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Will Communism Ever Work?

If you believe Communism can work then you must believe that people aren't inherently greedy, which IMO is nonsense.

Capitalism is a system that works with human nature, Communism works against it.
 
The classic Communism analogy

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little ...

The second Test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else. All failed to their great surprise and the professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder to succeed the greater the reward but when a government takes all the reward away; no one will try or succeed.
 
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Firstly, forgive me if I don't take the professor's experiment as a grand example of socialist failings. It has so many fundamental flaws (not least when referring to what should ostensibly be a communist system as 'socialist') in its basic understanding of what communism is actually about that bothering to use it to illustrate anything is a waste of time.

Though, to be honest, that nebulous analogy could be easily reversed to explain classical free-market capitalism as well.

A professor teaching a two-term course hires a large lecture hall. He randomly selects four or five students and puts them at the front of the class. He then sits everyone else increasing distances away from him, with the vast majority of the class seated at the very end of the hall. He forbids people to move from their seats.

He then whispers the answers to the first test in a voice just loud enough for the front few students to hear, before handing everyone the test and walking away.

He comes back and finds, somewhat inevitably, that the randomly selected ones in the front who heard what he said did much better than the ones at the back. He then laughs and fails everyone sitting behind the first few students, explaining that if only they worked harder to hear what he had to say they'd have done better.

He then hands the answers for the rest of the term's exams to the front row of students, explaining that they were 'strivers' and 'knowledge seekers', and thus deserved to be rewarded for their efforts, while castigating the ones further back as 'shirkers' and lazy, idle failures too uninterested to dig themselves out of the academic hole they are in. Finally, he implements an examination system that gives the people in the front (excluding the randomly selected 'strivers', who already have the exam answers) easy exams, the people behind them moderately tough exams, and the ones at the very back (Again, the majority) brutally hard exams.

He then lectures for the rest of the term in a whisper just loud enough to be heard by the front few rows.

At the end of the term, he checks the grades of everyone in class after they've gone through his implemented exam system. The ones with high grades are allowed to move to the front for the second term, and the ones with low grades are moved further back. He finds that most of the people with high grades are the people who were in front anyway, and most of the people in the back were the people who were in the back all along. He then explains that capitalism works by concentrating all the wealth and power in the hands of a very small segment of the population while forcing the vast majority of people to work long, hard hours for relatively tiny amounts of money and with little to no prospect of ever moving up because of the manifold inherent disadvantages stacked against them. Those that are in front, stay in front, and those at the back, stay in the back producing profits for the front.

There, capitalism in a nutshell.

And if you think there are inaccuracies in that analogy, then I can only reply that they are no greater than the massive inaccuracies contained within the Texas university analogy.
 
DubaiSpur said:
Firstly, forgive me if I don't take the professor's experiment as a grand example of socialist failings. It has so many fundamental flaws (not least when referring to what should ostensibly be a communist system as 'socialist') in its basic understanding of what communism is actually about that bothering to use it to illustrate anything is a waste of time.

Though, to be honest, that nebulous analogy could be easily reversed to explain classical free-market capitalism as well.

A professor teaching a two-term course hires a large lecture hall. He randomly selects four or five students and puts them at the front of the class. He then sits everyone else increasing distances away from him, with the vast majority of the class seated at the very end of the hall. He forbids people to move from their seats.

He then whispers the answers to the first test in a voice just loud enough for the front few students to hear, before handing everyone the test and walking away.

He comes back and finds, somewhat inevitably, that the randomly selected ones in the front who heard what he said did much better than the ones at the back. He then laughs and fails everyone sitting behind the first few students, explaining that if only they worked harder to hear what he had to say they'd have done better.

He then hands the answers for the rest of the term's exams to the front row of students, explaining that they were 'strivers' and 'knowledge seekers', and thus deserved to be rewarded for their efforts, while castigating the ones further back as 'shirkers' and lazy, idle failures too uninterested to dig themselves out of the academic hole they are in. Finally, he implements an examination system that gives the people in the front (excluding the randomly selected 'strivers', who already have the exam answers) easy exams, the people behind them moderately tough exams, and the ones at the very back (Again, the majority) brutally hard exams.

He then lectures for the rest of the term in a whisper just loud enough to be heard by the front few rows.

At the end of the term, he checks the grades of everyone in class after they've gone through his implemented exam system. The ones with high grades are allowed to move to the front for the second term, and the ones with low grades are moved further back. He finds that most of the people with high grades are the people who were in front anyway, and most of the people in the back were the people who were in the back all along. He then explains that capitalism works by concentrating all the wealth and power in the hands of a very small segment of the population while forcing the vast majority of people to work long, hard hours for relatively tiny amounts of money and with little to no prospect of ever moving up because of the manifold inherent disadvantages stacked against them. Those that are in front, stay in front, and those at the back, stay in the back producing profits for the front.

There, capitalism in a nutshell.

And if you think there are inaccuracies in that analogy, then I can only reply that they are no greater than the massive inaccuracies contained within the Texas university analogy.
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This got a standing ovation from me.
 
DubaiSpur said:
Firstly, forgive me if I don't take the professor's experiment as a grand example of socialist failings. It has so many fundamental flaws (not least when referring to what should ostensibly be a communist system as 'socialist') in its basic understanding of what communism is actually about that bothering to use it to illustrate anything is a waste of time.

Though, to be honest, that nebulous analogy could be easily reversed to explain classical free-market capitalism as well.

A professor teaching a two-term course hires a large lecture hall. He randomly selects four or five students and puts them at the front of the class. He then sits everyone else increasing distances away from him, with the vast majority of the class seated at the very end of the hall. He forbids people to move from their seats.

He then whispers the answers to the first test in a voice just loud enough for the front few students to hear, before handing everyone the test and walking away.

He comes back and finds, somewhat inevitably, that the randomly selected ones in the front who heard what he said did much better than the ones at the back. He then laughs and fails everyone sitting behind the first few students, explaining that if only they worked harder to hear what he had to say they'd have done better.

He then hands the answers for the rest of the term's exams to the front row of students, explaining that they were 'strivers' and 'knowledge seekers', and thus deserved to be rewarded for their efforts, while castigating the ones further back as 'shirkers' and lazy, idle failures too uninterested to dig themselves out of the academic hole they are in. Finally, he implements an examination system that gives the people in the front (excluding the randomly selected 'strivers', who already have the exam answers) easy exams, the people behind them moderately tough exams, and the ones at the very back (Again, the majority) brutally hard exams.

He then lectures for the rest of the term in a whisper just loud enough to be heard by the front few rows.

At the end of the term, he checks the grades of everyone in class after they've gone through his implemented exam system. The ones with high grades are allowed to move to the front for the second term, and the ones with low grades are moved further back. He finds that most of the people with high grades are the people who were in front anyway, and most of the people in the back were the people who were in the back all along. He then explains that capitalism works by concentrating all the wealth and power in the hands of a very small segment of the population while forcing the vast majority of people to work long, hard hours for relatively tiny amounts of money and with little to no prospect of ever moving up because of the manifold inherent disadvantages stacked against them. Those that are in front, stay in front, and those at the back, stay in the back producing profits for the front.

There, capitalism in a nutshell.

And if you think there are inaccuracies in that analogy, then I can only reply that they are no greater than the massive inaccuracies contained within the Texas university analogy.
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Its a completely biased analogy of capitalism. It implies that to be successful (which ultimately means wealthy) in a capitalist society you need to given an unfair advantage. That its some kind of boys club. If you look at the people at the very top of the ladder you could argue this is true however, a majority of people aren't and won't be. All I ask for is an environment whereby I can make enough money to ensure I am happy and can achieve my own aspirations. I have achieved this with no assistance and no degree, simply by working my arse off. This is why I would not want to live in a communist society. I'm self employed and the concept of being a cog in a nationwide machine with little chance of bettering myself would be completely soul destroying.

I completely agree with the idea of a Marxist Utopia but humans are inherently greedy and power hungry so its completely infeasible. Humans strive to stand out amongst their peers, money has just become the currency in order to allow them to do that. If it didn't exist it would be something else.
 
Paxtonloudmouth said:
Not really for the vast majority it would improve their standard of living.
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In that case you're stating that the poor want more - no real surprise there.

I consider myself (possibly unjustly) as more intelligent and more hard-working than most. I believe that deserves more than average - I don't think that anyone should be able to tell me to give up my extras in life for some stranger to whom I owe nothing.
 
Steed Train said:
Its a completely biased analogy of capitalism. It implies that to be successful (which ultimately means wealthy) in a capitalist society you need to given an unfair advantage. That its some kind of boys club. If you look at the people at the very top of the ladder you could argue this is true however, a majority of people aren't and won't be. All I ask for is an environment whereby I can make enough money to ensure I am happy and can achieve my own aspirations. I have achieved this with no assistance and no degree, simply by working my arse off. This is why I would not want to live in a communist society. I'm self employed and the concept of being a cog in a nationwide machine with little chance of bettering myself would be completely soul destroying.

I completely agree with the idea of a Marxist Utopia but humans are inherently greedy and power hungry so its completely infeasible. Humans strive to stand out amongst their peers, money has just become the currency in order to allow them to do that. If it didn't exist it would be something else.
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This is the part that always gets me. Who says you can't stand out under communism?

'Perfect' communism is not about making you a featureless machine. That is the exact opposite of what the system is intended to do.

Your life under an 'ideal' communist system, as imagined by Hegel and Marx, would run thusly:

You would be provided all the necessities you needed (food, water, shelter, electricity, etcetera).

You would participate in a direct democracy, where you would decide on every action your community takes.

This would include dividing up what needed to be done, i.e, 'work' as we think of it today. Everyone would be assigned roles they had to do for the benefit of the community, for a certain time period. Growing crops, maintaining infrastructure, repairing things, building things, educating children, looking after the ill and wounded, etcetera, etcetera.

Crucially, though, you would not spend all your time doing these things, because you would only be doing what is necessary, i.e, what has to be done. You would not be producing things in excess to create profits for some factory fat-cat, you would not be working long hours to brighten some accountant's balance sheet, and you would not spend all your days labouring away on things you hate doing because your shareholders demand it.

You would do only what is necessary to ensure society is fully provided for. Beyond that, and this is the seminal point of communism, you are free to do whatever work you feel best suited to doing, work you feel connected to as opposed to dehumanized by. You would be engaging in 'creative labour', where the product of your efforts is something that you own and that you gain satisfaction from.

The whole point of communism is maximising the time available to you to do that, because that is what Marx and Engels believed would truly develop the human mind, and the species as a whole: doing what you felt best suited to doing, something you enjoyed doing. The entirety of human history up to the advent of global communism, in Marx and Engels' eyes, has been one class of people exploiting another in order to grow wealthy on labour that wasn't theirs. Under a communist system, that is gone: you do what you need to do for society, and then you do what you want to do, or are suited to do.

There is absolutely no reason you cannot compete with others in that system. None at all: you are equal in that you all contribute equally to society, doing what is necessary for its preservation, and in that you are all provided for equally. Beyond that, what you do creatively (i.e, your creative labour) can, and was arguably supposed to, define you. You could rise to the top of communist society by earning the acclaim of your fellow men for your creative efforts, much like other men and women are earning their acclaim for theirs.

Sure, there wouldn't be materialism as there is today, and money wouldn't be the way we judged whether a person was worthy of being spoken to or regarded as a success or a failure. But there would still be self-achievement, self-improvement and competition: these things are central to the idea of 'creative labour'.

Sadly, like I said before, such a revolutionary change in the way we think and act cannot be brought about before people genuinely want it. And when you try to force the issue and impress communism on people unprepared for it or unwilling to accept it, you end up with Glorious Beetroot Collectives, widespread poverty and the same oppressors as under capitalism but with a different name, probably with 'Worker' in it.
 
DubaiSpur said:
This is the part that always gets me. Who says you can't stand out under communism?

'Perfect' communism is not about making you a featureless machine. That is the exact opposite of what the system is intended to do.

Your life under an 'ideal' communist system, as imagined by Hegel and Marx, would run thusly:

You would be provided all the necessities you needed (food, water, shelter, electricity, etcetera).

You would participate in a direct democracy, where you would decide on every action your community takes.

This would include dividing up what needed to be done, i.e, 'work' as we think of it today. Everyone would be assigned roles they had to do for the benefit of the community, for a certain time period. Growing crops, maintaining infrastructure, repairing things, building things, educating children, looking after the ill and wounded, etcetera, etcetera.

Crucially, though, you would not spend all your time doing these things, because you would only be doing what is necessary, i.e, what has to be done. You would not be producing things in excess to create profits for some factory fat-cat, you would not be working long hours to brighten some accountant's balance sheet, and you would not spend all your days labouring away on things you hate doing because your shareholders demand it.

You would do only what is necessary to ensure society is fully provided for. Beyond that, and this is the seminal point of communism, you are free to do whatever work you feel best suited to doing, work you feel connected to as opposed to dehumanized by. You would be engaging in 'creative labour', where the product of your efforts is something that you own and that you gain satisfaction from.

The whole point of communism is maximising the time available to you to do that, because that is what Marx and Engels believed would truly develop the human mind, and the species as a whole: doing what you felt best suited to doing, something you enjoyed doing. The entirety of human history up to the advent of global communism, in Marx and Engels' eyes, has been one class of people exploiting another in order to grow wealthy on labour that wasn't theirs. Under a communist system, that is gone: you do what you need to do for society, and then you do what you want to do, or are suited to do.

There is absolutely no reason you cannot compete with others in that system. None at all: you are equal in that you all contribute equally to society, doing what is necessary for its preservation, and in that you are all provided for equally. Beyond that, what you do creatively (i.e, your creative labour) can, and was arguably supposed to, define you. You could rise to the top of communist society by earning the acclaim of your fellow men for your creative efforts, much like other men and women are earning their acclaim for theirs.

Sure, there wouldn't be materialism as there is today, and money wouldn't be the way we judged whether a person was worthy of being spoken to or regarded as a success or a failure. But there would still be self-achievement, self-improvement and competition: these things are central to the idea of 'creative labour'.

Sadly, like I said before, such a revolutionary change in the way we think and act cannot be brought about before people genuinely want it. And when you try to force the issue and impress communism on people unprepared for it or unwilling to accept it, you end up with Glorious Beetroot Collectives, widespread poverty and the same oppressors as under capitalism but with a different name, probably with 'Worker' in it.
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I agree with all of this apart from the naming of Hegel,who was far from a communist. However I am guessing that was a typo as you seem too well informed to make that mistake. Guess you meant Engels.
 
DubaiSpur said:
"Come home with this shield, or on it."

Spartan mothers used to say that to their sons before sending them off to battle. If they came back with the shield, they had fought well and honorably in service to their fellow Spartan warriors (a shield being used to protect more than oneself, as opposed to, say, a helmet). If they came back on it, they had died fighting honorably. If they came back without it, they had fled or displayed cowardice, and thus were no longer important in the eyes of their mothers or in wider Spartan society: indeed, they were a source of enormous shame.

To Spartan society, the concept of family was less important than the concept of society. Plutarch spends an inordinate amount of time labouring that point in Moralia, even though he considered family relations one of the most important tenets of communal life. Contemporary histories of Sparta corroborate this, with the military worth of a child ( one form of determining relations based on societal value) determining whether he was allowed to live or thrown off a mountain for being weak.

I'm not saying that was an ideal society: GHod knows, it wasn't. From a modern perspective, it was probably one of the most horrific ancient societies, with nationwide infanticide, slavery and eugenics seen as being normal and healthy. But what is true is that the Spartan people were societally conditioned to give up many of the things that conservatives today argue form part of our genetic makeup: the concern for our family above all, looking out solely for oneself and ignoring the needs and demands of wider society in the pursuit of your own interests. Through a program of mental, physical and emotional conditioning that started right from childbirth, the Spartans destroyed the notion that somehow we were familial animals, only bound together by faint vestiges of civilization. They showed that it was possible to change the way individuals thought, that it was possible to put society above self-interest.

It can be done. It is false, and perhaps deliberately disingenuous, to suggest that we are somehow permanently hardwired to live as we lived millions of years ago, concerned only with the propagation of our line and the well-being of our immediate relations, and merely paying lip service to all the ideas of civilization in order to put a veneer of 'order' on our primeval selves.
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I'm not sure that I'd base my opinions on 2000 year old anecdotal evidence, but each to their own.

What you've described there is the virtual slavery of an entire population through coercion from a very young age. I'll stick to my critical thinking and forming my own opinions as I assume most people want to. That's why communism can't work, people prefer to be individuals - even if it is as a member of a herd.
 
DubaiSpur said:
Firstly, forgive me if I don't take the professor's experiment as a grand example of socialist failings. It has so many fundamental flaws (not least when referring to what should ostensibly be a communist system as 'socialist') in its basic understanding of what communism is actually about that bothering to use it to illustrate anything is a waste of time.

Though, to be honest, that nebulous analogy could be easily reversed to explain classical free-market capitalism as well.

A professor teaching a two-term course hires a large lecture hall. He randomly selects four or five students and puts them at the front of the class. He then sits everyone else increasing distances away from him, with the vast majority of the class seated at the very end of the hall. He forbids people to move from their seats.

He then whispers the answers to the first test in a voice just loud enough for the front few students to hear, before handing everyone the test and walking away.

He comes back and finds, somewhat inevitably, that the randomly selected ones in the front who heard what he said did much better than the ones at the back. He then laughs and fails everyone sitting behind the first few students, explaining that if only they worked harder to hear what he had to say they'd have done better.

He then hands the answers for the rest of the term's exams to the front row of students, explaining that they were 'strivers' and 'knowledge seekers', and thus deserved to be rewarded for their efforts, while castigating the ones further back as 'shirkers' and lazy, idle failures too uninterested to dig themselves out of the academic hole they are in. Finally, he implements an examination system that gives the people in the front (excluding the randomly selected 'strivers', who already have the exam answers) easy exams, the people behind them moderately tough exams, and the ones at the very back (Again, the majority) brutally hard exams.

He then lectures for the rest of the term in a whisper just loud enough to be heard by the front few rows.

At the end of the term, he checks the grades of everyone in class after they've gone through his implemented exam system. The ones with high grades are allowed to move to the front for the second term, and the ones with low grades are moved further back. He finds that most of the people with high grades are the people who were in front anyway, and most of the people in the back were the people who were in the back all along. He then explains that capitalism works by concentrating all the wealth and power in the hands of a very small segment of the population while forcing the vast majority of people to work long, hard hours for relatively tiny amounts of money and with little to no prospect of ever moving up because of the manifold inherent disadvantages stacked against them. Those that are in front, stay in front, and those at the back, stay in the back producing profits for the front.

There, capitalism in a nutshell.

And if you think there are inaccuracies in that analogy, then I can only reply that they are no greater than the massive inaccuracies contained within the Texas university analogy.
Click to expand...

Now I understand why you don't like capitalism - what you've described is nepotism.

True capitalism is a meritocracy - there are some flaws that in rare circumstances can cause the situation you've described, but on the whole hard work and intelligence can shine through.
 
No,true capitalism is economic anarchy. Meritocracy is far far more unrealistic than Socialism. In an ideal world I also would be in support of a meritocracy. However free market capitalism is far from that.
 
scaramanga said:
I'm not sure that I'd base my opinions on 2000 year old anecdotal evidence, but each to their own.

What you've described there is the virtual slavery of an entire population through coercion from a very young age. I'll stick to my critical thinking and forming my own opinions as I assume most people want to. That's why communism can't work, people prefer to be individuals - even if it is as a member of a herd.
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But you're completely missing the point. I'm not saying that is what communism is, and I am not saying that was a good thing.

I'm saying changing the way people think about society can be done, and has been done. The question is, do you do as the Spartans did, or do you try and change people's value systems instead, to impress upon them that the value of a fellow member of society is equal (not greater) than the value of a family member?

That simple concept (everyone is equal in their contributions to society) somehow corresponds exactly with lobotomies and herd mentalities in froth right wingers' minds, for some reason. It's as if they believe that only by being purely selfish and self-interested can anyone form an independent thought, and the minute someone does something for a stranger (like pushing them out of the way of a train, for instance) that they would also do for a member of their family, they become Commie slaves wielding Kalahsnikovs and coming to spray beetroot juice over our Western way of life.

Come on, scara, I know it's coming. "Communism equals herds and slavery, hurr durr." I'm almost expecting it at this point.

edit: just read that over and it looks more confrontational than I'd like it to be. Apologies. But my points stand nonetheless. :)
 
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Paxtonloudmouth said:
I agree with all of this apart from the naming of Hegel,who was far from a communist. However I am guessing that was a typo as you seem too well informed to make that mistake. Guess you meant Engels.
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I've done it a lot, actually. I confuse the two very easily, what with their names sending me into a linguistic froth at times. :) Forgive me, my theoretical days are far behind me.
 
It is funny that the only Government in this country since the war to have economic growth in every year of its term was the most Socialist. That is a historical fact.
 
scaramanga said:
Now I understand why you don't like capitalism - what you've described is nepotism.

True capitalism is a meritocracy - there are some flaws that in rare circumstances can cause the situation you've described, but on the whole hard work and intelligence can shine through.
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A meritocracy? My alma mater advertised scholarships as a way of getting people to apply for admission (replete with 300 dollar admission fees), but then only gave scholarships to international students because they paid more in fees, thus recouping the financial loss to the university fairly quickly.

Domestic students with far better grades were overlooked because the university needed to turn a profit. Funny how that works.
 
[video]http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2?g=6&c=ufb1[/video]

Remind me again why I am motivated to work hard?
 
DubaiSpur said:
But you're completely missing the point. I'm not saying that is what communism is, and I am not saying that was a good thing.

I'm saying changing the way people think about society can be done, and has been done. The question is, do you do as the Spartans did, or do you try and change people's value systems instead, to impress upon them that the value of a fellow member of society is equal (not greater) than the value of a family member?

That simple concept (everyone is equal in their contributions to society) somehow corresponds exactly with lobotomies and herd mentalities in froth right wingers' minds, for some reason. It's as if they believe that only by being purely selfish and self-interested can anyone form an independent thought, and the minute someone does something for a stranger (like pushing them out of the way of a train, for instance) that they would also do for a member of their family, they become Commie slaves wielding Kalahsnikovs and coming to spray beetroot juice over our Western way of life.

Come on, scara, I know it's coming. "Communism equals herds and slavery, hurr durr." I'm almost expecting it at this point.

edit: just read that over and it looks more confrontational than I'd like it to be. Apologies. But my points stand nonetheless. :)
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This is where I think we'll continue to differ. I don't want to condition anyone into thinking anything - the very idea of doing so disgusts me.

So in that sense, yes, I suspect communism could be made to work but it all sounds a little 1984 for my liking.
 
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