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

"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.