This isn’t what some of the early communists envisioned (what Marx himself envisioned is difficult to say, as he was cagey about the topic), but it’s how most of the actually existing communist societies worked (at least the ones which functioned at all), and I think if countries ever give communism a try again, and I would be surprised if they didn’t, this will be how it works again. The idea of a society without money, wage-based employment, incentives, etc. is in my book totally unrealistic and not to be taken seriously. The Warsaw Pact model at least has a track record of working mediocrely (or better than mediocre, depending on your definition and whose statistics you cite). The model of a moneyless society has no track record and I doubt it ever will.
Right. The model I sketched out above is just taking certain Communist sayings and logically applying them to today’s problems.
Problem today : most of the land and most of the factories and most access to quality education (the “means of production” - education is obviously today a critical component to produce anything valuable) is owned by the super-rich, the 0.1%. As those members of the moneyed class die, their children, who did nothing to earn it, inherit it all. Basically the same as an aristocracy.
So don’t The People of the United States all equally deserve the ‘shares’ of assets produced by other citizens who have died, not just the people who had the luck to be born to wealth?
I mean you could argue that either way, but let’s suppose you conclude the people do deserve a cut. So you have essentially a gigantic sovereign asset fund, that the assets of deceased wealthy individuals goes to, and individual citizens are all considered equal shareholders.
Just like any asset portfolio, it would have managers. It would sell off assets - people who earned their fortunes within their lifespan would be able to buy assets from it.
It would have dividends. Companies under public management would be prohibited from overpaying their CEOs more than N times the wage of the lowest worker.
Essentially this is a system where the state owns a significant amount of the means of productions, and all citizens are shareholders instead of just some citizens as shareholders.
It sounds a lot like the Communist ideals that I heard about.
Empirically, though, people didn’t. As you noted, East Germany had to build walls to keep its people from fleeing.
And the manufacturing was in many ways a sham, as so much of what they were making wasn’t anything that anyone wanted to buy.
Ultimately, that was the other fatal flaw of Soviet communism – it wasn’t economically self-sustaining. The whole 70-year experiment was essentially financed by the surplus value of Russian extraction industry sales to the West. In other words, the Soviet system maintained itself parasitically upon capitalism, by selling energy to meet the needs of the productive economies of western countries.
Wait, what? Why was NATO a military alliance then? NATO existed as a counter to the Eastern Bloc’s vast land armies, air forces, and strategic missile arsenal. If the whole Eastern Bloc was economically dependent on sale of resources, it would have been much cheaper to just stop buying anything from the USSR with a total set of sanctions. Every member of NATO would be bound to them. As the USSR went broke, it wouldn’t able to afford it’s vast military, and then NATO could downsize as well…
East Germany built walls to keep its skilled professionals from leaving, you can’t conclude from that that everyone wanted to leave. (Everyone didn’t leave, between 1945-1961 when leaving was a possibility: about 80% of people stayed, which is a lower emigration rate than some capitalist countries). Anyway, the argument you’re making boils down to “we should trust people’s subjective preferences in order to assess which social order is the best.” That’s not an unreasonable argument, but the problem is that 1) it leads us to places where neither of us would probably like to go (women in patriarchal societies are subjectively happier, relative to men, than women in modern societies, so you could argue that patriarchical socities are the best, which neither I nor you would agree with), and 2) a lot of the eastern Europeans who voted to end communism in 1989-1991 came to regret their decision, in no uncertain terms, by about 10-20 years after the fact. Ceaucescu was the only Warsaw Pact leader to be executed, but twenty years after the fact most Romanians wished they had him back. I’d certainly agree that Ceaucescu was not a good leader either economically or morally, but what this tells us is that assessing the quality of a system by asking people “how happy are you?” has some significant problems.
I saw a news photo back in the early sixties of a family that had been machine-gunned to death trying to flee that fucking stinkhole. I don’t know if you’re right about the wall being intended to keep professionals in but it doesn’t make any difference. Killing people including little kids to keep them from leaving is abominable and so is the government that ordered it.
Then there’s also the relative difference in lifestyles between West Berlin and East Berlin, where West Berlin was a hubbub of economic and entertainment activity and life in East Berlin was drab, dark and lifeless, just like everywhere else in communist countries.
Given the many, many millions of people murdered and starved under communism (estimates range between 20 to 70 million killed by the USSR, China and Cambodia alone), not to mention the lives of fear, repression and privation that the surviving population had to endure for five decades or so, it’s an utter mystery to me why people don’t get cranked up like they do over Nazism, which was dwarfed by the evils of communism. Yet let a group of communists get together to promote their views and crickets chirp. One would almost think this has more to do with the ideologies involved than with the true amount evil perpetrated on their behalf.
So this doesn’t fit in the defense of fascism thread but at least fascists are honest about the goals of their misanthropic insanity. Can’t say that about communists.
The employer/employee relationship, wages, and profit are necessary parts of capitalism but they aren’t sufficient to have capitalism: all of them can exist in non-capitalist societies. I’ve never seen a claim seriously made that capitalism predates, at the very earliest, Renaissance Italy, and people usually cite a date much later than that.
That’s really interesting that you make that argument. I think that the issues raised by automation provide an argument for central planning, but a very different argument than the one you make (i.e. I think that as late capitalism tends towards more and more automation replacing human labour, it’s going to become necessary to have the state control most of the economy either so that it can limit the pace of automation, or else so that it can directly employ people).
I disagree. Central planning as the main driver for economic growth and citizen happiness has worked when?
That’s Socialism. Communism is a specific branch of Socialism. Communism is the specific branch of Socialism that asserts that the only way to achieve socialism is by the violent overthrow of the existing class system, with the *destruction of * the ruling classes, who will otherwise subvert socialism and restore the status quo.
Marx had observed that in previous workers revolutions, the ruling class came back and took back everything they had previously owned. I can’t remember if he specifically said they all had to be killed to prevent that, but it was one logical outcome of his thesis.
China and Russia were both countries with a historical tradition of legitimate government by absolute rulers. It’s impossible to say what English or American communism would have looked like, but it’s possible that it would have looked different than Russian or Chinese communism.
Other countries were influenced by Russian and Chinese communism. And often they came to be governed by military leaders who had been in command in the armed conflict. Those leaders brought military styles of government with them.
Marx and Lenin agreed that communism entailed the destruction of the existing government. They were in conflict with other socialists on this point. But once you destroy the existing government, you leave a vacuum. Lenin at least saw clearly that the sudden introduction of democracy into Russia wasn’t going to work, and stood poised to seize power when the opportunity came (which he thought was inevitable).
This is the answer; in every communist nation that there’s been so far, the communism has been imposed from on high, not something that grew more or less organically from grass roots beginnings. And that’s mostly due to Lenin’s influence on the notion that you could switch over via a violent revolution.
But once the revolution’s over with, you now have a bunch of people who have to more or less be coerced into being good communists, and who constantly have the temptation to enrich themselves at the expense of the system or to be really lazy, because the system’s more or less running counter to human nature.
“A police state is one in which the criminals are in charge.” - Robert Harris, Fatherland
The guy tallying how many beans each pleb receives tends to slip a few extra into his own pocket.
Pol Pot tried to limit the pace of industrialization.
In much the same way as You Know Who tried to minimise an over-concentration on Talmudic scholarship.
Does Godwin’s law apply if we are discussing dictatorships and political mass murder?
Here’s the problem and why Communism ends in dictatorship and mass murder.
Whether you are starting from a feudal system like Czarist Russia or a modern capitalist democracy, most of the factories and banks and dot.coms are owned by an elite 1% (Orwell’s “Inner Party”), right? And let’s say there is another 19% who directly benefit from that system. The middle managers, professionals and other “Outer Party” types. Even the remaining 80% of proles whose life isn’t super great under the system, are still part of it. They still depend on it for their jobs, , housing, food, etc, unfair as it may be.
Well, the 80% decide one day that the system is unfair. Typically under the influence of a different “Big Brother” who sees an opportunity to take power away from the old “Big Brother”. So they decide to re-distribute the spoils of the 1%. The 1% don’t want their spoils redistributed and they have the means to resist so that means you need to take it by force. And as I mentioned, it’s not just the 1%, 20% of the population supports the old system, so they will need to be dealt with too. Although historically, it’s not the uneducated, starving 80% who drives the revolution. It’s a segment of the educated empowered 20% who feels disenfranchised with not being part of the 1%.
And once you redistributed the factories and farms and dot.coms, there is another problem. Who is going to run them? Suddenly no one knows how because you’ve killed, imprisoned or exiled the people who ran them. Or even if you didn’t, they won’t want to run the businesses and farms they no longer own, so you need to make them by threat of force.
The short answer is that while it’s easy to hand wave “let’s just give x to y”, the reality is that any time you want to take from one person and give to another, limit the pace of innovation, motivate people to do jobs they don’t want to do that don’t benefit them, you have to use force. And the greater the change, the more force you need to use.
Capitalism may be an unevenly distributed system, but it is more fair and provides superior results because it protects private ownership and lets people negotiate their own deals based on what they value, not the state.