12-11-2020, 04:46 PM
(12-11-2020, 07:17 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-11-2020, 05:58 AM)Einzige Wrote: There is no Communist government. That's the point. It will be a radical restructuring of all labor, which will be entirely self-directed, and consequently all society. I'd recommend checking out the Marxism 201 sub on Reddit.
There is a quote at the heart of Marxism. ’From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.’ The reality is more like this. ’To the new communist elite according to their greed. Or else.’ The twin problems are the lack of control of the workers over the elites, and the lack of a tie between the ability and the need.
Even in Marx' time, the slave-owning planters of the American South were able to enforce "to each according to his ability" from slaves while 'giving' the barest essentials of life to slaves. The worst thing possible for an elderly slave was manumission, which meant that he was on his own without the means of survival. That typically meant death by starvation and cold. Real prosperity fairly distributed makes the achievement of basic needs easily accessible, and at a certain point makes overproduction (surfeit) more of a problem than underproduction (shortages).
Maybe the next phase of economic organization will be that powerful entities (governments, for-profit corporations, and powerful non-profit entities) will determine how people consume. I look at the contemporary attitude of many capitalists who deem the duty of the rest of humanity to make those elites even wealthier and to indulge their often-debased urges (even on sexuality and drugs) while acquiescing to their systems of command-and-control. I see that as a nightmare. Castles and palaces for the elites, complete with harems? Donald Trump would have been a perfect Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
As Lord Acton said, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Such has applied to all powerful people, whatever their claim to legitimate holding of power.
Quote:Unfortunately, the communist twin concepts are a lot closer to human nature than the Marxist ones.
Marxism is obsolete because Marxism antedates the discoveries of Freudian psychology, some of the remarkable technological innovations that were at most scientific curiosities of his latter years (the telephone, the electric light, recorded music, automobiles, elevators, petroleum refining) or were yet to emerge (motion pictures, animation, radio, refrigeration, air conditioning). Social reforms that have nothing to do with socialist revolution (getting children out of the workforce and into school, effective labor unions, and increasing enfranchisement of voters often from the working class) have themselves changed the relationship between capitalist 'producer' and industrial toiler. If you look at one of Marx' scientific contemporaries, Charles Darwin, you will find that Darwin only exposed the controversies that would set the scientific communities on their own paths that would redefi9ne what good scientific practice is.
Marxism fails to explain innovations in business practice. So why could the Skaggs brothers (founders of Safeway Stores) develop the supermarket? Because conditions had changed enough that people got paid enough that they could not need to buy groceries on credit, arguably a consequence of the rise in wages as children were no longer competing with their parents in the workplace. Why could Henry Ford sell cheap, highly-standardized cars? Because the new high-tech capitalists of his time could start to pay non-starvation wages. The sweatshops of the time were 'low-tech' industries such as textiles.
Quote:Now I could acknowledge that there is not now and has never been a Marxist government. Marxism is too far distant from human nature. Recent history does not lack for governments that call themselves Communist. Their existence makes most people avoid the scam like the plague.
The body count, economic orders incapable of competing with the rest of the world due to slow innovation, economic policies that waste such resources as energy... Free markets do far better than do command economies in meeting basic needs, although even a capitalist society such as WWII-era Britain will have to abandon the free market and consumer choice to fend off the danger of the Man Who Shall Not Be Named.
Quote:I visited Marxism 201. I found little but one sentence slogans that gave no clue as to how to bridge the gulf between Marxism and human nature.
You might try to bridge the gulf yourself? How would you try to solve the twin problems? Declining to do this would be regarded by me at least as a total fail?
Ideologies out of touch with human nature or with basic rules of physical science and mathematics (and economics is to no small extent modeling of the chemical and physical rules of thermodynamics to production and trade)... fail. Chattel slavery died because it was inconsistent with feelings of guilt over the exploitation and dehumanization of slaves. Fascism, including Nazism, failed because it could never promote human solidarity across national lines and depended upon inhuman brutality. I see our corporate bureaucracies and public-system imitators ultimately doomed for their inhumanity as they become increasingly inefficient, unresponsive, and inhuman.
Do you want to hear of a thoroughly sane economic order? Try the Old Order Amish. I wouldn't suggest joining them, as people accustomed to the consumer society with its mobility and information-age technologies of entertainment as difficult to surrender as heroin for an addict. The Old Order Amish go to school only as far as the eighth grade and keep repeating the eighth grade until school-leaving age. It's not great for anyone who has much intellectual curiosity. But consider this: their material lives are not particularly uncomfortable.
Theirs is a world of farming and food production, with some carpentry (and it is very good carpentry) on the side. They make some good furniture, and I would take a trip to Amish country to get some if I lived clearly outside it (as in Texas, Florida, or perhaps California). It is solid and plain... ornamentation is for schmucks. They have few white-collar jobs because they have no bureaucracy. No banks or insurance companies. Ostentatious behavior is rare. That's for people who show how rich and powerful they are, most likely by treating others badly. They are mobile enough; they have buggies and bicycles, and a buggy in southeastern Pennsylvania probably gets one around faster than a car in midtown Manhattan or anywhere off the expressways in Chicago.
I'm not saying that we should go back to Amish standards of education or to abandon the marvels of video and the internet. I consider mobility a good thing. We might be better off with small business instead of giant, monopolistic, vertically-integrated businesses.
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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.