Also that we would not be able to buy wants such as books and videogames?
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Western ideals
Is it not a false rumor that Communists believe that their jobs should be chosen for them by the government and that the government runs everything?
Last edited by Manifesto; 18th June 2009 at 03:56.
Also that we would not be able to buy wants such as books and videogames?
Everyone should have free access to books. There are people who love creating video games so I'm sure that there could be free access to the games as well, although I'm personally less concerned about the immediate distribution of non-essential material items post-revolution or during it.
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True I was mostly using video games as an basic example of a want.
Availability of things like video games might be somewhat limited during and immediately after revolution just in an attempt to stabilize production of necessities first.
Those things should eventually become available, and things like computer games are almost infinitely reproducible for cheap once the original programming work is finished.
Without intellectual property laws, game CDs and DVDs could be freely copied and shared and run on hardware that is now being manufactured without DRM, so it shouldn't take long for video games to become available again after the revolution, although there may not be many people working on new ones right away.
Speaking of which when will we probably have a revolution?
It's impossible to tell. Conditions are different all over the world, there's no clear idea of who "we" are, and class consciousness can develop rapidly in the right conditions, or be suppressed to the point where workers are scarcely aware that there is a problem at all.
Most likely, we will not see a communist revolution in the United States for a very very very long time, but there is always hope and it's really impossible to know for sure. The best we can do is try to build class consciousness and be ready when the time comes.
Well I am American and was hoping it would be under 30 years.
So am I, and don't hold your breath. There's no real working class movement in the US right now. Conditions are unlikely to develop that rapidly, but it is theoretically possible.
Be ready to wait even longer. We live in the belly of the capitalist beast, after all. Class consciousness in the US is pretty much the lowest in the first world for a multiplicity of reasons. Though something tells me all we're missing is a truly devastating catalyst to set everything off.
YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS
It is a falsity in the highest degree. Marxist and most other tendencies are against states. However, a temporary world state is a necessary evil. The worker run world state will exist as long as production is below post-sacristy levels. The direct democracy of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' will be nothing like the governments of the state capitalist USSR and China, or capitalist 'class dictatorships' like America, the UK, and France.
The means of production of these items will simply change hands from private ownership to communal ownership. You can still play Halo.
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." -Wilde
"Beaucoup de clopes! Beaucoup de vin! Beaucoup de rhum! Viva la révolution!"- Bilan
"The Sun shines. To hell with everything else!" -Stephen Fry
Not quite, the dictatorship of the proletariat lasts only as long as capitalism does. Socialism and some degree of scarcity aren't incompatible. The only difference being that a labour credit system would be necessary until "after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly". Though, of course, people such as the SPGB would disagree and support free access immediately (albeit perhaps with some degree of rationing initially, though not labour credits).
Well, we want the end of the state, so yeah, it's false. People could choose their own jobs, and "the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune."
Well, we could have things going comparably to a punctuated equilibrium, in which case we would currently be in stasis, and are working to create an "epoch of social revolution." Some claim that we already are in one, and have been since around the early 20th century, which is somewhat strange, seeing as it apparently means that the epoch of social revolution lacks social revolutions.
