CheezytheWiz said:Dude, I already explained that forced equality is not part of our program
Children can also be extremely selfless
It seems impossible for you to imagine that people as a group will direct these movements
Traitorfish said:what do you interpret socialisation of production as meaning, and what do you understand Marx as having advocated/predicted.
Leaving it to some bureaucrat to decide what people need is for the most part unsatisfactory as much has leaving it up the market; people must decide for themselves what they need, and how to meet those needs.
Besides, this isnt exactly a criticism unique to communism, given capitalisms historically rather poor record in meeting the needs of the majority
in that period certain inequalities, for want of a better word, may be sustained, in this period of transition
then most workers accept this as entirely reasonable
if you are a doctor for the money you probably shouldnt be a doctor.
I don't know what you're referring to.I follow the Cheezy mode of socialization. I believe this is what Marx advocated.
Marx was of the opinion that material circumstances, rather than utopian schemes, are what lead to socialism. Take his comments in The Civil War in France, about how the Proudhonists and Blanquists who participated in the Paris Commune were forced to abandon their programs almost immediately, instead bending to the demands of material circumstances and to the democratic will of the proletariat. "Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not", as Luxumburg had it.Marx never dealt, (and I don’t think that he wanted to deal with), the impossible and infinite complexities of an egalitarian society that he prescribed. These complexities are really only glossed over by his critics and a few other New-Hegelians. I believe that Marx’s predictions do not matter, as almost everything he said would happen hasn’t. And those that haven’t probably won’t.
From the perspective of a worker, perhaps, but workers are an essentially secondary category within capitalism. The market primarily acts as the field in which capitalists compete and accumulate, within the intent of increasing their share of capital; if they fulfil peoples needs in the process, then it's all well and good- and they are usually compelled to at least give the impression of meeting needs to sell commodities- but there are no assurances that this will occur in a rational or efficient fashion.Isn’t the definition of a market people deciding for themselves what they need, and how to meet those needs?
You are unaware of the existence of the Third World? Or the historical impoverishment of the majority in the First World?First, I believe you have to justify this statement.
Capitalism, in the proper sense, refers to a system of generalised commodity production. It does not demand the existence of a "free market", which is what I assume you are referring to.Second, no nation operates under a pure capitalist model.
I think you take my comments about "democratic distribution" to rather absurd ends. I'm not suggesting that every ounce of material consumed must be assigned by some comprehensive parliamentary structure, merely that production goals are determined by different workplaces and communities communicating in rational fashion, rather than being clumsily inferred from the shifting chaos of the market. It doesn't mean that consumption won't involve individual choices, or that production will pay no reference to consumption; the point, after all, is to produce for individual needs, which are by definition varied and subjective.Third, your two paragraphs combined simply result in a garbled mess that cannot be adequately summed up by simply saying that people must decide for themselves what they need and how to meet that need. Supplanting this upon an egalitarian society becomes a complex gigantic rubberband ball of interweaving intricacies that cannot be dealt with justly without an overarching bureaucracy. What happens when one factory believes that the workers in another factory are living ostentatiously and that they really don’t need some of the material objects that they have? What happens when I decide that I need some papaya, but my comrades decry that I really don’t need it because it is an expensive luxury? How do you replace the capitalist marketplace without being authoritarian about it? Or am I just supposed to get over not having my papaya that I could otherwise have in a capitalist system?
I don't believe that the mentality to which you refer is, in fact, "infectious", but is a product of material and idealogical circumstances. Capitalism is a system, at its heart, which demands people screw each other; is it any surprise, then, that we should see a lot of people under capitalism trying to screw each other over? Socialism, in contrast, is a system which demands people work together, so would it surprise you if that attitude, instead, came to predominate?We also revert back to the “screw them,” capitalists. Which I readily admit, do exist, and hamper society as we know it. But how do you make them and their infectious mentality go away? How do you alter their input on their children (think of a few verbose, young, well to do, members of this community for instance). How do you think you’ll change the current status quo of the ruling aristocracy? Furthermore, why do you think that there won’t be people in a socialist/communist model saying, “screw them.”? Particularly when there have been a large number of communist/socialist nations that have openly said, “screw them!”
1. Some people put more in, they get more out; in a society which has not yet developed a fully communist system of production ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", and nothing else) that's simply the natural way to arrange things.1. What moral justification is there for their (the inequalities) existence in this transition period?
2. Why do the inequalities exist in the first place?
3. What makes their existence inherently immoral?
I don't quite understand what you're asking here; you're asking why we should "begrudge" those who work harder or better than others? Did I suggest that they should?For instance, I know full well that I am not exerting my full potential in my career, despite the road of success I happen to be on (PhD student, federal employee). I have reached a happy point, with happy goals. My father and my mother are the same way. They could achieve more, they could take on greater roles, but choose not to because they are content. Most of my friends are the same way. Who are we to begrudge a group of people within our society who do work to their full potential and end up raking in lots of money? Who are we to begrudge them to the point where we somehow arrive at the conclusion that we are actually equal when it comes to our labor and importance/impact on society? Again, how do you gage a person’s skills, or a person’s effort? How do you avoid people taking advantage of your system when it is plainly evident that the vast majority of people have no desire to work their guts out? And isn’t socialism and communism supposed to deter people from working their guts out anyway? Doesn’t Marx profess that the road of communism is a road of comfort, with easier labor at less hours per day? Isn’t it supposed to lead to an easier life as a whole? Doesn’t this necessarily imply that if everyone centers around the socialist group think that the people who are the most productive in society will no longer exert the same level of effort? And what makes you think others will pull up the slack given that they are now just as equal as those who were once working their guts out?
Well, first I would remind you that this is "Ask a Red", not "Argue With a Red", so I hope you'll forgive me if I merely lay out the Marxist perspective on this issue, rather than trying to contest you blow for blow.Why do the workers get to decide what is reasonable? And how is that not authoritarian? What happens when what the workers decide to be reasonable completely bends the “work versus reward” paradigm and engineers and doctors unilaterally decide that the work involved in being an engineer or a doctor isn’t worth the reward granted to them by the less skilled, less educated workers? Do you believe this is possible? Is this not a looming negative impact with your model? Don’t invisible hand markets already take this into account, and don’t they exist for very valid reasons? I can never envision a society that is truly equal across the breadth of society where people willingly choose to endeavor into these fields at a rate that satisfies societal demand when much easier mutually exclusive alternatives to labor exist, unless society affords these professions additional economic benefits (which, at that point, don’t we defeat the purpose of implementing the social/communist model anyway). Life, forever and always, with every human being, is about work versus reward. It revolves around every decision we make. All human beings will always favor reward over work. And the only people who will pursue these careers will be people who find real, selfish enjoyment, in performing this line of work. People who love and are fascinated by physiology and medicine will become doctors. People fascinated with math, physics, and mechanics will become engineers. If the economic impulse is removed then many people who currently pursue these labor intensive, but reward heavy jobs, will not pursue these fields because they will never view the work as being worth the reward. In short, you will never be able to fulfill the real demand that society requires.
Traitorfish said:Therefore, the reclamation of free labour must be a reclamation of social labour, which means that the means of production must not simply be re-appropriated, but socialised, which is to say, must be placed under the control of the community, dissolving capitalist social relations and thus preventing the restoration of the capitalist class.
I don't feel particularly obliged to respond in detail to an unsolicited polemic in an "Ask A..." thread, but it may be worth clearing up the Marxist conception of society, at least for those less hidebound in their conception of humanity as a pack of Robinson Cruesoes obliged, against their will, to inhabit the same planet.
Marxism, as a materialist theory of society, holds that material conditions dictate the existence of living creatures. As humans are uniquely capable of remaking their material conditions, they are thus uniquely capable of remaking their existence, and so the existence of human beings in any given society is determined by how they produce and reproduce their environment. However, human labour is, in practice, a social affair; every incident of human labour embodies the previously expended labour which enables it, while this labour will itself go on to, at least in part, enable further labours. This means that the form of production and reproduction is a social form, that production is a system of social relations, which in class society are expressed in the dominant property forms of a given social formation. That capitalist social relations mystify this, by throwing up individualising property forms which atomise human beings and alienate them from the social experience of their labour (the source of Alassius' confident Thatcher-paraphrasing), does not make it any less the case.
Communism, therefore, proposes the abolition of property, and with it the demystification of social relations; the re-purposing of production not for exchange on the market, but directly for use. That doesn't mean that all production has to be centrally directed- lord no!- but that all production is conducted in reference to those who enable it, and those who it further enables. A more complex affair to day than in Marx's, no doubt, but if there is one thing that has not only kept pace with but actually surpassed the increasing complexity (and therefore increasingly social form!) of production, it is communicatory and coordinatory technology, as demonstrated by the simple fact that a huge amount of complex production can be coordinated within capitalism, with only a relatively small amount of what is produced ever actually having to be plopped down on a shelf in the hope that somebody turns up to buy it.
If you have any more rants (and you scrape back a few points for admitting as much, I'll give you that), please start a new thread.
Edit: Also, that last little bit about "power" is just odd. I'm really not sure what strawMarx is being referred to; Marx explicitly deals with the distinction between state power and class power in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, among other documents, so the pearls of wisdom offered here would not exactly surprise him. Somehow, I can't help but feel that Alassius learned everything he knows about Marxism from a discussion with some CPGB-ML creep.
Well, we do try.This exemplifies what is wrong about Marxism. You guys are superb at throwing a truckload of big words into grammatically correct sentences...
Then allow me to try. I honestly do want to, if only people are willing to actually engage in a sensible and mutually respectful exchange of questions and answers, rather than trying to hijack threads as a platform for their own unfocused anti-Marxist exposition....but that is the extent of your offer. You don't try very hard to give practical answers.
Short answer, the dissolution of social relations which generate a mystifying ideological superstructure, i.e. capitalism. A decent treatment of capitalist "mystification" can be found in this video: part 1 part 2Exactly what does it mean by "demystification of social relations"?
I'm going to ask here, how complex an answer are you wanting to this? It could be anything from a multiple-volume series of books, to the simple word "revolution", depending on the level of detail you're interested in.How do you implement it?
"Better" in what sense? Democratising production is an emancipatory goal, and socialising it an egalitarian one, both of which seem fairly clear, so I'm not sure what you're asking beyond this.And how does it make everyone's life better?
Democratically, through councils, delegation, and so forth. If you're asking for a hypothetical model, then the most complete one which I could point you to would be parecon, which, although imperfect (it lacks a properly Marxian understanding of production, for a start), is at least a decent illustration of the sort of thing that we're after.How do you mean by "conducted in reference to those who enable it"? That everyone would have a say? Which was exactly what my post was about. It doesn't have to be centrally directed? Sure. But who directs it? The "society"? In what ways can you organise production, socially or not, without making some people more powerful than others?
I don't care. This is "Ask a Red", not "Ask an Alassius". Start a new thread, if that's what you're after.My post was exactly about why that isn't possible.
You don't "build" communism, at least if you're approaching it with anything regarding a coherent understanding of Marxist thought. Stalinists try to, and some of the more dim-witted Trotskyists think that they should be allowed to have a go, but I honestly don't consider myself to be much of a muchness with them. My understanding of revolution is organic, rather than mechanical; a process of social reconstitution in which new social relations are generated, rather than an episode of political reconstitution after which new social relations are constructed.Your "clearing up" steered clear off explaining how to do it, being merely satisfied with "it should be like that". What the paradise should look like was never a hard question. How to build it was. The lack of understanding of the latter was the reason none has been built.
Maybe? I don't know, I'm not clairvoyant.Your faith in "communicatory and coordinatory technology" is no more than an extension of Marx's faith in mechanisation replacing human labour. That happened in some cases, but our economy still relies on gigantic factories in China that employ, literally, a quarter of a million people each. Same with technology in management. Computers unfortunately do not think. Everything a computer does is because a programmer told it, in more precise terms than laws, what to do. A computer does not have insight. It doesn't understand the semantics or implications of its instructions. In other words, it cannot replace human thinking. You still need humans to make decisions. Which brings us back to the question: who will make these decisions? Does making decisions make them more powerful? Can they abuse that power?
I don't believe that he did; utopian blueprints were really not his speciality. The entire basis of historical materialism denies their validity, and he spent most of his time working on either contemporary issues or on fundamental theory to invest a lot of time wrestling with the ins-and-outs of long term social organisation.Or, perhaps you could be so kind as to point out where exactly Marx addressed unequal power in the "classless" society? I'm not referring to something he said. I'm referring to the utter lack of consideration of that problem.
Same thing, in practice. One Stalinoid is much like another.Regrettably I did not have the honour to meet anyone in CPGB-ML. My knowledge of communism came from a decade of school education in a country where Marxism was still a mandatory part of the curriculum, my own readings, as well as the gracious gentlemen on this board including you. I've yet to see a satisfactory answer. Would you enlighten me?
There is no such magical entity as a "community", or "society". There are only groups of people: an individual is a group of one, and the "society" is the group of everyone. Equally, there is no such thing as a "collective self-interest of the workers". There is only a set of separate interests of each individual worker. These interests sometimes overlap, giving the illusion of a single, collective will, but it is by no means guaranteed to be a consensus.
The difference between the group of everyone and the "society" in the Marxist usage, is that you cannot expect everyone to participate in "regulat[ing] the general production", because different people want different things. As long as this difference exists, it is tremendously difficult to get everyone agreeing on anything - think about what kind of debates it would involve to decide which cars to make, or what kind of power plants to build, or who to have a holiday in Cyprus, or who to clean the toilet. The number of decisions you can make in a given day is inversely proportional to the size of the group. It is not practical to run a referendum for every day-to-day issue.
In other words, the basic goal of communism - socialisation of production - simply cannot be done in its literal sense.
What can be done is to delegate control to a (much) smaller group of people, who will have the power to arbitrate in case of disagreement. When you say "socialising", you don't mean transferring control of capital from capitalists to everyone. You mean transferring control to some other group who would supposedly represent the people.
But what makes a capitalist a capitalist? By owning capital. So when you give all capital to the Vanguard Party, the Party stops being representatives of the people, and becomes the new capitalist class instead. Marxism began by assuming communists "have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole". It is precisely this confusion between the people and the elites that made communism fatally vulnerable to the rise of totalitarianism.
Of course, delegation can work. Liberal democracy makes plenty uses of representatives. But liberal democracy does not assume the representatives have "over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march".
If you ask an average voter, he will likely tell you that his representatives are the daftest people he knows.
The "liberal" in liberal democracy originated from the belief that "the individual is sovereign", that "government even in its best state is but a necessary evil".
It was because of this mistrust that strenuous restrictions were placed on the representatives to prevent abuse. Most famously, the American Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech, freedom of body, private property, due process, and other rights, by saying "Congress shall make no law" with regard to those rights.
Of these restrictions the protection of private property is the most essential. What good is habeas corpus if you cannot support yourself, when the single group in control of capital does not want you to be employed? How do you exercise freedom of speech, if the same group controls all the media? And what would judges do if their relatives' jobs have been threatened?
These are actual ways people's freedom have been abridged in communist states,
even if all those rights were formally guaranteed (Václav Havel, in his essay The Power of the Powerless, has some excellent accounts of how this works). Proclaiming you are all for freedom does not by itself protect freedom. Or equality, for that matter. You have to find a way to prevent people from breaking your system, instead of merely hoping that everyone would magically become nice. That is largely a solved problem in liberal democracies. The solution is balance of power, both within the government, and between the government and the people - hence the need for private property. Even if there is only one government, as long as the different branches inside the government do not want to see any single branch growing too strong, the power of the entire government is limited. Same goes with capitalists. As long as the capitalists compete against each other, none of them will be powerful enough to dictate to everyone. And long before any grows too powerful, we'd have the government stepping in with antitrust lawsuits, etc.
Here is the same issue as above. The reason Marx gave for a violent revolution was that as long as the bourgeoisie hold power, they would never willingly give it up - as if they have a single will - so any amount of progressive reforms must be for the purpose of preserving the existed order of things. And given that he predicted capitalism to become increasingly monopolistic, commercial crises to become more frequent and more devastating, preserving that isn't going to help much (notice the flawed reasoning here?). Hence, power must be given to a new, better class in order to create a thoroughly different organisation of society.
But power does not belong to classes. It belongs to groups of people, the latter being amorphous and hard to define or demarcate. Essentially, power is the ability to influence other people to do something they would not do otherwise. When you destroy the class that holds power, this ability to influence is not automatically transferred to the entirety of the other class. Marx incorrectly thought that private property was the cause of power. A bourgeois has more power than a proletarian because the former has control of means of production. If the latter wants to eat, he has to accept whatever work the bourgeois demands him to do, instead of doing the kind of work that he'd like to - a phenomenon Marx called alienation, the cure of which would equalise power. But ownership of private property is far from the only source of power. A father has power over his children because he can punish them. A religious leader has power over his flock because they believe in him. A government regulator has power over a company even if he doesn't own it. An extortionist has power over his victim. More relevant to communists, a person in charge of managing production and distribution has more power than the workers. A person who can influence who is chosen for those managerial roles has the most power. As the need of management did not disappear with private property, these powers were not abolished but given to the Vanguard Party. And you shouldn't be concerned about the lack of restraint on those powers: you have just gotten something "a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic"!
Short answer, the dissolution of social relations which generate a mystifying ideological superstructure, i.e. capitalism. A decent treatment of capitalist "mystification" can be found in this video: part 1 part 2
I'm going to ask here, how complex an answer are you wanting to this? It could be anything from a multiple-volume series of books, to the simple word "revolution", depending on the level of detail you're interested in.
"Better" in what sense? Democratising production is an emancipatory goal, and socialising it an egalitarian one, both of which seem fairly clear, so I'm not sure what you're asking beyond this.
Democratically, through councils, delegation, and so forth. If you're asking for a hypothetical model, then the most complete one which I could point you to would be parecon, which, although imperfect (it lacks a properly Marxian understanding of production, for a start), is at least a decent illustration of the sort of thing that we're after.
Facilitation board becoming an elite class
Facilitation board members do very important economic work running the economy, and thus one might think they would gradually take over a parecon. However, it is easy to block this from happening, as board members could be required never to handle proposals that pertain to their own region. It is impossible to bribe board members, due to parecon's unique currency.[4] Board members also work in a balanced job complex where they do disempowering tasks, and any Facilitation Board meeting would be transparent to the public.[8]
You don't "build" communism, at least if you're approaching it with anything regarding a coherent understanding of Marxist thought. Stalinists try to, and some of the more dim-witted Trotskyists think that they should be allowed to have a go, but I honestly don't consider myself to be much of a muchness with them. My understanding of revolution is organic, rather than mechanical; a process of social reconstitution in which new social relations are generated, rather than an episode of political reconstitution after which new social relations are constructed.
I don't believe that he did; utopian blueprints were really not his speciality. The entire basis of historical materialism denies their validity, and he spent most of his time working on either contemporary issues or on fundamental theory to invest a lot of time wrestling with the ins-and-outs of long term social organisation.
In regards to the last three points, you seem to be under the impression that Marxism is another form of bourgeois politics, that what we offer is a program to be carried out within the terms of existing society. It isn't. It's a theory of class struggle and of social revolution; we can identify the mechanics, and try as best we can to help move society towards the ends we would like to see, but we can't draw up some enormous blueprint and set about trying to put it together, piece by piece.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
This line of thinking comes from the same manner that produces conclusions like "there are no two animals of the same species, since each is genetically unique." Communists don't disavow the existence of the individual, or the uniqueness of people and their motives. What we do is realize that there is something bigger than the individual. Capitalist defendants - I shouldn't even say that, since capitalism doesn't even operate on the basis of a lack of society, it's really just a personal obsession with the self and lack of interest in anything else (narcissism if I ever saw it) - don't.
Great, so how is one person better at deciding what is best for everyone?
Do we really need to go back through this again? Let's pretend that Traitorfish and I just posted a bunch of links to cooperative enterprises, both past and present, I'll remind you of the cooperative (committee-driven) nature of modern corporations, maybe Azale drops in to remind us of the Argentinian anarcho-syndicalist factories. You call us stalinists, scream "it's wrong!" or outright ignore us, and we're back to where we started again.
Gee that was fun.
No we don't. There you go again, projecting onto us a bunch of USSR-copycat M-L nonsense. And you wonder why we get snippy with you.
Which is why such a system is state capitalism, and not socialism. You stifled your own question.
As I said above, I really do tire of your projectionism. No one here has spoken in favor of a Vanguard Party for any industrialized nation. Continued attempts to strawman in this thread will be regarded as trolling and reported as such.
What is the point of this paragraph?
You know, you'll make a brilliant Trot one day.
In this vein, it may be tempting to put the source of disagreement down to a difference between practically-minded people and ivory tower theorists...
This is a really good read, although it's more suited to anarchism than leftism as a whole: http://infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQI want to start a thread comparing an ideal* communist and ideal capitalist state, and the road to get there.
Can a Red suggest me any links that can fill me in on communism enough to start an unbiased discussion ( in less then ~100 A4 pages of text )?
Anyone who's disenfranchised from the means to what they produce. Anyone who works for a corporation that is at the mercy of top-level decision makers.- Who are the people in the struggling class in modern western europe countries?
Too many to list. A stronger sense of class unity is generally what needs to develop.- What are some actions they have to take, to achieve an ideal communist state?