Under capitalism, Man oppresses Man.
Under Communism, it’s the other way around.
I think you guys forget that darling erislover isn’t advocating Communism as much as predicting it. Communism is the inevitable direction that society will take, and I think erislover has come up with a compelling, if unothodox, scenerio where that might happen. Communism isn’t the sort of thing that you can really support- it is more like particle physics- it either happens or it doesn’t. Your belief or ideas about it are fairly irrelevent.
Thinking ahead, all sorts of good things would naturally occur under communism. Racism and sexism would become irrelevent. People would taste freedom and know what it is like to truely own your life and your work. I’ll stay away from that line of thinking, however, and watch were this thread goes. I don’t think that I really have too much to add.
It is pretty hard to talk about communism. It is one subject that everyone thinks they understand and few people do. I appreiciate your attempts wrap your mind around a new paradigm, instead of falling back on the old excuses.
Carry on.
As far as communism goes, I’d say it’s always been around, albeit on a smaller scale. Like in a family, where everyone pitches in and does their part-one person does the dishes, the other the laundry, each person does their own thing, and takes care of themselves, but steps in to help the one who needs it.
Exactly, guin, the family unit is a great metaphor for societal interaction. The poor family unit is normally stronger, and the family members help each other out more to make do with what little resources they have. The wealthy family, however, can hire help to do tasks, go out to eat, provide (somewhat) extravagant allowances for their children, and most importantly, the wealthier people are free to pursue any number of liesure activities. Dissention in complacent households is common (the teen angst of suburbia, for example) because we don’t have to ave a strong family unit, we won’t have a strong family unit.
The metaphor can be stronger still by noting that, say, parents will try and teach their children work-ethic by paying them to do chores (capitalism in the face of relatively plentiful resources), while the poorer family relies on concepts of duty and obligation— necessity!— in motivating people to perform tasks (propoganda leading to communism-like behavior).
Like all analogies, however, it can fail under an intensely scrutinizing eye. It still makes a compelling example.
Forgive me for not understanding, but I fail to see why communism would help bring these changes about. If folks are to be expected to give their labor for the good of the whole community, what is to stop them from being selective in who can be a part of that community and what roles those who are part of the community get to play?
And Eris has done a good job of debating his point, but while he has raised some key issues (Can growth continue forever? Will technology outpace our ability to learn it?) I do not understand how communism provides solutions to these queries.
If at some point in the future economic growth stagnates indefinitly we can assume that the human population growth has also leveled off thus eliminating one obvious reason for yet more goods and services. Even under a steady population number there is no reason that economic growth could not continue as everyone’s standard of living increases. But if we hit some undefined economic wall in the future and growth simply stops, would we lose all motivation for capitalism? Things would still need to be replaced, food and services would still need to be obtained.
And there will still be jobs that have to be done that lack appeal. Someone has to clean out the sewer system. In a capitalist society, we provide a payment motivation to get individuals to perform this task. What motivation would there be to do this under communism? “That’s okay Earl, you learn to program and sit in the nice office, I’ll handle your crap.”
The technology barrier mentioned by Eris, if it comes to pass, won’t be solved under communism either.
The communist future that Eris sees, perhaps worries about, seems a fairly bleak one to me; a stagnate economy marked by no technological advances and no hope of ever obtaining a better future.
Hmm Blackclaw, I don’t know that stagnation was the end result explcitly, but certainly given finite, decreasing resources any society will stagnate.
The key role that would lead man into communism is facing a quantity of resources that could only conceivably be used for a small number of very focused goals… I feel communism is the only societal construct suited to such a state of existence.
Of course, even that resource pool would dry up, unless technology came around in the meantime to help lengthen resource use (through, say, ultimate recycling programs). There are a few almost endless energy sources in the universe available if we are clever enough to utilize them efficiently; so electrical power, for example, needn’t be based off of fossil fuels anymore.
[sits back, and lets paranoia sink in]
Man, we just gotta get off this fucking planet, I swear. There is simply no excuse for not having a massive space program. None whatsoever.
[/paranoia]
Plus, under communism (either my style or standard Marxism) people have learned to live in peace one way or the other, and we can only assume that this is because people stopped taking advantage of each other. So certainly it would be the case that “Racism and sexism would become irrelevent. People would taste freedom and know what it is like to truely own your life and your work.” There is no other way communism could work unless such things were true!
You bring up sewer systems; I say, what about everyone composting their own biological waste? Apartment building residents can take turns sorting through that, and it isn’t like if they shift jobs temporarily that they will get fired: there’s no boss to fire anyone, and everyone is doing similar things. You and I, Blackclaw, would easily call such behavior sacrificing, but when everyone* has* to do it or shit falls apart, it isn’t sacrificing anymore: its a normal point of order. Just like we get up for work now, and pay fluctuating gas prices, and submit ourselves to potentially crushing debt with no guarantee of any of it paying off in the end. Standard way of living; we’ve adopted it, we accept it. IMO, that is really all it takes for a society to work (if man is as flexible as I posit).
It seems crazy as hell, I know, but it isn’t that I can’t see it working. I can see it working. If 6000 people dying banded America together for a short time, think about what having little spare resources would do. Your whole mindset changes; it has to change. Perhaps the key signalling here was to see that communism flourished in relatively poor countries in times of strife and oppression. But they fell (and continue to dissolve) because the resources were there to go around, and people knew it.
Well, the future seems bleak itself; communism is how we will postpone our own demise for as long as possible. It won’t be a living hell, IMO, but if I compared our two societies I know which one I’d choose. As well, there is no reason that technological innovation wouldn’t continue in my scenario. People are naturally given to attempt to grow. The social construct doesn’t change that, it just limits how much we can put forward to what goals, and even then (I am asserting) the societal construct isn’t something we impose on ourselves, it is something that comes as a consequence of the environment we live on.
Just want to thank everyone for their continued response to this thread. Very intriguining, even if I am being rather forceful about the whole affair. It has given me much to think about.
eris-you, an Ayn Rand fan, advocating Communism?
Pass the smelling salts!
A novel to read that considers what a communist society might look like is “The Dispossessed” by Ursula LeGuin.
Guin, I shit you not, when I picked up my copy of “Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal” today, it burst into flames right in my hands! 
Well, I suppose I ought to throw in 2 or 3¢…
No, communism is not inevitable. Like everything else in human society, it can only be brought about through consciously directed human activity. The birth of communism (or, rather, the socialism which renders communism possible) can only come about through a political crisis that stems from an economic crisis.
Economic crises are inevitable, however - the repeated booms and busts of the economic cycle over the last two hundred years are ample enough evidence of that. But the outcome of such crises is not set beforehand and depends on the organization and militancy of the classes involved. So on the one hand you have Russia in 1917, and on the other you have Germany in 1933 - both spurred on by economic and political crises, but with fundamentally different outcomes. Russia had an organized revolutionary party with the clear goal of the overthrow of capitalism; Germany had revolutionaries but they were not solidly organized around the same goal.
Well, the other difference is that in Germany of 1933, there was capitalism…capitalism didn’t really exist in Russia in 1917.
It’s important not to overstress the importance of organized revolutionary parties. They develop out of the turmoil and crises that lead to the revolution, but don’t themselves cause the revolution. Revolutions happen because of mass action, and because of class awareness and solidarity.
Incorrect. Capitalism was flourishing hale and hearty in Russia by 1917. Though most of it was run by foreign concerns (especially British and French), it was nonetheless capitalism and it ruled the entire country, not just Moscow and St. Petersburg. Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia was written in the 1890s, but it was not a prediction - it was an analysis of fact.
Actually, the role of organized revolutionary parties cannot be overstressed. Germany quite simply didn’t have one in 1933, or even in 1918 when there was strong working-class awareness and solidarity. Revolutions do happen because of it (like February 1917, for instance) but for a revolution to succeed in the socioeconomic sphere, not just the political, it needs an organized, disciplined party that is solidly committed to that same social and economic change. And finally, such parties don’t come about because of the turmoil and crises that cause revolt - at least not successful ones. The Bolsheviks had existed since 1903, and had spent those years initiating and cultivating contacts within the working class, proving their revolutionary program through the struggle for leadership in the working-class movement so that they would be able to argue for putting a real social revolution into effect when the moment came.
Olentzero,
I misspoke…there was, of course, capitalism and industrialization in Russia in 1917, but it wasn’t a capitalist society. As you pointed out, most capital was foreign…British and French, and there wasn’t a large native capitalist population, and likewise not a large native proletariat. Look at the figures Lenin gives in his “Development of Capitalism…” In appendix II, Lenin gives the number of workers in factories in European Russia in 1891 as 738,146. That’s out of the entire population west of the Urals, and includes Finland, the Baltics, the Ukraine, and eastern Poland. According to his figures, total rail laid in European Russia was 29,063 km. What Lenin’s book does is give us a snapshot of a country that is beginning to industrialize. It’s a country that’s starting to change its economy to a capitalist one, but the dialectic is still between peasant and feudal lord, not between worker and capitalist.
As for the necessities of organized revolutionary parties, Germany in 1918 did have one…a few, actually, among them the KPD, the Independent Socialists, and the Union of Revolutionary Shop Stewards. In spite of this, there wasn’t sufficient class solidarity, and so the Freikorps (who were made up largely of the working class) were able to crush the uprising in Bavaria. In 1933, the KPU still existed, but, under Stalin’s orders, betrayed their class and refused to participate in a unity government with the Social Democrats, allowing the Nazis to take control.
What was the revolutionary party before the English Civil War? Were the roundheads really that organized until a few years before the war began? What was the revolutionary party before the French Revolution? I don’t believe the Jacobins emerged as a force until after the Revolution began. Would you say that the “turmoil and crises that cause revolt” weren’t active in 1903? Remember, 2 years later, there was a popular uprising and the Czar almost lost his throne. Of course, a revolutionary party can help revolutions to happen, but without popular support, they’re doomed to fail. A real social will happen following a social revolution because the new group in power will attempt to change society to benefit itself. It’s the natural synthesis that results.
I thought Marx was sorta clear on the point that it was. Am I that badly mistaken?
And everyone had plenty of resources to go around, so the political system was flexible. Because none of the systems were capitalism, they were unstable. IMO.
I disagree. The figures you quote for 1891 show that Russia was indeed just beginning on the road to industrial capitalism, but those figures certainly didn’t hold steady or progress slowly over the course of the next 25 years. Capitalism, both domestic and foreign, had a large untapped source of profit to organize and it did so with gusto. Even though there may have been a reactionary tsar on the throne, Russia by 1917 was well and truly capitalist.
All under the shadow of the SPD, which had been long committed to the idea of parliamentary socialism - socialism through the ballot box. They weren’t big enough to challenge the SPD, and even such luminaries as Luxemburg and Liebknecht hadn’t come to the conclusion of breaking off from the SPD and forming an independent party with revolutionary socialist politics. The abdication of the Kaiser in 1918, to me, indicates there was a serious amount of class consciousness and solidarity in Germany (I believe there were sailors’ revolts in Kiel at the time) - but it was following a leadership that was loath to present a real challenge to the capitalist system. They would have much preferred to leave capitalism alone until they got voted in as a majority to the Reichstag and take it from there.
Ah, the Freikorps - founded by the right-wing Social Democrat Noske, IIRC. The existence of the Freikorps points more to a ‘socialist’ leadership deathly afraid of a real working-class challenge to the existing system than it does to any sort of anti-revolutionary mood of the working class. A revolutionary force that’s strong enough to overthrow a monarch isn’t suddenly going to turn on itself when it stages an insurrection unless it’s directed to do so by the leaders in whom they still have trust.
A criminal mistake, and just one of many pieces of evidence that proves Stalin knew absolutely nothing of Marxism, or socialism, or communism.
The Roundheads, or Parliamentarists, were the revolutionary party in the days leading up to the English Civil War. The idea that Parliament had more of a mandate to rule than an absolute monarch? That that mandate came from the people of England, rather than from the God of the Church? Highly revolutionary for the times. And of course the organizations that supported Parliament didn’t spring Minerva-like, fully formed, from the soil of England. It took time for them to form and organize and grow strong enough to present a challenge to Charles I. But organization there was - no movement forward towards a parliamentary England could have been possible without it.
I’m going to have to read up a little more on the French Revolution, but there have to have been revolutionary organizations before the French Revolution in order to give a pole of political attraction for both the emerging bourgeoisie and the poor and working people of France. The Revolution didn’t happen because one day the majority of the population woke up and said “Fuck it, we’ve had enough”, but because there were initially small groups of people who got together first to argue among themselves what was to be done and then turn out to others and make those same arguments.
Of course I wouldn’t argue that. But if there had been an organized revolutionary party advocating independent working-class politics, things would have turned out differently. Perhaps not to the extent that 1917 did, but I do not doubt that Nikolai II would have lost the throne in 1905.
Which is why any revolutionary party worth its salt will look to win influence among the working class long before a revolutionary situation arises, and then when one does, to win influence in the working-class institutions that are thrown up as a result in order to push the revolution further.
Of course. Socialism doesn’t happen the moment the working class takes over all the factories and army barracks and declares new government institutions, but that very act makes revolutionary social change possible. Instead of “group” I would subsitute “class” - since I think a group taking power is more a coup d’état than a revolution - but essentially I agree with you on this point.
I quote directly from the Communist Manifesto on this point:
In other words, the struggle is always there, but the outcome isn’t a sure bet. It depends on the relative strength of the classes involved in the struggle.
erislover, I’m sure you know enough about the history of Russia during the First World War and of Germany during the Weimar Republic to not make statements like “everyone had plenty of resources to go around”. And both systems were capitalism. Or how would you describe the economic system of Germany in the 20s and early 30s?
Olen, I must admit that “everyone had enough resources” was poor phrasing; instead, I should have said “there were enough resources to go around.” My apologies, it certainly does change the meaning significantly.
As far as those systems being capitalism I suppose I will look into them more to give a detailed response.
True there were enough resources - but not everybody was getting them. Hence the economic crises and from there the political ones.