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The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist

The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia—except usually with more murder. So I would say the political problem is very much not solved and post-scarcity Utopianism isn’t going to get us there.

scollet 5y ago
I don't think you're projecting as far as OP. F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism. That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.
- jordwest 5y ago
  Leninism, Marxism was founded at a time when the labor equation was very different. Back then, generally there was a fixed ratio between labor input and productivity output. So communist ideals were about how to centrally distribute that productivity output while centrally controlling the inputs. With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output. We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient. I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Marx was writing precisely at the time that the equation shifted to its modern form. A single spinning jenny operator could do the work of eight or more spinners.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Marx spent the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over how capitalism was increasing the productivity of labour to previously unthinkable levels [1]. He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible. So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio. The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state. In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public. And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx. [1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"
    - KineticLensman 5y ago
      > The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state. Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did. I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe. Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  > Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) _Lenin_ called it "state capitalism." That was the official policy of the USSR under Lenin. State capitalism.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > _Lenin_ called it "state capitalism.” Lenin called a transitional phase that was intended to take 6 months to establish and another 6 months to phase out into socialism “state capitalism” (it may be the case that “war communism" of 1918-1921 was officially recognized as something of an extension of that phase necessitated by emergency), but state capitalism was never officially the long-term policy or the self-description of the state of the economy past that point; the criticism from non-Leninist Marxists is that what the steady state of what the USSR became was state capitalism, not socialism.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      Yes it was supposed to be temporary, but the policy still remained official until after his death. (Did he really say just 6 months?? That doesn't sound right. But anyway it would have only been a prediction -- which failed.) "Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR)
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        The NEP wasn't (in its own theory) state capitalism but a transition from war communism (which I think was, even in its own theory, still state capitalism) but to a mix of “socialized” industry and state-guided private capitalism. (Yes , critics would say that the “socialized” industries were really state capitalist and that the degree of centralized “guidance” made the private sector also state capitalism, but we’re talking about what Lenin and the internal theory of the USSR portrayed it as, where it was a different temporary stepping stone to fully socialized industry.)

scollet 5y ago

I don't think you're projecting as far as OP. F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The totalitarian state that is necessitated by the communist political system always turns out to be as hellish, selfish, and mismanaged as any late capitalist dystopia Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism. That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.

jordwest 5y ago
Leninism, Marxism was founded at a time when the labor equation was very different. Back then, generally there was a fixed ratio between labor input and productivity output. So communist ideals were about how to centrally distribute that productivity output while centrally controlling the inputs. With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output. We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient. I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Marx was writing precisely at the time that the equation shifted to its modern form. A single spinning jenny operator could do the work of eight or more spinners.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Marx spent the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over how capitalism was increasing the productivity of labour to previously unthinkable levels [1]. He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible. So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio. The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state. In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public. And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx. [1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state. Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did. I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe. Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.
DarylZero 5y ago
> Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) _Lenin_ called it "state capitalism." That was the official policy of the USSR under Lenin. State capitalism.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > _Lenin_ called it "state capitalism.” Lenin called a transitional phase that was intended to take 6 months to establish and another 6 months to phase out into socialism “state capitalism” (it may be the case that “war communism" of 1918-1921 was officially recognized as something of an extension of that phase necessitated by emergency), but state capitalism was never officially the long-term policy or the self-description of the state of the economy past that point; the criticism from non-Leninist Marxists is that what the steady state of what the USSR became was state capitalism, not socialism.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Yes it was supposed to be temporary, but the policy still remained official until after his death. (Did he really say just 6 months?? That doesn't sound right. But anyway it would have only been a prediction -- which failed.) "Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Break_(USSR)
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      The NEP wasn't (in its own theory) state capitalism but a transition from war communism (which I think was, even in its own theory, still state capitalism) but to a mix of “socialized” industry and state-guided private capitalism. (Yes , critics would say that the “socialized” industries were really state capitalist and that the degree of centralized “guidance” made the private sector also state capitalism, but we’re talking about what Lenin and the internal theory of the USSR portrayed it as, where it was a different temporary stepping stone to fully socialized industry.)