Are most/all of the common negatives railed at communism just capitalist propaganda?

Political Philosophy
303

Would you say more about why you wanted “to avoid this”. It isn’t a new idea, after all. “You will earn bread by the sweat of your brow” Genesis 3:19. We may not like it but… that’s the way it is–for most people. Don’t know about Elon Musk.

Seems like a problem that philosophers are skeptical of essentialist claims which you say are “probably the best attested aspects of our biological world”?

I’m an essentialist to some extent (I haven’t worked out how far). For instance, there is something essentially different about maleness and femaleness. Women driving tractors and men raising children doesn’t invalidate the rule. Gay is essentially different than straight. Etc.

304

I believe i did in the comment you’ve quoted. Thus:

They(the claims) aren’t interesting. They are brute, full explanations of otherwise rich, discussable aspects of human nature. If something is a fundamental, biological function, we need say no more about it - we can just pass it over to the biologists to describe.

I agree with your comments on essentialism. It seems one of the least-ignorable aspects of the world. Most things are as they are. Nothing to discuss.

305

In North Korea, the population’s primary source of food and necessities is the jangmadang: grassroots black markets that emerged during the 1990s in response to a breakdown of the state redistribution system.

It’s like a miniature of what happened at the end of the Bronze Age when state “temple economies” failed due to widespread war. People turned to free markets out of necessity.

306

Although I myself am not a communist, I do believe that under any other system not everyone is equal. This is because in any other system there is unequal suffering (meaning that some sector of society bears the most suffering so that other sectors can prosper) while in communism the goal is to win and progress without anyone suffering more than anyone else.

I do believe that yes, most of the common negatives railed at communism are just capitalist’s coping mechanism for denying that a communist society would be best in terms of supporting total equality among society, and that they express this coping mechanism through propaganda, however what else are they supposed to do?

Communism, inherently, is utopian as it puts its people in positions of total equality, and I, while I do believe total equality is good and that governments should strive towards it, don’t think that it should come before the advancement of the human race as a whole. Under a communist society progression is inherently limited because of the lack of unequal suffering (losing) that would be contributing towards a greater goal (win). I see it as societies on the more capitalistic side will progress faster than those on the communistic side at the sacrifice of unequal human suffering.

In addressing historical objections that describe situations in which societies striving to be communist have failed, I would say that none of those societies were truly communist but simply attempts at attaining communism, one could argue that communism, even existing as an ideal, is responsible for societies attempting to achieve it, however, is Christianity responsible for the crusades? I personally don’t think so, I think humans are fallible. The communist utopia and the route to the utopia are two different things that can be recognized separately, I can morally justify the ideals of communism without morally justifying the means in which anyone in the past has used to attain a communist society.

So in all, as someone who does not identify as a communist, I believe that most of the negatives brought up around communism confuse communism as it stands, separate of human fallibility, with historical attempts at achieving communism.

307

Can you say more about what leads you to believe the following two statements:

“Under a communist society progression is inherently limited because of the lack of unequal suffering (losing) that would be contributing towards a greater goal (win).”
“I see it as societies on the more capitalistic side will progress faster than those on the communistic side at the sacrifice of unequal human suffering.”

Setting aside the propaganda, there’s no reason to believe either is true. In fact, if anything society progression under capitalism is inherently limited and progress would be faster under communism.

308

Now that you point it out, the existence of a underclass inherently means that progression is limited in capitalism. Can’t believe how I did not realize this earlier. However for the second point: capitalistic societies will still progress faster because they are exploitative of the underclass and if they are more exploitative they will progress faster. Thanks for the insight this was my first post and I’m so happy someone responded!

309

I’ve been hearing anti-communist propaganda, beginning as a side dish with my mother’s milk 80 years ago. The 1917 Revolution scared the bejesus out of the capitalists; Das Capital and the Communist Manifesto were just books–not to be confused with an actual take over. The first big reaction was during the Red Scare in 1919-20, a violent anti-labor, anti-worker, anti-black attack. In various forms the anti-commie beat has continued since.

Capitalism exploits the working class, which composes about 90% of any capitalist economy. The vast extent of exploitation is a measure of their effective control. Just curious: who are you counting as the “underclass”? Your typical working class person, exploited though he/she may be, isn’t “a lumpen proletarian” yet. We certainly have an immiserated underclass. They live in various degrees of poverty (abject to sort of genteel); they own nothing; they are often in debt (credit card, car loan); they are, at best, dependent on the state for some services, like medical care; they may not have that either. They usually do not have much education – certainly not college, maybe not even high school. College graduates with student loans and few prospects for decent paying jobs are not in the underclass, unhappy as they may be. If they are very unlucky, they could end up there.

China is some weird sort of communist country–a blend of authoritarian rule, market-capitalism, and very top-down social organization. It is decidedly “group” oriented, as opposed to individualist. They are as good at exploitation as anyone might wish, Whatever it is, they have made huge economic and social progress.

All that said, I think socialism (not “communism” as demonstrated in the USSR or the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, et al) is preferable to capitalism, EVEN IF its progress is slower.

310

I agree, with the fact that socialism is preferable over capitalism and I myself identify as a socialist. As for the underclass definition I just mean the demographic of society that is least fortunate in however the society defines fortune. Not necessarily underclass as I now know how it is defined. I meant working class not underclass. Sorry very new to this.

311

This ended up being longer than I intended, but we don’t talk much about the reality of class.

One way of differentiating between the working class (again, the 90% of the working population who depend on an earned wage to exist) and the underclass is this: The working class is exploited. The underclass has been discarded.

Conditions vary greatly for the working class – ranging from well-paid technical, trades, and various other types of skilled jobs on down to unskilled workers who make less than a “living wage”. For the last 50 years (starting around 1973) inflation, slow wage growth, off-shoring of jobs, and so on have made it more difficult for the working class. In the post WWII boom, 1 working adult was sufficient to support a family (say into the early 1960s). Then a second part or full time second adult was needed to earn what 1 worker previously could. A typical family is likely to have both parents working full time, and the older teenage children working some sort of part-time work.

Americans have tended to expect upward mobility, but in the last 3 decades, exceeding the income and social rank of one’s parents has become less likely. So, to make a long story short, it’s harder to get ahead.

Some people experience downward mobility – sometimes rapidly. Single parents, for instance, often lose economic standing, becoming poorer over time. It isn’t that single parents are irresponsible; it is that taking care of children is both expensive and requires unpaid time at home.

Millions of working class people are at risk of poverty; it only needs one major financial disaster (accident, medical, job loss, etc.) to drop out of “making ends meet” into “broke and in debt with no income”. If a family cannot get back on their financial feet fairly quickly, they may end up in the underclass.

Put an infant into a barely functional home; “educate” him at a barely functional school; have him live in a barely functional community, and that child will not find much success in life, regardless of how intelligent he may be, how good a person he would like to be. He’s screwed from the get go. He will almost certainly be a member of the underclass.

If only 10% of Americans, just to pick a low number, are members of the underclass., that’s 30 million people. Are they in the underclass because they were irresponsible, criminal, addicted, stupid, alcoholic, lazy…? Some, sure. But most people end up at the bottom because society doesn’t need their productive power. The official unemployment rate may be 3%. 4%, or whatever. But only people who show up at an office to claim benefits are officially unemployed. If you haven’t worked at all in the past, haven’t worked for a couple of years or more, earn money by working “under the table”, beg for money, or whatever, you are not unemployed – you just disappear from the statistics. How many people are in that boat? In better times, a rule of thumb was that the real number of jobless was about double the official rate. In bad times, it’s worse.

I don’t want to suggest that the underclass is by definition just a bunch of shiftless lazy parasites. Living in poverty actually requires a lot of sustained effort to keep body and soul together. It takes a kind of discipline to maintain the effort in the face of contempt, humiliation, and a lot of inconvenience. It’s a struggle.

312

Can you explain what leads you to believe the following statement is true:

“…capitalistic societies will still progress faster because they are exploitative of the underclass and if they are more exploitative they will progress faster.”

Once again setting aside the propaganda, there’s no reason to believe this true. In fact, if anything society progression would be faster under communism.

313

I believe that capitalistic societies will still progress faster than communistic societies because of how the work towards progression is distributed among members of that society. In a capitalistic society, because a portion of the population is taking the brunt for the rest of the population, it allows the rest of the population to be able to think, allowing for more intellectualism within society as opposed to a society where everyone gets equal thinking time. What I am trying to say is that, distinct of human fallibility if we had a petri dish of communists and a petri dish of capitalists, the communists would all have equal opportunities to seek intellectualism, while in capitalism the “best fit” would have greater amounts of time to seek intellectualism than those more unfit. I am 100% open to having my mind changed on this, I just don’t see how in a situation where 2 societies whose populations are diverse (in the manner of ability to do certain tasks needed in order to achieve the common goal), whose populations are trying to progress towards a common goal, and whose populations are infallible exist, how it could be possible for the communists to be able to progress faster when not everyone can carry the same amount of weight, and not everyone uses their free time effectively enough to progress society further forward. I am trying to phrase this clearer, people must uphold society, they uphold society by working to sustain the community they live in, this would be like making sure necessities are covered like food, water and shelter. Because upholding society is different than progressing it, some people will naturally be better at progressing it and worse at upholding it, while others would be vice versa. So separate of human infallibility, where everyone is still trying their very best to contribute to society, some will naturally be better at progressing society rather than upholding it, illogical to restrict the opportunity to progress society by giving everyone equal opportunity to try and progress society. I think it would make more sense if those who can progress society at a more effective rate would take more time to do that while someone else makes up the time lost sustaining society.

Okay so, separate of human fallibility, societies operating under a capitalistic system would progress faster than those operating under a communistic system, as people are different in their ability to contribute to society, and that there are two different ways people can contribute to society and both are needed to progress society.

Because progress requires unequal specialization and communism gives the opportunity for the society to prioritize equality over specialization, communism may progress slower than capitalism.

As I am writing I am thinking as well, I now realize that no, separate from human fallibility, there is no way to determine what society would be faster. If humans are infallible, the communistic society would be planned perfectly to avoid resource waste and exploitation would be eliminated. However, because humans are fallible, communism relies too much on the moral discipline of its own people in order to be more practical than capitalism. Thanks for helping me come to this conclusion.

314

@filetmignonpapi

You don’t seem to have taken the following Marx maxim into account: “From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs”.

My understanding of Marx’s final stage communism is that it is ultimately about everyone working cooperatively to progress society as a whole. Each individual would play their role in achieving this. As opposed to capitalism where the progression of society as a whole, for all intents and purposes, is a by product.

Plus there are many attributes of capitalism that work against the progression of society as a whole with the protection of intellectual property as but one example. Imagine how much more progress the pharmaceutical industry, as but one example, would make if they all worked cooperatively by freely sharing all their ideas and findings.

There is so much waste and inefficiency that is intrinsic to capitalism. A well managed communist society would run rings around capitalist societies because of this.

1 Like
315

I was thinking that when I read Filet’s post. Besides that, Societies have to exercise some control over specialization because training specialists is expensive, and an economy can employ/absorb only so many. Maybe 100,000 people in Iowa would like to be urban planners. What would we do with that many urban planners in a state where its largest city is less than 250,000 people? They would end up wrecking the state, trying to do their unnecessary work.

For example, far too much capitalist money has been diverted into financial markets, which are pretty much divorced from actual production and consumption. True, it contributes to the wealth of the 1/10 of 1% , but money diverted in this way is unavailable for investment in practical, actual production of goods and services. (This is an observation of the French economist Thomas Pikety.). The cost is a slower growing economy failing to meet the needs of its citizens.

316

In reality, most of the population in any healthy society do work more or less cooperatively to advance society. It’s not by design, it’s a necessity–a byproduct, as you put it. Some people work in food production, others in construction, others in distribution, and so on and on. People must work to produces the means of existence (in any society) and personal preference, need, feasibility, opportunity, ability, and so on sort out millions of people into 10,000 different kinds of jobs. By this method, the people are fed, housed, clothed, educated, and cared for more or less adequately. I have really disliked some of the jobs I worked in, but they all contributed to the general forward movement of society. I suppose the kinds of jobs that don’t forward society are those of the super rich (parasites) or the Mafia – Dons, hitmen, drug dealers, loan shark, pimps, etc, or the work of common thieves.

1 Like
317

Excuse me for butting in…

You are of course welcome to think of communism in this way, but, since you mentioned Marx, I’d like to just point out that it doesn’t sit well with Marx’s thinking. It’s basically a productivist, Progressivist-with-a-capital-p view that comes straight out of the ideology of capitalism.

Marx, by contrast, emphasized the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all, and the abolition of alienation. The point is not some big effort to take society forward—whatever that means—but to emancipate people. The idea that “each individual would play their role” is, in my opinion, a collectivist mindset that cannot be found in Marx, and which I find totally inimical to emancipation.

On the other hand, many Marxists have shared your view, so I’m not saying you’re uniquely bad. Many of the Bolsheviks thought along similar lines.

But how is this any more than wishful thinking? I mean, it’s a seductive idea, and as a Leftist I’ve been as inspired as anyone by the promise of a communist post-scarcity Star Trek Next Generation future. But given the spectacular and unprecedented dynamism of capitalism, I think communists either have to show exactly how a communist society could do this, or else abandon it as a central goal. Regarding the latter, one might ask oneself the question: if it turns out that communism cannot achieve the intensity of technological progress that happens in capitalism, would I abandon the cause of communism?

In case you think I’m being uncharitable, my basic point is that I think you are justifying communism too defensively, entirely on capitalism’s own terms.

318

Marx has some sociological merit. Some merit for historical analysis. It can reasonably inspire drives for unionization, workers rights and dignity, analysis of class dynamics, and is generally popular on those merits alone. That the lower class is in a position to be exploited by the upper class. But it isn’t a good economic theory.

The subjective theory of value is just truer in a way that the labour theory isn’t. That value can be objectively determined by need, or necessity, and most things people value are due to fetishism, and irrational, or false. Even if you give that absolutely necessary for survival is the only kind of value, and everything else has no true value, that only points to an extremely limited number of things. Almost everything is rendered valueless, or the value is up to the discretion of the state. The very fact that value is asserted to be objective, and not subject to human judgment or determination means that it is prescriptive, and not descriptive, or authoritarian at heart, or core. The authoritarianism cannot be said to be imposed from without. Also, because it is not descriptive, but prescriptive, unlike supply and demand it cannot make predictions about market value. The value that it purports to be able to derive is based on necessary labour time, but that reduces to a wide range of dynamic variables, that constantly fluctuate, and cannot actually be calculated. Some insertion of the arbitrary will take place.

Lastly, it just isn’t true. Value isn’t objective, and isn’t a feature of the world that has nothing to do with human judgment. Value actually is subjective, as the subjective theory suggests, and supply and demand is overwhelmingly superior for dealing with real markets, and predicting value and behavior. So while I think that it has plenty of merit in policy, philosophy, history, and sociology, as critiquing and examining power dynamics, exploitation, and class conflicts and solidarity, it isn’t a substantial economic theory, in my view. Just the notion that the market can be done away with, without completely eliminating demand is extremely dubious. On Star Trek they invented replicators, and that’s how they did it. But for as long as demand exists, a market will, regardless of if it is a legitimate one, or a black underground one. The market would have to be suppressed, and strongly, and it still won’t work, but it could definitely really suck if you got caught.

319

The above post of @Wosret’s is a good example of what the OP refers to as “capitalist propaganda,” though as I explained before, a better term is ideology, since there is obviously no conscious manipulation involved.

For Marx, value is socially objective, independent of any individual’s valuation. It is not “nothing to do with human judgment”. It is in fact entirely human-relative, in that it is a feature of human social relations.

Marx did not say anything like this. Need pertains to use-value; value as such is something else, determined by socially necessary labour time. And there is no asceticism in Marx; he does not think that the only valuable things are those that are strictly necessary for survival.

Also, fetishism in Marx is commodity fetishism, which is social relations appearing as objective properties. It has nothing to do with a moralizing judgement on what people value. This is a mix-up of two senses of fetishism: (a) treating an inanimate object as if it had its own independent self-standing powers; (b) having an unreasonable or obsessive interest in something. Marx means (a), used as an analogy.

Marx’s theory is not really a rival theory alongside the others. It’s something different. It’s a critique that takes the categories of Smith and Ricardo and works through them until they generate contradictions that those thinkers couldn’t resolve on their own terms—contradictions that Marx makes sense of with his own theory, one that explains the source of profit, but makes no attempt to forecast price fluctuations.

To fault Marx’s theory for an inability to predict market value is like faulting the theory of plate tectonics for its inability to predict the Turkish earthquake of February 6, 2023.

Tectonics explains why earthquakes happen, without warranting a forecast of any particular tremor. The impossibility of the short-term prediction follows from what the theory says, i.e., it’s not a defect. Value is the same: it is realized only ex post, in exchange. The fact that socially necessary labour time cannot be calculated in advance is a feature of the theory, not a bug. Supply and demand, meanwhile, tracks the oscillations—the deviations in price—without ever accounting for what it is they are oscillating around.

There’s an important difference between political economy and economics. The latter has for a long time referred primarily to neoclassical economics, which is thoroughly mathematized, aiming to be a neutral, technical, transhistorical science. But political economy, the study of wealth and value and so on as they arise within specific social and historical circumstances—this was never refuted. It’s just that the focus of establishment academia changed—the influence of positivism and the needs of capitalism dictated changing priorities.

Marx was of course in the political economy camp, though it’s also important to see that his theory was also a critique of that tradition from within (immanent critique).

Certainly Marx’s theory is outdated and wrong in many ways, but the liberal-conservative criticisms that I usually see rarely work, partly because they’re based on misreadings and category errors.

1 Like
320

That the value is dependent on humans and social relations, isn’t the same thing as it having to do with anyone’s judgment. He did hold the value to be objective, and not related to anyone’s judgment. I was mistaken about the value depending on being necessary to people. The necessity is just in the production time which is no small error on my part. I misspoke.

The word “fetishism” is not a neutral term, and cannot be said to not carry moral judgment.

Another criticism of the labor theory is that one can of course spend a hell of a lot of time on something that ends up being worthless, and in order to deal with this, you have to just reinsert supply and demand. It is worthless only if there is no demand for it. So that the labor time becomes a superfluous consideration, when you still have to fall back on demand to insure its value.

If we hand two rival theories of tectonic plates, and one could make predictions, and the other couldn’t, I think that would matter too.

321

Yes, ok. Value is social but is not determined by anyone’s estimation of worth. We agree on the distinction between the theories. But then when I go back to your original post, I don’t see a good argument as to why one theory is wrong and the other is right.

Yes, but plate tectonics and seismology are not rival theories. They are at different levels. Supply and demand is like seismology; Marx’s theory is like plate tectonics. One follows price fluctuations and attempts to be predictive, the other explains what they oscillate around, the centre of gravity.

But Marx was not using it in that sense, and it’s unlikely the word had much connotation of moral judgment when he was writing in the 19th century. You only have to read what he wrote to see that the following is what he meant: treating an inanimate object as if it had its own independent self-standing powers—used as an analogy.

That said, there probably was something slightly derogatory in it, since Marx took the term from the anthropology of religion in connection with “primitive” idol worship. But any judgment here is about the illusion, that of thinking the object has magical powers; it’s nothing to do with a judgment about what people ought to want and need. Anyone who has read any Marx should know this is the opposite of his way of thinking, though I grant you that some Marxists have thought along those lines.

For Marx, commodity fetishism affects everyone, including himself. It is not any kind of verdict about what people desire.

This is built in to Marx’s theory. Value isn’t set by labour-time on its own but by socially necessary labour-time—and “necessary” already encompasses the satisfaction of a social need. Labour spent on something nobody wants just doesn’t count as value-producing in the first place.

Labour-time becomes superfluous according to what you want to know. If all you want is the movement of prices, then sure, you can drop it—but then you’ve also dropped the questions Marx was actually asking, like where profit comes from.

1 Like
322

Well, I grant that I just said that I didn’t think values are the kinds of things that are objective, but subjective. Value implies the qualitative, in my view. But people are free to disagree.

I don’t think that labor is a substantial consideration in predicting market value. Overhead cost of production is, which used to be a lot more linked to labor in his day than it is now. The complicated contrivances you have to navigate in establishing labor time, which isn’t the literal labor time, but involves a whole bunch of speculative labor time, and collective labor time, depending on the level of skill and training… It doesn’t contribute much in the way of prediction at all. That it is used more to explain the values after they have been revealed rather than predict them is right, I think.

Well, we can at least agree that it isn’t neutral, and is intentionally meant to invoke primitive tribal superstitious thinking. It isn’t about what people should want and need, and if I said that, then I was mistaken. It is meant to be about where the value is seen to be, in the product, rather than the necessary labor time.

That ultimately the necessary labor time has its eye on the proletariat, and fairness is something I think I said is a huge reason why people like it, or consider it good. I think that fairness is a real concern and makes the whole project incredibly endearing to many (myself included). I do think that we can incorporate those concerns into a socialist project without the theory itself. But, if Marx was right, then communism is inevitable anyway, much like for Hegel history was a long walk to progression of freedom, or spirit, for Marx history is just a long walk to communism.

The point about labor time being superfluous is that demand actually doesn’t determine just price. If the value were inherent to the labor, then it wouldn’t matter if there was no demand, that couldn’t make the labor worthless, or without value. It could just make it not profitable. But introducing use-value, is just another term for demand. Demand ultimately determines both, value and price.

I think that profit likely comes from how much people are willing to pay for things, or how much they want them, and how scarce they are, and how much they cost to produce. I do not think that it is good to allow unchecked profit pursuit without any regulation though.