Staler87
Warlord
Everyone is a proletariat.
Communism in Civ 4
- Thread starter VCrakeV
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Except to be a (member of the) proletariat is to be dependent on the bourgeoisie; you might as well say everyone can be an employee without anyone being an employer.
Imperator Knoedel
Simperator Knoedel
And? How is that relevant? In a communist society the means of mental production would of course belong to all the people, that is everyone could look something up on the Internet and has free access to all forms of education. The means of mental production are of course used for ideology and propaganda in capitalism, but that doesn't mean they just stop existing all of a sudden in Communism, instead they become available to everyone. In Communism there is no separate intellectual class because everyone is somewhat of an intellectual.
Depends on how far we are willing to stretch the term proletariat. At its most basic, a proletarian is anyone who has nothing but their labor to sell in order to survive. The modern welfare state muddles definitions because he allows people to survive who neither work nor own property. A farmer for the most part is not a proletarian because he owns his farm and can just live off his own labor without selling it. A multimillionaire is not a proletarian because he is set for life and doesn't have to work at all. A physicist might very well be a Proletarian if he would end up homeless and starving if he doesn't teach and write books and do research on a regular basis.
I assume this quote refers to how industrialization made craftsmen obsolete by outproducing them.
The problem with intellectualism is that it serves the interests of the ruling class, once there is no more ruling class that it could serve I don't see why should be a problem.
So a society in which every one has free access to the entire knowledge of humanity and nobody is bogged down in doing pointless busywork would be worse at technological progress than one where only a small minority has that freedom while the vast majority is in a daily struggle just to survive?
Nobody is Proletariat because nobody has to sell their labor in order to survive, which as I said is the definition of the term.
Staler87
Warlord
Right because now that billions of people have access to the Internet we see scientific theories popping up from nobody's all the time. Not everyone is Albert Einstein, and not everyone is capable of such higher mental activity. The means of mental production is used for ideology and production in a capitalistic system. I guess universities don't exist in any capitalistic country. The knowledge is already available to everyone its just that to actually understand where we are in physics/pretty much any subject, right now it takes years of university under the direct instruction of a person who spent years taking the course. This can't be replaced by a few Wikipedia articles.
So farmers don't sell their products? Multimillionaires either worked hard to get to that point (meritocracy) or inherited it. Either way we need people to manage companies. Division of labour results in efficiency as everyone learns how to do their one task really well. The managers and owners do their part and the workers do theirs. The owners should make more as they take the associated risks with running a business, and it requires more skill to run a business than to work for one.
I don't know where you live but in Canada we have something called a meritocracy where you advance in society based on your skill. So there isn't really a ruling class in modern liberal democracies (not counting America which is coming close to a corporate state) for the intellectuals to serve. Even in previous times intellectuals were the largest critics of the ruling class so I don't really get this argument.
As I've pointed out before it doesn't work that way. There is absolutely no way the laymen are going to read a couple Wikipedia articles, teach themselves physics, and then think up of a great new theory. That only happens in fantasy land. Doing pointless busywork? The basis of communism is from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Because everyone needs to provide even if it is unnecessary communist societies become the kings of busy work. Capitalist societies (because labour is paid for) generally despise busy work as it loses someone money. Again I don't know where you live but in Canada even during recessions the amount of people who live life as a daily struggle to survive is a very small minority of the population.
But are they not all proletariat? They all have to labour to receive their needs. Although this is not technically selling it might as well be.
Communism is a nice ideal to think about but it won't work and it hasn't worked. Every time it has been tried it has devolved into a brutal totalitarian regime. People aren't all motivated by the good of the fellow man. Their own personal survival and thriving motivates them heavily however. Capitalism motivates people, communism does not (well unless you have gulags, those motivate people). It really is as simple as that.
Lexicus
Deity
Staler87 said:
It's not - not really. "Everyone" has to, you know, work and stuff and most people don't have time to devote years to studying physics.
Staler87 said:
Yes, "farmers" as Marx or for that matter Aristotle would have known them largely no longer exist in the advanced capitalist countries. Most of the real work is done by machines or manual laborers. The people who own the means of agricultural production are usually capitalists who are quite far removed from the actual work.
Do you really believe we have a meritocracy right now?
Staler87 said:
Division of labor only applies when you do actual labor. By definition, the owners of a company do not do anything productive whatsoever. The idea that owners are morally entitled to the proceeds of business is complete nonsense, owners do not "risk" anything beyond the value of their investment in a modern limited liability corporation. For larger corporations even this minimal level of risk (lose what you put in if the company fails) doesn't exist as the government will bail you out should you start to fail.
I agree we need people to manage companies, however "owners" are largely a hindrance to efficient enterprise. In the US for example companies use about 91% of their profits for dividends and stock buybacks, rather than anything productive like R&D or, you know, employing people.
Staler87 said:
So the answer to the question above is yes. It really depresses me that there are actually people out there who believe this.
Staler87 said:
You should read this guy named Antonio Gramsci. He talked about something called 'cultural hegemony' which is the means by which the ruling class ensures that cultural narratives which normalize its rule are perpetuated.
It is fairly simplistic stuff but far more predictive of reality than this 'meritocracy' nonsense you've been sold by someone...indeed, the fact that you believe in a 'meritocracy' is evidence of precisely this phenomenon whereby the ruling class perpetuates narratives that normalize its rule. The modern trend is for these explanations to be meritocracy-oriented (people become wealthy because they contribute more to society!) though in the past they tended to focus more on gods and cosmic alignment (the King's rule is divinely sanctioned!). Interestingly, we find something of a bridge between these two explanations in Adam Smith's admission that the Invisible Hand of the market was actually just the hand of God.
Staler87 said:
That is also a strawman, since it's not what Imp Knoedel is suggesting. Greater access to information and to the leisure required to systematically learn things can only result in more scientific progress.
The only way to disagree with this, is if you believe most people are born incapable of doing higher-level theoretical work and no amount of change in their social circumstances will change that.
Staler87 said:
Clearly, you've never lived or worked in a "capitalist society" for longer than a day or two. Either that or, by your own theory, there are no actually-existing capitalist societies in the world today.
Staler87 said:
True, every attempt to establish Communism by self-appointed Communist revolutionaries has failed. To see the true fulfillment of Marx's vision one must look to the "capitalist" west, with its system of corporate economic planning ("social production controlled by social foresight") and corporate socialism (in Ch 27 of Capital Marx calls the system of modern banking and the modern corporation "the abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself").
I'm sorry to contribute to the derailment of this thread but I couldn't resist. Mods feel free to move this to OT.
Not really; they'd be closest to the petite-bourgeoisie (the class who employ themselves).
I'm kind of torn now. After my conversation with Staler, I did some research, and realized how removed research is from Communism. On the other hand, Lexicus has made some good points on the leisure to study/research.
Is it just Communist Parties (like Lenin's) that stall scientific progress?
Is it just Communist Parties (like Lenin's) that stall scientific progress?
Imperator Knoedel
Simperator Knoedel
You mean like the party that sent things, animals, people and stations into space before anyone else?
georgjorge
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I don't know if Canada resembles a meritocracy (living in Europe). But even if it did, people would have to acquire these skills (through education, imitation during early development etc.), and I take it not everyone has the same chances of acquiring these skills. I'm not talking about talent or potential here but about the material costs of education or the preferences inherited through family. So there are big possibilities for the same groups of people remaining on top quite a long time even in a meritocracy.
What's more, there is a constant battle about which skills are worth how much. There's no "natural" values stating that a CEO has to earn a hundred times as much as a teacher. Again, it's the people on top having the most influence on how these values are formed. This is where the idea of "everyone getting what he's worth" conflicts with structures of power.
Lexicus
Deity
Imp. Knoedel said:
VCrakeV is generally correct that authoritarian regimes which lack free discourse are worse at science than those in which free discourse is the norm. Free criticism is essential to doing good science. Ironically, free discourse is also necessary for good economic planning. Sadly, Communist parties tend not to place much value on free discourse.
georgjorge said:
The formal economic theory which underpins this meritocracy stuff is called marginal productivity theory of labor value, and it basically states that everyone is paid according to their contribution to production. But as a former professor of mine said, marginal productivity "is an invented category that is used to explain an outcome of which it is in fact the result." Basically, it says you're paid what you're worth, and we know this because we can measure your worth - by measuring how much you're paid!
The real reason people are paid what they're paid is power, plain and simple. But of course, explaining real-world conditions people face as the result of power imbalances, rather than the natural result of people's differing contributions to production, has all kinds of messy implications for existing power structures and so forth. Marginal productivity theory has had success in economics not because of its predictive or explanatory power (it has none) but because it serves to expunge all these messy moral and political questions about distribution from the field of economics. It turns the Market into a god who apportions rewards and punishments to those who deserve them. And the Market god demands sacrifice in the form of austerity budgets, wage cuts, layoffs, huge wealth going to hedge fund managers and bank CEOs while the rest of us squeeze to get by.
So that's really the pernicious effect of mainstream economics, that it produces a normative picture of how the world should function while at the same time claiming to be purely descriptive and "scientific" in its approach.
georgjorge
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This Lexicus comment is one of the best I've seen on this forum. Even though it won't help VCrakeV much in implementing Communism into his mod 
Lexicus
Deity
Like I said recently in a thread on OT, I can always be counted on to offer a well-considered opinion on theoretical matters which are of no practical use to anyone 
I don't know, maybe VCrakeV's mod could make Communism something of a 'catch-up' mechanic? Since IRL countries that went Communist were 'behind' the capitalist west in terms of economic development, maybe it could give a research bonus (or cost discount) to techs already known by n civs or something? I'm not sure how easy it would be to mod a civic to have that effect though (for all I know, impossible).
Other than the food-hammers thing that's the best I can come up with.
EDIT: Oh, also not sure how feasible this is but there should be a strong diplomatic affiliation between Communist civs. IIRC the diplo bonuses for sharing civics are coded to the leaders though and not the civics. So eg Mao will like you if you run SP but running SP doesn't make any SP civ like you. It would be cool if this could be implemented somehow to get something kind of like the Ideologies from V.
I don't know, maybe VCrakeV's mod could make Communism something of a 'catch-up' mechanic? Since IRL countries that went Communist were 'behind' the capitalist west in terms of economic development, maybe it could give a research bonus (or cost discount) to techs already known by n civs or something? I'm not sure how easy it would be to mod a civic to have that effect though (for all I know, impossible).
Other than the food-hammers thing that's the best I can come up with.
EDIT: Oh, also not sure how feasible this is but there should be a strong diplomatic affiliation between Communist civs. IIRC the diplo bonuses for sharing civics are coded to the leaders though and not the civics. So eg Mao will like you if you run SP but running SP doesn't make any SP civ like you. It would be cool if this could be implemented somehow to get something kind of like the Ideologies from V.
That isn't so much the fault of marginal productivity theory than of theories which assign marginal productivity to things other than labour (e.g. hedge funds and bank accounts).
Staler87
Warlord
I realize that we don't have a true meritocracy, and the degree to which we have one changes depending on where one lives. But we do have at least a partial meritocracy where people of exceptional ability will usually do will and people of exceptional inability will do poorly. I do not believe that people get rich because they contribute more to society. But the reality is people who forge business empires are smart, talented people. People who inherit business empires may not be.
I do have a job and know that busy work is better than no work in the opinion of a capitalistic society. However, people do get asked to leave if there is nothing to do. Additionally the busy work is at least semi-useful as in a communist society many tasks were made up that were completely useless because they just needed something for people to do.
To say people are paid because of power is way too simple. People are paid as to the perceived value of their employers. In the case of a CEO, oftentimes they are their own employer, so they pay themselves lots of money. University professors have very little real power and yet they can pull in six-digit salaries. Teachers would have similar levels of power as professors (maybe even more so) and get paid less because society (their employer) values them less.
You are using crony capitalism as an argument against capitalism. Just as you should differentiate between communism as Marx laid out and communism in the USSR, you should differentiate between pure capitalism and the modern form we practice. Yes, in the modern form we practice consumers often get screwed and cronies get fatter but we practice a form that is far gone from what Adam Smith laid out in the Wealth of Nations. In fact we have done things that Adam Smith directly said not to do. For example: allow corporate donations to politicians. A lot of people are unaware of how anti-corporation true capitalism is, and how corporations skew what capitalism is and advocate a perverted sort of crony-capitalism as the way to 'free markets'. Naturally this drives people away from capitalism which often works in the favour of giant corporations. People get mad that corporation does x. Corporation apologizes and says there should be more regulations to prevent x. Giant corp eats costs associated with regulations and small competitors get bought out. Obviously this is not the sole reason for the rise of giant corps but it hasn't helped.
Sorry about the rant, and de-railing the thread, but I'm pretty sure the thread was already de-railed long before this comment.
I do have a job and know that busy work is better than no work in the opinion of a capitalistic society. However, people do get asked to leave if there is nothing to do. Additionally the busy work is at least semi-useful as in a communist society many tasks were made up that were completely useless because they just needed something for people to do.
To say people are paid because of power is way too simple. People are paid as to the perceived value of their employers. In the case of a CEO, oftentimes they are their own employer, so they pay themselves lots of money. University professors have very little real power and yet they can pull in six-digit salaries. Teachers would have similar levels of power as professors (maybe even more so) and get paid less because society (their employer) values them less.
You are using crony capitalism as an argument against capitalism. Just as you should differentiate between communism as Marx laid out and communism in the USSR, you should differentiate between pure capitalism and the modern form we practice. Yes, in the modern form we practice consumers often get screwed and cronies get fatter but we practice a form that is far gone from what Adam Smith laid out in the Wealth of Nations. In fact we have done things that Adam Smith directly said not to do. For example: allow corporate donations to politicians. A lot of people are unaware of how anti-corporation true capitalism is, and how corporations skew what capitalism is and advocate a perverted sort of crony-capitalism as the way to 'free markets'. Naturally this drives people away from capitalism which often works in the favour of giant corporations. People get mad that corporation does x. Corporation apologizes and says there should be more regulations to prevent x. Giant corp eats costs associated with regulations and small competitors get bought out. Obviously this is not the sole reason for the rise of giant corps but it hasn't helped.
Sorry about the rant, and de-railing the thread, but I'm pretty sure the thread was already de-railed long before this comment.
Lexicus
Deity
Staler87 said:
At first glance perhaps but not when you recognize that other factors - the scarcity of your particular skills, for example - can be explained in terms of power, while there are aspects of the question - that men tend to be paid less than women for the same work, for example - that can't really be explained by any other dynamic than power.
Staler87 said:
Now, it's kind of ironic because you accuse me of simplicity- this is certainly quite simplistic. The power we're talking about here is always relative. The question is how much power does someone have relative to the person paying them wages. University professors mostly do have lots of power relative to their employers, due among other things to the social norm of tenure.
As for the rest of what you're talking about, it's pretty muddled:
Staler87 said:
I'm not making an argument about "capitalism" one way or the other here, unless you think redistributing wealth (which I did make an argument for) would end "capitalism" or something. And I think my power argument applies a lot more broadly than to just capitalism. Why do you think slaves and serfs don't get paid for instance? Could power have something to do with that?
Staler87 said:
Er, so? Adam Smith was an anti-capitalist, even if his theories were perverted by capitalists for propaganda purposes.
Staler87
Warlord
I think were really talking about the same thing as far as wages go. I'm saying that the perceived value of the employee gives them higher wages. You're saying the power employee gives them higher wages. In reality the power comes from the perceived value of that employee. Although there is something of a wage gap many of the most shocking statistics, at least in Canada, are very exaggerated. You see a chart of health sector employee wages and men get paid more than women, you break it down and see that men merely occupy higher paying positions and get paid more or less the same in these positions. Although this could still be considered a problem it isn't people actively paying men more. Plus this would support either theory as men may have more value to their employers. (I'm not saying the wage gap doesn't exist anywhere just that feminist organizations exaggerate it to shock people which is something most social justice movements do unfortunately)
Again this could be explained with perceived value and in reality we're arguing the same thing here. Someones perceived value to society and their power in society are pretty much equal when the society is their employer.
I know I went on a rant but surely it wasn't too confusing
.I'm not making an argument about "capitalism" one way or the other here, unless you think redistributing wealth (which I did make an argument for) would end "capitalism" or something. And I think my power argument applies a lot more broadly than to just capitalism. Why do you think slaves and serfs don't get paid for instance? Could power have something to do with that?
The bases of capitalism is the ultimate power of the market. Redistributing wealth skews the market and therefore is anti-capitalistic. I do agree that some wealth distribution can be good but you have to be careful. No one really understands exactly how the market works (economic information is too dispersed) so to meddle with it isn't the best idea.
My argument can just as easily explain this by saying that the owners believe the slaves are sub-human and have no value. Even if they do have value their perceived value to the employer is zero as otherwise they would be paid.
Adam smith was anti-crony capitalism. He invented capitalism. (in essence). I will completely agree with you that his works have been perverted by those claiming to be capitalists for their own ends but to say he is anti-capitalistic is like saying George Washington was against the United States of America. We have basically taken every warning Adam Smith gave us about using his system and thrown it out the window allowing the corporation instead of the consumer to thrive. I would agree that Adam Smith would be taken a back by the system we call 'capitalism' now but saying he is anti-capitalistic is simply ridiculous.
I don't know maybe we're using different definitions of capitalism here. Because my definition is basically the economic system Adam Smith laid out in the Wealth of Nations where the invisible hand guides the market and consumers have the ultimate power.
Imperator Knoedel
Simperator Knoedel
Capitalism is a socio-economic system in which the dominant form of work is wage labor, that is people work in exchange for money. That is what Marx boils it down to in Das Kapital. If Capitalism was a civic, it would be in the Labor, not in the Economy category. Everything else, competition, corporations etc. is secondary, and most of the so called socialist states like the USSR were actually just a special form of capitalism, where the means of production were controlled by one centralized capitalist who happened to be the state as well while the basic paradigm of wage labor was still the dominant way of production. "Crony" or Corporate Capitalism is nothing more than capitalism that is already developed. Corporations are a logical consequence of the way capitalism works. What is "crony capitalism" anyway but the logical consequence of what happens when Capitalism meets human nature.
Also Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism. Nobody invented capitalism, it came about as a result of historical development. You could argue that Smith created a scientific theory to describe capitalism, but Marx did the same thing and better.
Also Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism. Nobody invented capitalism, it came about as a result of historical development. You could argue that Smith created a scientific theory to describe capitalism, but Marx did the same thing and better.
georgjorge
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This is it. If the person paying the wage perceives you as valuable he will pay you a lot, but that he perceives you as valuable results from structures of power. It is worth mentioning that nowadays there are jobs which the majority of people in a society see as grossly overpaid (upper management comes to mind) but their "real" value isn't reduced by that, so even in a so-called democratic society it's not always about what the majority thinks about the value of something.
I don't really get that argument. "Meddling" with the market might not always produce favourable results, but neither does a market without "meddling". I think that here you have fallen into the trap of viewing a market as something natural which should stay untouched by external forces, like a natural habitat.
Thanks to Knoedel for bringing the discussion on what capitalism is back on track. I would add that Capitalism needs to lead to some sort of capital accumulation (and capitalists), but that's very much connected to wage labour.
By that definition, the socio-economic system in which owners of capital were privileged, such that they could exact tribute from workers in exchange for granting them access to the means of production, would not necessarily be capitalism (as said workers could operate said means of production as a self-managed firm) - and a socio-economic system in which owners of capital were not privileged, such that they could not pay a worker less as a wage than the value said worker added (else said worker would, by having free access to the means of production, work for themselves), could be.
georgjorge
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There would be no wage labor in such a system. Why would owners of capital go to the trouble of hiring workers and paying them exactly what they added, hence making no profit (surplus) at all? Also, how would they acquire their capital in the first place without surplus (though I know about primitive accumulation but that's not sustainable)?
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