Communists unite like they have nothing to lose! 
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but communism was supposed to be the end product of socialism after the state whithered away, right? Now, clearly none of the so-called communists countries had states (ie, governments) that whithered away, and that’s probably why the biggest of the bunch, the USSR, referred to itself as a Socialist Republic. So, maybe the OP wants to ask if socialism will ever rear its head again in the guise of a transitional condition between Capitalism and Communism.
As **Lemur **said, I doubt it. Some new ideology is more likely to take hold, or aspects of Socialism held up as some end in itself, as is happening in Venezuela.
Communism may rear it’s ugly head again if our civilization collapses and we go back to being hunters and gatherers or some such. I seriously doubt we’ll see anything like it at the nation state level again. But then again, I doubt we’ll see pure capitalism at that level either. What we’ll see is more of what we have now…a sliding scale between capitalism with socialist aspects with the slider bar being set depending on the desires of the citizens. Want more security? Set the bar closer to the socialist side. Want a more vibrant economy? Move it a touch more toward the capitalist side. Want to destroy your nation state and ruin your economy? Push the bar to far one way or the other.
-XT
Communism will begin to re-grown when Gen X reaches its 70s.
By then, generations of young people will have grown up with no cultural memory of Red excesses & evils, & CGI & the Web will have so degraded the idea of objective evidence that no one will believe the things it “achieved”.
Communism works when there is no scarcity of material goods.
There is one place in the world where this is true, where the more you give away, the more you have. And that is with computer code.
Linux is communism, and communism works.
In the real world? Not so much.
lol…have you heard of RedHat? 
(I’m just kidding btw…in the world of open source things do seem to work fairly well.)
-XT
There’s been some interesting points… “Communism” the brand doesn’t have that same ring anymore, and even if the ideas that have been associated with it (at one time or another) live on, they’ll likely fly a different banner. Examining the Marxist reasoning itself, it’s true, it’s now clear there’s no hard reason to destroy capitalists because you can just tax them (back in Marx’s day taxes were miniscule and governments tiny). Moreover, laws regarding anti-trust and fair competition, have combatted capitalism’s worst shortcomings. I think Marx was spot-on: if those laws didn’t get written, capitalism would coagulate into a single, vile monopoly and merge with government.
Yet for all the reasons that the impetus to erect communism has gotten weaker, there’s just as many that it’s gotten much easier to do!
The main reason communism failed in the USSR is that the beaurocracy failed. If the government manages everything, it has to be a damn good manager. Yet this problem isn’t static, and beaurocracies evolve. Technology yields better and better solutions. I don’t think technology has been exploited by goverment well enough yet, but Stalin would’ve done wonders if he had computers instead of paper forms. In a few years, I think we’ll see new organizational paradigms emerge that could be so effective as to be able to effectively direct a true command economy.
Yet if computer are going to do this, they’ll by the same token make capitalism more efficient, more fair, and more equitable. The internet hasn’t yet given rise to better beaurocacy, but it has given us price comparisons and reviews. These reduce prices, increase quality, and let smaller firms compete better.
BUT, for all the progess in curing capitalism of its worst evils and learning to get the benefits of communism without its excesses, we do have to do one thing: STOP CORPORATE MERGERS.
Yeah, it’s pretty incredible how we have pure, real-life, full-fledged-hippie what’s-yours-is-mine communism flourishing in the realm of computers. This includes open source, it includes all of wikipedia. It sure as fuck includes us, giving detailed answers to random people on gq just for the hell of it.
EDIT: Oh… but notice how NOONE wants to actually be called a ‘communist.’ It’s all “open source” or “community” etc.
Communism as an ideology was a dead end, an evolutionary branch of human progress that didn’t continue. Progress has a thousand fronts and one of the most important is economic justice. Where Marxism most fails (in its eagerness to be relentlessly practical) is its pretense that *only *economic justice is important.
Its a hot-house flower, a construct of political science, an attempt to devise a rational system to govern people out of whole cloth. Like libertarianism, its weakness lies in its abstraction, it is *too *rational, it is rational to the point of ceasing to be human. We are still monkeys, and monkeys are not adding machines.
:dubious: Improved information technology erodes historical memory? I think not.
Communism (or something like) it will become attractive again in a post-scarcity society (see brazil84’s earlier reference to VN replicators). Since that’s not likely to happen in any near future I can see, I don’t see it coming around soon. I foresee a return to Feudalism before that happens.
Japan accomplished the same thing without having to kill as many of their own people to do it. The resulting products that their factories made were also of higher quality, and products weren’t only turned out in the factories where the people were sufficiently threatened to put in honest labor. In the USSR, any industries or particular factories/train depots/whatever that the party didn’t focus on, and thus the workers of weren’t bullied, practically shut down until the attention moved back.
I don’t think there’s ever been any government that, once it decided to grow industry, wasn’t able to do so at a pretty impressive rate. Of any of them, Communism has probably done the worst if anything. Russia’s factory might didn’t save them from the Nazi’s. Cold weather, sheer size, not fooling around with R&D, treating its people as entirely expendable, and the fact that Germany was fighting against the US, Britain, and whoever else at the same, all is what saved them.
True, Russia maintained a near even footing with the US in the space race and in terms of military might, but every other bit of technology in the country was dead-still. Without any government pushing, the US continued to develop TV, microwaves, washing machines, automobiles, fashion, personal computers, toys, etc. Life improved for the workers in the US and Japan, because in the end, sociopathic as they may be, businesses exist to serve the desires of the populace–which generally focus on making life better for themselves and their children.
As an iterative process, capitalism leads to a decline in laissez-faire capitalism, and the increasing wealth and comfort of the workers. Certainly, people won’t ever be “equal” under it, but I’d rather be just another grunt with internet, than an equal with everyone else in my country and breaking my back tilling soil for the rest of my life. Capitalist nations, having passed the time in history of robber barons, leaves communism with having nothing to point to to sell its thing beyond jealousy of our betters.
Unfortunately, you never know if that won’t be sufficient. Certainly it seems to be for a suprising number of people.
Of course, history refutes this view. The notion that companies would continue to merge and merge until there is one big company has never been the trend in market societies. Unless government steps in to prevent competition, there are no natural monopolies (perhaps with the exception of the deBeers diamond cartel). It’s not the anti-trust laws that accomlish this. It’s just the way the market works.
Nope. The flaw with a command economy is the conceit that the government can know as much as millions of consumers. In a market economy that information is embodied in prices. If you don’t have prices set by the market, you don’t have that information. No matter how much technology you have you’ll never be able to capture this complexity.
Yes, by all means stop efficiency.
The problem with your argument is that no monopoly wants 100% of the market; they want almost all of the market, but to leave smaller companies to deal with marginal or risky markets that they consider not worth the risk or expense. You are “disproving” the claim that corporations tend towards monopoly, by using an ideologically pure definition of monopoly, which naturally doesn’t appear in the real world.
And given that societies DO break up monopolies, and pass laws to discourage them, how can you say that anti-trust laws don’t keep them from continuing to merge ?
Only if the market is complex. In some future society, if the technology works out that way, the economy may consist of simply rationing out raw elements and energy to local or even personal manufacturing devices, with the actual product designs being made by AI or just spread for free on the Net. “Divide X amount of resources by Y amount of population” is a rather simple economy.
Now, the question would be, is that Communist ? Depends on who you ask.
Since when have mergers had anything to do with efficiency ?
No, I’m using monopoly in the general sense, just like everyone else.
Even before anti-trust laws in the U.S. there was no monopoly except those that were created by government power. Furthermore, the cases that I’m aware of that have been brought against so-called monopolies since anti-trust laws have been passed seem brought more for political reasons than for any economic reasons.
Given the fact that the market’s complexity tends to increase, this scenario seems highly unlikely.
That’s the reason that companies merge. Do you think they do so on a whim because two boards of directors feel like hanging out more?
Oh, please. :rolleyes:
Given that the scenario involves technology that doesn’t as yet exist, the fact that the market has behaved a certain way in the past means nothing.
Boards of directors don’t care in the slightest about efficiency. They care about profit. If they can make money by merging two or more companies, selling off assets, skimming the pension fund, and bailing out on golden parachutes before everything collapses, then that’s what they will do. Or whatever else increases profits.
If I’m wrong, I’d welcome some examples to prove it.
Actually, it does. “The market” is merely how people act when they buy and sell products. People have been essentially doing the same thing in terms of buying and selling since ancient times. No change in technology has affected basic human behavior.
Besides obtaining profit through theft (which is illegal, you know), when companies make a profit that means they are being efficient. When they can more efficiently use resources they get rewarded with more customers. That means they make more money than their competitors. That means the make a profit. Profit is a good thing. It is the just rewards for a company better serving consumers.
I’m glad to hear things are working out well on your planet. But here on Earth we seem to be going in a different direction.
Corporations are merging into bigger corporations and eliminating the idea of a free market. Anytime a single source controls a majority of an economic sector, you’ve lost the free market effect. This isn’t a new idea - Adam Smith himself acknowledged that monopolies were a problem that arose in capitalist systems.
I agree. Which is why I like a free market rather than the economy we are developiong in this country. It doesn’t matter whether it’s George Bush or Bill Gates single-handedly making decisions about the economy - the point is that one person shouldn’t have that much power.
Again, let’s see some examples of this if it’s so prevalent. Look at the huge corporations that were titans in the 1970s and 1980s – Ford, GM, IBM, etc. Where are they today? Yes, you can point to a few corporations today that are so huge it seems they control some sector of the market, but it’s only historical amnesia if you think the situation will be the same in twenty years.
Furthermore, even if a single source does control a large sector of the economy that doesn’t mean there is the absence of the free market. If consumers freely choose this corporation, that’s the free market, even if it controls 90% of the market. The free market is not about a result, it’s about a process. As long as no company is using the government to stop competition and it’s not defrauding the public, it’s the free market.
I agree with you that the government shouldn’t have that power, but Bill Gates doesn’t force me to do anything. Bill Gates sells a product that I and many other people want to buy. He only has the power I and other consumers have given him. Why should he be punished for giving the best deal to consumers?
You’re ignoring externalities (i.e. tragedy of the commons,) which may be legal and free but are using more than their share of limited resources, and/or costing others something (cancer, bad water, etc.) that they did not sign up for.
Looking at their profits, it’s “efficient”. But only because the externalities are not paid for. The overall effect on the economy is not positive because sometimes they take more than they produce.