Is workable Communism really impossible?

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Theres nothing to suggest that communism, or even for that matter a egalitarian communal system is mutally exclusive from a high technology society.

Science and technical innovation brought us technology, not capitalism.

Capitalism, while a mandatory transitionary stage from feudalism is neither the ends nor the final destination. The heirarchal system is unstainable.

This is all theory, none of which matters unless we have a working example in reality that can sustainably function with a decent record over a couple of decades. Greece looks wounded and desperate, maybe it can be a guinea pig.

how does the commie reason the nature of man in light of this? Do they accept this flaw as being built-in to the human being or is it a function of the unequal world that a small group (the "man") have constructed (the "system").

that is interesting. what causes greed & corruption, and how can a system built by a flawed human being be proofed against the flaws of human nature? Or are we just fine, and economic inequalities cause people to rob others or not pay higher taxes when they can afford to so that those with no food can eat and have shelter.

What is this "corruption" and this "greed" ... who has it, and what causes it?

Both the Nazis and the Communists believed that a New Kind of Man could be bred.

Stalin and his pet biologist Lysenko believed that careful imposition of environmental conditions could produce the ideal hard working self sacrificing altruist by means of Lamarckian methods.

Hitler and His buddies believed in selective breeding to produce ideal Aryan people.

ruveyn

This is a fundamental misunderstanding people have about what communism is. It is emphatically NOT an egalitarian utopia or altruistic in any greater degree than capitalism - at least, in its original form. After the Bolshevik revolution the ideology is warped to suit the situation in Russia, but orthodox (ie Western) communism, early Marxism, was a different story altogether on this subject.

The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. - Karl Marx, on socialism.

What it was essentially about was class supremacy for the productive (ie working) classes, with labour itself being the sole "currency". No profit, no earning money from other money, no sitting back and collecting rent, no welfare state. Produce, if you want anything at all, or presumably die.

Last edited by edgewaters on 30 Jul 2012, 8:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People are too independent minded and disobedient for communism to work.
Historically, look at how many people had to be killed to bring them under the boot heel of communism in other countries.
Tens of millions.

No price mechanism = failure. simple as that.

Both state/Bolshevik communism, and Marx, had price mechanisms or the equivalent. For the Bolsheviks it was essentially a matter of state capitalism; goods in the Soviet Union were priced by essentially the same supply and demand forces as in the market, but with no competition (not unlike how pricing is done by the corporate cartels currently forming in certain industries). For Marx, the cost of something was to be equal to the labour inputs, and to be paid in labour.

I really can't see much in Marx that isn't workable, or at least, wasn't in his time. The big problem I see is the equality of labour value, and the relatively low value of innovation, worth no more than its labour inputs. Marx himself admitted technological progress would be very slow. This would mean many problems, for instance populations could outstrip food production easily without technology to increase efficiency and yields. Environmental damage could be huge, since it would take forever to develop ecologically friendly technologies.

As far as state communism goes, China is kicking everyone's ass. Not simply because it is going capitalist, but because it does not seem to need to reconcile state capitalist ideology with free market ideology - it makes use of whichever works best in a given situation, and there just isn't a great ideological fuss over doing everything all one way, or the other. It transitions fluidly between both on a case-by-case basis. Like the West used to do, when it wasn't crippled by partisan ideologies, when it was generating new wealth instead of just living off the old wealth.

Last edited by edgewaters on 30 Jul 2012, 8:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Greed leads to corruption, and hell if I know what causes greed. Why people can't be content is beyond my knowledge. I use it as an analogy with the stomach: when you don't eat, your stomach tightens and slowly shrinks, forcing you to eat slowly and in small amounts until it grows again. But if you eat too much, your stomach stretches and you bloat. Keep eating and eventually your stomach will grow enough for an obscene amount of food to seem trivial.

And I never said that I didn't agree with socialism. But to be reasonable, unless you can make everyone play nicely, communism won't work. You need literally incorruptible people to work out a system with next to no money.

Socialism I agree with; the poorest people should not be starving to death while the richest own ten mansions and get 70,000$ for horse ballet. >.>

What you call "the nature of man" is what I would call "the lower nature of man."

probably

Interesting that you brought that up. I'm speaking largely about evil, and since communism (though many will argue that the examples we've had is not true communism) has been able to rack up so much evil, pain, suffering, and miserable economic conditions in such a short period of time, I'm speaking more specifically about the assumptions about man that communists have when dreaming up this social and economic model. There is the world of theory, and then there is reality when it is lived out, and how have these assumptions about man lead the commie to the conclusions that it does...

If we were to replace nature of man with, say, the opposite: "Higher Nature Of Man" ... still, does the commie explain evil... as a function of institutions held by the few to suppress the many, be it women, minorities, or the proletariat, or is it within us all, and a battle we must wage on the darker half of our nature. Class may be more relevant then the other two, but I'm sure modern day commies champion the collectivist trinity of race class and gender... and perhaps even environmental justice as well.

It seems in the end a tribalism. Capitalism is tribalism around who you know... but Communism is tribalism around class, Nazism was tribalism around race, and fascism was tribalism around the state. The human being functions as a heard, and that reinforcing heard mentality must have played a role in crafting this new man.

The thinking seems to be that the march of progress is inevitable, we are on the right side of history, and that this generational process will lead to a more morally evolved human, a new man if you will. They tie morality to progress as if the human's nature progresses with technical and scientific and social progress. Illumination in how the natural world works, and health helped shape the perfect Nazi, and they all have a sense that the Lamarckian method is largely at play in bringing up a more morally evolved person.

The counter view that many like me take is that the human being comes into existence with many flaws built in, and that moral progress is not to be taken for granted even if we favor same sex marriage, champion gay rights, have great public transportation, access to health care, and wealth redistributed more evenly, as we can just as easily revert to moral primitivism if those things are taken away, returning us to our default.

We may behave differently under those circumstances, but we are not morally evolved, and certainly not a new man.

well until we have a working example, it isn't a workable model because it is nothing more then a theory. Is it a natural fit for most human populations, and what preconditions and changes in the populaces general assumptions and beliefs have to be made for marxism to be exported there? How does it apply today considering how technology has rendered so many jobs un-necessary, especially when it is already more efficiently automated, like education, finance, or manufacturing.

That is the problem, as I see it, with those kinds of labels. Communism, as it developed in the last century had nothing to do with the views of Karl Marx. Lenin used Marx's terminology to justify his power grab.



Well, I think you are reifying a category. Which communists? Just like capitalists are not all the same, neither are all communists the same. Communism has developed into many mutually antagonistic movements.