Communism, flaws and repression.

Great Debates
121

I don’t get it. Of course I don’t believe that every revolution has always in every case resulted in dictatorship.

The American Revolution is one such case where revolution did not end in dictatorship, and it is my belief that if George Washington had decided to play Caesar or Cromwell, we wouldn’t have had a democratic republic after the revolution, because even if we’d have defeated the neo-Caesar, the requirement for civil war to defeat him would lead to authoritarianism. And of course, to defeat Caesar you need a general to lead your army, and how do you prevent this general from becoming Caesar?

As for the French Revolution, here we have a perfect example of the leader of the Army of the Republic literally picking up a crown and setting it on his own head. So yeah.

If Washington had been more like Napoleon, the same thing would have happened in America. Of course, we could have then muddled along, and had another couple of revolutions, and eventually established a liberal democratic state (as eventually happened in France), but I’m glad we didn’t have to. And of course, our government in 1787 didn’t represent certain people who were bound to service, and if the American Revolution had failed maybe they’d have been emanicipated sooner when the British outlawed slavery. Or maybe not, because if the British had held on to the lucrative American colonies they might not have outlawed slavery when they did.

122

But they were a driving force in bringing responsible government to Canada. Win-win on that one for both nations.

123

I suppose we should accept the claim of Olentzeroism at face value, but not the claim of communism by billions of communists at face value.

124

Given that when it comes to communist intellectuals, everyone, their grandmother and their dog of the countless factions of communism believe their one belief is the one and only true belief, with little if any grounding in reality, your argument ad auctoritas is absolutely baseless.

125

And nothing it shall remain until the theory can find a way to unfuck itself and discard its basic ignorance of human nature.

126

Lets get back to Marxism 101.

First there is a bloody revolution in which the owners are put up against the wall, leaving a country with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Then after a while, something magical happens so that there is no need for govenment throughout the world. That is communism.

It seems that all the communist governments Olentzero claims are not communist are or were in fact only on the way to communism, for they are or were at the dictatorship of the proletariat stage.

Hands up – anyone know what the magical formula is that gets us from the dictatorship of the proletariat to global non-government? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Personally, I think the transition from various dictatorships of the proletariat to a one-world non-government will be brought about by flying unicorns shitting well-being and lollipops out their assholes, but that’s just my theory.

127

I don’t recall what Marx’s own views were on the necessity of world revolution. He spent most of his writing described how he envisioned a Communist society working and committed relatively little effort in describing how we were supposed to get there. I believe his views were that when you explained the benefits of Communism to the workers, they would inevitably be converted. Eventually all the workers in the world would be Communists and a Communist society would just happen through the weight of historical inevitability. I don’t recall what would happen to the capitalist oppressors in this scenario.

Lenin had a more pragmatic view. He saw that many workers would fail to see the advantages of Communism beforehand plus the oppressing classes would actively work against the founding of a Communist society. So Leninism was based on the idea of a Communist vanguard - a group of Communists would would create a Communist society for the benefit of the workers.

Both Classical Marxism (or Luxemburgism after its best known advocate) and Marxist-Leninism had the same goal of creating a Communist state - it was just that they had different views on what would be necessary to reach that goal. But they agreed that once the Communist state was reached, the government would just wither away as it became unnecessary for the running of society.

128

Engels’ 1847 The Principles of Communism: “If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words.”

Marx and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto: “In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

The boys couldn’t conceive of getting to where we are today without a violent revolution. History has proven them wrong.

129

That’s where the floating unicorns come in with Marxism. What has become increasingly evident over the decades is that good government and good coordination between states makes for more robust economies and the betterment of the people in those economies, whereas lack of government is the bedfellow of failed states and all the terrible atrocities that are brought against the people in those failed states.

130

No, he spent most of his time describing how capitalism worked, how it was another form of class exploitation, and the necessity of struggling against it. What, for example, do you think Capital is all about?

Again, no. In the Communist Manifesto, way back at the beginning of his political career, he and Engels both saw that capitalism, like all forms of class society before it, caused resistance to its oppression. The only way that resistance could become effective is if those who were already fighting the oppression of capitalism (and this was happening; the Chartist movement in England had staged a general strike in 1842, six years before the Manifesto was written) understood what it was they were fighting for as well as what they were fighting against. There weren’t any ‘benefits’ to explain because Marx and Engels didn’t have the whole society planned out beforehand like the reformers Owen and Fourier did; to them that was utopian and ignored the creative ability of the working class to build a society in its own interests. And a communist society wouldn’t just ‘happen’; the Paris Commune in 1871 provided Marx and Engels with a concrete lesson in how the workers needed to actively overthrow bourgeois society and establish democratic councils based in the workplace in order to run the new society.

No, yes, and not quite. As a Marxist, Lenin understood the importance of clarity of aims within the workers’ movement; his early work consisted of analyzing the features of Russian capitalism (not only through study of the literature but going to the workers and getting information from them) and using that as a basis from which to argue in pushing struggles forward (around wages, hours, conditions, and the like). Of course it’s painfully obvious that a ruling class is going to oppose resistance to its rule to a greater or lesser extent; any political movement on either side of the class struggle is going to need organized, disciplined leadership if it’s going to get anywhere - a/k/a the vanguard. Given the highly oppressive nature of tsarism, that vanguard needed to be a lot more secretive and conspiratorial than most, but Lenin was always adamant that the majority of that vanguard should be drawn from the ranks of the working class and not the ranks of the intellectuals. It was the only way the party could maintain its desperately needed organic links with the class as a whole. Again this is clearly illustrated in how the Bolsheviks operated throughout 1917; they fought for leadership in the soviets (worker’s councils, which had been thrown up independently by the workers themselves and not created by the Party), arguing for the necessity of a further revolution. By November they had that leadership and support for the revolution, which is when they staged it - again with the active support and participation of the working class in St. Petersburg and Moscow, not over the workers’ heads and on their behalf.

Having read Pierre Broué’s excellent history of the German Revolution, I think a lot of what lay behind the differences of opinion between Luxemburg and Lenin was the fact that Russia was cut off from events in Germany because of the Russian Civil War, and the Bolsheviks didn’t have a particularly clear idea of what was going on. As for your second assertion, it’s not the government that would wither away, but the state. The state, as Lenin argued, is an instrument the ruling class uses to maintain political, economic, and social power over the whole of society at the expense of the classes it rules. Some form of government is generally going to be necessary to keep society functioning, but that’s not to say that it can’t be a minimally operating government - basically keeping accounts of production and consumption and not much else. And since those functions could be performed by anyone in a classless society, there is no need for one group to maintain political, economic, and social power over all of society at the expense of the rest of society - and the state, therefore, withers away as society approaches that point.

131

And I’m not saying you do. I’m asking for a cogent explanation as to how the American and French revolutions managed to avoid falling into the trap that you say is very likely in the event of revolutions, and you’re giving me nothing more than “Well, Washington wasn’t a dictator”. Thin gruel indeed, especially when you consider some of the shit John Adams pulled in office (like the Sedition Act) which were pretty dictatorial. OK yeah, he got voted out of office in four years, but the fact that he did pull some dictatorial moves while in office shows me that the American revolution had just as much potential to go absolutist (and not for the only time - Wilson’s Sedition Act, anyone?) as the rest. So, again I ask - how’d that revolution luck out?

132

And yeah, I realize I said last night I was done with Little Nemo, but damned if he didn’t come up with something worth addressing at length for once…

133

That was a bad law that lasted less than three years, and which the Attorney General limited prosecution by eventually requiring prosecutors to obtain his permission before enforcing it.

The law was used to target anarchists, socialists, and trade unionists. For example, anarchist Hyman Lachowsky and socialist Samuel Lipman were convicted for disseminating pamphlets that criticized the USA’s involvement in the Russian revolution. Rather than face lengthy prison terms, they chose to be deported back to Russia. Lipman was lethally purged in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Lachowsky died in a National Socialist German Workers’ Party concentration camp. The case of Mollie Steimer, Jacob Abrams, Hyman Lachowsky and Samuel Lipman | libcom.org

The USA had, and has, some bad laws. Activists have been ostracized, assaulted, and killed for expressing their views in the USA. But let’s keep this in perspective. The USA has never come remotely close to exterminating a significant portion of its population, as is common in communist countries. When a country goes off the rails in time of great social turmoil, what is it about communism and fascism that leads to mass executions, whereas liberal democracies instead simply get back on track?

134

Democracy and the free market have their flaws but they’re both based on the principle that the way to arrive at the best answer is to have a number of different alternatives available and make a choice of which is best.

Some other ideologies work on the principle that there is only one true answer and all other answers are false. If you have the only truth why should you allow a bunch of lies to exist alongside it? Eliminate the lies and, while you’re at it, eliminate the people who are telling the lies. That way truth will reign everywhere.

135

[quote=“Olentzero, post:130, topic:552471”]

That is utterly wrong. Marx wrote a fable about how a fictional thing he dreamed up behaved, and then set himself in opposite to it. But his descriptions were and are horribly wrong.

136

Wait, Marx’ descriptions of 19th-Century capitalism were horribly wrong? I’m gonna need a cite for that, because I know he did a buttload of research on the subject, and his best friend and co-author, Engels, was a factory owner who wrote a book on working-class conditions in England.

137

You misunderstood me. I was not focusing on the idea of inevitability but on the idea that socialism is something so fundamentally different from capitalism that they cannot coexist in the same society, i.e., we cannot implement however vigorous a set of social-democratic programs and measures within a capitalist economy and fairly call it “socialism.” That is the position which I was asserting that most “socialist” parties have abandoned but you have not. Was I mistaken on that point?

138

To Olentzero and other true believers, communism is defined by its outcome. By definition, communism is a system in which the workers control the means of production, everyone is satisfied with their lot in life, there are plenty of goods to go around, and there are no evil capitalists siphoning off the ‘social surplus’ and exploiting the workers. The workers meet and determine the production schedule, and everyone’s happy with that, and everyone feels fulfilled. In fact, they’re so damned happy that the state just withers away and everyone just continues on working for the common good. The result is bliss on earth.

That is Olentzero’s standard for communism. Anything short of that is not communism, by definition. Any country that tries to organize society along these lines but fails is not communist. It is an unfalsifiable theory. There might be 100 worker’s revolutions over the next thousand years, and every one of them can end in misery, and communists will still be saying that ‘real’ communism has never been tried.

The flaw in this way of thinking is that it’s essentially a belief in a fairy tale. There is zero evidence anywhere that societies are capable of organizing using communist principles on anything larger than a local scale. There is MUCH evidence that such organizations don’t work, and can’t possibly work. They lack fundamental structures, information, and incentives required to organize economic activity.

I would point to the Soviet Union after Stalin as an example of an honest attempt to make communism work. The Soviet Union post-1960 still had plenty of repression, but it didn’t have mass terror. By and large, the people in charge were functionaries who honestly tried to make the economy work. The Soviet planning bureaus employed tens of thousands of people. They had supercomputers (or the Soviet equivalent) trying to calculate supply and demand. They had armies of actuaries pouring over millions of transactions in warehouses full of ledgers. They had theories of ‘scientific’ management of production. They worked damned hard at making communism work.

And they still failed. The only reason the economy worked at all was because a secondary economic structure evolved inside the communist structure. The equivalent of pay for performance developed over time through rewards for quota-matching, state homes, special stores, and limousines for successful people.

And then there was corruption. Corruption actually kept the system going. Black markets took some of the pressure off the inadequate state planning bureaus. Kickbacks and bribes and barter replaced nonexistent pricing structures.

And of course, there was still intimidation. You might not get hauled away and shot by the NKVD for being lazy as was likely to happen to slackers under Stalin, but you might find that you can’t get a car, that your family is always on the bottom of the list for an apartment larger than a shoebox, or that your kid’s application for higher education is denied. There was an oppressive state hanging over everyone, and everyone knew it. So people plodded along and did the minimum required to avoid the eye of the state commissars.

But this was still a real attempt to make things work. It wasn’t just a bunch of power-hungry zealots hiding behind the fig leaf of communism to purge their enemies. There were many true believers in the higher levels of the Soviet hierarchy, and they tried their best to make communism work.

So how come it didn’t work? It didn’t work because communism lacks two things critical to the organization of society: information and incentives. Central planners cannot possibly know the optimum mix of goods and services required for a society, because the knowledge required is local, and much of the knowledge doesn’t even exist until it is discovered through a process of bargaining.

Let’s say the state has 100,000 hammers to give out. Who should get them? If you simply ask people if they want a free hammer, everyone will say yes. And even if everyone wants the system to work and only wants to take a hammer if they believe they can make the best use of it for the state, they still don’t know who should get it. I have a hammer with a cracked handle. So I need a new one. But I don’t know if my neighbor has a hammer at all. Or perhaps neither of us have a hammer, but he needs one badly I don’t need one as much. How am I to know? How is HE to know? Economists call this ‘the coordination problem’, and communism has no good answer for it.

In a capitalist system, the information is revealed through negotiation and transmitted out of the local area through the price system. I think I need a hammer, so I offer a price for it. My neighbor needs it more, so he offers a higher price. Now I’m forced to actually decide how valuable a hammer is in comparison to all the other things I could buy with my money. Eventually, the price lands on something that closely represents a very, very complex set of choices - the price of hammers becomes the representation of the relative value people in society place on hammers relative to all the other goods and services available to them. And as conditions change and the demand for hammers goes up and down, prices change along with it and send signals to everyone in society that allows them to make efficient choices.

And, you don’t need a central planner to determine how many hammers to make. Producers look at the cost of hammer production, and the price people are willing to pay for them, and raise production if profit is to be had. If there is LOTS of profit, other producers jump into the market, and push the asking price down to the point where there is just enough profit to justify the level of production of hammers. The marginal businesses who weren’t very good at it leave the market. The rest of them start competing by improving manufacturing processes, innovating with new features or materials, etc.

All of this activity is driven by personal incentives - good hammer producers are rewarded, people who make good hammer consumption choices save more money for other things. All the incentives in the system drive everyone towards optimum behavior. No coercion is necessary. In fact, for the system to work best, you must keep coercion out of it. Everyone must be free to make their own choices.

Now, there are lots of ways markets can break down, but the basic notion of market-based allocation works because it aligns incentives with human nature and because it creates mechanisms by which information about supply and demand is created and transmitted to everyone who needs to act on it.

In communism, those mechanisms don’t exist. So the only way to incentivize someone is through force. And if you are forcing people to do things, you lose the information required to make central plans. The result is shortages and gluts. Misallocations of production which require increasing amounts of coercion to correct. Unintended consequences thwart the best intentions of central planners.

You eventually get exactly what the Soviet Union was in its last days - a society that was ostensibly ‘classless’, but which had class shot through it as everyone jockeyed for position in the hierarchy of power. A society of dull, drab daily lives as people kept their heads down to avoid the wrath of petty bureaucrats and local empire builders, and in which corruption, alcoholism, and mediocrity were part of the fabric of society. And an economy sputtering along with low levels of efficiency and a poor standard of living for the average worker.

And that’s the best you can hope for from communism. The lucky ones get to lead lives of dull gray mediocrity. The unlucky ones fill mass graves.

139

No, you weren’t. It basically boils down to the fact that a vigorous set of social-democratic programs enacted under capitalism are, at some point, going to be taken away again because they threaten profits. Sweden is an excellent example of this: many of the benefits working people were entitled to under a majority Social-Democratic government have been steadily eroded away by the center-right coalition that’s been in power since the '90s. And the so-called ‘left’ parliamentary parties (the Social-Democrats, the Left Party, and the Environmental Green Party) have put up token resistance at best. What good has giving up the more revolutionary position done, in the long run?

140

It has preserved democracy. The center-right coalition got into power because it was what the Swedish people wanted. Isn’t that what really counts – what the people want?