Communism: Can it work?

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I'm with you on "communism has never really been tried" not adding up, but that's not quite the argument we're having right now. It's more "well, what hasn't been tried, and should we try it?" We're just calling that communism for purposes of this discussion, since any pushback against capitalism is probably going to be more communal in some way, and we need a placeholder name for this unspecified change.

Obviously, I'm inherently skeptical of any such shift, but heck, let's at least have the discussion.
Good luck, gentlemen. [Bows out]



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First, there have been so many honest attempts to establish a form of Communism, and they have all failed so blatantly to achieve the one thing they're supposed to (ie, release the proletariat from lives of drudgery and exploitation) that it becomes harder and harder not to conclude that the problem lies with Communism itself rather than the coincidental failings of individual regimes.
'Communism itself' is an empty placeholder, an abstract location beyond the current situation. This is all that communism per se can be said to mean.

The second reason is more theoretical. If you postpone all happiness, justice and morality to some unspecified future when the state will wither away and the dictatorship of the proletariat will begin, then you are just begging for brutality and murderous injustice in the here-and-now. As Albert Camus was pointing out 60-odd years ago, Marx's materialist dialectical theory of history writes a blank cheque for murderers and psychopaths. The reason so many Communist states go bad is intrinsic rather than superficial.
I'm not sure what "go bad" refers to. Does it refer to the fact that they were willing to murder? Or does it refer to the fact that, ultimately, those regimes collapsed and were reclaimed by capitalism?

I think it's pretty safe to say that most every first world conception of justice writes a "blank check" to murder. Most any conception of the Good writes a "blank check" to murder. Every conception of the Good will draw a relation to those it considers enemies of the Good. Depending on the extent of their attempts to oppose the Good, potentially anything is justified. From a slap on the wrist to outright murder to torture to anything in between. It is entirely dependent on the situation. Sometimes, bad guys need to actually be killed. I'm not justifying anything that actually happened. I'm simply saying that this idea of "blank check" does little to no work in condemning communism specifically.

What it condemns is the existence of the Good.

One does not measure the legitimacy of the political project by the body count. Furthermore, it's totally unclear that communism is especially egregious in that regard.
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I'm with you on "communism has never really been tried" not adding up
How? Perhaps it's more clear if I put it this way:

Communism-as-it-will-be has never been tried. It hasn't. I might as well say:

Communism-which-has-never-been-tried has never been tried.

It's really that simple. It's an amazing obfuscation to name the exact political structures of the 20th century as Communism-in-itself and play the easy game of picking them apart based on the precise events of their failure which we already witnessed.

Why would anyone think that the communist of today or the future would ever replicate the exact moves of past revolutionaries (as if even that were possible). This is the core of Marx's theory of history. Progress towards the Good based on the current situation. It is called dialectical because it is like dialectics: an argument, a conversation.

At this point in the conversation, I am saying one thing: you've won all the other past arguments, but I still think you're wrong. And for these reasons...



It's no more an obfuscation than defining Communism by whatever form it takes next, thereby making it conveniently exempt from any criticism. It's the no-true-Scotsman fallacy. If the next form fails, I presume someone will end up saying that that isn't Communism, either. And on and on. The idea is not that the next form Communism takes will be identical, it's that the fundamental premise is flawed to the point at which anything which avoids those flaws can't really be called Communism. At some point the word has to mean something.

Obviously, we've agreed in this thread to use the word as a placeholder of sorts. I've agreed to that obfuscation for the sake of argument. I don't think Arch was using the word that way, however, so I was merely replying in kind. He was referring to people who regard the failures you're talking about as some incidental problem of execution, rather than being indicative of a fundamental flaw in the underlying systems. I agree with him. But in the "placeholder" sense of the word, this has yet to be determined. However, it's obviously prudent to compare this next iteration to the previous ones to see if it is sufficiently different from those that have failed. And determining that will depend largely on why we think they failed.

Anyway, ready when you are. I think we're still back at determining what problems may be both innate to capitalism and immune to self-correction.



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But capitalism corrects itself by turning away from pure capitalism. The difference between capitalism and communism is capitalism is flexible and can absorb non capitalism beliefs as defined by Adam Smith and all attempts at communism has failed. The Russian system collapsed and China still claims to be communist, but obviously is not. Cuba and a few others limp along in a system that does not inspire the revelutionary fervor of previous decades. All that remains communist in China is the worst aspect of Lenin Marxism, the totalitarian control.
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Anyway, ready when you are. I think we're still back at determining what problems may be both innate to capitalism and immune to self-correction.
After reading this post, I'm convinced we're not at all ready, since we're not on the right terms. And really, the 'right terms' are very easy to understand. What hard is to shake off the old, familiar patterns of discussion about communism that pretty much all of us have been raised on. Although it might seem self-serving, everything I've tried to do in this thread has been towards enabling an actually productive discussion of communism: communism as a possibility, not a failed mistake. You can easily see how, to enter into the discussion on, say, Arch Stanton's terms is to already assume communism utterly dead.

And, of course, the past is dead in that sense.

It's no more an obfuscation than defining Communism by whatever form it takes next, thereby making it conveniently exempt from any criticism. It's the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
I know it's fashionable to simply call out these fallacies and consider the case won, but unless they are formal, these 'fallacies' are merely familiar patterns of discussion and themselves are subject to counterexample. Furthermore, it's precarious to apply them, since they are merely generalizations. Still, I think your understanding of my position based on this fallacy is very useful, because through it I may have finally found a way to explain to you what I think the only 'right terms' of a discussion on communism are.

Wikipedia says that the no true Scotsman fallacy involves rejecting the legitimacy of a counterexample to a universal by discounting that counterexample's relation to the universal.

Consider the following. When Michelson and Morley attempted to detect the presence of ether by measuring the speed of light, they famously found that the speed of light was, contrary to the ether hypothesis, constant in all measured reference frames. While, in our current relativistic conception of the world, this result is clearly a counterexample to the idea of ether, Michelson and Morley themselves declared their experiment a failure.

Now, were they committing the no true Scotsman fallacy or where they simply being good scientists by insisting on the precision of their measurements?

We know now it would take the revolutionary figure of Einstein to make a proper place in science for their result, but until that point, it's clear that they had no real reason to throw out the entire edifice of Newtonian Mechanics based on their result.

Now, while I am making an analogy, know that I consider this analogy to be perfect in that what happens in politics is not merely metaphorically related to what happens in science but IN ACTUALITY the same, exact movement. I'm using science as an example now because, since it is a perfect analogy, it has the effect of clarifying while brushing away familiar patterns of discourse native to contemporary political ideology.

What both display is a commitment to an idea. The idea in MM's case being the Newtonian framework, the idea in our case being Communism. Each failed iteration of Communism is, as in science, a failed experiment. A matter of contingent human error. The failure is not in the idea itself. The idea somehow remains eternal.

Now, of course, we know now that for MM, the failure was in fact in the idea itself of Newtonian mechanics. But this would take the intervention of Einstein and relativity as an alternative option. And, in this same way, we find Marx proposing the alternative option to capitalism. He is revolutionary in that he insists, as MM could not, that there an alternative option IS available. That science has progress YET to be made. That we have not reached the final configuration of human thought.

Indeed, there was no single 'counterexample' or even set of 'counterexamples' that defeated Newtonian mechanics. For decades, scientists let counterexamples build up and up, continuing to construct what could be called ad hoc solutions to integrate them into the overall framework. If relativity did not come along. If Einstein did not intervene (and of course he did not do all the work here, I'm simplifying), then perhaps we would have lived with these ad hoc solutions for eternity. There was no progress of science between these two points but a radical leap of perspective: a revolution.

So, you can see how, this idea of particular undermining universal introduces two ideas crucial to having a proper discussion of communism:
  1. Communism is necessitated by capitalism before communism has any concrete existence -- in science, all the data needed to CONSTRUCT relativity existed prior to the establishment of the theory itself

  2. Communism is a way to properly integrate -- make necessary -- capitalism's 'ad hoc' solutions

If the next form fails, I presume someone will end up saying that that isn't Communism, either. And on and on. The idea is not that the next form Communism takes will be identical, it's that the fundamental premise is flawed to the point at which anything which avoids those flaws can't really be called Communism. At some point the word has to mean something.
I've actually given you a very clear definition of what the word means. Communism per se is, quite simply, the political situation following capitalism.

The fact that no past project can be called 'true communism' is simply due to the fact that they have not actually succeeded in changing the situation. We know this because the essential features of the capitalist situation have remained entirely the same from its inception. This is all anyone means by the idea that 'true communism' has never been tried. 'True communism' is defined by its success.

This perhaps is the no true Scotsman as the fallacy is intended, and as you can see, it becomes quite a useless talking point. But perhaps now you can see how I never made it. The appearance of me making it was informed by the ideology from which we've been raised. You expected me to say it, so you simply project it onto my words without really reading them. What I've been saying throughout this thread has been very different.



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I'm sorry, bro.



No worries; I'm kinda sorry for you, because that post is crazily unnecessary. The key part of my last post was this:

Obviously, we've agreed in this thread to use the word as a placeholder of sorts. I've agreed to that obfuscation for the sake of argument. I don't think Arch was using the word that way, however, so I was merely replying in kind.
I understand why we need to use the word as a placeholder for purposes of this discussion, and I have no problem with it. Someone else came in using it differently (and understandably), and I responded to that response using the same terminology. We don't need to go through this whole thing of reestablishing what I've already agreed to establish.

I haven't projected anything onto you. I wasn't even speaking to you when I replied. Not that I mind you jumping in, but when you do, and you consider the context of what I was replying to, I think it's pretty clear there's no issue here.

That said, I can't resist responding one thing, even though it's only going to delay the actual discussion further: The scientists in your example were being good scientists, yes. But they also generally have the sense to use a different name for something when it changes a certain amount. In your analogy, Communism is Newtonian Mechanics, not the idea of Science itself.



The Idea of a uncorrupt Communist world can work, but there will always be corruption in the world, so the idea of an Communist fair society is unlikely.



you take it away... to show them what they had
communism is a system that sounds good in theory: everyone is equal and we're all friends and let's live together without religion and without nationality and without anything blah blah blah.

But in practice, as it happens in the Soviet Union, its Brought disaster upon tens of millions of people and it is the worst thing that happened to mankind second only to Nazism.



What;s happening in Russia now? Putin is like, the Russia dictator? I can't remember his name, bloody hell.



will.15's Avatar
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How? Perhaps it's more clear if I put it this way:

Communism-as-it-will-be has never been tried. It hasn't. I might as well say:

Communism-which-has-never-been-tried has never been tried.

It's really that simple. It's an amazing obfuscation to name the exact political structures of the 20th century as Communism-in-itself and play the easy game of picking them apart based on the precise events of their failure which we already witnessed.

Why would anyone think that the communist of today or the future would ever replicate the exact moves of past revolutionaries (as if even that were possible). This is the core of Marx's theory of history. Progress towards the Good based on the current situation. It is called dialectical because it is like dialectics: an argument, a conversation.

At this point in the conversation, I am saying one thing: you've won all the other past arguments, but I still think you're wrong. And for these reasons...
Maybe communism as you see it hasn't been tried because it can't be.



planet news's Avatar
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I understand why we need to use the word as a placeholder for purposes of this discussion, and I have no problem with it. Someone else came in using it differently (and understandably), and I responded to that response using the same terminology. We don't need to go through this whole thing of reestablishing what I've already agreed to establish.

I haven't projected anything onto you. I wasn't even speaking to you when I replied. Not that I mind you jumping in, but when you do, and you consider the context of what I was replying to, I think it's pretty clear there's no issue here.
Okay, cool. Still, I'm worried you're making concessions to me just to get the ball rolling without actually taking them seriously. At this point, I won't force it any more, because I can see it's far past annoying, but if you do happen to take the framework we've laid out seriously (really, just a Platonic framework), there's a chance you could walk out someday a communist! Or, as much a communist as I am (which is as much as one could be, I'd claim).

Communism is a placeholder, but in a very specific sense: it is a placeholder for Truth, the Good. It is an Idea in the Platonic sense. This is how movement towards it becomes synonymous with the movement of science... and beauty among other things.

That said, I can't resist responding one thing, even though it's only going to delay the actual discussion further: The scientists in your example were being good scientists, yes. But they also generally have the sense to use a different name for something when it changes a certain amount. In your analogy, Communism is Newtonian Mechanics, not the idea of Science itself.
As long as it was, I laid it out fairly poorly back there. Communism is Newtonian Mechanics insofar as I wanted to show how the no-true-Scotsman 'fallacy' is not a fallacy at all when it comes to doing something like scientific work: which, again, I claim to be the same kind of movement as 'political' work.

But Communism is Einsteinian Relativity insofar as I wanted to show how revolutionary movements relate to contemporary situations. In other words, how the no-true-Scotsman 'fallacy' becomes a fallacy: only after the fact when we can stand back and see how unreasonable we were being. In this case, Capitalism is Newtonian Mechanics, since, at the time of MM, it was the dominating regime.

Analogy as a Theory of History:
Capitalism : The current situation : Newtonian Mechanics (NW)
Communism : The future situation : Einsteinian Relativity (ER)
When a regime dominates, it becomes the thing itself: the Good, the True. Newtonian Mechanics was Truth itself -- especially so in modernist times. Even today, Relativity is Truth itself. As long as no alternative theory exists, there is no way to even conceive of how it could be false. Even in the presence of overwhelming 'counterexamples,' the current situation can still be justified by means of the no-true-Scotsman 'fallacy.'

What it amounts to is maintenance of being, a care of being; making sense of the world in whatever way you can. All communist want to do is help to make sense of the world in a different, possibly better way.

I will claim that the entire ideological edifice of what is in the U.S. called 'liberal' is nothing more than a perpetration of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy through the power of the state. Market failure, in the eyes of the democrats, is not a counterexample to the market, but simply a failure of true market, which is heavily mediated by the state. Liberal in the European sense, the reactionary/conservatives, are pure insofar as they need not resort to the arbitrary ad hoc machinations of the state to solve their problems.

Still, ultimately, both lay in the same situation.

Analogy as a Framework for Our Discussion:
inconsistencies of data with theory in NW : 'problems' with Capitalism : N/A
elegant re-integration of (inconsistent) data into theory in NW : results of laissez-faire theorists : Conservatism
ad hoc re-integration of (inconsistent) data into theory in NW : market regulation by the state : Liberalism
re-necessitation of (now consistent) data into new theory in ER : the Communist 'solution' : Communism
And, lastly, the shift from NW to ER was an axiomatic shift. A shift in universal principles. Still, what ultimately enabled the formulation of ER was the onslaught of particular, concrete issues with NW. Thus, we begin with particulars. Concrete matters of the present situation.




Let me start by saying that I have limited knowledge on this topic, so if I'm way off base feel free to bash the hell out of me.

I think it was Will who asked ... how do we define communism? That's a good question, since there are many types of communism.

It seems to me that communism can work and has worked on a small scale, but not on a large scale. For example, some of the Native American tribes used (is used the right word here?) primitive communism and it worked out just fine for them. Well, until ... you know what happened.
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Communism can't work because the nature of life, at least in this universe, is a competitive struggle for resources against an entropic backdrop. Any collectivist system based on sharing leaves itself wide open to predation, and inevitably gets corrupted. Idealism about living in total harmony forever and ever is sadly naive and quite simply contrary to the status quo of biological necessities for physical lifeforms hanging on for dear life and scraping out an existence in a physical universe that is gradually falling apart.

As others have said more clearly and succinctly, it can't work because of human nature, and, I'll add, because of Nature's nature and our universe's nature too.

Okay, all done talking kooky. Life sucks. I'm goin' back to bed.
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The human nature line is the refrain of this thread and all contemporary liberal ideology about communism, but it doesn't make much sense if you just think about it for even a second. Everything you say sounds fine if we were just human animals. But we're not. We're also subjects. We can make decisions.

Tomorrow, everyone could randomly wake up and decide to be good to one another. This is something that we are all capable of. It is absolutely possible. You just cannot deny this possibility. So we know that it is within the realm of possibility that this could happen. The fact that we are stuck in a historical age and so forth doesn't make this possibility less likely. It helps us understand just how we might bring this possibility around by looking at how to reverse the way things work today.

Furthermore, for any version of communism, it will ultimately be the case that 'human nature' will be modified to the extent that predation is no longer a part of human nature. This doesn't take any internal transformation per se. The internal is already external. In short, there is no stable human nature. If the system of distribution can make living plentiful, then competition does not appear internally nor externally.

Lastly, it is not at all necessary that resources are scarce. There is such a thing as plentitude. We know this. The fact that resources are scarce now does not imply they will always be -- think of technologies. You speak cosmically of 'the universe.' Can you not imagine just one planet where food is plentiful? It is also unclear just how resources are scarce. It is often pointed out how the collective spending on one luxury -- jewerly for example -- could compensate for the starvation of billions. Of course, I am not saying that this wealth could even in principle be freed to do such work, but the scarcity here seems much more a kind of lopsidedness than absolute lack.

Accusations of naivete are popular here, but it is those who take the way things are as the way things always will be who are truly naive. Indeed, this is the definition of naivete. Humans are still very young. We have a long way to go. We're not at the end of history yet, kids.

Why are teens the most suicidal age? They think they know it all.



That's a very interesting response. I have some thoughts:

1) Yes, we are active, rational agents and can override our baser instincts. Absolutely. But saying we can do something is different than counting on it, and counting on it across the vast majority of the population, which is what's necessary to make this sort of thing work. Being capable of doing a thing is not the same thing as being capable of doing it consistently. When you say we're capable of being good to one another, that's kind of like saying we're capable of running a 3:45 mile. We have that within us, too, but not everyone can do it and even fewer can do it consistently.

2) "Human nature will be modified." While I agree with the idea that systems can have a huge effect on how we behave (assuming that's what you mean), I think history shows us over and over that certain basic human impulses will always strenuously resist control. We can curb and suppress temporarily, or redirect, but we can't never merely modify people. The only two ways I think you can say this are either a) by suggesting we'll be ready for this after many, many generations are basically bred for things other than base survival, so that communism will be possible in some far distant future once humanity has evolved into something very different, or b) that it'll be made possible through pacifying the population with genetic modification. Which is absolutely horrific.

3) Regarding scarcity. Technically, you are correct: scarcity always exists in the sense of what we desire in comfort. If we desire much less, it's possible that we will have much less scarcity. But that goes back to the idea of modifying human nature. It's also a tough sell, because it's basically talking about trading a huge amount of basic human striving and excellence for this communist ideal. Even if you find this to be worthwhile trade off, it is a trade off.

Also, even then, there will be scarcity. Maybe a lot less, but there will always be some. Things will always go wrong, even if we're much better to each other and much more modest in our expectations of comfort and wealth.