Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: As a Bernie Supporter I think Biden will lose to Trump if he continues to do these steps [View all]The Magistrate
(95,244 posts)At bottom, it is the view that what a society produces ought to belong to the society, and not to private parties who superintend facets of its production, and appropriate to themselves a disproportionate quantity of the society's produce. It does not, and never has, meant either autocratic state control or diveying up everything into equal shares. Capital, the surplus of what is produced over what its production costs, is the engine that drives new economic activity, and would do so whether it was administered by public or private means. Humans being involved, one can expect log-rolling and sharp practice in any case, but with public administration, however contrived within a democratic polity, it ought to be more difficult for a few individuals to extract value in greatly disproportionate share from society's capital.
Marxism is something different. Marxism is a particular theory of how socialism will emerge from capitalism. Marx saw this as something which would inevitably occur as industrialization reached its peaks, producing of necessity a trained and regimented work-force, who would be subjected to extreme penury owing the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands, and who would come to understand they actually controlled the mines and factories, etc., on which capitalism's profits depended. This he supposed would occur first in countries like England and Germany, France and Belgium. Nothing of the sort happened, and a variety of people enchanted by the theory, and its promise success was inevitable, set about trying to figure out ways to redeem the promise. Lenin's view was that imperial expansion was what was delaying the inevitable emergence of socialism, and he conceived further the idea that establishment of socialism by revolution might be achieved through forcing accelerated development of a backward, largely feudal society such fin de siecle Russia. At this point it should be obvious that Lenin's program had little to do with the original ground of Marxism, and as Orwell observed, 'one does not establish a dictatorship to preserve a revolution, one makes a revolution to establish a dictatorship'.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden