alt Hacker NewsCentralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.
In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.
If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.
The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.
Replies
Unfortunately you’re taking to the void here
People can’t differentiate between what Marx wrote and what classic dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao) did under some retcon “Marxist” banner
> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though
What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.
Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.
Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.