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So informing was a useful tool to knock down your potential rivals or those whose faces did not fit. I despair at Human Nature sometimes...

by SeanDav 11y ago

pjc50 11y ago
This is the real limitation of Communism. In attempting to eliminate all forms of socio-economic status discrimination, it eliminated all but one: Party status. In a one-party state your position in the hierarchy forms a total ordering. The only way to get ahead is through the party. This is far more brutal than the capitalist "rat race", where there are lots of different company fiefdoms (each of which is internally a command economy, of course) and you can just quit and try to climb the ladder somewhere else. In a Communist rat-race, it may be necessary to denounce your enemies to the extent of getting them killed, in order to advance your career. Note that an environment with no "Exit" and no "Voice" (in the exit/voice/loyalty model) results in lots of "Loyalty" ritual. This is also very conducive to demonstrating your loyalty by condemning other people's lack of loyalty.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Perhaps you mean Marxism–Leninism (which ought to be called Stalinism really). While the Eastern Bloc and friends perhaps aspired to Communism, they certainly weren't there.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I don't accept the "it wasn't real Communism" argument, because real Communism has never been produced at a national scale despite a couple dozen attempts. We must conclude from the evidence that, yes, that is what real Communism is and produces, with real humans, which is the only kind of human that matters. There is at the moment no reason to believe that the next attempt to produce "real Communism" will produce anything different than what has already been produced. I don't see great differences in practice between the USSR and their eastern European wards. Given how extraordinarily dangerous that all attempts to produce Communism to date have been to all involved, even the Communists(! you remember "Stalin" and the other big names, you forget how many of their own he purged to get there), the rational answer is to stop trying. Communism is a great deal more likely to kill you than save you... and by you, I even mean its advocates in particular, which are really prone to getting purged, and in those cases where they don't get purged, only at the cost of continuously looking over their shoulders and living in a high-grade police state. Advocating Communism in practice comes perilously close to advocating for a government that will kill you, personally, not "generic you".
    - rdancer 11y ago
      No. It was on the trajectory towards communism, but didn't achieve it. For starters, the economy used money. If you want to see sub-state communism, look at kibbutzim. You will have plenty material for criticism there.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      "All attempts to achieve Communism?" There has been one famous example, the USSR and its friends. It's arguable as to whether communism was even really the goal (Soviet politicians famously promised constantly "communism in 10 years" and everyone knew that was a lie). Certainly what they had was not communism, because communism is stateless, classless and, as my fellow commenter points out, lacks money.
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      Do you accept "it wasn't real free market" argument when free market policies and deregulation fail or lead to an increase of suffering, poverty and inequality?
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Marxism-Leninism is fine. Lenin decided to skip industrialization and went for socialism in one country (though he did try exporting "class consciousness" via war with Poland), as well as initiating the Red Terror. Stalin refined what Lenin had began. Considering that communism requires the simultaneous abolition of the state, money/credit in favor of pure production-for-use and all class distinctions, it is dubious whether this can even be done at all, and certainly most countries are in no position to come close.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      Communism requires no such thing. Marx and Engels and every other serious communist thinker understood that it had to be a gradual process requiring tremendous amounts of state coercion and oppression. Ctrl-F for my other comments on this thread to see an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto. Don't underestimate your enemy or they will win.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    I just saw a great interview of Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton history professor. He's spent many years digging through Soviet archives and other primary sources and just published the first book of a two volume series about Stalin. One of the things that he found was that these people were actually Communists. It's easy and tempting for us to dismiss the Soviet Union as megalomaniacs that used Communist rhetoric for their own ends, but that's not the truth. These people were true believers and they did the things they did in order to bring Communism to fruition. It's a dangerous ideology fueled by envy and contempt. The Cold War was not just two great powers contending for influence, it was an all out battle between two fundamentally opposed visions for humanity. One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself. Edit: Link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Of course they believed it, but nonetheless they were not actually heading towards it. How do you transition from a police state with a strong social hierarchy and monetary economic system to a stateless society with no classes or money overnight?
      - marcoperaza 11y ago
        They were doing exactly what Marx and Engels called for. Violent coercion and oppression is the only way to crush human individuality. Verbatim from The Communist Manifesto: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. EDITORIAL: I presume rebels means anyone who isn't a communist 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    While I know there's a big problem in American discourse with overlabelling everything from single-payer healthcare to duck hunting permits as "communism", I think if you can't call Marxism-Leninism or Bolshevism "Communism" then we're deep into no-true-Scotsman territory. The inherent problem with framing everything in terms of class struggle is there's no room for human rights, which leaves the individual vulnerable to being crushed by the system. The few remaining people on the left who really do derive ideologically from Marxism-Leninism really need to notice this and advance their thinking a bit.
- klibertp 11y ago
  > in order to advance your career Yeah, but "advancing one's career" is something that you didn't have to do at all in eastern bloc countries. Yes, if you wanted to get out of the country, or get rich, or own a car, or own a TV you really had to have friends in the right places. But an overwhelming majority of people didn't even know they should want things like this. Instead, they were happy to be alive and to have shelter and food, even if they had to wait in queues for hours to get that food. Personally, I'm not old enough to remember much, but I do talk with older people - of the age of my parents and grandparents - and many of them have nothing but praise for the communist period. For example, I'm being told that year after year all the school children were able to go on summer vacation free of charge. They say all the textbooks, even at the university level, were either completely free or cost less than a pack of matches. Literacy and higher-education rates skyrocketed. Some remember even earlier times, when there was no electricity in most villages and they feel grateful for all the infrastructure work that was done then. The more I hear and know about the era, the less I understand how it was really like. It seems so alien, so impossible, and it did fail in the end, but it somehow worked for nearly 50 years before that! How was that possible?

So informing was a useful tool to knock down your potential rivals or those whose faces did not fit. I despair at Human Nature sometimes...

by SeanDav 11y ago

So informing was a useful tool to knock down your potential rivals or those whose faces did not fit. I despair at Human Nature sometimes...

pjc50 11y ago

This is the real limitation of Communism. In attempting to eliminate all forms of socio-economic status discrimination, it eliminated all but one: Party status. In a one-party state your position in the hierarchy forms a total ordering. The only way to get ahead is through the party. This is far more brutal than the capitalist "rat race", where there are lots of different company fiefdoms (each of which is internally a command economy, of course) and you can just quit and try to climb the ladder somewhere else. In a Communist rat-race, it may be necessary to denounce your enemies to the extent of getting them killed, in order to advance your career. Note that an environment with no "Exit" and no "Voice" (in the exit/voice/loyalty model) results in lots of "Loyalty" ritual. This is also very conducive to demonstrating your loyalty by condemning other people's lack of loyalty.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Perhaps you mean Marxism–Leninism (which ought to be called Stalinism really). While the Eastern Bloc and friends perhaps aspired to Communism, they certainly weren't there.
- jerf 11y ago
  I don't accept the "it wasn't real Communism" argument, because real Communism has never been produced at a national scale despite a couple dozen attempts. We must conclude from the evidence that, yes, that is what real Communism is and produces, with real humans, which is the only kind of human that matters. There is at the moment no reason to believe that the next attempt to produce "real Communism" will produce anything different than what has already been produced. I don't see great differences in practice between the USSR and their eastern European wards. Given how extraordinarily dangerous that all attempts to produce Communism to date have been to all involved, even the Communists(! you remember "Stalin" and the other big names, you forget how many of their own he purged to get there), the rational answer is to stop trying. Communism is a great deal more likely to kill you than save you... and by you, I even mean its advocates in particular, which are really prone to getting purged, and in those cases where they don't get purged, only at the cost of continuously looking over their shoulders and living in a high-grade police state. Advocating Communism in practice comes perilously close to advocating for a government that will kill you, personally, not "generic you".
  - rdancer 11y ago
    No. It was on the trajectory towards communism, but didn't achieve it. For starters, the economy used money. If you want to see sub-state communism, look at kibbutzim. You will have plenty material for criticism there.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    "All attempts to achieve Communism?" There has been one famous example, the USSR and its friends. It's arguable as to whether communism was even really the goal (Soviet politicians famously promised constantly "communism in 10 years" and everyone knew that was a lie). Certainly what they had was not communism, because communism is stateless, classless and, as my fellow commenter points out, lacks money.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Do you accept "it wasn't real free market" argument when free market policies and deregulation fail or lead to an increase of suffering, poverty and inequality?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Marxism-Leninism is fine. Lenin decided to skip industrialization and went for socialism in one country (though he did try exporting "class consciousness" via war with Poland), as well as initiating the Red Terror. Stalin refined what Lenin had began. Considering that communism requires the simultaneous abolition of the state, money/credit in favor of pure production-for-use and all class distinctions, it is dubious whether this can even be done at all, and certainly most countries are in no position to come close.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Communism requires no such thing. Marx and Engels and every other serious communist thinker understood that it had to be a gradual process requiring tremendous amounts of state coercion and oppression. Ctrl-F for my other comments on this thread to see an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto. Don't underestimate your enemy or they will win.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  I just saw a great interview of Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton history professor. He's spent many years digging through Soviet archives and other primary sources and just published the first book of a two volume series about Stalin. One of the things that he found was that these people were actually Communists. It's easy and tempting for us to dismiss the Soviet Union as megalomaniacs that used Communist rhetoric for their own ends, but that's not the truth. These people were true believers and they did the things they did in order to bring Communism to fruition. It's a dangerous ideology fueled by envy and contempt. The Cold War was not just two great powers contending for influence, it was an all out battle between two fundamentally opposed visions for humanity. One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself. Edit: Link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Of course they believed it, but nonetheless they were not actually heading towards it. How do you transition from a police state with a strong social hierarchy and monetary economic system to a stateless society with no classes or money overnight?
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      They were doing exactly what Marx and Engels called for. Violent coercion and oppression is the only way to crush human individuality. Verbatim from The Communist Manifesto: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. EDITORIAL: I presume rebels means anyone who isn't a communist 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
- pjc50 11y ago
  While I know there's a big problem in American discourse with overlabelling everything from single-payer healthcare to duck hunting permits as "communism", I think if you can't call Marxism-Leninism or Bolshevism "Communism" then we're deep into no-true-Scotsman territory. The inherent problem with framing everything in terms of class struggle is there's no room for human rights, which leaves the individual vulnerable to being crushed by the system. The few remaining people on the left who really do derive ideologically from Marxism-Leninism really need to notice this and advance their thinking a bit.
klibertp 11y ago
> in order to advance your career Yeah, but "advancing one's career" is something that you didn't have to do at all in eastern bloc countries. Yes, if you wanted to get out of the country, or get rich, or own a car, or own a TV you really had to have friends in the right places. But an overwhelming majority of people didn't even know they should want things like this. Instead, they were happy to be alive and to have shelter and food, even if they had to wait in queues for hours to get that food. Personally, I'm not old enough to remember much, but I do talk with older people - of the age of my parents and grandparents - and many of them have nothing but praise for the communist period. For example, I'm being told that year after year all the school children were able to go on summer vacation free of charge. They say all the textbooks, even at the university level, were either completely free or cost less than a pack of matches. Literacy and higher-education rates skyrocketed. Some remember even earlier times, when there was no electricity in most villages and they feel grateful for all the infrastructure work that was done then. The more I hear and know about the era, the less I understand how it was really like. It seems so alien, so impossible, and it did fail in the end, but it somehow worked for nearly 50 years before that! How was that possible?