Antifa: need to know

[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.