Is workable Communism really impossible?

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China looks to be working pretty well. They've departed signifigantly from theory, but so did the Bolsheviks.

As far as the theory goes, it's simply dated; it was likely workable when he wrote, but not for long after. That was already true by the time of the Bolshevik revolution, which is why huge departures from theory had to be made, such as embracing the kind of Blanquism that Marx detested, making wages mandatory when Marx's whole thrust was against the wage as a form of slavery, neutering the soviets in favour of the Party, and so on. The theory just didn't work in the real world, or at least, not by that date.

Marx wasn't a prophet - and neither was Smith, nor even the founding fathers in the US. When people forget that these were just humans and had no crystal balls, assigning them infallibility, problems develop.

How do you define working? By the barrel of the gun? You can't force people to do things they don't want to do, they have to be in their self-interest to do so. Subsistence level living or under the threat of violence is the only way communism can "work",

BTW, China has an unsustainable economic and political system and is doomed to collapse. There bubble will burst as all others have and then there will be 2 billion Chinese people wanting to be free.

Well if we're talking state communism - it has been both a populist movement, and imposed by force (occasionally both at the same time). It was always above "subsistence" living where standards were above that initially - living standards have actually declined considerably in Russia since communism was abandoned. Although it's difficult to imagine they could have continued at that level if it had been kept, things would probably be about the same. Really it doesn't seem to depend a whole lot on the -ism being used, there's precious little difference between Third World countries that went capitalist or communist, Russia was always behind, the West had been wealthy for a long time under a number of different political regimes, and so on.



That's just the mirror they're holding up in the direction of the US and Europe, I think. If it's doomed it's not showing the signs of it, like the West is. It's doing what the West did when it used to be prosperous and moving forward, instead of in terminal decline since the 80s. They're doing the mixed economy (always a winning recipe), making decisions based on pragmatism rather than just any old ism. We're starting to look like we just stepped out of the 1860s, with an economy that seems to be following suit.

Take a look at any 'diva'.

Once upon a time these people started out normal, if you didn't know any better, life would be good.

You are happy with your £3.00 bottle of wine if that is all that you know. But then you get a bit richer, you start buying £5.00 bottles of wine, now the £3.00 bottle tastes like vinegar as your tastes adjust even though a year earlier you would have been happy to drink it. The important thing to realise is the satisfaction you now derive from drinking £5.00 bottles all the time is exactly the same as the satisfaction you used to get from drinking £3.00 bottles of wine.

When you were drinking £3.00 bottles of wine, a £5.00 bottle would be a treat, something special, but now it is just normal everyday wine.

Each time you get a bit richer, climb up the wealth ladder you upgrade your wine. You move to an £8.00 bottle, then a £10.00 bottle, £20, £40, £100, £200 etc etc until all you ever drink is the most expensive and highest quality wine in existence.

The problem is when that super high level of luxury becomes your 'normal', this means that there is no wine better than what you are already drinking, so you will only ever get the 'normal everyday experience' from drinking the wine. It gets worse though, because you are so used to always having 'the best', if anything goes slightly wrong, if you have wine that is 'the best' - 0.0001% it will taste like vinegar to you.

Even though you are drinking only the very best wines in existence, the maximum pleasure you can derive from it is the same as someone that only ever drinks £3.00 bottles of wine. But while the poor guy can treat himself to a £5.00 bottle occasionally and really enjoy it, you don't have that option, you can only look forward to disappointment and vinegar whenever you have something that is only 99.9999% perfect.

That is why so many people that are very wealthy and who believe that they are worth it and deserve the very best end up becoming complete a***holes and divas, the very best the world can offer is their everyday experience and anything, anything that goes wrong results in screaming apoplexy.

It is no way to live...

The free market part of China appears to be working rather well. But most of Chine (about 2/3) is peasant China with low incomes. In addition China is still thug ruled and politically corrupt to the bone. We shall see in the next few decades whether the operative free market (or semi-free market, if you will) will rescue the rest of China from raw power and rule by thugs.

It may be that the political backwardness of China may overcome the economic progress of China. At which point the regime may well resort to nationalism and play the "war card" with the West. Or China may reform itself politically (it is possible) in which case that may be good new for the West. Now China can resume its historically prior role as the Middle Kingdom of the Earth.

ruveyn

People have been saying that for decades, but the evidence for this is apocryphal. That culture has been around a lot longer than western civilization(and certainly the USofA), and it is not based around democracy. Asian cultures have violently resisted dumbocarcy and attempts at democritization, with considerable success. China will always be a dictatorship. The chinese people want security and those who truly want to be free can leave the country. China does allow people to leave and partly because they have an excessive population with a problematic surplus of men. That country has a strong incentive to pursue colonialist and imperialist policies.

We will see, in the not too distant future whether China can continue to exist with a significant free market economic component or not. We will see if its political imperatives doom their recent entry into the realm of market economics. Please recall that China was a major imperial and even intellectual power for centuries (way back when) but were unable to equal European power at its high point. Nor did the Chinese ever originate free economics or scientific based technology (the came close, but missed on that one).

Hang around and see how it turns out.

ruveyn

If Karl Marx were suddenly placed in China by a time machine, would he even recognize "Chinese Communism" as it is now practiced.?

ruveyn

Doubtful.

I think conflict theory is really corny, especially when it overestimates the extent to which conditioning plays a role in our behaviour vs. our nature. I think conditioning merely determines how our primal behavioural patterns manifest rather than replace them.

I believe that politics inherently revolves around our concept of human nature. Maybe left wing vs right wing boils down to social constructivism vs essentialism more than anything else rather than around the left being naive or the right being inherently fearful of change. Not that it's that black and white, but it's a matter of how far you lean towards either outlook. A far right reactionary would be a lot more essentialist than a moderate right winger for example.

I think this is a much better explanation than attributing fear, stupidity, ignorance, or moral degeneracy to either side.

Unrestricted, laissez-faire capitalism is proving itself to be highly destructive to national economies(despite being lucrative for transnational corporations). This doesn't mean free markets will disappear, but the need for restrictions of capitalism is clearly necessary given that the removal of this restrictions in the form of deregulation of the financial sector of the US economy is what triggered the current global economic crisis.


That being said, the chinese most certainly DID originate scientifically based technology! I won't go into a list of chinese inventions but one of them that had a global impact was the GUN. What matters is the future, and not the past. The height of European and Western power is clearly over whether you like it or not.

Capitalism has always thrived equally well under dictatorships as under democracies. China is likely to demonstrate the fallacy of a link between democracy and corporate capitalism as it exists in the present day.

That 2/3s of the population are peasants with low income merely provides China with a massive reserve army of labour, the very thing Friedman saw as so critical for the survival of corporate capitalism (the infamous NAIRU idea to deliberately depress wages and create unemployment), and which we have been developing ourselves for a long time now by creating a permanent underclass in the service industries, with part time jobs for minimum wage which barely meet basic needs.

The free market isn't going to rescue anyone, it sure didn't in Russia. It extended "raw power and rule by thugs" rather than limiting it. It is not a magic fairy that runs around waving some sort of utopian wand, it is just an efficient economic system, no more than that. The rise of democracy that is associated in the West with capitalism is strictly incidental; having more to do with industrialism and inherent characteristics of the West, than what -ism it happened to be operating under. So far it has had plenty of time to demonstrate this link on a global level, and it has failed pitifully to do so, under a huge variety of situations.



Only if the ruling dynasty/regime can fulfill the traditional "Mandate of Heaven" that the succesful dynasties and regimes fulfilled. This one would appear to be doing so, thus far at least. The MoH is centered around the concept of the relationship between a good father and a loyal son. This is the model for ideal government in Chinese society and always has been, not Western concepts of government as the servant of the people.

*applause*


I couldn't have said it better meself, edgewaters. Libertarians keep pushing the fallacy of the magical free market solution to the worlds problems because they stand to benefit financially from it at the expense of everyone who's not an entrepreneur!

Karl Marx believed in political and economic democracy. To him, collective ownership was democratic. China is none of the above.

1. The model that has show that it works and last is regulated capitalism. Totally free unrestricted capitalism has never worked. We had best get used to the Mixed Economy.

2. Chinese thinking completely missed out on the reductionist hypothetical approach to finding causes. Chinese thinking was holistic to the bone. Thus they never developed physics that happy combination of experiment and mathematics. Even the Greeks missed on this (they did not like the empirical method much). This successful recipe was finally formulated well enough in the time of Gallileo and Newton and it was done in Europe, not China or any other Eastern domain.

The Chinese nearly got it, but they missed. The would not isolate cause by reductionist thinking.

ruveyn

Communism can be successful when practiced on small scales with willing participants. On large scales it quickly degenerates in such a way that it violates it's own principals and defeats it's own purpose.

For large scale communism to work, humans would have to be a little more altruistic.