It is your claim, so you need to prove it. We have three things here: equity, stability, and maximizing. I understand what equity is; for example, individuals get the same proportion of created wealth. You need to tell what you mean by stable and how we can assign a parameter to it so we can maximize the parameter by changing social order, and notice that this parameter is maxed when people are treated equally.
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Inequity increases the probability of discontent, which increases the probability for instability for a given society. Maximizing the stability of society requires equity.
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People used to live in unequal conditions for ages; they have been simply convinced or forced, so I think that they have been living in a pretty stable society; otherwise, there was a sort of social movement that naturally led to a society in which people are treated equally a long time ago. I donât think that humans, by nature, have any tendency toward equity. Some people are simply selfish, greedy, cruel, or have any other evil traits. Others are generous, humble, kind, or have any other good traits. So I would say that equity can only be achieved naturally in a population which majority of individuals have good traits.
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You seem to have lost track of the context of our discussion. We were discussing how your list of principles could be logically derived from the contents of my earlier post.
No, I was explaining that equity is not a stable and natural solution of dynamical social system if the majority of the population has evil traits. You were arguing that inequity increases the probability of discontent, and an increase in discontent increases the probability of instability or social change. I argued that social change to equity has never happened in human social systems, so one of these premises or even both is false in the human population. So, letâs look at the first premise: Does inequity increase the probability of discontent? We have to notice that there is always a person who gains more, letâs call the person A, and another person who gains less, letâs call the person B, in an unequal system. A is certainly content if he is a greedy person. B is certainly discontent regardless of whether he is a greedy person or not. So we obviously have a discontent person, but we have to notice that we have a content person as well. So, how does the system evolve, or your second premise? It depends on who has the power. If A has the power, then this situation is the stable solution, so A is going to gain more than B always. I gave the example of two people here, but it wouldnât be difficult to generalize the idea to the population.
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Indeed you put it very succinctyly and I think, having read more posts by @Flying they are a wolf in sheepâs clothing. They came in here offering to âsave us from our ignoranceâ around communism as some authority figure on the subject when their central thesis is the above which is a classic pro-selfishness capitalist theory and just tell us to âdeal with itâ that this is some immutable law of nature with no kind of persuasive argument that it is so, just the usual âitâs naturalâ.
Pro capitalists want to jump to the selfishness law of the jungle but humans are the social creature and we have only survived through cooperation, that is how we made complex societies so I think there is a stronger argument for that. Even in Richard Dawkinâs - The Selfish Gene, which has been much misrepresented as in support of the greed is good capitalist philosophy, he has a chapter called âNice Guys Finish Firstâ where he discuses that while genes may be selfish it is in the interest as a species to cooperate. So maybe everything is self interested in the end but it doesnât amount to screwing over each other like in capitalism. Communism can be self interested if it leads to a better society for everyone.
Just like it is better for everyone not to be killing one another in tribal warfare or other such short sighted accumulative behavior.
Thank you @WeSee for your continued defense against these underhanded attempts at undermining communism.
I would not. You have repeatedly been prompting me to answer in the very long form responses that you seem to enjoy but there is so much in the thread I do not have the inclination to go through with a fine tooth comb and respond to every single point as you keep asking me to do.
I will continue responding to the posts and facets which interest me.
I think all participants in the discussion would find your reflections interesting to hear
As most otherâs responses are of a similar length to mine, I donât think they would want to read a doctoral thesis either, which is what you are asking of me.
@WeSee After I published my formula concerning personal interest in the previous discussion, we ended up having a conversation about egoism and personal interest. I have now published a separate topic about this in the Ethics category (since Political Philosophy did not seem quite appropriate for it).
The topic is called:
âOn Human Egoism and the Regularity of Personal Interestâ
There I examine these concepts in more detail in connection with the formula already mentioned, including with the help of a conditional graph.
I personally invite you â as well as anyone interested â to join the discussion on this eternal and still highly confusing subject.
Look at the period of the collapse of the USSR and the entire socialist bloc. As soon as the communist parties lost power, all of those countries shifted onto capitalist tracks. Who was crushing them by force of arms during that period? No one.
Even Russia â the birthplace of socialism â is not talking seriously about returning to that system. Why?
A failed attempt to build communism by a number of countries in the 20th century is a strong argument against Marxism - Leninism, a valid one. I do not agree with this argument and will try to refute it.
Firstly, the basis of these argument is a certain understanding of progress as a linear process, progress like a plane taking off. But according to dialectics, progress is more like a group of climbers conquering a mountain peak. Much time and energy are spent running back and forth, dragging backpacks to intermediate camps, ans so on; and only a few climbers reach the peak out of a large team, and not always and not immediately.
Technical, cultural, social, economical, moral and other progress went slow through mistakes, overcoming crises, and returning from a dead end. Every science, every technology, the assertion of human rights, establishment of feudalism and capitalism knew a long way of developing with many failures and regression on the way. Many countries did not succeed in building capitalism yet. Actually, the absolute minority managed to establish capitalism which led to welfare of their population, you write about. But, for example, Latin American economies, having freed themselves from colonial dependence in the first decades of the 19th century, with their already dominant capitalist structure, have not been able to approach the level of development of West European countries for more than a hundred years and still remain within economic and political dependence on the United States.
Hegel described progress in the terms of the triad: the grain - the stalk - the ear (the head). The same ear of corn simply crumbles to the ground, that is to say progress goes together with crises and impasse, which are always temporary.
Your reasoning is:
Everything that has been attempted many times and failed, is impossible.
Communism has been attempted many times and failed.
Therefore, communism is impossible.
I try to prove that the first premise is erroneous. Many things both in nature and in social life had been attempted many times, had failed, had been attempted again, and succeeded at last.
Secondly, according to Marx, communism is not an alternative to capitalism, but its logical continuation on the stage of advanced capitalism. Marx and Engels doubted that Russia would be able to carry out a revolution because the capitalism there was not advanced one, proletarian and bourgeoisie were few in number. But you mention countries like Congo, Somalia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Laos⊠I am not sure that they had (advanced) capitalism. Of course, it is an interesting social experiment to step, for example, from feudalism to socialism, it is a challenge, it is maybe even possible, but it is not entirely consistent with Marxism. I think that it should not be a part of the argument against the theory. So, I would narrow down the list of attempts, excluding from it too local and too brief experiments. Then there would be not so many attempts left.
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You obviously have not really read anything I have written in this thread. The Soviet Union was not small-c communist in the first place â it was not a stateless, classless society based on âfrom each according to their ability, to each according to their need.â Rather, it was big-C Communist, i.e. an authoritarian state capitalist system in which the Party apparatchiks took the role taken by the capitalists under private capitalism. But you are clearly oblivious to this important distinction, such that I am not sure if it is worth it to discuss this topic with you.
Impressive rebuttal! Good work. 
How many times in nature did it fail to create us humans? millions, billions, countless? Should it have âgiven upâ after a few tries before humans were created?
Not that we are the âpinnacleâ (but one could objectively make the observation the human mind is the most complex thing to have been conjured up in the soup of life) and evolution is not a linear trajectory up either as most misconstrue it, but rather, simply put, by Richard Dawkins, change over time.
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Thank you 
!
Yes, exactly. How Engels put ut: " Nature is the test of dialectics". Nature proves to us that the laws of dialectics work everywhere. All plants and animals did not appear immediately in their contemporary form in the far past, but underwent a long development, from simple to more complex forms. And in social life it is the same: from simple to more complex towards progress through periods of regress.
Completely agreed on the example of the pendulum and on the synthesis. I understand sublation in the same way.
But what concerns the triad of properties, I really ascribe it to Marx or at least to the founders of Marxism and I mean it literally.
Marx does not write the triad explicitly anywhere, but it emerges from his statements about communism. I think there is no doubt that Marx and Engels understood communism as a domination of common or collective or public property. Further, Marxism interprets communism as a dialectical return to a primitive state, when common ownership of the means of production prevailed. In âOrigins of the Family, Private Property and the Stateâ: âIt will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gents.â
So, apparently a primitive state was taken as the thesis. The second formation or the era of human prehistory was taken as the antithesis. Communism was regarded as the synthesis. The we get the triad: common property (during the first or archaic formation) - private property - common property (during the third formation).
This is how I understand the reasoning of Marxists. Are there other interpretations?
This post will be, on the one hand, a reply to your comment, and on the other hand, about a more important aspect of our discussion. So I apologize for its length.
FIRST.
After your suggestion to google the subject of egoism â for which I thanked you â I once again read a number of materials on this topic. And indeed, as you said, there are many different definitions of egoism, many of its forms, and also discussions about the influence of the surrounding environment on its manifestations.
There are also observations such as this:
âViews about the egoistic nature of man were already known in ancient philosophy (Democritus, Epicurus) and were further developed in the ethical doctrines of Enlightenment thinkers (HelvĂ©tius, Hobbes, Mandeville, Spinoza, Holbach, and others). They believed that human beings are guided in their actions primarily by their own interests.â
However, these thinkers â and many after them â also wrote that the manifestations of egoism are, and should be, limited by the surrounding social environment, just as in the quotation you provided:
âthe surrounding environment limits this manifestation almost completely.â
The only thing I personally disagree with in your quotation is the phrase âalmost completely.â I would rather say: âto one degree or another.â
As you further write:
âIn an environment of absolute safety and high social cohesion, egoism becomes maladaptive.â
I almost agree with this â specifically regarding such an environment. In my opinion, such environments may exist in certain special and limited communities: for example, kibbutzim, religious communes, monasteries, or early Christian communities.
But you will not find an entire state â or even an ordinary city or village â built on such principles. Such a society could theoretically resemble the communist state envisioned by Marx, but we have not yet seen such an example.
Moreover, not even the most developed capitalist countries, with their enormous productive capacities and abundance of consumer goods â enough, theoretically, for âeach according to his needs,â as Marxist communism demands â have managed to achieve this. So what can be said about socialist economies with their chronic shortages of one thing or another?
However, everything above is mostly a reaction to your post.
SECOND.
The main issue, however, lies elsewhere.
In my opinion, the central misunderstanding between us is that you â like many others â interpret the phrase âPERSONAL INTERESTâ in my formula exclusively as egoism.
But many sources also speak about such a concept as âhealthy egoism.â
In the Ethics section of our forum, in the topic âOn Human Egoism and the Regularity of Personal Interest,â I present my own analysis of the concepts of egoism and altruism and illustrate their relationship through a conditional graph.
For the sake of clarity, I divided egoism there into two conditional forms, which I called âaggressive egoismâ and âreasonable egoism.â
To better understand what I mean, I would ask you to take a look at that topic. There you will see that aggressive egoism occupies a much smaller place in the graph than reasonable egoism. However, together they still outweigh altruism.
And this is precisely what my formula about personal interest is intended to express.
After that, I think the discussion will most likely shift toward the question of whether the proportions shown there correspond to reality.
Personally, I think it would be interesting to hear your opinion (and perhaps the opinions of other users) regarding your own view of these proportion
Having re-read my comments, I realized that they were rather chaotic. Somehow I jumped to examples too quickly instead of saying more explicitly what I wanted to illustrate by these examples.
The question was âare most of the common negatives railed at communism just capitalist propaganda?â. In my opinion yes, they are. And my first argument is the (mis)understanding of communism by anti-Marxist philosophers and thinkers. Communism was never built yet, and Marx left very vague ideas about it. Then what exactly are they railing at? As I see it, they often misinterpret the term of communism.
This was actually my argument. There is a set of reasons to support it. Some of these reasons came from me, and others were given by other forum participants. These reasons are:
- Tabemann pointed out that there is a big difference between Communism and communism. Which one is actually criticized? Communism as a proletarian ideology having been progressive in the 19th and 20 th centuries, is limited to a certain historical period. There is no need to criticize it because it cannot be repeated in the same form during another historical period, at least because there is no working class anymore for which Marxist theory was developed. Communism with a low c is still a theoretical construction and it should be considered accordingly.
- The concept of communism was changed by Marx himself, then it was developed and changed by Engels and then by later marxists. Whose communism is criticized?
- Marx left a brief explanation about economic content of communism. He distinguished six types of production modes: primitive, asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist and socialist/communist modes of production. All the modes of production are defined by the type of ownership of the means of production. And only speaking about communism, Marx suddenly jumps to the principle of distribution, to the âfrom each according toâŠ, to each according toâŠâ. The form of ownership of the means of production, the most important component of his theory, remained essentially the same as in socialism. The conclusion is that the theory needs to be refined.
- In the text of Marx there are many fragments, which are not unambiguous. I gave an example of such fragment. I can add that there are other difficult terms, which are often got confused, like Latin words âcommunisâ and âsocialisâ or German words âAufhebungâ and âVernichtungâ. All this shows that according to Marx, communism is not that simple like a society without classes.
Child labor stunts a childâs emotional and intellectual development. They were employed because they were cheap labor, and their small size enabled them to do some things a larger adult could not. Marx was, of course, against child labor, but factory work also stunted an adultâs emotional and intellectual development and besides that, wore them down to an early death. (Agriculture might employ children as well, often the children of farmers. âHelping outâ is one thing â working beside an adult all week (like an adult) is something else altogether.)
Whether laboring is a âfine way to spend oneâs lifeâ or not depends on what the labor is. To paraphrase a joke by satirist Tom Lehrer, âLabor is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.â I havenât worked in a factory; I havenât spent a lifetime hoeing row crops. I have worked in a number of jobs which were barren, boring, dull, and poorly paid. I also worked in some good jobs which were interesting, satisfying, and adequately paid. How much one is âpitted against laborâ depends on what kind of labor is under consideration. In addition, people are not hired for their personal growth. They are hired to make money for the company.
Another angle on labor is the expectation of the worker. The more one is educated, the fewer hardships one has experienced, the higher oneâs expectations are likely to be. There is an unfortunate mismatch for many graduates between what they hoped for in college and what they experience on the job. (Maybe this is more of a marketing problem than anything else.)
As a very naive and callow fellow (a long time ago), I began work life with an assortment of delusions about what work was about and what I was worth. Brick walls awaited my collisions with reality.
I suggest this is a self-care issue.
I have been through a ringer in my life, and in starting my work life I was essentially destitute and alone. But i read. I think. I create. I did not allow those circumstnaces to colour my own behaviours. Thus, my work was never demeaning or mind-numbing, despite it being objectively dull, boring and repetitive for years. I made enough money to move to a slightly-better, but worse-paid job to allow me to get educated. I am now educated. Choosing to remain in a factory is, in fact, a choice. I am not saying all have it open to them to simply walk out and do something else - but labour is a choice. If you arenât willing to learn to do other things, labour will be where you land. I see nothing wrong with this.
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with your choice to remain in factory work. I admire your approach. My father spent 40 years working at a small town post office â 1930s to 1970s. It was a combination of physical work (the P.O. handled more freight back then) and mental work â memorizing railroad schedules (for mail routing), sorting mail, accounting, and dealing with the public. He was grateful for the job, did it well, and didnât complain.
Maybe one can look at labor as a choice â it seems more like an obligation imposed by nature. Birds, bees, beavers, and our esteemed selves all must work in order to feed, shelter, and preserve our existences. But what we labor at usually involves a series of choices.
As a mediocre high school student I was hoping to get a low level clerical job. Fortunately, a teacher intervened in my case and connect me with a state program for visually handicapped/blind people, which very poor vision qualified me for. They offered to pay for college, so I ended up going to a state college. Four years in college (and then a graduate degree) raised my expectations above my performance capacity.
The degree, more than skills, enabled me to do work that was far more interesting than being a clerk typist, though in several pinches I did do temp clerical jobs.
I would have been a happier person and a better employee in all of my social service and education jobs IF I had had acceptance of the necessity of labor, and the terms that are normally involved in the work place. However, resentment and dissatisfaction suited my leftist politics. (That the two were a good match didnât occur to me at the time.)
So here I am, years past retirement, finally in possession of a lot more insight into the world than I had in my âsalad daysâ. I am still getting educated through extensive reading (much more history than philosophy, though). I still count myself as a socialist, of some sort, and still think capitalism is bad. But at 80, I wonât have to worry about it too much longer.
I wanted to avoid this. Philosophers tend to be extremely skeptical of essentialist claims (despite them being probably hte best-attested aspects of our biological world, in almost every case).