> CB: No you wouldn't find them because they don't exist. That is not a
> Leninist or ML position. What you are announcing is a typical
> anti-communist, suburban myth.
Actually, I am residing currently in the midst of a major East-coast metropolis, although I have also lived in suburbs. But how is my place of residence relevant to the argument?
> The quotes below have been elided and
> distorted slanderously often in the manner you do it here, so as to
> make out
> Communists as unthinking religiousioses.
What's elided and distorted? I think they're pretty representative of what people like Lenin wrote, and the web site I quoted is trying to present Marxism-Leninism to the public, so I would suppose that it would try to put its best foot forward.
> Just like here. You are not being precise in your analysis of this
> language. I just pointed out to you that you drew an unwarranted
> inference
> about the quotes you adduced, that they don't say Communists say they
> are
> infallible. You reply there is such a quote. That's a superstitious
> belief
> you have about Communists. Not one based on actual quotes you have
> read, but
> on word of mouth or all the anti-Communist myths floating around in an
> America still full of hangover lies from the Cold War.
As Chris pointed out, Trotsky was pretty fond of the word. If I had more time, I'm sure I could find Lenin and others of his followers besides Trotsky using it.
The main point, though, is this: for polemical purposes, primarily, I think, a lot of followers of Marx have often boasted that their theory enabled them to have definite knowledge of future developments. In particular, they have constantly insisted that the capitalist system contains the seeds of its own destruction, in that it would generate a serious of more and more serious crises for itself, while the working class grew ever stronger and more organized, leading to a final conflict in which the working class would seize power and establish a system in which each would contribute according to his/her means and receive according to his/her needs.
If you want to claim that this is not the basic theory of Marxism and Leninism, then I can only stand with my mouth agape. If it isn't, what is?
So, if it is in fact the central claim of ML, then it has clearly been falsified by events. In the first place, Marx based this whole notion on the idea that the revolution would occur in the most advanced capitalist countries, when they developed the forces of production to the point that their further development was being hindered by capitalist anarchy and could only be carried further by a socialist form of ownership. But revolutions have not occurred in advanced capitalist systems, which have proven quite capable of containing ordinary labor movements, much less revolutionary ones. The only revolutions which have occurred have been in less advanced countries, beginning with early 20th-century Russia. ML theorists have tried their best to paper over this contradiction, but in fact, as far as I can tell, it blows the guts out of any scientific respectability Marxist "crisis theory" might have.
> In my experience, Marxists are more critical in their thinking than
> anti-Marxists. That does not imply that Marxists are perfectly
> critical,
> just comparatively more critical and materialist than anti-Marxists in
> general.
In my experience, there are critical Marxists and non-critical ones. The critical ones have long since abandoned the "crisis theory."
> Marxists have been predicting the
> "inevitable" fall of capitalism about as often as wacko Christians have
> predicted the Second Coming of Christ, despite the fact that they have
> never been able to give a convincing theoretical case that the
> capitalist system contains the famous "fatal contradictions."
>
>
> ^^^^
> CB: You comparison of "about as long" is pretty clearly way off ,
> since ,as
> we know some Christians have been making their predictions for about
> 2000
> years, and the Marxists have been making predictions for about 150
> years.
I didn't write "about as long"; I wrote "about as often." Are you having trouble reading English? Of course Christians have been around much longer than Marxists. The point is that whenever a Marxist says that "capitalism has entered its final period of fatal contradiction" and then it turns out to survive after all, the Marxist weasels out of it by cooking up a reason why what he/she said should be ignored. The type of Xian who predicts the Second Coming does the same thing when the fateful day arrives and nothing happens.
> Then there's the slight matter you overlook, that unlike the vast
> majority
> of other theories, including Chrisianity, _there have been_ Marxist
> revolutions that got up to changing 1/3 of the lands and people of
> humanity
> (!) and that only 70 years after The Manifesto.
Most of which, as in the Soviet Union and China, have gone back to capitalism. And, as I said above, these were not in the most advanced capitalist countries, which is where Marx said they would happen.
> Of course , there is a big ebb now.
"Big ebb," no shit! In fact, as far as anyone can tell who is not committed to ML dogma, capitalism will continue to rule the earth for as long as we can see into the future. As a socialist myself, I really wish that weren't true, but reality is reality. Marxism-Leninism supposes that there is some sort of secular trend toward a world-wide workers' revolution, but it seems to me that one has to be really blind to the facts to claim that such a trend is real.
OTOH, there are also the possibilities of peak oil, climate change, etc., which might well cause tremendous upheavals in the world system within another generation or so. (I doubt that I will be around to see it, but my kids probably will.) But this has nothing to do with Marxist theory -- Marx paid practically no attention to ecological matters, and assumed that the material resources for more and more production would be available forever, as far as I can see. In fact, until quite recently, Marxists tended to heap scorn on any idea of "ecological limits" -- more coal, more steel, more factories, more machines, more everything was the watchword. These days, at least the more "critical" Marxists are changing their tune somewhat, but as usual, without admitting that their great hero was wrong in the slightest.
> Think about it this way. Which would you bet on ? Capitalism will last
> foreever . Capitalism will have system ending crises within the next
> 100 or
> 150 years .
I think I answered that already.
> Actually, Marx was something of a genius, but all Marxists think of
> him as a
> human being, not superhuman. That would be an unMarxist understanding
> of
> Marx. Our attitude toward Marx is like the attitude of physicists to
> Einstein.
Then why do most Marxists refuse to admit that the bearded one ever made a mistake? Physicists have found lots of mistakes in Einstein and other prominent physicists.
The reason is that physicists are interested in testing their theories empirically, and replacing them when they don't work.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax