Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?
- Thread starter Joij21
- Start date
aelf
Ashen One
Something evident since the second post in this thread.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Most Western countries have had governments which were at least partly comprised of Marxists have successfully participated in democratic governments at a regional or national level in much of Asia and South America. Marxists lead a successful transition to democracy in Nepal, and governed the country for most of its post-transition period. The current president and prime minister of Nepal are both members of the Communist Party, having traded the office back and forth with the liberal Nepali Congress over that period.
The over-representation of authoritarian strongmen among "Marxist" regimes is not a character of Marxism so much as it is of post-colonial regimes in general, and reflects the popularity of Marxism-Leninism as a political program of anti-colonial political movements in the mid-to-late twentieth century. There are enough examples of non-Marxist authoritarian regimes in post-colonial countries- in Algeria, in Iraq, in Burma, in Iran- to bring this identification with Marxism and authoritarianism into pretty serious question.
The over-representation of authoritarian governments in post-colonial regimes is a reflection of the tendency for non-authoritarian regimes to be susceptible to Western interference, as in Chile, Indonesia or Iraq. "Kill your enemies before they kill you" was a lesson well-learned by many would-be anti-colonial revolutionaries studying at the feet of colonial overlords. You have cited China as an example of Marxist authoritarianism, but the immediate predecessor to the CCP was another authoritarian anti-colonial revolutionary government, and arguably one that was, in terms of blundering self-interest and of sheer political violence against political enemies, considerably worse than the Communists, which itself succeeded a clique of military warlords who were even worse, because China's brief experiments with democracy were brought to a close by Western-backed military strongmen also as soon as they had begun. This is not to defend authoritarian post-colonial regimes, but to clarify that they are historically so prevalent because they are only kind of post-colonial regimes which Western imperialist powers, in their fecklessly grasping short-sightedness, permitted to exist.
Last edited:
I don't disagree with how you have broadened the scope of authoritarian rule. I would though attribute it more to the human tendency to seek individual power and riches at the expense of others when opportunity arises. But that is a quibble. 
Many systems seem to deliver reasonable outcomes if there's a certain threshold of both Rule of Law and good governance ahead of time. At least, after the human cost of creating that system in the first place. Of course, once you have good governance, fine-tuning becomes easier and it's fine-tuning that does the majority of heavy lifting.
Lexicus
Deity
I don't disagree with how you have broadened the scope of authoritarian rule. I would though attribute it more to the human tendency to seek individual power and riches at the expense of others when opportunity arises. But that is a quibble.
"From such beginning of governments, what could be expected but a continued system of war and extortion?"
-Thomas Paine
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
"Bad things happen because people are bad" is a theological explanation, not an historical one.I don't disagree with how you have broadened the scope of authoritarian rule. I would though attribute it more to the human tendency to seek individual power and riches at the expense of others when opportunity arises. But that is a quibble.
A system that taps people's natural tendency to selfishness, and makes it a force for net improvement, might have a long-term advantage. It might be more humane than forcing people to conform against their instincts.
Last edited:
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
I don't see what's inhumane about preventing people from hurting or exploiting others?
There's nothing saying that the choice is completely binary and all-or-none, mind. But you need to allow for human instincts. And if you do it wisely, you can create an aggregate benefit.
Or just a recognition that what we know intellectually can be waylaid by humans' natural tendencies. Much of individual and human history has been determined by both the good and not so good aspects of human beings. Writing history is mostly an intellectual exercise, but the actual making of the events is often not.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Selfishness is not the same thing as self-interest. We can assume that humans are naturally self-interested; that they are naturally selfish requires some sort of proof. Any society taps peoples natural tendency to self-interest, that is why we live in societies, because of the concrete benefits provided by associating with other humans, but a society based on universal selfishness has no clearer historical precedent than a society based on universal altruism.
Writing history is the exercise of explaining historical events, to which broad generalisations at human nature, carried out at several degrees of abstraction from everyday live, does not readily contribute. "Mao was a wicked man" might be a truthful statement, but the understanding it provides of us revolutionary China is precisely zero.
I'm honestly not sure why you wrote this. There is no one forwarding that the society should be based on selfishness; I only forwarded that being able to turn selfishness into aggregate benefit would be a positive. As to arguing about what 'selfishness' means, honestly I'm not that interested. It has a colloquial meaning that's sufficient for my comment.
I disagree. When "great leaders" appear in history and create change, their individual personality and its characteristics are part of their mark on the history that is being created. (Do we need to look further than Trump?). Certainly you can list the events of particular historical times an draw some conclusions, but to actually understand many of the whats and whys you need to understand the personalities at work. Can one actually get a handle of European history from 1795-1815 without understanding What kind of person Napoleon was? To reduce Mao to "he was evil" is to do both him and history a disservice. My whole point is that much of what happens in the world is driven by the fundamentals of human nature as individuals act on them.
Reading Piketty's Capital, it's occuring to me that right-wing-classical and far-left/marxist economists have an odd relationship. Both Marx and Piketty are building on the rigid, mechanistic views of the likes of classical economists like Ricardo and Solow on how economies operate, viewing technological development as exogenous and disregarding social, legal and political factors. This, while condemning market economies as inherently dehumanizing (maybe they wouldn't feel that if they weren't using such an approach). You might forgive Marx for this mindset but there's really no excuse for contemporary economists for blithely ignoring a whole branch of economics (instutional economics) when discussing prosperity at society level. And from what I can tell many sociologists and historians seem to be suffering from the same blind spot.
An article I read earlier today also quoted Mr. Paine: "Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness." Such quotes can be fun but I think that they have a tendency to end discussions rather than further them.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
In that case I think socialism is the best way to turn selfishness into a net positive. In imperial China there was a saying that the state “kept merchants at arms’ length, but in a vice grip.” The view was that people who became merchants probably weren’t the people you wanted gaining power. At the same time, they were a useful tool for moving goods where they needed to go and for creating additional revenue for the state. Still, you couldn’t just let them go and do their own thing. The balance was weighing their selfishness against their social utility.
In this sense capitalism is based on selfishness, as it is based in the selfish aggregation of wealth by unleashed merchants, and their corresponding monopolization of all political power. The “aggregate benefits” of capitalism are actually benefits of industrialization. I think any system that truly subjugated those merchants to the common good would have to be socialism.
Certainly Chinese/foreign merchants were a necessity for the ruling classes to support their luxurious lifestyles and those merchants needed enough freedom to be efficient and reliable. In that system, the selfishness of the ruling class is also evident. NK is a good example of an elite group that controls trade such that only a few get the benefit. In NK, the monopolization of power has led to control of trade such that only a few benefit. If the goal is wide spread prosperity, you have to have a system that is flexible enough to allow the selfishness of capitalism to keep innovation active and making QoL progress while at the same time minimizing the political power of capital. In addition, you need a government focus on the QoL values that benefit most of the people. That is difficult. Hell, they both are. Furthermore, you have to fit these two pieces into a larger puzzle that includes economic issues like jobs, investments, growth, and property rights.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I thought, per your own post, that selfishness is not of capitalism, but of humanity per se.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
The colloquial meaning of "selfishness" is its literal meaning: an excessive self-interest and reduced concern for others. While all human beings exhibit selfish behaviours at some point, it's a much stronger claim that all human beings are fundamentally selfish. They aren't, and this is in part precisely because they are self-interested, and they recognise that selfishness is against their self-interest because it erodes trust and obstruct opportunities for mutual benefit. Both capitalism and socialism each propose, in their own way, to maximise self-interest to the exclusion of selfishness.
The claim to which I was responding was that authoritarian governments are the product of "the human tendency to seek individual power and riches at the expense of others when opportunity arises". I contested that this is not sufficient to explain the emergence of authoritarian governments, that it doesn't tell us anything about the historical conditions which give rise to authoritarian governments. I don't really understand how the comments you make above are a response to that objection.
Similar threads
