Communism: How would it work

[Alien]

@Frankenstein Monster

With “my” vision of Communism (or Libertarianism), we would all be civil cervants. There would be no profit motive. Institutions (all of them being government institutions) would be judged on how well they achieve their mission (customer service, efficiency, innovation) not on how much profit they make.

The “democratic free market” part would mean that anybody who had an idea for some new service or product or line of research or whatever other endeavour, could ask for a vote on that subject, and if approved, would be free to set it up. E.g. anybody who thought the DMV (just a random example) were doing a bad job (poor customer service) of their mission, could force a vote to set up a competing, better DMV.

The “civil cervants” part assumes that people will strive to provide the best customer service and efficiency for nothing but the good feeling they have when they go to bed at night. That sounds utopian to me

The “democratic free market” part assumes that those who “vote” will always vote for the best solution without any fear of people becoming angry with them for the choses they make. Who should pay to set up a competing DMW and how do we know that a new one will do better? Public disagreement on how things will turn out is the blueprint of democracies, not communism.

[Frankenstein_Monster]

My goal for society is to have a system that encourages progress. Progress towards what? I’m settling for Life, Liberty and the widest opportunity for pursuit of happiness. Broadly interpreted.

To further clarify:

Would everyone have a job?
No.

Would there be poverty? Homeless people?
Yes. Yes.

The last thing I want to pretend is to have a solution to these problems. These have been with us since forever and we’re very far from even understanding them (on a societal level). I think they are deeply rooted in human character and individual variation.

Of course, “society” should strive to reduce these problems and try to help those who fall victim. Hopefully, we can reduce the number of individuals who fall victim, and reduce the duration for which any individual is a victim.

What I most emphatically don’t believe, is that the solution is to pour endless money down a bloated entrenched unaccountable government bureaucracy sinkhole.

[clairobscur]

@Alien

I cannot disagree more with XT that if communism were worldwide, then the next step would be a move to no governments (in theory). On the contrary, communism requires a central government. No government - no communism. .

Actually, ** Xtime ** comment isn’t of his own making. A communist state is theorically precisely the ultimate step, when government wither and die. The period during which there’s a need for a centralized state (still in theory) is defined as “socialist”, not communist. And the USSR (not USCR, as you can note) defined itself accordingly as “socialist”, with comminism a goal to be reached at some point in the future.

That’s why you generally need to define what kind of “communism” or “socialism” you’ve in mind when you want to discuss these political systems. There are too much different understandings about the meaning and content of these words.

[Frankenstein_Monster]

@Alien

The “civil cervants” part assumes that people will strive to provide the best customer service and efficiency for nothing but the good feeling they have when they go to bed at night. That sounds utopian to me

It doesn’t to me. I think this is the most powerful motivator of all. You see it work even in most commercial companies (as long as Enronism hasn’t taken over).

Not that I’m pretending that motivation is a simple issue. It varies across individuals and organizations. What motivates workers?

I’m just proposing to take out a minor undesirable motivant that is far from the most important one in most management theories.

The “democratic free market” part assumes that those who “vote” will always vote for the best solution without any fear of people becoming angry with them for the choses they make. Who should pay to set up a competing DMW and how do we know that a new one will do better? Public disagreement on how things will turn out is the blueprint of democracies, not communism.

My “vote” argument needs clarification. I certainly don’t think that everybody setting up a business should be subject to a vote. Or that everything should be voted on. Or that voting is the solution to everything. I’m just looking for a way to hold dysfunctional organizations accountable. (Much) more democracy is one of the tools we have.

[jjimm]

I’m a European social democrat who favours the free market in most (but not all) circumstances.

My thought is that the protestations of Marxists that Communism is a good idea, but it’s never been carried out properly, are pure bullshit.

A few microcosmic examples:

In China I was looking for lunch one day. I went into a restaurant. It was empty, apart from a waiter asleep on a table. My Chinese friend woke the guy up. He was really pissed. “Go and find another restaurant!” he barked. As we left, my Chinese friend explained that the waiter would get paid if he was working or not.

In Vietnam I learned that Ho Chi Minh had requested a small grave by his modest house when he died. Instead, right in the middle of the war, the Communist party wasted huge sums of money, diverted from the war budget, to build a vast mausoleum out of prime Italian marble.

In Hungary I learned how the party infiltrated every aspect of life with an insidious secret police, torture, executions, and imprisonment without charge.

In my opinion, incentive is the problem, and all the other problems of Communism stem from this.

Since Communism offers no personal incentive to do any damn thing, it has to incentivise some other way. The only way it can do this is with a two-pronged approach.

The first is to encourage people to do any work at all by using the cult of party/personality - persuade people that their personal sacrifice for the party/people/leader makes them heroic - this leads to agitprop and control of the media.
The second is dreadful punishment for transgression. This requires an extensive secret police network, neighbours spying on neighbours.

Because everybody works for the government, bureaucracy multiplies. Since humanity is naturally acquisitive, corruption flourishes: free enterprise goes underground, with favours and fixings instead of entrepreneurialism. Corruption infests the bureaucracy, dragging the system to a snail’s pace. This screws with the centralised distribution of goods, leading to deprivation.

It’s not a great ideal at all, it’s a disastrously flawed one, because it ignores human nature.

[msmith537]

Most people who oppose free markets have very little understanding how and why markets work. In a free market system we make choices every time we buy something. The laws of supply and demand create a natural equilibrium that as resources become more scares, we have to sacrifice more to acquire them. Eventually, as prices rise it forces us to seek alternatives. There are natural checks and balances built into the system to make it the most efficient. That doesn’t mean that eveyone’s needs are satisfied, however.

Communism attempts to satisfy everyone’s needs however that means choice has been replaced by something like rationing, I suppose. Since there is no private property, I imagine that you would just be assigned living quarters like a freshman year in college or something. Since there would not be markets to instantly communicate price information, I imagine some sort of decision making process would decide how many widgets to produce and how many should be assigned to each person or living unit. The question is would people be allowed to trade or barter resources. For example, if I don’t have a car, can I trade my gas ration to someone else?

[jjimm]

@msmith537

Since there is no private property, I imagine that you would just be assigned living quarters like a freshman year in college or something.

Indeed, despite how it was portrayed in the western media, according to some reports I’ve read, the Tiananmen Square protests weren’t entirely pro-democracy (at first). Many of the students were originally there to protest for more choice over where they were sent after graduation. Their family might be in Shanghai, but they’d find themselves sent to Shenyang, Xinjiang or Tibet by the Party.

I highly recommend the German movie Goodbye Lenin for a fictional, yet enlightening and very amusing, take on the transition between Communism and Capitalism.

[hlanelee]

Communism can’t happen! Greed and envy are part of the human condition. People always want something they don’t have or worse, want something that someone else has. It is the way we are wired. Also, not everyone that participates will be rational or act rationally, someone always has a wild hair.

[E-Sabbath]

Communism can and does work, in practice. The trick is, you need a complete and total lack of scarcity of goods in order to implement it, where giving something to someone does not remove it from someone else.

The only way to implement this in the real world would be Star Trek replicators. On the other hand, the Free Software movement is an example of exactly that sort of society, which developed naturally, based on no scarcity, for copying software beggars no-one. There are no mandated leaders in Linux, for example, for each person is free to take the code and wander off and do what they want with it. And from it, large and complicated structures, based on voluntary cooperation, have been built. It could also be considered a perfect anarchy.

[astro]

Haven’t various attempts at communism taken enough giant, steaming dumps on the human condition at this point, that popping your neck out of the rubble and wondering how to make it “work” is an absurdist fantasy.

[Chicago_Faucet]

I’m willing to play along. I like to think through these types of “What If” scenarios.

Here’s my vision of how a fully functional Communist society would operate. Now, here are my assumptions. I’m assuming that the society in question has been operating as a Communist society for several generations already, and all of the revolutionary kinks have been worked out. After having the one Fearless Leader who led the society into Communism, the society would now have a sort of Board Of Directors who oversee the various Ministries of the society. Sure, there would be corruption, but it would be skimmed off the top, and no one would probably notice this extra burden within the huge machinery of the society.

First, since the drive to be as efficient as possible, and thus, as profitable as possible, would not exist anymore, you wouldn’t have a single employee stretched as far as they can go, to do as many jobs at once as possible. So, an individual’s job would consist of a few menial tasks. This would mean that the number of employees in a particular role would be three to five times as many as what we know of today. But, since the system that would be needed to keep track of the society would be enormous, think “The Matrix”, ten times as many employees would be needed just to support the system.

One employee’s job would be to maintain the plumbing on one floor of one building. One employee’s job would be to process the 10/W35s (invented form) for a dozen citizens. One employee’s job would be to carry bricks from this location to another location. One employee’s job would be to administer flu shots for a dozen citizens.

Our lives would be boring. There would be less stress to keep producing. But, looking at the society as a whole, it would appear to be this huge lumbering beast, just plodding along. It is a machine that appears to be self stabilizing, but with much maintenance needed to keep it going. The overhead to keep the society going would be enormous, but the society would produce pretty much at the same level that it consumes, with the exception of natural resources, which would be raped.

Getting back to an individual’s job. Since an individual’s job is so menial, and that individual’s job, as menial as it is, keeps the society humming along, then there would be no 8 to 5 hours attached to the position. You would be your position 24 hours a day, but with much downtime in between. At parties, instead of asking a stranger, “What do you do?”, one would ask, “What are you?”

At some particular given age, you would take a battery of tests involving your intelligence, potential, and skills, and your role in this society would be determined based on what you have most to offer society. A few weeks after taking these tests, you would get a letter in the mail informing you of your position. You would have a location and date to report to your new location. If some sort of higher education is needed or warranted in your new position, you would be shuttled off to some University to get that education.

Economics. You can call the unit of measure dealing with wealth whatever you choose: Dollar, Unit, Credit, Chit, Allowance; but it would definitely take on an entirely different mental value than what we know today. Looking back at my time in the Marine Corps, my housing was taken care of, my food was taken care of, my travel was taken care of, and I even got a clothing allowance. If you calculate what my paycheck was versus the hours that I spent at my job, I made far below minimum wage, but it was all “profit” to me. Knowing that I would get another check in two weeks no matter what, and that all of my necessities were taken care of, I could go out and blow the entire check in one night, and just hobble along until my next paycheck.

The value of whatever this currency is, in the loosest sense of the word, would fluctuate depending on several outside factors, determined by some army of other citizens, based on the availability of certain resources. The currency would be produced by the government, and given a value by the government. The value of the currency would not be tied to any sort of other value, such as gold, and this currency would have absolutely no value outside of this society. If a shortfall occurs, the government would simply print more. Inflation and Deflation would fluctuate, but then again, no one would care or probably even notice. The bright side is that since this society would be a self contained machine, there probably would be no debt.

In this perfect Communist society, individuals would get paychecks of sorts. The paycheck would reflect your value to society, but since your basic necessities were taken care of by the society, I don’t imagine that there would be much of a difference between pay levels. I also don’t know if there would be such a thing as Retirement. But I just haven’t thought about that aspect much.

There would be deductions from the paychecks, but not for Social Security and such that we know today. There would be an itemized list of your Lifestyle Cost: Housing, Food, Transportation, Entertainment, Medical; deducted from your paycheck. An individual may have some freedom over the allocation of their resources to these different Rights that society is affording them, but since these were deducted from the paycheck, an individual would perceive these services as personal Rights. They would demand access to them, and in the case of a shortage (flu shots) more would be deducted from their paychecks in order to correct the problem.

This last example shows that there would be a sliver of Supply And Demand present in the society. During a shortage, it would cost more Allowance to get the same service, and the opposite during a surplus of a particular product or service.

I believe that it goes without saying that the main thing that would be lacking from this perfect Communist society would be style. With more citizens involved in a certain process, and less personal value, most cars would look the same, most houses would look the same, most clothes would look the same.

But let’s move on to Entertainment. There would be libraries. There would be nightclubs. There would be bowling alleys.

As a citizen, you would have ample time to devote to your personal interests, but not many resources to “pay” for them. So, such “cheap” diversions, such as writing, would flourish. And since everyone else has a lot of time on their hands, your work would probably get read by a number of other citizens.

I would like to end this post with two specific examples of how the society would work on a Macro level. The first deals with the simple process of turning a tree into a chair.

One citizen’s role would be to cut down five trees a month. That citizen gets paid their due Allowance by the Government for doing this job. One of those trees gets put onto a truck by a different citizen, whose job it is to put five trees on a truck a month. That citizen gets paid their allowance by the Government for this job. This truck was manufactured by a Government owned company, and took a hundred people to manufacture since each person was responsible for one moving part on the truck. The same process goes for the maintenance and fuel for the truck. One citizen drives the tree to a factory, and they get paid their Allowance for doing this trip five times a month. At the factory, one citizen unloads the truck…yada yada yada. Inside the factory, one citizen shaves the bark from the tree, five a month. Another cuts it into sections, five a month. Another uses a lathe to form the legs, while another simply does the seat, and another does the back. Then the finished chair is loaded onto another truck by a citizen whose job it is to load five chairs a month. Again, another truck drives the chairs to the location, and another citizen unloads and delivers them, five a month.

The second example would be if your refrigerator stopped working. Since this is covered under your Lifestyle cost that you have already paid, you have a Right to a working refrigerator. You make a phone call to your local Resource Division and report the problem to someone who takes five phone calls a month, and get paid for it. They call the local Refrigerator Division and talk to someone who takes five phone calls a month. This other citizen contacts a local Refrigerator Repair Personnel who fixes five refrigerators a month, and gets paid for it by the Government. Not one, but five Refrigerator Repair Personnel show up to your house to fix the refrigerator. Five are needed because there are five moving parts in your refrigerator, and each citizen is responsible for one moving part. Each moving part took a hundred people to manufacture and transport that part to you, and each was paid their monthly allowance.

In conclusion, I think progress would be comparatively slow in the perfect Communist society. I think it would be stable, but boring.

[HPL]

@E-Sabbath

Communism can and does work, in practice. The trick is, you need a complete and total lack of scarcity of goods in order to implement it, where giving something to someone does not remove it from someone else.

The only way to implement this in the real world would be Star Trek replicators. On the other hand, the Free Software movement is an example of exactly that sort of society, which developed naturally, based on no scarcity, for copying software beggars no-one. There are no mandated leaders in Linux, for example, for each person is free to take the code and wander off and do what they want with it. And from it, large and complicated structures, based on voluntary cooperation, have been built. It could also be considered a perfect anarchy.

You meant to say “In theory”, right?

Because otherwise I don’t know how you can reconcile “In practice” and magic(IE, Star Trek Replicators).

[msmith537]

I think Chicago Faucet’s interpretation is fairly accurate. I would just add that there would be an excessive amount of shortages and gluts as the beurocracy would be unable to keep pace with fluctuations in demand.

[Malodorous]

@msmith537

I think Chicago Faucet’s interpretation is fairly accurate. I would just add that there would be an excessive amount of shortages and gluts as the beurocracy would be unable to keep pace with fluctuations in demand.

While this was certainly true in Soviet Russia (and I presume other failed communist state), I don’t think it would necessarily be true. Especially with advances in economics, communications and info tech not to mention a certain amount of practice at getting the bugs out of the system, I don’t think its obviously true that a beaurcracy could never be as efficent as free market at anticipating supply and demand.

[XT]

Excellent posts so far. I especially enjoyed Chicago Faucet’s post on the subject…thats exactly what I was looking for. I agree with msmith537’s caviot of shortages and gluts, as it would be the government deciding what products to make or not make, such fluctuations would occur constantly.

My own (quick) take on an all worldwide communist society would be that innovation would be almost completely stifled. Basically we’d move back to an industrial based society, as I think it would be impossible to maintain a high tech base with unmotivated workers…while maintaining industrial production would be much easier. I think it would be a grim and boring society/world, but it would probably be fairly stable, and mostly balanced…EVERYONE would be at the same level (generally, if we somehow eliminate the vast party corruption :dubious: ). When I say at the same level I’m guessing at something about the general level of what the average Soviet citizen had in the ‘haydays’ of Soviet style communism. You wouldn’t have the depths of poverty we see in, say, Africa…but you wouldn’t have the affluence of, say, the average American citizen at any period in the last 50 years.

@Alien

I cannot disagree more with XT that if communism were worldwide, then the next step would be a move to no governments (in theory). On the contrary, communism requires a central government. No government - no communism. World communism would be nothing different than the kind of communism that we see today on a small scale, with the noteabley exceptions of peace and outside influence. It would put food on the table of families, but it would deny the same families the freedom to purchase what they want, become what they want and do what they want because the greater good would always thrumph the desires of the individual. And then there’s this ugly thing called nationalities and group thinking that communism never understood.

@clairobscur

Actually, Xtime comment isn’t of his own making. A communist state is theorically precisely the ultimate step, when government wither and die. The period during which there’s a need for a centralized state (still in theory) is defined as “socialist”, not communist. And the USSR (not USCR, as you can note) defined itself accordingly as “socialist”, with comminism a goal to be reached at some point in the future.

Well, I agree with you Alien…I don’t think that global communism would ever equal the no government utopia that was predicted by Marx. However, as clairobscur stated, its not MY theory…its standard doctorine, and I was merely repeating it making no comment of my own thoughts.

-XT

[Malodorous]

How is this “standard” vision of no gov’t supposed to work. If the free maket doesn’t determine production and there’s no central gov’t, what keeps everybody from all producing, say, action movies and no one making bread.

[XT]

@Malodorous

How is this “standard” vision of no gov’t supposed to work. If the free maket doesn’t determine production and there’s no central gov’t, what keeps everybody from all producing, say, action movies and no one making bread.

Good question…I guess the Virtuous Peasants and Workers will just ‘know’ what to produce…they will have control of the means of production after all. I actually never thought of that before to be honest…and I bet Marx et al didn’t eitther, though I could be wrong. Maybe one of the boards ‘communists’ will take a shot at this thread and answer that question.

-XT

[Rashak_Mani]

hhmmm… I’m no fan of communism… but I’ll try to defend a possibility.

I think Communism works quite well as a means of changing a backward society into an industrial/modern one. Worked for Russia. Very poor countries might actually get better overall.

Another way communism works well is when there is an “Enemy”. By creating a need for government leaders to be efficient… overall the system works better. No threat and they becomes inneficient and wasteful. I sincerely doubt we have an outside “global threat” that would require a communist earth to resist… and even then capitalist means could still do better… if there aren’t many political constraints.

[Malodorous]

@Rashak Mani

Another way communism works well is when there is an “Enemy”. By creating a need for government leaders to be efficient… overall the system works better. No threat and they becomes inneficient and wasteful.

This is a good point. When there is a “war on”, then the workers are motivated by patriotism instead of profit, as well as forcing gov’t officials to be a bit less corrupt. In fact, in many respects the formerly capitalist allied countries like Britan and the US transformed themselves into partially communist ones with rationing, strong market controls etc. during WWII.

Of course once the war is over, there is far less impetous for people to go to work and for beuracrats not to indulge in corruption. Maoist China, for one, delt with this by manufacturing enemies from within during the Cultural Revolution, or trying to inspire its people to produce by trying to “catch up” with its Cold War enemies during the Great Leap Forward. A quick glance shows that efforts were much less effective then the “real” war time inspired production.

So the question is, without a wartime enemy, how can communist workers be inspired to produce.

[XT]

But is it communism, per se, that worked, or simply totalitarianism? Look at Japan or South Korea…or Nazi Germany for that matter. In the former cases both countries were as backwards as Russia was (with less resources too boot) and managed to bring themselves up without communism…but WITH a strong totalitarian government.

-XT