Measuring Marxism: The Democratic Ideal

This post is part of a series attempting to quantify Marx's theory of socialism.

The preeminent question in Marxism is the creation of socialism: this is roughly reflected in the democratization of the means of production. Democracy and productive, Marxist-style socialism are not the same, though.

What distinguishes Marxian socialism is its ability to birth a new society founded on different relations of production. These relations center on the "socially aware" human being, which is forced into existence by the extreme economies of capital accumulation which are decreasingly able to hide the underlying relations of production from the exploited populations.

Indeed, this kind of society is predicated on a rather basic understanding of democratic principles. It stems from the recognition of accumulated economic power, the treatment of those powers as utilities (see Yves Smith: Why Do We Keep Indulging the Fiction that Banks are Private Enterprises?) and the application of the democratic ideal of equal representation in that model.

Measuring Marxism: The Centralization Myth

This post is part of a series attempting to quantify Marx's theory of Socialism.

Marxism is largely a method of accounting and interpreting the mechanisms of economic power. While political power is understood to play a role, it is largely considered subservient to the role of economic motion. In times of stagnation, wherein technological changes often do not correspond with expanding markets and economic power is uniquely centralized, contemporary nodes of power are entrenched, and their social relations tend to become apparent. In such times, the condition of civil society becomes increasingly apparent, with all its nuances and relations to these power structures. Gramsci notes of this phenomenon:

"when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. ... Hegel's conception belongs to a period in which the spreading development of the bourgeoisie could seem limitless, so that its ethicity of universality could be asserted: all mankind will be bourgeois. But, in reality, only the social group that poses the end of  the State and its own end as the target to be achieved can create an ethical state - i.e. one which tends to put an end to the internal divisions of the ruled, etc., and to create a technically and morally unitary social organism."¹

Measuring Marxism: Where Did We Go Wrong?

 In my previous series, I assessed one aspect of the moral vision in Marxism - its relationship to individualism. This time around I want to confront the so-called "failure" of Marxism, and how can we measure his vision of socialism. This post is part of a series attempting to quantify Marx's theory of socialism.

Comprehensive privatization in China. The bureaucratization that plagued the Soviet Union. Repressive policies in nearly all 'socialist' states. The dilution of democratic apparatuses in the same. The data seem conclusive: Marxism has failed. Either that, or our measurements are off.

In fact, these failures reveal a number of conditions which do more to support Marxism than anything else. The accurate measurement of the Marxist framework has very little to do with the propaganda efforts of the NATO / Soviet blocs, which often invoke the imagery of workers' power for their own political gain.

Furthermore, it is the self-proclaimed anti-communists themselves who long ago quantified the very measurements which prove just how right Marx was.