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Is Socialism/Communism or a similar system inevitable in a humane society?
Sorenson
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A little over a week ago, Douglas Rushkoff submitted a rather interesting article to CNN on the subject of how jobs and the concept thereof may be becoming "obsolete":
Individual productivity is always increasing as new technologies are being introduced, and in terms of productivity there are two holy grails that allow for the potential for virtually limitless per-capita production: sophisticated robotics and sophsticated AI. With robotics and AI, manufacturers and service providers gain employees that requires only a fraction of the financial obligation of a flesh and blood worker while producing far more goods in a far more efficient manner. Short of a Von Neuman-styled manufacturing system that can take in raw materials and spit out finished goods almost instantly, this is effectively the end of major developments in manufacturing and most service provisions outside of minor adjustments to allow for more precise manufacturing as required by certain goods.
So now you have an extrordinarily large amount of people whose jobs have been more or less permenantly outsourced due to the mass-implimentation of robotics and AI. What exactly do these people do? The smart-ass answer is, of course, that they become mechanics, programmers and other people involved with the development and maintainance of these systems. But this suffers from several problems:
A) Only a small fraction of these displaced people will be wanted or needed to maintain and develop these systems, as you can only have so many engineers or programmers per system. This also applies to any job that a robot or AI is simply unsuited for (teachers, doctors, psychologists, etc)
Only a small fraction of these displaced people have the capability to learn the new skills required to switch to a robotics and AI-based economy, be it in mental or monetary means. This ALSO applies to any job that a robot or AI is simply unsuited for.
C) The potential for recursive maintainance and development could very well remove the need for any more than a small token force of programmers, and, as noted, the AI and robots could do the job far better than their human counterparts anyway.
Also suggested by some is the idea that individuals would become entrapeneurs and provide services and goods of their own. Again, however, this suffers from several problems:
A) Most people will lack the monetary means to start up their own business to provide a good or service.
Even if a person can start their own business, the owners of the means of development and production may take notice of the demand for the product this person is offering. As they have far greater means of development and production and far more readily-available capital on-hand, they have the ability to produce a similar good and flood the market in an effort to undercut the individual entrapeneur.
This creates an extrordinary problem for the vast majority of humanity. Those who own the means of production will continue to gain wealth as people continue to buy goods, particularly in essential areas such as foodstuffs and medicine; because they employ only an extremily small number of people relative to their overall productivity, however, only an extremily small fraction of that wealth goes back down to the workers. Due to the lopsided nature of monetary transactions in this economy, the production owners will containue to gain wealth, the very small group of human-centric workers will remain more or less stationary, and the vast majority will continue to lose wealth as they continue to spend on necessities until they have spent every dime to their names.
So what then? Capitalism, Libertarianism and other ideologies that focus on the individual and the concept of self-sufficiency suffer a critical breakdown at this point: people cannot become entrapeneurs in their own right as they simply cannot compete with those who own the vast majority of the wealth and means of production, and most people cannot become employed due to an extremily limited number of available jobs and the limiting factors of ability to learn new skills and ability to pay for the acquisition of new skills. And as both systems are hostile to any form of wealth redistribution, there is no way to effectively tap into the extrordinarily large amount of wealth that has now more or less been permenantly sequestered within the domain of the the top 1% to 0.1% of the population.
In this situation, there are only three possible outcomes:
A) A new social class of permenant welfare recipients is created that lives off the taxed table scraps of the owners of the means of production.
The mass die-off of the vast majority of the population, the process of which will likely lead to complete and total social breakdown as you wind up with millions upon millions upon millions engaging in rioting, looting and killing out of anger and desperation.
C) The consolidation of all liquid and infrastructure assets into a singular entity for division amongst the populace.
Considering the nature of taxation in the United States, A is extrordinarily unlikely and is also questionable when taking into account the "humane" qualifier: we're barely able to pull in $2.6 trillion per year as is, yet providing for the hundreds of millions of individuals who have been permenantly left unemployable would come at the pricetag of roughly $2 trillion alone assuming total yearly compensation of $10,000 (considerably less than the poverty level) per displaced working-age individual. B is, of course, not only inhumane but comes with the potential for the complete self-destruction of America. Only C can allow for the relative maintainance of society while ensuring a decent standard of living for the populace: considering that U.S. personal income was about $12 trillion as of 2010, assuming complete circulation of income that would allow for a stipend of approxometily $50,000 for every single individual over the age of 18.
Communism has its own flaws of considerable note, of course: as Rushkoff notes in his own article, the attempt to create complete economic equality can sap the motivation to excel, and the concept of effectively destroying the concept of different social classes is one that is an outright impossability due to the way that human beings view themselves and view others. Considering the alternatives, however, there's no other way to be able to maintain a semi-stable society and economy, as capitalism eventually will reach a tipping point due to the mass accomulation of wealth by an extremily small sector of the populace and the absolute depletion of wealth from the vast majority of the populace.
EDIT: GOD DAMN IT, that's the third time the fucking title got eaten.
The article primarily focuses on the issue of what people do for production and as an occupation, only very briefly touching upon the subject of how we actually get to that sort of state in the first place. Considering both the rapid development of technology in the last few decades and the issues of economic stability and the distribution of wealth that have been raised with increased volume over the last few years, however, what may be a far more important question to ask is not what we do in a post-scarcity and post-mass-employment society, but rather how we can transition to a post scarcity and post-mass-employment society.The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Unless an external source of funding comes in, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms.
We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit -- at least in this case -- is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.
New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs -- as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.
Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.
The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."
The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.
While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.
But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.
For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.
Individual productivity is always increasing as new technologies are being introduced, and in terms of productivity there are two holy grails that allow for the potential for virtually limitless per-capita production: sophisticated robotics and sophsticated AI. With robotics and AI, manufacturers and service providers gain employees that requires only a fraction of the financial obligation of a flesh and blood worker while producing far more goods in a far more efficient manner. Short of a Von Neuman-styled manufacturing system that can take in raw materials and spit out finished goods almost instantly, this is effectively the end of major developments in manufacturing and most service provisions outside of minor adjustments to allow for more precise manufacturing as required by certain goods.
So now you have an extrordinarily large amount of people whose jobs have been more or less permenantly outsourced due to the mass-implimentation of robotics and AI. What exactly do these people do? The smart-ass answer is, of course, that they become mechanics, programmers and other people involved with the development and maintainance of these systems. But this suffers from several problems:
A) Only a small fraction of these displaced people will be wanted or needed to maintain and develop these systems, as you can only have so many engineers or programmers per system. This also applies to any job that a robot or AI is simply unsuited for (teachers, doctors, psychologists, etc)
Only a small fraction of these displaced people have the capability to learn the new skills required to switch to a robotics and AI-based economy, be it in mental or monetary means. This ALSO applies to any job that a robot or AI is simply unsuited for.C) The potential for recursive maintainance and development could very well remove the need for any more than a small token force of programmers, and, as noted, the AI and robots could do the job far better than their human counterparts anyway.
Also suggested by some is the idea that individuals would become entrapeneurs and provide services and goods of their own. Again, however, this suffers from several problems:
A) Most people will lack the monetary means to start up their own business to provide a good or service.
Even if a person can start their own business, the owners of the means of development and production may take notice of the demand for the product this person is offering. As they have far greater means of development and production and far more readily-available capital on-hand, they have the ability to produce a similar good and flood the market in an effort to undercut the individual entrapeneur.This creates an extrordinary problem for the vast majority of humanity. Those who own the means of production will continue to gain wealth as people continue to buy goods, particularly in essential areas such as foodstuffs and medicine; because they employ only an extremily small number of people relative to their overall productivity, however, only an extremily small fraction of that wealth goes back down to the workers. Due to the lopsided nature of monetary transactions in this economy, the production owners will containue to gain wealth, the very small group of human-centric workers will remain more or less stationary, and the vast majority will continue to lose wealth as they continue to spend on necessities until they have spent every dime to their names.
So what then? Capitalism, Libertarianism and other ideologies that focus on the individual and the concept of self-sufficiency suffer a critical breakdown at this point: people cannot become entrapeneurs in their own right as they simply cannot compete with those who own the vast majority of the wealth and means of production, and most people cannot become employed due to an extremily limited number of available jobs and the limiting factors of ability to learn new skills and ability to pay for the acquisition of new skills. And as both systems are hostile to any form of wealth redistribution, there is no way to effectively tap into the extrordinarily large amount of wealth that has now more or less been permenantly sequestered within the domain of the the top 1% to 0.1% of the population.
In this situation, there are only three possible outcomes:
A) A new social class of permenant welfare recipients is created that lives off the taxed table scraps of the owners of the means of production.
The mass die-off of the vast majority of the population, the process of which will likely lead to complete and total social breakdown as you wind up with millions upon millions upon millions engaging in rioting, looting and killing out of anger and desperation.C) The consolidation of all liquid and infrastructure assets into a singular entity for division amongst the populace.
Considering the nature of taxation in the United States, A is extrordinarily unlikely and is also questionable when taking into account the "humane" qualifier: we're barely able to pull in $2.6 trillion per year as is, yet providing for the hundreds of millions of individuals who have been permenantly left unemployable would come at the pricetag of roughly $2 trillion alone assuming total yearly compensation of $10,000 (considerably less than the poverty level) per displaced working-age individual. B is, of course, not only inhumane but comes with the potential for the complete self-destruction of America. Only C can allow for the relative maintainance of society while ensuring a decent standard of living for the populace: considering that U.S. personal income was about $12 trillion as of 2010, assuming complete circulation of income that would allow for a stipend of approxometily $50,000 for every single individual over the age of 18.
Communism has its own flaws of considerable note, of course: as Rushkoff notes in his own article, the attempt to create complete economic equality can sap the motivation to excel, and the concept of effectively destroying the concept of different social classes is one that is an outright impossability due to the way that human beings view themselves and view others. Considering the alternatives, however, there's no other way to be able to maintain a semi-stable society and economy, as capitalism eventually will reach a tipping point due to the mass accomulation of wealth by an extremily small sector of the populace and the absolute depletion of wealth from the vast majority of the populace.
EDIT: GOD DAMN IT, that's the third time the fucking title got eaten.
Sorenson on
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When a worker is displaced by a robot, offering them a robot repairman job is only the shallowest of possibilities. You really don't see an employment boom from information technology? The dot-com era ushered in employment levels that were previously thought to be theoretically unattainable. And it was primarily due to what new technology made possible. New possibilities dwarfed worker displacement.
If I'm replacing humans with robots (or mail with email), it's because robots are a significantly cheaper labor force. If labor is significantly cheaper, then business is significantly cheaper. If business is significantly cheaper, then new businesses can be created that do things which in the past simply couldn't be done. Because the cost was too high (or the difficulty too high) to make money doing it. It's no longer just about the previously existing business that replaced workers with robots - it's also about the previously unprofitable non-existent business which can now actually exist as a net-add to the economy. And it will need workers. Not just robot repairmen. It will need everything from entrepreneurs and marketing execs to cleaning crews and truck drivers.
However, if and when technology reaches a point where we can cover basic needs for everyone with minimal cost or effort, and this doesn't lead to a population growth crisis, then I think some sort of Communist system might be inevitable.
Somewhat Longer Answer: So long as people stand to profit from scarcity of materials or labor, there will be a capitalist underpinning to any forward society.
It is only in a truly post-scarcity model where we can start talking about communism in any successful way... but even then base human motivation will likely cock it up.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I don't understand this. You can't base an economy around iPhone apps, can you?
No, it's not. It's not anymore than capitalism is the end of history for any industrial society at least vageuly interested in owning crap.
As much as we love to think that human societies basically want the same things we want, and value the same things we value, the actual reality is, no, frequently they do not, and when they do, the subtle differences are enough to result in hugely different political economic-norms, to the degree that they would offend our sensibilities. Now, I don't think OP is misguided or carrying anything other than fairly good, positivist intentions, but I'd be lying if the possible train of thought resulting from this--on the inevitability of political economy for humans because they are human alienated me).
(Sorry, it's just this whole 'End of History' thing pisses me off without fail. Fuck, even Marx and Engels limited themselves to urban, industrial societies. Any humane societ? Really?)
Someone, somewhere got paid to test that game. And likely continues to get paid to test new installments and level packs or whatever it is that's always cluttering up my top 10 paid apps list. Not that game testing is really the sort of playing you presumably meant.
I don't think that, outside of some sort of singularity event leaving us in a post-scarcity world or a world where human labor is literally completely unnecessary, we're going to reach a pure communist or entirely jobless society. I do hope that some kind of true universal welfare state is in the future, though. Considering how many resources actually exist, it would be nice if we could ramp down the individual greed enough to make sure that every human being (or at least every citizen of your country of choice) had a place to live, clothes to wear, health care, and food to eat, whether they have a job or not.
Likewise, people who can leverage better housing/transportation/whatever are sure as fuck going to want it.
I don't imagine it would be easy to implement, but as long as we're wishing for future utopias, I feel like "everyone is guaranteed enough to live" is a less far-out one than "nobody has to work because the robots do it all".
I'm not sure that "Rome tried it 2000 years ago and it didn't work" is a valid criticism against a social program. Modern economies are pretty different from Imperial Rome.
My Roman history is pretty blah. I know some rudimentary stuff, but I can't really claim any extreme knowledge.
My understanding was that they gave permanent welfare to the lower class, in the form of some food, shelter and money. The lower class, without any jobs or anything, just fucked like rabbits, making many more of them than in the other class. Since there were more poor, more money was diverted to continuing to feeding and sheltering them. Basically it is an exponential money pit, is what I was trying to go for, and why you can't really have it.
Or I'm just completely full of shit (nothing new).
Not really, the 'bread and circus' thing was a political prop used occasionally to win favor rather than a permanent system. The welfare state is nothing like the roman institutional framework, much less the cause of collapse. There was a marked urban decline rather than the population 'fucking like rabbits' as people had to leave the city to work on estates to get enough to eat.
Though the struggles the Romans had with their gold-backed currency, an ultra-wealthy elite's refusal to pay taxes, and inability to overcome a deadlocked budgetary system sound pretty familiar though don't they?
...and now you're going to tell us exactly what flawed assumptions he made, right?
I kid you not, that is an argument my father used against me. I was arguing how absurd it is to have a religious mandate to have as many babies as you possibly can (my entire family is super catholic and Catholicism is very big on married couples pumping out babies) b/c of eventual overpopulation (and the kind of corrections (read: war) that it entails) and his argument was just there is always war and disease. So we should populate the earth as much as we can in case of the next black plague....how do you argue with that?
Oh also we have to keep our birth rates up in order to fend off the muslims. Other common defences are: which one of your younger brothers would you get rid of and the firstborn is the most selfish (i'm the oldest in my family).
Rome had a major structural problem that persisted for centuries until it effectively killed them. The cities were full to bursting, while the rural areas were dominated by massive slave plantations owned by wealthy families based in Rome. The empire did not have the technology to improve the lot of the urban poor - although they did way better than you'd expect and ended up inventing some awesome things like aqueducts and the modern retail on the bottom/homes on top apartment building.
Periodically, Rome tried to grant farmland for service to soldiers, political allies and the like, hoping that it would lead to greater settlement outside the cities - the Roman interior was always shockingly underpopulated and barren. This usually lasted a few decades until an economic crisis caused the price of crops to fall and, since this was a gold economy, only wealthy had the funds to weather the troubles. When these crises occurred, the wealthy either bought up, foreclosed or just outright seized the smallholders' farms.
All the efforts to develop the interior of the empire then vanished as the small landowners retreated back to the city as destitute refugees and the wealthy reconsolidated their massive slave operations. These operations served as cash machines for these families, whose leadership were responsible for the endless blood feuds, throne grabs and nastiness that defined Roman politics for most of the empire's existence.
The Gracchi revolts, which were the start of the decline of the republic, revolved around this, and the cycle repeated for almost a thousand years. The current thinking of why Rome fell was that the hinterlands got tired of this cycle, and being taxed and abused by wealthy Romans without any benefits to themselves, and switched their allegiance to the upstart "barbarian" kingdoms.
I suppose the ironic thing about Communism, is that there is no way for a Communist government to be operated by the people it's supposed to liberate. A just Communist government run by labor workers is destined to fail.
I can if you like, but even a cursory reading of his rantings should clear up any confusion you might have as to what I'm talking about. Are you really trying to prop up Marx here? Communism doesn't work. Every country that has tried to implement it has later been forced to abandon it because it's not a viable political or economic system.
But, such a system will still have social classes. There will always be jobs that need to be done, so there will need to be material incentives to get people to do those jobs rather than just sitting around all day enjoying porn plugged directly into your brain. So, doctors, robot designers and cyber-porn producers will need to be paid in excess of the basics.
And some things will always remain scarce. There is only so much beachfront property to go around, for example. So, the people who work the actual jobs will be able to live on a house on the beach while non-workers will live in less-comfortable government-provided housing elsewhere.
Rigorous Scholarship
No, but facism is!
Honest question - how do you respond to this? It seems like kind of a legitimate question. Do you really believe your parents should've had fewer children, and if so... looking at your siblings, do you feel the world would be a better place if one or more of them never existed?
Except for China, Vietnam and Cuba, of course.
I'm not an up with communism guy - totalitarian orthodoxies aren't my thing - but there's a ton of space between Marx and 20th century communism. It's like blaming George Washington for how Liberia turned out.
Marx's descriptions of capitalism and its effects on European society are still valid today. His weakest points are his beliefs in the inevitability of revolution, but if you do a little research about what 19th century capitalism was like, and how many revolts it spawned, you can see where he'd get his ideas.
I'd say the biggest blind spot in Marx is that he did not foresee the ability to capitalist democracies to evolve into social democracies, with labor laws and a social safety net that blunts the worst excesses of capitalist societies. Of course, you could argue that we're seeing the widespread rollback of those reforms, and Marx may prove to be more right than wrong in the long run.
You say, stop being an idiot.
There's a huge difference between advocating mitigating a harmful practice and murdering people who have already done it. You don't thin out the existing children, you simply try to convince them that they shouldn't have a large family of their own.
The alternative is to let them have large families and let supply and demand sort them out the hard way. In a world of limited resources, we'll be referring to the third child as "the family larder."
Any policy debate that requires "assuming time machines exist" as the starting point isn't going to go anywhere. You don't choose to go back and undo past bad decisions, you decide to make better decisions in the future. I won't miss the kid I didn't have any more than I'd miss the winnings for the lottery ticket I'd never bought.
Taking your question seriously, though, I'd cut the kid that grew up to become Hitler.
I don't know that material incentives are necessary for the existence of social classes. Even if there were enough of [insert every possible physical commodity, including things like locale, etc.] to go around and let everybody have as much as they want, you'd still have social classes based on fame and admiration. Famous people exist in a different social class from other people even in today's society. An executive for Random Corp. Inc. might make as much as an up-and-coming athlete, movie/TV star, or musician, and can enjoy the same material rewards, but isn't in the same social class as any of those people. In a world without scarcity the elite would presumably be those whose company was desired by many. Anybody can have a banquet followed by a 3-day yacht party for their birthday, but only those whose activities touch a lot of lives will have people waiting on line to get aboard that yacht or want to read about it in the robot-generated news.
Then communism in its purest form failed, giving rise to new capitalist states, while the remaining communist states adopted some capitalist measures to patch up the most egregious failures of communism (like mismanagement, inefficiency, etc).
Short story short - human irrationality is going to screw with any economic model we come up with. Capitalism with some socialist programs, or communism with a great deal of capitalism allowed, seems to be working pretty well to me though.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Please do. It would be very helpful for me to have a list of his flawed assumptions. For that matter, how do you do a cursory reading of Das Kapital? Is there a Cliffnotes version?
My biggest fear is that the West's leaders are going to decide en masse that the Depression-era reforms were either failures or no longer necessary and plunge us back into late 19th century style capitalism. That'll pretty much be the end of Pax Europa/Americana, and we'll be lucky if it doesn't spark another century of revolts and wars.
You could skim The Communist Manifesto. It's pretty short, and bourgeoisie gets a lot easier to parse the 98th time you read it.
That's still a stupid question. Which of your four imaginary alien pocket dragons would you choose not to have in our side-reality?
Rantings? I've read the Eighteenth of Brumaire, and saw no rantings to speak of. He made a lot of flawed assumptions (his conception of value - essentially, David Ricardo's - is completely flawed, his knowledge of non-European history is scarce, to say the least, his view of society as a conflict between burgeouisie and proletariat is reductionist). His Das Kapital is exactly that, "Das Kapital", not "Der Komunismus" (one of the ironies in Marx's thought is that he gave little account as to what Communism would be).
To qualify Marx's writings as "rantings" (as opposed to, say, "wrong" or "flawed") is intellectual trogloditism. To not make a differentiation between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism (which is what I assume you mean by "Communism" - though I'll be the first to say the political apparatus of Marxism-Leninism comes from a natural possible reading of Marx's works) is silly goosery.
The question of the thread is moronic (the poster isn't). No, really, it is. Seriously, Western Civilization: you've been living with teleology since the rise of Christendom, it's time to let it go. We can live without questions of social "inevitability".
"Back to XIXth-century capitalism"? Where were you during the last 30 years? Late XIXth-century capitalism is back with a vengeance, complete with a Gilded Age in the USA, increased global trade and free-market orthodoxy.
And please, let's not discuss "the reason the Roman Empire fell". This idea, of a single reason (or few reasons) for such an event, was debunked by Arnaldo Momigliano some 60 years ago. A German historian made a list of "reasons the Roman Empire fell, as proposed during the last four centuries" - a list that included capitalism, communism, emancipation of women, centralization, descentralization, Christianism, paganism, impotence (caused by hypothermia, caused by those warm baths), celibacy, pacifism, militarism and so on and so forth.
And it's back with a vengeance - see Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire for a good overview of the current historiography. Modern archaeology, political science and general science science have contributed a lot to modern historians' understanding of what happened to Rome.
The general outline isn't particularly novel and doesn't require conspiracy theories about lead, impotence or anything else. It's just that Rome lacked the ability to provide more than defense for most of its periphery and, by the end, Rome was little more than a bunch of peripheries.
When the barbarians routed the army in the field. the peripheries melted away over the decades. Rome had nothing to offer them, little to threaten them with and nothing to bring them back.
What do you mean "going to"? They already did. What do you think the last few decades of dergulation was all about?
Capitalism failed misrably with the Great Depression. We patched up the holes and went on. Then people died and forgot what happen and other people got greedy and said "Why all these damn rules? We don't need them!" and then it all happened again.
Except this time, so far anyway, the people in charge still haven't bothered to read a history textbook and learn what we did last time to fix the problem.
I wouldn't even go that far. I think they're falling into a problem we have as a society, in general.
We like to pretend that the invention of the computer and the internet have invalidated all previous societal wisdom. We think we live in a new age with new realities, new ideas and anyone suggesting "old" solutions to new problems is merely deluded. I've seen literally dozens of articles and op-ed pieces in the last decade that make this case.
Great Depression solutions, in this worldview, will not work because the world is completely different than it was then. We need 21st century solutions, which are usually some form of 19th century economics.