern West are the closest thing (to be sure, they have important differences) to an implementation of Marx's theories that has occurred, so their relative success isn't really an indication of Marx being wrong.

asgard1024• 11 years ago

Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

It is possible. But let's not jump to conclusions. There wasn't any prosperous democratic country in Europe before cca 1600 either.

There are some smaller experiments. Things like Mondragon Cooperative or Kibutzes. These don't end too badly. It is even being claimed that they have higher productivity. They probably also exhibit lower outward growth, which tends to be bad when they compete with capitalist economies. Just like democratic societies tend to project less military force compared to dictatorships (because it doesn't help the general public, only the elites on top), these "marxist" economies also don't grow (compete in the market) very aggressively, to their disadvantage. But for the workers (I mean people doing stuff, majority of people and the ones that actually deserve to be paid) it may well be a better system, just like democracy is better than dictatorship.

ilaksh• 11 years ago

We should learn from history. Marx didnt have alll of the answers. The problem to solve is how to get diversity and freedom with integration and efficiency at the same time. I think the trick to this starts with a contemprary all-encompassing knowledge management system. Contemporary in that, for example, it is not tied to hierarchical ontologies, which we may need to upgrade knowledgment to avoid that.

jkot6• 11 years ago

As someone from post-soviet country I find this bit offensive. Something like 'how I become erratic Nacist' and bunch of hogwash how modern nacism can learn from mistakes of the past.

But do not be mistaken, this guy is not stupid and probably can negotiate better deal for Greece.

jwdunne3• 11 years ago

Please don't confuse Marx's theories with Marxism-Leninism. The latter is more like state capitalism, i.e like most 'communist' countries we have seen. If you actually read what communism, socialism and marxism are about, you'll find that they are a far cry from the ideology of the soviet union (as defined by their actions). For one, a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism but clearly did not feature in Soviet states. It was a distortion by Stalin, I believe, since it's also called Stalinism.

It does seem, however, mob mentality (think the effect Hitler's speeches had, despite such insane content) combined with a dictatorship of the proletariat creates the perfect open field for totalitarianism to take hold, where even further power is taken from the working class. The fact it also creates a scapegoat in the capitalist, wealthy class is even worse.

Kiro• 11 years ago

a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism

What does this mean? It sounds like you're trying to emphasize it as something good but I can't see how anything with the word dictatorship in it can be that.

jkot6• 11 years ago

No true Scotsmen fallacy.

I read Capital and some other bugs. Problem is that Marxism defined as 'class struggle' is essentially hate movement, they are defined by their enemy. Once they come to power and the 'class struggle' is solved, it does not have any more solutions. So it needs 'constant revolution'.

For one, a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism but clearly did not feature in Soviet states.

It did. But 'working class' was defined as factory workers, but 90% of people were working in agriculture. Marxist solution was to convert everyone into factory worker and kill rest.

It was a distortion by Stalin, I believe, since it's also called Stalinism.

Stalin was not distortion, there were other leaders similar to him, who would take his place if we would not exist. Also other countries followed similar fate (China, North Korea...)

tomp• 11 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism, not Marxism (like the problem with Hitler wasn't nationalistic politics in general, but Nazism in particular)?

anentropic• 11 years ago

though people argue that even if you make the distinction, one thing tends to lead toward the other

jevgeni5• 11 years ago

There were a lot of problems with the USSR. If we look at it only from an economic point of view, then it failed because planned economy is broken by design.

dragonwriter7• 11 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism, not Marxism

"Communism" was the name of the system Marx advocated (the title of his work with Engels is The Communist Manifesto.)

Now, Soviet Communism is distinct from Marx's Communism in that it is based in Leninist vanguardism, which still calls itself Marxist, but radically departs from Marxism in a number of ways, both in terms of understood preconditions and program, in order to address the fact that Russia was not an developed capitalist society of the type Marx's theory was based in.

MisterWebz• 11 years ago

From the article, if you took the time to read it.

This determination to have the complete, closed story, or model, the final word, is something I cannot forgive Marx for. It proved, after all, responsible for a great deal of error and, more significantly, authoritarianism. Errors and authoritarianism that are largely responsible for the left’s current impotence as a force of good and as a check on the abuses of reason and liberty that the neoliberal crew are overseeing today.

hownottowrite• 11 years ago

"The sense of self-satisfaction from being feted by the high and mighty did begin, on occasion, to creep up on me. And what a non-radical, ugly, corruptive and corrosive sense it was.

My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement."

Unfortunate that the most important thought was buried at the bottom.

tormeh4• 11 years ago

"Academic research has found that people’s susceptibility to flattery is without limit and beyond satire. In a study published in 1997, B.J. Fogg and Clifford Nass of Stanford University invited people to play a guessing game with a computer, which gave them various types of feedback as they played. Participants who received praise rated both the computer and themselves more highly than those who did not—even those who had been warned beforehand that the machine would compliment them regardless of how well they were doing. Yes, even blatantly insincere, computer-generated flattery works."

From: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being-good-n...

And thus the winners of the system justify our inequality.

atopal• 11 years ago

Since that study is never properly referenced, here you go:

B.J. Fogg & C. Nass (1997) Silicon Sycophants: The Effects of Computers that Flatter. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46(5), pp 551–561.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581996...

And yes, that 10 page paper costs $36. Thank you, Elsevier.

jerf3• 11 years ago

Incidentally, this goes a long way towards explaining Marx's popularity. His philosophy flatters certain people, especially intellectuals, and tells them what they want to hear. For this, much can apparently be forgiven, even such minor details as "total nonfuctionality of the rest of his theories" and "hundreds of millions of corpses". Such minor trifling details are not important next to the fact that he says what many of us deeply, profoundly want to hear.

And so the eternal and ever-desperate efforts by intellectuals to figure out how to separate the things they want to hear from the bits of the theory that are wrong. But, alas, I'm pretty sure they're inseparable.

mc323• 11 years ago

How does this explain what is crudely called "biting the hand that feeds you"?

Despite what this says, there are those who are strictly, to a great fault, at times, principled. And this principle can overcome the problem of flattery.

This is the kind of thing which tends to bite some people at work. Pointing out the warts, short -sightedness, despite the promise of a steady job, some managers can see this as threatening, rather than an awakening. Not everyone caves in to the siren call...

kybernetyk• 11 years ago

how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi

Well a first class ticket costs far more than the economy class and offers more perks. So actually he was entitled to walk past them because he purchased that privilege. And he was able do so even though he wasn't born into aristocracy/nobility.

tormeh4• 11 years ago

He knows it was paid for. He either questions whether the money was rightly apportioned to him and his flight or he questions whether money should be able to buy that privilege. See also Sveme's comment.

sveme• 11 years ago

His point was rather how easy it is for yourself to betray your convictions of people's equality, simply by someone gifting you a first-class plane ticket.

adaml_623• 11 years ago

I approve of people who can list their failings out loud and aren't ashamed of them. With this comment he's asking everyone to remind him that he needs to keep his feet on the ground and his focus on real people. And he's simultaneously telling us that our world is being shaped by 'entitled' people deciding what is best for the rest of us.

spikels3• 11 years ago

I find this hilarious! Despite his epiphany in the airport line he seems to have no problem deciding the economic fate of not only his entire nation but much of Europe. Now that's a false sense on entitlement!

pavlov• 11 years ago

He's a cabinet member of a democratically elected government. It's not a false sense of entitlement when the people of Greece have actually entitled him to carry out the program that Syriza promised.

mc323• 11 years ago

I'm not sure we can do much about this. Other than through indoctrination. It's human nature. Your local public system asking for donations in return for tickets to some high minded event tug at this vanity.

Never the less, there are good cases for prioritization. Say at a hospital the most critics but with the best chance for survival are prioritized.

And ideology will not get rid of this. If it's not directed by money it gets directed by class or position or favoritism.

So in this case I dont think the solution is to eradicate the behavior, but rather make it more accessible and less tied to a particular privilege.

return0• 11 years ago

As someone who voted for his party (mostly for anti-corruption reasons), i think he was the worst choice for finance minister. I never understood what his (so called modest) proposal was in any way since it was always hidden in a nebulous universe of words that in the end amounted to nothing substantial. This article is equally vague. I know he 's a media darling, but he 's too narcissistic and argumentative to be taken seriously.

rjsw• 11 years ago

Seen from the outside, he seems an ideal person to me to be the finance minister. The issue is whether Greece can get a bit of runway to let it deal with the corruption problems or whether it should just be confined to the modern equivalent of the workhouse.

alvarosm2• 11 years ago

So he wants to be a Marxist but he can't reconcile that with the economic facts he's learned, because Marxism is completely wrong. Too bad. We don't need to read his painful and boring rant.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

Marxism is pretty spot on as theory of development of capitalism.

mikeyouse2• 11 years ago

What's the phrase?

Something like, "Marx was completely right about capitalism and completely wrong about communism."

Interesting thought experiment at least.

aminok4• 11 years ago

Marxism holds that the capital owner commits "wage theft" against the employee everytime he profits. It's sophomoric, flawed logic for edgy teens.

jevgeni5• 11 years ago

The most deliciously ironic thing is that the main Marx's grief with capitalism - the fact that the workers didn't own the means of production (or "capital") - was rectified exactly by the modern financial capitalism today's left love to bash.

If you take a look at blue chip companies (and I bet a lot of midcaps as well) a huge amount of their shares, often way over 50%, is owned by their employees. This fact doesn't necessarily help sell Che Guevara t-shirts or help your populist party win elections, though.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

How many of those are voting shares tho?

jevgeni5• 11 years ago

Usually most of them are common (i.e. voting shares). What has a potential to get exploited isn't the fact that people can't cast their vote, but that:

- they can't (or don't care to) coordinate themselves

- don't have the necessary expert knowledge to understand the impact of a lot of motions proposed to the general assembly.

However, this isn't a capitalism problem, but a general power structure problem, applicable to any institution, be that capitalist or socialist.

karmacondon• 11 years ago

This is only kind of true. Much of the > 50% of shares that are owned by employees are owned by executives and former executives. Think about how equity is distributed at any startup. The average "worker" still doesn't own the means of production or capital. Definitely not by Marx's definition of ownership, and not by the common usage of the term in our day either.

Points for political snark, though.

jevgeni5• 11 years ago

I think this is dependent on the age of the company. Last one I've looked at was SocGen - an old French bank. 90% of their shares are owned by employees and I think somewhere around 7% by executives.

I can easily imagine that a just IPO'ed company would have a vastly different shareholder structure, though.

pjc503• 11 years ago

Marx really needs an intellectual salvage operation to rescue the sound observations from the ruins of Marxism. His works highlight a number of structural problems. In terms of solutions it's been a disaster, but the failure of a solution does not mean the problem goes away.

For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_... : includes observations on the effect of labour-saving innovation. This keeps coming up again and again here in the context of e.g. self-driving cars.

See also this line from the middle of the article: "Both [communists and social democrats], in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals."

jerf3• 11 years ago

"His works highlight a number of structural problems."

But that's not very valuable. "Identifying problems" is easy. Step outside and point at something; you're probably pointing at a problem of some sort.

And we humans seem to be very susceptible to the argument

    1. I see a problem over there.
    2. I propose this solution.
    3. My solution must be correct because I identified the problem.

(If you have a hard time believing that, because it is so obviously fallacious when spelled out, start looking for it in political discussions. It is unbelievably rampant, so much so that it is almost invisible because it is simply everywhere. As a bonus #4, "If you don't agree with my solution, you must not care about the problem and you are therefore a bad person." Also unbelievably rampant.)

We are not so hard pressed for the identification of problems that we need to go looking at the writings of someone from over a hundred years ago with a terrible track record of his ideas being implemented. We just need to use our eyes for a minute or two.

Solutions, now, those are hard. Based on how history has gone I do not see Marx having much to offer us there.

"instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice,"

Well, of course they did. The reason why Marxism always decays into tyranny is that it intrinsically requires liberal applications of force to even appear to work, because it does not match how people function naturally. Free societies don't look Marxist. Rational societies won't look Marxist. (Rational societies would probably be incomprehensibly strange to us, honestly, and won't fit into any of our preconceived notions. By no means should this be interpreted as even remotely a claim that our current society is rational.... ha! No. Also I appreciate the distinction between "free" and "rational".) Even if they solve the "problems" that Marx identified, it won't be with his answers.

pjc503• 11 years ago

I don't see so much of #3, but #4 is certainly rife, along with "I don't accept any of the solutions so the problem must not exist" (qv global warming).

The main reason for doing this would be to get good workable solution ideas into and out of the left in the 21st century. Greece is in a state of uneven collapse and there is a strong need to do something to improve its situation from that of debt-austerity. Varoufakis is one of the men on the spot trying to find something that can actually be delivered with a good chance of working. There are plenty of other places in the developed world where people are experiencing deteriorating standards of living and lacking the political capability to improve them. (Another idea worth incorporating is Sen's "capability", which is freedom to do a thing plus the economic ability to do it).

One should not overlook the amount of force deployed in the name of making capitalism work either.

gadders• 11 years ago

I believe it was Margaret Thatcher that said "The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Yanis should feel right at home in Greece, seeing as essentially they have run out of money from Germany.

aminok4• 11 years ago

Edgy teens love people who rail against logic, conventional wisdom and the established way of doing things, so Yanis should have a lot of fans in the West, just as Chavez did, just before he set Venezuela on a course for economic ruin, and doomed millions of its people to years of lost opportunity and economic chaos.

RodericDay3• 11 years ago

I'm going to reproduce a an r/philosophy reply, since I think it fits well

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http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...

I'm a doctoral student in philosophy, who focuses on Marx and Marxism. It's the only subject I feel confident speaking on with some degree of authority. I do want to point out that those who see this article as starting from an erroneous point of view are correct. There's several clarifications that should be made if one is going to understand Marx (and I emphasize understand, not support – not that supporting Marx’s work is good/bad in and of itself).

First: The constant idea that Marx can be tied to the dungeon regimes of the 20th century is untenable. Of the tens of thousands of pages and approximately 50 volumes of collected works of Marx, at most 5 pages spell out what socialist society should or ought to look like. There's many reasons why Marx thought a discussion of what a future society should look like is a dubious endeavor. To summarize them curtly, imagine an ancient Athenian trying to envision wall street, it’s very dubious they could. The material and social conditions they are in limit and structure the thoughts they can have, ipso facto to envision a blue print for socialism is rather futile. Within those 5 pages though, none of them say anything about death camps, non-democratic institutions, cults of personality, or STATE based economies as the ultimate goal of society. They consistently advocate for the full development and realization of the best aspect of our capacities and nature (e.g., ‘the freedom and development of each is contingent upon the freedom and development of all’). Now one could ask what about the famous quote "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is important to note that in the mid 19th century context dictatorship did not mean exactly what it means today. It meant who has power in the state. So Marx would say we presently live in the dictatorship of the capitalist class (even if the state is prima facie democratic, that class has monopoly power of the state – I don’t think this point is contested by anyone that follows campaign donations and its connection to voting patterns by representatives). Marx wanted the workers to have power over the state, but in a democratic fashion (hence his praise of the paris commune). When asked what does dictatorship of the proletariat mean, Marx and Engels responded, look at the Paris commune, that is what we mean (Marx later went to affirm that it also meant equal voting rights for all races and genders). I say all this to indicate that Marx is a critical philosopher of capitalism; he is not a philosopher of socialism. And the few things he did write on socialism are anathema to anything tantamount to the USSR, Pol Pot, Mao's China, etc.

Second: Socialism is NOT - according to Marx - state based regulation and social programs. This is a common misconception. People argue that social security and Medicare are SOCIALIST (or that the USSR was socialist), they are in fact SOCIAL programs in a CAPITALIST society. Their existence is predicated upon revenues and taxes of people employed in a capitalist social relation. Socialism, according to Marx (and many other 19th century and early 20th century theorists) is workers ownership of the means of production. That means the same people that work in the workplace, own it democratically. So, McDonalds for instance would not be run by a board of directors that is divorced from the day to day management and running of the store. Instead the same people that work there, democratically run the workplace (read Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work for a good defense of why this system is both viable and just – there are hundreds of successful institutions like this, Wikipedia Mondragon if you’re interested). Democracy prevents monopoly ownership of the means of production. Part of the reason Marx does not thing welfare liberalism (e.g., a capitalist society with strong social programs) is viable in the long-term is due to various contradictions and negative tendencies in capitalism. If value is created in production, and surplus value must be created and reproduced in the capitalist system to fuel its growth and development, then it follows that taxes and welfare programs are a leech on that value. What is good for capitalism in the long term (i.e., maximum surplus value) is bad for the working class, what is good for the working class (share of surplus value going back to them in higher wages or better social programs) is bad for capitalism in the long term. This seems rather obvious now; the system is prone for local and large scale crises. It's also important to note that this definition of socialism, that Marx used, is antithetical to the state-capitalist (socialist in name only) regimes of Stalin, Mao, etc. Those were non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, where the workplace was run by bureaucrats and non-democratically elected state officials. Thus not socialist, and not indicative of the possible failure/success of socialism.

Third, and finally: the comments on human behavior are rather confused. If one looked at a slave society we could make all kinds of ‘natural human behavior claims’ (notice the author says its human behavior to watch TV – tell that to a hunter gatherer) that are now obviously false. E.g., it’s just human behavior to shackle people; it’s just human behavior/nature that X race is illiterate, dumb, feckless, etc. It’s just human behavior for one race/class/gender to be subservient, and for one race/class/gender to be dominant and hold leadership traits. What needs to be pointed out is that certain institutions and social relations bring out the good and bad in human behavior. They stunt, inhibit, or foster, our capacities. Some institutions and relations make us better, some make us worse. So it’s foolish to read off from a particular society with all its unique and historical nuance, timeless truths about human behavior. Are twenty-first century Americans addicted to their property and possessive? Yes. Were ancient Greeks polytheistic believing the gods were tantamount to humans?Yes. Were X race of people in a position of servitude by Y oppressors? Yes. Does that mean these are timeless traits of all humans at all times? That's a rather impossible claim to be certain of. And in many instances demonstrably false (e.g., basically every race based claim in human history by oppressors is later shown to be false). According to Marx and Engels, we should foster and develop institutions and relations that express what's best in us, but if we maintain the mindset that we already know everything there is to know about human behavior and nature, and all future projects at amending and improving such things are futile, we are supporting an impossible to defend position (as philosophers and rational thinkers that's no good). Marx knew this very well. Hence why he ends Volume III of capital with the claim:

“In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”

Overall this is a rather bad article. If one wants to understand Marx, just read Marx. Even if you don’t agree with him, and don’t want to support his ideas, the only way to be sure of what he said is to read him yourself. It’s only fair – and actually quite liberal and open minded – if one is going to live in a capitalist society to read its best proponents, and also its best critics. Marx is the latter.

unicornporn4• 11 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067911

RodericDay3• 11 years ago

You should reproduce the text in the body, and I'll delete mine. It's way too unassuming as it is, I didn't even think of clicking on it!

dragandj• 11 years ago

As someone that was born in an ex-communist/socialist/whatever "no true marxist" state that had a system in which workers' assemblies owned and managed (large) state companies, but who (luckily) never had to read Marx, i might just ask this:

Set aside the rosy situations where the workers share the surplus, what happens when workers collectively squander and fk up the means of production? Because, in reality, that is exactly what happened.

aminok4• 11 years ago

Greece is doomed with pontificating populists like Varoufakis, who are ever eager to take the path of least resistance and pin the blame on an unpopular minority, leading the government.

skilesare• 11 years ago

This article has some great stuff in it. I've been putting together some answers to some of these questions and it is currently very 'amateurish'. My economic training doesn't go much past Micro and Macro Undergrad courses and I'm to the point where I need some professional direction.

There are probably some economics PHDs floating around this thread, and if you like talking about this stuff and would be willing to critique the stuff I've put together, ping me @afat.

tjradcliffe• 11 years ago

His analysis points to the fundamental flaw in Marxism while not just ignoring but praising it: it rests on the notion that "binary oppositions" completely dominate world history and social dynamics. Class struggle, class opposition, is what defines left-wing thinking.

He's not wrong that Marx relied on manufacturing a sense of "binary oppositions" to drive his cartoon of history, but while such a story is great for creating drama it does a demonstrably, repeated, empirically terrible job as a way of either understanding history or changing the world, unless by "changing the world" you mean "changing the world into one vast prison camp".

It is far too easy to pass from benign academic twaddle about "binary oppositions" to "us vs them" to "you're either with us or against us... and we get to say which you are, not you." Marxism is made for the power-mad, precisely because of this obsession with the "binary oppositions" Varoufakis is so enamoured of.

The insistence that "binary oppositions" dominate history does strongly inform the labour theory of value, but the analysis is transparently false. Labour is special because human beings have a special place in any political economy, simply because there wouldn't be one without us. But the "binary opposition" he sees as being unique to labour is nonsense, and this would be obvious if the role of "binary oppositions" in his theory didn't serve as a major distraction to analysis.

Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

This is precisely the "binary opposition" that Varoufakis touts as being unique to labour. It is nothing of the kind. It was nothing of the kind in the days when a lump of coal could be used to heat a pauper's hut or fire a steel mill. All economic inputs have both an unquantifiable-in-advance value-creating capacity and a market value.

Humans are fascinated by conflict. Present us with a conflict and it will grab our limited attention, leaving very little over to ask, "Hey, all this sound and fury is kind of signifying nothing."

This is the most important role of "binary oppositions" in Marxism (and its bastard step-child, post-modernist literary analysis.) It uses this simple flaw in our attentional structure to allow people to smuggle claims that would otherwise be obviously false right under our noses.

Do capital and labour have somewhat different interests? Sure. Do they have many interests that are also shared, based on their common nature of human beings? Absolutely. This is not a binary opposition. This is an argument for a democratic clearing house where differences are aired and decisions made. There needs to be eternal vigilance that one side or the other (mostly the other) doesn't gain undue influence in such a place, but the false belief that the world is dominated by black-and-white "binary oppositions" is completely unhelpful in this enterprise. It sheds no light on our legitimate differences, and trying to fix things up later on by talking about "intersectionality" is a poor patch on a broken analysis.

We are not a set of 1's and 0's in binary opposition to each other, some with the bit flipped to "labour", some to "capital". We are human beings, full of contradictions far more complex and diverse than this ridiculous scientistic reductionism can possibly encompass.

AnimalMuppet3• 11 years ago

Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

In fact, that's true of everything in a market economy. Everything I buy has more value to me than its market price (otherwise I wouldn't buy it).

Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013)

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