Material conditions or moral conviction.

[Bijan Li Causi X]

Marxists say that revoluions occur, when material conditions slump, due to capitalist crises, yet, i think due to liberal reform, and concesions, most industrialised nations will keep conditions quite high, to avoid being toppled from within, especially in imperialist nations.

Greece and a few others are the exceptions.

I think, people in FW industrialised nations, are more likely to fight for marxism, because of moral convictions, for example, when i found out that capitalism rapes the Thirdworld, i did not care that i was doing ok under it, I just believed that freedom is privellage extended unless its free for one and all.

Sure we have some poverty, but, not such widespread poverty as to make the conditions that cause revolutions.

We also have an underclass, of people who have never worked, and never try, who, along with the lumpen, are far too unreliable, with all due respect to the panthers.

Che
Castro
Marcos
Engels

All were morally oposed to the system, but were fairly wealthy.

[A.R.Amistad]

Marxists say that revoluions occur, when material conditions slump, due to capitalist crises, yet, i think due to liberal reform, and concesions, most industrialised nations will keep conditions quite high, to avoid being toppled from within, especially in imperialist nations.

Greece and a few others are the exceptions.

I think, people in FW industrialised nations, are more likely to fight for marxism, because of moral convictions, for example, when i found out that capitalism rapes the Thirdworld, i did not care that i was doing ok under it, I just believed that freedom is privellage extended unless its free for one and all.

Sure we have some poverty, but, not such widespread poverty as to make the conditions that cause revolutions.

We also have an underclass, of people who have never worked, and never try, who, along with the lumpen, are far too unreliable, with all due respect to the panthers.

Che
Castro
Marcos
Engels

All were morally oposed to the system, but were fairly wealthy.

Moral convictions, and particularly class consciousness, is important to a revolution, but the deepest moral convictions can end up in failure if the objective conditions for revolution are not right.

[Bijan Li Causi X]

good answer

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm not fairly wealthy - in fact I just skim by in life and if I was fired tomorrow I'd be out of my apartment in a month - even if I found another job in two weeks. My girlfriend and I live paycheck to paycheck and she has tens of thousands of dollars of debt due to ambulance rides resulting form epilepsy. In 2009, you could literally take a walk around my area in Oakland California and within one half hour you would have seen more foreclosed houses than you can count with your fingers. In the US, unemployment for youth (18-30) is about a quarter of the population and for black people in some cities there is unemployment reaching 50%. In Detroit, I have no idea what the total unemployment is, but I just read that the amount of vacant or abandoned houses is equal to the entire size of San Francisco. So I don't think we are fairly wealthy - I think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and a few hundred other people we never hear about but have billions of dollars are wealthy.

Wealth and poverty can not really be measured by comparing wages or material possessions, but has to be measured in terms of inequality. Otherwise, you could argue anything: that people today are wealthier than they were in the 50s and 60s since wages are higher and people have ipods and flat screen tvs and so on. People were better off in the 1930s than they were during the first depression in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century. You could argue that people in Haiti are better off now than they were 50 years ago or that people in slums of Mexico won't rebel because they are so much better off than people in Haiti.

If you look at inequality, on the other hand, in places like the US, average CEOs make 300x the average worker and inequality is on a level similar to the gilded age. Working class living standards have shrunk over the last generation in the US and exploitation is high with US workers working more hours than most other industrial countries.

There is nothing automatic about revolutions - struggle happens regardless, but organizing that into a movement does not just happen because people hit a certain level of poverty - otherwise basically, people would have to be living below the level of people in Haiti for a revolution to happen (since there is currently no revolution in Haiti).

So the objective part - inequality, exploitation, poverty, war, rascim, boom/bust and crisis - is always generally present no matter what in capitalism.

IMO where the subjective part comes in is how workers organize their fight-back and struggle. So the same conditions can exist in two different places but the reasons why or why not a revolution might happen depend on a whole set of circumstances such as how strong is the ruling class, how much repression do they have, are workers won to reformist or liberal ideas, are there independent working class organizations, are there revolutionary organizations that are rooted in the working class, etc.

Also, people like Marx and Engels, while a professional and bourgeois respectively were in a sense "class traitors" - their opposition to the system did not just come from a moral decision - they were living in times and places where there were already movements influencing their ideas about the world. There were the bourgeois revolutions before them and that influenced ideas in Germany and while they were taking on the ideas about how to win democracy and so on, there were also labor struggles and movements in places like England. The Communist Manifesto was something written for a French revolutionary group, Value Price and Profit was written as part of a debate about an actual strike movement across Europe demanding higher wages, the Paris Commune was obviously the source of further thinking for these guys and people like them. For people like Che, there was already movements across the world fighting against colonialism and imperialism... as Che famously said "One, two, many Vietnams". So far from just being a moral decisions, their politics came out of trying to understand and help existing working class movements or anti-imperialist movements.

[Roquentin]

A key tenant of Marxism, at least everything post The German ideology where it is spelled out explicitly, is that material conditions create consciousness and not the other way around. Ideology, good or bad, comes after productive relations, which is why (and I would argue it is correct) moral convictions being a force for revolution runs contrary to Marx's thought. That was the big philosophical rebellion in Marx against Hegelian idealism, which he and Engels treated with a great deal of contempt. Simply put, material conditions and productive relations where the decisive factor rather than ideals.

[scarletghoul]

A key tenant of Marxism, at least everything post The German ideology where it is spelled out explicitly, is that material conditions create consciousness and not the other way around. Ideology, good or bad, comes after productive relations, which is why (and I would argue it is correct) that moral convictions being a force for revolution runs contrary to Marx's thought. That was the big philosophical rebellion in Marx against Hegelian idealism, which he and Engels treated with a great deal of contempt. Simply put, material conditions and productive relations where the decisive factor rather than ideals.
This mechanical materialist approach is a big problem in Marxists. Yes the economic base determines the superstructure and man's being determines his consciousness etc etc.. but to say that ideas and thought can not in turn affect the material conditions and change the world is just wrong. There are great battles to be had in the realm of consciousness; we can't just leave it up to the material conditions to decide mechanically.

[Jolly Red Giant]

but to say that ideas and thought can not in turn affect the material conditions and change the world is just wrong.
Maybe you could expand on this ?

[Roquentin]

This mechanical materialist approach is a big problem in Marxists. Yes the economic base determines the superstructure and man's being determines his consciousness etc etc.. but to say that ideas and thought can not in turn affect the material conditions and change the world is just wrong. There are great battles to be had in the realm of consciousness; we can't just leave it up to the material conditions to decide mechanically.


You're missing the point. Morals and ideals that have no effect on material conditions and productive relationships were of little or no consequence to Marx. Sure, ideology matters, but only in so far as it alters the world.

That isn't to say you can't change productive relationships, but the important part to remember is that they have to be changed. Just preaching empty morality is of little or no consequence. The majority (including all of Das Kapital) of Marx's works are based on this perspective. This is why he devoted his entire later life to examining the capitalist mode of production rather than morality, he knew quite well it was more important.

[NecroCommie]

I would also like to point out that class consciousness is relevant even in nations where material conditions are otherwise ripe. Many a revolution has fallen due to complete failure to understand what marxism is even about.

[A.R.Amistad]

I would suggest this for reading about the whole "base-superstructure" debate

http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1986/xx/base-super.html