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SGTObvious Communist must be totalitarian 6/14/2004 11:01:55 AM

It cannot exist without totalitarianism, because in a Communist society, no person can be free to own something, produce anything for his own possession, or trade it freely. Even an intanglible something, like a service cannot be legal. In a communist country, I cannot agree to plant your garden if you wash my car. Why not? Because the ghost of Capitalism is inherrent in every human exchange. If You wash my car in return for a service, you have committed capitalism- you might get very good at car washing, and one day wash you will twenty cars in return for all sorts of things, and you will gain in wealth compared to other people, and this we cannot have in Communism. The only way to prevent free trades of anything, is too assume that ALL human labor and the products of ALL human labor belongs exclusively to the State. This makes all the people slaves of the state, and to maintain this system, a totalitarian government is a necessity. Communism fails 100% of the time because people will act like people- they will trade and deal to their own benefit. But since communism lacks a legitimate way to do this, it turns into corruption.

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ilpars RE:Communist must be totalitarian - SGTObvious 6/14/2004 11:30:12 AM

I am not saying that Comminism is not totalarian. I am saying that a comminist party can be not totalarian. It was a long time I read a book about comminism, but here is as much as I remember. Correct me if I am wrong. Marxist comminist ideology tells us that Comminism is the evolutionary result of the future. It visionalise an ideal society of the future in which there are no classes, no prievileges. In this society People will work for the common good not for personal goals. Even usage of money in public life will be obsolote. A society like in Startrek films. Marx visionalised the change as evolutionary not revolutionary. The faulty at Soviets line of thinking was they forced this change by revolution. But their society was not ready for the change. Marx told that a long capitalist ruled period needed for the society to be ready for the next step. In short, some Comminist parties are predicting a slow, easy passage to that society by evolving into it. Their mission is to handle the social problems one by one and raise the educational level of society to ease the problems of evolving. These kind of Comminist parties are not totalarian. They predict an enlightened totalarian future. Of course Marx never thought on the possibilty of Capitalism itself can be evolve into an enlighten liberal society which has still different classes. That is where social democrats come into play.

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celebrim RE:Communist must be totalitarian - SGTObvious 6/14/2004 12:19:05 PM

SGTObvious: I don't entirely agree. I do believe that Communism inevitably evolves into a command economy as a result of social pressures, but it doesn't have to be totalitarian in its inception. An easy way to see this is to imagine that 20 people started a Marxist commune in the mistaken belief that Marx would have approved of this. He wouldn't have, he would have called them a bunch of unscientific Utopian dreamers, but that's another conversation. These 20 people meet to determine how resources will be allocated within the community, and so forth. No one person has complete control over his resources, but on the other hand no one person has complete control over anyone's resources. No one is free, but this is not the same as totalitarian. At worst, you have some sort of 'tyranny of the mob'. At best though, if everyone has a reason to be altruistic, the system works out just fine. The Early Christian Church actually tried out communism for a few years before abandoning the concept as unworkable. Oh, it worked for a few years, the problem is that it doesn't scale for at least two important reasons. First, as the community gets larger and larger, the job of coordinating affairs gets larger and larger. Eventually, if everyone in the community took a full hand in organizing affairs, nothing would get done. The whole community would be in a perpetual state of organizational meeting. One of the most famous and incisive criticisms of Communism is that 'it takes up too much of your evening' (the same can be said of pure Democracy for that matter). So, in order to keep the organization running, it becomes necessary to turn over the decision making apparatus to a small subset of the community. This functionally becomes a class distinguishment - the decision making class and the non-decision making class. And effectively, this very quickly turns into totalitarianism because the decision making class has complete control over the non-decision making classes resources. In fact, they have far more control over these resources than ever the aristocracy had over the working class in a capitalistic society. So in practice, communism actually works against Marx's goals. You can actually watch this transition kill communism in the Early Christian Church experiment. Eventually, as the Church grew beyond a few hundred followers, it simply wasn't feasible to run the Church finances without people specially appointed to do so. The second thing that kills communism in practice is that since everyone reaps the same reward regardless of effort, there is a strong incentive to not do anything or at least to do as little as you can get away with. So long as everyone in the community has a vested interest in the health of everyone else, communism works just fine. For example, small family groups tend to be 'communist' in their affairs - even up to the level of small tribes. But eventually, if the group is successful there is an incentive to join the group for selfish reasons. You gain acceptance into the group for the purpose of being taken care of by the hard working members of the group. This ultimately destroys the group, because inevitably people start feeling resentful - that other people aren't doing thier share - and eventually these problems become unresolvable and people stop working so hard in protest and the system starts to slowly collapse. You can watch this affliction overcome the Early Christian experiment in communism in the annuals of the early church as well. Initially, the Early Church shared all its goods with all of its members. But eventually, it instituted the rule 'let him who doesn't work not eat', and eventually gave up on universal social care entirely and went back to just taking care of widows, orphans, and others incapable of fending for themselves.

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mudshark RE:ilpars 6/14/2004 1:29:32 PM

of course Marx never thought on the possibilty of Capitalism itself can be evolve into an enlighten liberal society which has still different classes. And you think it can ?

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chemist RE:Communist must be totalitarian - SGTObvious 6/14/2004 3:34:46 PM

Hate to be splitting hairs here Celebrim. I realize I'm bringing a toothpick to a knife fight, but here goes. Is it fair to describe hippy communes or the Shaker communities as COmmunist? Wouldn't socialist be a more fitting description? Is there not a difference between communal and communist? Isn't the nature of a central commity that has total control over resources in fact totalitarian? Oh, here comes the pain(flinch)..

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celebrim RE:Communist must be totalitarian - SGTObvious 6/14/2004 6:37:15 PM

"Is it fair to describe hippy communes or the Shaker communities as Communist?" If they aren't communist, what are they? Arguably, they are the only communities that it is fair to describe as communist. (More on this latter). "Wouldn't socialist be a more fitting description? Is there not a difference between communal and communist?" No, its probably less fitting to refer to a communal group as socialist than communist. Socialist generally refers to a government system in which (at least theoretically) altruistic social programs are funded by a system of progressive taxation and administered by bureacratic professionals. This does not describe what is taking place in a Quaker commune. "Isn't the nature of a central commity that has total control over resources in fact totalitarian?" Yes, but what I was trying to point out is that the central planning committees which are so indicitive of large totalitarian communists states are as much the necessity of the scale of the state as the type of economic system that they are implementing. If you have just 20 or 50 (or whatever number sufficiently close to 1) members of the community, you can get by without a central planning committee. The real problem is that we have no idea what 'Communist' means in a functional since. No one does, not even Marx. So noone really knows what it is fair to call communist and what it isn't fair to call communist because no one has ever given a satisfactory description of a functioning communist state which meets Marx's definition. You see Marx never tried to describe how his theoretical Communist state would function. He merely asserted based on his understanding of the economic data that was presented to him that it would inevitably come into being as a result of what he believed was the incurable flaw in Capitalism - class division. As I just asserted in the previous post though, any attempt to go beyond theory and create a functioning Communist government inevitably contains class divisions which inviolate the model as a Communist government. When a liberal tells you that you can't tell whether communism has failed because its never really been implemented, he's absolutely right in one sense. Communism has never been implemented, but as you may have guessed I believe it is because _it cannot be implemented_ (at least with current technology, I leave the discussion of Enlighted Technocracy to another day). For the record, Marx made several critical flaws in analyzing his statistical data upon which his fortune telling was based. The most severe of which was he assumed that a given profession always had the same value regardless of the social setting. You see, he was plotting wage trendlines for 'skilled' craftsman - say Blacksmiths or Coopers or whatever - beginning in the Reinassance and continuing up to his time. That data said that the real wage (purchasing power) of a skilled craftsman was continually falling. He therefore concluded that eventually a skilled craftsman would not be able to feed himself at some point. He was aware however that the total purchasing power of society was increasing, so he assumed 'the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer'. The thing he didn't understand was that in the 15th century, a craftsman was an upper class educated laborer. By the 18th century, the shift from agrarian economies made craftsman ordinary laborers. The supply of craftsman had gone up, and conversely the ammount they could charge for thier services had gone done. Meanwhile, the upper class ranks had shifted from glassblowers and joiners to an even higher level of education - accountants, machinists, engineers, and so forth. So really, he was comparing apples and oranges. Capitalism therefore lacked the killing flaw he thought it had, and therefore did not become less and less profitable, but in fact became more and more profitable. And because the capitalist workers weren't losing more and more control over the 'means of production' they were able to force concessions with thier upper class employers to produce relatively stable socialist societies he simply couldn't foresee. (I also maintain that he underestimated altruistic impluses amongst the upper class, but that's a different story.)

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ilpars RE:ilpars 6/15/2004 3:42:11 AM

Yes, isn't what is happening in Western societies. Capitalism needs a large spending population to consume the products. So, successful capitalists always on the favor of the wellfare of the population. Social democrats also come into the play at this point. By ensuring a minumum quality of life, the problems of class differances put to minumum. IMO, capitalism tempered with social democracy is the best system.

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chemist RE:Communist must be totalitarian - SGTObvious 6/15/2004 4:20:16 AM

You'd think I'd learn not to contradict celebrim(Chemist retreats, rubs knot on forehead and knucles from being hit with an academic 2x4)..

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chemist RE:ilpars 6/15/2004 4:21:26 AM

Maybe you'd like to say that to a few pro-CCP guys over on the China threads Ilpars?.

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