Was Communism *Ever* a Viable Alternative Economic System?

No, it wasn't.

Fantastic idea, though. Communism works for small groups of people, and it seems to be the most natural system. Families, kibbutzim, hunter-gatherer bands, small companies. But as soon as you need a government or an HR department, it all goes to pot.
 
Crossbow said:
And just to help clarify things a tad, places like the former USSR, the Peoples Rublic of China, and so on, were never communist; even though there respective dictatorships loved to describe themselves otherwise.
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"No true communist"? :rolleyes:
 
It's one of these things that looks as if it can work on paper, but comes a cropper when confronted with actual human nature.

Rolfe.
 
Why do people keep saying "It looks good on paper." What looks good about it on paper? If it actually looked good on paper, then it wouldn't run aground on the shoals of human nature, would it. I mean, who is it for? Ants? They already have their system. Chimps? Hell, they're more human than humans. Chimps couldn't make it work. So who is it for, actually?

Hey, I have an idea. Let's seize everybody's stuff, pile it all up in one big centrally-controlled heap, and share it equally. And kill everyone who disagrees or gets in the way, because the needs of the many supercede the so-called "rights" of the few. I will offer my services to help manage things, since it's my idea. Trust me on this: we'll all be much happier sharing everything equally, except for the ne'er-do-wells we'll be forced to kill or send to the labor camps.

So. Who's with me? Hey, it looks great on paper. No reason I can see why it wouldn't work.
 
epepke said:
No, it wasn't.

Fantastic idea, though. Communism works for small groups of people, and it seems to be the most natural system. Families, kibbutzim, hunter-gatherer bands, small companies. But as soon as you need a government or an HR department, it all goes to pot.
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It's not a fantastic idea if it doesn't stand a chance of working. Communism can indeed function on small groups, but only if everyone agrees to share and no one exploits the system for their own personal gain. This is impossible to prevent.

McHrozni
 
theprestige said:
ETA: Oh, and I should probably ask you for your definition of "communism", too.
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I guess the Marxist definition would suffice (even though nobody wants to talk about it in threads like these): a stateless society in which everyone is totally free, does whatever they want and works as much as they like, shares everything with everybody else and everybody has everything they could possibly need or want.

It never was a viable economic system, because nobody ever defined it as one. Even Marx didn't know what it would actually look like or how it would function.

Virus said:
Central planning doesn't work.
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Most corporations (some of them as large as some countries) disagree; they do plenty of central planning.

There is some truth though to the old Austrian economics idea that if prices of products are planned from the top they don't transmit information of the costs incurred by producers of the parts that go into those products or the services needed to make them. A good example are the electronics companies who define price ranges for the products from the top and just try to find producers who can make it for them regardless of human cost.

WildCat said:
"No true communist"? :rolleyes:
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In the same way that none of the English, the Irish and the Welsh was ever a True Scotsman. No country ruled by a communist party ever claim to have reached Communism.
 
WildCat said:
"No true communist"? :rolleyes:
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In a sense it is true. Marx saw communism rising in an industrial society and transitioning to a post industrial culture. That was the one condition never satisfied by any of the nations that embraced communism. The closet anyone ever came was Germany and France in the 1930's.

Where I think Marx went wrong we he never saw the rise of a middle class., who in a communist revolution have the most to loose. Around the world today we see a number of social democracies doing well for themselves and I think thats the closest anyone in our time will ever get to seeing a communist country.
 
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McHrozni said:
It's not a fantastic idea if it doesn't stand a chance of working. Communism can indeed function on small groups, but only if everyone agrees to share and no one exploits the system for their own personal gain.
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In other words, it can work for a nuclear family, but once that family breaks and the kids form their own, there's a huge chance it won't work anymore. Proof: inheritance battles.
 
WildCat said:
"No true communist"? :rolleyes:
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Yes, pretty much.

You can call yourself Kal-El and go around wearing ridiculous clothes with a massive letter S on the front, but that doesn't make you able to fly, nor does it make you Kryptonian.

As to the OP, no it isn't. It MIGHT work if some fundamental questions are ever answered, but I doubt they ever will be. As for Socialism, yes, that is viable to a limited extent. That is to say, a Socialist system for many things, mixed with responsible capitalism.
 
I agree with Toontown that it still looks like rubbish on paper. Like its cousin ideology Fascism. There's nothing good about absolute state control of all aspects of life.
 
I think people are confusing primitive communism (kibbutz) with Communism.

Like Dessi said, Marxist Communists never give a viable system because they were against utopian socialism. How it works must rise out of the capitalist system, or so they would say. I jokingly call it an ideologically mandated cop out. It is also supposed to be an international movement. Since the State is meant to wither away, a Communist State seems like an oxymoron.

Here is the most recent take about the Dear Leader's death from a socialist organisation:

THERE ARE, after all, clues that North Korea isn't socialist, which people who claim to have read Marx and Engels could have picked up on.

Take the inequality, for example. The weekly bar tab of the "Dear Leader" was reputed to be many times higher than the average North Korean's yearly income. Even discounting the exaggerations you'd expect from a hostile Western press, no one really disputes that the Kim family spared itself no creature comforts.

Or the succession process itself following Kim Jong-il's death. Supreme power passed to his son, as it had to him from his own father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994. That doesn't seem like the sign of a society where the masses have democratic control over politics and the economy.

...

FRSO, for example, dwells on a system of social services that includes universal health coverage and education, as well as free housing. This record is remarkable for a country of North Korea's limited resources. It is not remarkable, however, for a country where the state controls everything. The state has to provide health care, education and housing, because there are no institutions outside the state--unless you count Kim's Workers Party, which is bound up with the state and permeates all aspects of North Korean life.

This is really what attracts these organizations to Kim's Korea. PSL, WWP and FRSO identify socialism with state control, pure and simple. They don't ask who controls the state. They may "prefer" that workers control the state democratically, but they don't deem workers' power to be an essential feature of socialism.

In this, they depart from the tradition of Marx and Engels that has always insisted that socialism meant "winning the battle for democracy," and that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of workers themselves."
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Linky.
 
Virus said:
I agree with Toontown that it still looks like rubbish on paper. Like its cousin ideology Fascism. There's nothing good about absolute state control of all aspects of life.
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What looks like rubbish on paper? Marx never gave a plan. He set out to show that capitalism was a terrible system based on exploitation and alienation and Communism was the mandated outcome. Capitalism is pregnant, at in its tools of oppression would be tools of liberation, and all that.

I think probably 60% of his arguments were wrong, though well formulated. But we never got "Communism on paper" except for descriptions of what capitalist oppressions it do away with.
 
Ziggurat said:
Perhaps, but that's not an important sense. "Communism" in the sense of what communists actually do when in power is far more relevant than "Communism" in some abstract, never-happened-and-never-will sense.
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Yep. It's interesting how nobody judges Nazism by how it looks "on paper".
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
What looks like rubbish on paper? Marx never gave a plan. He set out to show that capitalism was a terrible system based on exploitation and alienation and Communism was the mandated outcome. Capitalism is pregnant, at in its tools of oppression would be tools of liberation, and all that.

I think probably 60% of his arguments were wrong, though well formulated. But we never got "Communism on paper" except for descriptions of what capitalist oppressions it do away with.
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Maybe the problem is that we're looking at Marxism? What about Leninism? My understanding is that while Marx stipulated that communism would arise naturally from industrial society, Lenin proposed that communism could be stimulated artificially in a pre-industrial society.

Presumably Lenin had some process in mind, some method of arriving at the end-state? Maybe we should be looking at Leninism?
 
Ziggurat said:
Perhaps, but that's not an important sense. "Communism" in the sense of what communists actually do when in power is far more relevant than "Communism" in some abstract, never-happened-and-never-will sense.
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Which was the point I made later in the same post. It is a conundrum that we cant judge communism because there has never been a true communist state.

So possibly rather than question - is communism a failed system, why when the opportunity arose, it was never implemented in a way Marx might recognize
 
No doubt today's Nazi sympathizers prefer to judge National Socialism by how it looks on paper than by its track record.
 
Virus said:
No doubt today's Nazi sympathizers prefer to judge National Socialism by how it looks on paper than by its track record.
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With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.

-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

Yup, looks good to me :p .

The problem is that the Nazi Party based a lot of policies on opportunism. Hitler would talk about left-wing economic reforms to the farmers and then tell the industrialists that he was lying and that he would get rid of the trade-unions. Also, the Nazi Party leaders are the ones who actually came to power, and they pretty much did what they promised: centralise power for Hitler, persecute the undesirables, invade. There were some nice ideas in the mix, like outlawing child labour. But the national education commitment outrightly included indoctrination of State obedience even in 1920.
 
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