(12-14-2020, 03:37 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-14-2020, 03:11 PM)Einzige Wrote: Democracy is irrelevant. When control of the productive processes is held exclusively by proletarian society, then representative democracy ceases to be relevant, for every worker can Express his own interest through his own actions.
Humans work in groups. You advance a theory based on individuals acting alone, but doing so will cause you not to be followed. The theory just does not match the observed reality.
Quote:Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint (Max Stirner, individualist anarchist) because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or ‘it its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him (for which Saint Max calls him “an unusually cunning and politic mind”, Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
- Marx, The German Ideology
Seems fairly realistic to me. I do not put forward a theory of individuals acting alone, but of removing the barriers that prevent them from acting together for their own self-interest. Communism is not collectivistic or individualistic: it abolishes these bourgeois abstracts in favor of the lived life.