How To Defend Your Belief In Communism

[The Vox Populi]

The Following are just a few possible arguments that could be presented and a few counters to said arguments.

Communism Has Been “Tried and Failed”:

The problem with this commonly used argument is that more or less everything has been tried and failed. Take democracy for example. Can I argue that democracy is a futile endeavor because it failed not once but multiple times it was tried?



Even in America, democratic government needed to be reworked- but despite the many failed attempts at democracy, the idea that anyone today would want anything other than a democracy is laughable. Let’s keep this in perspective before claiming that Communism was tried once and should now be abandoned for all time.

*

Communism is “Great on Paper”:

I’m particularly irked by this argument because most everything is “great on paper”! Now there’s no real response to the whole “Communism is great on paper but doesn’t work in application” because of how broad it is. Really, it’s more of a prefix to an argument (such as the ones below), and any response is going to have to be more specific. Still, if you really do need an immediate response, simply point out that egalitarian, classless societies that shared work and held common property have existed since the beginning of time.

Communism Conflicts with Human Nature:

I’ve found this line of reasoning especially prevalent among religious groups, and while you could debate whether or not humans are basically good or bad till the end of time, there is an argument you can use in defense of Communism even if humans are inherently evil (which, for the record, I myself believe).

*

Now the argument tends to go “If humans were also basically good, Communism would work. But humans are basically bad- that’s why Capitalism works. Capitalism takes humanity’s evil nature into account.”

*

See, this argument is just ridiculous- first, if humans were basically good, we wouldn’t even be having to bring up Communism to begin with. Second, Capitalism doesn’t so much “take humanity’s evil nature into account” at it does reward it. Greed, deception, selfishness, reckless individualism, decadence, and the like- these are all things that Capitalism not only makes excuses for, but encourages! If we’re going to base our economics on the concept that greed is acceptable, should we then base our legal system on the concept that perjury, harassment, and murder are acceptable?


There's actually a big market for furniture made from human skin...
Just because humans are naturally bad doesn’t mean we should base our entire society around the hopes that they’ll act badly.

*

Communism Is Against Religion:

Let’s face facts- Marx was an atheist, as were many prominent Communists. However, to assume that Communism and religion are opposed would be wrong- indeed, if you take a look at what Marx wrote about religion, you’ll find his issues weren’t so much with faith, as the use of religion by the powerful for control, and the use of religion by the powerless as an excuse for not taking action. In reality, even Communists who would describe themselves as “anti-theist” almost universally hold to the belief that what you believe (or don’t believe) is your own business. On the other end of the spectrum, you will in fact find Christian Communism, liberation theology, and social justice movements arguing that it is not Communism but Capitalism that is antithetical to the basic principals of religion.

Communism is Against Democracy:

My response to this accusation is two pronged- first, we need to point out that not all Communist leaders seized power, most prominent among Marxists democratically elected to power was Chilean president Salvador Allende, who lost his life in a CIA-backed military coup. Second, while there were dictators who claimed to be Communist, these men were Marxists in about the same way that the propagators of the Spanish Inquisition were Christian. Take a look at the writings of Marx or Engels or Luxembourg and you’ll see the demands for power to be put in the hands of the people, not the party chairman or head of the military. Communism believes in democracy- it is with Capitalism that democracy doesn’t mesh so well. Democracy is meant to be a system in which all have equal power. However, in a system where money is power, any inequality in wealth is going to mean an inequality in influence over government. The wealthy man can hire lobbyists, give campaign contributions, fund advertising, hire people to smear his opponents, and so on (and let’s not forget the straight-up bribe). Is that equality? Let’s take a look at what democracy looks like in the US.


Not exactly faith-inspiring is it?
Planned Economies Aren’t Efficient:

It’s not a common argument, but every once in a while you’ll run into someone with a penchant for economics who’ll take this line of argument. They state “Hey, there’s no way a planned economy will work unless you’re always over producing ______ or trying to catch up to the demand for ______. It’s inefficient.”

*

Now you can probably argue exactly how a planned economy could work- and that’s a debate for another time. The easiest response to this argument is to point out that Capitalism isn’t exactly efficient either. When someone can take natural resources, use them to create a product, and finding that the market for novelty sumo tables doesn’t actually exist, be stuck with a warehouse full of the stuff, you can’t exactly assert Capitalism doesn’t have just as much potential to be wasteful.

Society Won’t Function Without the Free Market:

Another argument sometimes used by the economically minded is that the only way for society to function is through the natural process of supply and demand. Now my response to this is to use my own conditions- unless you attend a college set in an extremely rural area, I’m geussing you won’t be able to use the exact same points, but hopefully you’ll be able to use the basic logic behind them.

*

Now as I said, I attend a college surrounded by miles of forest and not much else. There is a massive demand for theaters, restaurants, shops, grocery markets, and other diversions, yet nothing happens. See, what the acolytes of the infallible system of supply and demand don’t realize is that supply and demand is like fate- it only works in retrospect. Yes, demand is met (or else, it moves elsewhere), but how long and how much do you have to demand for a product or service before it shows up? There’s no standard, no pattern, no system. Things were either meant to be or not meant to be- all in all, the whole “supply and demand will answer everything” stance taken by some really can’t be held.

Communism is Against My “Right” to Private Property:

You ever see ads for buying a star, or property on the moon? You laugh at it- maybe you’ll think it’s a nice sentiment- but at the end of the day you don’t take it seriously. After all, the moon and stars can’t be bought because they’re not anyone’s to sell. It all makes about as much sense as buying a cubic foot of air from a man named Steve. Steve can’t actually give you a cubic foot of air, can’t prevent you from moving through said cubic foot of air, and has no way of owning a cubic foot of air to begin with.

Yet we view land (and private property, made from resources from land) as a sacred right. Why? Land is just land- land didn’t belong to anyone until some neanderthal took up a club and declared that all dirt between points A, B, C, and D were his and his alone. Yet today if I were to attempt to do the same thing and claim that all within an invisible border belongs to me and no one else, I would be called a thief. That’s the origin of this so-called “right”, someone in the distant past just took it, and because of this, you can “buy” a plot of land, never use it for anything, and yet have every right to keep anyone from living there. That’s just not rational- the world belongs to everyone, and you can only “own” property in as much as you can be the one currently using it.

Communism Is Against Prosperity:

Come one- you don’t have to be a Communist to recognize that we can’t live in decadence and luxury. Communism isn’t against prosperity, but it is against mindless excess. Private jets, whaleskin leather seats for you SUV (look it up), imported caviar with every meal- there’s no way that we can live like this- the planet is having a hard enough time keeping up with current rates of consumption as it is. Further, let’s not imagine for a moment that fast cars and big houses are what make a life worth living. Freedom, dignity, peace, equality- I’d take that over a gold plated BMW any day.



If You’re a Communist, Why Aren’t You Poor?

The inbred cousin of the question of “Why can’t I be stinking rich?” is the question “Why aren’t you desperately poor?”. *Now I’ve touched on this question before, but it comes up a bit and I’ll try to address it here as well. We might not believe in decadence, but we don’t want people to be poor either- that’s not what Communism is about. Equality in wealth will mean the end of millionaires and billionaires, but for countless people across the planet, the standard of living will dramatically increase. We aren’t poor because we’re not supposed to be poor- no one is!


We’re not big fans of either extreme…

Big Government Doesn’t Work:

We couldn’t agree more. Communists don’t believe in big government, we believe in collectives, *communes, and communities working on a local level to address problems and issues unique to them. If they choose to band together for whatever reason, they may of course do so, but at the end of the day, we do not believe in the state. Even Lenin, a Communist who was about as “big government” as Marxists get, called for the abolition of the state. Communism is about power to the people, not the politician.



Communism *Has Killed Millions:

Here’s the big one.

Now if you’ll take a look at the texts of Communism, nowhere will you find anyone say “By the way, you should totally purge entire sections of your population”, yet nevertheless, it cannot be denied that millions are dead at the hands of “Communists”.

That’s “Communists” in quotation marks- you see, mass murder reflects on the ideals of Communism in about the same way that (as I’ve said above) the Spanish Inquisition reflects the ideals of Christianity. Let’s face it, people will use any justification for their actions. The men who killed in the name of Communism only used Communism as a facade for their own agendas. After all…

The Tuskegee Spyhilis experiments did nothing to treat African American farmers the researchers knew were infected, and did so *in the name of science, but exactly how is (secretly) giving someone a disease reflective of the goals of science?

And the reign of terror- was this the product of enlightenment and reason?

And is this democracy?

People kill people- that’s the sad truth. Communism has nothing to do with it.

[helot]

Communism *Has Killed Millions:



There's also another one for this... There is not a single political ideology which has not had any of its advocates engaging in violent acts. To claim communism is refuted because some communists have killed people is to set it apart from everything else, to give it a special place where one incident of violence negates any and all arguments for it. It is a double standard, it's not done to the prevailing ideology. It is a dishonest claim. I think it's best to point out this dishonestly everytime it's brought up.



Anyway, it's pretty easy to argue for communism. Most people are incapable of formulating compelling arguments against it. In fact the only compelling argument i've come across is actually an agreement with its necessity but a bleak pessimism over the possibility of a successful revolution. That can be countered by conceeding it's not set in stone however even just for basic rights it requires a mass movement putting the 'fear of god' into the ruling class (god being the workers ofc ;) )

[Tim Cornelis]

The Following are just a few possible arguments that could be presented and a few counters to said arguments.



Communism is “Great on Paper”:

I’m particularly irked by this argument because most everything is “great on paper”! Now there’s no real response to the whole “Communism is great on paper but doesn’t work in application” because of how broad it is. Really, it’s more of a prefix to an argument (such as the ones below), and any response is going to have to be more specific. Still, if you really do need an immediate response, simply point out that egalitarian, classless societies that shared work and held common property have existed since the beginning of time.

My immediate response would be along the lines of this:

You don't have to be theoretical as practice is on your side. I usually overly simplify communism to a few points:
1) Participatory democracy
2) Workers' Self-Management
3) Economic planning
(Additionally it may also be:
4) Common ownership
5) Confederalism)

Participatory democracy:
We have the Zapatistas, Marinaleda, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the Landless' Workers Movement that prove participatory democracy can work.
The Zapatistas have construed a network of self-governing communes, known as the Councils of Good Government. There are 32 autonomous municipalities (or communes if you will) each consisting of up to circa a hundred constituent communities. These communities make all decisions through participation of all willing. They elected one or multiple delegates to execute their decisions at the commune-level (or municipality). The 32 communes gather to make decisions regarding large issues, e.g. peace negotiations. They additionally have peasant cooperatives of collective farming of coffee. All this in spite of being besieged by a superior military, harassed by right-wing paramilitaries, and having multiple languages and dialects, terrible infrastructure, low education level amongst the population, dire poverty, and bad means of communication.

Marinelda is a Spanish town based on a cooperative economy. It has one cooperative that employs 2,600 people, all earning the exact same per hour. Housing costs 15 euro a month. Local police was abolished and realtors and bankers are not welcome. Annually, circa 100 popular assemblies are organised to make decisions regarding the municipality. It is one of the few municipalities in Andalusia with no deficit, and it has an unemployment rate of 2% (which would qualify as full employment by some standards), in stark contrast with Andalusia as a whole with an unemployment rate of up to 30%.

The AbM in South Africa has thousands of members, and works in accordance with participation, autonomy, and democracy. Most of its members are poor and poorly educated, yet they maintain a highly democratic movement that facilitates makeshift education systems and builds sanitary facilities.

The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) may be the most convincing yet. It has 1,500,000, has existed since 1984 (iirc), and has a directly democratic system based on participation, decentralisation, and grassroots democracy. Yet it works. So the argument communism doesn't work on a large scale, in this regard, falls flat. It is based on based (illegal or legally squatted camps) with 10 to 15 families. These have a collective assembly to make decisions in. They elect two representatives, one man, one woman, to a regional coordination and essentially as camp secretary responsible for ensuring decisions and organisation is maintained as was decided. Additional representatives are elected to the state-level coordination and the National Coordination Body. The land they squat is collective property and families can choose to cultivate it individually or cooperatively.

Workers' Self-Management:
There are thousands of instances of successfully worker managed cooperatives. The largest is the Mondragon Corporation employing almost 90,000 people. Marinaleda, the MST, and the EZLN also have cooperatives. Problematic is, of course, that in a market context these cooperatives make workers the collective capitalist actor—it doesn't break with capitalism. However, it does prove workers can manage the economy without capitalists.

Economic Planning (decentralised and from below):
Examples of these are scarce as it requires a complete overhaul of the system (unlike worker cooperatives). Rural areas in Spain 1936 may be named as an example, using distribution according to needs or labour vouchers as a means of distribution. The Free Territory in Ukraine also had communes wherein peasants and workers drew work programmes to be executed cooperatively. Currently, there is this town in China, Nanjie, the so-called "last Maoist village" (not true by the way), which distributes food, housing, clothes, education, and healthcare completely free of charge. It does have problems as it is encircled by markets, so it produces beer (among other things) to make a revenue to import goods. And loans were signed to sustain this, making Nanjie almost bankrupt. It also has 7,000 migrant workers on a population of 3,000 whom are not entitled to the same benefits. It does suggest, though, that work points can replace money. Nanjie also lacks democracy and participation, and is highly authoritarian and corrupt.

All this suggests that the basic structures of communism are feasible as practice shows.


Communism Conflicts with Human Nature:

I’ve found this line of reasoning especially prevalent among religious groups, and while you could debate whether or not humans are basically good or bad till the end of time, there is an argument you can use in defense of Communism even if humans are inherently evil (which, for the record, I myself believe).

*

Now the argument tends to go “If humans were also basically good, Communism would work. But humans are basically bad- that’s why Capitalism works. Capitalism takes humanity’s evil nature into account.”

*

See, this argument is just ridiculous- first, if humans were basically good, we wouldn’t even be having to bring up Communism to begin with. Second, Capitalism doesn’t so much “take humanity’s evil nature into account” at it does reward it. Greed, deception, selfishness, reckless individualism, decadence, and the like- these are all things that Capitalism not only makes excuses for, but encourages! If we’re going to base our economics on the concept that greed is acceptable, should we then base our legal system on the concept that perjury, harassment, and murder are acceptable?


There's actually a big market for furniture made from human skin...
Just because humans are naturally bad doesn’t mean we should base our entire society around the hopes that they’ll act badly.

*

Pointing out the what I wrote above shows participatory democracy can exist on a large scale, and thus that the basic structures of communism are feasible and not contrary to human nature.




Communism *Has Killed Millions:

Here’s the big one.

Now if you’ll take a look at the texts of Communism, nowhere will you find anyone say “By the way, you should totally purge entire sections of your population”, yet nevertheless, it cannot be denied that millions are dead at the hands of “Communists”.

That’s “Communists” in quotation marks- you see, mass murder reflects on the ideals of Communism in about the same way that (as I’ve said above) the Spanish Inquisition reflects the ideals of Christianity. Let’s face it, people will use any justification for their actions. The men who killed in the name of Communism only used Communism as a facade for their own agendas. After all…

The Tuskegee Spyhilis experiments did nothing to treat African American farmers the researchers knew were infected, and did so *in the name of science, but exactly how is (secretly) giving someone a disease reflective of the goals of science?

And the reign of terror- was this the product of enlightenment and reason?

And is this democracy?

People kill people- that’s the sad truth. Communism has nothing to do with it.

I a while ago I was compiling a list of mass murderers. It's not finishes but you can use fore future reference:


One of the easiest, though not one of the most accurate, means to determine the death toll of capitalism and socialism is to look at the leaders of said ideologies. I will therefore compile a list of mass murders and hope to do my part to undo the witewashing of history in favour of capitalism. Many capitalist heads of state have been exempted from their crimes and their names forgotten while their crimes parallel those of the socialist heads of state. I must stress that I do not aim to rehabilitate Stalin.
We are often cynically told that “socialism has killed 100 million people, let’s give it another try!”. Often these numbers are inflated, sometimes by more than ten times. It is often said that Stalin killed 60 million people, by anti-communists, but more often the academic number of 20 million is named. R.J. Rummel, professor at the University of Hawaii, cites the numbers used to reach the conclusion of 20 million victims:
“The figure comes from the book by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Macmillan 1968). In his appendix on casualty figures, he reviews a number of estimates of those that were killed under Stalin, and calculates that the number of executions 1936 to 1938 was probably about 1,000,000; that from 1936 to 1950 about 12,000,000 died in the camps; and 3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization.”
These numbers are, however, false, but never rectified. When the Soviet Union collapsed, till then secret archives were opened for public view. These archives accurately exposed the number of victims of Stalin’s regime. Nevertheless, many historians continued to build on previous estimates and thereby staunchly kept repeating the number “20 million victims.”
Soviet Archives opened in 1991 showed that 681,692 people died in the Great Purge; and that 1,053,829 people died in the Gulags from 1934 to 1953. Regarding the Holodomor: “One modern calculation that uses demographic data, including that recently available from Soviet archives, narrows the losses to about 3.2 million or, allowing for the lack of precise data, 3 million to 3.5 million.”
R.J. Rummel, apparently oblivious of the archives which give accurate and exact estimates, he himself insists that 20 million is a gross underestimate and argues the number is closer to 43 million victims.
With the use archives we can see this is not the case. We have 600,000 that died in the Great Purge, plus 3,5 million that died in the Holodomor, and 1,500,000 that died as a result of the gulag system (including those that died after release due to the gulags). In addition to the number of victims of various other campaigns (as well as the Soviet famine of 1932-33), which adds an additional 500,000, we reach a total of 6,1 million victims of Stalin’s regime.
Allow me to compile this list of “mass murderers,” using standards used by capitalist ideologues, namely: all deaths are the responsibility of the head of state; all excess deaths that occurred due to failures in distribution, production, or government policy are attributable to the ideological system itself (for example, it’s always “Stalin killed X million people” or “socialism killed X million people”). Combatant casualties of war are not included in any list. This list only includes those heads of state or governers who governed after 1850 and maximum estimates of more than one million deaths.
1. Mao Zedong: 20-55 million people (Great Famine and Cultural Revolution).
2. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (British prime minister) and Victor Bruce (Governer General of India) and George Curzon (Governer General of India): estimates range between 6-19 million people for Indian famines between 1896-1902 (average: 12,5 million).
3. Adolf Hitler: 12 million people (the Holocaust)
4. Benjamin Disraeli (British prime minister) and Robert Bulwer-Lytton (Governer General of India): 8-10 million people (Famines of 1876–1878 in India)
5. King Leopold II: 8-10 million people died in his privately owned land known as the Congo Free State.
6. John Russel (British prime minister): 6-8 million people (Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852 and Orissa Famine of 1866 in India).
7. Josif Stalin: 6,1 million people (see above)
8. Vladimir Lenin: 5 million people (Famines of 1921/22).
9. Winston Churchill: 1,5-4 million people died in the famine of Bengal of 1943.
10. Chiang Kai-Shek: 3 million people (Chinese famine of 1928-1930)
11. Lin Sen: 3 million people (Chinese famine of 1936)
12. Enver Pasha: 2,5 million people (Armenian genocide, and murder of Greek Pontians, Assyrians, and Anatolian Greeks).
13. Henry John Temple (British prime minister) and John Lawrence: 2 million people (Upper Doab Famine of 1860-1861).
14. Kim Il Sung: 2 million people.
15. Pol Pot: 1,5-2 million people.
16. Yahya Khan: 200,000-3 million people in Bangladesh Atrocities of 1971.
17. Yakubu Gwon: 1 million people died in the Biafra famine.
18. Mengistu Haile Mariam: 400,000-1,5 million people (Red Terror in Ethopia)
19. William McKinley: 200,000-1,5 million people (Philippine War of Independence)
20. Sukarno: 500,000-1 million people (anti-communist purge of 1965-1966)
(Note: famines in India under British rule significantly increased both in size and frequency, and in total killed up to 60 million people, with circa 22 million prior to 1850 and circa 37 million after 1850).
On the above list we see more than 17 names whose regimes and policies are responsible for the death of between 83.4 and 145 million people. This list may be incomplete as some mass murderers may not be included, for example Japanese general Hideki Tojo is said to be responsible for the murder of five million people, as well as Chinese famine of 1943 which killed millions of people. In India 7,5 million people are said to die each year due to malnourishment. Additionally, this list may give a tainted view as the accumulative death toll of certain massacres are not included due to it having being carried out by successive heads of state. For example, the US bombing in the Vietnam War may have killed up to one million Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese, but cannot be included in the list as different US presidents were responsible for this slaughter. The same could be said for left-wing insurgencies and guerillas wars all over the world. Similarly, each year 10 million children die because of poverty in capitalist countries (2 million of which in India alone). They do not die because there is a lack of food, sanitary resources, medicine, but because it is not profitiable to provide it to them, and hence they die. They very reasonably be said to die because of the capitalist system which is profit-driven. This means that in the last decade alone, 100 million children have died because of capitalism. Another example is civilian casualties in World War II where some sixty million died on the “Allied” side and twelve million on the “Axis” side. Yet another example may be the Taiping Rebellion between a religious agrarian socialist cult-like Kingdom (Taiping Heavinly Kingdom) on the one side, and the Qing Dinasty and Western imperialist powers on the other. This lead to a war in which roughly twenty million people died, but it is difficult to ascertain who is to blame for these.

[The Vox Populi]

My immediate response would be along the lines of this:

You don't have to be theoretical as practice is on your side. I usually overly simplify communism to a few points:
1) Participatory democracy
2) Workers' Self-Management
3) Economic planning
(Additionally it may also be:
4) Common ownership
5) Confederalism)

Participatory democracy:
We have the Zapatistas, Marinaleda, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the Landless' Workers Movement that prove participatory democracy can work.
The Zapatistas have construed a network of self-governing communes, known as the Councils of Good Government. There are 32 autonomous municipalities (or communes if you will) each consisting of up to circa a hundred constituent communities. These communities make all decisions through participation of all willing. They elected one or multiple delegates to execute their decisions at the commune-level (or municipality). The 32 communes gather to make decisions regarding large issues, e.g. peace negotiations. They additionally have peasant cooperatives of collective farming of coffee. All this in spite of being besieged by a superior military, harassed by right-wing paramilitaries, and having multiple languages and dialects, terrible infrastructure, low education level amongst the population, dire poverty, and bad means of communication.

Marinelda is a Spanish town based on a cooperative economy. It has one cooperative that employs 2,600 people, all earning the exact same per hour. Housing costs 15 euro a month. Local police was abolished and realtors and bankers are not welcome. Annually, circa 100 popular assemblies are organised to make decisions regarding the municipality. It is one of the few municipalities in Andalusia with no deficit, and it has an unemployment rate of 2% (which would qualify as full employment by some standards), in stark contrast with Andalusia as a whole with an unemployment rate of up to 30%.

The AbM in South Africa has thousands of members, and works in accordance with participation, autonomy, and democracy. Most of its members are poor and poorly educated, yet they maintain a highly democratic movement that facilitates makeshift education systems and builds sanitary facilities.

The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) may be the most convincing yet. It has 1,500,000, has existed since 1984 (iirc), and has a directly democratic system based on participation, decentralisation, and grassroots democracy. Yet it works. So the argument communism doesn't work on a large scale, in this regard, falls flat. It is based on based (illegal or legally squatted camps) with 10 to 15 families. These have a collective assembly to make decisions in. They elect two representatives, one man, one woman, to a regional coordination and essentially as camp secretary responsible for ensuring decisions and organisation is maintained as was decided. Additional representatives are elected to the state-level coordination and the National Coordination Body. The land they squat is collective property and families can choose to cultivate it individually or cooperatively.

Workers' Self-Management:
There are thousands of instances of successfully worker managed cooperatives. The largest is the Mondragon Corporation employing almost 90,000 people. Marinaleda, the MST, and the EZLN also have cooperatives. Problematic is, of course, that in a market context these cooperatives make workers the collective capitalist actor—it doesn't break with capitalism. However, it does prove workers can manage the economy without capitalists.

Economic Planning (decentralised and from below):
Examples of these are scarce as it requires a complete overhaul of the system (unlike worker cooperatives). Rural areas in Spain 1936 may be named as an example, using distribution according to needs or labour vouchers as a means of distribution. The Free Territory in Ukraine also had communes wherein peasants and workers drew work programmes to be executed cooperatively. Currently, there is this town in China, Nanjie, the so-called "last Maoist village" (not true by the way), which distributes food, housing, clothes, education, and healthcare completely free of charge. It does have problems as it is encircled by markets, so it produces beer (among other things) to make a revenue to import goods. And loans were signed to sustain this, making Nanjie almost bankrupt. It also has 7,000 migrant workers on a population of 3,000 whom are not entitled to the same benefits. It does suggest, though, that work points can replace money. Nanjie also lacks democracy and participation, and is highly authoritarian and corrupt.

All this suggests that the basic structures of communism are feasible as practice shows.



Pointing out the what I wrote above shows participatory democracy can exist on a large scale, and thus that the basic structures of communism are feasible and not contrary to human nature.





I a while ago I was compiling a list of mass murderers. It's not finishes but you can use fore future reference:
As for capitilisms death toll, let us not forget the countless deaths caused through slave trade alone. (I do not believe I saw this mentioned anyways)

[GeorgeZinn]

A friend, upon hearing my interest in collectivism, anarchism, said she hopes I haven't been brainwashed by 'egalitarian' ideals. Close relatives had been strong supporters of communism in former Yugoslavia. They ended up spending time on Naked Island. I don't know when this was, but she has a revulsion for any talk of socialism or communism. I am at a total loss as to how to suggest 'next time' it will be different. I suspect early adherents were believed an egalitarian world was about to unfold.

[ВАЛТЕР]

A friend, upon hearing my interest in collectivism, anarchism, said she hopes I haven't been brainwashed by 'egalitarian' ideals. Close relatives had been strong supporters of communism in former Yugoslavia. They ended up spending time on Naked Island. I don't know when this was, but she has a revulsion for any talk of socialism or communism. I am at a total loss as to how to suggest 'next time' it will be different. I suspect early adherents were believed an egalitarian world was about to unfold.

"Goli Otok" it was a forced labour camp for those who sided with the Comintern when Yugoslavia split with the rest of the Eastern block due to Titoite opportunism and revisionism.

Anyway, from the Marxist-Leninist perspective you can easily point that the Yugoslav state abandoned socialism with its deviation from the the Marxist-Leninist line in favour of Kardeljism and Titoism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

My immediate response would be along the lines of this:

You don't have to be theoretical as practice is on your side. I usually overly simplify communism to a few points:
1) Participatory democracy
2) Workers' Self-Management
3) Economic planning
(Additionally it may also be:
4) Common ownership
5) Confederalism)

Participatory democracy:
We have the Zapatistas, Marinaleda, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the Landless' Workers Movement that prove participatory democracy can work.
The Zapatistas have construed a network of self-governing communes, known as the Councils of Good Government. There are 32 autonomous municipalities (or communes if you will) each consisting of up to circa a hundred constituent communities. These communities make all decisions through participation of all willing. They elected one or multiple delegates to execute their decisions at the commune-level (or municipality). The 32 communes gather to make decisions regarding large issues, e.g. peace negotiations. They additionally have peasant cooperatives of collective farming of coffee. All this in spite of being besieged by a superior military, harassed by right-wing paramilitaries, and having multiple languages and dialects, terrible infrastructure, low education level amongst the population, dire poverty, and bad means of communication.

Marinelda is a Spanish town based on a cooperative economy. It has one cooperative that employs 2,600 people, all earning the exact same per hour. Housing costs 15 euro a month. Local police was abolished and realtors and bankers are not welcome. Annually, circa 100 popular assemblies are organised to make decisions regarding the municipality. It is one of the few municipalities in Andalusia with no deficit, and it has an unemployment rate of 2% (which would qualify as full employment by some standards), in stark contrast with Andalusia as a whole with an unemployment rate of up to 30%.

The AbM in South Africa has thousands of members, and works in accordance with participation, autonomy, and democracy. Most of its members are poor and poorly educated, yet they maintain a highly democratic movement that facilitates makeshift education systems and builds sanitary facilities.

The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) may be the most convincing yet. It has 1,500,000, has existed since 1984 (iirc), and has a directly democratic system based on participation, decentralisation, and grassroots democracy. Yet it works. So the argument communism doesn't work on a large scale, in this regard, falls flat. It is based on based (illegal or legally squatted camps) with 10 to 15 families. These have a collective assembly to make decisions in. They elect two representatives, one man, one woman, to a regional coordination and essentially as camp secretary responsible for ensuring decisions and organisation is maintained as was decided. Additional representatives are elected to the state-level coordination and the National Coordination Body. The land they squat is collective property and families can choose to cultivate it individually or cooperatively.

Workers' Self-Management:
There are thousands of instances of successfully worker managed cooperatives. The largest is the Mondragon Corporation employing almost 90,000 people. Marinaleda, the MST, and the EZLN also have cooperatives. Problematic is, of course, that in a market context these cooperatives make workers the collective capitalist actor—it doesn't break with capitalism. However, it does prove workers can manage the economy without capitalists.

Economic Planning (decentralised and from below):
Examples of these are scarce as it requires a complete overhaul of the system (unlike worker cooperatives). Rural areas in Spain 1936 may be named as an example, using distribution according to needs or labour vouchers as a means of distribution. The Free Territory in Ukraine also had communes wherein peasants and workers drew work programmes to be executed cooperatively. Currently, there is this town in China, Nanjie, the so-called "last Maoist village" (not true by the way), which distributes food, housing, clothes, education, and healthcare completely free of charge. It does have problems as it is encircled by markets, so it produces beer (among other things) to make a revenue to import goods. And loans were signed to sustain this, making Nanjie almost bankrupt. It also has 7,000 migrant workers on a population of 3,000 whom are not entitled to the same benefits. It does suggest, though, that work points can replace money. Nanjie also lacks democracy and participation, and is highly authoritarian and corrupt.

All this suggests that the basic structures of communism are feasible as practice shows.



Pointing out the what I wrote above shows participatory democracy can exist on a large scale, and thus that the basic structures of communism are feasible and not contrary to human nature.





I a while ago I was compiling a list of mass murderers. It's not finishes but you can use fore future reference:


Comrade, I obviously completely understand your sympathy with "Workers' self-management" and also wish for this, but I do think we should be more honest with people about what communist governance would entail.
While I don't know the exact statistics for past communist countries, 39% of the US labor force during WW2 was employed by the military industry. I know that in Socialist Nicaragua more than half of the downtrodden work force had to be relocated to industries necessary to protect the rule of that State. In Revolutionary conditions any ideals we may have, such as the abolition of manual work and money itself, are subordinated (temporarily, so long the capitalists of the world still have their imperialist armies) to the needs of the State.

[Thirsty Crow]

A friend, upon hearing my interest in collectivism, anarchism, said she hopes I haven't been brainwashed by 'egalitarian' ideals.
This is a common argument. It rests on the assumption that any set of political attitudes and positions which is opposed to one's own cannot be held but as a consequence of "brainwashing". Essentially, the trick is to assume it is cultish and unreasonable.

I can't really see how this would be the case, since "brainwashing" indeed is a real phenomenon but not one that is even remotely similar to people developing interests in forms of communist class politics - either on their own, induced by experience (for instance, the failed student struggle was what prompted me to gain interest in communism, from the standpoint of the experience of struggle and from my own perception of the shortcomings of it - for instance, the whole idea of "emancipatory higher education" seemed like a gross chymera right from the start), or through discussions with communists. This latter aspect simply doesn't function as cult-like brainwashing, even in the cases of leftist sects (some of the aspects are simply missing - strategies of severe psychological pressure, removing a person from her immediate social surroundings etc.).

And as Valter said, the people you speak of in Yugoslavia were political prisoners - the old Stalinist guard. But it has nothing to do with "Titoite revisionism" (and it is quite apparent that anti-revisionists are simply unable to account for the material basis of this revisionism - the one in question being the diplomatic relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia, with conflict centered on Trieste and Greek CP partisans who were left for dead by the USSR so that a diplomatic treaty with the UK may be respected; another hugely important issue were the so called "associate enterprises", the main lever of soviet imperialism).

[Rafiq]

Brainwashing does not exist, we are all brainwashed. If views are imposed on a more concentrated, direct level, it goes to show of the ideological impotence of those views. But that is not something alien from what we call normal, the imposition of views by external means. One would contrast brainwashing with "forming your own views". But what if the process of forming your own views is really accepting views alien from your interests, under the premise that they are yours? What are "you" to begin with, why are "you" such a legitimate authority from which you form views? Don't you know that the means from which you form views are ideological? "You" or "I" don't think in a vacuum.

[RedMaterialist]

A friend, upon hearing my interest in collectivism, anarchism, said she hopes I haven't been brainwashed by 'egalitarian' ideals..

She hopes. I suspect she derives a lot of benefits from egalitarianism: such as the right to vote, the right to pursue a career of her choice, the right to be free from sexual harassment, all egalitarian ideals which have done a lot to diminish the subjection of women to men.

[Anti-Traditional]

''Communism Has Been “Tried and Failed''

State Capitalism has been tried and failed. Just because the state runs the economy it doesn't make things any different, you still have a boss who has all the power, you still exist in a wages system. Communism stands for the abolition of wage labour in favour of a society of voluntary labour directed towards social needs and everything is free.

''Communism is great on paper but doesn’t work in application”

That's great if it works on paper. We can't say it doesn't work in application because it has never existed, as outlined above. Hopefully it will work, it should do, we already work in a social environment, barely anyone truly works for themselves, the only difference is that under Capitalism the Capitalists enjoy a disproportionate amount of the collective wealth we work together to produce.

Communism Conflicts with Human Nature

Who knows what human nature is like? One minute we love, the next we hate, both emotions are equally natural.

Communism Is Against Religion:

Most Communists are against religion because it encourages people to put their faith in God rather than themselves. However in a Communist society, there's no reason why people wouldn't be allowed to believe in whatever they want, provided they dont push it on others.

[RedMaterialist]

''Communism Has Been “Tried and Failed''



Wrong. One example: The communist party in Vietnam politically and economically organized a small, third world state to successfully defeat the greatest capitalist military power in history. It took 20 yrs (including the defeat of the French) and rivers of blood, but the communists won.

The Vietnamese communist party (as do the Chinese) still controls the major parts of the economy, banking, energy, communications, etc., and allows the petit-bourgeoisie to operate. The Vietnamese are not going to turn history around and go back to a pre-1945 economy and are not going to turn their country over to international capitalism.

[Anti-Traditional]

Wrong. One example: The communist party in Vietnam politically and economically organized a small, third world state to successfully defeat the greatest capitalist military power in history. It took 20 yrs (including the defeat of the French) and rivers of blood, but the communists won.

The Vietnamese communist party (as do the Chinese) still controls the major parts of the economy, banking, energy, communications, etc., and allows the petit-bourgeoisie to operate. The Vietnamese are not going to turn history around and go back to a pre-1945 economy and are not going to turn their country over to international capitalism.

I was responding to the 'Communism has been tried' thing...

[Alonso Quijano]

The Following are just a few possible arguments that could be presented and a few counters to said arguments.

Communism Has Been “Tried and Failed”:

I Actually think the Paris Commune and the Socialist Society in North Spain were great experiments.


Even in America, democratic government needed to be reworked- but despite the many failed attempts at democracy, the idea that anyone today would want anything other than a democracy is laughable. Let’s keep this in perspective before claiming that Communism was tried once and should now be abandoned for all time. All other uprisings were surprisingly shut down, either violently or by making people and ideas disappear. Perhaps someone is afraid that you might get communist for what it really is?


Communism is “Great on Paper”:

Leninism isn't. And failed. Some German Marxists warned about it and said so, back than. And what about Capitalism? Can we even call it "great on paper" any more?

Communism Conflicts with Human Nature:

Human nature is athleticism, is art, is comedy, is cinema, is literature. And even in our bourgeois state of mind we still just know that it's better when it's from the heart and not as a desperate attempt to get rich, don't we?

*

Now the argument tends to go “If humans were also basically good, Communism would work. But humans are basically bad- that’s why Capitalism works. Capitalism takes humanity’s evil nature into account.”


You mean, it takes into account how it will ALWAYS bring crisis which is it can solve? Don't you ever help your friends, for instance? Not all is money.


Communism Is Against Religion:

Don't say everything yourself if you can quote: Make you seem read and into it, and not just improvising stuff:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churches.htm

Communism is Against Democracy:

Seems you get lost in it. Rosa - saying it's not democracy if isn't free - wants to run to parliament - boom!

Not exactly faith-inspiring is it?
Planned Economies Aren’t Efficient:

It’s not a common argument, but every once in a while you’ll run into someone with a penchant for economics who’ll take this line of argument. They state “Hey, there’s no way a planned economy will work unless you’re always over producing ______ or trying to catch up to the demand for ______. It’s inefficient.”

*

There is more than one economical theory as to how it will be, and right now without having the rest that hypothetical situation know, it makes no point to try and choose one system over another.

Society Won’t Function Without the Free Market:

Describe societal function.
*

Communism is Against My “Right” to Private Property:

The Manifesto had dummed it up greaty: I's bourgeoi property we're against. Private property, an appartment you don't need but keed making me from by subletting it to those who actually need it.

Communism Is Against Prosperity:

Research show the is prosperity is 7, and you're wages are X, by the end of the year your annual salary is 7/x=more or less minimum.

However Capitalism is Against Art.


If You’re a Communist, Why Aren’t You Poor?

Because knowing the I'll probably won't lead the revolution home so-soon, I want to be the one who telly every in the next crises (how much time is there left? 20 years?) that "I TOLD YOU SAW ALL THE TIME. NOW YOU BELIEVE MARX WAS RIGHT?"
Besides, you don't have to be poor to take care for people.


We’re not big fans of either extreme…

Big Government Doesn’t Work:

And we wouldn't want it to!


Communism *Has Killed Millions:

Here’s the big one.

The EASY one. Choose what they like to wear/support/embrace/live/work. It's really easy to find Capitalist-motivated wars.