Edit: This question attracted way more interest than I hoped for! I will need some time to go through the comments in the next days, thanks for your efforts everyone. One thing I could grasp from the answers already - it seems to be complicated. There is no one fits all answer.
Under capitalism, it seems companies always need to grow bigger. Why can’t they just say, okay, we have 100 employees and produce a nice product for a specific market and that’s fine?
Or is this only a US megacorp thing where they need to grow to satisfy their shareholders?
Let’s ignore that most of the times the small companies get bought by the large ones.
Bro what?
Are we just supposed to believe what you’re saying? Because I have easy counter-argument. You’re out of touch with what Marx wrote and if say-so if enough proof then this statement is proven and you’re wrong. Now, unless you can actually prove this statement we can argue this point.
This literally does not change the original argument. Do you think farmers do not need an input? What disqualifies a farmer from being a small business owner?
Do you think they didn’t have food vendors in the 19th century? Do you think a tomato vendor is a 20th or 21st century concept that invalidates this supposed 19th century argument?
I guess this is another “we just have to believe you” points. Just because you don’t understand Marx’s definition of capitalism doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Why is this even a point?
I’m not 100% sure what you’re even trying to say here but if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, Marx would agree with you here.
I guess you also don’t believe logistics existed before 1863. Also your logistics argument doesn’t contradict Marx. And a fisherman owning a fishing boat would mean they own the means of production because the boat is A TOOL to catch fish. The fish don’t magically jump into the fishermans hands. They need to be caught, which requires labor and to ease that labor tools are used. Fish existing doesn’t make a fisherman a fisherman, otherwise I’d be a lumberjack simply because there’s a forest near my home.
I suggest you actually try to understand Marx before you start mindlessly criticizing something.
I understand Marx fine. He was an academic who grew up the privileged son of a lawyer, and never spent a day of his life worrying about how he was going to feed his family by working on a farm or in a factory.
His ideas about land alone being enough to be considered “means of production” are informed by 19th century feudalist-cum-post-feudaliast Europe, and the transition point between the Prussian Kingdom and a unified and nascent German state as it industrialized.
His view of industrialization is like that of Upston Sinclair: “Holy shit, WTF? This is terrible.” Trauma and secondary trauma informed by other people. But as an academic his understanding of how the economy works at the level of what was a rapidly changing factory scene. 21st century economics don’t fit 19th century ideals.
And you as a lumberjack is the perfect example. You might own a saw and live near a forest. Cut all the trees you want. Who will buy them without access? So now you need a road. But your 19th century horse cart can’t drag a 400kg log anywhere to sell it, so you now need to buy a truck and loading system. Only now too you have an actual logging setup that gets your product of raw timber to a mill for sale. Marx calls all these things the means of production, which is cute, but he assumes that the social whole is different.
The road needs to be graded and maintained, your saw oiled and sharpened, your truck maintained. Which all also needs labor to happen. As was the cries of trucking unions when the Teamsters formed, you are just part of the machine. Which means that when you get down to it and nitpick, everything and everyone is a part of the means of production of something else. There are no gaps and no bourgeoisie locking up every critical aspect of the social whole, and small businesses as the largest employer in the US mean that Marx’s theory doesn’t stand up to reality anymore. The end user and end consumer provides demand, which is as necessary as the road and truck and mill for you as a faux lumberjack. Demand is a human non-labor aspect of the social whole we all have, which is more important than the means of production. Just ask the bourgeois board of Blockbuster Video, or a small local newspaper.
Right. There’s so much wrong here that I won’t even bother correcting you on everything. You start off not by addressing his points but by trying to character assassinate so you wouldn’t have to address his points. Absolutely disingenuous.
Then between your ramblings you make statements that Marx would disagree with (like land alone being enough to be the means of production) or you try to disprove Marx by stating something Marx himself used as a foundation for the criticism of capitalism (like everything and everyone being a part of the means of production of something else). And finally you make apparently clear you have not read even a summary of his biggest works, Das Kapital, because you say stupid shit like this:
Das Kapital goes into great lengths specifically to prove those “non-existent” gaps exist. They existed 2 centuries ago and they still exist. And the fact that you think his criticism does not apply to small businesses is just another example of how little you actually understand what Marx wrote.
Well, I doubt we were ever going to agree, even to disagree.
I will say that Marx’s ideas have been tried and tested and have never held up to real world application. Bemoan capitalism all you like, then explain how the Holodomor happened.
Anyways, have a pleasant day.
Of course we not going to agree. The only way we could ever come to an agreement is if you acknowledge that you’re talking out of your ass and considering you haven’t gotten that memo yet I doubt you’ll ever get it.
Oh really, what ideas exactly?
I’ll bemoan capitalism all I like and I don’t need to explain how Holodomor happened because I’ll happily bemoan Holodomor as well. Just because the soviets were pieces of shit doesn’t mean I have to be team capitalism.
Well, let’s take 3 non-standard examples:
Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn’t have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the “best” socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.
Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of “driver” by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.
Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.
Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it’s immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.
And while I’ll happily admit that I haven’t needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx’s ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.
You said Marx’s ideas have been tested and I asked for those ideas, not about which countries tried to adopt a certain style of socialism.
Yugoslavia paved its own way with Titoism which Leninists would probably go as far as to not even call socialism. If you’re going to call it an example of Marxism failing you need to be more specific on which Marxist idea failed because Tito also rejected quite a lot of Marxists ideas.
As for Albania and Bulgaria both of them followed Leninism, Albania in particular went so deep with Leninism they started calling Krushchev a revisionist. Leninism does takes ideas from Marxism but the vanguard party idea makes it also very different from what Marx had talked about. I personally view Leninism as something not representative of Marx’s vision of the future and instead a derivation of Marxists ideas. So once again, you need to more specific on what Marx’s ideas failed.
If I’m going to make the arguments for you then you could say central planning is a failed idea because the USSR showed how easy it is to misallocate resources and the top-down bureaucracy leads to an inflexible economy. And in case it’s not clear I would 100% agree that a planned economy is not a good idea.
All I see here is whining about “uh, guys, no one did it perfectly right 100% the first time, so it doesnt count.” Like what a child says when playing a game.
Like how all y’all didn’t vote for the nice Black lady because of not being perfect enough to your privileged liking on Gaza, then seem to not able to connect your actions to the repercussions which are what that one douche is enabling in Gaza.
Sorry, but it’s just a bunch of tankie apologist BS, and a perfect example of why no one takes full communism or socialism seriously in any country that isn’t already a single party state, corrupt to the maximal extent possible and unable to waiver from the party line. The Communist Manifesto might as well be some conceptual only scifi fictional government document, like the Star Trek reference to the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies or the United Federation of Planets Constitution. Plot devices for the individual, wholly useless to society as a whole.
Which also does a huge disservice to anyone pushing for a blended system that is known to work well in limited circumstances.
You’re playing a disingenuous game from the start. You talked shit about Marx without knowing anything about Marx. Now you’re talking shit about Socialism in the context of it not working once when you have examples of capitalism not working either. The US is currently bailing out Argentina after their capitalist endeavors failed. I don’t see you calling capitalism a failure.
First of all this is going to come to you as a shocker but not everyone is American. And as a non-American I told Americans they should still vote for Kamala and then focus on fixing their political landscape (including telling Israel to fuck off) because if Trump gets re-elected there won’t be anything left to fix.
I’m not a tankie you moron. I’m well aware of the issues socialism has ran into in the past and I’m not going to defend that. Yet I’m still a socialist because you’d need to have your head pretty far up your ass to not see how capitalism has ran its course.
You’re doing a disservice by defending capitalism.
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