New to this, an ethical question i need help with.

[Retro]

Hey everyone!

Well this is my first real post, i've been monitoring this forum for awhile and i decided to join, and hopefully learn more. My friend introduced me Communism about 6 months ago, and i realized how blind i was to many things. I've been trying quite hard to get all the information together before i start spouting off inconsistencies and so i can further spread these ideas to other people, and perhaps dispell their falesies about Communism and what it is. I'm tired of hearing how evil and such that it is, and when i ask why, they refer to Russia, and they spout how it didn't work there. It angers me greatly, the fact that people are so ineducated, which i partially can not blame them, since capitalists have pulled the whool over many of their eyes so to speak.

In fact, i remember when i was younger, reading that Russia was evil and helpful to Germany during World War II...In a World history book made for the US schools. How hilarious is that? Propaganda? I think so.

Oh well now that im done ranting about all that, here is a question i've been having problems with:

In a communistic society, you have everyone working for the better good of one another, correct?

So how can we be sure that doctors, lawyers, or anyone that is working to help someone else is actually going to go to their full effort to actually help that person in the communistic society?

In capitalism they have money to worry about, and if they fail, they suffer the rate of perhaps not making all of the money that they could if they did well. I say this in the case of docters and malpractice, where they can actually lose money for making mistakes through being sued.

But what can they lose in communism? What is there to keep them wanting to do the best work they possibly can?

Please expand beyond the answer of, "Well they are helping one another and to try and better the human race. So to do this they have to try the best they can."

Seriously i got that answer once, and its quite vague to me.

Hopefully i did this right, i look forward to any responses, because this idea is bothering me a lot. And im not sure how to fight for it, in case someone uses it against me. <_<

[LiquidX]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2004, 02:59 PM
In a communistic society, you have everyone working for the better good of one another, correct?

So how can we be sure that doctors, lawyers, or anyone that is working to help someone else is actually going to go to their full effort to actually help that person in the communistic society?
Well actually you have the gist of it, but in communism you are working towards the well being of the community (thus communism), whether it be a town, a province, or a country.

To answer the question about people giving full effort: There is no real way to have people giving 100% except if you give them 100%. I&#39;ll elaborate, take for example a doctor and a butcher (might not be the greatest example, but i&#39;m sure you&#39;ll understand what I mean). The doctor has to give his full effort to the community because he wants the community to do the same for him. So when the doctor goes to pick up his meat, he wants the butcher to do a good job on it, and make sure his food is properly prepared. On the other spectrum, the butcher will do much the same. Because he&#39;ll want the doctor to do his job right when he is sick, or just going for a checkup.

In a perfect communist society, this is what would happen...however human nature dictates that a communist society is extremely hard, if not impossible to reach, kinda like a Utopia.

Hope that helps you out a little. :D

[Alejandro C]

Welcome to the board.

to paritially answer your question about doctors: in any society you can assume that there will be certain organizations that will monitor different idustries- services, production, distribution, etc. In a capitalist society one of the organizations that monitors doctors is the insurance companies. if a doctor fucks up and gets sued the insurance company will take a close look at what exactly the doctor did and what he has done in the past. if the doctor has been sued many times the insurance company might refuse to give him insurance anymore which practically says that he/she will not be able to practice medicine. the state also monitors the doctors actions and can take away his/her license. in a communist society there would necessarily be similar regulations. if a doctor keeps fucking up they will not allow him/her to be a doctor anymore.
a strong part of incentive in a communist society would be nationalism. if a doctor or lawyer is outstanding in their field they will increase in their social standing and earn the respect of those around them. they also might earn recognition from the state itself. i.e. cuba often holds ceremonies and runs newspaper stories congratulating individual sugar farmers for an outstanding harvest. this sort of moral incentive creates a strong bond within the community, as opposed to a monetary incentive that might teach people to be isolated or loathe other parts of the community.
there are also some small &#39;property&#39; rewards in communism. although private property is abolished an individual who gives an outstanding performance may be able to live in a bigger (state owned) house or may recieve special foods sometimes. the point is that everyone can understand that their jobs are equally important to a sociey. so you don&#39;t have the doctors and lawyers looking down on the teachers or bus drivers simply because they make less money.
a basic tenet of communism or socialism is the worth of the individual. for instance if you had a city of 10,000 doctors- they would all be fucked. no one to cook, build, pick up trash, etc. similarly with any proffesion. a society needs many different components to function. why should a garbage collector be given one onehundredth of what a doctor gets when both are invaluable to society, and both work hard? you might say because the doctor went to school for all those years. well in a communist or socialist society, school is free. so those 15 years while the doctor is in school learning for free, the garbage man has been collecting garbage. you can see that most people would want to be going to school for 15 years so many people would want to be a doctor creating the natural process of weeding out of a large selection the best doctors to service the rest of the community.
you can quickly see that a community that was structured like this would create much happier people. as i heard the leader of bhutan say yesterday &#39;i&#39;m not conerned with my people&#39;s gross national product, just their gross national hapiness.&#39; this is the morally superior attitude which will lead to a richer and more meaningful life.

[ComradeRed]

In fact, i remember when i was younger, reading that Russia was evil and helpful to Germany during World War II...In a World history book made for the US schools. How hilarious is that? Propaganda? I think so. propaganda? yes. ironically, the russians turned the tide in the war @ stalingrad, yet most "americans" say "they" did it at d-day.

well the basic question is motivation right? i mean in capitalism people work for money because they are greedy and that is why communism failed, right?
WRONG&#33; communism failed in russia, china, and inevitably cuba becaue there was no industrial revolution which creates the bourgeoisie that oppresses the masses. If there was no IR, where would the bourgeoisie come from?
Capitalists say that if there was a hundred &#036; bill on the ground would you pick it up. naturally you would, but WHY? why, because we live in a capitlaist society whereas it is nature that is the adaptation to an environment, vis-a-vis darwinian studies, and whereas we live in a capitalist society we can deduct that it is merely the adaptation to capitlism that we are greedy, it is not natural law that dictates this.

hope that helps&#33;

[redstar2000]

In a communistic society, you have everyone working for the better good of one another, correct?

So how can we be sure that doctors, lawyers, or anyone that is working to help someone else is actually going to go to their full effort to actually help that person in the communistic society?

Although there will almost certainly be no lawyers in communist society--what purpose would they serve?--your question would apply to everyone who did have useful occupations that involved the welfare of others...in short, to almost everyone.

So why would people try to do their best instead of slide by with mediocrity?

The answer is, I think, an essentially "selfish" one. One&#39;s status and prestige in communist society would be based on competence.

The "better job" you did, the more likely you would be to be noticed and praised...both by your peers and--if your accomplishments were really notable--by society in general.

Capitalism pretends to be a "meritocracy" -- a social order in which ancestry or wealth "does not really matter".

Compared to feudalism, this claim is quite plausible...but we know the truth is otherwise. The doctor&#39;s son has a much better shot at becoming a doctor (if he wants to) than the kid that grows up on welfare...regardless of talent or ability or intelligence.

So it is, I think, in all occupations except the shit-shoveling at the bottom of the social pyramid.

In communist society, people will choose their occupations because of their intrinsic value. Someone will become a doctor not in order to make a lot of money but because they are fascinated by the science of medicine.

Thus they will be working to satisfy themselves...and will do "the best they can" because that&#39;s what you always do when you are satisfying your own desires.

And if they turn out to be really good at what they do (much more likely under communism than under capitalism since potential wealth is not a factor in people&#39;s career choices), then they get status and prestige as "bonus points".

It&#39;s true that there are a small minority of people who find their greatest satisfaction in "helping others" and there may be more of them under communism.

But communism would work just fine even if no such people existed at all.

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.vze.com)
A site about communist ideas

[STI]

While we&#39;re on the topic of bashing the anti- communist arguments of the capitalists, I&#39;d like to sort of elaborate on something redstar said:


In communist society, people will choose their occupations because of their intrinsic value. Someone will become a doctor not in order to make a lot of money but because they are fascinated by the science of medicine.


It&#39;s a common argument made by anti- communists that "people wouldn&#39;t be able to do the job that they want", but this is much more true in capitalism. Nobody says "I want to work on an assembly line when I grow up". People take these jobs because they must. In communism, a person would be more free to find work which (s)he finds useful and pleasurable. If somebody finds assembly line work useful and pleasureable, more power to them, but machines would do most of this type of work, as most people probably wouldn&#39;t want to work on an assembly line. The more machines do the &#39;boring&#39; work for humans, the more humans would be free to do the jobs they actually want to do. Machines can work 24/7, and don&#39;t need things like wages or vacations. The capitalists use this as a tool of maximizing profit (and in the process put a lot of workers out on their asses), but in a post- capitalist society, it would be used to liberate the workers from tedious labouring. It would be much easier to make machines which could do work for us, as we wouldn&#39;t be pouring billions of dollars every year into researching new ways to blow each other up. The same amount of research time could be used to find ways of allieviating suffering and liberating workers from labour.

Also, it would be easier for a person who wanted to change from one carreer to another, since (s)he wouldn&#39;t have to worry about all the time spent not working while in training (university, in the case of doctors), and the financial problems which could, and probably will, result from this. Such an environment would make it much more favourable to become a doctor, just because you want to. This would result in more doctors who really care about healing people, as opposed to doctors who really care about money.


Of course, the "human nature" card is always the last resort of a capitalist losing a debate. They&#39;ll bleat like sheep and scream atop the mountains that "humans are naturally greedy", or that "people will only do things for their own benefit". There&#39;s a thread about this whole thing somewhere (i believe here in the theory forum, though i may be wrong), so I won&#39;t get into it here.

Hope it helped.

[Retro]

Wow, thanks for all the great well thought-out responses.

I knew i was right when i joined, now maybe i will finally understand more.

Thanks again.

[Alejandro C]

I&#39;ve studied two communist countries fairly indepthly- china and cuba. if you look at the political culture in these countries motivation was NEVER a problem. i believe the same is true with the USSR. communism has never failed because of people saying &#39;what&#39;s the point- theres no incentive&#39; i believe that this can be largely credited to the organic and legitmate communist revolutions. another reason has been the propaganda of the state. but the point is that the philosophy of communism has proved to be sound. abolition of private property and an all powerfull state which destroys classes has NOT destroyed motivation or ambition. ask those who doubt you why the USSR was able to produce all of their accomplishments. if motivation was destroyed then there would never have been a cold war, or russian domination of olympics, etc. the problems with past communist countries was mainly a lack of honesty and realism- or in other words TOO MUCH MOTIVATION. people wanted to do so well that they set unrealistically high goals, which they could never meet- i.e. great leap forward in china or the ten million ton sugar harvest in cuba. they were so eager to do better that when they fell short of their goals they refused to accept it. enter economic disaster.

[STI]

But a capitalist will always say that the people in those countries were forced to do all the work they did. I tend more to showing the inconsistancies between China/USSR/Cuba/N. Korea and "real" communinsm.

[LiquidX]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11 2004, 03:47 PM
But a capitalist will always say that the people in those countries were forced to do all the work they did. I tend more to showing the inconsistancies between China/USSR/Cuba/N. Korea and "real" communinsm.
I wholeheartedly agree. There is a huge difference between "real" communism (as in, how communism is supposed to be) and the "current" communism as I like to call it (as in, how communism is and was run in countries such as Cuba, USSR, Korea, etc.)

The big difference is the fact that "real" communism is the ideal setting, a utopia if you will. It is a perfect society where everyone is happy, everyone works, and the economy goes round.

The problem with a "current" communist society is human nature. Human nature is the stumbling block for communism. What I mean by this is that people constantly crave more power, more money, etc. So the system becomes out of whack when someone gets too greedy.

The idea that I have always had is that if we were to breed a large number of children and raise them to ignore those types of cravings then perhaps communism could be possible. I&#39;d love to see if it could actually work, but I doubt there will ever be that kind of movement in my lifetime.

[redstar2000]

Human nature is the stumbling block for communism. What I mean by this is that people constantly crave more power, more money, etc. So the system becomes out of whack when someone gets too greedy.

Like the psycho-villain in teen-age slasher movies, it&#39;s the "criticism" that will not be killed.

"People constantly crave more power, more money, etc." because...well, because that&#39;s just the way people "are".

"Therefore", we should give up on this commie crap and get out there and hustle a good scam...like "everybody" else does.

*Yawns*

The fact that there is very little in the way of scientific knowledge about "human nature" never inhibits the mindless repetition of this mantra.

The fact that we can gather from history the inference that "human nature" appears to change rather dramatically from one epoch of class society to another is likewise disregarded.

I&#39;m starting to wonder if people who bring this "idea" up all the time do not have an unspoken desire to indulge in cannibalism.

That, after all, was once "human nature".

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.vze.com)
A site about communist ideas

[Jimmie Higgins]

Originally posted by LiquidX+Feb 14 2004, 03:45 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (LiquidX @ Feb 14 2004, 03:45 AM)
[email protected] 11 2004, 03:47 PM
But a capitalist will always say that the people in those countries were forced to do all the work they did. I tend more to showing the inconsistancies between China/USSR/Cuba/N. Korea and "real" communinsm.
I wholeheartedly agree. There is a huge difference between "real" communism (as in, how communism is supposed to be) and the "current" communism as I like to call it (as in, how communism is and was run in countries such as Cuba, USSR, Korea, etc.)

The big difference is the fact that "real" communism is the ideal setting, a utopia if you will. It is a perfect society where everyone is happy, everyone works, and the economy goes round.

The problem with a "current" communist society is human nature. Human nature is the stumbling block for communism. What I mean by this is that people constantly crave more power, more money, etc. So the system becomes out of whack when someone gets too greedy.

The idea that I have always had is that if we were to breed a large number of children and raise them to ignore those types of cravings then perhaps communism could be possible. I&#39;d love to see if it could actually work, but I doubt there will ever be that kind of movement in my lifetime. [/b]
Yes, people in capitalism do seek to have more power over others and more money because both of these things mean you have more power over your own destany in capitalism. Most of the people who are my parents age and have been working lame-ass jobs where they are overworked and still can&#39;t get all the freetime they need or healthcare they need and so on fanticize about one day owning some small shop where they&#39;ll own the business and provide a service that is connected with their personal intrests - a local movie theater or bar or whatever. This is the acceptalble dream for working class people in the US; to someday save enough to become petty-bourgoise. They never say they want to open a bar and then become a franchize and eventually become a forture 500 business and idversify and so on (though maybe they fanticize about being able to sell a sucessful business and retire young). So I think this shows that people have a desire to controll their own destiny; "be their own boss"... not become a boss of others and make profits off their backs. But because people are not shown other viable alternative to how things work in capitalism, their dreams are within capitalism rather than the communistic alternative of everyone being their own boss.