If Communism is so great why did it fail every time?

[A Marxist Historian]

If you want to fly, building an aeroplane is better than jumping a cliff. You can't fly under your own power.

If you want to build a socialist society, you can't just decide to do it. The material conditions for it must exist. The material conditions don't exist in one country, even a big one.

Not even the cleverest bear can lay eggs.

But if you mean, what should the workers in a revolutionary territory do if the revolution fails to spread - as happened in the 1920s - then the answer is that all they can do is continue trying to promote the revolution worldwide while trying to hold on against the (inevitable) counter-revolutionary nature of the 'revolutionary' state.

But the fact is that long before 40 years is up the revolutionary territory will have gone back to being a strightforward capitalist state of some kind.

So then a state of the workers, created by the workers, a workers state, will just gradually turn into a capitalist state, without a counterrevolution. Just turn from one into the other.

If so, then why not the other way around? Why not go the other way, once you've got the material conditions necessary for world communism, and gradually turn the capitalist state into a workers state? Just elect some well-meaning, mild-mannered socialists into power, and they can do the job?

A lot easier than revolution, don't you think?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I've never understood why you couldn't achieve socialism in one country.

I do understand that class war is global; that capitalism is a global system of exploitation; and that the ultimate ideal of communism calls for internationalism.

But why can't one territory achieve socialism, if it can achieve complete self-reliance?

Well, it's been tried over and over, and failed each time. That should tell you something.

Why? Because for socialism to work, you have to, first, overcome material scarcity, and have a society whose economic level, labor productivity, and economic functioning are, at bare minimum, superior to anything that exists in any capitalist societies. Or some folk will prefer capitalism...

And even beyond that, otherwise you'll have scarcity, rationing, and bureaucrats to decide who gets what, and, since they can, take the best stuff for themselves...

In short, as it was Marx I think who put it (or was it Trotsky?) "all the old shit comes back again."

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

But why not?

And I ask because I genuinely want to learn, not to antagonize you.

Because we live in a global economy. Any economy cut off from the rest of the world will suffer tremendously. As almost any economist will tell you, it was the collapse of world trade and protectionism that was the final triggering factor for the Great Depression.

And that was then. Nowadays, an isolated economy would be even worse off.

When economic barriers were put up around Iraq by Clinton, a million and a half people starved to death.

-M.H.-

[W1N5T0N]

It failed because the system did not manage to purge three things:
1. concentration of power (political)
2. concentration of material goods in the hands of the "revolutionaries"
3. the allowing of egotistical bastards to rule and thrive.

basically, "marxism" in the 20th century was a fine example for "freedom fighters" fighting for the freedom to rule YOU.

[Workers]

Guys... when are you going to realise it's a troll? All the obvious red flags are there. He made this topic right after his 10th post, he said "you" instead of "we" (thereby subconsciously declaring that he's not a comrade of ours), and if you read his other posts, you can even see how he claims to be a devout communist, right before apparently turning around and deciding that communism was proven not to work.

Either that, or we misunderstood the topic, and he's talking to the capitalists. In that case, though, the thread should be moved to Opposing Ideologies, or the cappies will never be able to answer.

[Blake's Baby]

So then a state of the workers, created by the workers, a workers state, will just gradually turn into a capitalist state, without a counterrevolution. Just turn from one into the other...

What 'state created by the workers'? It won't 'turn into a capitalist state', it is a capitalist state. You seem to have a bizzarre idea that changing the personel of the state somehow transforms it into something other than what it is. If that's what you believe, I advise you to go and campaign for some lefties to get elected to power somewhere.

If so, then why not the other way around? Why not go the other way, once you've got the material conditions necessary for world communism, and gradually turn the capitalist state into a workers state? Just elect some well-meaning, mild-mannered socialists into power, and they can do the job?

A lot easier than revolution, don't you think?

-M.H.-

You might think so, but then again you are a very strange fellow with some very odd ideas.

The class of the people administering the state does not define the class character of the state. Sir Bosoneby Carrington-Trumpet, Duke of Northarglebargle, second cousin to the king, husband to the Countess of Mafflefaffle and heir to the vast Inversludgie estates, could be prime minister but that doesn't make the state a feudal aristocracy. Joe Munt, a train driver from a council estate near Spogg, West Crapshire, could be prime minister but that doesn't make the state a workers' republic.

The working class doesn't 'create' states, it destroys states. Did it destroy the Russian state? No. Did it destroy Germany, America, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Serbia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Austria? No.

It siezed the Russian state, then fought a bunch of others for it. It (or rather, by this time, 'the Bolsheviks' acting as they thought on behalf of the working class) then held and militarised that state. There was no ending/beginning, no that was capitalism/this is socialism, no tabula rasa. To claim there was, to believe that the political makeup of the state can mean the end of the state itself, is the rankest idealism. Material conditions are what is important. Russia never went beyond capitalism because capitalism can no more be superceded in one country (even a big one, conversely with as you point out a very large preponderance of peasants) than it can be in one city or one neighbourhood or one street or one house or one bedroom or one head.

Capitalists may have been expropriated; but this does not mean capitalism as a social relationship was done away with. Just as you can put all the poor in prison, but that doesn't mean you can abolish poverty.

The state is the state is the state is the state is the state. You don't abolish and recreate it every time you change the government, or the personel, or even the structures through which it's governed - unless of course you believe that the Queen of the UK needs to be abolished so we can have a proper bourgeois republic and then we can have socialism...

You destroy the state by getting rid of capitalism. The second didn't happen - look outside if you don't believe me - so only an idealist could believe that first did.

[Tim Finnegan]

Communism is immanent within capitalism, it is not something which is capable of failing, or, for that matter, succeeding. It merely is.

[Thirsty Crow]

But why can't one territory achieve socialism, if it can achieve complete self-reliance?

Mainly becuase such self-reliance (autarky) is a fantasy if it doesn't include outright miltiarist expansion or control over resources which aren't immediately available.

[DasFapital]

Then Marx was incorrect on this one, as the state of affairs nowadays proves that the class consciousness of first-world nations are lower than in the rest of the world. Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy touches on this. And I never said imperialism didn't exist, but it was in its embryonic stages, and had not developed to the point it was at during the time of the Russian Revolution. There is a world market now, and things have changed. Marx understood this. He often went back and critiqued earlier works of his that no longer held relevance for the time period. Your claim that the revolution must happen in first-world countries has no basis in reality, and stinks of chauvinism. Do the silly, uneducated victims of Western imperialism need their more enlightened comrades to come save them, rather than taking revolutionary action into their own hands? It's like your implying that these people are too stupid to avoid taking the "wrong" path, therefore they need to sit around and wait for guidance. Lastly, why are you so opposed to authoritarianism? Marx was an authoritarian himself. Him and Engels wrote multiple works describing how the use of authority would be essential to establishing communism.

I am saying the material and cultural conditions are not always developed enough in the third world for revolutions to work. Also I would make a distinction between having some sort of authority and authoritarianism. Sure there could be some sort of government to maintain stability and order to ensure progress but I do not believe society should be ordered to the constant decrees of a state party.

[Peoples' War]

Communism is immanent within capitalism, it is not something which is capable of failing, or, for that matter, succeeding. It merely is.

What it sounds like your saying is that it will happen, and will just happen, that is the law of history.

Which I would argue against, based on the Engels' quote about socialism or barbarism.

Terry Eagleton makes a good point:

Did Marx see the victory of socialism as inevitable? He says so in The Communist Manifesto, though Hobsbawm denies that it is a deterministic document. Yet this is partly because he does not inquire into what kind of inevitability is at stake. Marx sometimes writes as if historical tendencies had the force of natural laws; but it is doubtful even so that this is why he saw socialism as the logical outcome of capitalism. If socialism is historically predestined, why bother with political struggle? It is rather that he expected capitalism to become more exploitative, while the working class grew in strength, numbers and experience; and these men and women, being moderately rational, would then have every reason to rise up against their oppressors. Rather as for Christianity the free actions of human beings are part of God’s preordained plan, so for Marx the tightening contradictions of capitalism will force men and women freely to overthrow it. Conscious human activity will bring revolution about, but the paradox is that this activity is itself in a sense scripted.

You cannot, however, speak of what free men and women are bound to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion.

[Ocean Seal]

Me personally its because I hate freedom and want to destroy the happy liberal utopia that is this world. I'm also an angsty teenager who listens to punk rawk which brainwashed me into not supporting our troops and joining the NWO-Islamist conspiracy. So that pretty much sums up the majority of the left.

[Deicide]

What you talking about OP nobody starved or lacked clothing during Comrade Stalin's time, it's only after he died and those nasty evil revisionists came in that Communism started to suck!!!!!!

[danyboy27]

Just an question,why do you fight for an idea that was proven that it cant work.



Just asking,no troll replays

Beccause Marxism in itself make sense and does explain verry well the relationship between the mean of production, capitalists and worker?

[Tim Finnegan]

What it sounds like your saying is that it will happen, and will just happen, that is the law of history.

Well, I'm not. So... There you go? I guess?

[Peoples' War]

Well, I'm not. So... There you go? I guess?

So you agree that people need to make it happen?

[Skyhilist]

OP, if you consider countries like China and North Korea and the late U.S.S.R. communist, you don't belong anywhere near politics.

[Art Vandelay]

OP, if you consider countries like China and North Korea and the late U.S.S.R. communist, you don't belong anywhere near politics.

So basically you're saying he'll fit right in?

[Tim Finnegan]

So you agree that people need to make it happen?

Yes, but I think that it emerges out of the antagonisms of capitalist social relations, rather than as something that is explicitly pursued. "Communism", in this sense, describes a potentiality which is immanent within capitalism, rather than a particular program or goal.