Can someone please explain Communism to me, and why a person would want to be Communist?
Just do what I did to figure it out, read the Communist Manafesto. Now I understand it well.
I have read the Communist Manifesto, which is why I ask why anyone would want to be a Communist.
Possibly some true Communists will come along and give this a more expanded treatment. But I think Communism has a lot of appeal for an idealistic person. If you truly believed in people’s better nature, you might think it was possible to have “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” without encouraging sloth. And you might think the government could have the power necessary to create this system without becoming corrupt.
The quick and dirty answer is an economic system that eliminates all private property.
It seems attractive on the face of it since it eliminates the “haves and the have-nots” and gets you into a classless society. Since there is no private property everyone shares equally in goods and services.
Unfortunately this ignores some realities that are very hard to overcome. Say you busted your ass through high school and 12 years of medical training to become a doctor. Should the guy who skipped classes and goofed off through high school, skipped college altogether and becomes a ticket collector at the train station be allowed the same priviledges as the doctor?
Some people would say yes…it shouldn’t matter and the doctor does what he or she does because that is what they want to do. Unfortunately that ignores the fact that most people will see the guy goofing off and able to get exactly the same goods and services as the smart one and want to goof off as well.
IANAM but I was immersed in it often enough as a sociology grad student…you don’t mind if I use the term “Marxist” rather than “Communist”, do you? (you are asking theoretical questions and Marxism is the theory)
a) Marxists are materialists. They believe that what “counts” – what is important – is material. In this respect, they are in the same camp as some of the most seriously hand-over-fist cash-grubbing profiteers, and it is important to understand this part FIRST. To hell with the abstractions and idealistic crap, who’s got the gold and the good eats? All else is a bunch of illusory shit that keeps some folks from seeing reality. Got it?
b) Marxists are dialectical materialists. They believe the social system by which ownership and control of material goods is distributed is not some kind of fair and equal system but is a power struggle in process. On one side of that power struggle are the folks whose efforts actually go into the creation of material goods; on the other side of that power struggle are the folks who own “the means of production” – which could be factories, farm land, or anything else that, simply by owning it, makes production of material goods possible. Note here that this distinction assumes that folks who own the means are not the ones doing the labor. Obviously, you could be a farmer on your own farm. The Marxists are not much concerned with such folks; most of the world works more like where a large landowner owns lots and lots of farm land and hires you to pick the vegetables.
c) Marxists ARE idealistic but only about empowering the laboring folks. They want the people who do the work to own the stuff they produce. They do not think it is fair for anyone to own “the means of production” and hire other folks to do the actual work. Actually, really pure Marxists will say they are not “idealistic” about this, they are “realistic” about it, because such a revolution is inevitable: the workers will take control (via revolution) of the means of production away from those who don’t do any actual work and then workers will own AND work (kind of like the small farmers I said they don’t pay much attention to, see above).
d) Because Marxists are not idealistic, questions of power and authority and freedom and responsibility and so on are considered meaningless except infosar as they are derived from questions of who possesses control of the “means of production”. Therefore, questions that might seem important to you – like “exactly how will the working class be organized so as to make its decisions once it collectively owns the means of production? will there be leaders and people in positions of authority? will those folks still work on the farms and in the factories? will they be chosen by the people via popular vote? will laborers still have the right to say ‘up yours’ to their elected leaders, and if so under what circumstances?” – are not important to them. If the laborers own the means of production, the laborers as a class will run the society and don’t give me a bunch of that complex abstract crap about social structure and participation, ownership is ownership, end of story, got it?
… may I amend with a few questions of my own?
Can anyone explain the motivation for doing a better job than those around you, or for being innovative, under Communism?
Did it fail in the Soviet Union because self-motivation to do the aforementioned for the good of the country just wasn’t good enough for people?
Will it wither away in Cuba when Castro dies? And what is its future in China and North Korea?
You can hardly still call China a Communist country, so that answers that question…
I mentioned something to this effect in my post as well (why spend years working to become a doctor when you can goof off from day 1 and still enjoy the same benefits).
None of these places practices true communism. They have differing brands of socialism. As you mentioned, under true communism there is little motivation for hard work or innovation and these countries realized that as well. All of the socialist countries definitely have differing groups of have and have-nots (mostly have-nots) and are a helluva long way from a classless society.
China, of course, is embarking on inventing something new. A socialist society (government) with a capitalist economy. Oil and water? Maybe. Chances are capitalism will slowly overtake China…hopefully it will be a gradual and painless effort and not short and violent.
About the only ‘successful’ form of communism I’ve ever seen are the Israeli kibbutz system (and they are fading away). Even it doesn’t meet the pure ideal but I think it’s the closest anyone has ever come and actually making a communist system it work. However, these sorts of systems only tend to work with relatively small groups of like minded people. They fall aprat when translated into the much more diverse and larger populations.
Wouldn’t true communism be practiced in families-everyone pitching in and doing their fair share? Of course, not ALL families do this…
Here’s a good explanation I heard from that Russian comedian when he was on Night Court.
Imagine you are in the middle of Milwaukee. No matter where you go you are still in the middle of Milwaukee. You could drive 1,000 miles in any direction and you would still be in the middle of Milwaukee.
To which of course Bull Shannon replied “Arrrrrrggggghhhh!”
Marc
Well, I’ve known four ex-Soviets who were all happy to come here, and I’ve known some Communists who rally that Real Communism has never been tried, but I’e had an earful about what it was like to live in the post-Stalin USSR and no one had anything good to say about it.
I’ve always felt that the irony of Marxist-style communism is that it is unstable and degenerates into “private” ownership, and even went into some details on that in another thread.
Basically, I can understand the desire to remove classes; what I don’t understand, at all, is how Communism achieves this (or how anything could achieve that). There is always a class of people with power: the government. They effectively control production, distribution, etc.
Ahunter, some interesting comments. I’ve always felt that Communists were strict materialists… moreso than the Capitalists they defile.
I know there are a few Communists here on the board, so we’ll see.
Marc, that is exactly what the Soviets I knew mentioned: the way everything was essentially the same no matter where they went, with the possible exception of the Baltic States.
Yup. Most notably human nature. You could easily program a squad of androids to practice communism, and (asuming they don’t develop bugs and rebel), it’d work perfectly.
But humans? Pfffffffft. It all falls apart the moment one guy wonders, “Why can’t I have more than my neighbor?”
Think about a family. Everyone contributes in some way and everyone gets taken care of. You contribute because you love your family members and you know that if everyone works hard then everyone benefits.
I could see why some people would want to extend this to a larger group. Communes and kibbutzes are examples. In some ways, so are churches.
The problem seems to be when force is used to make people act a certain way.
Chapter 4 of Acts of the Apostles
Dooood…you quoted…Yakov Shmirnov!!!
AAAAAHHHH!!!
Wow, AHunter3, what a great explaination of Marxism!
I think the thing to remember about socialism, communism, and marxism is when and where they were dreamed up. These systems were invented in the developed nations, in the 19th century. The most developed nations of that time, anyway. No social safty net, other then the woefully inadaqute one provided by churchs and other pvt charities. An enormous disparity between rich and poor. Enormous, hopeless suffering and privation among the poor. Lives of ease and plenty for the rich. And perhaps a poor understanding of (or refusal to accept the facts about) human nature? IMO, the development of these theories about how to make the world better were inevitable.
AHunter3 wrote:
Wilhelm Reich – whom I am convinced was a crackpot in most respects – wrote a book called The Mass Psychology of Fascism which contained a few ideas that seemed slightly less crack-pottish than his weird theories about orgone energy and orgastic potency.
One of his contentions was that the rise to power of Stalin after the Communist revolution in Russia was every bit as “inevitable” as the Communist revolution in the first place. He reasoned that the people who currently own the means of production (the “Bourgeoise”) got to their positions of power by rising up from among the ranks of the commoners (the “Proletariat”). If the current people who are in charge are kicked out of their positions of power, we won’t suddenly get peace and equality and to-each-according-to-his-need and all those other nice things that are supposed to happen when the Proletariat overthrows the Bourgeoise – instead, we will simply get a new Bourgeoise. If the government now “owns” all the land and capital, the people with the most authority in the government will be the new Bourgeoise. Stalin, who connived his way onto the top of the heap, became the Bourgeoisiest Bourgeoise of them all. And if Stalin hadn’t done it, so reasoned Reich, somebody else would have.
Well, I believe that many economists (primapily Hayek and Von Mises) have argued that one of the primary benefits of a free market is the ability to disseminate a vast quantity of information to those that want it, through prices. Following from this, it is argued that it is impossible to effectively control an economy without this information. I’m not well-versed on the details of this theory, but it would preclude communism from working even without human nature coming into play.
Philosophocles wrote:
You’re talking about verses 32, 34, and 35, right?
Disturbingly, in the beginning of Acts chapter 5, God strikes a man dead because he doesn’t donate all of his money to the apostles’ cult.