I downloaded Burnham's arguments, but for complicated reasons, I couldn't work from them. So, let's see if we can generate a useful discussion starting with what I think I now about Marxism, a few basics.
Fair enough. I don't want to subject you to too much reading.
As I understand his philosophy, economic needs, according to Marx, are the basis of all societal action. The needs need to be determined, then the system would be built to provide it.
I agree. The primary task of governing should be to provide all of its cooperative citizens with the essential needs to survive and thrive. Those basic needs are shelter, food and a safe environment. It should not be the task of government to provide highly intelligent, arrogant people with the opportunity to prove their superiority by attaining material wealth and power.
A society is cooperative endeavor. Economic cooperation not competition will work. Citizens born with the gift of high intelligence, or any other gift, ought to use those gifts to enrich the lives of others in the spirit of cooperation.
Marxism is often equated with a form of "economic determinism", but actually it's a little more complicated. Marx believed that
everything in human consciousness was determined by the material nature of reality and social relations. So that means religion, art, music, morality, literature are all reflections of reality within human consciousness. Applied to psychology, that means our dreams, sexual fantasies and the visions or hallucinations of mad people are also reflections of the material world. I'm not sure how they prove that, but that is how far they are willing to go.
It's worth keeping in mind that this approach means that Marxists tend to reject the idea of inborn "gifts" or "intelligence" and so reject the concept of individual genius. They take the view that the role of individuals in history is more of being the right person in the right place in the right time. If Napoleon had been killed early on in the battles of the French Revolutionary Wars, say in Italy in 1796, Marxists argue that
someone else would have taken his place in the military coup in 1799 and become Emperor of France.
In more contemporary history, what they are saying is that even if you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler, Hitler wasn't a unique individual who caused historical events a certain way. So someone else would have stepped in to his shoes and performed the same role, maybe better or worse, and played out the historical laws that were operating for that time. So even when you get back to your present as a time traveller, only minor details of history may have changed but the big picture is relatively the same.
So, individuals intelligence can only be built on the basis of that already existing co-operation and the struggle of ordinary people to make historical events. Whilst your Napoleon's and Hitler's get the name recognition, it is in fact the rest of us who fight
their wars, produce the armaments for their armies and keep the economy, society and culture going. The role of individuals isn't as great in history as we are told or first imagine. Individuals don't create events, but rather than serve as the figureheads for much larger historical forces (usually classes) which meant that, one way or another, those events were going to take place anyway.
I understand that Marx asserted that a society of classes will result in one class exploiting another.
I don't find it useful to think of humanity divided into classes. The concept of a classless society, I think, is simply another way of saying that all people are equal in human worth. If that's what Marx meant, I agree.
In order to measure something, we need standards. For measuring distance, for example the standards include miles, kilometers and so on. There are no fair standards for measuring human worth, thus the idea of a superior class is a fabrication.
We are born equal in human worth but not born equal in talents and abilities. Thus it is unfair to have people unable to compete to survive while others attain wealth. That unfairness in governing motivates protests which can turn violent.
IMO, the world is not yet ready for full-blown socialism (a cooperative economy) because we have not yet invented a government that is corruption-free and consistently makes the right decisions. Cooperative economies must be well-managed. If they are badly managed, then they fail economically like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela and Viet Nam.
Socialism is alive and well in other countries as part of a mixed economy.
In recent years, I've had to concede that I probably haven't believed as strongly in the existence of classes that Marxism would require. For instance, if "all history hitherto is the history of class struggles" that would mean that the history of religiousforums.com from 2004 to the present in 2020 is also a history of "class struggles". That's hard to square with the reality of individual members and staff. Whilst the notion of class and class conflict "works" on grand historical levels, it is much less clear how it works on the scale of individual and day-to-day decisions.
In terms of the role of the state, that is significant. The assumption is that the class nature of the socialist state acts as a sufficient safeguard to ensure it's "progressive" historical role. But then you get down to the level of individuals operating within it and the possibility of abuse of power, corruption, ideological fanaticism, and things start to unravel. The Soviets had this dilemma in that they blamed Stalin for his "excesses" as an individual due to the "cult of personality" but
didn't hold Socialism or the Soviet state responsible. That's a bit of a hard thing to reconcile in Marxist theory and there appears to be some weaknesses on that area.
I understand that Marx believed that a revolution would be necessary to bring about change.
I disagree. There are two factors involved in bringing about an effective change: The economic plan itself and the government that will manage it.
A violent revolution is pointless if it only replaces one ineffective government with another. We humans have yet to invent a government that wasn't both corrupt and inept. The best we can say is that some are not as rotten as others.
If the means of production are to be government controlled, that government needs to be able to consistently make the right decisions.
Using current technology, I think it's possible that we might have such a decision-making system in the not-too-distant future. Until then, the "mixed economies" are the best we can do.
Once created, an effective decision-making system can now go online in an advisory capacity only, the way that our President Franklin Roosevelt used his "brain trust" of economic advisors to ease the USA out of the great depression. When the nation reads the debate-discussion online, and learns to trust the decision-making process, I think a peaceful revolution will happen.
The reason a revolution is needed is that the state is under the control of a given class. So Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" would, in the orthodox view, have been undertaken in the interests of the monopoly capitalist class. whilst certain compromises were introduced to "buy off" the working classes, these didn't affect the nature of American capitalist economy or society. It's worth keeping in mind that after FDR died and the Cold War started, the USA began a political assault on progressive movements that had developed in the 1930s and 1940's with McCarthyism.
Assuming for a moment that Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2020 and gone on to win the Presidency and implemented his reforms (each of those being pretty difficult given the institutional power of the capitalist class) any future election would give the democrats and the republicans the opportunity to overturn them. This is in much the same way Reagan came to challenge the New Deal's political consensus in the 1980s, 50 years after the fact.
The far left in America is very weak but has grown somewhat in recent years due to opposition to Trump (the Democratic Socialists of America expanded rapidly, whilst the CPUSA grew only a little bit). So there is a
very long road to a socialist revolution in the United States if that is what is needed to achieve socialism there.
