Communism

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Hey

I have been reading for a while about Marxism. I have very interested in this area of philosophy and at least on paper it seems like a good idea. However, most people know this idea has never succeeded in practice, some say because people are just too gready etc… I beleive that people are gready because the society they live in is greedy ( i.e Capitalist ) and if society changed would human nature change too, or is human nature fixed. I don’t know.

Hence my question is:

Is Marxism a flawed theory because humans, by nature are greedy and thus cannot be changed by external infulences?

2

The flaw lies in our fear.

People resort to greed out of fear, fear of going without.

We also fear ridicule, some people fear being ridiculed for their naivity.

Fear of being powerless?

I dont know much about marxism but maybe its like telling a joke…its got to be done well otherwise people will wonder wether to laugh.

3

Human nature is ugly because it exists in conflict with both good and bad elements (in the social sense). However, through education, the good can be encouraged and the bad discouraged.

Think of human nature as a piece of wood. In order to be made useful, a level must be applied to remove the bumps and knots, and a press must be used to force it into the shape desired. However, once the wood has assumed that shape, it does not revert back to its previous state. Naturally, some pieces of wood are more suited to carving than others; however, with proper controls in place, they oughn’t ruin anyone’s project.

4

The problem with communist systems so far has been their focus on punishment of greed, forced labor, and a poor system of rewards.

As a person in touch with Eastern European culture I can tell you why communism failed in Russia. It failed because the culture in that part of the world is not very warm, much like the climate. I could write on and on about this, but don’t feel like it.

Anyway, I wish that the French, or some similar culture, had been communist first. If that were the case I believe that the people would have insisted that everyone have a much higher standard of living.

I totally blame eastern Europeans for setting back communism maybe a hundred or more years.

Communism should be about everyone NOT being a slave to production, thus work should only be about producing maybe a mild surplus of what people need to live, and live well.

Meanwhile, achievement should be rewarded through the ancient system of fame. People that do good things for society should be treated like our sports heroes, and so forth.

To date, I can’t think of one communist society that didn’t approach their business in a harsh way. That’s because the poor, or whomever, were angry at the rich and couldn’t transcend that emotion.

The management of the rich has to be done with an even hand. Yes, we’re taking all of your stuff, but we still like you and have good stuff ready for you to.

5

Yes, and the excuse that people are “greedy” is as much bullshit as the argument that capitalism is the only economic system that will work.

The old adages: “what you do not know cannot hurt you,” and, “you won’t know what you are missing if you haven’t ever had it,” are important to consider here. Greed and excessive expectations happen only after one is exposed to a privilege and an unmoderated resource, where one can indulge without consequence. But in the event that they had not known that privilege existed, they would not experience a sense of loss or injustice. It is only after the child knows there is a red-rider BB gun that he can get upset when he doesn’t recieve it as a gift. Similarily, the human race cannot become greedy until it has the opportunity to be conditioned that way through excessive privilege to something that is either unneeded or unmoderated, that which wasn’t previously needed. In that sense, modern living has produced a dependency on a certain level of accomodation that creates a higher degree of consumerism. By default, the human being doesn’t need what he will later be conditioned to believe he needs. This doesn’t mean that human’s aren’t natural consumers, but only that the rate of consumption and the forms of consumption are sometimes nonconservative and become luxuries where they should remain extremely limited in accessibility.

Some say you don’t know what you had until its gone. I say- you won’t know what was gone unless you had it.

Interestingly enough it was Marx, Engels, Feuerbach and the lot, who claimed that human nature was influenced externally and they developed a materialism to dictate the ‘science of politics.’ The opposing parties founded the ideology of democracy and capitalism on egalitarianistic principles which were derived from extra-materialistic altruisms; Cartesian indoctrination was the mindset of eighteenth century business man, for example. The former system, based entirely on materialism, treats man as immanent in his production and physical existence- the latter treats man as transcendent to his material world and places the world at his “use” rather than as his origins. This causes the tendency to divide man from his environment and treat the environment as external. No. Man is his environment…he is not in a Cartesian theatre waiting for the movie to end so he can go home. Furthermore, Marxism recognizes the natural inequality of man’s physical abilities and works to create an economic system that accomodates each strength accordingly. The egalitarianism attends to a metaphysical system of morals, pretending that “rights” and equality are granted and not earned, or rather, not a consequence of the natural hierarchy of order in the animal kingdom. They fail to understand that ethics and morals are only materialistically objective and are achieved through power…they can never be transcendentally supported.

Regards,

Willy Nelson

6

Humanity is an awkward mix of learned behavior (which can be altered and taught) and instinctive impulses, which are in some cases hard to deny, and more or less impervious to alteration.

Are humans naturally greedy, that is, do they have an instinctive motivation for self gain and preservation? Yes.

Does that greed mean that communism is impossible? No.

Humanity is also a herd animal, and subsquently, we seek self preservation through group defence and group improvement. Certain systems, i.e. capitalism, train us to ignore the instinctive herd mentality, whilst focusing only on self preservation. It also indoctrinates us, such as the legend of the American Dream, thus claiming our learned behavior as well.

Communism would, under the right circumstances, teach us to embrace our self preservation/improvement, but that it go through the route of group preservation/improvement. I think that this is a much more natural route, which is why most societies in their early forms espoused some sort of socialist arrangement, i.e. Christian proto-communism in post Roman Europe.

7

Actually communism as defined by marx has
never been tried. We have had leninism and
stalinism, but not marxism. the problem is
with people who think they come first no matter what,
people who put their own money ahead of peoples lives.
I think of it like being children. Children for the most part,
only think of themselves, as you grow to adulthood you begin
to think of others. think of adults, one of the common traits
of adults is they think of others, they put others first.
And think of those people we value the most, Ghandi, MLK,
mother Teresa, pope john paul, they put people first and
we recognize these people as a higher form of people.
Saints as it were. Once we reach up, instead of down, which
is to say, once we begin to value people (reaching up)
instead of reaching down (valuing money or ourselves ahead
of the common good) we can begin to achieve the goal
of improving ourselves as well as our society.
We can take the idea of communism as a society
who is concerned for others. A higher value.

Kropotkin

8

If there is ever to be a successful communist government it has to supply a lot of toys and free time for people. That way they will feel rich, but it will not be at others expense.

9

Communism versus capitalism is a fight that has torn apart many thinkers, including Sartre, Camus, Fitzgerald and some of the most sophisticated and thorough minds of the last century.

I suspect this whole thing is ethics versus economics. To put it sociologically: the moral implication of economic systems. This is an ideological conflict lies at such a complex level so that it isn’t for anybody to figure out on his own, who in the first place, needs to already mastered ethics, economics, sociology, psychology, historian and IT. This is something that needs massive intellectual collabration, immense effort and time. A vast dynamis data base including needs to be set up to as the empiricality for it. This data base involves computerised econometrics module systems, into which real life and all kinds of social variables that can be input and updated. In this scientific trend I trust, in this scientific future alone.

Marxianism is pre-mathematical political-economics, which personally I regard as pretty much an antiquity. These kinds of ideologies that lack desperately in socio-scientificality, have proven to be mainly detrimental towards the welfare of general society.

10

Marxism is as flawed and stupid as capitalism: both are based upon a sick sort of materialism which reduces a man to a simple object, ready to be manipulated by any sort of purposes.

But Marx was undoubtedly a good-hearted man. He did really want the world to be reformed. He did really believe in justice.

11

what i want to know is why it is so hard to simply put arbitrary limits on the profits made by the most succesful corporations, and all subsequent profits would have to be donated to charity. a capitalist would tell you that chopping off bill gates’ profits at the $100million mark will actually discourage future entrepeneurs from even attempting to make money at all, or that once bill hits the limit, he will no longer try to make the world better for a profit, and will simply choose to stop working instead of working purely for charity.

im ok with either of those scenarios, even if i dont even think they are neccesarily true. first of all, if entrepeneurs were only motivated to make $100mil, there will still be pretty much exactly as many entrepeneurs as there are today. second, if a $100 millionaire is so selfish that he will actually retire and sit on the beach for the rest of his life instead of struggle to obtain more money for himself, i dont want that dirt bag capitalistically contributing to the welfare of my people. since he is obviously a selfish douche, the things he contributes arent necessarily going to be good for america instead of for his profits.

i think the only reason why the poor people dont revolt and destroy the rich is because they assume that the rich are somewhat contributing to the welfare of the poor, probably indirectly. if the rich are actively destroying the poor, or creating things like brainwashed materialistic consumerism (which was apparently a decision made sometime in the twenties) simply for the sake of increased profits, and they arent returning the investment made by the consumers through the quality of their products or their charitable use of those profits, fucking murder and rob them. seriously.

also, has communism ever come close to happening? i mean the famous examples are all evil dictators exploiting the poor just like everyone else. castro seems like he was occasionally nice, but horribly crippled by economic sanctions. what about small scale communes? i hear they all fail too, even though there isnt a selfish dictator murdering people left and right.

12

Hi free_thinker. Ultimately one comes to believe either that individuals should have the right to live their lives freely, as they themselves see fit, or live instead tethered to the arbitrary whims of the collective, living their lives for the “common good” (whatever that is subjectively defined as) of the state. In economic terms the former is Capitalism, the latter is Communism.

One makes one’s choice.

13

jerry!!! ill get you this time. ive been taking econ classes

if the poor people, who outnumber the rich by an extremely large margin, are unsatisfied with the way the rich are redistributing their wealth, why should they not revolt, kill the rich and steal their stuff?

because the government will stop them? why should the government stop them? why does the government prevent monopolies from existing?

the government prevents monopolies from existing because they think its not fair for some super rich guy to set prices for necessary goods much higher than they need to be. what is the difference between a monopoly of one company that can set the price wherever it wants, and an oligopoly that sets its prices slightly lower, but still way too high according to the poor?

who decides that monopoly prices are too high? would the same authority say that gas prices today are too high? have the laws preventing monopolies been tethered to banning only monopolies (although their intent is preventing price gouging, not monopolies themselves, right?) by the ambiguity of any law that decides gas prices are currently too high?

the poor decides that prices are almost always too high for them to live the way they want. we should somewhat listen to them, but, for good reasons, we should not do whatever they say.

basically, what im saying is that the poor people should revolt and steal if they arent treated fairly. the government should stop them in most cases because if they didnt, the rich people would be treated unfairly and nobody would want to accumulate wealth in our country. the reason why the poor should be stopped in most cases is because the government thinks that the distribution of wealth should go a certain way. the way that they want wealth to go should be the way that creates the most happiness. why does the government do anything if it isnt purely to create the most happiness? why does anything do anything if not to create the most happiness?

the current state capitalism assumes that utilizing the selfish exploitative methods of the free market is the easiest, simplest way to more happiness. so far, it has proven to be the only one that worked. thats not because its the only possible way to create the most happiness, its because communism and socialism have been hampered by many problems not directly related to the structure of who gets how much money.

unless of course europe’s economic problems are based entirely on the laziness of people who get too much free handouts, in which case id be somewhat wrong. but i dont actually advocate the kind of free handouts that win elections easily, im more interested in some kind of larger scale redirecting of investment effort towards employing poor people and making them happy. the incentives for owners should not be purely profits, it should include govt mandated behaviors that increase happiness in any way. unemployment relief and free health care are only a small part of what can make citizens happy.

heres something that may sound crazy: the government thinks that the wealth should not go only to those warlords who are able to amass an army of poor people because those warlords may not be the best guys to redistribute that wealth. for the same reason that the government prevents the poor majority from rising up and destroying the rich, they should prevent the rich from doing the same against the poor. the difference between the rich today and the warlords who would control the poor in the theoretical anarchic future is only that the warlords got their power by force and the rich got it through providing products that they convinced consumers to buy, which i would often classify as an indirect force potentially as sinister as the warlord’s methods.

both should be limited to using their powers for good only. if forcing capitalist owners to do this causes fewer people to become capitalist owners, GOOD.

if the problem is the allegedly ambiguous definition of good, then thats not really a problem. i think the problem is that money has corrupted all power into not caring about the welfare of the people.

(sorry, i typed that very fast and didnt think much about it)

14

Ah, my old friend FM. I’m glad you’re taking econ classes. I can only hope persuasive writing classes are just around the corner. Or basic English classes at the least.

Tonight I will pour myself a stiff drink and read through the above ramblings. May be a nugget or two of something in there worth dissecting.

Keep swinging, FM. I have always appreciated your tenacity.

15

“Ultimately one comes to believe either that individuals should have the right to live their lives freely, as they themselves see fit”

How many people are doing this in capitalist society?

16

what if they think the life of a billionaire is fit, and theres only one billion dollars in the world? the individual cant be the one who decides because that wont necessarily create the most happiness for all. the one who sees fit has to be some objective, altruistic third party.

why is the word ‘either’ in there if it only says one thing?

17

Strangely you’ve made a good point. Let me clarify by rephrasing:

Ultimately one comes to believe that individuals should have the right to pursue their lives freely, as they themselves see fit, or live instead tethered to the arbitrary whims of the collective, living their lives for the “common good” (whatever that is subjectively defined as) of the state.

Capitalism cannot promise more than freedom to pursue. Good point.

Hope my clarification helps.

18

“Capitalism cannot promise more than freedom to pursue.”

Well some people don’t even have sneakers.

19

Yes, you’re right.

Obviously we ought to take everybody’s freedom away then and subject everybody to whatever Adlerian’s values are.

20

jerry, people VERY often choose to exploit those who are weaker. imagine you are in heaven, before you are born. you have the choice of going to earth or a slightly futuristic commune planet. if you go to earth, you play the lottery and have a one in a million shot at not having a shitty life. commune planet everyone is as happy as the lower middle class, and nobody is capable of imagining how life could be better.

either we force the strong to not exploit the weak, or MOST people in the world will be FORCED to live crappier lives than they have to. no they cannot simply try hard and magically become rich. if people are free, they will exploit the weak. thats bad. it doesnt take any kind of ambiguous, capricious value system to determine that exploiting the weak is bad. its not hard to determine what is exploitation and what is not. stop assuming that it is.