If this is against human nature, how has the Christian monastic tradition survived? Even the Jewish Torah says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I don’t think communism as such is doomed to failure. Socializing or collectivizing all industries at once on an imperial scale & expecting central offices to manage it all was bound to hit snags. And the central power structure was exploitable by power-mad terrorists (in the classic sense, not the modern “stateless militant” connotation)–but power-mad terrorists have succeeded in capitalist régimes as well, viz. the Argentine Dirty War, Pinochet in Chile, Papa Doc in Haiti, & Hitler in Europe. Heck, the vigilantes who ended Reconstruction in this country were terrorists. It’s not like only the left produces them.
I think there is a natural tendency to have an “in” category, whether it’s yourself, your household, your abbey, or your nation-state, & an “out” category. In the “in,” one may be more communist. In the “out,” the science of markets & the calculus of hostile force both tend to apply, with less communitarian tendency.
But socialism & redistribution can work, with the right system & ethical mores. Well, as a pessimistic quasi-Malthusian, I expect they’ll eventually run into to ecological limits, but no more so than decentralized “free” capitalism, which due to its chaotic nature often has no tools to deal with those realities.
Because only a very small number of people choose to enter monasteries, and the ones who do, do so of their own free will and not because they’re coerced. I don’t think that’s a good example.
I was going to denounce you as a foolish libertarian individualist, but you do at least acknowledge that radical communitarianism works where “consensual.”
So, yeah, you may have a point. But I think ultimately society needs the iron hand of law in the service of wisdom, else people race toward foolishness.
The telling thing about the Khmer Rouge may be that they were a rural/regional movement, based in the outlying provinces. (I thought they were based in the western hills, but that may just be whither they retreated when the Vietnamese ran them out.) They struck out against the “cultured elites” of Phnom Penh. Classic regional/tribal resentment, & very familiar–exploited by a man who sought to be a god & national founder.
What’s a redistributionist system of the right? Are you counting the kleptocratic policies of the Nazis as “redistributionist”?
I don’t think a government should refuse to govern responsibly for fear of those of its people who disagree (or, more precisely, those favor their own interests over those of the state) leaving. But your other points are well taken.
This is substantially a matter of bad practices, not a flaw of collectivism per se.
Amazing how you manage to define these problems in a way to tar Keynesianism at the same time. Well, you’re just wrong.
Market forces are enormously inefficient, a mess of trial & error, because with no central research agency, it’s just a bunch of special interests staggering about in the dark. So don’t pretend that this is efficient. Anyone who’s seen a business fail & its proprietor give up in hopelessness knows that there are always inefficiencies. But yes, with an arbitrary central planner things will be bad. That’s why we need not only Marx’s ideals (means of production in hands of the workers) but Bastiat’s warning about using the government to serve one special interest over another.
Given a functional egalitarian welfare state, non-biased (that is, general) redistribution can actually help business by feeding consumption.
What is an “average capitalist worker”? Capitalists derive their power from held wealth: land, stocks, bonds; in their purest form they are rentiers. Workers work for capitalists unless they are working for themselves as owner-proprietors.
Which sounds like a reason for a(n at least partial) command economy more than a reason for a free market. I’ve seen what happens when trash hauling is privatized. I’ll take a mixed economy.
IIRC, they were originally based in the eastern jungles of the country, close to the action in Vietnam. As Spalding Gray liked to point out, living out there and eating bugs and roots for a decade or so had to have taken a toll on their minds.
OK, foolsguinea, this is just bad. At least have some good arguements. I like taking apart people’s arguments, but this is a painful public service this time.
Eh? This statement doesn’t make much sense. Either people have the mroal right to leave for whatever reason they choose, or they do not have the right to leave and are effectively slaves fo the regime. There are no other practical choices.
Yes. Yes it was. The essential flaw of all Communist economics was a total lack of information, because the Communists systematically destroyed it out of fear of becoming prodit-mongers. That the economic direction they forced everyone to adhere to was a really bad is a salient point, but they themselves destroyed the possibility of knowing what was a good choice. Yes, they choise a particularly bad option, but it was their own fault that they didn’t know the difference. This is inherent in all Communist regimes, because they maintain control by destroying all sources of information and substituting top-down 9and usually made-up) information fo their own. Thus, when they make decisions, it is always in an echo chamber where all sources of information are echoes of their own opinions.
Blinks. Amazing arguments. :rolleyes:
Giood Lord, you’ve just described a massive strength of free markets as a weakness (a a sad tactic Marx used frequently). If the small business fails, it’s because the owner didn’t do a good job or creating its business, in at least oen critical area. Efficiency that is, actual efficiency and not the completely mythical concept you seem to have some up with out of nowhere) says that it should fail.
Moreover, governments cannot but serve one special interest over another. That is always and everywhere the purpose of government. It may at some times be done for a relatively good reason, or with a relatively good principle at heart, but the essence of government is favoring certain segenets and not others.
I… I don’t even know where to begin with describing how utterly false this statement is. The only thing I can even think of to say is that you clearly do not understand consumption. At all. All you are talking about is favoring some consumption and some business at the expense of free choices and other businesses.
If you had even the slightest interest in paying attention, you would have understood it blatantly obviously “workers in a capitalist system”. While capitalism is not totally required for a free market, it is thus far the best form of capital-accumulation we’ve discovered. it requires some legal protectyions, but it allows large and efficient enterprises which can serve regional, national, and global markets.
This helps non-capitalists and three obvious ways. First, it makes more, better quality, and cheaper goods available on a mass-market basis. Witness how even in the early free markets of American and Britain that custom manufacturing was common). Land transportation was horribly expensive, so markets were limtied to the local area. GFoods were expensive, although the quality was somewhat better than the early manufacturing days. Industrialization was absolutely built on a foundation of capitalism.
Second, it permits investments by relatively poor people. People can pool their money for better returns. Indeed, because of this markets may not be so efficient there is possibly no way to beat it. Gone are the days when simply having wealth nearly guarranteed continued growth.
Third, it permits a wide array of high-paying jobs, and therefore lots of relative mobility. This is the key point you missed. Capitlists do not have power, per se. They have wealth, but in a free democracy the two can’t be readily exchanged. At times, welath may allow you to erratically influence the political process, or power allow you to get wealth. Still, these methods are unreliable and often risky. Capitalists are ultimately subject to more relative restrictions on their behavior than the wealthy at any earlier era.
I don’t know where you live, but trash hauling is privitized in most of the country. I’ve certainly never seen any particular worsening of service for it. But if you have problems, then is sounds like you’ve just identified a golden opportunity to start a business yourself. Of course, if you con’t actually do better, then perhaps your service. The standard of free markets is always the next-best alternative. Socialists, Communists, and other utopian fools never understood this. They always compared it to the perfect little dreamland they obsessed over, and naturally got the nightmare instead.
The reality could never be as good as the dream, and they were certain the dream could be real, and real now. What they didn’t see was that their obsession with cotrol meant that every change always resulted in massive unintended consequences. And eventually, the only way to keep the dream was to paper over things by imprisoning whole nations and lieing constantly and everywhere. In fact, Communists are not automatically Totalitarian. But from the very first moment, however they achieved power, the onyl way to keep it was to constantly continue oppression. It is notable that the while the Russian-post-Stalin era wasn’t quite as cruel as Evil Uncle Joe, it did not significantly alter his polcies: it just reduced them. When it finally did reduce them, the entire structure was revealed as a sham and collapsed. The governemnt and the limited economy literally could not function without oppression.
I think putting the means of production in the hands of the workers is fine. There are plenty of collectivized companies and some of them actually do quite well. But I don’t think all means of production should be collectivized and run by the government.
The problems you describe with special interest in a capitalist society are the same or worse in a communist society. What you are doing in both cases is distorting the market (IOW distorting the value of products and the labor used to produce them) based on something other than how people actually value them.
Yes, but at least workers get to pick what careers they want to pursue based on their aptitudes and interests.
Oh, man, where do I start? With the OP, I suppose.
The one thing those documentaries got right is that places like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Albania under Hoxha, and North Korea today are horrifically repressive regimes that nobody deserves to live under. The one thing they got wrong is that these systems were somehow socialism or communism.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly state that the emancipation of the working class (i.e. the overthrow of capitalism) must be the act of the working class itself. The one real example of that was Russia in 1917; the workers had organized themselves into councils that were effectively running things in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the Bolsheviks fought for political leadership in the soviets and won the argument for the necessity of a revolution. What happened under Stalin, as an aside, has nothing to do with the practical implementation of communist theory and everything to do with the political and economic situation Russia found itself in as a result of the isolation of the revolution.
In contrast, every other country that has been pointed to as an example of socialism or communism lacks that one vital element. Everyplace else, the political and social changes have been imposed from above by a small party in the name of the working class. That’s not communism. Or socialism.
That’s like saying that Ice Cream as detailed in documents of the 1600s is made by hand churning a crank, and thus ice cream made with modern equipment isn’t Ice Cream. I’m sorry but the process used to turn a nation into a Communist state isn’t the answer to the question of whether it is or isn’t a Communist state. If it’s a nation with a centralized government and a Socialist economy, then it’s a Communist state, regardless of how it got there.
To torture that metaphor only slightly, I’m not talking about the method, I’m talking about the ingredients. Quiescently frozen or hand-cranked, you don’t get ice cream if you don’t use cream, sugar, and flavoring.
Only Russia had an organized, fighting working class that was ready, willing, and able to establish and exercise its political dominance - the indispensable element in building a communist society. All other countries labeled communist or socialist lacked it. Without it, there can be no communist society.
At the root, Communism fails because it supresses markets. Markets function as information transmission points-buyers transmit their expectations (as to price and quality) to the sellers/producers, who alter their production to serve the demand. Communism replaces this information system with “central planning”-which means that some political hack, who (most likeley) has no clue as to the implications of his incompetence, decides on what will be produced.
That is why the old Soviet Union was famous for making craploads of unwearable shoes. lousy apartment buildings, and junky cars.
What is so magical about the “working class” that you exalt them with a halo around their heads?
The “working class” are humans just like the dictators that you’re trying to differentiate as “fake communism.” They form the very same seed that leads to cronyism and nepotism. All idealists will spawn their own corrupt members.
To continue the metaphor, it’s as if you believe that sugar extracted sugarcane is more pure than the sugar from bee vomit. Therefore, the sugarcane ice cream will not cause tooth decay. It’s nonsense. If you make ice cream with either, the final product will still rot your teeth.
This is totally wrong in every possible way. There is no logical way to support this based on the history of Russia, Germany, China, and Cuba just for starters.
Edit: and it could go either way. It is euither true for all of them or not true for any of them. In no case were the Communists much except an “organized, fighting” portion of the working class, “ready, wiling, and able to establish and exercise its political dominance.” In no case were they even a majority of just the working class.
So let me get this straight. First world western nations in which most people are working class and in which government is via democratic elections, are communist, such as the USA, Canada, England, France, Germany, etc., whereas the countries that call themselves communist are not communist, such as North Korea.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. I’m trying to avoiding repeating long multi word phrases – I replaced your 22-word sentence:
*
“In contrast, every other country that has been pointed to as an example of socialism or communism lacks that one vital element.”*
… with “fake communism.”
How am I to parse your sentence? Should I not assume I can add “incorrectly” to your sentence based on your context? Such as, “In contrast…has been (incorrectly) pointed to as example of communism lacks vital element”
Quote:
This is substantially a matter of bad practices, not a flaw of collectivism per se.
I suppose the deaths of 5 million Ukrainians was just a matter of “bad practices”?
And so it devolves into arguments as to what is and what is not communism – every communist intellectual at odds with every other communist intellectual, each claiming his brand of communism is the one true communism.
The simple fact of the matter is that those horrific communist counties that collectively killed millions of their citizens were communist countries, not fake communist countries.
Reality counts. The rest is intellectual masturbation.
This is called “propriété d’usage” here, property by use, that is to say as long as you’re using an item, it becomes functionally yours, but you have no claim on it if it’s sitting on a shelf and someone else needs it. I’ve seen the idea in action in a few anarchist communes, and it can certainly work in practice.
Nor do I get why it would automatically stifle innovation - that argument only works if you start from the underlying assumption that personal wealth is the only reason to ever do something, but it’s not. Doing the right thing, making something that’ll help the whole community and that everyone will know comes from *you *and thus respect you more for it, those are powerful motivators as well. As is the plain creative drive - doing something for its own sake, because it’s fookin’ brilliant. Certainly folks like Newton or Pythagoras didn’t do it for the money ;).
In my mind, this type of thing fails on a national scale however, because
a) the community is too big to relate to (i.e. it’s much larger than each individual’s monkey sphere) and
b) the people don’t enter into it on a purely voluntary basis. There’s no alternative unless some other country stamps your visa and lets you come in if you want to opt out of the Worker’s Paradise, which is hardly an automatic or reliable procedure. Once being part of the community becomes mandatory, then it’s easy to become resentful against your own, and thus to have less incentive to try and make it work beyond filling your belly. Especially if you’ve heard of other communities working some other way which you’d prefer, yet are denied to you.
Except that history disagrees with you. All the rationalizing in the world that something shouldn’t be so, regardless of how good your argument is, it’s what happens in the real world that matters. We can speculate that without incentive, people aren’t all that interested in working the tedious jobs that have to be done, working with people they didn’t like, etc. That without private property, there isn’t the security that if your company succeeded, the government wouldn’t just co-opt it.
Any large venture requires the pooling of a mass of resources. It’s not something you can do on your own in your garage. You need people to be willing to accept a particular hierarchy, to do as ordered, and to innovate on their own.
There have been historic and modern countries with meritocracy, with fiat money, with the scientific method, with the printing press, and yet they stay stuck as a third world country who never does anything impressive. Certainly all of these ingredients are also necessary to form a corporate venture, but only when the individuals can personally profit does it seem like they can be bothered to actually make a reasonable run at it.
Feudalism had a trick up its sleeve: the divine right of kings. You can impose just about any political system you want on people if you convince enough of them it’s God’s will.