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Old 02.16.2012, 08:18 AM   #64
jonathan
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I am happy to see a thread like this when I pop back in for a visit. Makes me happy, so thank you "symbols" for making something interesting. I am also happy that the last two pages of this thread constitute fluff and I don't actually have to read them.

By and large, I consider myself to be Marxist (or Marxian): somewhere in between. I feel like I have some authority to answer this, but it is like Glice said, there isn't going to be a stock Marxist answer for this and so I think if I'm going to take a stab at this, I need to lmake some things clear.

Marxism is NOT TELELOLOGICAL. Marx (the man) made a point of not speculating too heavily on the intricacies of a utopian society. He does lay out ten or so short term demands, and I think if you have a look they're pretty difficult to disagree with. The reason for this is because he is attempting a practical philosophy of materialism relying exclusively on historical evolution, which essentially means you take whatever the situation and try to make it into something better. So my understanding of Marx puts secondary the idea of a utopian society and instead is used precisely as a critical tool. At the same time, it is important to have a general idea in mind of what exactly you are trying to shape from the mess we inherent from history. Thus...

I think a great counterpart to any Marxist analysis is this article here: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html. It is by Marshall Sahlins, an economic anthropologist. I have to admit, I haven't read the article I just posted, but I did read it as the first chapter of his book "Stone-Age Economics", so maybe consult that for more info. The two may be different, not sure. This, in essence, brings in I think what RanaldoNecro so carelessly tried to articulate in his post, which is actually rather fundamental to any Marxist analysis; economic activity is culturally relative. If I remember the main thesis of Sahlin's article correctly, by limiting your material wants, it is possible to scale down the means of production toward a more egalitarian system, which (I doubt I need to tell you) is the essence of all Marxist analysis. Sahlins shows that people in hunter-gatherer cultures are able to survive and work less because their needs are relatively few. They have to eat, shit, sleep, and maybe chat for a while. So, what is by and large an assumption of modern economics that people naturally have a tendency for endless material wants which require an endless amount of satisfaction is more or less proved false by the existence of hunter-gatherer cultures and their tendencies to remain within that mode of subsistence

The problem with capitalism is that it is a self-perpetuating system, which is the same as saying that the construction of goods based exclusively on their exchange value (i.e. commodity fetishism - imbueing goods with objective value, via objectified social relations") is something that is "reified" (the process of commodity feitishizing in culture). Communism, would, by definition, reduce the exchange of goods in terms of their use-value, which would in effect undermine this process. So, actually you wouldn't necessarily have "the finest of the fine" of everything because the concept of "fineness" would be irrelevant. Everything is reduced ENTIRELY to use value, not exchange value. The question, under Communism, would be "what wipes my ass? A leaf?" and the answer being "ok then, as long as my ass gets clean."

Private property is similar in this regard. Your comment about beach front property is not actually relevant. The answer, everyone would get to use the beach if they happened to live near the beach. Under communism, there is no private property, so yeah, you can just run along on the beach and no one is going to shoot you. I think by and large, the idea that you can possess things but not own them is crucial to this. It's also important to remember that this system of organization is not ahistorical. In fact, enclosure of the commons is one of Marx's main arguments and is absolutely crucial to his analysis.

I don't advocate the return to a hunter-gatherer economy, but something I have deemed "the noble peasant", which actually mirrors I think other political economists (both capitalist and communist). I firmly believe that ALL Utopian societies are advocating more or less the same thing, which is to say a system of localized producers who can equitably exchange with other localized producers to meet the needs of all. I think people should grow their own food and make their own products and trade them with other people. The greatest freedom that can be achieved is via more self-sufficiency, so I'm also an advocate of the whole "small is beautiful" idea.

In short, I'll sum up and say that this may or may not have helped to answer your questions, but that is largely because the intricacies of a Utopian system cannot be known and so, to some degree, the answers you are seeking are unanswerable. There is, however, a HUGE CORPUS of research relating to the inefficiencies of neo-liberal economics, not to mention the myriad of tragedies which happen on a day to day basis. It is difficult to criticize what are suspiciously perfect theoretical arguments by neo-liberal economists, but it is easy to crticize their practice. As such, we should consider whether a free-market as it is currently practiced serves the total population of humans and I think it's pretty easy to say it doesn't.
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