Second Thought - Why You Should Be A Socialist In 2024

buh [she/her] · 11 months ago

Second Thought - Why You Should Be A Socialist In 2024

quarrk [he/him] · edit-2 11 months ago

Maybe I'm just a cranky Marxist — JT's videos are great as a gateway to socialism for the most propagandized Westerners. But does anyone else pick up on an apparent socdem tendency in the explanations provided in videos like this one?

His argument for socialism boils down to moralistic criticism of unequal distribution, and pointing to socialism as a society in which all people receive a guaranteed minimum income, in other words, a more egalitarian society in terms of value received.

Is this not almost identical to the utopian arguments of the Lassalleans whom Marx criticized in his Critique of the Gotha Program?

LesbianLiberty [she/her] · 11 months ago

Well he is an explicit ML at this point, I'd chalk it up to him trying to be convincing to a larger swath of the population who aren't as well versed in this as Marxist Leninists

quarrk [he/him] · 11 months ago

Not trying to be pedantic here. The channel is great overall. But I feel we owe it to him to be critical when necessary, so that he can produce better content. And right now it’s making me cringe like when a teacher tells a white lie about how something works, due to the inconvenience of teaching it properly and accurately; forcing the student to have to un-learn it later on, or maybe never receiving the correction.

The audience of the Gotha Program was essentially the same as JT’s audience, and Marx found it important to produce a polemical critique against reformist tendencies.

We don’t necessarily want support from social democratic groups who have demonstrated fickleness in historical periods like the 1918 German revolution.

We shouldn’t water down the essential tenets of revolutionary theory when appealing to the proletarian masses. We shouldn’t focus so much on distribution, on vague “equality”, or on bourgeois electoral democracy.

These gateway videos should be honest and focus more on the necessity of a total revolution in production, the necessity of a change in our way of life, not merely reform in existing political institutions.

Choice excerpts from the Gotha critique:

What is a “fair distribution”?

Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?

What is equal right (to the social product)?

This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Over-emphasis on distribution

Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it. Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?