Can We Ever Say "How Communism Will Work"? - That Awkward Qu

[redstar2000]

Revolutionary communists and anarchists are often taunted by both capitalists and reformists with the snide question: how does your system work, anyway?

The implications are many: we "don't understand human nature" or "incentives". Or we think people are capable of dramatic changes over a brief period of time, something contrary to (carefully selected) "history". Or we are simply "wishful dreamers" who "don't understand" even the rudiments of production and distribution.

Leninists, who often claim to share our ultimate goal, also jump into the fray...arguing that "many generations" will be required to "train people" in the habits of communism before they can be trusted with such liberties.

These are "awkward" questions for us; we are not "social engineers" by training or inclination. Living in class society, our first priority is to overthrow its totality and that's where our mental and physical resources tend to be concentrated.

We are not "constructive".


Making matters more difficult, of course, is predicting the level of development of the means of production and distribution at some indefinite point in the future when communist revolution takes place. Yet it is that level that determines what it is really possible to actually do.

An anarcho-communist in 1950 who attempted to construct a plausible "plan" of future society for the year 2000 would have been unaware of personal computers, the internet, cell phones, the explosion of information, globalization, nuclear energy as anything more than speculation, and likely a good deal else. Her "plan" would have become obsolete within a couple of decades.

This sort of thing is not a problem for reformists (whether they call themselves "socialists" or something else); at their most radical, they simply plan to remove the old capitalist class and otherwise leave things "about the same" as they are now or will be in the future.

Most Leninists are not terribly concerned either; they think their model--the USSR--will work "fine" with some "tweaking"...computerized central planning, more consumer goodies, stricter control of the "secret police", etc. They are probably right about that.


So why should anyone listen to us? Why should anyone take our expressed goal--a classless society--at all seriously? It's "vague" and "fuzzy", lacks coherent details, and is "counter-intuitive". It "sounds" attractive but, in the context of bourgeois society, looks more like "Heaven" than a real human society on earth. Considering that all of recorded history is a history of class societies, one can hardly fault the sceptics. It is "realistic common sense" to plan for modest and gradual "improvements" in things; even the Leninists, while paying lip-service to "revolution", actually "plan" to convince people to elect them to bourgeois parliaments where they too will introduce "socialism" in an "orderly" and "disciplined" fashion.

Thus I would contend that any "plan" for classless society must sound wildly "utopian"...it is "too different" from everything we "know" about daily life in class society and "think we know" about "human nature".


That doesn't mean, of course, that we should "ignore" the question or dismiss it as irrelevant. What it does mean is that any "plan" we might produce would, most likely, be obsolete as soon as it was written. Only in the period actually leading up to the revolution would a "plan" possibly make sense for that particular period in time, be relevant to the objective conditions of that period.

So if I or anyone says "this is how production will work" or "this is how consumer goods will be distributed" in classless society, we are really constrained by our ignorance of the future, and the "plan" may well turn out to be utterly meaningless.

And, of course, there are our personal limitations. I may have, as some have said, "an ego the size of Mount Everest"...yet even I recognize the inevitable limitations of a single mind at work; it is highly improbable that a single "genius" will come up with a "unified plan" that will resolve all difficulties.

The premise of real communist revolution involves the efforts of millions and tens of millions of people, who will bring their collective "wisdom" to bear on the details of communist society. There will be thousands and tens of thousands of "plans" and matters will be very disorganized for a number of years and perhaps even decades. There will be no powerful central authority to impose a particular plan over all of society; instead people will see what "works" and what is truly "impractical".

Initially, I expect communist society to be economically "simpler" than the old order...just getting the "basics" in good working order again will be a demanding task. But in a wider social sense, I expect a substantial increase in complexity as all of the old social institutions are dismantled or thoroughly reconstructed.

There will almost certainly be new kinds of economic networks...perhaps very different from anything that we are familiar with. We can call them "production for use" but how they will really work is difficult to anticipate. We know people won't "buy and sell" and we're pretty sure that they won't barter...how will they decide who gets what? And how will they decide who produces what and how much?

We can speculate within certain general constraints. Social decisions must be made by directly democratic methods as far as practical; by mandated and recallable delegates otherwise. People must have direct "hands-on" control of their working conditions and considerable voice in "what" they produce; certainly no one can be "commanded" to produce something they despise.

Whatever forms distribution might take, they must all conform to the dictate of free availability for use, probably on the basis of "first come, first served".

Yet, it must be admitted that saying these things is "not saying very much" in the eyes of capitalists, reformists, and most Leninists. They will continue to demand something from us as "proof" of our "seriousness" that we can't really deliver...a "plan" that would hypothetically "work" under the constraints of the present social order and all the social implications thereof. Our failure to suggest a form of "classless society" that could "work" within the assumptions of class society (capitalist or socialist) will "forever" be seen as "proof" of our "utopianism" and "irrelevance".

Perhaps that is a "disadvantage" that we'll just have to live with.

:cool:

[Kez]

Quote: from redstar2000 on 3:35 pm on July 25, 2003

Most Leninists are not terribly concerned either; they think their model--the USSR--will work "fine" with some "tweaking"...computerized central planning, more consumer goodies, stricter control of the "secret police", etc. They are probably right about that.

even the Leninists, while paying lip-service to "revolution", actually "plan" to convince people to elect them to bourgeois parliaments where they too will introduce "socialism" in an "orderly" and "disciplined" fashion.



grow up, the USSR was not leninist, dont spread lies man, dignify yourself mate, dont smear an ideology you seem not to understand yourself, just means future cadres will be as dumb as you

Your anti-leninist campaign falls on deaf ears, while you try to smear it with trendy anti-commie bourgeoise terms such as "discipline", "orderly" etc etc

As for how communism works, its clearly deefineed, its not a fuckin vage thing as you suggest, we only have to look at Capital, which is the main critique of Capitalism and where Marx and Engels have shown how Socialism works in a clear, precise manner, not mumbo jumbo vague bollox you come out with.

Please restrain your ignorance when you talk of Lenin...

[sc4r]

For once I almost agree with the gist of what RS is saying.

Not the usual denigrations about other ideas of course.

But when he says 'No-one understand how communism would really work' he is on the money. He's not quite in the bullseye though. The bull is that no one really understands how it would work, or if it would work.

Which is to my mind an excellent reason for not proposing 'straight to communism.

[Invader Zim]

As I see it I dont even want "communism" to work as such, not based on any model either planned or instated so far. However I agree with you RS2000 on what you did say, I doubt that until communism is actually tried in the conditions it was designed to operate in come about all we can do is guess at its appearance. In an Ideal world with out rather irritating US sanctions and political pressure from the west, I am sure that the model designed by Marx and Engles would be highly efficent. However I can not see it happening that the USA or a future equvilant ever not being in existance, so we must wait for another "marx" to arrive and adapt the system to cope with the west.

Well thats how I see it anyway.

[Monks Aflame]

Marx didn't forsee the coming of a service-based society. He didn't see such globalization and power and technology concentrated in a few countries, or one huge superpower. I don't think he thought first world nations would emerge as they haved. For his global proletariat revolution, you require a large majority of the proletariat as opposed to the bourgeoisie in all countries, and that isn't the case in most first-world countries, not the same proletariat as Marx was writing about.

So what can we do? Wait generations for slow, gradual change? Immediate huge changes? Trial and error? It seems the imbroglio of the world cannot be untangled, with multi-national corporations owning sweatshops all around the world, with poverty and homelessness and crime and the uneducation. How will all this be fixed? Will we fuck up, really badly, and it will just be another failure of a revolution? Yes, no one knows.

[redstar2000]

As a matter of fact, Kamo, there's almost nothing in the entire collected works of Marx and Engels about "how communism will work" except some very general remarks along the lines that I indicated in my original post.

Even your hero, Lenin, complained of this--saying that after the revolution "we didn't know what to do...no one had studied that". Lenin himself, by the way, pretty much copied every scrap and fragment of Marx and Engels on communist society that he could locate when he wrote State and Revolution.

We could, if we wanted to and thought it would be useful, attempt to "plan the details" of a hypothetical communist society...but it would be an academic exercise since we have no way of knowing the actual conditions that will exist then--and it still wouldn't satisfy capitalists, reformists, and most Leninists because they would immediately respond: "people are not like that". And that is true; people in classless society are really different from people in class society.

Sometimes, I think that's what bothers them more than anything else.

:cool:

[The Feral Underclass]

As for how communism works, its clearly deefineed, its not a fuckin vage thing as you suggest, we only have to look at Capital, which is the main critique of Capitalism and where Marx and Engels have shown how Socialism works in a clear, precise manner, not mumbo jumbo vague bollox you come out with.

Are you trying to tell me that if you handed a copy of Capital, The German Ideology, and indeed the communist manifesto over to someone who's interest in Communism was as intense as someones interest in paint drying would be able to read them and understand them, whole heartedly and without any problem.

Every person I speak to about Marx's writing all say the same. He uses abstract words to describe things, his language is dated and to be honest, sometimes its quite heavy going, especially if your learning. And to someone who isnt learning, it certainly would be "mumbo jumbo".

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Indeed people are sceptical about communism, and of course people think it is just a utopian dream. One of the most common things I ever here people say is "it's a nice idea, but it could never work". However, this mentality can be won over, through comrades taking the time to educate people. But, the problem is, working class people dont have the time to learn about revolutionary politics. I was talking to a couple at a rave over the weekend, and they have a seven year old daughter. the guy use to be a firefighter and now they both do odd jobs in order to surivive. They where both saying, they would love to be able to read about politics, attend forums and be active, but they simply do not have the time to do it. They need to work, they need to feed themselevs and their daughter. I believe it is the same with the working class as a whole. People simply do not have the time nor the inclination to even care about changing their conditions, because their too busy trying to survive in the conditions they are in now.

We need a movement which eleviates those burdens. In order to win people over to communism, Libertarian in my case, we must have full time comrades commited to helping working class people. Freeing up their time so they can concentrate on others things.

RS2000 talked about having tens of millions of people organizing and doing things. But first we have to get to a point where working class people actually recognize they need to change society, and even before that, what exactly society is! Again, how can people do that if their too busy trying to pay for their water and electricity bills.

Instead of talking about what comes after the revolution and abouot distribution etc, we need to look at getting people to understand their material conditions within society. They need to understand what their exploitation is, and where it comes from.

If we had a movement which literally supported the working class, people would soon begin to learn more about their expoitation, more about the world and ultimatly fight for revolution.

[The Feral Underclass]

What is the point of this argument. Your talking about abstract things, that arent really important. Your talking about a society which you know nothing about by your own admissions. What's the point. I think we have more pressing things to worry about. How can we get people to imagine a world you couldnt imagine, before they acutally know what the world their living in now is actually all about.

We need to get things into perspective comrades. We need to concentrate our efforts on discussing how me explain this society, instead of discussing that we could never know what a communist society would look like....jeez, no wonder the left is so fucked up!

[Severian]

Any "plan" for how a future society will work IS inherently utopian. Societies evolve, they don't come into being by somebody planning or wanting them.

That was the whole point about Marx, the whole thing that made him different from all earlier socialists and communists. He didn't try to draw up a blueprint.

Marx just pointed out the direction in which things were evolving. Not that it'll come inevitably or without effort - an analogy here is childbirth, difficult for the mother, and it's helpful to have a midwife.

So yeah, definining communism is vague. It has to be. "Tomorrow does not belong to us."

See Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels for more on this.

Sc4r is correct, also.

[Umoja]

Based on the fact that the only thing in communism that we can possibly "forsee" is the revolution, how do we know Communism can ever be succesful? Especially when the conditions of it working are incredibly vague....

For example as Severian mentioned, "Any "plan" for how a future society will work IS inherently utopian. Societies evolve, they don't come into being by somebody planning or wanting them." It would seem all forms of modern government were designed to be the Utopian form, but in practice this has never held true. How can something we can't easily package and sell (hmmm... Maybe that's a result of the Capitalism talking?) be that effective? It seems more to me that most Marxist believe that the revolution will come, Capitalist will burn in the street, cities will burn, the entire old system and anything related to it will burn, and finally everything will reconstruct itself and everyone will start to create stuff for some unknown purpose, better end this run-on sentence. It just seems rather abstract to me Redstar, and you've served to make traditional marxism seem more abstract. Did I miss something?

[redstar2000]

Based on the fact that the only thing in communism that we can possibly "forsee" is the revolution, how do we know Communism can ever be succesful? Especially when the conditions of it working are incredibly vague....

Of course, we can't.

All we can put forward with any conviction is general principles...as if we were saying "If communism works, these will be its main characteristics." That's what I tried to do in the "What is Communism?" thread.

Some have suggested that since the details of a future society are perforce impossible to foresee with any accuracy, that we simply shouldn't discuss it at all and concentrate on preparing for communist revolution.

I agree, but with one exception...there is no reason why we cannot make a "wish list". Another word for "wish list" is, of course, the minimum that we would find acceptable.

A "communist" society that was still racist would be unacceptable. A "communist" society that was still patriarchial would be unacceptable.

You see where I'm going with this? There is no reason not to demand everything that we want...and that list can be in as much detail as you wish.

When someone says to you "Oh, you can't ask for that now...wait until later, after the revolution, and we'll talk about it then...", look out! You're about to get screwed!

This kind of point is usually raised in the context of "appeals to unity for limited gains" but can include the revolution itself. The "rationale" is that "in order to maximize support for our 'main' purpose, we must be careful not to 'offend' some part of the population that would otherwise support us".

For example, we must "unite" with liberal capitalists in order to defeat fascism.

The consequence of accepting that rationale is the gradual erosion of our revolutionary ideas until they eventually become liberal bourgeois ideas. An idea that "stays inside your head" and is never communicated to others "for fear of offending them" and thereby "disrupting unity" is an idea that withers away.

The better and clearer idea we have of the characteristics of communist society--our "wish list"--the more likely we are to attain those goals provided we actually communicate the ideas to others.

The details of communist society are and must be speculative; the characteristics are principles that we disguise or "tone down" at our peril.

:cool:

[Blackberry]

Quote: from Libertarian Commie on 3:35 pm on July 28, 2003
What is the point of this argument. Your talking about abstract things, that arent really important. Your talking about a society which you know nothing about by your own admissions. What's the point. I think we have more pressing things to worry about. How can we get people to imagine a world you couldnt imagine, before they acutally know what the world their living in now is actually all about.


We have seen some 'modern' examples of communism/anarchism. The Spanish Revolution is a good example of this. Just read up on it.

I think what RedStar2000 is trying to get at is that we have no way as in influencing the values of a future society. Sure, a communist society would run along basic communist principles, but it stops there.

We can't 'predict' any more, since we won't know of the scenario, or the technology available at that time.

[redstar2000]

jeez, no wonder the left is so fucked up!

In case you hadn't noticed, LC, this is the Theory Forum where many "abstract" things are discussed and argued over in great detail.

This may not please you at this point in your life...or ever. But you can be sure that you are operating right this minute on the basis of someone's theory or, more likely, a collection of bits and pieces of several people's theories. You may "believe" that you are "thinking for yourself"...but everything you think you know about the real world came to you from someone who thought about the matter, accurately or inaccurately. (Which is not to say that you could never have an idea that was both original and useful...but it's rare for that to happen.)

There are many reasons why the left is "fucked up"...but discussion is not one of them. Any efforts we make to figure out anything may possibly be enormously helpful at some future date. Any net increase in our understanding of social reality and how it works is vital to our future success.

I share your frustrations with people who think that because they're discussing "theory" that they have no obligation to write and speak with clarity...and if you think I'm one of the offenders, I sincerely apologize.

A lot of this stuff is not easy and that's just the way things are. Social reality is complicated and sometimes difficult to understand.

But without understanding, we are helpless...no better off than some barbarian who knows only "kill or submit".

Without understanding, we cannot change the world.

:cool:

[Dynatos II]

When Marx speaks of communism he doesnt mean one specific social structure. He means all forms of human society after private property and class division are gone. for example, maybe one century mankind may have one way of organizing society (when i say organizing i dont mean a government or authority) to making sure things get done, the next century things may be organized in a different way. It will all depend on the technology and the environment of the specific era. Just like nature, communism will keep evolving itself to adapt to its environment and the situation of mankind (technology, human nature, population, etc.). Of course they will have things in common like basic communist principles (no class structure, no central authority, equality, etc.) but the way they are applied may differ.

All social systems since the beginning of civilization were obviously different but they all were based on the same principles (class divisions, some sort of authority, private property, etc.). Even though they were all based on these principles, they were all organized differently (from slavery to feudalism to capitalism... im sure i skipped a few). In the same way, communism will be based on the communist principles but there will be different ways of applying these principles.

Thats why the communist revolution is so different from all the other revolutions. It not only changes the way society is organized but is also changes the basic principles of all hitherto societies since primitive communism.

"The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas." -Marx and Engles

So there wont be ONE way communism will work. there will be many different ways.