Marxism Kritik

1. Reforms entrench capitalismMichael, Albert, 1994 (Stop the Killing Train)

Without pressure from below, politicians’ desires to preserve ruling hierarchies will keep them from using the “peace dividend” to eradicate homelessness, reduce unemployment, or build better schools and hospitals for those who now get the worst of each. Indeed, it will prohibit doing anything that will make society’s worse-off: (1) Relatively wealthier compared with elites, and (2) relatively better prepared to demand more of society’s output for themselves. It isn’t that innovative politicians will promise to improve people’s lives with better budgets. They will. But unless they are forced, they won’t stick to their constituency-rousing rhetoric. Changes they actually peruse will always be system enforcing, not system threatening.

2. Capitalism will lead to fascism and warSteve Clark, 1994 (Editor, New International, p. 27)

Only a few years ago, the authoritative representatives of the world’s bourgeois ruling classes were hailing the dawn of a New World order, built on what they portray as the historic triumph of democratic capitalism over communism. They pledged a future economist plenty, expanding democratic rights, and growing world peace. As humanity heads toward the twenty-fist century, the future in fact offered by international finance capital is one of deepening economic depression and an accompanying march toward fascism and war. The political conclusions that best fit this reality—and are thus the best guide to action—are communist conclusions.

3. Socialism leads to freedomHarold Freeman, 1981 (The Political Spectrum: Opening Viewpoints, p. 106-107)

For individuals, socialism means an end to economic insecurity and exploitation. It means workers cease to be commodities bought and sold on the labor market, and forced to work as appendages to tools owned by someone else. It means a chance to develop all individual capacities and potentials within a free community of free individuals. Since socialists assume that human nature emerges from the kind of society in which we live, they argue that the highest freedom is not simply the ability to take one’s place on the social ladder, but the opportunity to assume control over and constantly reshape the basic institutions of society.

4. The first step to change is this debateMichael, Albert, 1994 (Stop the Killing Train)

Debating these and related questions while consciousness-raising, demonstrating, and organizing isn’t “utopian” but is instead the only comprehensive approach to social change. To win a New World, even to significantly improve this one, we must know what we want. To journey from here to there, we need to know where “there” is. What are participatory economy and what steps can attain it? What are a feminist kinship sphere, and culturally intercommunal community sphere, and a participatory political sphere? In each case, what steps can take us from what we have to what we want.” In face of the horrors we all know so well, it does not evidence maturity, pragmatism, or wisdom to dismiss revolutionary desires as strange. It evidences defeatism, or even lack of humanity. Don’t whisper the R-word.