Is Communism a rationalist or a romantic ideology?

In the ongoing Fascism thread, smiling bandit made this statement:

To which I replied:

BTW, Lind is not alone in thinking rationalism vs. romanticism the fundamental difference between Communism and Fascism. Science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle – who happens to be that rarest of animals, a Pat-Buchananesque paleoconservative with a brain – drew that same distinction in his Pournelle Chart.

Anyway, smiling bandit replied:

Not wishing to further hijack the Fascism thread, I propose the question for debate in this one: Is Communism a rationalist or a romantic ideology?

Romantic.

As is true Capitalism.

Neither can exist in their pure forms. At least not in the world as it is today (and I am hard pressed to imagine them working at all no matter how much you idealize society).

Both are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists.

Each, left to themselves, have severe problems and produce horridly undesirable results.

It seems to me that even most rationalists would have enough evidence that, by induction, they could reason that having a single person in charge makes corruption quite likely, and thus make fascisim a losing proposition.

If not, then the name rationalist is a misnomer.

Capitalism isn’t a political ideology, it’s an economic model based on privately capitalized assets.

Communism is an attempt to distribute labor and reward equally. It fails because a small group of people eventually end up doing a greater share of the work without additional reward. The United States had many attempt at communal living which failed for this reason.

To answer the title question, it is an unstable compound of both, which is a large part of what makes it both so powerful (i.e., attractive as an ideology which can appeal strongly both to reason and emotion) and so dangerous (liable to lead to disaster and factionalism, which, when communists actually get their hands on state power, leads to vicious purges).

Fascism is also such a mixture, though a lot heavier on the Romanticism, and the Rationalism is largely confined to instrumental uses, such as organizing the bureaucracy of the death camps.

The difference between communism and fascism, however, does not have much to do with this. The difference lies in their diametrically opposite view of the relative moral worth of human beings. The left, from revolutionary communists to democratic socialists and American so-called “liberals,” believes, at root, that all people are of equal fundamental worth, and equally deserving of respect, and of the good things in life. Most leftists can accept that people are unequal in terms of their abilities and character, but they do not think that that is relevant to what people deserve out of life. Just because you were lucky enough to be born, or made by life circumstances, into someone who is smart and industrious, it does not follow that you deserve more happiness than someone who was born, or made by circumstances, to be stupid and lazy.

Also, from a leftist perspective, if people do evil things, it is not because they are inherently evil (or any more so than anyone else), but because evil circumstances forced them into it or warped their minds. To minimize the amount of evil that happens, society needs to be re-structured so that such circumstances arise as rarely as possible. Luckily (as most leftists believe) the sort of society in which this would be the case is precisely the sort of egalitarian society that leftists think is the most just anyway. If everyone has enough to meet their needs, and nobody has ostentatiously any more over and above what they need than anyone else does, then nobody will have ane reasons of either necessity or envy to try to take away the things that are needed by others.

By contrast, the right, from Nazis to democratic conservatives and the American “center,” believe that some people are fundamentally more worthy than others, and deserving of more respect and more of the good things (and, usually, that some people, at the other end of the scale, are virtually worthless, and undeserving of anything good). The supposed basis of this inequality may be different in different versions of right-wing thinking. It might be race or nationality, it might be “family,” it might be intelligence, or industriousness (see Magiver’s post above for an example of this sort of thinking), or courage (such as when we are told that wealthy businessmen or stock traders deserve their riches because they “take risks” that ordinary folk like miners and construction workers do not), or it might be just a matter of some people being born leaders, and some being born followers (and, of course, it is also often various combinations of these things, and probably others, in different proportions). However, whatever the basis for it, the fundamental idea is that some people inherently deserve admiration and reward more than others.

From the right-wing perspective, evil happens either because some people are inherently evil (they cannot transcend their evil nature, so the only way to contain their evil is to imprison them or, if you are truly rational about it, kill them - this explains both Nazi death camps, and the Texas justice system), or else it happens because some people have got into the wrong place for them in the necessary social hierarchy. If a natural leader is (like, say Napoleon) is born into humble circumstances, or if a natural follower is born into power and privilege (like many incompetent hereditary monarchs seem to have been), bad things tend to happen unless and until they are reassigned to their proper level. In order to make such evil circumstances less likely, some more “liberal” right wingers (especially if they do not believe that race or family history are particularly important factors in determining moral worth), argue for maximizing equality of opportunity, so that the more talented, industrious, courageous or whatever will generally tend to rise to the level of power and privilege within the society that is appropriate for them, whereas the untalented, cowardly and slothful will sink to their own proper level.

Despite some superficial similarities, this sort of right-wing egalitarianism (which only some segments of the right adhere to anyway) is very different in its aims and effects than is the left-wing egalitarianism (which is universal, and fundamental, on the left). Left-wing egalitarianism seeks equality of outcomes, with everybody, ideally, ending up with an equally good life in as far as that is humanly achievable (of course, leftists disagree enormously amongst themselves about the best way to reach this desirable situation, and, indeed, about how far it can truly be achieved). For right-wing egalitarianism, by contrast, equality of opportunity is a means to the end of creating a radically unequal society, that will be maximally stable and conflict free because it maximizes the chances that everyone will find their proper level within it.

True. Thinking capitalism is a good economic system is a political ideology, however (as, indeed, is thinking it is a bad one).

Well, maybe, but the equality of reward is much more important to the communist than is the equality of the contribution of labor, which is little more than a sugaring of the pill for people who are not of an 100% communistic cast of mind yet. Right wingers perhaps find this hard to grasp, because it is fundamentally alien to their way of thinking and sense of values. For the true leftist, every person really deserves as much as anyone else, just in virtue of being a person. For rightists, everybody deserves different degrees of reward, according to what sort of person they are, and some may deserve little or nothing (although right wing thinkers disagree amongst themselves as to what makes someone more deserving: whether it is being more ‘Aryan,’ or more industrious, for instance).

Of course, in practice, most people are to some degree torn between these two incompatible value systems, but someone with a truly communistic value system would not really mind if they found that they, because of their natural industriousness, they were doing all the work to support their naturally lazy comrades.

Communists also tend to believe that different levels of industriousness, or whatever, are not really innate anyway, so that after a communistic system of equal reward all round has become established for a generation or so, so that everyone has been treated equally well for all their lives, then individual differences in industriousness will largely disappear. The problem with that, of course, is that there seems to be no guarantee that everyone will become equally, and at least moderately, industrious, rather than everyone becoming equally thoroughly lazy.

The word “romantic,” as Lind is using it in the article linked in the OP, means something very different from how you are using it; it refers to a specific cultural-intellectual tradition in modern Western history. See Romanticism. Romanticism in that sense is no older than the 18th Century, though the idea of “romantic love” goes back at least to the 14th.

“Rationalism” is, again, a name for a specific intellectual-cultural tradition, and a name that does not imply that rationalists are rational, but only that they believe in the goodness and power of rationality as they understand it.

Your arguement is a no true scotsman defense. Communists thought they were being rationalist. Most communist leaders were intellectuals who disdained religion and superstition as irrational. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that they were just replacing one god with another and were as rational as the average moonie. They had the same irrational attachments as everyone else and they were not vulcans but just as emotional as everyone else.
If communism was not a rationalist ideology, there has never bee a rationalist ideology. The mistake is confusing there idealism with romanticism. They could be very romantic sounding about communism because they thought they were being so rational about the perfect world which would inevitably follow.

Why are there so many threads discussing communism and socialism these days? :dubious:

Only as many as the market can bear…

:o Oh, you know how it goes. It starts out as simple little get-together, you all have a few too many, one guys pipes up that he knows where to score some meth and some hookers, another guy sees a copy of Das Kapital on the shelf, and then things just kinda spiral out of control . . . :eek:

Look, we all gotta get our story straight: This girl was never here, puddleglum was home watching TV the whole time, and nobody knows anything about what happened to the bourgeois class. Got it?!

Huh? From your cite:

Sounds to me like Whack-a-Mole is using the word in exactly that sense. How do you mean it?

And this is why it fails every single time it’s tried. If people aren’t compensated for their efforts they move on. Anybody who has studied history or economics understands this because there is a historical track record of economic failure with communism. It doesn’t work.

Romantic. It seeks to create an ideal that is not based on empirical evidence. It attempts to create a new type of human being, ignoring the actual nature of human beings, as a biological species. There might have been a time, when Behavioralism had some credibility, that it could have been called rational, but that time has long past.

No. Whack-a-Mole says both Communism and capitalism “are romantic ideals and their adherents, those who believe in their pure forms, are akin to religious fundamentalists.” He is mistaken in assuming that every ideal-arguably-detached-from-reality is a by definition a romantic ideal; there is more than one kind. Rationalism, whether Voltaire’s or Marx’ or Ayn Rand’s, does not emphasize “intuition, imagination, and feeling.”

Once again, that might not be a scientific attitude, but it is still a rationalist one as distinct from a romantic one. Kind’s position in the analysis is – at least, strongly implies – that the humanists are the ones with the proper scientific attitude on their side. Bertrand Russell posits a similar schema in A History of Western Philosophy.

No. It is imagining a world that not only doesn’t exist, but can’t exist. It’s based on wishful thinking, not empirical observation or even deductive reasoning. It’s a fiction.

There is more than one kind of fiction and “romantic” does not encompass them all.

And the other things I mentioned were why it’s “romantic” fiction.

Hey, what’s with this new function where the original quotes are preserved in the quote? I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not.