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And state capitalists will keep defending Vietnam as "communist" because the universities offer courses in "Dialectical Materialism and Ho Chi Minh Thought", I'

by hnbad 3y ago

And state capitalists will keep defending Vietnam as "communist" because the universities offer courses in "Dialectical Materialism and Ho Chi Minh Thought", I'm sure, just as when they denounced LGBT rights protests as an American "color revolution". It's not your DNA anymore, it's The People's DNA now. Once again goes to show that if you try to use a state to build communism all you get is a state, which is all the more likely to slide into authoritarianism because it gets to claim it's all for the common good. If you actually want to build communism, you need to start bottom up with material conditions first. This is why anarchists keep talking about prefiguration.

neontomo 3y ago
I've never been convinced that communism wasn't about power, like with capitalism, it's just different people holding the sticks.
- hnbad 3y ago
  That's why I prefer the label "anarchism" even if the desired end state of anarchism fits Marx's definition of communism as a "state-less, class-less" society. To paraphrase Bakunin: I don't care if the stick I am beaten with is called The People's Stick, I want there to be no stick at all. Vanguardism by trying to utilize the existing systems of oppression to bring about communism fails the instance it succeeds in taking over those systems because the interests of rulers are not those of those ruled over. Aspirationally communist states like the Soviet Union or Mao's China merely succeeded in abolishing the capitalist class by replacing it with the bureaucracy. But under communism there must not only be no capitalist class but also no working class because the perpetuation of a working class means there is still a class system and the oppression that comes with it. Anarchist practice means creating federated, horizontal structures and dismantling oppressive hierarchies (i.e. the systems that enable people to exert power over others). You can still have individual bad actors but the damage a bad actor can do in a horizontal structure is negligible compared to what they can do in a hierarchy, especially one that rewards bad behavior (cf. people complaining that sociopaths make the best business people). So at worst, yes, you will have other people holding the sticks but the sticks will be much smaller and thus easier to overcome if used against you.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Some amount of hierarchy is unfortunately necessary if we want to tackle larger issues that necessarily require coordination (like, say, global warming - you can't mitigate it if any commune can just "opt out" because e.g. they personally aren't affected in a negative way). I think the important thing is to always treat hierarchy as a cost. So whenever things need to be organized, you look at that cost versus the benefits to see whether it is justifiable at all; but even if it is, you still try to minimize the cost to achieve the requisite outcome. Broadly speaking, in the context of governance in general, it means loose confederations with power mostly flowing "bottom up", but with mechanisms in place that still do allow to tackle those aforementioned emergencies like AGW that require top-down enforced coordination.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      I think you mean violence, not hierarchy. Engels made a similar mixup when he wrote a screed against anarchists based on a misunderstanding of "authority" to mean any form of violence. Anarchy describes organization and cooperation within a group. There can be groups that have different interests and those differences in interests can lead to disagreements that can be resolved in different ways. That doesn't change. Even in prehistorical gift economies there is evidence for various forms of diplomacy to arrange agreements with other groups: migration, gifts, demonstrations of power, ceremonial fights or, as a last resort, war. It's worth pointing out that this is no different today. States can make all the laws they want but if they want other states to do what they say, they need to find a different way to do so. And more often than not, this fails unless both sides can find a mutually beneficial agreement.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        I meant both. To get back to my example, groups operating completely independently would not be able to solve AGW. To solve it, you need a single coordinated plan across different groups, and people and organizations who will see it through. At that point, you have a hierarchy. Further, some groups will refuse to participate for selfish reasons, and thus it may be necessary to compel them to participate in said hierarchy. But there are different ways to arrange those things. The problem with most hierarchies today is that they're sold as something innately good, not as necessary evil to solve a particular problem. If you're building a hierarchy with the latter perspective in mind, you add plenty of checks and balances to make sure that it does not entrench and take over other issues.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Correct, and it even seems self-evident from the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" that many communist theorists adopted as descriptive of their theory.
  - the_af 3y ago
    It's worth noting that in communist theory (which you mentioned), the dictatorship of the proletariat is an intermediate step before communism is fully achieved, it's not the end goal. In practice I'm not sure the proletariat ever held this power (as a class; individuals may have).
    - tcmart14 3y ago
      And in communist thoughts, capitalism is sometimes referred to as "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." I've always taken it to mean where power relies and not in the modern sense of what we call a dictatorship.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        It can be interpreted more or less literally, depending. Thing is, while Marx is the originator of that term and concept, the source from which most people are aware of it is actually Lenin/Bolsheviks and their offshoots (Mao etc), and they were very much on the literalist side of that interpretation. But they had to be to do what they wanted - a society run by workers - because they managed to take power in Russia, a country, where 80% of the population were peasants who did not, as a rule, support Bolsheviks (the de facto Russian peasant party was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party). Consequently, when you look at early USSR, it had gems like these in its 1924 Constitution: "ARTICLE 9. The Congress of Soviets of the USSR is composed of representatives of the urban Soviets and of the Soviets of the urban type, on the basis of one deputy per 25,000 electors, and of representatives of the Congresses of Soviets of the rural districts on the basis of one deputy per 125,000 inhabitants." That is, rural (peasant) votes were explicitly diluted ~1:5 wrt urban (worker) votes in the Soviet council system. Needless to say, this has very little to do with democracy, but it is a good example of taking "dictatorship of the proletariat" literally.
- Jiro 3y ago
  "Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it's the other way around."
somenameforme 3y ago
I don't understand how communism can work, even in theory, without authoritarianism. If a state guarantees minimum standards, then many people would be motivated to pursue their own interests. In a communist society, who wants to be a janitor? In a capitalist society that role is filled in a very brutal fashion - clean the toilets, go find another job, or go homeless. That's nothing to be proud of, but if the choice is between that pseudo-freedom and the very real non-freedom of the government dictating you are hereby deemed a toilet cleaner, I'd much rather go for the former. I'd also add that I only mention janitor as something more relatable. There are a tremendous number of less well known jobs where people essentially have to sacrifice their health to provide the niceties we all take for granted. For instance if you've ever been in a town with a paper mill, it smells horrible 24/7 and its effects on everybody's health are even worse. How/why would anybody ever work/live in such places in a communist system, unless forced to?
- ttymck 3y ago
  It sounds like you've described two systems where folks are forced to work at a paper mill.
- NhanH 3y ago
  Communism assumes that no one has to clean the toilet, but the toilet would still be cleaned. It’s the abundance of resources premise. You can’t have communism in a scarcity world. The common example being taught to kids are oxygen: think of how everyone can consume as much as they need, and there are enough for everyone. How the toilet actually get clean is left as the exercise for the reader.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    It's tiring to hear people critique communists using the same tired arguments I hear from Christians critiquing atheism. "If there is no God, why wouldn't you rape and murder everyone" and "If there is no police, why would you clean the toilet" have the same answer. Yes, if you have a toilet and think cleaning toilets is yucky but you value having a clean toilet, you'll have to ask someone to clean it for you and they'll likely not want this to be a one-sided relationship unless you're literally phyiscally or mentally disabled to the point people want to take care of you because you can't do so yourself. That does not require capitalism. Heck, you could even have money without having capitalism. The question is what money can buy. Under feudalism for example - not that feudalism is preferable to capitalism unless you think you'd get to be the king (and arguably not even then) - all the money in the world wouldn't have turned a peasant into a king because the lord would have just had his guards confiscate the money, kill the peasant and flay their corpse as a warning against not knowing your place in the hierarchy. Saying "if I don't pay people to clean the toilet, it'll just be dirty forever" not only betrays your own suspect attitudes to hygiene but also a complete detachment from how 99% of human interactions operate, namely based on a shared interest of not wanting to be taken advantage of and helping when you can. Some people genuinely like cleaning toilets. Some people don't mind cleaning their own toilets. Some people would really rather not have to clean their own toilets and are willing to do other things for other people. Some people are filthy slobs and would rather have a dirty toilet than clean it themselves or help others. And yes, the obvious answer to "what about jobs that will literally kill you" is: then why should anyone want to do those jobs? If the jobs are vital to the survival of the group, those sound like some pretty damn prestiguous jobs that would lead to whoever does it being held in very high regard and treated as a saint. If the jobs are largely useless to the group, they simply won't be done unless we can find a way to do it that won't kill you. The difference is that under exploitative systems we either literally force people to do so at gunpoint or we treat the workers as disposable drones and only compensate them (or invest in their safety and care) as little as we can get away with. But I understand that all of this might sound like fanciful prose if you can only ever envision systems working if they rely on exploiting some 90% of the population even though they're only held together by those 90%'s misplaced compassion.

by hnbad 3y ago

neontomo 3y ago

I've never been convinced that communism wasn't about power, like with capitalism, it's just different people holding the sticks.

hnbad 3y ago
That's why I prefer the label "anarchism" even if the desired end state of anarchism fits Marx's definition of communism as a "state-less, class-less" society. To paraphrase Bakunin: I don't care if the stick I am beaten with is called The People's Stick, I want there to be no stick at all. Vanguardism by trying to utilize the existing systems of oppression to bring about communism fails the instance it succeeds in taking over those systems because the interests of rulers are not those of those ruled over. Aspirationally communist states like the Soviet Union or Mao's China merely succeeded in abolishing the capitalist class by replacing it with the bureaucracy. But under communism there must not only be no capitalist class but also no working class because the perpetuation of a working class means there is still a class system and the oppression that comes with it. Anarchist practice means creating federated, horizontal structures and dismantling oppressive hierarchies (i.e. the systems that enable people to exert power over others). You can still have individual bad actors but the damage a bad actor can do in a horizontal structure is negligible compared to what they can do in a hierarchy, especially one that rewards bad behavior (cf. people complaining that sociopaths make the best business people). So at worst, yes, you will have other people holding the sticks but the sticks will be much smaller and thus easier to overcome if used against you.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Some amount of hierarchy is unfortunately necessary if we want to tackle larger issues that necessarily require coordination (like, say, global warming - you can't mitigate it if any commune can just "opt out" because e.g. they personally aren't affected in a negative way). I think the important thing is to always treat hierarchy as a cost. So whenever things need to be organized, you look at that cost versus the benefits to see whether it is justifiable at all; but even if it is, you still try to minimize the cost to achieve the requisite outcome. Broadly speaking, in the context of governance in general, it means loose confederations with power mostly flowing "bottom up", but with mechanisms in place that still do allow to tackle those aforementioned emergencies like AGW that require top-down enforced coordination.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    I think you mean violence, not hierarchy. Engels made a similar mixup when he wrote a screed against anarchists based on a misunderstanding of "authority" to mean any form of violence. Anarchy describes organization and cooperation within a group. There can be groups that have different interests and those differences in interests can lead to disagreements that can be resolved in different ways. That doesn't change. Even in prehistorical gift economies there is evidence for various forms of diplomacy to arrange agreements with other groups: migration, gifts, demonstrations of power, ceremonial fights or, as a last resort, war. It's worth pointing out that this is no different today. States can make all the laws they want but if they want other states to do what they say, they need to find a different way to do so. And more often than not, this fails unless both sides can find a mutually beneficial agreement.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      I meant both. To get back to my example, groups operating completely independently would not be able to solve AGW. To solve it, you need a single coordinated plan across different groups, and people and organizations who will see it through. At that point, you have a hierarchy. Further, some groups will refuse to participate for selfish reasons, and thus it may be necessary to compel them to participate in said hierarchy. But there are different ways to arrange those things. The problem with most hierarchies today is that they're sold as something innately good, not as necessary evil to solve a particular problem. If you're building a hierarchy with the latter perspective in mind, you add plenty of checks and balances to make sure that it does not entrench and take over other issues.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Correct, and it even seems self-evident from the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" that many communist theorists adopted as descriptive of their theory.
- the_af 3y ago
  It's worth noting that in communist theory (which you mentioned), the dictatorship of the proletariat is an intermediate step before communism is fully achieved, it's not the end goal. In practice I'm not sure the proletariat ever held this power (as a class; individuals may have).
  - tcmart14 3y ago
    And in communist thoughts, capitalism is sometimes referred to as "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." I've always taken it to mean where power relies and not in the modern sense of what we call a dictatorship.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      It can be interpreted more or less literally, depending. Thing is, while Marx is the originator of that term and concept, the source from which most people are aware of it is actually Lenin/Bolsheviks and their offshoots (Mao etc), and they were very much on the literalist side of that interpretation. But they had to be to do what they wanted - a society run by workers - because they managed to take power in Russia, a country, where 80% of the population were peasants who did not, as a rule, support Bolsheviks (the de facto Russian peasant party was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party). Consequently, when you look at early USSR, it had gems like these in its 1924 Constitution: "ARTICLE 9. The Congress of Soviets of the USSR is composed of representatives of the urban Soviets and of the Soviets of the urban type, on the basis of one deputy per 25,000 electors, and of representatives of the Congresses of Soviets of the rural districts on the basis of one deputy per 125,000 inhabitants." That is, rural (peasant) votes were explicitly diluted ~1:5 wrt urban (worker) votes in the Soviet council system. Needless to say, this has very little to do with democracy, but it is a good example of taking "dictatorship of the proletariat" literally.
Jiro 3y ago
"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. But under socialism, it's the other way around."

somenameforme 3y ago

I don't understand how communism can work, even in theory, without authoritarianism. If a state guarantees minimum standards, then many people would be motivated to pursue their own interests. In a communist society, who wants to be a janitor? In a capitalist society that role is filled in a very brutal fashion - clean the toilets, go find another job, or go homeless. That's nothing to be proud of, but if the choice is between that pseudo-freedom and the very real non-freedom of the government dictating you are hereby deemed a toilet cleaner, I'd much rather go for the former. I'd also add that I only mention janitor as something more relatable. There are a tremendous number of less well known jobs where people essentially have to sacrifice their health to provide the niceties we all take for granted. For instance if you've ever been in a town with a paper mill, it smells horrible 24/7 and its effects on everybody's health are even worse. How/why would anybody ever work/live in such places in a communist system, unless forced to?

ttymck 3y ago
It sounds like you've described two systems where folks are forced to work at a paper mill.
NhanH 3y ago
Communism assumes that no one has to clean the toilet, but the toilet would still be cleaned. It’s the abundance of resources premise. You can’t have communism in a scarcity world. The common example being taught to kids are oxygen: think of how everyone can consume as much as they need, and there are enough for everyone. How the toilet actually get clean is left as the exercise for the reader.
- hnbad 3y ago
  It's tiring to hear people critique communists using the same tired arguments I hear from Christians critiquing atheism. "If there is no God, why wouldn't you rape and murder everyone" and "If there is no police, why would you clean the toilet" have the same answer. Yes, if you have a toilet and think cleaning toilets is yucky but you value having a clean toilet, you'll have to ask someone to clean it for you and they'll likely not want this to be a one-sided relationship unless you're literally phyiscally or mentally disabled to the point people want to take care of you because you can't do so yourself. That does not require capitalism. Heck, you could even have money without having capitalism. The question is what money can buy. Under feudalism for example - not that feudalism is preferable to capitalism unless you think you'd get to be the king (and arguably not even then) - all the money in the world wouldn't have turned a peasant into a king because the lord would have just had his guards confiscate the money, kill the peasant and flay their corpse as a warning against not knowing your place in the hierarchy. Saying "if I don't pay people to clean the toilet, it'll just be dirty forever" not only betrays your own suspect attitudes to hygiene but also a complete detachment from how 99% of human interactions operate, namely based on a shared interest of not wanting to be taken advantage of and helping when you can. Some people genuinely like cleaning toilets. Some people don't mind cleaning their own toilets. Some people would really rather not have to clean their own toilets and are willing to do other things for other people. Some people are filthy slobs and would rather have a dirty toilet than clean it themselves or help others. And yes, the obvious answer to "what about jobs that will literally kill you" is: then why should anyone want to do those jobs? If the jobs are vital to the survival of the group, those sound like some pretty damn prestiguous jobs that would lead to whoever does it being held in very high regard and treated as a saint. If the jobs are largely useless to the group, they simply won't be done unless we can find a way to do it that won't kill you. The difference is that under exploitative systems we either literally force people to do so at gunpoint or we treat the workers as disposable drones and only compensate them (or invest in their safety and care) as little as we can get away with. But I understand that all of this might sound like fanciful prose if you can only ever envision systems working if they rely on exploiting some 90% of the population even though they're only held together by those 90%'s misplaced compassion.