Anark does (in my view) a well-cited and very polite refutation of Socialism4All’s response to one of his off-the-cuff videos, and a vastly more polite response to BadEmpanada than he deserves.

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    There are too many to be worth time fully recounting but his entire premise is using Marx’s descriptions of some qualities of capitalism as making a society either simply capitalist or not. This is the exact antithesis of what Marx is doing in defining or highlighting those terms and phenomena and not at all in line with what he was doing, e.g. saying, “you’re only abolishing capitalism if all these things are gone!” It just makes no sense at all if you have actually read Capital, and I am confident Anark is either lying about having done so or is intentionally misleading.

    Let’s take alienation from the commodities one produces. Would you like to tell me where Marx says, “under socialism this will just be gone”? Marx is actually describing his conception of the development of capitalism from precursor relations and how its dominance appears, hidden in society. There is absolutely nothing in it that says, “every aspect of capitalist society will go away once we have a real socialist revolution”. That is actually the exact opposite of what Marx predicts, which is that the working class will simply take the society they have and begin it’s transformation in their interests, oppressing the bourgeoisie in the process. And the full culmination of the working class being the final oppressing class will be communism, achieved via an extended struggle within a worker-run society. He describes capitalism as developing over hundreds of years to do similar things, albeit while maintaining class conflict with an exploiter class above (unlike the dictatorship of the proletariat concept).

    I don’t even remember exactly what Anark says about alienation from the product of one’s labor but it’s such a commonly misunderstood idea that I would bet that is also deeply flawed. Just mentioning this because it’s my specific example, but the point I am making is about the larger idea exemplified in it.