Apologies, I was unaware that brief answers to the OP were unwelcome.
So I’ll jsut agreee with Lib that if money, ownership and property rights are ever to become curiosities of history like slavery and human sacrifice, it will only be though a voluntary act, ie. government and its equivalents must be voted into non-existence.
as others have said, under a communist system their is no incentive for people to go above and beyond the call of duty.
by necessity some people must be more equal than others, in order to make the decisions and that power will always result in corruption.
In addition capitalism is to some extent self organising, you get paid by your employer and then manage your own private finances, you or your employer are responsible for paying your taxes to the government. Communism requires a huge centralised bureaucracy to make sure that everyone gets their share, with all the obvious civil liberty implications and potential for corruption.
I think that communism can work, just not with human beings on a large scale.
One more for the “it doesn’t work at a basic level”. Humans are the weak link.
I’d love to live in a “equal” society… but I don’t think that others should be forced into it. In the end my lazy side would prevail knowing that the State will provide. While individual risk and entrepeneuship would suffer.
If the middle class owned much more shares and stock that would eventually make for a more “communistic” society. Where all would own the means of production and wealth inequality would be minimized. Where corporations would be owned by their employees… you would have the incentive too. The problem would be that some corporations eventually would be more sucessful… buy out others… etc… and inequality all over again.
Probably the best working example of communism I can think of is a NYC co-op appartment. These are basically appartments where all the tenents own shares in the building. The co-op board consisting of residents of the building makes every decision regarding the building - who gets to live there, maintenance, what color you can paint your appartment, EVERYTHING. They are notorious for being corrupt, petty and overbearing.
Communism is fundamentally unable to work at any level as anything but a tyrany of the majority.
But that’s ok. The objective is not to make everyone the same. It’s to maximize the opportunity for people to share is the success. Unfortunately, it also means that we share in the risk of failure.
This is an important observation. This is exactly what we have to turn around. We have to make sure that a communist system preserves incentives for people to go above and beyond.
And that is not at all impossible.
Look at the Free Software and Open Source Software movements. Numerous people turn out to be very highly motivated to write better and better software and freely share their work with the community. Those are the impulses we have to develop and build on in a communist society.
(I know very well that the situation is more complex than that, the analogy should not be overinterpreted, it is just one example illustrating that tendencies to support communism do exist in human nature.)
So that is an important lesson to learn, and something to avoid in a communist system.
I know many more of these “counter-examples”. Intuitively appealing but proven not to work in practice. E.g. worker-owned enterprises. These do not tend to do very well at all in many respects, e.g. innovation, good management, absence petty politicking etc. It is important to consider what exactly is wrong with such organizations and apply those lessons. (I reject the “human nature” cop-out. Human nature encompasses a great variety of impulses and great individual variation, good and bad. There should be incentives to bring out the good tendencies.)
But you would still have to draw your manpower from the city-states. I see this as having the same problems as the U.S. in 1861 - officers and men leaving the army rather than fight against their own state.
See, we told you: Linux = Communism
B. Gates (no relation)
Redmond, Washington
Thanks for the replies, most of you.
I would like to note that I personally believe that communism is impossible on a large economic system for the reasons noted and others, but well suited to smaller systems (say, within a small community or company). By studying what works and what doesn’t work, we are able to look more objectively at other systems.
Just out of curiosity, what conclusions have you objectively drawn about any other system?
Well, I’m only familiar with two other systems: Capitalism and Socialism.
Like communism, socialism works best with a smaller group, or a single-industry based society, where government control can be managed. The problem here is that you have to have a buyer for your product, and it has to be enough to pay for the social services.
Capitalism works well with complex markets, though it leads to high income disparity and stratification. The weak point of capitalism is that it inherently disregards the wellbeing of individuals, which when combined with stratification means it can be an instrument of repression. Thus, governments must adjust for it with legislation.
Except that even then you don’t really have a good example of communism. Those small communities and companies still depend on capitalism when it comes to trading with the outside world. Even then, those small communities and companies can be threatened when members decide to leave or outside economic conditions change. The Amish, though hardly communist, are having a hard time maintaining their lifestyle in some areas of the country because of prevailing economic changes.
You ask what can be done to improve communism, but I ask this, what is there in communism to improve? Polish a turd all you want and you’ll still have a turd.
Marc
Economic systems don’t invent themselves. What is there to improve in communism? Maybe by tinkering with some of the aspects of it - including a free market system, etc - we can take the best from each system and improve on one.
Well, heck, let’s compare:
[ul][li]The most left-leaning capitalist nation (i.e. the one with the biggest social safety net) is arguably one of the Scandinavian countries, possibly Norway.[/li][li]The most right-leaning communist nation (i.e. the one with the greatest tolerance for private property and entrepreneurship), arguably China.[/ul][/li]
If Norwegian citizens feel their government has gone too far to the left, they can change their leaders through an open vote. If the Chinese government feels its citizens have gone too far to the right, they respond with crackdowns, prisons and tanks. There can be little doubt which system offers the better range of flexibility and the lessor chance of repression.
Frankly, I don’t see where you’ve satisfactorily addressed any of the questions raised in thie thread.
It was never my intention to satisfactorily address any of the questions raised. It was my intention to get the questions raised and open a dialogue about them.
I don’t debate to be right about something, I debate to learn. If I make statements that don’t hold water, then via debate responses I can get a better understanding of how the systems do work and what needs to be addressed. I’m still digesting this thread.
Well, okey-dokey, though past experience suggests that when someone starts a thread with a premise and invites others to argue them out of it (i.e. “tear that apart. I want to see the holes in it.”), they in fact have no intention of allowing themselves to be moved and the bigger the mountain of counter-argument, the more firmly they hold their ground as the logic of the premise becomes secondary to the moral imperative of defending it as a symbol of individual opinion against the tide of the unfeeling masses, ironic (and unnecessarily lengthy) as this observation may be in a discussion about communism.
If we’re talking about small-c “communism” as distinct from state-managed social democracy, then here’s an interesting quote on the “Spanish Revolution” (which happened during the Spanish Civil War but was a separate social phenomenon) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution:
That experiment in anarchist “communism,” if you can call it that, did not last:
So whether it would have been sustainable in the long run is speculative. But this example does illustrate that it is just possible that a decentralized, worker-controlled “communism” might not only work, but might be superior to capitalism in some measures of economic performance.
Of course, the prospect of earning vast economic rewards within a free-market system does stimulate innovation in a way these communist economic conditions might not. No workers’ committee would ever have come up with a Sony Walkman or a Pet Rock. (Whether that is a good or bad thing is debatable. 
)
And there’s the crust on the biscuit. Government control cannot be managed to the individual level. What’s great for the common good may be a crap sandwich for the individual. “But I wanted to be a doctor, lawyer (insert dream jobs here).” “Not possible, we need sewer cleaners today, that is what you’ll be”
Indeed. I have little more to add myself. These utopian models are real-world non-starters that require fundamentally non-human and universally voluntary behavior for success. No one could get all of 1000 people to adhere sufficiently well to such a system to make it workable, much less a country. And as long as the rest of the planet doesn’t play along, that country gets preyed upon from the outside. It’s a pipe-dream.
Worked in Spain, didn’t it? (See above.)
There’s another thread on the subject, but you’re going to have to provide us something more authoritative than some anecdotes from a wikipedia article. That article could have been written by one of the libertopian fruitbats on this very board for all we know. At any rate, your talking about a rather small-scale, and very brief development.