Antifa: need to know

[GMDino]

(08-22-2017, 05:18 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Jesus, about communism, you know the thing you just claimed I was displaying ignorance about.

Dang!  I knew Dill was good at explaining but not son-of-god good!  

[Dill]

(08-22-2017, 03:16 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: They sure as hell were more powerful than them.

They sure as hell weren't more powerful than them.

Ahh, so they hold power.  I guess when you focus solely on my points about physical or intellectual gifts you chose to ignore my points about temporal power.  I suppose I'd be confused as well I only attempted to understand a fraction of the argument being made.

You didn't make any points about "temporal power" until I questioned the biologism behind your claim that anti-Communism is hard-wired in human nature.

If "temporal power" turns out to be the kind of power created by social organization and cooperation, then it undoes the explanatory power of your claims human nature is "hard wired." 

It's not biology which allows a physically weak Roman to make four strong Greeks to carry him about in a sedan chair.  Would that Roman's slave girls be attracted to him because he was "powerful" and "ensured their offspring would have a better chance of survival"?

Do women ever choose mates for reasons unrelated to power, beauty and "offspring" or are they pretty much trapped in all that hard wiring? 

People often believe that the form of social organization they grew up in is "natural," with social roles based upon natural distinctions between people.  Those who believe they benefit from existing social organization tend to want to further that belief. "You can't change nature." 

Once the distinction between aristocrats and commoners was "natural."  Then some people decided it wasn't. After several revolutions and years of public education, few people believe that distinction is natural any more. Once the power of whites over blacks was assumed to result from natural superiority. Then some people decided the superiority wasn't natural. We are still sorting that one out.  In one culture it is natural for men to work in the fields. In another, field work is women's work.

It is difficult to argue against Communism without positing some "natural' division of labor, or of the fruits of labor.  One usually proceeds by imagining a workplace constructed by capitalist relations of productions based upon some conception of "fair wages."  Lazy workers get paid the same as hard workers. Every capitalist can see that is unfair. And that is why no other system but capitalism could work--inside capitalist relations of production.  

[Dill]

(08-22-2017, 05:18 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Jesus, about communism, you know the thing you just claimed I was displaying ignorance about.

I thought maybe you were talking about Das Kapital, which you claimed you had read.

If you check out post #222 above, you can see that I have made a start.  I'll add a few more points specifically describing Marx's view of Communism.

Communism, as Marx conceived of it, was grounded in the notion that forms of human social organization are historically variable, and that all forms were heretofore invariably grounded in class domination. The latter meant the total value produced by a society would be unequally distributed between classes. The dominant class extracted surplus value from the dominated class, much like your lazy worker gets paid for less work. (Das Kapital describes how this works, but says little about Communism.)

Since the basis for class domination varied across history according to differing modes of economic production, and since none of these bases could finally be determined "natural," Marx argued for the possibility of a mode of economic production which did not separate people into classes, one of which extracted surplus value from the other.

Capitalism, he thought, had unleashed a tremendous productive power.  It's development had put humankind in a position to move on to a more equitable form of social organization. He doesn't say much about what that would look like, except that it should retain the means of production developed under capitalism, but adjust labor to production to reduce its alienation from the worker due to external control by state and ruling class (i.e., by abolishing private ownership of the means of production). The few passages he speaks of this emphasize development of individual human potential through varied types of labor--not one person mindlessly turning a wheel in a factory for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. 

The Communist ideal, however, could never be realized without control of state power, which could be accomplished peacefully through the ballot or by revolution. The transition to Communism would be managed through a period of socialism which retained much of the bourgeois state apparatus. But without the need for class domination, that state would wither away. At this point Communism looks little different from the "scientific anarchism" of thinkers like Bakunin, who imagined communities of producers working and exchanging freely with one another.  The only government Marx ever approved of was, so far as I am aware, was the Paris Commune, which lasted less than two months. His conception of what Communism might actually look like has to be gleaned from his critique of other socialists.

There is more to say about this, as others have filled in the concept of Communism since Marx, taking it in different and sometimes contradictory directions. That's why I say there isn't one theory of Communism.  But that should keep you busy for a while.

To the above referenced theories you can add the version of Communism which appears in anti-Communism--that's the one where all the workers get the same pay, regardless.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(08-22-2017, 06:55 PM)Dill Wrote: I thought maybe you were talking about Das Kapital, which you claimed you had read.

Snarky, I dig it. 

Quote:If you check out post #222 above, you can see that I have made a start.  I'll add a few more points specifically describing Marx's view of Communism.

Communism, as Marx conceived of it, was grounded in the notion that forms of human social organization are historically variable, and that all forms were heretofore invariably grounded in class domination. The latter meant the total value produced by a society would be unequally distributed between classes. The dominant class extracted surplus value from the dominated class, much like your lazy worker gets paid for less work. (Das Kapital describes how this works, but says little about Communism.)

Since the basis for class domination varied across history according to differing modes of economic production, and since none of these bases could finally be determined "natural," Marx argued for the possibility of a mode of economic production which did not separate people into classes, one of which extracted surplus value from the other.

Capitalism, he thought, had unleashed a tremendous productive power.  It's development had put humankind in a position to move on to a more equitable form of social organization. He doesn't say much about what that would look like, except that it should retain the means of production developed under capitalism, but adjust labor to production to reduce its alienation from the worker due to external control by state and ruling class (i.e., by abolishing private ownership of the means of production). The few passages he speaks of this emphasize development of individual human potential through varied types of labor--not one person mindlessly turning a wheel in a factory for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. 

The Communist ideal, however, could never be realized without control of state power, which could be accomplished peacefully through the ballot or by revolution. The transition to Communism would be managed through a period of socialism which retained much of the bourgeois state apparatus. But without the need for class domination, that state would wither away. At this point Communism looks little different from the "scientific anarchism" of thinkers like Bakunin, who imagined communities of producers working and exchanging freely with one another.  The only government Marx ever approved of was, so far as I am aware, was the Paris Commune, which lasted less than two months. His conception of what Communism might actually look like has to be gleaned from his critique of other socialists.

There is more to say about this, as others have filled in the concept of Communism since Marx, taking it in different and sometimes contradictory directions. That's why I say there isn't one theory of Communism.  But that should keep you busy for a while.

To the above referenced theories you can add the version of Communism which appears in anti-Communism--that's the one where all the workers get the same pay, regardless.

Sure, it's a start.  Can you please explain why these ideas, although they have been attempted, have yet to actually work?

[Dill]

(08-22-2017, 07:11 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Snarky, I dig it.

Sure, it's a start.  Can you please explain why these ideas, although they have been attempted, have yet to actually work?

What do you mean by "work"? 

You earlier claimed that "logic" dictates drawing what works from many different political theories.  Without drawing on socialism, it is unlikely that liberal democracies like the US and Great Britain would have survived in the great depression. So some of those ideas apparently work very well.

As far as societies which have set Communism as an ideal and call themselves "Communist," we would have to include China, which seems to be doing ok as the US' prime competitor on the international stage now--though some would argue that is because it incorporates elements of capitalism, the reverse of the trend described in the previous paragraph.

As far as those which set Communism as an ideal, then became stuck in the socialist stage and stagnated--e.g., the Soviet Union--there are a number or reasons I think. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany, then put the first man in space and stood toe to toe with the US as the world's other super power for over four decades. So by some standards it was working for a while.  But it was also a party dictatorship, neither democratic nor flexible, and excluded from much trade outside its own Comecon, which consisted of mostly developing 2nd and 3rd world countries.

I add here that the Leninist recipe for establishing Communism has some built in problems. It seems to work very well, under some conditions, as an ideology for seizing state power. But that seizure terminates in an authoritarian state which cannot respond well to changing conditions and eventually has to devote enormous resources to repression.  That happened in the Soviet Union. Attacked from within and from all sides, in order to survive, Soviet "Communism" had to militarize quickly and remain militarized. No leader was ever able to reverse that trend. The state could not "wither away" but actually had to expand.

Other "failed" Communist nations which replicated the Stalinist model after WWII, like Romania and Albania, followed the same path that most dictatorships have since Aristotle first described tyranny as a form of government. They had to define their own people, collectively, as a threat.  Also, I would argue that in places like Albania, where the party was run by one unchecked dictator, declaring virtually everything state property effectively converted it to the leader's private property.

Communist Yugoslavia appears to have "worked" until Tito died and various ethnic groups ditched the Communist ideal for ethnic autonomy. It was a favored vacation spot of Europeans during the '80s.