"Communism sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality!" = most tedious line of conversation EVER?

marx had a servant!!!!1!!!11

xp: no

he was also against abolishing child labor laws

Max: that quote basically boils down to, "man is not a man, man is the group." I.e., communist; i.e., anti-individualist.

One of the things people overlook in evaluating capitalism is the fact that it comes with a built-in feedback mechanism: money. An worker in a capitalist system knows exactly how well she's doing (regardless of what her boss or her spouse or her friends say) according to that one simple measure. The more she makes, the better off she is. Similarly, a company can measure its success by how much it grosses vs. how much it spends, and it can use this information to decide how much to pay its employees. If the company manufactures widgets, it knows exactly how many to make, based on how many its clients will buy. And the widget-punch manufacturer that supplies the company is similarly informed.

No one has to coordinate or regulate these interconnected systems in order to enusure that they function properly. Regulation may be necessary to prevent certain abuses, but the basic function of the system is guaranteed by the nature of the built-in immediate feeback mechanism that capital provides. No one designed this mechanism into captial. It isn't a philosopher's invention or a "good idea". It's just the way things work. You don't have to know why they work this way to notice that they, in fact, do.

In attempting to remove capital and the feedback it provides from the system of production and distribution, communism winds up with something much less flexible, intuitive and coherent. How many widgets should the manufacturer make? The number demanded by his clients? The number he feels like? The number insisted upon by a government agency in a city thousands of miles away? There is no reason for the manufacturer's clients limit their demands, or for the manufacturer to exceed his own expectations. And due to the complexities of modern manufacturing, there's no way for any individual or agency to fully grasp the entire system. As a result, production in a communist system is often something of a blind beast, spitting out widgets according to absurd whims.

Of course, the logic of production in a capitalist society is far from perfect. "What the market will allow" doesn't necessarily have much to do with what people actually need -- in fact, it explicitly excludes the poorest of the poor, simply because there isn't much money in them. But it at least has a flexible, responsive, "smart" feeback mechanism to guide production and reward success.

he was also against abolishing child labor laws

just to be Johnny Red here for a moment, "child" was still a young concept in Marx's day - the 19th century saw the whole concept of childhood coming to mean something other than "years before puberty"

In view of current events - the ongoing credit crisis prompting massive government bailouts of financial institutions - one might also say that "capitalism sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality".

actually i forget where i read that marx (could've been engels) was against ending child labor. wikipedia says the communist manifesto wanted to abolish it. dude was a flip flopper.

as are pretty much all thinkers as they develop their ideas.

communism threads sound great on paper...

child labor sounds great on paper

great sounds on paper child labor

^ New Dub album.

Regulation may be necessary to prevent certain abuses, but the basic function of the system is guaranteed by the nature of the built-in immediate feeback mechanism that capital provides. No one designed this mechanism into captial. It isn't a philosopher's invention or a "good idea". It's just the way things work.

Heh. Oh, you're serious.

when I was like 12 I really thought anarchy sounded cool

nb I probably thought it sounded cool when I was a lot older than 12 too

I really dont want to check imdb and see how old I was when the movie Hackers came out

Anarchy sounds cool on paper.

When I was 14 I went to a meeting of "Anarchistic Unionists". Seriously. Actually they've probably got the key to everything.

I guess it's really just another word for anarcho-syndicalism, isn't it

Mutual Aid sounds quite appealing...that Russian guy Kropotkin. Not sure if it'd really work though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_%28politics%29

Tracer: the problem with capitalism is that it does not manufacture its own ends. It manufactures certain results, but on a large, social scale, it's aimless, stupid, and serves nothing but capital itself. In other words, it can't be allowed to lead or guide society. We get into problems like the current credit crunch when we let capital define our goals. That's why regulation is absolutely necessary, and why people who insist that the free market will "naturally" serve the greater good are morons (or selfish liars, either way, not worth listening to).

This brings up the most obvious benefit of communism: the whole system is engineered (ideally, idealistically) to serve the greater good. Production and distribution don't depend on the hermetic logic of the market.

When I was 14 I went to a meeting of "Anarchistic Unionists". Seriously. Actually they've probably got the key to everything.

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 6:06 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

sounds like the iww

communism looks good on paper too
http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/71600357.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=17A4AD9FDB9CF193875DCB1DD8387ABB40AD3EB810E63E33A40A659CEC4C8CB6

I'm never convinced by arguments based on 'human nature' - a concept so nebulous it can never specifically defined, much less proven

"I object!"

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/2005/0805/images/pinker1.jpg

Is Steven Pinker Right??

eurgggghhhh that hair *shhudders*

contenderizer, my problem with your breakdown is that you're imagining that capitalism as practiced is not also the result of regulation and social engineering. It is.

Capitalism and communism are easy to think about as opposites in the abstract, but in practice, there's rarely that kind of purity. Case in point: is China today capitalist or communist?

copulatist

No, I admit that capitalism as practiced IS the result of regulation and social engineering. But I think the basic engines of capitalism (goods and services in exchange for other goods and services, supply and demand) exist and make sense independent of such control mechanisms. Capitalism as practiced at the national level is an imperfect harnessing of those underlying engines, but at least it corresponds to something coherent and meaningful -- something that exists independent of our philosophy regarding it.

Communism -- the subordination of individual self-interest to the good of the social whole -- also exists, of course, but not in the "opposed-to-capital(ism)" way that communist philosphers imagine. Real-world, everyday communism doesn't forbid individual ownership, capital and free trade any more than everyday capitalism forbids social conscience and/or altrusim.

That last one re: Tracer.

this line is especially annoying bcz you'd think that if something had an obvious flaw that would make it not work in reality then SOMEONE WOULD WRITE IT DOWN

and like max noted the word "communism" means everything and nothing. the soviet councils of 1917, kerensky's provisional government, the mensheviks, lenin, stalin and trotsky all had completely different notions of what "communism/socialism/marxism" meant and how to carry it out. pointing out that they all didn't "work" seems beside the point.

marx himself writes in the german ideology

'Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.'

like jihad

Re: Batwing -- Marx said a lot of things. The Manifesto is a call to sudden, even violent revolution, not a dispassionate study of a slow, inevitable social process.

ilx sounds great on paper ...

ilx sounds FLY like paper

Does this bug the hell out of anybody else?

-- Doctor Casino, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 2:29 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Link

yes.

not gettin into this thread so late in the game, looks like fun though.

DINESH

Me and some commie buddies showed up outside an event of his handing out unflattering quotations disguised as programs to people on their way inside. I managed to hand him one as his entourage escorted him inside. He stopped and gave it a once over and said "oh no, you didn't use a CAPITALIST print shop to print these, did you? *tsk tsk tsk*"

As they went inside another friend shouted out "When we hang the capitalists, they will sell us the ropes!"

-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, July 29, 2008 8:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

sneaking communist propaganda onto dinesh d'souza leaflets sounds good on paper

haha

The only perspective I have on this is when I stayed in Estonia with a few people who are about a couple years older than me, so about 23ish, meaning they were about five when the baltic states left the soviet union. Their take was something like "The problem with communism is you're not supposed to want things"

then we watched hilariously disturbing/sexually explicit ads for things like chicken which were directed by their secondary school english teacher during soviet times.

I remember being shown oddly sexual ads for ice cream that came from 1970s/80s Russia three years ago or so. Anyone have a link to these things? Eerie stuff.

I once attended the Z M3dia conference put on by Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent of Z Magazin3. He wrote a book called Participatory Economics that basically seems like communism. While he talked about it in the house I think they inherited from her parents, sailboats looked lovely through their window. I recorded Ch0msky speaking. They were very proprietary about it and didn't want me to make it freely available. They live in Woods Hole, on the mainland very near my island. They had absolutely no interest in local politics, their own local economy. It was weird.

:/

I used to love Sargent's "Hotel Satire" columns. I wonder if she does them any more. I haven't read Z in a long time.

He wrote a book called Participatory Economics that basically seems like communism.

I have readed this. It is not so good, and Z is a very strange place.

Like Z are the strawmen our antagonists claim us to be.

z magazine has always been pretty terrible