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

"You credulous fools."

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article-teaser/files/OTR-ChristopherHitchens1V.jpg

when you think about it, ALL religions are cults

heh, guilty...

Even Marx had servants, when he could afford them.

i think knee-jerk accusations of fascism are more common, and just as brainless

when you say "communism sounds great on paper," what do you mean? marxism? trotskyism? maoism? and which papers? the manifesto? kapital?

any and all.

Ask someone a thousand years ago they'd probably say "Democracy sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality!"

Also, it depends how you define 'work' - the Soviet Union was doing pretty well on its own terms till external forces (and its rather overenthusiastic expansionism) brought in down. And Cuba does a passable imitation of a fully functioning society less than a hundred miles from the undisputed idealogical centre of global capitalism!

nothing works in reality

reality bites

he Soviet Union was doing pretty well on its own terms till external forces (and its rather overenthusiastic expansionism) brought in down.

There was this man called Joseph Stalin, see, and he LOVED gulags.

And Cuba does a passable imitation of a fully functioning society less than a hundred miles from the undisputed idealogical centre of global capitalism!

I know a few political prisoners I can tell you about.

when you say "communism sounds great on paper," what do you mean? marxism? trotskyism? maoism? and which papers? the manifesto? kapital?

any and all.

-- darraghmac, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 11:10 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

lol dude i dont know about you but theres plenty of "communist papers" that dont sound so great to me

'there are only two kinds of music...' is more trivial but no less irritating

Even Marx had servants, when he could afford them.

-- Dingbod Kesterson, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 11:09 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^ this is the same kind of "ZINGED YA, COMMUNISM" that the original phrase partakes in

I'm not saying the systems in those countries don't/didn't come with massive human cost (as does capitalism)! I'm just demonstrating how the statement being examined is pretty meaningless. Whether or not communism can be achieved without repression is a different matter.

xpost to Alfred

xxp: "country and western"?

The statement may be annoying in its ubiquity, but it's defensible. Like much of the rationalist utopian thinking that followed in the wake of the age of enlightenment, OG Marxist communism grounds itself in a vast number of unjustified assumptions about what people want, what they will "naturally" do under this or that circumstance, and how human societies actually function. It's reductive, simplistic, elitist and even arrogant. Thus, it may seem practical/practicable "on paper", when one isn't actively challenging its assumptions, or dealing with individual and social complexities.

We can't really critique capitalism on the same grounds. Capitalism is sustainable (thus problematic) simply because it does work. I don't mean "work" in the sense that max does ("people are happy, healthy, unoppressed"), I mean that it functions as described in the sales brochure. Goods and services are traded for money, supply and demand determine value, etc. The day-to-day functionality of capitalism does not depend on dubious assumptions about humanity's higher nature, and requires no externally-imposed support system. If you'll forgive the word, it's a "natural" product of the way that human beings have organized their conception of the individual and society for thousands of years. Private property, trade, and money have existed as concepts, after all, for a long, long time.

That said, I don't know why the dumbed-down "communism is GREAT on paper" meme is so persistent.

"Republican, Democrat, they're both exactly the same thing, man!"

lol dude i dont know about you but theres plenty of "communist papers" that dont sound so great to me

-- max, 30 July 2008 15:13 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i meant that don't work in reality, and that's probably what's meant most of the time by this statement.

fwiw Russian style of government basically had absolutely nothing to do with communism as envisioned by Marx et al, especially after Lenin expelled Trostsky, etc. Stalin never even read Marx.

I mean that it functions as described in the sales brochure.

I don't think this is strictly true at all, but I definitely lol'd at your chosen metaphor

"Republican, Democrat, they're both exactly the same thing, man!"

fearless Pelosi/Reid leadership has put the lie to that. Welcome home, troops!

capitalism doesn't function as described in the sales brochure but it functions

anyway the most interesting/accurate aspect of Marxism is its analysis of capitalism - predictions of a post-capitalist society and how quickly and easily one could be achieved, eh not so much

capitalism doesn't function as described in the sales brochure but it functions

you could say the same thing about communism if it had ever actually been put into practice (ie, autonomous worker-owned collectives running everything)

Communism vs. Democracy is a better head-to-head than Communism vs. Capitalism. Democracy is another absurdly idealistic, "unnatural", rationalist utopian scheme that really shouldn't work. But unlike communism, it does seem to work (that is function as advertised, in a sustainable manner, with minimal social disruption). Perhaps this is because it promises/demands less, has often worked to disempower the state in favor of the individual, and permits the accumulation of personal wealth & power.

worker-owned collectives running everything = syndicalism?

Communism "doesn't work" in the sense that it has proven unable to keep up with capitalism as an economic engine. Capitalism wins at exploiting resources, growing the economic base, developing technology, etc. Capitalism has its own flaws that may or may not yet undo it as well, at which point Communism might actually "work." Communism did not "work" in a specific context, i.e. a global power struggle with a capitalist power.

i think what shakey is saying is that communism sounds great on paper, it just doesn't work in reality.

no, shakey = "communism didn't fail, it was just executed wrong!"

The day-to-day functionality of capitalism does not depend on dubious assumptions about humanity's higher nature, and requires no externally-imposed support system.

I am not sure this is true at all, especially the part after the comma. Cf. Gilded Age robber-baron capitalism to a system with an FTC, FDIC, SEC, etc. As for the part before the comma, it's only true to the extent that all actors are rational, self-interested and have equal access to information. (Which plays into the second part.)

Democracy.....does seem to work (that is function as advertised, in a sustainable manner, with minimal social disruption).

not as advertised, though?

How about single party Communist countries in which officials are elected by the people, such as Vietnam? Communist or no?

China.

I agree w/a lot of what's been said here btw. I think the problem is no one's figured out the right way to transition to communism from older economies (Lenin tried to use socialism as an intermediate step)

My point above kinda boils down to the idea that Democratic societies (usually hybrid capitalist/socialist) make the carrot seem easily accessible and tend to hide the stick.

I am not sure this is true at all, especially the part after the comma. Cf. Gilded Age robber-baron capitalism to a system with an FTC, FDIC, SEC, etc.

As for the part before the comma, it's only true to the extent that all actors are rational, self-interested and have equal access to information.

no, shakey = "communism didn't fail, it was just executed wrong!"

it wasn't even executed at all. Mao, Stalin, Castro et al - in every single instance these guys were just bullies who used the most convenient ideological tool at their disposal (ie, the appealling idealism of "communism") to consolidate power and run shit.

True Marxist communism requires a hell of lot more top-down control.

I think Marx would disagree. what would be required is control from the BOTTOM - ie, the "workers"

charismatic leaders: the self-clowning ovens of communism

and this is the whole problem with "communism" as executed in the 20th century - it basically boiled down to dictators and/or existing elites claiming to represent the "workers"/"the people" when they did no such thing. Every single "communist" state was/is essentially a state-run capitalist economy - the working class never got shit.

Gore Vidal: "Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor."

the problem with Communism starts at the root: the basic assumption of how prices are derived for goods is just flat wrong

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/paretian/social.htm

That said, I don't know why the dumbed-down "communism is GREAT on paper" meme is so persistent.

man, you guys love to over think things. it's probably because when people use this it's usually got sweet FA to do with their actual opinions on communism and they have no intention for it to be some statement of ultimate truth. it's just a shorthand way of saying that they are not fully convinced of some random argument that the other person is making. this is despite the fact that the other person is trying really hard to make it sound good. aka. "what-ever!"

personally I think its a huge tragedy of the 20th century that Marx's ideas were effectively totally discredited due to the actions of a bunch of bloodthirsty autocrats who never gave two shits about any of his work whatsoever. Kinda like with Jesus and Christianity.

^^ this is the same kind of "ZINGED YA, COMMUNISM" that the original phrase partakes in (sic)

-- max, Wednesday, 30 July 2008 16:16 (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Incorrect. It is a statement of fact. Much of the reason for Marx's poverty was that he insisted on not living in accordance with the theory which he helped to invent, and therefore he lived beyond his means.

Leninism =/ communism, or at least there are other variants that don't involve a dictatorship of the proletariat.

i liked this thread more when it was less about communism and more about this stupid phrase

dingbod im not really sure what point youre trying to make, but im fairly confident that its stupid

the OP is a lame-ass statement of course, but it's basically backwards. communism is a mess theoretically but it worked just fine in practice! it took heavy state force to keep a lid on everything, the population not the least, but half the world was communist for half a century, that's not a 'failed' record for a form of government. it could have gone on forever, but for the outside pressure. monarchy and feudal economics were garbage too but that had a pretty good run, didn't it.

I'm actually rather comforted that ILX still has a tough old Red in its midst. "You should have lived through the 70's" etc.

why aren't there more communes?

Leninism = communism, but like Marxism it has never been purely achieved

"living within one's means" is hardly a communist idea. what is "one's means" anyway? fiscal discipline? bourgeouis! (i always spell that wrong...)

Utopia and Utopian texts generally get better and better as the details get filled out, aha, in the perfect society the cities are *exactly* three miles on a side - that's where we've been going wrong!

"If you like Russia so much, why don't you go and live there" is another (Cold War) cliche that's re-entered my brain recently due to this ongoing mess in Ukraine.

nu Russia comes to u

and it's opposite: "none of those communist regimes were authentically marxist."

"the truth lies somewhere in the middle"

The non-tiresome question is "where is there room for the most improvement and what are we going to do to make things better?"

"don't bring me problems, bring me solutions!"

wish i could remember the specific conversation that prompted this thread

it wasn't even executed at all. Mao, Stalin, Castro et al - in every single instance these guys were just bullies who used the most convenient ideological tool at their disposal (ie, the appealling idealism of "communism") to consolidate power and run shit...

I think Marx would disagree. what would be required is control from the BOTTOM - ie, the "workers"...

Transition to communism, though, requires a radical and comprehensive rejiggering of society at every level. Whether or not Marx admits it, this in turn requires a great deal of top-down organization and control, at least during the transition period (thus Lenin's Dictatorship of the Proletariat). In terms of practical application, that was one of the primary problems with communism in the 20th century: the failure of newly-imposed revolutionary goverments to cede power/wealth to the workers as a whole, eventually resulting in something much like despotism (Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc.). This failure wasn't due to "bad people" or to external pressure, but rather to Marx & Lenin's seeming ignorance of basic human nature.

Rereading the Manifesto a little while ago, I was struck by how openly it seemed like Marx did essentially advocate totalitarianism and top-down state control (i.e. I think he did admit it). I'm not sure the gap between theory and practice was as great as people sometimes like to claim (NB as with Peterson, this is the only major Marx piece I am especially familiar with):

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

The third highlighted passage actually seems like it might have anticipated (and excused in leaders' minds) the economic disasters of collectivized agriculture in the USSR, China, and Cambodia.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

#10 is obv good, #2 definitely could be, #3 might be defensible. #5-7 absolutely call for top-down state control of the economy. #8-9 basically anticipate the Khmer Rouge imo, considering that the "equal liability to work" in "industrial armies" and "equitable distribution of the populace over the country" will be implement by the new consolidated despotic state.

hugely relieved to scroll up itt and not find myself. now i will rob future-me of the same peace.

in general you are i think right to say that yes, marx did know what the transition he was implying was going to have to be like. here are some spitballed caveats

#5-7 absolutely call for top-down state control of the economy.

as you quote from upthread the idea is that the state will be functionally democratic, and collective worker decision-making will happen fractally, all the way from the factory floor to the ministries. now this would be quite a feat (democracy invariably sounds like bullshit) and also it would be extremely peculiar and pointless for someone in 2020 (or 1920) to wed themselves to the specific economic prescriptions of the communist manifesto. but imo accomplishing the general vision of popular economic+political control is less the problem of Human Nature it's supposed to be and more a problem of simultaneously needing to grow an organic democratic infrastructure and fight an inevitable war to the death with the old order, which is v bad for the grass. (you'll recall the prototypical bourgeois republic had similar difficulties, lurching from republicanism to militarized authoritarianism to reactionary restorationism and back while history's engine struggled to turn over. in 1848, every 60-year-old you met had lived through all of this.) anyway, our present evolved form of capitalism doesn't seem particularly to mind for instance "centralisation of the means of communication" in the hands of pretty much anyone except the state, though of course whoever it is will be happy to work v closely w the state, just as long as there's no democracy involved.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

show me the lie tbh. again, this is not too different from what had already happened as capitalism rotted feudalism from the inside, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly (despotically)-- the enclosure of the commons, the requisition of church lands, the execution of kings and princes, the multi-decade money sink of the railroads in countries full of starving people, entire populations sent down the mines, entire agricultural bases changed, sometimes disastrously (the irish know what a capitalist holodomor looks like). yr point about collectivized agriculture is nevertheless not wrong but it's also worth mentioning that all of the countries you name were attempting the stalinist agrarian-to-communist leap, not exactly the vision of "most advanced countries" in 1848. i don't think even the 30yo marx of the manifesto would have been optimistic about them.

don't see where full employment anticipates the khmer rouge-- "liability" i suppose implies that everyone is forced to work (whereas capitalism kindly lets a few people off) so okay let's amend that to "opportunity" now that our robots are so good-- but agree that "equitable distribution of the populace" is an unfortunate phrase in light of the 20th century. i think "gradual" is the key word there tho-- i don't know that he's thinking of forcible population transfer but imagining the eventual shape of a communist population. capitalism certainly had a shape of its own, one no one had planned but which it nevertheless assumed violently and rapidly. remember that all the changes capitalism had wrought-- contemptuous of human life almost (tho decreasingly) beyond the imaginations of we who live in the bourgeois, half-socialized hemisphere today-- were, to marx, necessary and inevitable.

Hm, well, the distinction between liability and opportunity doesn't seem insignificant to me.

the idea is that the state will be functionally democratic, and collective worker decision-making will happen fractally, all the way from the factory floor to the ministries.

Where did Marx state this?

Good points about early capitalism. I agree that the agrarian-to-communist leap was not what Marx had in mind but the fact that communism did not catch on in the most advanced countries itself seems to disprove the theory - surely the immiserating cycle of capitalist production and alienation of labour should have organically led to revolution?

it did! the manifesto is written from the middle of it; that's why it sounds so confident. then it was defeated. turned out capitalism wasn't old, but young. no doubt many hard lessons to be learned from 1848 but "this will continue forever" is not one of them, especially in our world where it seems yet another longstanding liberal safeguard against an event like 1848 is trashed every day.

my description of the worker-council model there is probably slipping forward into 1871 (or into 1905), whoops-- tho i'd be surprised if you couldn't find marx talking about something like it somewhere. in general tho you already know this is always the argument, even under a totalitarianism like stalin's where it is a transparent fiction: that you and your fellow workers are the ones who control the state.

Ha, OK, I wasn't remembering the context of the 1848 revolutions.

Yes, worker rule is always the argument, even, as you say, in the most authoritarian communist regimes, but nothing in the Manifesto really gives me an impression that Marx was mapping out some decentralized, democratic system, as opposed to the authoritarian versions that occurred irl. If anything, centralization seems pretty key.

The southeastern Indian state of Kerala is probably the most successful irl application of Marxist socialism. It actually puzzles me that it doesn't get more discussion among Western leftists.

I've been trying to think if there's /any/ system or principle about which this couldn't be said. Doesn't everything ever sound good on paper but run into problemos in real life?

Lots of things don't sound good on paper!

hugely relieved to scroll up itt and not find myself. now i will rob future-me of the same peace.

i feel like this should be the prologue to every post on ilx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_Kerala

Sund4r otm - this is pretty astonishing and underrated. Well I've never seen it mentioned before.

*southwestern

Kerala is awesome

also a long history of matriarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marumakkathayam

I fear that the absolute control required for the dictatorship of the proletariat attracts fucked up authoritarian people like Stalin.

It wasn't a case of attracting Stalin - the dictatorship within a dictatorship was his very own marvellous pièce de résistance!

although i know you on 2nd read of your post you aren't saying it wasn't tbf!

The southeastern Indian state of Kerala is probably the most successful irl application of Marxist socialism. It actually puzzles me that it doesn't get more discussion among Western leftists.

― One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact (Sund4r), Wednesday, January 15, 2020 3:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

their economy is not particularly socialist

"Sarcasm doesn't really translate over the internet".

It's almost as if sarcasm has existed in written form for centuries and you're just shit at parsing it

tedious argument i've been seeing everywhere lately, any time someone brings up billionaires having billions of dollars: "net worth isn't the same thing as liquid capital though"

guess a lot of people just learned that jeff bezos doesn't literally have a hundred billion dollars in a capital one account

a lot like the "communism sounds great on paper" and "the truth is somewhere in the middle" lines, half the time i think people just say these things because they heard other people say them and they want to say something, not because they're actually trying to make an argument

my fault for hanging around reddit/twitter

Love this essay (Tronti died a couple of weeks ago).

"Speaking for myself, I know that I would never have the freedom that I feel, inside myself, without having passed through, in my thought and my life, the historic experience of communism."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/a-message-from-the-emperor

admittedly I didn't know he was still alive, but I'm surprised I'm only hearing of his passing now

RIP

I don't have time to read this right now, but the Marx/Kafka thing is so perfect I can't believe I haven't encountered that before! thanks for posting this

Yes was laughing at the Marx-Kafka observation earlier. Great essay.