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:
- 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
- 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.