Sure people are willing to work for the benefit of others, but less reliably so than they are willing to work in their own interest. Compassion as pathology is a rather silly characterization of the concept.
I worked building houses for Habitat for Humanity, but I not nearly as much, as consistenly and as hard as I work to put myself through school. Which of these would you rather rely on as a basis for economic prosperity?
Communism works very well, in practice, as long as there is no scarcity of resources.
The thing is, there is currently only one location where there is no scarcity of resources. The digital environment. The Open Source movement is a fairly decent version of a communistic society, I always thought. And it does compete against capitalism. It even subsumes it. And thus, grows further. The only way to defeat Microsoft was to create a different paradigm, and by goodness, it’s working.
On the other hand, it still doesn’t work in the physical world.
This has been a surprisingly instructive thread.
There are two kinds of Communists right now, I suspect: those who are old-line leftists who haven’t given up their faith in Communism despite the rather luckluster showing of most Communist countries, and thos who adopt Communism out of frustration with the free market system.
See, the free market system fails people. It fails them a lot. Don’t give me any bullshit about Communism being more of a failure than the free market, that’s a moot point to someone who’s lost his life savings to some corporate scammers like Enron, or who’s been globalized or outsourced out of a decent living and is now working in Target.
These people are going to have a hard time sharing the belief in capitalism that has been manifested here, and there are a lot of them over time, because, as I said, free market capitalism fails people frequently, and in places without a social safety net like the U.S. and other Banana Republican countries, it can really hurt them when it does.
This is what creates discontent with the free market, not the mysterious allure of some obscure ideology.
The only reason more people don’t sieze on Communism in much greater numbers is that it’s clearly washed up as an economic system, if it ever was a workable one. Basically, wherever it’s taken hold, troglodytes have taken power, making a pretty clear demonstration to me that it’s such a poorly designed system that it leaves a power vacuum which the inevitable dictator, or dictatorial oligarchy, moves into.
I think what’s going to happen eventually is kind of like what’s happening in Europe – societies will use the free market to build wealth, but will also develop extensive social safety nets “This far, and no farther, shall you fall in our society. We will not have homeless beggars roaming our streets.”
America will be late to adopt this but will eventually do so. The Third World will probably shoot themselves in the foot a lot before they get around to it.
My own feeling is that most free market economies grossly underutilize the productive power of their citizens, and the one that figures out how to really get the most out of people, and reward them for delivering it, will beat the living hell out of other economies. I’m not sure how that will happen, but I’ve seen the free market fail so often, and in so many ways, that I’m sure it will. This may be the best system we have at present, but it’s not even close to being the best system, period. The free market advocates are like the Romans advocating a trade empire founded on a huge base of slave labor as the best thing there could possibly be, because nothing better than the Roman system existed.
Then.
I didn’t mean to set up a strawman or put words in your mouth. Sorry if I came across that way. My oversimplification of communism was meant as an obvious caricature, just like my oversimplification of religion was.
You asked, how to folks keep the faith? Well, they are attracted to some of the, well, attractive ideas. Duh. To understand the attraction of the ideas, it helps to understand the ideas. A complex subject.
A few posters have tried to explain some of them. I am not going to try. There are many sects of communism and they differ a lot among each other. I differ with many of them.
As for misrepresentation, please let me withdraw my statement in the context of the OP. It is true that I dont’t think the killing of large numbers of people by rulers who call themselves “communists” has anything to do with communism; that communism “can’t be brought about voluntarily” (as I have said elsewhere, it can only be brought about when done voluntarily); that China has anything to do with communism. But like I said, there are many sects, including those that will actually soft-pedal the killings or advocate authoritarianism. For any given statement which I would call “misrepresentation”, there might well be some sect that in fact advocates exactly that. And the question asked in the OP applies to them, too.
All those revolutions came because it was inevitably and inexorably revolution time. The Communists simply managed to win out as the survivors of the bloodbaths.
Exactly.
“Every revolution evaporates, and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.” — Franz Kafka
Well, I like Orwell’s version better, when the animals can no longer tell the pigs and humans apart.
“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” - P. Townsend
Well, ok, I’m no Marxist/Leninist, but since none seem to be emerging, I’ll try to add some insight even though I can’t directly answer the question. I’m definitely a leftist, but a weird one, socialist libertarian to be exact. Will that make me a communist in the eyes of this board? I don’t know.
First of all, let adress some terminology that we’ve danced around a little bit. Marxism/Leninism is distinct from Marxism, and also distinct from Maoism. I kind of get the drift that the OP is addressing communism in a general way though. I’m comfortable with a general discussion, but I want to make sure that’s the discussion we are having.
It isn’t entirely unfair to compare Lenin apologists with holocaust deniers, but it is a mistake to lump all communists together in such a way.
Now, if one accepts that Lenin was evil despot, then it hardly seems a stretch to me to consider that Lenin’s real goal wasn’t to create a worker’s paradise. Can we all concede that point? What were Lenin and his predecessors really trying to do? Was soviet union really an attempt to create a worker’s paradise or to gain absolute control?
It is a fair point to say that giving that much control to a despot is going to screw things up royally, but do historical examples represent sincere attempts at a worker’s paradise? I can’t think of one. It seems to me that if you denounce communism by purporting that those were real attempts, then on some level, you are buying into the propaganda that you try to denounce.
OTOH, if a revolutionary comes to your door spouting Marxism-Leninism, then one has good reason to be skeptical about what they’re selling. Personally, I believe the ideology of armed revolution is fundamentally flawed. It puts power in the hands of the people who obviously shouldn’t have it in the first place. Zealots, megalomaniacs, and sociopaths who will peddle anything if it will give them power. Combine that with state control of resources and an ideology of constant revolution/state of war, and you have a potent recipe for the abuse of power.
Believing in a national health system, progessive income tax or any form of market regulation makes you a gulag-building, Year Zero commie in the eyes of some on this board and in this thread.
Not me. If you intend to regulate coercive forces in the market, then I’m with you 100%. It’s only when you intend to implement some plan to steer the economy this way or that way that I think those things. Msmith said, “In the Marxist society, each according to his need.” But that’s not right. It’s “Each according to what some bureaucrats a thousand miles away say he needs.”
I have precisely zero sympathy with any state planned or directed society. Communist or fascist. Regardless of the ideals or intentions of leaders and followers it will degenerate into brutal totalitarianism.
However I do not subscribe to the tyranny of unchecked market forces and the concomitant externalised costs, inherited wealth and unearned privilege particularly when facing global threats such as WMD’s and global climate change.
And although private property is a bulwark against tyranny (not that it helped in Nazi Germany) I certainly don’t believe there is an absolute untrammelled right to private property that trumps all else.
Inherited privilege, inherited poverty, inherited differences in life-chances are all coercive. Freedom is more than the right of rich and poor alike to bathe in the city aquaduct.
‘Devil take the hindmost’ is not the basis of a decent social order.
As far as I’m concerned my freedom is enhanced by my higher taxes being used to address some social problems. I’m also happy for them to be used to smack down on scum regardless of whatever bleeding heart reason there is for their scumminess. It is not enhanced by squandering money on pointless weapon systems like the euro-fighter, invading other countries on the basis of deliberate lies etc. Tell me the truth, convince me you have a good plan and convince me by your plans and stated intentions that it is altruistic and not a grab at resources and an attempt to impose dogmatic free market absolutism on a newly liberated society and I’m all ears though.
Politics for me is the messy business of figuring out how to run a decent society and build a better world and absolutists of any kind, be they dogmatic socialists, conservatives, anarchist or libertarians are the enemy. However, if they have something to contribute ideas and policy-wise, I’m happy to buy a slice. I just don’t want to buy the whole damn pie.
I’m definitely not about centralized planning.
I believe in personal property and the right of a person to the fruits of one’s labors, but natural resources are another issue. I see a market economy still functioning but in a more limited sense.
Like I said, “If you intend to regulate coercive forces in the market, then I’m with you 100%.”
I don’t think steering the economy is as bad as some people make it out to be. It can be pretty efficient and at the same time avoid the sort of brutality of authoritarian cases of the past. Japan with its sunset-sunrise model seems to have done them pretty well. Second largest economy and I wouldn’t call them authoritarian. Korea followed a similar route with the government enouraging certain sectors to grow and things are fine there, too.
Unless you were specifically talking about centralized economies. I don’t think there’s much debate there.
Well yeah…that’s the problem. In a market economy, people’s “need” is communicated by how much they are willing to pay for a good or service. In any implementation of Communism, that communication is removed. There’s no real way to figure out what exactly everyone needs or wants so they take a best guess.
A centralized economy is not the same as a steered economy. The economy can be steered by pulling various “levers” - fiscal policy, taxes, subsidies and so on. It will skew the markets but that’s not always a bad thing. A free market economy definitely makes the most efficient use of resources to meet people’s needs and wants, but it does not guarantee that everyone’s needs and wants are met.
The pirmary steering mechanism the American government uses is the control of interest rates, which I add to your otherwise effective post solely for the sake of completeness.
What are you talking about? Every society has a collective memory.
And I think ‘steering the economy’ is folly. Japan is not a good example. Their economy is very sick.
The problem with ‘steering’ an economy is that it presupposes that the government is somehow capable of picking winners and losers, of determining what the ‘right’ industries are, what the ‘right’ economic direction is, etc. In fact, no one is capable of predicting that, and almost all attempts at ‘industrial policy’ have been colossal failures. If you want to use Japan as an example, have a look at MITI and what it has/hasn’t achieved. Or you could look at the U.S. Sematech chip consortium, or France’s Minitel project, or…
China’s unholy alliance with Wal Mart?