Successful Communism

[Leoreth]

You didn't answer my question.

 

[Ahovking]

You didn't answer my question.

democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried at our time, Dont think that Democracy is the final form government when we Still have year and years trying new for ideas for Government, i dont think in 2000 year later we would still be using Democracy

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

-Winston Churchill

their will be a time when men look back on democracy and see it as evil as Communisim

Communism isn't a form of government...

 

[Ahovking]

Communism isn't a form of government...

oh im sorry "Communist state"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state

 

[Leoreth]

You still failed to describe what this better way of government should look like.

If you have no idea yourself, what's the point of all that?

 

[Huayna Capac357]

oh im sorry "Communist state"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state

Dictatorship is a form of government. Communism is an economic system. And communism end is anarchy. So...

 

[Ahovking]

You still failed to describe what this better way of government should look like.

If you have no idea yourself, what's the point of all that?

Im saying that democracy is the the best form of Government we have tried at this time. but at some point democracy will be seen like communism in 1000 years time.

 

[Ahovking]

Dictatorship is a form of government. Communism is an economic system. And communism end is anarchy. So...

Communism State is a form of government characterized by single-party rule or dominant-party rule of a communist party and a professed allegiance to a communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state.

Communism is not an economic system because Communism use Socialism

 

[Ajidica]

What are you smoking? 'Communist State' is not a governmental system; and is in fact a contradiction. Communism is a stateless entity because according to Marx government was based on class tensions and when we are all one class there is no more government. What you are talking about is Bolshvism, Marxist-Leninism, or Stalinism. I've never understood the distinctions betweent the three except that Stalinism had more dictatorial overtones and advocated 'communism in one state.'

I'm not the best on the differences between communism and socialism but I believe it is that communism is the abolition of private property while socialism has the industries owned by the workers but a government still exists. Initialy they were the same thing but diverged in the later 19th century with revisionism.

 

[Alassius]

No, I think individuality is an entirely different creature from liberty. Certainly individuality seems to be predicated on some liberties, such as the liberty to hold beliefs. But short of mind control even the most totalitarian regimes cannot obliterate individuality completely, because taking away liberties is one thing but actually being able to stop people from doing anything you don't like is another.

Isn't stopping people from doing things the same as taking away their liberties of doing such things? Correct me if I'm wrong: you seem to be saying, while it is possible to take away a specific liberty, it's not possible to take away the entire individuality, hence they are different. But that doesn't suggest they are entirely unrelated. Perhaps you can compromise individuality by taking a way a number of liberties which constitute it?

There is no way you can quantify and divide individuality like that, so this makes no sense at all.

How about if I tell you to take your innate individuality and sum it with all other persons' then divide the total by the number of people to get your real collectivised individuality? Does that make any sense to you? Well, that's what you're suggesting.

I can tell you now that your understanding of theory seems to suck big time. I don't think there is any way to convince you of anything unless it can be reduced to "this person has one dollar and the other person has two".

Keep in mind I was talking about how the collectivists interpreted individuality. I wouldn't find it surprising that some leftists concurred, seeing that I was speaking in their tongue. I don't necessarily agree with them myself. Freedom of speech from state censorship, for example, is a priceless right that everyone should have, whether you have one dollar or a million dollars. If you can't accept their theories, it means you're to the right of collectivists, which is a good thing

What you're doing here is virtually the same as constructing a strawman. You create your own definition of individuality and collectivism with your own rules about when they mean what, create a web of relations connecting the two and material wealth, put them together in a fashion that appears logical and present the result as a critique of Marxism. I have seen badly-written Leftist essays like that. It's quite ironic that I'm reading something similar coming from the other side.

Now, that's a different accusation from saying "the collectivists were wrong". If you think I was misrepresenting collectivism, would you be so kind as to explain how collectivists justified themselves? And which parts of my reasoning would a collectivist (not you) find disagreeable?

You could've cut all of the above down to the simple statement of the usual critique of Communism - that it aspires for freedom but ends up with a dictatorship. But an aristocrat might have said the same about democracy during the French Terror. It's no criticism of a theory that people have applied it badly. At worst it just indicates that the theory is difficult to apply. I'm not willing to give up on it simply for that reason, though.

Where you fail completely is in coming up with a coherent theoretical critique of the theory.

It's not merely difficult to implement Marxism. There are serious, fatal flaws in Marxism that to this day remain unresolved:

1. Material abundance in Marx's sense has never been achieved;
2. Nobody has found out how to make planning work better than the market;
3. Machinery did not completely replace human labour;
4. Abolishing the need to work has not historically made people willing to work more enthusiastically;
5. Removal of private property ownership did not abolish class.

Marx made opposite assumptions to the above points when he argued for his anarchist paradise. His elaboration on these questions did not go much further than "advanced mode of production must liberate more forces of productions". Yet those aspects were precisely where the Soviet Union differed from his conjectures. Other human struggles, such as religion and culture, were typically described as different manifestations of class struggle by Marx ("history of all hitherto existing society" etc.), and he basically wished them away, because abolition of classes was going to fix everything. These are my arguments against the plausibility of a Marxist utopia. As for other aspects of Marxism, Karl Popper offered excellent criticisms to dialectical and historical materialism, whereas labour theory of value is all but replaced by other theories, such as marginal utility.

The critiques of collectivism is different. Collectivism is certainly not difficult to implement. Critiques against Stalinism are plethoric, and are usually against collectivism rather than Marx's anarchist utopia. F.A. Hayek for instance argued as early as in 1940s that collectivism must always degenerate into totalitarianism. He was right. Plenty of other people, among whom many communists, have rebutted collectivism, yet few came up with ideas to cure it of its innate deficiencies.

Now, to summarise my critique of Marxism, I ask three questions:

1. Whether or not an utopia where everyone lives happily ever after is at all possible, the reasons against which have been given above;

And, assuming the utopia is possible, whether collectivism would still be the means to achieve it:
2. If so, what can be done to ensure the mistakes in Soviet Union would not be repeated;
3. Otherwise, what are other ways to achieve the utopia.

It is my belief that communists have answered none of these three questions satisfactorily. This was the main reason revolutionary Marxism has lost its status as a mainstream ideology. Of course, leftist intellectuals have tried - and Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as well as Marx's own transitional socialism phase, were all answers to the question of what should happen in the absence of material abundance. Others, typically more modern socialists, gave up on the ideas of abundance and anarchy altogether, essentially becoming welfare capitalists. The abandonment of orthodox Marxism is surely not a coincidence.

Freedom of speech is not a policy. Sheesh, you don't even know your own liberal politics

Pray tell, how is freedom of speech not a policy if you can write it down as "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"?

People do tend to be liberal about interpreting words, including yourself, evidently. But here I'm particularly unsympathetic to your complaint. The dictatorship of the proletariat is democratic, but it is also a dictatorship because it's the uncontested rule of the workers. As a capitalist you wouldn't have much if any say in such a society, but as a worker you would. Is that indicative of doublespeak or of some nuance?

Can you tell me who were "capitalists" and who were "workers" during the Great Purge? This argument, which was used by Stalinists, might have worked if the people actually knew they were one of the working class, as opposed to of any combinations of opportunist, capitulationist, revisionist, fractionist, individualist, counter-revolutionary, reactionary, running-dog, renegade, traitor, scab, spy, saboteur, quisling. And that is if you also assume the working class actually had a say. In reality, few people did know. One day you are a perfectly proletarian worker. The next day you have betrayed the revolution, because you said something vaguely unorthodox, or because you sided with the wrong party leader, or because someone found out you have a relative living abroad, or because you stepped on your boss's toe, or simply because you were an intellectual. For all practical purposes, the dictatorship was a dictatorship, and most people had preciously little control over their work, pay, reading, entertainment, food, clothing, housing, travel, don't even think about fancy things like a fair trial. Yet they were told to believe it was a democracy. That is the textbook definition of doublethink. "[T]o be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out". Isn't the very notion of "uncontested rule of the workers" such a carefully constructed lie?

Yeah, and at this rate no one should be surprised that you don't know much.

Apparently, Marxist approaches that are not deterministic have the singular characteristic of being dry and boring, so there really is only the deterministic version, which you can simply knock down by saying "but look at the USSR!"; and that's why Marxism sucks.

That's not what I said. Marx's original theory was deterministic. It was also dry and boring. Being dry and boring has little to do with the validity of a theory. In fact, whether determinism is a sound philosophy doesn't make or break Marxism either. If determinism is valid, because most of Marx's predictions have dramatically failed, something in his induction must have been terribly wrong. If determinism is not valid, the entire historical materialism would be moot. Lenin and later communists used non-determinism to excuse Marx where he was wrong, then carried on to use determinism to claim communism is still inevitable. But you can't have it both ways.

Here's an interesting video about motivation:

The only thing is I don't think the label "purpose-maximisers" makes much sense, since I don't think we can maximise purpose. Purpose-oriented as opposed to profit-oriented would be better.

That's a nice talk. It's essentially what Marx meant when he said people would work spontaneously in a communist society. I think the speaker pointed out a crucial prerequisite: pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. In Marx's world, people are not paid by money, but by practically unlimited goods, so he wasn't entirely wrong in expecting spontaneous work. This is also the basis of claims that if a communist revolution happened in a rich country it would be successful. At least according to Marx, the rich countries of his time, such as England, were but a small step away from material abundance.

It didn't work out in the Soviet Union because there wasn't such an abundance. Scarcity of basic goods can indeed be solved by material incentives, which did not exist in the Soviet Union. No incentives meant people did less mechanical work, and made less basic goods. Less goods meant the creative types weren't doing creative work either, except for those who were a part of the propaganda machine. This was how (I quote Yeekim) "if the People pretend to be working, the Party pretends to be feeding them" came about.

 

[Alassius]

No its not. Its what Marx meant by it. That you can't separate the modern meaning of dictatorship with the Marxist meaning is not my fault. Do you also think that Marx thought that capitalist society had a strange and taboo sexual attraction to physical objects?

Let me be more clear: Marx meant a dictatorship to be a dictatorship. He absolutely meant to be brutal. He wanted a dictatorship against the bourgeosie, and a democracy for the proletariat. Lenin's contribution was to refine that to a dictatorship against those who were told to work, and a democracy for those who told others to work, or "democratic centralism".

No it wasn't, and no, they didn't justify their dictatorship with it. They justified it because of the great peril the socialist movement was cast into.

"Great peril"? Sure, let's not get into how many tanks and nukes Soviet Union had, for now. I'll quote Mao from On The People's Democratic Dictatorship:

"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.

...

The state apparatus, including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument for the oppression of antagonistic classes, it is violence and not "benevolence". "You are not benevolent!" Quite so. We definitely do not apply a policy of benevolence to the reactionaries and towards the reactionary activities of the reactionary classes. Our policy of benevolence is applied only within the ranks of the people, not beyond them to the reactionaries or to the reactionary activities of reactionary classes.

The "reactionaries" were by definition people in the same country, i.e. "those who reacted", not outsider imperialists. Or did you mean reactionarism was the "great peril"? If that's the case, I suggest you spend some time studying the Cultural Revolution, see for yourself who were really in peril, and who weren't. It may also get you some better ideas about who were the "reactionaries" and who were the "people". Their membership didn't quite match the literal meanings of the words.

Actually, it is what Lenin said.

And no, its nothing like the state labor camp system. Either you are wholly ignorant of this phrase, or you're playing stupid to make me look like a Stalinist.

It's exactly like state labour camp system. It's the precise reason for there to be such camps: a place where those who didn't work can be re-educated. How would you deal with someone who is plainly lazy? Or someone who refuses to give up his crops to the collective? Or someone who insists on making shovels at home, instead of making tanks in a factory like you told him to? Do you let them to have the freedom to do what they want, just don't feed them, or do you lock them up and force them to work?

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and explain this. Again.

It is simply a modification of the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" philosophy, by filling in the caveat that one could receive but not contribute. The obvious exception to this rule is those who cannot work by no fault of their own, or really should not be. This includes children, the elderly, and the mentally and physically disabled. If everyone is to receive in kind, they must contribute in kind. Surely you can see why eliminating free riders is required, it is, after all, the main criticism of the Right. And what a vapid criticism it is.

A modification of no less significance than the difference between utopian Marxism and realist Stalinism. You do understand the whole point of having a centralised government was that they couldn't afford "to each according to his need", hence the need for an organ to decide how to distribute "according to his contribution"?

It will have evolved the processes of providing a surplus of demanded and required goods, and produced an educated, liberal populace with a firm grounding in democratic principles. Such a people would accept no less than democracy. Do you think Americans, or Britons, or Frenchmen today would let anything else rule over them?

Do you think this surplus is the same thing as Marx's material abundance? That it is sufficient to make anarchy practical?

I merely made an observation about the causes of those reforms.

At any rate, no one said Marx was an infallible prophet. We know he was wrong about many things.

Good, then we have something in common. It's a start. Now, do you also agree that a Marxist proletarian revolution is no longer possible in the rich world? That's the crap Traitorfish and I were talking about.

There you go again with the strawmen. Its not constructive to your argument to assign such positions to me and then set about destroying them.

There is no reason for you to assume that this "production bureaucracy" would exist, or that every facet of the economy and of life would have to be managed by some all-encompassing government agency. No one is talking about that. You seem to think that all socialists hold the USSR up as the pedestal to which all their movement aspire, and that it was the most perfect expression of socialist and Marxist ideas, or at least the most natural. None of this is true. For all the technical crap you seem to know about Marxism, I shouldn't even have to explain to you why this is so.

Most modern socialists understand the deficiencies of the Soviet system as well as its successes, and accordingly believe that a mixed economy probably works best. Both the market and planning system have their places. This is, at least, the position of every non-Maoist leftist party in the United States.

I can't think of any socialists today who think that socialism means dictatorship. In fact, they explicitly argue that it means democracy.

That an overpowerful bureaucracy existed in every single communist country is no reason to assume they would exist? Can you say it again with a straight face?

These days, roughly speaking, there are two kinds of socialists. One kind believes in state property, or thinks state property is a road that leads to anarchy. The other kind believes that private property and the market are necessary if evil. The two schools are fundamentally against each other. They are not compatible. Nor do they profess to be. You can't lump together socialism and Marxism. Modern social democracy is a variant of capitalism. It is further from Marxism than Stalinism is. For all the contrast in outcome, Stalin faithfully implemented all the actual policies Marx mandated, from collectivisation of property, to state planning of production, to persecute people who did not work, instead of, say, handing out benefits to them. Many of these policies are now opposed by modern socialist, but not because they were deviations from Marxism. They were Marxism. You can spend days talking about communism being an anarchy wouldn't allow a bureaucracy. But a bureaucracy was the only practical policy that communists ever came up with.

Now, if you believe that a mixed economy works the best, you must also believe the following: that private property and the market are indispensable; that some form of unequality is unavoidable, though it can be mitigated; that a successful entrepreneur should be amply rewarded; that commercial crises do not doom capitalism; that anarchism is a nice idea that's never going to work. These are the views of today's mainstream politicians and economists, in both moderate left and right. All of them were explicitly condemned as bourgeois hypocrisy by Marx.

One of us is defending centuries of ostentatious privilege and oppression. And one is defending socialism.

So which socialism were you defending? The capitalist sort, or the Marxist sort?

 

[aelf]

That's a nice talk. It's essentially what Marx meant when he said people would work spontaneously in a communist society. I think the speaker pointed out a crucial prerequisite: pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. In Marx's world, people are not paid by money, but by practically unlimited goods, so he wasn't entirely wrong in expecting spontaneous work. This is also the basis of claims that if a communist revolution happened in a rich country it would be successful. At least according to Marx, the rich countries of his time, such as England, were but a small step away from material abundance.

It didn't work out in the Soviet Union because there wasn't such an abundance. Scarcity of basic goods can indeed be solved by material incentives, which did not exist in the Soviet Union. No incentives meant people did less mechanical work, and made less basic goods. Less goods meant the creative types weren't doing creative work either, except for those who were a part of the propaganda machine. This was how (I quote Yeekim) "if the People pretend to be working, the Party pretends to be feeding them" came about.

I don't want to attempt discussing anything conceptual with you anymore, partly because I'm tired of having to either rehash the same points or explain some intuitively obvious things (like how liberty and individuality are related but distinct and should therefore not be treated as the same question). So I'm just gonna ask one question: Issues about utopia and abundance (which are not that important anyway - I'm sure you can see the distinction between the theory and the end point... or maybe not) aside, isn't the Marxist struggle partly about taking the issue of material needs off the table? That's why workers ask for more compensation, right?

So, again, besides your constant use of the boogeyman in the form of the Soviet Union (even your criticism of dialectical materialism and collectivism, where you're not simply name-dropping, boils down to "Look at the Soviet Union!"), what else can you really say about Marxism?

 

[Camikaze]

Alright, everyone says that Communism and Socialism aren't necessarily always like the regimes of Stalin and Mao. Camikazee's signiture says it, Karalysia pretends to be a Communist Robot. So, when has communism worked in a manner that was unlike Stalin and Mao? When has it worked successfully according to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Just to be clear, I'm not saying by having the Vonnegut quote in my sig that socialism (in the strict sense) does work, but that it is not evil in its nature.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Just to be clear, I'm not saying by having the Vonnegut quote in my sig that socialism (in the strict sense) does work, but that it is not evil in its nature.

Here's my belief THE PEOPLE (Or the majority) of those who support socialism have good intentions. The governments that enact them do not however.

 

[Ajidica]

Umm, you might want to read up on your history. When the swedish govt began to socialize during the Great Depression, it was done as a moderate 'middle way' between communism and capitalism. It was done to prevent a slide into fascism like Germany and Italy were doing and to avoid the political deadlock of France. The Swedish govt had good intentions with the socializing of the country.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Here's an interesting video about motivation:


Link to video.

The only thing is I don't think the label "purpose-maximisers" makes much sense, since I don't think we can maximise purpose. Purpose-oriented as opposed to profit-oriented would be better.

That reminded me of learning in General Psychology last fall that studies show that people (in particular children) tend to overestimate how much of their motivation for doing something comes from the external reward offered for its completion rather than the intrinsic reward of doing the task. Kindergartners generally love to draw (enough that the opportunity to draw is often a reward for doing some other tasks), but if you start to offer them candy as a reward for drawing and then after a while ask them to draw they refuse to do so unless they are rewarded. I believe studies also show that children tend to like vegetables a lot more if they were not told that they had to finish them in order to have dessert.

I also recall hearing about one local court system (I don't remember where) that was having trouble attracting competent public defenders, until they decided not to increase the salaries but to stop paying them at all. It didn't take long before some of the highest price lawyers around started competing with each other to take on these cases pro bono.



Anyone familiar with this forum probably recognizes mods like FfH as superior to most commercially produced computer games.

 

[Archbob]

People just still haven't realized "true" communism is impossible to achieve so continue on their ideals without ever realizing its not possible.

 

[Joecoolyo]

Nothing's impossible.

Though you can say it's very, very, very difficult to achieve "true communism" in today's world.

 

[Love]

Everyone must believe in the same thing for it to work.

 

[Munch]

Everyone must believe in the same thing for it to work.

That would certainly help:

Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering from imperialist oppression.