But, that’s just it. The Wright Brothers were in the position to build a prototype, and try it out without putting any lives at risk but their own. The Wright Flyer might have failed as every other flying machine invented to that date had failed.
The Revolution is a machine which might or might not fly – and we can’t even know the answer until everybody gets on board. No prototypes or test runs are possible. Can’t you see how that would make people hesitate to commit to it?
So I look around my community, and what do I see? A lot of well off people. At the top of the money pile are a few who’s businesses have been very successful. Then there are professionals, then unionized employees, then non-unionized employes, and finally the chronically unemployed.
The owners, professionals and unionized employees tend to have nice homes and nice camps. Non-unionized employees tend to have nice homes, but go camping rather than have camps. The chronically unemployed rent homes and apartments, often with government subsidy. We have a social safety net that takes care of people who cannot take care of themselves, we have universal health care, we have pensions for seniors, and we have universal education. In short, anyone can make something of himself or herself in our country, and for those few who cannot, we take care of them. We are essentially a classless society, for anyone, no matter how low their birth, can rise to any position in life. For example, I paddle out with a disabled person who lives in social housing, and ski with a person who owns a major shipping line, but both of them sent their kids to public school, both of them used universal health care, and both of them are just regular folks if you did not know of their personal finances. Class simply does not come into the equation. Class is not relevant to political and economic life for most Canadians.
Now I really can’t see the folks with homes and camps, or even just homes, wanting to revolt. My community’s and my neighbouring community’s representatives in Parliament are National Democratic Party (left but not commie left), from whom I voted BTW, and they do a nice job at balancing the little guy against the corporate towers. The party in power at the moment is Conservative, but economically they are taking care of things nicely, and socially they are not ruining things, so continuing the democratic system works for us.
The only folks who do not have comfortable economic lives here are the chronically unemployed. There are not enough of them to succeed in a revolution, they do not have the ability to hold down jobs, let alone run a country, and in any event, the rest of us would stop them should they try to ruin our otherwise very nice lives. A good example is the anarcho-syndicalist Smash the State from another city in my province, organizing street people as modern Wobblies Let’s face it, those folks are never going to lead a successful revolution.
In short, communism does not address the needs of workers where I live, in Soviet Canukistan. Although communists try to deny it, the simple fact of the matter is that in my country we live in a democracy that permits equal weight to all voters, and in which most voters work for their daily bread, so we collectively decide how to run our own country. We, the people, do not want some radical and violent fringe group, such as communists, having a revolution, taking over and running the show, taking away most of our fundamental legal and political freedoms, destroying our economic well being, and putting many of us, our friends and families up againt the wall, or simply causing us to starve.
If someone comes up with something better, we’ll consider it, but simply trotting out the same tired old horse of communism will not cut it, for time and again communism has shown itself to be disasterous.
So what it comes down to is that communism is not communism unless it succeeds. That’s silly circular.
The corollary is that once the circumstances necessary for communism to succeed are in place (a horn of plenty preventing any scarcity of resources, and a global society in which all groups get along with all other groups), there will no longer be any need for communism.
Let me put it another way, Olentzero: Is true communism or socialism something we can reach by evolution rather than revolution? Obviously you are committed to the idea of socialism as something that is to come after capitalism – an idea that has been called “the theology of the final goal,” and which most self-ID’d “socialists” in Europe have abandoned. But not you. But, does the final goal need to be reached in one bound, or is it something we can reach by gradual stages, finally arriving at a point any rational person would call socialism, but without being able to point specifically at any earlier point at which capitalism definitely ceased to exist?
Look, for instance, at Venezuela under Chavez. His “Bolivarian Revolution,” following on a strictly electoral revolution-if-you-can-call-it-that, appears to be nothing more, at present, than social-democracy-on-steroids. Do you think it can, or will, grow into true socialism without any more revolutions?
And Muffin brings the discussion up short.
Yeah, the working classes could revolt and seize the means of production and overthrow the shackles of etc.
Except, what have they got to gain by doing that? As Marx famously said, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Except, in liberal democratic America and Europe and Japan and so on, that just isn’t true. The working classes aren’t starving, they aren’t freezing, they aren’t dying in droves of disease. It’s certainly true that the rewards of modern life are disproportionately claimed by the capitalists and professionals, sometimes egregiously. But while a working class person’s share of global output might be smaller today than it was 50 years ago, in absolute terms their standard of living hasn’t fallen, and in fact has risen even in the face of stagnant wages.
There’s never going to be a working class revolution of the type that Olentzero imagines as long as the majority of the working class is able to survive and eke out a living. If the working class was being steadily squeezed harder and harder, and more and more wrested from them by the upper classes, then we could imagine the workers deciding they had nothing to lose by revolution.
But that hasn’t happened, and there’s no indication that anything like that is on the horizon. The capitalists aren’t squeezing the working class, their vast fortunes aren’t gained by extracting a nickel and then another nickel and then another nickel from the impoverished masses. That’s rather feudalism.
I suppose if we have a general economic collapse then all sorts of things become possible. Except the likely outcome of a general economic collapse is not that the workers will seize power, but rather that various nasty authoritarian states will replace our modern liberal democratic states. Or the other option is the reverse, that productivity will increase so much that a modern standard of living can be produced so cheaply that it can be given away for free, like digital watches in cereal boxes.
But if prosperity becomes so widespread that the unproductive can be given a comfortable living with the equivalent of spare change found under the couch cushions, then what incentive do these unproductive people have to start a revolution?
Thing is, in modern society if you’ve got what it takes to lead a successful worker’s revolution, you’re probably doing pretty well for yourself in the professional class. And if you’re living in poverty because there’s some reason you can’t hold down a job, well, those problems are going to prevent you from being a very successful revolutionary.
So yeah, there are impoverished proletarians living in today’s modern liberal democracies who have nothing to lose but their chains, but these people are very small minorities. Most people have plenty to lose. And there goes the revolution.
A big noperooni on that one. Olentzero’s one indispensable element is a “fighting working class.” Not a well balanced, well educated, clear thinking and compassionate working class as we have in most western first world nations, but a “fighting working class.” Remember, kids, communism just wouldn’t be communism without a fight, so get out there and start killing your fellow citizens today.
And here we reach the usual limit of stretching metaphors. The point was not how the Wright brothers finally achieved powered flight, but that there was a point in history in which they hadn’t yet, and that point in history was not proof positive that powered flight could not be achieved. Moreover, they weren’t just pulling ideas out of their [hats] but studying what other people had been doing and what went wrong, thereby increasing their own chances of success. As a revolutionary socialist, I need to know what went wrong and why in order to more cogently and consistently promote revolutionary politics.
Test runs and prototypes are most certainly possible. 1905 in St. Petersburg was one; so was the Paris Commune. The US has had its own examples, like the Seattle General Strike of 1919 when the workers ended up running the city. They needed to grow and expand in order to survive, but even when they collapsed they ended up giving people a taste of what real change could be like (and in the case of 1905, etched itself deep enough in workers’ memories that they were all too happy to try again in 1917).
Thanks for telling me what I think. Of course you’re wrong as usual. I don’t think that socialism is something that is to come after capitalism; I think of it as something that needs to replace capitalism, and soon, if human civilization is going to continue. But I certainly don’t think it’s inevitable, and I refer you back to Marx’ quote about the outcome of revolutions no matter what the age being either a revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes.
Capitalism certainly didn’t come into being that way. While the bourgeoisie developed somewhat quietly out of the old guilds and merchant class in the 1400s and 1500s, their expanding economic activity and increasing political power came up against the limits of feudal society and the interests of the nobility, leading to the revolutionary explosions of the English Revolution (a test run for capitalism) and the later American and French Revolutions (the real deal). The working class, in a similar manner, has developed gradually (but not always quietly, even at the beginning) out of the old peasant and farmer classes as they lost their land and were forced into the cities, and as our economic and political power have grown, we’ve run up against the limits of capitalist society and the interests of the bourgeoisie. From the Chartists of the 1840s to the fighting unions of the 1930s and on, we’ve seen the test runs set off by the conflict (like the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution) and need to organize for trying to put the real deal into place. That having been said, it’s pretty obvious to anyone that a simultaneous worldwide revolution is a complete pipe dream. But revolutions in economically more powerful countries would be a great impetus in promoting the revolution in the rest of the world. I do not doubt that for a time there will still be countries desperately clinging to capitalism, but the point of a socialist revolution is not to coexist alongside capitalism. With any luck, the confidence given to workers by the examples of revolutions elsewhere will help the process along.
No. Progressive as some of the reforms he’s implemented may be, he’s still one man at the top of society and he’s only willing to take things so far. He’s popular and supported by workers, but they’re still finding that their interests sometimes end up colliding with his (and the upper class in Venezuela). Chavez is caught between a rock and a hard place; he leans too far one way he ends up angering the other side.
After the real estate meltdown, the banking shitstorm, and the steadily increasing unemployment rate that economists argue we’re just going to have to live with, is it really all that certain capitalism can do this?
Yes. Next question?
No, I’m not certain that the “post-scarcity” society is possible. It’s simply one imaginable path to a future where the “means of production” are in everyone’s hands, not because the means of production are held in common, but because anything you can imagine can be produced by a fabricator, including more fabricators, and fabricators are in every garage, or at least on every block. Of course, that hypothetical future doesn’t leave much room for worker’s revolutions or smashing the state or dismantling capitalism, so much as making our current economic struggles moot.
After all, who cares what Bill Gates does, as long as your economic necessities are provided for? Even if there exists a larger capitalist economy where some types of goods and services are exchanged, it will be irrelevant to most people’s lives, because they won’t have to work for those esoteric goods and services. In this state, most people will be unable to “work for a living” because what can they provide for other people that these people can’t get for (as good as) free, from the nearest replicator? Some people might have skills or abilities that are in demand, but what do you pay these elite people WITH? They already have all they need to survive. So while there might be a quasi-capitalist economy where elites exchange scarce goods and services of some type with each other, the only thing worth buying would be the output of other elites, which would be anything that can’t come out of the magic box.
But as I said, I’m not predicting any such state of affairs. It’s just that we could plausibly imagine the economy of such a society as communist, although it does lack a certain je ne sais quoi, what with no sharing and community and interminable meetings and denunciations and shoulder to shoulder and the blood of the martyrs and so on.
Or, we could imagine the other way, like you say, with the sup-prime oil spill Bernie Madoff kleptocratic leveraged outsourcing downsizing rent-seeking special interest crony casino capitalism collapsing like a giant collapsing thing.
That isn’t likely, in my view, to result in the workers seizing the means of production either. More likely is that the guys who currently control the means of production keep a tighter hold, and we end up with an authoritarian dictatorship. And if you think our modern liberal democracies are really authoritarian dictatorships in disguise, well, I guess you’ll find out the difference when they stop ignoring the people who complain about the government on message boards, and instead track them down and shut them the fuck up.
And given that you claim that every existing government that has self-labeled as communist was actually something different, well, I guess that means that an authoritarian dictatorship is a very likely result of any sort of revolution, regardless of intentions. And so it seems to me, as I sit here in a warm office typing on a computer with a full belly and comfortable shoes, that the possible benefits of such a revolution, compared with the likely disastrous downsides, that such a revolution should be resisted with all my strength. So right now I’m on the side of the cops and the bankers and the preachers and the soldiers (You know, the guys who laid Jesus Christ in his grave), and so are pretty much everyone. So if you want to change my mind, you’ve got a pretty steep challenge ahead.
So, uh, how’d the Americans and the French luck out of that?
Well, the American Revolution wasn’t a worker’s revolution, as I’m sure you’d agree, since the industrial revolution was in its infancy in 1776. It didn’t topple the existing social order, and most of the same people who were powerful in 1775 were still in charge in 1783.
The French Revolution is rather on point, what with the Reign of Terror and Napoleon and Europe in flames, and a couple of restorations of the monarchy and more revolutions and colonial empires and such, until finally we get to modern liberal democratic France where there’s not much sign of a worker’s revolution.
Of course, political revolutions sometimes result in better governance, especially if they’re not particularly ideological or, well, revolutionary. But the more the revolutionaries imagine they’re going to remake society after winning the war, the worse the outcome tends to be. We can list the revolutions that resulted in improvements in the lot in life of the average person, and those that resulted in very little change except the names of the people in the driver’s seats, and those that resulted in widespread suffering and misery. It seems to me the first group is pretty small, and the second and third group pretty large. Even the American Revolution is more like the second than like the first.
Therefore, before a reasonable person can be expected to support a revolution, either the current system has to be intolerable, or the likely expected outcome has to be pretty impressive. If the proposed system after the revolution is a system that has never been shown to work in the past, then given the risks of disaster that have been shown to be a common outcome of, you know, war; and if the current situation is very tolerable, then what’s the incentive for revolution?
Last I heard, the American revolution was not a communist revolution and did not lead to communism, let alone Orlentzeroism. The American revolution took great care to establish and preserve personal liberties as against the state, and to put in place a legal and economic environment that encourgaged private business growth with less interference by the state, with careful attention to balance of power and preservaton of democracy, which is quite the opposite of communism in which personal liberties are given up to the state and private business is nationalized and/or communalized, and where there is only one supreme power, while democracy is thrown out the window.
The French revolution? I take it that you have forgotten about Robespierre and his Revolutionary Tribunal that he controlled. You know, The Terror. The purges. The mass executions.
Well, I’ve enjoyed my intolerable day at work today, so I’m going to close up my intolerable shop, have a nice intolerable drive along the base of the escarpment to my intolerable chalet, and play with my intolerable cat. I just hope that a revolution does not save me from my intolerable life before I make it home, 'cause, you know, that would be intolerable.
That ain’t what you said up here.
(Emphasis mine.) Come back when you’ve got it figured out.
But you’re claiming that the literally billions of people who think they are Communists are wrong. That you alone know what true Communism is. That every other Communist in history is wrong and you are right.
If you can’t be bothered to present your own argument, I don’t see why I should do it for you. Especially when I suspect that your “evidence” will be of the “my post is my cite” variety.
In The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution, Irving Kristol made a case that it was a kind of workers’ revolution, with a lot of hereditary privilege smashed. I forget the details, haven’t read it since college.
Assuming the United Empire Loyalists were mostly upper-class (I think they were, but I’m not sure), it could also be a case of democratization of a society via evacuation of its aristocracy. But, then, there were still plenty of upper-class families on the Patriot side.
I’m sure the risk of authoritarian dictatorship is present in any sort of (political) revolution, regardless of intentions. That does not mean revolutions are never worth having.
Didn’t I say “very likely result”?
Yeah, the American Revolution worked out pretty well for us. But if the general who controlled the army that won the war had been a more typical sort of person, we would have ended up with George Washington, Lord Protector of America, or some such.
If I were an average Joe living in the colonies in 1775, I doubt I’d have felt very enthusiastic about the prospects for a successful revolution, given the examples of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration, and back to the fall of the Roman Republic.
The American Revolution was very much an experiment, and I’m glad it worked out, but we only know it worked out from the benefit of hindsight. The odds are pretty good that a Second American Revolution in 2010 wouldn’t work out quite so well as the first in 1776. Or actually, it would be the Third, if we take the unpleasantness of 1861 as the Second, and how’d that Second Revolution work out for the South?
No, I’m arguing that people in this thread are wrong in accepting the claim of communism at face value.
Seeing as how, in this thread, I’ve actually said I base my arguments on my reading and understanding of other Communist thinkers and revolutionaries, I’m quite confident in stating this particular assertion is absolutely baseless.
But I did present my argument. I’m not asking you to present it for me, I’m asking you (in vain, it appears) to actually read what I write.
Well, since you’ve pretty much failed to read what I write anyway, I suppose we’re at no great loss here. I’m done with you.
You did, which is why I presented counterexamples and asked that you explain why it was less likely for the American Revolution to become an absolutist dictatorship. The best you could come up with was “Washington was a pretty nice guy”.
That’s incredibly weak.