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Ach! Hans, Run! It's [Communism]!
The Ender
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Communists!? HERE!? Dear God, someone save us!
So, for those of us that are socialists & those of us perhaps curious about what socialism is / how it differs from more mainstream leftist philosophy (Keynesian economics or Neo-Liberalism, for example), I figured I'd open a thread up.
What are you Goddamn Commies going to do to us!?
Communism's a pretty expansive term, covering multiple philosophies that share this core theme: that society would be improved if the means of production were in the hands of the working class rather than owned by a handful of wealthy kingmakers. Historically, 'means of production' referred to things like factories, fisheries, harbors & agricultural plantations; in contemporary times, this covers things like technology patents, laboratories, telecommunications, etc. Any industry whose products comprise the foundations for modern society.
What exactly it means for workers to own the means of production is a topic of long & arduous debate among socialists.
That guy over there is calling himself a 'Maoist'! I hate Mao! He was evil and foreign!
So, many branches of communism are named after people who initially wrote down the principles that they felt would best achieve worker ownership of the means of production (...and other things that the person felt were important at the time): Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Vladamir Lenin, Karl Marx, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, etc. The reader will no doubt note that many of the named persons are mass murderers whom ran police states, toppling dictators only to become dictators themselves.
To try and get this out of the way here: nobody who identifies themselves as a 'Maoist' or 'Stalinist' or 'Hoxhaist' believes that the programs initiated by those persons were great, only the originally authored philosophy (or the core parts of it, anyway). A Maoist (probably) does not think the Great Leap Forward was a good thing, but (probably) believes that Mao was right about political leadership only being a matter of who is best armed. A Hoxhaist (probably) does not think that the Albanian pogroms against religious people were a good thing, but (probably) believes that the most fundamental components of society are found in literacy & communication. Etc.
I am a liberal; people call me a hipster and tell me I need to get a real job. We cool, bro?
Contemporary liberal philosophy does find a lot of common ground with socialism (mainly in the area of social welfare & why it is a good thing), but there is a pretty severe chasm between the two schools of thought in that, for the most part, liberal philosophy buys into the concept of capitalism & some sort of free market (albeit one with some state oversight). Communist philosophy does not accept capitalism or a fee market structure; they are instruments of class warfare, are unstable and ultimately will remain in a state of ongoing collapse, only propped-up by steady theft from the working class. If you believe that it's possible to create a robust entrepreneur-friendly economy that is also egalitarian, most communists (including myself) would disagree.
You want to set-up an equal society? You monster! You'll never get away with this! I'm calling the CIA!
I'll be honest: in the last 5~ ish years or so, I've had mostly warm reception and dialogue when talking about socialism on the Internet, and I've been surprised at how many people were either likewise socialists or extremely curious in a non-antagonistic way about how socialism is different from the sort of leftist politics that tends to dominate North America & Western Europe. I'm not sure what got in the water, but I can't say I'm complaining.
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For instance, in theory, Communism abolishes the state in favor of proletariat-ownership. The concept of social class evaporates and the practicality of need overwhelms all pursuit of excess. It is, in effect, a self-imposed utopia where all people have all they require and no one is repressed (via the greed of others, or any traditional hierarchy). This, as far as I understand, has never actually occurred in any historically relevant country (i.e. the Eastern bloc, Latin America, or southeast Asia) that has called itself "Communist". Not even close. Not even remotely close.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding what counts as irony.
Additionally, I believe the fact that the choices for many people are to work in a job you don't like or live in poverty, that this forces people to do work they fundamentally think is immoral. Or in places where you think the work is done in a way that is unsafe, or immoral, even though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the work itself. I don't think anything could improve capitalism more than for employers to be forced to compete with the government for all labor, no matter how minor.
By the government finding work or paid training for people in their field it would ensure the development of skills. There are tons of fields where you have to struggle for a long time to find work for years before your labor is considered to be worth anything. I consider this situation to be incredibly unfair.
I also find it intolerable that how much employment, and where it is both geographically and in what sector of the economy is determined by government and private policies. It's not the person that will be left unemployed that gets to make these decisions, it's the guys at the top who are going to be well taken care of no matter what. For that reason, I think any society that has unemployed and does not pay them and provide significant assistance is immoral. When I see the banking crisis of 2007, and the long term unemployment that came after that I shake with rage. All of those unemployed people never did nothing to cause the situation that they are in. But greedy bankers who profited greatly by looting the economy got off Scott-free.
People call things like this communism. I don't really care what you call it, but I think these or similar reforms are necessary to improve the social, and moral state of our economy.
My guess? The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. Banks crashed the economy and got a nice, fat stack of cash from governments and their CEOs gave themselves big bonuses for fucking everybody else. And everybody else? Well, they just got fucked.
Socialism starts looking a lot more attractive when capitalism starts looking abusive.
and this
are why socialism sound real great. can't do much worse on this front.
I'm not sure how the one follows from the other.
I'd agree that most (or at least a significant minority of) people are employed doing work they don't like, or would rather not be doing. But I don't think a significant number find their work immoral. Mostly they just find it boring, or aggravating, or dislike their coworkers, or something. Even if maybe you find the majority of jobs out there immoral by some metric, that has nothing to do with the people doing the work. Regardless of how you might perceive some guy working the register at Mickey D's, and his role in cramming minimally-nutritional foodlumps down the gullets of unsuspecting victims, the register guy himself is probably just thinking, "This is boring, I hate customers."
And anyway, I've never seen a credible way around the fact that a whole lot of boring or distasteful work needs to be done, and not a lot of people like doing it. There are no doubt people who enjoy managing sewage, because there are all manner of weird people out there, but there are bound to be far fewer people who enjoy it than there are positions to fill. In the best-case scenario, you wind up with people who dislike it, but are willing to deal with it because of the awesome compensation they receive. Yet giving people awesome compensation for shitty work seems inconsistent with most forms of communism I've encountered, since it necessarily diverges from the idea of "everybody gets exactly what they need."
Either way, at the end of the day, you necessarily have people doing jobs they don't like, because every job has components of drudgery, and people don't like drudgery. "Work" is the thing you have to get done in order to generate the money you need to both subsist and fund the fun stuff, otherwise known as "play". You can't finagle your way around that, because that is what we're stuck with until we get to a post-scarcity world.
Socialism & communism are not really distinct terms; they were used interchangeably up until the McCarthy period, when people (in the west, anyway) began to retire the term 'communism' altogether.
Which school of philosophy were you thinking of in terms of the bolded statement? None of the schools of thought I'm familiar with seek the abolishment of the state; central planning is a key theme to socialist ideas.
Communism is not a utopian ideal; it aims to solve a specific problem (class warfare) through worker ownership of the means of production.
Denmark is currently being governed by a socialist prime minister (and Norway had one up until the conservatives took power a little while ago). Socialism is not an all-or-nothing scheme anymore than the concept of free market enterprise is.
It could be the case that I think people doing work that they find to be immoral is more common than it actually is, so instead I'll focus on the example of work that is distasteful.
In the sewage example, we might find that sewage workers are underpaid if there are constant threats of unemployment if workers are not willing to work for low wages. This is not the case when it comes to sewage work generally, but that has more to do with the powerful plumbers union. Which is powerful, in my opinion primarily because of the relatively high incidence of explosions/flooding when you cut corners in any kind of plumbing work. Unfortunately, not every industry is lucky enough to cause explosions when work is not done properly.
I'm not saying that people should never be expected to do distasteful work, but any work that is particularly distasteful should pay well and provide benefits. I've seen people dig ditches in the hot summer sun for days at a time for ten dollars an hour. I've also seen lots of construction workers forced to do jobs in ways that are unsafe, when reasonable accommodations could be made to make the job far safer.
In general, if you are doing distasteful work, employers should be willing to make some accommodations to make it less distasteful, and employees should be getting paid fairly well for it. Employers should be forced through high wages or other means to lure people into wanting to do that work instead of something else. The way I see it if you actually reach near full employment in a literal sense (less than half a percent) wages and working conditions skyrocket as every new hire to any firm becomes something they have to fight over. So the way I see it you can fix nearly every employment related problem by making workers more scarce.
I'm not really big on the label communist, or labels in general. People have extremely refined ideas of what labels mean, so once you invoke them they only want to discuss their idea of the label rather than any particular ideas that are being presented.
That isn't true at all. Socialism started out as the catch all terms for "Jesus Christ society is fucked up right now how do we fix it" sociological ideas in the early to late 19th century. Communism was a subset of this which dealt specifically with communal ownership.
Personally, I think it's clear that the terms are interchangeable.
Pragmatically, employers who need to find labor to perform comparatively dangerous (in the firefighters and policemen sense, not the poorly-ventillated factory sense) or distasteful work will need to charge more, but you also have to consider the size of the labor pool and realize shitty work won't always pay well. If your job is disgusting but anyone can do it, well... sorry, your pay's going to suck. But then if we're adequately providing training opportunities to the labor pool, they can grow themselves into better jobs.
In general, we're probably not too different in our preferred approaches, I don't think.
I would argue that when we restrict ourselves to simply trying to regulate via bureaucracy, we simply challenge whatever business interest to encompass the bureaucracy as part of it's business strategy: make connections with politicians, push 'experts' with industry interests in mind into regulatory positions, use both the media & financially interested persons in the academic community as advocacy platforms, etc.
This results in regulation being a constant fight, and I think that the public loses these fights far ore often than they win them (clearly we do win some of them, eventually, but it takes years for even the most basic & humane rules to be implemented on paper, and much more time before they actually become practiced as a part of industry culture).
I don't think your approach is necessarily problematic, and I would prefer it to what we have now. Fundamentally though, I think the problems in our economy are due to lack of worker bargaining power. If you make workers harder to get, or offer some kind of competing baseline employment, you create a situation where actual competition takes place in the market.
We can create minimum wages, but that doesn't stop companies from wage theft. We can create all kinds of regulatory protections, but that does not ensure that in the real world workers have the power to actually get those regulations to be enforced. On a very basic level, every worker needs to matter in a visceral way to their employer. If you make employees harder to find by creating an alternative baseline of employment, you are going to force companies to take their employees seriously or go out of business.
There are also other variations. A common political and historic definition described communism as an "end game"--a reason why, for example, 'communist' states did not typically refer to themselves as such. They referred to themselves as 'states in pursuit of communism', often 'socialist states'. You can have a communist party in the sense that you have a political organization that subscribes to that goal (and, to be fair, within the mandates of council democracy, a functioning party infrastructure, representing a distinct minority of society, is probably a lot closer to an egalitarian unit than the society as a whole is).
"But you need to be a socialist state to pursue communism." Yes, generally speaking, they felt so too. Except, for example, in cases of "proto-communism" or "primitive communism", in other words, societies as they existed before the meaningful rise of private ownership. The "tribe" sharing all things communally as a matter of survival. They did not start out as socialists, they simply were. According to that view of history. There are also people who think humans coexisted with dinosaurs, so primitive communism as a generic term of pre-historic (?) communal life doesn't seem that inaccurate by comparison.
Her party, the Social Democrats are, well, social democrats. Traditionally, at least. I would argue that in their current incarnation they're not even living up to that reformist heritage - they're governing in coalition with a Social Liberal party and the foundational agreement (not sure of the English term for this if any exists) of this government commits them to the economic policies of the previous, centre-right, government.
So basically, it's neo-liberalism and austerity measures all the way down. Obviously since the centre in Danish politics is solidly left of the US this might look like socialism, but I assure you Thorning-Schmidt has never read Marx or advocated worker control of the means of production.
This is especially true when he begins by distancing the party from other different kinds of socialism (only so that they can claim to be the real true "socialists" a term used not to explain contextual usage but to organize people and claim the history of the age as the history of the party)
Socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat (which on a side note was a term coined before the modern negative definition of dictator arose - governance by the proletariat or something might be a better term).
Communism a classless and stateless society - supposedly the state will just eventually wither away or something. Anarchists agree with this goal, but disagree about the means since they are sceptical of this promised withering away process.
But then it's true that Socialism also refers to a bunch of different ideologies, and Marx and Engels used the word Communism to distance themselves from the in their view misguided Utopian Socialists (Fabians etc.)
And I point to several European nations who have managed to implement comparatively non-fucked labor regulations and worker's rights within the confines of this bureaucracy you claim is doomed to fail.
The problems are not that government is fundamentally incapable of reining in the worst excesses of corporations, it's that American culture is fucked to the point where we think it's fundamentally incapable, and we think that things like minimum wage and worker empowerment are evil things that only communists do.
Before we could even hope to implement the kind of policies you're talking about, we'd need a sea change in public opinion. But if we realized that kind of change, there'd be no need the kind of policies you're talking about, because the government would be able to regulate things just fine using the basics of our existing system, and without having to experiment with a complete restructuring of our economic system which hasn't really been proven to work.
What you're suggesting is a little bit like deciding that you're tired of being poor, and endeavoring to get ten million dollars so that you can blow the whole wad on lottery tickets, because then you'll have a really good chance of winning the jackpot.
from the very document you linked.
In pure Marxist thought, socialism should be a goal of the revolutionary as it is a bridge to communism. Socialism is the arrangement in which the means of production are centrally-controlled by a state or party, and goods are produced based on their use-value, not on their marginal value (based on the planning of that state or party), thereby abolishing the profit motive.
Communism is the arrangement similar to what futurists refer to as post-scarcity, in which automated production creates a constant surplus of goods. Since there's a surplus of goods, and because the profit motive was already abolished during the socialist phase, there's no need for private ownership of capital. And because there's no need for private ownership of capital, there's no need for a state to enforce private property rights, and the power of the state shrinks significantly or even disappears.
Pfffft. A stateless, moneyless, propertyless civilization that only exists due to an abundance of goods created by automation, where poverty no longer exists, that can only emerge from a long multistaged process of evolution and revolution? Sounds pretty damn utopian to me.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
What we do have, although it is being eroded, is support for unions in law and custom and crucially the right for unions to strike (within some restrictions). The point is that labour gets to organize and fight for their interests same as capital, unlike (it seems) in the US. Freedom both ways.
The lack of legally mandated job security is made up by social programs to catch those who fall, while the ease of firing people means companies are more willing to take a chance and hire you. Flexicurity - it's pretty great.
But yeah, both of those systems are being undermined and eroded because neo-liberalism so that's fun.
The classic Nordic model is very market-oriented. Workers can bargain for their own wages - assuming the state protections their right to collectively bargain... and assuming that the negotiations aren't distorted by the workers literally starving and going homeless if they don't accept whatever crumbs they're thrown.
Denmark, even before the current austerity hard-on, is pretty damn capitalist. It's just capitalist with a heavy emphasis on social welfare programs and wealth redistribution.
...which is pretty much what I want in the US. I would love to see us achieve a state where no minimum wage laws are necessary, because of national labor unions and a robust social safety net. But we have such a cultural bias against people who refuse work and collect welfare. The idea that it should be okay for somebody on unemployment to tell a potential employer, "Fuck your piddly salary offer. I don't get out of bed for less than $X," is so far beyond the American consciousness that it makes me sad.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Which philosophy advocates for a stateless, moneyless society? Not Trotskyism, for the example I would be coming from. Currency is so useful as an exchange medium that nobody taken seriously advocated for abolishing it, and central government (what a Trotskyist would refer to as the Vanguard) is central tenant in just about any school of thought you wish to peruse. How else would you organize essential services & welfare? Automation clearly can't do it all, no matter how high tech it gets.
The fundamental principle that the public should own, say, Microsoft, rather than a board of private interests, does not strike me as somehow utopian.
Which countries were you thinking of specifically?
EDIT: Also, I didn't say 'doomed to fail'. I said that we lost more than we won, and that every regulatory battle was very hard fought.
I just wanted to mention that because discussions on socialism usually get bogged down by different people using the term differently.
In Das Kapital, Marx identified currency as a form of commodity. It's intrinsic use-value is only that of the metal that comprises it. It is only through commodity fetishism that we ascribe it any additional value other than as a metal ingot. Consequently, in the postcapitalist phase, the coin bears no marginal value - eg, it has no use as a currency, except to be bartered to those who need the metal for whatever goods they're producing. (Obviously, he didn't use the word 'marginal,' as Marx predated the marginal revolution. But his ideas on use-value, labor value, and commodity fetishism helped develop economic thinking that led to the marginal revolution.)
Even in Leninism, the vanguard party is a mortal entity. It exists only so long as it is required to prevent the rise of a new bourgosie; the abstract end goal (and a necessary event for communism to emerge) is the dissolution of the vanguard party once it is no longer needed.
- Lenin, The Withering Away of the State and Violent Revolution
Lenin was expounding upon Engels.
- Engels, Anti-Duehring
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Props.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Communism gets stronger the more people have died? Well that explains a lot I guess.
Yes, yes, yes. I like this thinking.
It's ideas like this that need much more airing. I think this leads towards a society that conducts business without being capitalist, ie dominated by the needs of capital owners.
I believe in a large part of socialism, perhaps even communism, but I think the idea that we should/would stop having a means of abstract exchange, ie money, is neither useful nor believable.
Every time I see a fictional post-scarcity communist culture, e.g. The Culture, they still have information or status or favours or time being exchanged. People are still doing business, just in a way that is so fundamentally different from capitalist ideas of business that the writers and most readers don't even notice. A long time ago I read a quote:
'Wealth is created when assets are moved from low-valued uses to high-valued uses'
This struck me as the fundamental benefit of trade, and it's not one that I think goes away with post-scarcity, because I as an individual will always have different abilities, and will value things differently from you. So I don't want a political system that rejects trade. I just think trading has been, well, perverted really, by capitalism.
I am not well-read politically, so I don't know if people have written about this, but what I want from my civilization is a system that synthesizes socialism/communism with business. An utterly uncapitalistic way of doing business.
Or is that just nonsense?
Do you know which pages in Das Kapital cover this argument? (This is the copy I use as a reference most of the time).
I have to admit here that the mathematical logic Marx uses in Kapital for some sections is simply too dense for me; I just do not understand a lot of what is in the Commodities & Circulation chapter, for example.
I know that Engels was very pie in the sky, but he is (usually) only taken seriously when working in conjunction with someone else (like Marx).
Lenin saw it that way, but neither Stalin or Trotsky agreed (Stalin arguing that it was simply not technologically / logistically possible, Trotsky arguing that the permanent revolution would always be opposed & would always have to be defended). This disagreement was a fundamental part of the divide in the Troika, where Stalin's single state solution ultimately won because it was seen as the most pragmatic of the ideologies at the time.
It's kind of weird. I'd think that the dual ideas of personal ownership of labor and collective ownership of government would basically address everything that the Communists complained about, but every one of their attempts at a system skewed as far away from them as possible.
- More Trotsky, 1939
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I love the crazy straw man ideologies old school Communists make up (and it's a rhetorical tactic still used by their more orthodox descendants)
At some point, Cheaper than a robot, smarter than a chimp stops being true. But that bottom X% of the workforce still exists, and will continue to grow larger.
My interpretation of that article was always that it was specific to the Kremlin, but on reflection, your interpretation does make much more sense. I'll cede the point, then, that a number of key philosophers did have an unrealistic utopian goal.
Personally, I don't not have a utopian / stateless goal in mind or image in my head when I think of the socialist worker's state.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
I find this incredibly stupid because one would think that the fact that a society is able to provide for all its population with less and less labor would be a good thing, but it looks like society is slowly collapsing from its own success.
In this situation it's normal that socialist ideas gain traction, since there is a lot of people who feel capitalists have excessive power over their lives. And given the power corporations have not only over the daily lives of people, but also over policy and governance, I can't blame them for thinking like this.
Personally I don't think socialism or communism come even close to a solution, but each day I see a guaranteed basic income as a better and better solution, not only to provide people with enough money to live, but to generally empower the working class. I would also love to see the change in the job market under those conditions.
Have I strayed a lot off topic? If so I apologize, I was just kinda typing my thoughts.
I agree with the thesis but not with your arguments / conclusions.
I'd like to see some socialist style benefits accrue in our society, less wealth disparity, better healthcare and access to basic needs, more equitable access to power by preventing moneyed interests from dominating.
I also think technical advancement is eventually going to lead to some sort of restructuring of society. How can you support the current society with the prospect of 0% employment, which I think is possibility. Already I believe you can construct a specific robot to outperform a human at any task, we just don't have a general purpose robot that can claim the same. At the same time, we have machines able to beat humans at mental tasks that would be their last refuge for employment. Wilson and computers like it will replace the experts, Turing Test winners will replace the social. There won't be anything left for humans save for what they value from each other uniquely, but will that end up as something you can call an economy?
The premise behind William Gibson's Bridge trilogy is a world where automation has allowed the wealthy to effectively secede from the rest of humanity. The rich live super sci-fi lives, with effective immortality and a host of amazing gadgets to do whatever they'd like, in highly guarded compounds while everyone else survives by picking over the trash of the dying old world.
That's looking increasingly prophetic these days.
To add, I'm not certain Communism, in such a idealized form, is compatible with basic human nature. Any realization of the concept of regimented self-denial (i.e. taking what you need, not what you want) on such a massive scale is going to result in a compromised implementation. Historically, we seem to end up with two results: Co-opted doctrine (i.e. a cult of personality, or a religion, or some other method of spreading the ideology that isn't the ideology itself) or a partial implementation in government/public policy (i.e. the socialism in Sweden, or the aforementioned Denmark).
The United States in and of itself has many of these elements. It's one of the great contradictions of our political landscape. Given the dangerously large (and growing) wage gap brought on by the Reagan era, it's fair to say we could use another small shift to the left.
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You make work.
I'm not really joking.
There should be some kind of law. Work expands to fill the available time. A lot of white collar work today is already meta - working about work, the capitalist version of thinking about thinking. How much time does a call center worker spend logging info about his calls in a ticketing system? How much time do I spend as a "project manager" not actually managing projects, but filling out Basecamp documents that nobody ever looks at and Powerpoint presentations that are promptly forgotten after they're shown?
For a not-too-terribly outlandish example: let's say that one of the robots halfway towards this great glorious future breaks down and hurts somebody. Well, better have somebody inspect the robot, and inspect all the other robots just to be safe, and that inspection team is gonna need a middle manager, and we'll have to log the inspection records in some kind of bureaucratic form, and from then on you have a permanent Department of Robot Inspection. Then one day a CEO realizes that he can outsource that department to Robot Inspectors, Inc, which itself is run on a profit motive, which means they can charge a little more than cost, but some of that money goes to a marketing team. So now you not only have robot inspectors, but robot inspection managers, the HR department for robot inspectors, the marketing department for robot inspectors. And that marketing department is based around sowing FUD among robot owners - "did you know that robot accidents cost companies a billion dollars a year?" - thereby manufacturing demand for more robot inspectors.
It doesn't matter if the actual worldwide cost of robot accidents turns out to be lower than the worldwide cost of maintaining a robot inspection industry, because what drives demand for safety isn't actual risk, but perception of risk.
Want a real-world example of exactly this? Workplace drug testing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.