Questions about maintaining communism on a large scale

[ZvP]

Communism would work well on a small scale because people are directly accountable. If they don't work, or perform poor work, they can directly see the affect of their actions on their own lives and the lives of people they know. In global communism, this would not happen; as they don't know or care where the products of their labor are going. Not only that, but since their contribution to the global economy is negligent, they would feel as though their actions will not significantly change the well-being of society (which is true, to an extent). How do we keep people accountable? How do we get people to contribute? Answering these questions is key if we want people to support the cause. This is the most common reason given when I ask people why they think communism can't work, and I don't know how to respond.

[theblackmask]

It still remains to be seem if any type of society can work on a large scale. The sooner people get away from the idea of communism as some monolithic system imposed downwards, the sooner we can stop debating whether or not its sustainable.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

What's the obsession with work? Every week we have 2 or 3 threads about keeping people accountable or punishing lazy people in a communist society. If you aren't a protestant or a capitalist you can go ahead and drop the work ethic bullshit. Communism will eliminate work and workers, if the question of punishing the lazy appears in a 'communist' society, then a counter-revolution has taken place and they'll have bigger things to worry about.

[jookyle]

The fact is, people who don't want to work aren't going to work regardless of which system the society they live in functions under.

[JPSartre12]

Well, you also have to consider that the socialist/communist society that we're talking about is so different than what we have nowadays that peoples' mindset are going to be just as different.

We're not picking up someone from an industrialized, capitalist nation and dropping them in the middle of a communist utopia. There's going to be a transition between the two - and as the economic conditions evolve, so will peoples' views on work, labor, motivation, ambition, etc etc.

We can't accurately predict what human behavior will look like in communism, but we do know that there are other motives for behavior other than sheer profit-making.

[Le Socialiste]

As if they wouldn't be on a larger scale? If a particular sector or major hub of production is performing below average or producing work that is subpar, it'll have an effect on its respective industry and all the other workplaces and services that rely on its labor. These'll be kinks that will have to be worked out and built upon, as society is reorganized and the old productive means are steadily dismantled with new ones assuming their place. But it's a mistake to assume people would be unwilling to work within the new system, as it's one of the major myths trumped up by everyone, from rightwing political pundits to liberal activists, ranging from the wealthiest CEO to the average working person. The former has a stake in ensuring such myths are perpetuated (whether he or she realizes it or not), whilst the latter adopts this outlook despite its contradictory nature.

It would be ridiculously naive to expect communism to immediately work on a global scale, as the new society emerges from the old. It will carry with it a lot of the baggage from the latter, as old views are upended and emerging ones adopted. It'll be a state of transition, requiring a certain level of organization that will have to be adequately heightened in order to meet the tremendous tasks ahead of it. All of us should probably acknowledge this fact, if we haven't already. We won't be walking into a ready-made utopia. But no revolution is possible without the support of the mass proletariat and others who must play a supportive (but auxiliary role) in the fight ahead. Socialism must be built (for lack of a better word) from below. This'll require the laying out and building up of the proper tools and organizational forms for the effective management of society, from the political to the economic - especially in places where the two overlap. Global socialism requires a global sense of solidarity, which has been wonderfully and brilliantly displayed time and again throughout history, most recently in the struggles and fightbacks surrounding austerity in America and Europe, and the revolutions throughout North Africa and the whole of the Middle East. Last year you had Egyptians sending messages of solidarity to people occupying squares and plazas throughout the US, while protesters urged others to "Walk like an Egyptian" in Wisconsin of the same year. That kind of communication and support is vitally necessary, and must be carried over into any future society. Socialism must assume an international character, or else it will degenerate and collapse in on itself.

At the heart of it, we should be less worried about how to deal with "lazy" or "unproductive" workers (when such traits are wholly attributable to the sense of alienation and powerlessness perpetuated under capitalism), and more focused on how to lay the proper groundwork for the inclusion of all kinds of people (along with their opinions), capable of ever more sophisticated means of organization and awareness. The fight against capitalism's tendency to unload the burdens of its crises on the backs of those who weren't responsible won't be won without a united working-class capable of coordinating on a mass scale its actions and movements. Capitalism provides the conditions for its own dismissal by the mass of the working-class, as technological advancements and communicative technologies take off, bringing people that much closer together. We possess the means to make it (socialism) work; it's a matter of realizing this and taking the proper steps.

[ckaihatsu]

Communism would work well on a small scale because people are directly accountable. If they don't work, or perform poor work, they can directly see the affect of their actions on their own lives and the lives of people they know.


This is a good starting point -- it's easier to conceptualize things being done at smaller scales because as individuals we're based in physical space and what's in our immediate proximity is what tends to concern us the most.

There's already the concept that -- especially at small scales -- the need to have an economy *at all* would *not* be required, and that a viable post-capitalist system of abundant productivity and equitable distribution could be accomplished without using money or tokens of value of *any* kind. (The idea is that for any given locus of production all who are a part of producing there would rotate through all necessary roles at regular, fixed intervals. They would collectively control that point of production and its output, with their own requirements satisfied from it first and foremost due to proximity (and labor effort, of course). Any productivity not immediately consumed by the workers themselves could be distributed outward in coordinated, pre-planned ways with other productive entities, for more-complex and larger-scale configurations.)

In such localized situations the intuitive, common-sense conclusion makes a lot of sense, since the social productive unit is relatively simple -- like the archetypal family farm, for example.





In global communism, this would not happen; as they don't know or care where the products of their labor are going.


This is actually *not correct* according to the definition of what communism is -- we can dismiss the argument as being ill-founded since a worker-controlled productivity means that the workers *would* be collectively directing where the products of their labor are going, and that they would *have* to be responsible for the same.





Not only that, but since their contribution to the global economy is negligent, they would feel as though their actions will not significantly change the well-being of society (which is true, to an extent).


If the key word here is 'change', then the point is correct in that not everyone's labor efforts would be *development*-oriented. Many work roles, now as then, are more about *maintaining* a reliable, dependable material condition, and that's not always easy to do. While ground-breaking innovations may be more flashy and dramatic from their novelty value, the day-to-day certainly deserves appreciation as well.

Unless someone is consciously, willfully wasting their work time -- in material productive terms -- their contribution to the global economy would simply be *proportionate* to their existence as an individual in a world of billions of people, no more and no less. It would be doubtful that anyone *would* waste their work time, and/or that co-workers would allow such a thing to happen.





How do we keep people accountable?


A collectivized productivity implies that liberated laborers would be co-accountable since they would be co-administrating their own cumulative labor power.





How do we get people to contribute?


This is, interestingly, an instance of *idealism*, since, in a fully collectivized post-capitalist economy, there is no "contributing" exactly -- not in the sense of "making a donation for the betterment of others".

Since all liberated laborers would be co-administrating all productive efforts in common it would be contingent on society *as a whole* to decide whether enough productive activity was going on or not. No one would be "contributing" because no one would be "bestowed upon". Everyone would have a proportionate say in what's produced and how they can participate in it, and what they would receive from it.





Answering these questions is key if we want people to support the cause. This is the most common reason given when I ask people why they think communism can't work, and I don't know how to respond.





It still remains to be seem if any type of society can work on a large scale. The sooner people get away from the idea of communism as some monolithic system imposed downwards, the sooner we can stop debating whether or not its sustainable.


I'd like to add that we can think of a post-capitalist productive social organizing existing on different *scales* as well -- less-critical social needs and wants could certainly be done on smaller, more-individualized and more-artistic scales, if that's what people wanted to do, and it was societally possible (no natural disasters to attend to, no large emergencies to deal with).

But -- if society reached a point of 'boredom' or 'stasis', it might find itself motivated to expand its productivity in more-complex, innovative, and large-scale ways -- it could organize more elaborate supply chains to feed into the production of more-engineered final products, if only to see if it could be done.

Much of social existence in such a world would necessarily be 'pro-active', at *whatever* scale, since there would no longer be an artificial separation between the planning of production and its fulfillment through labor effort. People could (co-)participate for reasons of personal motivation as well as for more-societal inclinations -- it wouldn't matter much as long as there were no humane needs unmet.

We wouldn't have to be concerned about a caste-like elitism emerging because it would be in the workers' / society's best overall interest to make sure that it co-administered its own work efforts according to the best practices derived from within its ranks. While today people are given fixed designations for their work roles, such specialization wouldn't be required from a society of workers' control since the administration of liberated labor could be done on the basis of mass-decision-making over *proposals* and *plans*, not over politically commodified *personages*.


Rotation system of work roles

http://postimage.org/image/1d53k7nd0/


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

http://tinyurl.com/mtspczpcpe
http://postimage.org/image/ccfl07uy5/

[Oswy]

The fact is, people who don't want to work aren't going to work regardless of which system the society they live in functions under.

One of the problems, as I see it, is that there's a tendency to imagine people's attitude to work under some future communism as likely being the same as it is under present-day capitalism (where exploitation and alienation generate demotivation on a vast scale). I take the Marxist position that we humans have evolved with predispositions specific to our species and which include a predisposition to do useful labour, for ourselves and our societies. I'm not offering that up in some starry-eyed way but matter-of-fact, scientific way; we're all orientated towards labour provided that labour has real social meaning for us; even when people try to escape labour under capitalism because of its exploitative and alienating characteristics they often get bored if they don't find something else to do, i.e. pursue their predisposition to labour. Agreed, there will always be some people who, for whatever reason, don't want to labour and will seek to free-ride, but given what I've outlined above, when given the opportunity to do work that is genuinely socially rewarding, as well as being in a wider context which satifies our actual human needs, I don't think free-riding will be much of a concern.

[Psy]

Communism would work well on a small scale because people are directly accountable. If they don't work, or perform poor work, they can directly see the affect of their actions on their own lives and the lives of people they know. In global communism, this would not happen; as they don't know or care where the products of their labor are going. Not only that, but since their contribution to the global economy is negligent, they would feel as though their actions will not significantly change the well-being of society (which is true, to an extent). How do we keep people accountable? How do we get people to contribute? Answering these questions is key if we want people to support the cause. This is the most common reason given when I ask people why they think communism can't work, and I don't know how to respond.
This is a problem of alienation of labor not scale, one workers can link their labor to utility then they can easily link their labor to the products of society they consume. You no longer have people working for wages to exchange for commodities but people working to advance human civilization.