civver_764
Deity
Well they would certainly be rewarded.
In the modern era though, you don't really see people inventing a new product all by themselves. It's usually research teams.
Ask a Red, Second Edition
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In the modern era though, you don't really see people inventing a new product all by themselves. It's usually research teams.
Zardnaar
Deity
Do you think communism would be better off as a subset of capitalism? IE a commune somewhere in the country?
Well, they said they did implement democracy: democratic centralism. One of the basic problems with communism is that it tries too hard to be the good ideology, and treats dissidence as ungood thinking. Even though democratic centralism was not really democracy, people were not allowed to speak against it.
Now that was a separate question. Going back to workplace democracy. Exactly how can you give power to the workers? Who decide what to make in a factory? Who decide if I have to do the dirtiest job? Who decide how to allocate resources? Do you let everyone vote for all of above? If so, do you vote for everything no matter how trivial it is? How efficient would that be? Otherwise, who says what should be voted and what should not? Does everyone have exactly the same say or not? If not, how do you prevent those with more say to accumulate power?
Zooming out to production at the society's level. If you let workers to vote on what to produce, what happens if a fad comes and everyone wants to build the same thing? In a market price changes curb that. What's the solution under communism? If that solution is a central planner, what happens if he makes a mistake, for example asking everyone to make steel? How do you prevent him from acquiring too much power?
Perfection
The Great Head.
With what? The potential for a giant company and millions of dollars?! Hard to top that!
I sure as hell do.
Certainly plenty of things require good sized teams but a whole lot of products out there are designed by single people or very small groups.I don't think that researchers in general need to be prevented from exploitation, we do pretty well for ourselves, thank you very much.
RedRalph
Deity
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'Religion' can mean so many different things, but I'd say communism and organised religion are, yeah.
Helping the society they are a part of.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Yeah that's pretty lame. I'd rather just stay in bed.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
If you say so, though I really wouldn't trust a resource editable by everyone if its about controversial politics.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
Who determines what is produced in a communist society?
_random_
Jewel Runner
On an Eastern Orthodox forum I visit sometimes, somebody started a thread asking whether communism was inherently at odds with Orthodoxy. While there was some discussion, a lot of people were a bit alarmed by the thought of Marxist ideology entering the church, and, given the persecution of the church by the Soviets, this seems quite justified. When the revolution comes, what do you think ought to be done to allay the fears of religious groups harmed by communists and to assure that such persecution doesn't happen under the new rule?
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I would not say that even I have a "true" understanding of it all. I am only in my early twenties, after all, and have a great deal of learning ahead of me. But I am perhaps a great deal more familiar with these ideas than the layman, the dispersion of which is here my purpose.
Let me begin by saying that there are many types of communist and socialist thought. Marx is not the first socialist, nor do all schools spring forth from his ideological fountain. However, he is the largest single contributor, and his school, I believe, is the most correct.
Let me begin with a short exposition on pre-Marxist thought.
Communal living has been a theme of human society since ancient times. Plato's Republic is the classic example of this. But there were more tangible examples as well, like the early Christian communes. And of course we know that nearly all societies began with some form of egalitarian banding, from the Celts to the Indians to the Amerindians.
Religion has been the prime motivator towards communal egalitarianism throughout history, primarily Christianity because of its emphasis on the ephemeral nature of the physical world, the equality of man before God, and the brotherhood we are expected to show one another as God's children. I confess that this was what initially drove me into the socialist camp, and that in some small way Marxism is special pleading to me because of it. Engels wrote a book, The German Peasant War, about one such example of this religiously-motivated communism. During the early Reformation, a German monk by the name of Thomas Muentzer led the peasantry in an uprising to win meager political rights for themselves, and eventually establish God's Kingdom on Earth. Luther denounced Muentzer as the spawn of Satan and ordered the Princes to slaughter their peasants like mad dogs. Muentzer was drawn and quartered. Another example is the Levellers during the English Civil War. There are myriad examples: Pugachev, Razin, etc.
Many of these religious communists, whom Marx and Engels referred to as the "Utopian Socialists," were bourgeois thinkers with good intentions but bad methodology. They saw the ills of modern society and set out to create perfectly constructed communal systems where everyone had a precise place, like gears in a machine, and it all ran wonderfully and everyone was happy. The problem was that it never turned out that way. Some of them were successful for many years, and then petered out as people left or they exhausted the natural resources of the area they had procured for their social experimentation. Most of these happened in America, where there was room for such things. These thinkers included men like Etienne Cabet, Michael Fourier, and Robert Owen. While their efforts and goals were admirable, they missed the ultimate point of communism: it is not to be decided beforehand, from the top down, how society will best function, but rather that society itself should decide how society should function. Thus, communism is anarchist by nature.
With Karl Marx, the egalitarian movement gained new footing. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out to provide the burgeoning socialist movement with a clear path, clear goals, and most of all a physical grounding for their ideals. Enter the Communist Manifesto. It was 1848, and philosophy and religion were no longer enough to convince people that something was true. You had to prove it physically. Marx said it rather aptly in his Theses on Feurerbach:
"The philosophers have only explained the world in different ways. The point, however, is to change it."
Engels and Marx had been working on this separately for some time, but their powers combined into a sort of Red Captain Planet and yielded the two Marxist methodologies, historical materialism and dialectical materialism. The former is used to analyze society, economics, and history, the latter to explain the path of history, and to predict where we will go in the future.
The core of historical materialism is that it sees all aspects of society as being outgrowths of the economic conditions of the people therein. Marxism is always concerned with the relations of people to the processes of production, and sees it as being of prime importance. It has applications in a variety of fields, such as history, art history, and sociology.
Dialectical Materialism reflects Marx's debt to Ludwig Feuerbach, a Young Hegelian, and also to G.W.F. Hegel himself. Hegel attempted to explain the movements of history as being essentially social examples of the type of dialectic argumentation that went on in the Socratic Dialogues. One side made its argument, then the other side made its argument, and by reconciling between the two what they agreed upon and could be made to agree upon, a third position could be reached that reflected the two positions it was indebted to. Society, Hegel said, moved in the same way. A given social system would give way to another over time, and the conflict between the two would produce something still greater. It wasn't an exact fit but the idea was close enough.
The real genius of Marx was to realize the driver of this change. Hegel ascribed it to a mystical sort of essence that reeked of whigishness, but Marx said it was class conflict that drove society to change. Throughout history, there has always been a poor majority who serves the rich minority, because they wield the reigns of power. To improve one's lot meant to ascend the class ladder, and over time this would lead to a challenge of the ruling class' power. The very act of ascending the social ladder against opposition from above is class conflict. It need not mean violence. But when things come to a head, it often leads to violence. Revolution, perhaps civil war, or maybe just a few political murders. Or maybe the Pope calls a crusade.
As an example, let us use an old favorite, feudalism. Feudalism was, by nature, decentralized politically, and based primarily upon a barter economy. It was characterized by self-production of most of one's necessities, from clothing to tables to food to houses. The only way to obtain security in such an unsafe, multi-polar world was to find patronage with a baron or lord, and the two ways to pay for that protection were military service and taxes (generally in the form of food, or a percentage of whatever it is that your produce). So you get someone else to do those things for you, pay them to you, and then you pay them to your lord, who probably does the same thing for a higher lord, and then the guy at the top claims to be God's vassal so that it all makes sense. The people who really get screwed are those at the bottom of the ladder, the peasantry, because they have to provide for everyone and everything. Its no coincidence that they are a huge, huge majority.
There are not many large cities in this decentralized world, because most people have to grow food all the time to pay their lord (most peasants worked 3 days for their lord, 3 for themselves, and spend Sundays at church, all by law). Cities arise because of commerce.
Lords do as lords do, and duel over resources with other lords. When one wins, his power increases and another's decreases. With an increased territory of "safe" land, trade of resources can resume. And with that increased power, the lord requires a larger army and a larger court, which means more taxation and further centralization. The cycle feeds itself. Cities grow, barons become subservient to kings, and the king in turn wants to destroy the autonomy of his subjects. Thus the very thing that makes Feudalism contains its undoing, because society was unequal and class conflict destroyed its coherency.
What was once Feudalism has now become mercantilist, as trade prospers and merchants become as wealthy as their kings. A middle class is born, small but powerful. They then begin to demand political rights and protections which they feel are their due, because of their wealth and power. These merchants are who will become the capitalist bourgeoisie, but we are not so far along as yet. As technology discovers more efficient methods of farming and producing, it takes less and less peasants to grow food. They go to the towns for work. The power of the landlord is weakened, since he has less to lord over. The pressures against feudalism, primarily that the lord's protection is no longer needed, mount, and serfdom is abolished. With more men free to work on things other than growing, the merchants seize the opportunity and hire them to expand their operations. But mercantilism thrives on the restriction of trade within the empire. And of course the good of the merchants is not the prime concern of the king, who fears that his power might be usurped by their continued prosperity. Especially since they are demanding silly things like rights, even the right to pick their king! It is from this theme that liberalism is born.
The conflict between merchants and kings becomes one of liberalism and monarchy, because there are many many merchants but only one king. When the merchants win, as they inevitable do, then their concern is the primary goal of the government. And thus those silly mercantilist trade protection laws come down. The birth of liberalism and the birth of capitalism are generally defined as one and the same, and many believe the two to be ideologically married. I am among them. The capitalists hire more workers, since less and less are needed to grow food. Technology is always the driving force behind this advance, because it frees people up to do other work. If one person's farming can feed 5 people, then those other 4 can go off and make boats or spin linen or mine for iron. If ten people can spin enough linen for the town when it took 50 before, then those 40 can go do other things. And so on and so forth.
Which leads us to capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by several things. First is the fact that social interaction takes place through the exchange of commodities, which are items produced for trade because they have use-value to someone who is not the producer. Second, the division of all of society into two classes of people, the people who own capital (Capitalists) and people who do not (Proletarians, or workers). Capital is simply a fancy name for the means of production, the equipment and land with which items are produced to be sold. Sometimes in a business there is only the capitalist and no workers, as in a one-man operation or a family farm. But most often there is the capitalist, who owns a factory and all the looms and equipment therein, and needs to hire workers to come and use the machinery to make things.
It is highly important to understand that the worker here seeks employment with the capitalist under compulsion. He has no productive means of his own, no way of making wealth, of procuring the things he needs to survive. His only object of use is his ability to perform labor. Which is, fortunately, just what the capitalist needs. So he hires him. Because of private property rights, the capitalist claims the profits from selling the products of his company, and thus the prerogative to disperse of them as he wishes. He sees that money as his, and only will part with as little of it as possible. So he pays the workers miserably. And who are they to argue? There is plentiful labor out there, if he doesn't like what the capitalist pays him, he is perfectly disposable to his boss, who will simply fire him and hire one of the unemployed folks who is so happy to have a job giving him some money that he is in no position to argue about how little it is. It is this reality, the bifurcated society, where property rights deliver the profits of the worker's labor into the hands of the capitalist, and the capitalist in turn seeks to maximize his personal profit, that characterizes capitalism.
Marx thought that the resulting class conflict between worker and employer would result in the mass-movement of workers through labor unions and such, who form a very clear majority, against their employers that would bring down the inequality of their relations and create a world where ownership of companies was held by all workers of the company, not just the capitalist, and thus that all workers would decide how the money made by selling their products was distributed. Because society is completely split into these two groups, the absorption of the capitalists by the proletariat would make everyone proletarians, and class conflict would cease entirely. We would have then created a just society, a brotherhood of man, ready to soldier on into the future together.
Marx thought that the anger over this oppression, and its total envelopment of all of society (not present in the past - why would the peasant care if the merchant or the king was his overlord?), would explode like a boiler run amok, and a French Revolutionary fit of violence would do away with the old regime, who would defend their privilege to the last. Yet he also saw the potential of democratic peoples (which only a few nations could lay the claim to when Marx was writing) to do away with Private Capital through democratic methods. He named the United States, Britain, and Netherlands by name. Many socialists have, though, embraced the revolutionary aspect of Marxism, spurred on largely by the success of the past revolutions, French, American, and Russian, among others.
And that ends my dissertation on Marxism.
From Marxism grew several schools of thought, designed to adapt Marx to pre-industrial or infant industrial societies.
The first was Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Leninism dealt with a number of problems that had arisen since Marx's death, namely that of imperialism. I find this to be Lenin's greatest contribution. Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism was a 1916 treatise by Lenin addressing the nature of global capitalist empires, their exploitation for natural resources, and the exportation of capital from the mother country. It teams nicely with what Karl Kautsky called the "Labor Aristocracy," which was a term he used to describe how in developed nations there existed a proletarian class who lived much better than the proletariat in developing nations. Kautsky observed that workers in the mother country benefit from the superprofits of these imperialist corporations to have higher wages and standards of living for their workers, who are still oppressed as much as before, but whose anger over it is somewhat averted by their increases standard of living. Shackles of gold are still shackles, though.
Lenin also developed the idea of the Vanguard Party. Because, he said, Marx was wrong and workers were only ever going to acquire trade-union brotherhood and not total class consciousness, it would be necessary for a small core of dedicated revolutionaries to rally them together and lead them together, acting with singular vision, to a socialist triumph. He may have been right, but unfortunately the only example we have of this the Vanguard in post-revolutionary Russia, which was forced by historical circumstances to abolish most other parties and absorb the rest.
Lenin's thought was also heavily influenced by a contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Lev Trotsky. Trotskyism was an attempt to adapt classical Marxism to the demands of an infant-industrial society where socialists had, or could, seize the ship of state. The core of this theory was the Permanent Revolution, which said that, under the guidance of the Leninist Vanguard Party, a pre-industrial, pre-liberal society like Russia could be led through the shortest path possible from feudalism to socialism, and effectively bypass the whole capitalist phase. Only parts of his theory are available to use to observe, the most salient being the Five Year Plans.
Joseph Stalin borrowed ideas from a variety of thinkers, such as Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin, and Grigory Zinoviev. His thought is essentially a perversion of Trotskyism and Leninism towards dictatorial, bureaucratic ends.
Mao Zedong went one step further, and attempted to adopt Stalinism and Leninism to completely agrarian societies. Its failure and shortsightedness should be obvious a priori.
I'm going to take the cop-out answer and say that society then would have to decide for itself. I think I-phones are a waste of time, for the price of $500. But of course part of a healthy life is having both things you need and things you want, so long as you understand the difference between the two (which modern consumerism does its best to blur the line between). I have relatively Spartan tastes myself, and require nothing more than a simple $30 flip phone, though I see the utility of more expensive cell phones. But I'm not going to pretend, for example, that a Mustang or a Lamborghini has any type of increased utility over an Escort or Nova.
You're trying to trick me into saying something, it won't work.
Thank you very much V.
How consumer goods will be distributed amongst members of society? In particular, how worker's salary will be determined and regulated, basing on his skill and performance? Will there be any sort of market regulations for such things?
P.S. Congratulations on today's holiday.
P.S. Congratulations on today's holiday.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I did not create this thread ignorant of that fact. Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!
I will answer more questions tomorrow, folks, or maybe late tonight.
But they innovate based on the same motivation as an individual: intent to copyright/patent their ideas and products which will in turn bring in more money for their company and ultimately the research teams.
GenMarshall
High Elven ISB Capt & Ghost Agent
Does Communism have anything in regards to the unemployed workers?
Regardless of utility, would you have an abundance of iPhones and Lamborghinis, or would you not? The point of this question is that if you don't have abundance, you would have to work out how to allocate limited products, then you'd come to the question of whom we should listen to. This is a real problem, and Leninism was the only practical solution that has ever been proposed by communists. If you do not have an alternative solution, by what logic can you say your version of communism would turn out to be different from the Soviet Union?
RedRalph
Deity
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Didn't you spend time volunteering teaching kids a while back? Same principle. Not everyone needs a huge financial incentive to do things.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
Indeed. I thank you for taking the time to write this.
A noble idea that I can see working for a community. But how can this be scaled up to a nation?
So I suppose the transition to Communism will not be done until workers in developing nations demand their rights.
And thus Communism is now associated with authoritarianism, and the social experiment of the Russian Revolution regresses, only going to capitalism nearly a century later.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Nope!
Sure, but I believe that said incentives provide much more motivation then volunteering.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
Are you confusing him with me? I did that because the class I was taking mandated it for credit.
Gogf
Indescribable
Why do you believe that egalitarianism is a good thing?
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