According to the doctrine, Communism is a natural consequences of industrialization and will emerge when the capitalist system becomes too top-heavy to support itself. It is an outgrowth of industrialized capitalism, and thus can’t be rushed along. Think about how hunter-gatherers eventually became too dense and thus game became scarse, so they started more intensive settled agriculture. The transition is something like that.
Every country that has tried “Communism” has been a pre-industrialized economy with more in common with feudalism than market capitalism. That’s like the hunter-gatherers suddenly deciding to form full-on kingdoms with a feudal system. You can’t just leapfrog like that.
A few misconceptions in this thread. First, Marx was an economic historian-he believed that “Commnism” was an inevitable evolutionary stage of post-capitalism. He thoght that he had discovered “laws” of history…so, most certainly, he did believe in communism.
Lenin was a ruthless man who realized that Marxism was not working in Russia-so he was determined to FORCE people to adopt it. That is why he wasn’t adverse to killing people to achieve what he saw as commnism. I believe that Lenin did have some semblance of a conscience-at the end of his life he realized how brutal his revolution had been.
Stalin was just a tyrant-he saw the whole apparatus of the Soviet government as something that was his to control personally. Lives meant nothing to him-he engineered the Ukrainian famine (that killed over 4 milion people), and made war on Finland, became an ally of Germany and then (when Hitler turned on him) switched sides, and engaged in new wars (Korea).
Neither Lenin nor Stalin had any illusions-they knew that Russia (under their brand of “communism”) was far behind the west-they attributed this to “insufficient class consciousness” in the Russian people.
Well, some examples. People even in capitalistic societies help each other without charging for it all the time, in the process making society run more smoothly. People set out on charitable causes or social crusades that don’t profit them but do profit society.
People in Communistic societies however tend to lack enthusiasm for their work since there’s no incentive to do well. And when handed totalitarian power they use it in the abusive fashion you’d expect of humans instead of acting as dispassionate overseers of the needs of society.
Wouldn’t a non-profit in a Capitalist society suffer the same issues of lack of enthusiasm that a Communist society does? We are talking ideology here so if working for the common good fails for Communism why would it work for non-profits doing the same thing?
As for using power in an abusive fashion I do not think that is unique to Communism. People in power under any system tend to do that as much as they are able.
Well, not really. The Soviets failed to implement it in part because half the governments of the world were determined to see them fail. If the American Revolution had failed because the French crown realized it ought to support its fellow monarch, would we be talking about how the founders’ ideology was wrong?
How did the rest of the world keep them from implementing Communism, at least after the Civil War was over? They certainly wanted to see the Communists fail, but the Communists wanted to see the capitalist nations fail also.
A lot of charity work in capitalist societies is funded by the surplus money of capitalists. Sometimes it is just from the goodness of their hearts, sometimes it is from shame from how they treated people on the way up. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, etc.
That seems to be a more successful model than everyone working for the common good all the time - supposedly.
The problem being that capitalist societies found much better ways to deal with the real problems Marx (and others) saw. The social welfare that the right hates inoculates us against Communism. If Hoover got re-elected in 1932, who knows what could have happened?
First, because the non-profits can in essence “skim off” the minority of enthusiasts while the self interested people do the rest of the work that keep society running. And second, because they are normally doing tasks that are more likely to generate enthusiasm in the first place. People can whip up selfless enthusiasm for feeding the poor and helping the sick a lot easier than they can for making random widgets in a factory or harvesting wheat.
But the nature of communism necessitates that people be given that sort of power. You can’t have a planned economy without someone doing the planning. And you can’t keep people from doing self interested things for profit without some sort of enforcement mechanism. And so on.
Note that communal style living works much better on a small scale with people who are on the whole more dedicated to the welfare of the group - such as a family.
That is fine but in a pure capitalist society do you expect there will be a lot to “skim” off? Further, we are talking about the operation of the society as a whole. I think a pure capitalist society will be as dysfunctional as pure communist society would…albeit in different ways. Perhaps some will be patrons of the arts and donate or feed some of the poor but the society as a whole will not be functional.
Again, a pure capitalist society will have people with power and while not running a “planned” economy will just as surely screw the system up. Forget innovation…you’ll have one car in any color you like as long as it is black under pure capitalism as you would under pure communism.
“Pure” is not a very precise descriptor in this type of thing. For capitalism, it would be better to say that a completely unregulated market system would not be stable in large scale. All sorts of systems (moneyless communism, unregulated capitalism, complete anarchy) are workable in small self selecting groups but not possible in large groups. From everything I have seen and read it has to do with our inability to consider only a limited number of people as individuals. Once people become faceless, individuals have a harder time putting the needs of others on par with those of themselves and their immediate circle.
A better statement is that is non-capitalistic as profits are not the driver of allocation of resources. Capitalism does not oppose charity or altruism, but charity can rarely be described as capitalistic.
What makes you think there won’t be? Just as there are plenty of self interested people in a communistic society, there are plenty of altruistic people in a capitalist society.
What you are ignoring is that there are capitalistic societies that aren’t the tyrannical capitalism you are speaking of. You don’t need to force people to look out for their own self interest; you just need to keep them from exploiting each other in the process. Tyranny is not a necessity for capitalism; it is for communism.
Capitalism is about profit, period. Empathy, pity, compassion and ethics of any kind are un-capitalistic impulses. As is any concern for the welfare of society. A true capitalist is going to either be a psychopath or trying hard to imitate one; that’s one reason psychopaths tend to prosper in our society.
Well, I think that’s fairly ridiculous. I think that capitalism v. communism only has to do with how the economy is organized and resources are allocated on a society-wide basis, not how people’s personal lives are organized or how they feel individually about other people. Sure both systems will probably have follow-on psychological effects, but to describe charity itself as anti-capitalistic is taking it too far.
To get back to the OP, I think the evidence is very strong that early communists really did believe what they were espousing. Most of them, after all, did not get any advantages from being identified as communists, so why would they have faked it?
It was only after communist regimes were established that there was any point in pretending to be a communist for personal advantage.
