Marxism (Communism)

[Rorschach Twin]

Who else thinks it could work, if people weren't so greedy?

[LadyLucretia]

Originally Posted by Rorschach Twin

Who else thinks it could work, if people weren't so greedy?

Maybe if everyone was lobotomized by age 2? Desire for power and wealth is part of human nature.

[GenniferBone]

Forget the greed part, there is a big lack of recognition for achievement in communism. It's always important to act for the good of the community, but when nobody recognizes an individuals, people tend to get sloppy.

Think of this way- You and a friend work at a factory. You work hard, work overtime, and always produce the highest quality product.

Your friend makes crap. And calls off all the time.

Both of you get the same pay, nobody recognizes or comments on your hard work. Your quality work is equal to his crap work.

Now, what incentive do you have to work hard?

Sadly, while a wonderful dream, communism doesn't provide for anything other then the bare minimum.

[DepthsofSpace]

Originally Posted by GenniferBone

Forget the greed part, there is a big lack of recognition for achievement in communism. It's always important to act for the good of the community, but when nobody recognizes an individuals, people tend to get sloppy.

Think of this way- You and a friend work at a factory. You work hard, work overtime, and always produce the highest quality product.

Your friend makes crap. And calls off all the time.

Both of you get the same pay, nobody recognizes or comments on your hard work. Your quality work is equal to his crap work.

Now, what incentive do you have to work hard?

Sadly, while a wonderful dream, communism doesn't provide for anything other then the bare minimum.

Quoted for the (muthafuckin') truth. It is also inherently against the individual, and self-expression. Collectivist thought always minimizes the individual while trumping society. Even in a anarcho-communist society, the individual and certian groups are persecuted.

As an AnCap, I was told flat out by a Red Anarchist that I was one of the first up against the wall after the 'revolution' (wow, that sounds so 'free'). I kindly told him after my revolution, I'd be glad to bank roll his construction of his own commune, and then left.

[Stormtrooper of Death]

Well I think in a perfect world if followed exactly as Marx had laid it out, it could work. But humans are nothing more than beasts in most cases so we need to remember that.

[gothicusmaximus]

Echoing everyone else's sentiment thus far.
Communist ideology isn't just contrary to human nature, but to nature as a whole. Competition is the impetus which drives social, as well as biological, evolution.

[Wormboy]

I agree with the above people. And hey, if you think it can work, go ask Russia ^.^

[raggedyanne]

everyone has posted excellent reasons. It's a beautiful ideal, but goes against human nature. For every person who wishes to live in the society Marx described, there are two willing to manipulate the situation for their own gain.

[MaguMan]

Originally Posted by Wormboy

And hey, if you think it can work, go ask Russia ^.^

Or Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, etc.

Communism was a nice little blip throughout the 20th century, but it's been shown to fail repeatedly and be an otherwise undesirable system of government on a national scale.

[Drake Dun]

The human nature line has always seemed to miss the point, to me. State socialism of any form is "contrary to human nature", sure. So is capitalism... or property, voting, marriage, snickers bars, the ascension of Christ, tee shirts, Gothic Internet forums. You name it. All of this is stuff that we came up with, not that mother nature saddled us with from the get go.

If anything, some kind of small scale socialism would most closely approximate our natural element. Homo sapiens has spent most of its history living in relatively egalitarian band societies, after all. And nomadic, at that - accumulation of wealth would have been a complete non-issue.

The deeper problem with state socialism is that it is stucturally infeasible. Trying to construct an entire economy through central planning is like cutting out your medula oblongata and then trying to regulate all of your autonomic functions consciously. Breathe in... breathe out.

Pretty much every criticism of capitalism comes down to the way it allows or even causes wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few. I share that concern, but skipping the whole accumulation process and just dumping all of that power directly into the hands of a tiny elite "vanguard" strikes me as a rather counter-intuitive solution.

Drake

[Sylph]

While in many ways restating, I also agree that communism is too flawed to ever be brought into practical usage. (Communism isn't necessarily Marxism, for the record, there is Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and many other varieties of communism, each quite different from each other.)

The idea behind it is a very noble one, a classless society where everyone is treated completely equally, where no one starves and everyone is pretty much equal sounds like a positive Utopia. However, the evidence is that it doesn't work.

During Russia's Marxist-Leninist Communism, considered in it's time a perfect communism created the byproduct called the Holodomor... where 10 million Ukrainians died because they couldn't produce enough food to feed the country -- Historians are still arguing over whether this counts as a genocide. They were "just Ukrainians" so they didn't matter to the Russian Government. It isn't possible to have a Communism without some hypocrisy and of course someone getting completely screwed in the end. Some one has to do the work after all, and without rewards for hard work you have to find an alternate method to make people work... usually punishment.

In not so many words, Communism looks pretty, but history proves that it simply doesn't work.

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by Sylph

Russia's Marxist-Leninist Communism, considered in it's time a perfect communism...

My understanding is that the Russian state was always seen as an intermediary step toward what Marx himself would have called "Communism" - a post-state, post-class socialism.

I guess I should point out that in my previous post, I used "Communism" in the sense ordinarily understood by Americans, in which it refers to Russian style state socialism. I assume that's what the original poster was talking about.

Drake

[Rorschach Twin]

Reading back at the way I posted this, it made it sound as if i was a supporter of Communism. I wouldn't really say that, but I definitely don't agree with Capitalism.

[RisingDemon]

Communism is a contradiction in itself, all that could ever, and will ever be reached, is 'The dictatorship of the proleteriat'.

[CptSternn]

First, to address what a few said above -

Marxism and communism are *not* interchangeable terms.

That being said, lets address a few other statements...

Marxism does recognise achievements. In fact, in a perfect Marxian society, much like that which Plato wrote about in the Republic, the best and brightest will be rewarded by being allowed to run the society.

Those who excel in various fields will have the opportunity to manage those fields.

Second, communism does work, in small countries. That being said, most of those countries are merely *based* on the wirtings of Marx and *based* on the idea of communism. Much like America is *based* on democracy.

America is by no means a democracy, many aspects directly conflict with the definition. Same goes for communist nations in the world.

If we are going to have a discussion on this, we need to first decide are we talking about Marxism, or communism. We then need to define whether we are talking about communism in theory, or communism based upon a certain regime, and the time frame in which that regime existed.

So far, this thread has jumped between three ideas and the comments made do not accurately reflect the topic.

[Rorschach Twin]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

First, to address what a few said above -

Marxism and communism are *not* interchangeable terms.

That being said, lets address a few other statements...

Marxism does recognise achievements. In fact, in a perfect Marxian society, much like that which Plato wrote about in the Republic, the best and brightest will be rewarded by being allowed to run the society.

Those who excel in various fields will have the opportunity to manage those fields.

Second, communism does work, in small countries. That being said, most of those countries are merely *based* on the wirtings of Marx and *based* on the idea of communism. Much like America is *based* on democracy.

America is by no means a democracy, many aspects directly conflict with the definition. Same goes for communist nations in the world.

If we are going to have a discussion on this, we need to first decide are we talking about Marxism, or communism. We then need to define whether we are talking about communism in theory, or communism based upon a certain regime, and the time frame in which that regime existed.

So far, this thread has jumped between three ideas and the comments made do not accurately reflect the topic.

Ok. I apologize.

I was meaning to discuss Marxism here.

I suppose I should say some of the main ideas of it then.


"Main ideas

The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels' collective works include:

* means of production: The means of production are a combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. The means of labor include machines, tools, equipment, infrastructure, and "all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it".[2] The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of production by themselves produce nothing -- labor power is needed for production to take place.
* mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including the means of production and labour power) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law; cooperative work relations and forms of association; relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
* base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” metaphor to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[3] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base-structure metaphor.[citation needed] The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between actual entities "in the world".[citation needed]
* class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possess, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness.
* ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology[4], Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[5] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[6] Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).[citation needed]
* historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
* political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity.
* exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labor, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
* alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[7] Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated."

(sourced to wikipedia)

[raggedyanne]

That clears up many things. I thank you.

[Rorschach Twin]

apparently that didn't clear up anything...

[Rasputin]

I admire marxism-but what i often dont like is on how they materialize, for some use is as a front in achieving power. Like they say that they wanted freedom of speech, thought and religion there are some whom respected it (as in Scandinavia, whom used to be a social democratic country whom also used some ideas of marxism), others dont-since they wanted to control these (like USSR).

and on the ideas of collectivism:
Its good to know collectivism to improve social condition-but we must also respect the sanctity of the individual, specially its ideas imbued through.

marxism wanted something-A classless society, under the ideas of a cernain broad united front of the major working foces composed of worker, farmer and of course us, intellectuals.

Early Christians wanted used to do communism, as Christ used to give fish and bread equally to the people, and so is the idea of a simple living and his integration with the masses.

[Rasputin]

improved version:

I admire marxism-but what i often dont like is on how they materialize, for some use is as a front in achieving power. Like they say that they wanted freedom of speech, thought and religion there are some whom respected it (as in Scandinavia, whom used to be a social democratic country whom also used some ideas of marxism), others dont-since they wanted to control these (like USSR).

and on the ideas of collectivism:
Its good to know collectivism to improve social condition-but we must also respect the sanctity of the individual, specially its ideas imbued through. as in other nations, the right for self determination (USSR doesnt apply-look at hungary, hungaarians, even they are used to be communist, wanted independence and self determination from the soviets, but the soviets crushed them and the idea of self determination, and so is in East germany, and Czechoslovakia. i remember a political cartoon epicting kurushev accused marx and lenin as counterrevolutionaries!) and as i admire marxism, i shun other ideas around marxism. mao said that "It is right to rebel!" but then "man is created for the society." it seemed to be contradicting. "We have a right to rebel as society created for us, so if the society is unsuitable, of course we have a right to change it rather than the society change us!"

marxism wanted something-A classless society, under the ideas of a cernain broad united front of the major working foces composed of worker, farmer and of course us, intellectuals.

Early Christians wanted used to do communism, as Christ used to give fish and bread equally to the people, and so is the idea of a simple living and his integration with the masses.

[Godslayer Jillian]

I like that this thread was resurrected.
First of all, most of the people before Sternn got something terribly wrong:
Marxism is not communism.
Communism is a hypothetical form of society and economy.
Marxism is the theory of how this form of society will happen.
You can't say that Marxism would be a nice idea if it worked. It either does work or it doesn't.
Karl Marx had certain ideals in his communism, but the Marxist theory is not about these ideals, but about the path society will take which will inevitably reach those ideals.
Marxism is basically oppression -> revolution -> anarchy -> socialism -> communism
Personally I do believe Karl Marx got it right. Marxism is accurate, and it is the only logical outcome of today's society.

[Magila]

Talking about communism it self, Due to what is happening nowadays in the world i.e : Oil is running out, prices are damn too high already.
I would say that communism to rise " yet again " would benefit people more in the future, Soon, in about 10 years you will see 1 rich person from each 50-100 poor, which drives to murder, theft, and whole anarchy.

Now about what LadyLucretia Just said, i would agree on most of it, but i'd say that this is rather untrue ( well, most of it. )

why ? when communism was spread people were all equal, every one worked for a stronger nation, you do take the same pay, since it had strict rules concerning jobs, people had to work equally, slacking on a job was not treated easily by the government itself, and i cannot see a reason why would any one slack on a job if he is living in a good atmosphere that works for his benefit.

Every food product was free, everything was the best quality ( you can check the old soviet instruments, they are still top notch till now.

Mainly the only "gap" in communism was that you can never get better than every one else, as in too rich... but to think about it in the future, 100 middle classed people or 99 poor, 1 rich ?

I am only stating this due to the oil mayhem going on around the globe, if they find a better way to fix that, a good replacement, that is cheaper than oil nowadays, i think communism would not be needed then.

[KontanKarite]

Dude, mother FUCK oil.

I saw recently, a car converted to run on Veggie oil. VEGGIE OIL people.

Explain why something as simple as a veggie oil powered engine does not standardly exist. Because it's too expensive? FUCK a bunch of that logic.

If the day comes that I own a vehicle, it's going to be veggie oil powered unless a better alternative presents itself. Everyone else can spend 4 dollars a gallon on gas, just give me your old cooking oil and grease when you don't need it anymore.

[Smile]

I think people wouldn't be as motivated to elevate themselves to a higher social class if Marxism (communism) was allowed to proliferate. For example, if you knew that, no matter how hard you worked, everything you owned belonged to the government, would you want to work your hardest? But then you've got to consider China and its rapid economic growth...
My opinion is...anarchy. Or a really kick-a$$ dictator who'll give everyone free universal health care.

[Magila]

Another good point in communism, that people did not complain about high taxes, the country had enough funds to be a good place, why nowadays every country " does " complain about high taxes, while most should know that taxes will eventually benefit the country that people live in ! I could say 60% salary tax on Denmark for examples, but denmark is one of the best countries in the world " you can make a research and you will know that this is true ".


A bad side of communism that i am amazed that very few people actually know, we were not allowed to communicate with the outside world, nor use the internet in Russia, we were not allowed to have phone calls with anyone outside the soviet union, also were not allowed to export or import any goods " at all ".


So i guess every ruler ship got a gap in it.