Reciprocity vs. Baseline Communism

I think the camping society (and in fact any well-running club) is more communist than you suggest. The expectation is much more like “from each according to their abilities” than like long-run reciprocity and it is failure to conform to this expectation that leads to ejection.

So (at least in my ideal club) everyone accepts that the stronger members will carry the tents and other heavy shared items as well as their personal stuff – their reward is higher status in the club. The people who get thrown out are those who are always mysteriously absent when it’s time to collect water or wash the dishes.

Obviously reality isn’t as neat as this: some members (often women) are imposed on to do low-status drudge work, the handful of people at the core of the club complain about the impossibility of getting the members to the AGM, and so on. But still.

I confess to not being sure I understand the logic of the original post. But it seems quite wrong to me to say, “the Golden Rule is supposed to be a paradigm expression of an ethic of reciprocity, not some strained, ‘broadest sense’ borderline case.” The Golden Rule is not an ethic of reciprocity at all. The Golden Rule says, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” An ethic of reciprocity says, “Treat others the way they treat you.” The whole essence of the Golden Rule is that you treat others well, not because you think you get some equivalent in return, but because you value them in themselves (just as you value yourself). Something similar is true of the distributive logic of communism: you don’t get to “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” unless you first take the moral step of separating the entitlement to having one’s needs met from the ability to meet the needs of others.

Sounds like there’s only two norms: Reciprocity and Hierarchy. Hierarchy can include reciprocity (patronage and clientelism), but it doesn’t have to – slavery is a good case example of hierarchy without reciprocity.

I still don’t see where the communism fits in as something separate. Even if the reciprocity isn’t denominated in specific numbers or obligations, it’s still there. It only seems to be there with helping the severely disabled, where help is given with no serious expectation that they will give back in return even in a nebulous sense.

You need more than just hierarchy and reciprocity, because of the moral claims of those who cannot reciprocate, because of age, illness or disability.

Erm, I got lost right at the beginning here. In what sense is ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ an ideal of strict exchange according to which what we get out is equal to what we put in? If we’re talking about individuals, it seems to me to imply the opposite, which is that what we put in and what we get out are to be separated (unless you assume that ability tracks neediness, and I don’t know why anyone would assume that). What did I miss?

how silly it would be for one workman to respond to ‘gimme the hammer’ with ‘only if you pass me the wrench’.

What used to be more common is responding to “plug in my drill” with “that involves plugs, get someone from the electrician’s union to do it, and don’t you dare do it yourself”. Demarcation disputes as a quasi-property right. You can have demarcation disputes in the family as well; it’s a very common pattern of one partner insisting on doing a particular task because they don’t like the way the other one does it.

I think “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” is relevant here as well. Compare the official ‘internal communism’ of Valve software with the actual firing of their female-led AR development team.

But then you would contribute x/2, half of the capacity to pay, in a strictly metaphorical sense: ‘one of two people’s share of the capacity to pay’. Ditto y/2, half the thirst, which would now mean ‘one of two people’s share of the total thirst’. Numerators and denominators no longer match. You may well be right that there is a rhetorical contrivance of the appearance of fair exchange here, for the purposes of appealing to a fairness-dominated world, but I’m also hearing a strong appeal, rhetorical and otherwise, to a fairness-transcending alternative.

JH @ 24:

Indeed. (We’ve got out of sync with comments and responses.) Me too; I agree that the spreading imperiousness of market analogies over the last couple of decades follows directly from this fuzziness about what can and can’t be described as reciprocal. Almost anything can be represented in both reciprocal and altruistic terms. That is, any piece of seemingly altruistic behaviour can be represented as a (utility-maximising) exchange, and vice versa, depending on where you draw a boundary around the consequences and systematic linkages you are willing to consider on this particular occasion. Assume you need to consider the practical viability of the whole of the Marxian idyll as a system, and of course the books need to balance there too; needs must be less than or equal to capacities. I think it would be more useful to have some kind of agreed scale of measurement (or customary language) to indicate how tightly and immediately (as opposed to loosely and ultimately) a piece of behaviour is being asked to balance out reciprocally. A rheostat with communism at one end and exchange at the other…

communism gives us perfect reciprocity, hence fairness, and also transcendence of reciprocity-as-fairness.
Even in the ‘perfect reciprocity’ view, it’s not individual reciprocity. You’re not balancing your karmic book with everyone separately, but only with the whole, the commune.

The message I took from Graeber is that such abstract ‘debts’ are not debts in the strict sense of our world, perhaps even an opposite. You can never settle them, they cannot be made precise, they can’t be taken out of the individual context. If you try to force them in the strict reciprocity view, you lose their essence.

At the risk of repeating Spufford @22, “from each according to her abilities” is, as the slogan of achieved communism, meant in pointed contrast to “from each according to her labor”: reciprocity is the principle of the preliminary, temporary stage of mere socialism.

Examples of the former principle are precisely where reciprocity is impossible, for example, a severely disabled person who cannot make a truly reciprocal contribution, or even someone who simply lacks the talent or skill to contribute to the same degree as others.

“Communism is supposed to be fair.” If you mean, “Communism defines justice as ‘fairness’ in some common sense version,” then no, that’s Rawls. If you mean “Communism is supposed to be just, which is ‘fairness’ in a broad sense,” then sure. But it’s a view of “true fairness” against common-sense “fairness” basis in equality or reciprocity. There is give and take (one must labor according to ability), but not equivalent give and take: those with lesser ability labor less, those with greater need take more.

In what sense is communism about “fairness”? Simply in the sense that it’s fair for labor to be un-coerced, and so workers must have an amount of control over the means of production that a ruling bourgeoisie makes impossible.

Why doesn’t fairness also require reciprocity? Well, first, because ought implies can, and it’s necessarily true that ability is not equal, so the less able cannot fully reciprocate. Second, “merit” is a moral superstition incompatible with a materialist understanding of human nature, so “getting what you deserve” is not actually deserved. Desert is ability and ability is ultimately luck. Third, if fairness is about control of labor, then whatever works want to do with that control is fair, and wanting to satisfy everyone’s needs, not just those of the most able, is what Marx thinks a classless society will want to do. It’s allowable and desirable, therefore better.

So, again, I think “from each according to need” is primarily a rejection of reciprocity, not an instance of it. Even if not a total rejection, the point is to make reciprocity no longer the central feature in our view of justice.

@36 “Because we’re good communists, we do assume that you’ll tend to take out what you put in, or slightly less.”

Is part of the temptation to see it as rough reciprocity about seeing it as a practical principle, rather than as a principle of justice? Namely: the system can’t go broke.

Because as I read Marx, the possibility of communism is the ever advancing productive power of technology, which will increasingly exceed human need. The idea is that “Each according to their ability” will always generate a surplus, provided that surplus isn’t funneled into capital and a capital-hoarding class. So, one reason it can leave behind reciprocity is because we don’t need it to stay afloat.

Holbo,

My point wasn’t to pretend you meant the obviously false one, but to show that the obviously true one is almost as confusing or problematic, since it requires rejecting many common ways of thinking about fairness (namely, any version grounded in the primacy of equality or reciprocity).

@Holbo #31.

Brett Bellmore is doing what I find among many conservatives/libertarians. To them Communism/socialism means only one thing: the authoritarian state socialism of the Soviet Union or Maoist China.
If you say communism means X, they will respond with an off topic comment about some atrocity committed by the Soviet Union or Maoist China.

Denying that communism means the authoritarian state socialism of the Soviet Union, or Maoist China, or any of the other horrible communist regimes, is something that only apologists for communism, the sort of people who’d think “we’re good communists’ wasn’t an indictment, would do.

I mean, you could analogize some positive aspects of the family, or fraternal organizations, to fascism, too. But why would you, if you didn’t want to try to rehabilitate the ideology that led to the final solution? It’s the same with communism. To everybody but ‘good communists’, communism means the Gulag, because only the people who are desperate to try it, yet again, have the need to deny that communism means the Gulag.

“Do you have a theory of language according to which it is not possible to use ‘communism’ to denote mutualism, not governed by reciprocity or hierarchy? As an exercise, you might try this. Could you use the word ‘giraffe’ to denote any social instantiation of mutualism? Hint: I think the answer is ‘yes’.”

Ugh. This is academic game playing, and like with lawyers engaging in rules-laweyering this is why people think academics are intelligent idiots. Yes you CAN write a book in which you you common words and define them in uncommon ways. But you shouldn’t. If you aren’t trying to rehabilitate Marx, Engels, and Lenin, you shouldn’t use ‘communism’ to talk about small-scale semi-reciprocal relationships. In fact you would have been MUCH better off if you had used giraffe, because then it won’t look like you are trying to smuggle in other stuff beyond your allegedly tight definition. Hell you probably would have been better off calling them ‘familial’.

While we are at it, where do we got off think of ‘familial, as non-hierarchical? In most instances of families they clearly are hierarchical as to parents and children. And very often also by age and gender of children.

I’m trying to make sense of 23. “Now imagine that, instead of letting x and y range over dollars and liquid volumes we let them range of capacities to pay and degrees of thirst (ability and need). The point being: the appeal of the formula sounds much the same as ‘we pay the same, we get the same’.”

Your formula is each pays x/2 and each drinks y/2. No matter what you substitute for x and y, given your formula, each still pays the same and drinks the same amount. I’m sorry, you can’t fool with Math.

I speculate that what you have in mind something along these lines: Let’s say my ability to pay is 10 and your ability to pay is 90, and the cost of a beer is 10. Then under communism I would contribute 1 and you would contribute 9. (*) We would have to do the same calculation to divide our respective thirst to find out how much each gets to drink. Now such a model is hypothetically imaginable but I find it far-fetched to assume that Marx had anything even remotely like that in mind. (In fact what is being described really looks like flat rate taxation. But I’m probably missing something, as everybody else on this thread seems to do.)

Brett Belmore @47
Your comment would imply that anyone who uses the term “Christian” would be meaning Jim Jones, David Koresh, or some other perversion of the idea. Because a group of people co-opt and misapply a term doesn’t automatically make their example the forever standard of what the originator said or implied.

As an architect by profession, and Catholic by upbringing, I can testify that reducing socialism to the linear taproot of Marx/ Lenin/ Mao is an absurd mythology , but a widely spread one.

First, a reading of art and architecture history of the 19th century, like Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement reveals that there were plenty of critics of the capitalist structure of the Industrial Age, whose criticisms either predated Marx, or were drawn independently of his thinking.

Second, the notion of flexible property rights, that can be widened and narrowed to the point of nonexistence, appears in foundation of Catholic social teaching from Rerum Novarum onward.
Again, while the Pope and Catholic theologians were aware of Marx, they drew their thinking from much different sources.

It serves the convenient purpose of property rights fundamentalists to sweep all contrary claims about property rights under the cloak of Stalin, so that any attempt to modulate the boundaries of property rights becomes a call for the gulag.

Sebastian @49 (and Brett passim): No, it’s not academic game-playing. The ideal of communism, or the cooperative commonwealth, was evolved long before the Bolshevists, by Owen, Fourier, Marx, Bellamy, Morris, Perkins Gilman, Russell, and others . It was (and is) a magnificent ideal — you really should get acquainted with it. It was so good, in fact, that the Bolsheviks stole the name, with all its well-deserved prestige, to describe their hideous system, which shared with it only some criticisms of capitalism but entirely suppressed the democratic and cooperative side.

It’s easy to see why the Bolsheviks should have wanted to steal the name, and it’s also easy to see why this suited capitalism’s defenders very well: they could use the ghastly Bolshevik perversion of communism to discredit the genuine ideal, to which they were no less inimical than the Bolsheviks were, though for somewhat different reasons.

Please be assured, SH and BB: Holbo, Spufford, Bertram, Timberman, Anon, and I will all be hauled off to the American gulag (somewhere in Nevada or Wyoming, I expect) on the same train as you two if Bolshevik pseudo-communism ever comes to power in the Land of the Free; and we all know it perfectly well, so there’s no need for you to remind us ad nauseam. Try to understand what we mean by the term “communism” (it is, after all, the original meaning) and then, if you like, try to persuade us that it’s a pipedream. (Sebastian has at least made a start by grasping that some aspects of family relations — generosity and self-sacrifice, not hierarchy — are among the sources of the communist ideal.) But please stop distracting us with that tired old ditty about “game playing.”

So, if “communism” (or worse, “socialism”) must always mention “Stalinist atrocities…”, then must “capitalism” always mention “the destruction of the environment…”, “the abuse of indigenous peoples…”, “the abuse of the poor…”?

Both communism and capitalism, as implemented in practice, have caused a great deal of pain and suffering. The “winners” of capitalism like to pretend otherwise, for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate that. Anytime someone dismisses communism “Because Stalin…”, they clearly are arguing from bad faith (or they are an idiot).

Sure, why not? Capitalism has had it’s failures. Having failures amid the successes is much better than having nothing but mind rendingly horrific failures, to the point where you’re driven to claim your idea has never ‘really’ been tried.

Like it or not, communism will always be defined by the gulag. And this is justice, so get used to it, and stop being annoyed when you advocate communism, and people bring the gulag up. The real question is, after it’s history of horror, why anybody who wanted the respect of their fellow man would ever refer to themselves as a “communist”.

Phil @56,

Thanks for clearly saying what I was inchoately thinking. I’m not sure I’d emphasize the epistemic aspect—the point is that they’re incommensurable, not that we can’t know the measure—but otherwise this seems dead on to me.

I’ll note here that Bakunin thought that something like Leninism was implicit in what Marx wrote, and that thinking so is part of some living left ideologies. If you really identify with William Morris and you want to argue against “communism leads to the Gulag” on that basis, fine, but if you’re a Marxist then I think you’re in denial.

I have some experience with different kinds of communalist attempts, and adoption of “to each, from each” without being able to control who is in the group is highly problematic. Not because of reciprocity — a group of people using contemporary technology is generally productive enough to easily support people who don’t do anything. But because some people just can’t get along within the group, and unless you can exclude them, the people in the group would rather not have it.

William Timberman @47,

“Would a guaranteed surplus make moral perfectibility moot? Probably not, but it might make the impact of such greed and rapacity as continued to exist a lot more bearable.”

My impression is that for Marx questions of moral perfectibility were, if not moot, then not really a central concern. If morality is the product of economic conditions, trying to change it independently of material conditions gets it backward. I take it this is also part of M and E’s principle objection to “utopian socialism.”

That’s also why it’s so annoying when people claim communism is over-optimistic about human nature: what’s so optimistic about the view that morality is utterly contingent and materially determined, or that the natural condition of humans is exploitation and conflict, a condition only improvable with historically late technological developments that allow for new economic relations?

And what’s so “pessimistic” about the view that institutions of private property and free exchange will magically turn selfish, violent animals into good sports who, if they lose the free market game, won’t begrudge–or inevitably avenge–the winners?

Anon @ 66

Another good point. I don’t think that Marx was a pessimist, however, or blind to the sources of human interaction that fall outside the realm of economic determinism. I’d say this: if you want to turn Hegel on his head you must be focused, nevertheless it’s still the case that if want to live outside the law you must be honest.

@geo: A waste of your time on the likes of BB, but thanks for trying anyhow.

And P.s.: What about Rousseau? Wasn’t his primitive society [c]ommunistic?

Rich @64: With sincere respect to Bakunin (and you): Marx was large, he contained multitudes. He had an immense and fertile brain, and tossed out fragments of ideas all over the place. Some of them had possible authoritarian implications; others had democratic implications; none were definitive or final. In any case, what he devoted most of his brain to was figuring out the internal dynamics and historical trajectory of capitalism. So a “Marxist” is, properly speaking (that is, according to me), someone who finds Marx’s analysis of capitalism plausible.

If you really identify with William Morris … fine, but if you’re a Marxist then I think you’re in denial.

Didn’t Morris call himself a “Marxist,” for whatever that’s worth?

@DN

> Stalin and company made the USSR a modern country, brought millions out of poverty, and won WWII. That they committed world-historical crimes along the way does not allow you to ignore these realities any more than the facts of Dickensian misery and ongoing ecological catastrophe allow me to ignore the successes of capitalism. Please try to discuss rationally.

None of this is accurate. Lenin’s communist party, of which stalin was a high ranking member, utterly wrecked russia, the fastest industrializing country in the world in 1913. several 1913 production figures would not be reached until after world war two. And stalin did not win world war two, he fought in world war two armed with weapons provided by the capitalist west, spilling the blood of his own people in vast numbers. Two thirds of his aviation gas, half of his aluminium and copper, virtually all of his rolling stock and best machine tools came from the west. And despite all this aid, he managed to still have larger famines after ww2 than anything the czars ever presided over. As for “Dickensian misery and ecological catastrophe” the peasants of the Ukraine would have loved Dickensian poverty, and the Aral Sea is plenty of testimony to communist environmental concerns.

But let us pretend that you are right, and that Stalin’s crimes are somehow justified by his economic achievements, and that those achievements were not largely illusory. If you think that, you should still be a capitalist. Why? Because capitalism has wrought similar levels of achievement with far lower levels of death and murder. If economic progress is your only metric for success, then you can’t be anything other than a capitalist. But, of course, you don’t actually believe that. If I argued that Pinochet was a great leader despite killing a few thousand people, you’d call me a monster, despite the fact that Chile has the highest HDI in latin america. So please, stop the special pleading and just call spades spades. stop fellating stalin just because he was vaguely on your side.

In the second Discourse, Rousseau makes family life predate private property. Still, the family is a historical development not given by our nature. It also sows the first seeds that will become fatal to happiness, by establishing a dependence on a division of labor. It is communistic- and dominates relations in that “happiest epoch” of human history- , but is at the same time a station on a continuum that leads, eventually, to utter slavery.

The family is given a more explicitly dark cast in Emile, I think.

Yeah, I don’t know where those guys got the idea that I consider Stalin even vaguely on my side.

Q: How do you get conservatives to care about the deaths of foreigners?
A: Have them killed by leftist regimes.

>I don’t understand how Brett Bellmore and cassander don’t get tired of themselves. How can someone be so boring and predictable and not feel the sting of self-contempt?

Funny, we feel the same about those who are still repeating Stalin’s lies …..

Communalism and communitarianism are both actual words. English has many words.

geo, sincere respect back to you, but it was different for William Morris to be a Marxist in his time than it is for someone to be a Marxist now. While Marx had some ideas that were authoritarian and some democratic, we now know which results his thought leads to when implemented, and we now also know that Marxist thought about capitalism doesn’t provide any understanding of capitalism that is useful in actually opposing it.

Certainly we shouldn’t think family communism is refuted by parent-child hierarchy.

It’s not just the parent-child relation, tho. It’s also the husband-wife relation, at least for most of human history. And e.g., the oikos, at least in Aristotle, includes master-slave relations. Etc, etc. I’m not sure where the communism is supposed to get a look-in, except in an idealized sort of modern family.

In regards to family as communistic – Greaber makes clear that he sees his three categories as non-exclusive. So a family can be both hierarchical and communistic – there can be a hierarchy where one party has final authority in decision making, while others

John,

I think one misunderstanding of Graber here is that you are missing the whole point he makes (and I think here is very influenced by Polyani) about these various systems of distribution being nested in a wider society. So you and Quiggan can go into a bar and come up with some system of who puts in what and who gets to drink what, but whether this is fair or not depends not on what the two of you think, but on what the entire community around the bar think. They may think that you are both able-bodied uni professors, and so should be mostly even in who buys, or they could figure that Quiggan has a bum leg and can’t hunt down his beer money, so you should pony it up. Or they could figure that because you are in the Holbo clan but married to someone in the Waring Clan, you have a social duty to buy the beer, but the Quiggan clan is responsible for the chicken wings because Seagull, the totem of the Quiggan clan, was the one who first brought beer-nuts and chicken-wings to the people, and thus the Quiggan clan has done since time immemorial. But either way, it is not only a question of beer and wings.

I think Ze has nailed our position, the more concise formulation of which is, “Wonderful theory, wrong species.”

Why do we get so emotional about it? Because of the damned piles of skulls, that’s why. How can you NOT get emotional about people promoting an ideology that, literally, piles up skulls?

I wonder about anybody who can pleasantly, academically, discuss an ideology that keeps ending up with mass murder. I mean, you guys are no particular threat to anybody so long as you don’t attempt practical applications, but, still.

Like I said up thread, you could analogize certain aspects of family life and fraternal organizations to fascism, too. If you were of that bent, you could so so as a way of casting fascism in a positive light. And, yeah, things didn’t work out so well in Germany, but they weren’t really fascists, they got things wrong, and the next time we try it, we’ll get it right…

But you wouldn’t, because, lamp shades made from human skin, and all that. Some ideas work out so badly in practice you don’t try to find the good in them, don’t try to get them right this time, you shun them. Well, decent people do, anyway.

Communism is that sort of idea. Not because communal arrangements don’t sorta work on a very small scale. Because it doesn’t scale without world-historical levels of evil, in practice.

And I see a bunch of people here, working hard to blind themselves to that, in the hope, I guess, that they can have another go at it someday. And rationalizing that you won’t end up with the piles of skulls.

But you will, if you get that chance, and how can I be unemotional about that?

Oh, spare me the faux outrage, John. I think *communalism* sort works, on a very small scale, where people share some over-riding cause, and where the communal enterprise is embeded in a larger capitalist society. Communism is a different beast altogether, an effort to force communalism on a large scale, and it never works for reasonable values of “works”.

And, you think I didn’t notice the way you carefully crafted the contours of your outrage, to exclude from its application anybody who advocates communism, so long as they just deny the obvious causal link to mass murder? Way to express outrage at anybody who points out the obvious, but not at the people who advocate a genocidal ideology.

I haven’t read Graeber and can’t speak to theories of communism(an exciting start to the comment, I know) but I am reading, on and off, the new Fiske (mentioned above) book at the minute, and his models, from my reading, are primarily talking about the ways people evaluate and understand their social relationships. If Graeber is working from him, then I assume ‘baseline communism’ maps on to Fiske’s ‘communal sharing’ and ‘reciprocity’ onto ‘equality matching.’
The main difference is that CS is primarily concerned with in group unity (so JQ’s running club), whereas EM is concerned with equality. (I’d assume gift giving etc) Fiske’s distinction is, ‘unity is directed toward caring and supporting the integrity of in groups through a sense of collective responsibility and common fate’, whereas ‘equality is directed towards enforcing even balance and in kind reciprocity in social relations.’ So they are two quite differen’t ways for a person to understand and take part in a relationship. (although ragweed is also right that these are in some ways context dependant; ie you can evaluate a relationship with a person in one context differently than you would with the same person in another context, and you can evaluate relationships with different people in different ways in the same context. )
That might be a little confusing, perhaps even wrong, potentially even irrelevant, and that’s because I don’t really understand his argument fully yet. But I thought I’d add my tuppence.
(I think though that perhaps talking about this type of theory in the context of Marxism(or whatever) doesnt really make a huge amount of sense. Theyre explaining two different things, afaict.)
I’d also note for Brett that this is compatible with violence, in group unity can lead to hostility towards an out group. In fact, according to Fiske, the relationship within the group best explains the reasons it commits violence against those outside of it.

While reading Fiske, John, you might also look at Christopher Boehm, also an anthropologist, and a primatologist too. In Hierarchy in the Forest he argues that we’ve inherited authoritarian/hierarchical ways from our primate ancestors and an egalitarian overlay when we became modern humans. He reviews lots of primate ethology lots of by now standard stuff on (quasi)egalitarianism in preliterate societies. Here’s a brief review of Hierarchy:

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/balance-of-power

Here’s an old post where I talk about Boehm a bit:

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/hierarchy_and_equality_the_essential_tension_in_human_nature_or_was_marx_ri/

And here’s review of his recent book on morality:

http://www.epjournal.net/articles/how-did-morality-originate-a-review-of-christopher-boehm-moral-origins-the-evolution-of-virtue-altruism-and-shame/

John, you are making no sense. You claim that ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ is a from of reciprocity. Then when several of us protest that it is no such thing, you come up with some sloppy math supposed to prove that even though it isn’t reciprocal on the face of it, you can mathematically turn it into something equivalent to reciprocity. Then you are pointed out that the math doesn’t make sense and your response is, oh come, who cares about math, clearly this is reciprocity and what’s the problem. You are adopting a position that is clearly nonsensical and then pretend it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Well to me this sounds like classic trolling. If it’s not, then you owe us an argument. Frankly if you think that throwing some x/2 and y/2 at us will get us to swallow an otherwise unsupported claim, that is offensive. We are not innumerate around here.

To be as clear as possible: Marx says that in communism, everybody’s needs are taken care of irrespective of how much, or if anything, they are able to contribute to the community. And you call that “a tit-for-tat balance? What drugs are you on?

JH: 83: “The only way for you to deny what I am saying would be to say this: the math here is so nonsensical that no one will ever find ‘from each … to each’ appealing as a kind of tit-for-tat balance. It will only be appealing as a kind of utilitarian ideal, or something. I think, to the contrary, it is appealing as a tit-for-tat balance.”

On Brett being Brett…. With certain notable exceptions, it seems to go something like this:

1) Human beings are an untrustworthy species. (This is a true fact.)
2) People who claim otherwise are fooling themselves, and attempting to fool me, and must be feared.
3) Because they’re fools, and I am not, I’m not bound to respect any of the rules they band together in their ignorance to make.
4) I’ve got a .45 in my nightstand drawer.

Thinking about Phil @108’s example of the succession of rounds, I wonder whether there’s any mileage in introducing the idea of commensality as something that is (at least in the classical societies with which I’m familiar, and such of the anthropological literature that gets cited in those discissions) clearly related to reciprocity in many cases but not at all the same thing. The Spartan sussitia, for example: every Spartiate is expected to contribute to the common meal and every Spartiate receives the same food and drink, and this is a key part of their homosocial and military bonding. Having something exotic and expensive and/or eating far more than one’s fair share simply isn’t done, not as a matter of reciprocity but because it goes against the whole idea of the common meal. Al asking for something expensive – in the knowledge that social convention will probably enable him to get it – is breaching the unwritten conventions of sociability as much as any expectations of reciprocity. Perhaps the ideal of baseline communism is precisely that access to resources should be governed by social and commensal relations rather than economic (i.e. reciprocal) relations…

I think a better argument against the use of the term “communism” is that it is tendentious (John admits this) and too often leads to exactly the argument seen here. I think, at a certain point, one should admit that the associations and rhetoric of a particular term make it too cumbersome and toxic to use effectively. And the desire to ignore such reactions speaks to a destructively combative stance.

I’m not really that bothered, but holding to the principle here involves having the boring argument for no benefit that I can see besides an affirmation of intellectual purity. Its not worth it, for my money.

” And the desire to ignore such reactions speaks to a destructively combative stance.”

True that. We sometimes call it ‘trolling’, no?

Phil 108: “If reciprocity means ‘I give you [what you want], in return you give me [what I want]’”

Add hierarchy to that and you have exploitation, as in Brecht’s poem in which the oxen gets the straw – which is really all he wants – and the farmer gets the corn that the oxen worked so hard to thresh (couldn’t find this online). Sure you can call that reciprocity if you like. Or communism (as BB might, quoting that old Polish saying “Russia gets our coal and in return we give them our textiles”), or you might call it Rumpelstilz. Does it matter?

“evidently you find it utterly implausible that ‘from each … to each’ has any overtones of reciprocity? It specifies a sense in which everyone puts in the same and gets out the same.”

As JHW, Chris Armstrong, Francis Spufford, engels, Minnow, myself and a bunch of others stated, no it doesn’t. It precisely specifically says the opposite of what you claim it does. It’s not just that virtually everybody on this thread disagrees with you, it’s also that you haven’t offered a shred of an argument to support your unusual interpretation, apart from a half-assed attempt to turn it into a math problem which you immediately abandoned when challenged. I won’t respond any more, this is just trolling.

“If two people both try equally hard, but one does 60% of the actual work (due to greater ability), is it in some sense ‘fair’ to divide the fruits of their labor equally,”

Communism doesn’t suggest the fruits will be divided equally, but according to ‘need’, and needs will be very unequal. So neither input nor output are equal. And in a large set of circumstances people will have no abilities but plenty of needs. If I do my nan’s garden because she is stuck in her wheelchair but still needs the garden doing, we have both contributed according to ability and taken according to need, but, really, it doesn’t feel reciprocal. Especially the day after.

The only sense in which something like this can look reciprocal is by virtue of people being in the same society, which averages out “from each” to “to each” over place and time. It works on the assumption that people on average will go through a period of productivity during part of their lives during which they can contribute work to others, and a period of non productivity during which they can live off of the work of others. This is why I previously focussed on membership in the group or society. If you’re not starving in the short term, then what matters is not reciprocity in the short term but whether the group is still likely to be around in the long term. The sense in which a family is “communistic” has nothing to do with absence of hierarchy — there’s almost always plenty of hierarchy — it has to do with families classically being a way of doing this averaging over time (children and grandparents get supported by parents).

“I would suggest to Brett that Libertarianism has the same failings as Communism. That being establishing it on a large scale without resorting to some form of Authoritarianism.”

I don’t advocate libertarianism as some kind of revolutionary change. I’m down on revolutions, they’re almost always 360 degrees.

I think a gradual evolution in that direction, with plenty of time to accomidate changes, and see what works, (And what doesn’t; Just because we’re the wrong species for communism doesn’t mean we’re the right species for libertarianism.) is more in order.

I don’t think this is in order for communism, because we already know how badly it sucks.

I wasn’t intending my comment to be agreement with the idea that “from each, to each” is really reciprocal.

armando, if a family has a member who has some sort of long term, inevitable non productivity then it depends on the average productivity of the family being high enough to support that person. Averages include low or negative numbers, after all. If that person is really too much for the family to support then just about every society has some way of dealing with this — generally emotionally traumatic ways. Families, even extended families, are fairly small so random variation means that this sometimes happens even when society as a whole is doing OK, which it often isn’t. A lot of the push towards communalism is (IMO) risk-averse: based on the desire to have more people to turn to if something goes wrong.

Possibly (if not probably) missing most of the point, but…

(i) Is this not a matter of how one defines the units involve: both A and B put in X effort and receive Y – where X is defined not in terms of energy or time expended, but “the best they could”, and Y is not defined in terms of loaves of bread, pints of beer or money, but “what they need”?

(ii) Isn’t the idea that this *looks* like reciprocity, explicitly on a very superficial reading, precisely so that it may appear as fair to those who might otherwise want to insist on a careful accounting of hours worked and loaves of bread received in return? In other words, communism is not reciprocity in any strict sense, but perhaps it needs to borrow some of reciprocity’s clothing, at least for as long as there are some people who think that those who worked a full day in the vineyard were seriously short-changed. I think this may simply be a restatement of John’s final paragraph in #23…

Neville: Is there any evidence that people were fooled into thinking that the communism Marx was advocating was really just reciprocity?

The Marxian “to each … from each” clearly expresses an ideal that is purely non-reciprocal. I think the confusion comes in when people try to imagine this ideal realized in an actual existing society. We naturally assume that there has to be a degree of reciprocity for any society to work, that there have to be mechanisms to prevent free riding. That’s the point of the examples (beer rounds, potluck and so on) offered above.
I’m not sure what Marx’s response to that would have been but clearly, one can distinguish the ideal he articulated from the messiness of real world social situations.

Btw are we on this thread forbidden to hold two different ideas in our minds at the same time? Why shouldn’t a certain arrangement have elements of both reciprocity and mutualism – see Social Insurance 132. I don’t see why that would be an objection to Graeber, or does he claim that any given society has to be either purely reciprocal or purely communist?

RP: Why would you not call it solidarity. We had that discussion recently, what is it about the idea of solidarity that makes Americans recoil from it? Any German or French would have no difficulty understanding how Social Insurance (which btw includes health and unemployment insurance in addition to retirement) is based on solidarity: the healthy support the sick, the employed support the unemployed, and those of working age support the retired but also their needy widows and orphans and those who can’t work due to disability. There is reciprocity in the sense of “I support the less fortunate in good times and expect to be supported should I fall on hard times myself” but not in the sense of a ledger that has to balance out. And the fact it’s not means-tested is not a bug but a feature, and neither is it US specific – it’s universal wherever social insurance exists.

Maybe I wouldn’t call it solidarity because I don’t really trust most other Americans, or feel that we have similar interests. If you really think that you have solidarity with the other people in your country, why do you think that there is such a disjunction between your apparent politics (just from the impression I get from your comments) and the actual politics of that country? That’s something I don’t get about standard leftism: “Solidarity forever, we are all workers (or whatever)” and “Oh, I wonder why we can never win an election?”

I do think that we can cooperate within a formal, risk-averse structure within which all of the work of coordination is done by a bureaucracy so that we don’t have to actually directly cooperate. Is that solidarity?

Rich @139: But the bureaucracy will have to democratically accountable, right? We’d have to cooperate to the extent of monitoring and controlling it. Otherwise Brett and his friends will — quite justifiably — break out their arsenals.

I agree with you that solidarity is a very scarce and fragile commodity just now. But I’d say that socialism/communism/the good society simply is the practical realization of solidarity. A long way off, I agree. So let’s start talking about how to get there.

RP: I was making a statement about the principle of social insurance being based on solidarity. Not sure how your response is related. Solidarity is certainly more of an aspirational ideal than empirical reality in most places. I notice however that American leftists are reluctant even to make that appeal. I think this is a mistake. Social Security is solidarity-based and it works and Americans stand behind it. Why not use it to make the case that we need more of that.

You know an awful lot about what people “think”, especially the bit that people don’t like it that everyone is covered by SS – really, do you have evidence for that? But you are still missing my point – if you want people to develop a positive attitude to solidarity, maybe one thing to do would be to not treat it as if it were a dirty word. And there is nothing contradictory in noticing that people may be motivated both by altruistic and selfish impulses. Reality is complicated, and again it is not forbidden to hold two different ideas in your mind simultaneously.

“If two people both try equally hard, but one does 60% of the actual work (due to greater ability), is it in some sense ‘fair’ to divide the fruits of their labor equally, not 60/40, on grounds that they both worked equally hard.”

It’s fair (in the sense that there are good reasons to find it a satisfactory outcome), but there’s an obvious sense in which it isn’t reciprocity. So, if we want to associate ‘fairness’ with ‘reciprocity’, we should avoid confusing matters by finding another word to describe the way in which it’s satisfactory – we could say that it’s not ‘fair’ (because different amounts of work done) but it is ‘just’ (because equal levels of commitment & need). Ultimately it depends whether you want to think clearly or not.

PPS Perhaps the point of the OP is just to draw attention to an interesting way of not thinking clearly. In which case, never mind.

After reading 151, I incline to the view that John Holbo is trolling. Unless “rhetorically balanced” equates to balanced in whatever other sense one chooses. Look! I said “neither fish nor fowl”, so I believe in capitalism!

The pub round is not the example. Take a bunch of people out for a long walk. They notice that their water needs replenishing. The most able-bodied and energetic immediately volunteer to fetch water from the spring at the bottom of the hill. When it arrives, the children and those visibly suffering from thirst get the most. In what sense is this reciprocity? That some amount of water was obtained and the same amount drunk is not evidence of anything about the relations among the people involved.

I’ll start with a concession, which is also a bit of a confession. I have puzzled and struggled through Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics on a _lot_ of occasions. And that shit about retributive justice and getting everything back in measure—it just makes no sense to me. I mean, I can get with a really abstracted notion of “balance” in terms of which justice is cashed out, but both the scales of justice image and Aristotle seem to be after something much more, I don’t know, quantitative seeming. And when Aristotle is on about something I just don’t get, I don’t hold it against Aristotle, I hold it against me. All of which by way of saying, there’s clearly a widely-felt intuition re justice-fairness-equality of measure, which I simply don’t share.

That said, I’m not really sure how much this is helping your case either. Two (related) points:

(1) I don’t think the ‘rough’ vs. ‘exact’ exchange is helping at all. It makes sense of speak of ‘rough’ exchange or rough measurements when, e.g., our tools aren’t up to the task of delivering precise measurements. It doesn’t make any sense to talk of rough exchange if the other person is arguing that the things in question are incommensurable. Which is what I was, and am, saying.

(2) More importantly, the rough exchange business makes a total hash of the intuition behind Aristotelian/scales of justice conception. Look, it’s not as if what you need for justice is to get the scales kinda sorta close to even. That seems like a total miscarriage of justice. If you buy this model at all, then you need get the scales well fucking even! Aristotle’s on about this at length—you need to get the measures perfectly back in balance for justice. Now again, you need to cash out what perfect balance or equality amounts to given that you’re dealing with not obviously commensurable quantities, but that the balance needs to be perfect and not simply some rough approximation can’t possibly be in dispute.

So it seems to me that if you want to go this fairness implies reciprocity implies exchange route, and use the scales of justice as a metaphor, then you really can’t stop short of measurement. The kind of notion of reciprocity you want makes no sense without it. (And talking about rough reciprocity just seems to be confusing things rather than helping.)

It says everyone pays in the same, according to a scale of ability, and gets out the same, according to a scale of need. That no one really understands such a ‘scale’, on reflection, is neither here nor there.

JH – we’re agreed that, in real social interactions, people work on a sliding scale between “things are OK if everyone puts in what they can and gets what they want” and “things are OK if everyone puts in and gets equal measurable amounts”, so that’s progress. What continues to baffle me is why you want to call both these things the same name. As I said above, the argument seems to boil down to “yes, but if you use these words this discussion gets much more confusing!”.

Here’s a thought: what if the home of reciprocity is the exchange between two strangers (who don’t share longer-term goals and don’t have any reason to trust each other), while the home of ‘baseline communism’ is the group operating as a group. The difference between the two is then in the (elided!) nouns – reciprocity says ‘Each [independent individual] gets the same value [from the other individual] for what s/he puts in [as individual 2 gets from him/her]’; BC says ‘from each [member of the group] [to the group] according to his/her abilities, to each [member of the group] [from the group] according to his/her needs’. Which would also clarify the code-switching that goes on. BC works when everyone acts as part of a group: when one person defects the other members of the group can reasonably start treating him/her as an independent individual, to be dealt with through norms of distrust and reciprocity. Conversely, reciprocity works when everyone’s out for their own ends; when people feel they’re part of a group with its own overriding purpose (e.g. for everyone to have a good night out), people can go up the scale to BC.

JH

It’s all mixed up. But the Good Samaritan was not looking for a reward, and the point of the parable is not that you should do good because what goes around will come around, but that you should just do good (random kindness and pointless acts of beauty). Do people actually do this? Yes, lots. In families, at small parties, when getting together to make music or in other crafts, very often they do it really intensely when the times are hardest (bands of brothers: greater love hath no man…). But when we start thinking about it, this disappears from view. Because the very nature of the motive precludes explanation: they did it just because! So we reach for reciprocity, or exchange, or hierarchy. Because these explain things. But it’s there nonetheless.

I think you’ve finally gotten around to the core of my point: Communal arrangements don’t scale, and communism is not communal arrangements writ large for precisely this reason. It can’t be communal relations writ large, because communal relations work best when they’re voluntary, and people do not voluntarily engage in communal relations except in small groups where everybody loves each other, or share some other over-riding common goal.

Because of this, communism, as distinct from communal relations, always requires massive levels of coercion. Always. And referring to the small scale communal relations of the family as “communism” is just an effort to obscure this, and pretend you could have a communism which wasn’t a horror.

No, that’s not an argument against positive change being possible, just against the idea that trying to extend a particular type of relationship that only works on a small scale to a whole society could ever work.

It isn’t an accident that communism keeps ending up at the gulag. It’s inherent in the mismatch between communism and human nature, which is huge. We should accept this, and move on, not keep trying something doomed to terrifying failures.

There’s going to be some mismatch between any system for organizing large scale society and human nature, because humans did not evolve in large scale societies. The best you can do is minimize the mismatch, and provide mechanisms for reducing the negative consequences of it.

Democracy is such a mechanism. Not a phenomenally successful mechanism, but coupled with constitutionally limited government, it’s the best mechanism we’ve found so far, because to a significant extent it works with human nature, not against it. It’s biggest problem is really just the tendency for people to try to defeat the limits, not realizing how important they are. (Damn fuses keep blowing, let’s get rid of them!)

I wonder about anybody who can pleasantly, academically, discuss an ideology that keeps ending up with mass murder. I mean, you guys are no particular threat to anybody so long as you don’t attempt practical applications, but, still.

The application to Second Amendment absolutism is left as an exercise for the reader.

I mean it’s not exactly a secret that you’ve explicitly said that the occasional pile of two dozen dead schoolchildren is simply the cost of doing business. Oh, you’ll make the infrequent feint towards, “Maybe something about mental health but we shouldn’t actually DO anything because OMG coercion,” and also the patently stupid idea of changing things from a slaughter to a shootout by amateurs with children in the crossfire. But still.

Groups hold together not just because of BC but because of ties of reciprocity, knitting the group together. Also, it isn’t the case that reciprocity is a distinguishing characteristic of relationships between strangers. Hostility or non-relation is an equally common thing to find.

On the last point, where there’s no relationship (or a hostile one) between two strangers, there’s nothing much to talk about. As for groups holding together because of ties of reciprocity – between whom and whom? If one party is ‘the group of which the individual is a member’, that strikes me as a very different relationship from the reciprocity which may obtain between two individuals – so different that it deserves a different name.

Let me go to a three-term puzzle, which may make things worse. But there’s always hope.

Exchange – Reciprocity – Baseline Communism (BC)

OK. Graeber, whom you started with, had something called ‘reciprocity’ (with exchange-like features), something called ‘baseline communism’ and something called ‘hierarchy’, and, er, that’s it; he didn’t concern himself with the difference between exchange and reciprocity, and it could be argued that he didn’t need to, as long as he defined his terms distinctly enough from one another (which AFAICS he did).

Is your argument that Graeber was actually talking about exchange, and that real-world reciprocity is a hybrid beast that shades off into exchange on one side and BC on the other? If so I’d heartily agree, as it’s the point I’ve been making (albeit without using the same nouns).

Nice work, Brett. There was a small but still worrying risk of a substantive discussion of communism getting started here, but fortunately you averted it. Well done.

Brett@183: [T]rying to extend a particular type of relationship that only works on a small scale to a whole society could [never] work. … There’s going to be some mismatch between any system for organizing large scale society and human nature, because humans did not evolve in large scale societies. The best you can do is minimize the mismatch, and provide mechanisms for reducing the negative consequences of it.

Must disagree with my respected fellow leftists: I think Brett has here articulated the most plausible objection against communism with much cogency. The question for us is precisely, as he says, how to scale up the generosity, trust, forbearance, etc that sometimes characterize families or small voluntary communities to much larger societies. Of course his usefulness turns into mischievousness when he stubbornly exists that this will “never” be possible, even though large societies have only existed for a few centuries and we have (barring nuclear or environmental catastrophe) countless millennia ahead. But his skepticism is bracing.

His reference to evolution and “human nature” is kind of threadbare. There’s a lot of work on altruism currently going on among evolutionary biologists and others (eg, Samuel Bowles) that seems to leave the question of how it evolved and how far it can scale wide open at the moment. Equally important, there’s culture. Gene-culture interaction is another wide-open field of theoretical inquiry at the moment.

Besides, you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to see that vast changes in social life and moral psychology have occurred over the course of modernity. Social/cultural evolution, for better and worse, is obvious. Patterns of literacy, sexuality, consumption, exchange, geographical mobility, and many other things have changed drastically. The idea that we’ll always be as mistrustful of everyone beyond our kin group as Paleolithic tribespeople or contemporary libertarians is, to put it mildly, a large and invidious assumption.

So how do we scale up solidarity? I don’t see any other way than the tried-and-true gradualist methods of persuasion, organization, and nonviolent resistance. Information technology, to the extent it doesn’t idiotize us, can be a great help; and other kinds of technology, democratically controlled, can greatly reduce the scarcity that makes conflict and possessive individualism seem inevitable.

Brett is right about one thing: it’s not going to happen soon. But to write off all possibility of significant moral progress forever because human nature is willfully obtuse.

Sorry: “stubbornly insists …”

“Lenin, by the way, is totally confused on this point. Not just about the practical difficulties. But also about what he is asking for. He thinks he’s against fairness, because he’s against bourgeois morality, but he misses that there is such a thing as believing in fairness without buying into the sort of bourgeois morality he rejects.”

I think it’s exactly the opposite, Lenin is not confused, he’s exactly right.

This whole discussion – reciprocity, how much one contributes and how much one takes away – is suffering from being held within the bourgeois mindset: ‘how much am I going to have to pay for this’?

What you have to do, I think, is to move into a completely different plain, where the concept of ‘reciprocity’ simply doesn’t exist. At the minimum it’s very hard, perhaps impossible. But maybe it is possible, in one form or another. I used to know a hippie guy who had this kind of mentality.

A fundamental aspect of human thought, at this stage in our evolution, is a kind of ‘selective memory.’ We systematically forget inconvenient, unflattering, unpleasant events. So our self-evaluations are often biased and faulty. When I think about my golf game I think about my *best* rounds, my *best* shots, etc. “That’s the sort of golfer I am!” I say to myself. So I wish.

I think a basic problem for utopianism is that it’s based on a similar selective memory of human capacity. True, humans can be extraordinarily generous & kind. But that isn’t the rule. At this stage of development we are mostly unanimous in insisting on the right either to give undesirables the boot from our camping clubs or the freedom to leave our club in search of a more congenial one.

Conjuring up social systems prematurely based on unrealistic assessments of our capacity is potentially harmful. The bridge made of spaghetti might not stand.

geo @ 197

Brett’s a worthy enough adversary, with occasional moments of real clarity, but he does cherish his animosities, and as often as not they seem to goad him into saying amazingly stupid things. This, I think, is one of those occasions. Given the evidence of history, he can hardly be as confident as he claims that we’ll always be what we were meant to be, i.e. tribal, stingy, and murderous. Saying such things in this forum, of all places, sounds to me more like a plea for sympathy than a battle cry. Hard to tell, with all the martial trumpeting that accompanies it, but I think you’re right to give him the benefit of the doubt.

engels: “Supposing for the sake argument you are right, would it not perhaps be worthwhile just once to have a thread where people could discuss what communism is, without spending most of the discussion on the question of whether or not it ‘literally, piles up skulls’?”

Because leftists in the 20th century just didn’t do this enough. It must be Brett that’s stopping us from doing it now.

If communism piles up skills

Wait, what?

I find it rather interesting that, here and in the dreaded pirate Roberts thread, different people are arguing against society-wide communism or stateless markets making basically the same point: people don’t cooperate in good faith except in very tiny groups.

– – – – – Brett Bellmore 02.22.15 at 10:18 pm
Morally speaking, I think that is about what you set out to do – – – – –

A theory which apparently does not apply to Brett Bellmore’s strong advocacy of birtherism.

The loss of the RBC comments database was not a big thing in the scope of the world, but it did take away the ability to quote from 10 years of BB defending numerous morally indefensible hard right wing pet rocks. Mitt Romney as the victim in the physical abuse of a fellow high school student anyone? Brett Bellmore provided the argument. To take “pile of skulls” seriously from a person who defended the handgun fetish the day after Sandy Hook is not required.

Yes, Brett, and equally it’s morally reprehensible to attempt a theoretical discussion of liberalism without mentioning the Great Depression, or a passage from the Bible without constantly shouting “Inquisition! Crusades! Paedophile priests!”

I do think that Brett gets to the heart of the problem with communism though, that it completly skews individuals incentives (to concentrate and excel at a few specific, marketable area of competence ), and they just end up piling up skills.

Graeber’s set of principles “communism, exchange, hierarchy” sounds like a partial transmutation of Karl Polanyi’s three possible patterns,”redistribution, reciprocity, exchange”:

Reciprocity: “movement between correlative points of symmetrical groupings”
Redistribution: “appropriational movements toward a center and out of it again”
Exchange: “vice versa movements taking place as between hands under a market system”

They can exist “side by side on different levels and on different sectors of the economy.”

–Quotations from Trade and Market in the Early Empires, p. 250 (1957)

Polanyi defined these in an explicitly spatial or geometric way: redistribution depends upon “centricity”, reciprocity depends upon “symmetry”, and market exchange may occur between any two points whatsoever; it is atomistic and disembedded. Remember, Polanyi was attempting to defend his thesis that the economy had been determined in the past by social relations of symmetries and centricities: the economy had been embedded. The essence of The Great Transformation is that the economy is now completely disembedded from those old relations, by the market system.

Polanyi would have classified communism as a form of redistribution: if it requires centricity, i.e. goes into, then comes back out of, a center (e.g. a central government).

But what did Polanyi mean by reciprocity between symmetries? It is very specific, and covers a huge set of transactions reported in the ethnography. It is NOT gifting or communism.

Polanyi was thinking of symmetries like extended family lineages, which have the same structure, and therefore correlative points. A typical example of reciprocity is the “brideprice”, in which a marriage between two clans would cause the bride to pass into the groom’s lineage (in a patrilineal tribe), and the groom’s uncles would, in turn, present cattle to the bride’s uncles (and not to the bride’s parents. This example is from reports of the Nuer tribe.) The idea is that the cattle, a prized productive possession, are to compensate for her clan’s loss of her fertility. And this pattern is repeated throughout the tribe, at every marriage, so the cattle get around.

Dowry is another example, in societies where all the children of parents, i.e. both males and females, would receive a parental inheritance, so the bride’s inheritance is forwarded along with her, at the time of her marriage.

I think that a lot of economic anthropologists have adopted Polanyi’s typology of transactions, without understanding that “reciprocity” is a very specific idea. It is not communism.

“As I say upthread, it is obviously cheeky of Graeber to use the term ‘communism’, where a term like ‘mutualism’ might have not caused Brett’s head to asplode or anon to get confused; and it is cheeky to use the revolutionary slogan to describe what Graeber takes to be actually existing relations. Nevertheless, his point – rightly or wrongly – is to assert that a relation that we think of as somewhere over the Marxist-Leninist rainbow exists right now, in small ways. ”

He’s wrong. Mutualism isn’t particularly related to communism and neither is the family.

And if he wants to provoke a useful examination of the concept, calling it ‘communism’ is stupid. It isn’t cheeky. It is ‘preaching to the choir’ in absolutely every ugly sense of the fundamentalist Baptist metaphor. It involves knowing that your in group will think it cute. It involves knowing that it will strengthen your in group’s sense of persecution. It involves knowing that the out group will be annoyed or infuriated by it. It is exactly the opposite of trying to provoke thought for the in group (the choir is merely expected to say “AMEN”) and it isn’t even remotely trying to provoke thought for the out group.

“And there are certainly enough contemporaneous blog comments from that time at other sites to establish quite clearly that I was never a “birther”, merely somebody who thought they deserved to lose in a court of law, not the editorial page of the NYT.”

If a judge dismisses your case as frivolous, didn’t you ‘lose in a court of law’?

John, I think you are right. The problem for me is in distinguishing the three, “communism, exchange and hierarchy”. How would Graeber, or anyone, actuate communism? If it is through a central redistribution, then that is a one-step hierarchy. If there is a bureaucracy, it is probably more than one-step. If by “hierarchy” he means power-relation, then that also applies to “exchange”, if money is involved. And how would he categorize brideprice?

Perhaps Graeber wants to define them by the actuating intentionality: “communism” is offered to the need of the receiver; “hierarchy” demands tribute for the receiver; and”exchange” is a two-way swap between, a big catch-all category. Perhaps this is to establish the premises for the thesis of the psychological conditions of debt. It might lead somewhere, but I wish he had used different terms.

230 seems an appropriate hymn to conclude what has indeed been a confusing thread. As a recessional, may I suggest this:

http://youtu.be/Z_1LfT1MvzI?list=RDZ_1LfT1MvzI

Well, I screwed that up. Twice, no less. Just imagine Billie Holiday singing God Bless the Child

Mattski, good point, but theory is a part of practice.

“If a judge dismisses your case as frivolous, didn’t you ‘lose in a court of law’?”

If the judge sticks his fingers in his ears and goes “Neener, neener” when you start to argue your case, I suppose in some sense you “lose in a court of law”. It’s not the sense I meant.

I meant that they were entitled to have a hearing on the merits, and lose because Obama was, in fact, as demonstrated by the best available evidence, (Not just the evidence Obama felt like producing.) born in the US. And, as it happens, as soon as a judge actually scheduled a hearing on the merits, Obama contacted the Hawaian government, and the supposedly illegal to produce original birth certificate was produced.

If anything was frivolous, if was the several years Obama spent fighting the production of that document in court. Although I suspect it was only frivolous in the sense a red herring is frivolous; It did keep some fairly tenacious enemies focused on a topic where he knew they couldn’t find anything.

In any event I am not, and never have been a “birther”, and the people accusing me of that certainly know as much.

John, just out of interest, would you also claim that Nozick’s alternative slogan ‘from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen’ expresses ‘reciprocity’? (Because that seems to me even more implausible than your argument above…)

engels: “Serious question, Rich: in what sense are you am anarchist rather than a liberal?”

Your ideology would make you unable to understand any serious answer I might give. But what makes you think that the linked article shows that Graeber is a revolutionary? He talks about revolutionary ideas sweeping the globe: so does everybody. What does he actually recommend doing in that article?

Whoa, lots more links. Since the same comment that I made that started this line of questioning mentioned prefigurative politics, you might think that I’m familiar with all this. I also link to a series of blog posts that I wrote about Occupy here all the time, to the point where I now treat such a link as a kind of joke: should I link to them again?

Graeber can call going out for a family picnic communism, he can also call the kind of activity that he recommends revolutionary if he wants to.

I meant “What does he actually recommend doing in that article?” to be a rhetorical question.

You know, the “straw-man ‘storming the Bastille’ sense” is pretty much what people will understand you to be saying if you say you’re a revolutionary. Maybe 99% of the people will understand the word as having that meaning. Graeber is trying to redefine words: that’s appropriate to what he does as an ideologist. Other people may find that they prefer not to try to redefine words.

Here’s a somewhat more serious answer to engels’ question: in all my life as an adult I’ve been doing similar kinds of activities: making things intended to let people work communally (starting with a recycling center that produced real income that let people support themselves through college, and was run completely by us as students) and protesting the wholesale failures of larger society (such as by participating in anti-war demonstrations). Back when I was a liberal, tiresome people used to show up and tell us that we’d never get anywhere through these means: that we had to be revolutionaries and overthrow the government. Now that I’m an anarchist, it appears that tiresome people will show up to say that all of those demonstrations and so on are retrospectively declared to have caused a world revolution after all, and that only a liberal would fail to see that we’d been revolutionaries all along.

‘the left seems unwilling to make the same sort of categorical break with [C]ommunism’

Maybe it’s because despite years of unremitting right-wing propaganda they don’t see Communism and Nazism as equivalent? Just thinking out loud here

doh. “that mutualism can be governed solely by mutualism” should read “that society can operate solely by mutualism”

@engels

>Maybe it’s because despite years of unremitting right-wing propaganda they don’t see Communism and Nazism as equivalent? Just thinking out loud here

And that’s precisely the problem. You don’t think communism is as bad, and you should. Whitaker Chambers was right, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies. Conquest was right that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler, and that his methods were not a perversion of Lenin, but the standard result of communist revolution. the Left needs to own up to its past, admit what it did, and hopefully, learn from it.

‘You don’t think [C]ommunism is bad, and you should’

Nope- I think it was bad, but not comparable to Nazism (for the reason John states among others).

Brett,

“I think Ze has nailed our position, the more concise formulation of which is, “Wonderful theory, wrong species.”

Why do we get so emotional about it? Because of the damned piles of skulls, that’s why. How can you NOT get emotional about people promoting an ideology that, literally, piles up skulls?”

Why not take as given that other people on this site might be coming from a different cultural background than yourself? Not everyone freaks out upon seeing the word Communism. My mother belonged to a couple of French communes, and could fill you in at length on the positives and negatives thereof. You seem to regard ‘Communism’ as synonymous with a whole bunch of things, that, plainly, are not the sense being used in this thread. (Not unique to ‘communism’ – things like ‘democracy’ and ‘libertarianism’ also seem to mean radically different things depending on the speaker.) But no one is obliged to cede you the vocabulary.

Granted, the ideals of “communalism” or whatever you want to call it appear to function poorly as the organizing principle for a modern state. If you actually wanted to construct an intellectual argument against it, you could compare death tolls from countries which had “Communist” revolutions to those from other countries. To be fair, you should probably limit the control group to other authoritarian regimes with nearby external enemies… even then, Cambodia would probably seal your case. But so far, you haven’t bothered to make or cite any case at all.

Brett, politics and political systems are not new. “Communism” gave the theocracy a new coat of paint. Theocracy has some pretty grim characteristics to start with. The more modern variant, with improved communications and book-keeping, allowed the state to actually direct the economy – with even worse results. But probably a great system for sapient ants…

On some levels, political “libertarianism” seems even more dubious. Please spare me arguments along the lines of “it’s never really been tried yet” – many of the same ideals were fundamental to the Roman republic… History includes a long, long, list of cases since then where some state collapsed – yet the absence of state, somehow, never led to anything much resembling the libertarian paradise. Nor have I ever met a human who would function comfortably within this mythic realm (possibly okay for sapient tigers?).

In a curious way, this might be an advantage. We notice the arguments which require that people stop acting like people, and aren’t seduced into trying it out as the organizing principle of society. So, no mountains of skulls. (As for whether those ideas ever made some state weaker than it should otherwise have been, paving the way to some historic atrocity – that sort of impact is impossible to assess.) I have a few acquaintances who probably could make a go of communalism – lovely people, now if only they comprised 99% of the population… That way lies Brave New World, or possibly yet another mountain of skulls.

So, perhaps a little more respect for communalist ideals? I can believe they represent a valid criticism of the excesses of more dominant paradigms, without thinking they should be taken as the model for the larger state. Much like many of your ideals.

Well, this went predictably south. (But it took a while!)

Going back a bit, it seems that JH has adopted the sort of position I was urging him to. (I think! Cf. 154, 161, 175, 191, 194, and more around there.) Is this right, JH? Earlier, you wanted to hold on to a link between reciprocity and exchange, but balked at an explicit suggestion of mine that exchange implies measurement.

Now it seems your position can be cast as follows: reciprocity might involve exchange or it might not. When it does involve exchange, it doesn’t look much like baseline communism. But at other times it looks a lot like baseline communism, but then it doesn’t involve exchange. And finally, it’s kinda hard to tell one from the other. I would take issue with the last, but let’s bracket that for a second. Given the bracketing doesn’t your position resolve into something very much like Phil’s “reciprocity-1 and reciprocity-2” (@108). Or at least, can’t it simply resolve into something like that? If not, why not?

JH@253: communism is a beautiful dream, but it doesn’t scale

Nearly everyone on this thread seems to take this for granted — at least I don’t remember having seen much argument to that effect, beyond “Well, it’s obvious you can’t care about people you don’t know.” I tried to offer some arguments to the contrary @197, hoping for counter-argument, but no takers. Maybe this will elicit some: would anyone like to explain why the cooperative and egalitarian societies depicted in, say, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris’s News from Nowhere, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia are impossible in principle and forever?

“Communism doesn’t scale” is true of systems of production, or indeed any form of organisation that depends on timely, predictable coordinated action. That does not mean that it cannot involve very large numbers in other spheres. Many of the routines of everyday life in any large metropolis, for example, would be impossible without spontaneous adjustment without regard for reciprocity, among total strangers (think of a crowded sidewalk, or a busy pedestrian crossing, or a subway platform). This is not an innate human capacity; it has been built over time.

@geo:

Nearly everyone on this thread seems to take this for granted — at least I don’t remember having seen much argument to that effect, beyond “Well, it’s obvious you can’t care about people you don’t know.”

For the purposes of this thread/argument, I remain agnostic about whether communism can scale. But—assuming that communism means some sort of social order that’s governed neither by market exchange nor by social hierarchies—this already seems to presume too much. At least, I don’t see why it’s a requirement for communism in the above sense scaling that one would have to care about people one doesn’t know, for most recognizable senses of “caring”.

@Holbo:

I still balk at the proposition that exchange requires measurement. I don’t see why it has to.

Exchange implies that the things exchanged are commensurable. In that sense, it implies (the possibility of) measurement. If you’re dealing with incommensurable quantities (in a very loose sense of “quantities”), then I fail to see why one would think that what you’ve got is exchange vs. something quite else.

(And justice is the weird case here precisely because it seems to me obvious that one’s not dealing with commensurable quantities [unless you’re literally going eye-for-an-eye] whereas Aristotle e.g. clearly thinks otherwise and the scales of justice metaphor clearly implies otherwise.)

“Communism can scale” is one of the ideas that historically got communism into trouble. Why should you want it to scale? What are the political controls that keep scaled-up communism from going bad? How do you keep communism from turning into hierarchy as it scales up? Most anarchist writers that I’ve read suggest some kind of federative process, in which you have communism or whatever you want to call it within small, local groups, but the people within these groups relate to each other in a different way than the groups relate to each other.

@John Holbo

Of course the dream was beautiful. Happy Aryans families tending farms on the Russian steppe, capital and labor both equally subordinated to the greater good of society, all working together for the greater glory of the people and state, Germany taking up its rightful place among the great nations of the world. Of course, none of it would have worked out as planned, but Hitler didn’t run on “we’re going murder a lot of people and lose a war”

>I don’t see a lot of evidence that the Left has blinders about the horrors of Stalinism, for example.

You don’t get a lot of out and out stalinists these days (though you do get a lot of people who quote out and out stalinists). What you get is people who can’t help saying “but”, as in, “Well of course Stalin was bad, but he did industrialize Russia.” No one says but about Hitler.

>You say Whitaker Chambers was right, but I don’t see a lot of people saying ‘Chambers Lied. The Rosenbergs died. Vote Hilary.’ Right?

During the cold war, the innocence of the rosenbergs, and other spies, was vigorously defended by the left. It wasn’t until the fall of the USSR and the opening of the soviet archives that this stopped, though mccarthyite remains an important political insult on the left to this day.

>The idea that the right is free of any associations with anything bad is a bit of a conservative fixation, at present – and, frequently, through history.

I would say that most people are of the vague opinion that their tribe is the source of all hope and light in the universe, and that the other fellow’s tribe are trying to ruin everything. But as to the more general assertion that the right fails to learn from its past, I find that extremely hard to credit, at least in the US. This is not because people on the right are clever or more virtuous than those on the left, but because the post ww2 American right has mostly been about fighting a rearguard action whatever progressive scheme was in vogue at the moment. Its ideology, to the extent it has any, is largely burkean. Sure, you have some intellectuals like Friedman flitting about the edges with serious ideologies, but in practice they served mostly as excuse generators for politicians who want to maintain the status quo.

> By contrast, the right-wing is currently up in arms about the very notion that the Crusades were a bad thing.

No, it isn’t. they are up in arms about the notion that their president thinks that he should call out the crusades as religious fanaticism, but not ISIS.

But even if you were correct that some on the right think the crusades weren’t so bad, what of it? No one, as far as I know, is actually calling for a new crusade. People on the left, people in this thread, are calling for Marxist governments.

> Eliminating lesser peoples, pushing them off their land to make room for the Master Race?

You mean like how Marx talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat “sweeping away” counter revolutionary elements of society and social liquidation?

>Mutualism and individual self-fulfillment for all sounds good to me, in the abstract. Racist tribalism and severely hierarchical dominance relations, as the root of social organization, not so much. Does your mileage differ?

Not so much, but I fail to see how that matters. Say I grant that Nazism, if not all fascism, is just as bad in theory as it was in practice. I don’t live in theory, I do live in practice, and I care far more about the practical results that follow attempts to implement than how pretty the theoretical end was. If by some bizarre twist of history Hitler’s regime had produced peace, prosperity and racial tolerance, I’d say we should all start reading mein kampf, and try to figure out what we can learn from those mad rantings.

And, of course, there were plenty of fascists that weren’t hitler and didn’t have his racial obsessions, just nationalist aspirations and visions of a unified, modern country working for the common good of all ensconced in a benevolent hierarchy that promoted the good and punished the bad. Lots of people like the idea of being a player on a team, even if they know they won’t be the captain. If they didn’t fascism would never have been good politics.

>Actually, I think it is far more likely that Republicans will call for a new crusading spirit, against Islam, than that Democrats will call for Marxism. Don’t you?

No. There were a couple months in 2003 when that looked like a possibility, but even there that impulse was largely the result of a bunch of ex-marxists turned crusading conservatives, not typical members of the red tribe. American crusading zeal, be it inwardly or outwardly directed, is a largely left wing phenomenon. The right is perfectly willing to fight to “defend” the US, and it’s quite willing to take an extremely aggressive definition of defense, but at the end of the day, a crusade ostensibly about saving the souls of the people you’re fighting. The ur-idea of american conservatism has always been “America is the shining city upon a hill, and our duty is to defend it.”

>Do you really maintain that this was a noble dream, and it only went bad when they unwisely tried to scale it up, past the point where it could work ok?

Fascism failed because it was conquered militarily. Had it not been conquered, it still would have failed, but not really because of scale. Frankly, the idea of a small scale fascist community doesn’t really make sense because fascism is all about the question of how you organize society on a big, industrial scale. Hierarchy can scale really well, the problem it faces is information processing. Big hierarchical systems can do extremely impressive things, but need specific, measurable directions. If you want to maximize the number of widgets a factory produces, they’re fantastic. But if you want to maximize the economic output of a country, you need a subtler system. Fascist central planners ran into the same problems that socialist ones did.

“To me the dream of communism is a lot more congenial…”

Not to me. Not even particularly on the small scale. The dreams of both communism and fascism involve way too much of humanity as conformist little ants. There is a reason why gays and Jews get killed by both groups–they don’t fit perfectly in to all the little plans. (I’m perfectly aware that other non-communist, non-fascist hyper-conformist groups also like to kill gays and Jews).

I think a few key words apply to mutualistic communities that don’t come into ‘communist’ understandings: compassion, charity, tolerance.

Take the gay community in the years when about 1/4 of us were dying of AIDS: Graeber might call it ‘communist’, but it actually centered on a bunch of things that don’t seem to enter much into his equations.

Compassion–knowing that a man you loved had been rejected by his parents and siblings, and didn’t want to die alone.

Charity–seeing that asshole preachers would denounce him at the hospital, but knowing that someone needed to give him soup.

Tolerance–knowing that the big queen or the scary leatherman both could work together, because we had to but also because we could see the innate humanness in each other.

One of the reasons I have trouble with the communist label is it sucks all of the really important connections right out of everything and tries to replace it with a mechanistic monstrosity.

During the cold war, the innocence of the [R]osenbergs, and other spies, was vigorously defended by the left.

FWIW, the archival records shows no credible involvment of Ethel Rosenberg, though she was aware of her husband espionage activities, as her brother admitted fabricating all apparent evidence to the contrary (with the encouragement of the prosecution, according to him). This, moreover, was probably known to Juge Kaufman at the time of her conviction. There are several credible independent sources showing that Julius Rosenberg did transmit valuable information to the Soviet Union, but not necessarily about the specifics of the atomic bomb, so even his sentence was probably too harsh (especially compared to other atom spies).

Anyhow, Stalin was evil and communist governments working within the bounds of a healthy democracy have existed, currently exist and have a decent, though not impressive, track record at the local level.

Fat fingers strike again. But point is, maybe you should suspect that anti-comunists demonstrated good judgement, and start doubting your own, if a theory that goes so bad sounds good to you.

Nothing is wrong with peace, love, and understanding, but after the 20th century, maybe anyone who thinks they have anything to do with communism should have figured out they were to gullible to be theorizing about politics. Shouldn’t whether your intuitions jibe with real world outcomes influence your confidence in your own judgement?

No, the evidence of your bad judgement is that you think communism has anything to do with any of those things.

“Freedom” … “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. Happy?

The contention of some people here (Cassander, Sebastian, Brett) seems to be that market capitalism is NOT an “enforced social norm”; is without “ugly conformist streaks”; does not “sort the worthy from the unworthy as one of the most important tasks”, and so on.

This will get you into more intellectual and emotional troubles. I suppose you could fall back upon the contention that it is a matter of degree, but then, look at what is happening.

In reality, after increasing inequality for about 40 years, this whole system recently caused itself to have a complete financial crash, followed by a bailout which protected the general structure of the highest levels of capital ownership, followed by a huge recession in which austerity programs were enacted to whip the lesser mortals back into line.

There are two different scandals here, a first-rate intellectual scandal, plus a disastrous immorality. Both are revealed to be close to the heart of the system, and so far, they are not brought to justice.

Were people murdered? Well not en masse, but we know that livelihoods have been ended, lifetime earnings permanently foreshortened, the US suicide rate has risen steadily since 2006.

Is this a necessary consequence of capitalism, or unnecessary? And if unnecessary, how would you propose to fix it?

“I say that communists are in favor of these things, but fail to realize them in practice. You say that communists are not in favor of these things, even in principle (I take it.)”

I don’t want to get in the middle of a spat, but I think you could fairly argue that many early 20th century fascists also believed in those things. They just disagreed what needed to be done to achieve them. Hitler thought the Jews had to be eradicated, Lenin thought it was the bourgeosie. Neither of them argued publicly that their enemy should be murdered, but both of them adopted that policy behind the scenes.

I don’t think Sebastian is going to find that quote from Marx, because I doubt if it exists. The direct quotes from Marx and Engels on authority, discipline and so on that I’ve seen generally have to do with the Marx/Bakunin conflict, especially over Spain, and are usually from letters, minor essays, etc. It’s rather as if someone quoted from a thread here centuries later as evidence of considered political opinions. There are bits and pieces of poorly attributed quotes about how are you going to run a Barcelona factory without discipline that anarchists gleefully seize on because later on the workers ran the Barcelona factories without discipline, but this doesn’t amount to what Sebastian wants.

Bruce Wilder has already provided the core quote, though. Marx put the moment for communism off to the future and was quite scornful about the socialists who thought they could start it, if only at a small scale, immediately. That’s why I still think that geo’s position — the big, happy family of socialism, everyone dreaming in their own way about the same kind of basic communism — doesn’t really take Marx seriously.

Oh for crying out loud. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was a tasteless joke that became much less funny when Lenin was done with it, but it was a joke. If you aren’t able to see the overt irony of referring to a group large enough to contain every single wage laborer as “a dictator”–the logical impossibility of the term taken literally–then you could at least read the damn passage, where Marx makes the irony clear by saying it’s the opposite of capitalism, which is a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” Lenin, of course, didn’t get the joke, since he equated the proletariat with the communist party. And a party can, indeed, be a dictator.

The punchline is that capitalism is a “dictatorship.” So, you can either choose to insist “dictatorship” holds its narrow ordinary usage, in which you must also accept that capitalism is a dictatorship, or you must accept it has a very broad, primarily ironic usage, in which case you must acknowledge that Marx’s meaning is not as diabolical as you wish it were. His “dictatorship” is no more literally one than capitalism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is, in simplest form, a state in which those who were once wealth-generating non-laboring property owners have no political power whatsoever. If you’d like a historical analogue: it’s a semi-democracy just like America was in principle during slavery and until women’s sufferage: democracy for some, not all.

It is a contradictory state, to be sure: a small group’s freedom is absolutely reduced to zero. But for the remaining majority–again, every single wage-laborer–freedom would radically expanded, a much more *democratic* society, since the majority of the people (and “the people” in democracy is *always* only that) would finally have real rather than abstract political power.

If you’d like to contrast that theoretical (intended) “dictatorship” unfavorably to any historically existing “democracy,” be my guest. But you might start here: http://scholar.princeton.edu/mgilens/pages/research

You’re of course welcome to argue that there’s no way to effect a dictatorship of the proletariat except Lenin’s way. But that’s not the argument, the argument is about what Marx intended, not the feasibility.

“War and struggle isn’t a necessary evil, for Hitler, as it is for communists.”

But Hitler said it was. Like Lenin did. Of course, it was a virtue to be warlike (as it was for the Bolsheviks) but the fascist claim was that they were peaceable so long as elements like the Bolsheviks and Jews didn’t force them into war and they got their land back.

I agree with your general point but I don’t think it is so easy to make the distinction you want. Both were peaceable utopias on paper, as it were, and to those who were temperamentally inclined that way, and both proclaimed that the blood of some baddies would have to spilt to get there.

“And the exact same thing is true of the communist dream. Sure, if you are willing to bracket all the evils that are right there in the large print”

The question is are the evils comparable: a temporary stage of genocide in comparison to a temporary stage in which a small group is deprived of political rights. If you do see these as comparable, then you must also believe western democracies are comparable, since they too had “temporary stages” in which minorities were deprived of political rights. (And I assume you also consistently believe that the end doesn’t justify the means in the case of western democracies, too, of course?)

“The idea of the good life being to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind” is perhaps the most extraordinarily sectarian, and dull, I have ever read, but YMMV.”

I understand some might see it that way (though whether the *alternative* option is preferable is key here–grinding 19th century labor? 21st century iphone games?). But you might notice the quote completely undermines your claim that Marxism is a “fundamentally illiberal vision.” The key phrase is “just as I have a mind.”

Marxism is anti-“liberal” but on liberal grounds. Its principle complaint is that under capitalism workers do not have control over–liberty with respect to–their labor, and that this means they don’t have control over–liberty with respect to–their time, which means they don’t in fact have liberty over their person. The goal is to change that. That’s why the vision of the good life is having the ability to use one’s time as one pleases. The fact that you find the example boring is *precisely the point*: you’d use be “free” (in the wild, illiberal sense of actually having the economic and practical power) to do whatever you like.

Again, you’re welcome to argue this is an impossibility, but it’s simply false that the goals of Marxism are in any way ethically comparable to Nazism or that it’s a fundamentally illiberal view in a substantial sense.

“Even assuming that the Communists wanted to eliminate all their political enemies, that’s still utterly different from Nazis wanting to eliminate other races. ”

But they didn’t. Or at least that wasn’t their public aim. They wanted to purify the German race and let other races thrive outside the German lands according to the natural law … blah, blah, blah. I don’t like it either but personal preferences don’t have any moral weight. The fact is it was, according to its lights, a utopian ideal of peace and love that just happened to be a) impossible to achieve b) based on a load of pseudo-scientific bollocks and c) doomed to cause immense quantities of death and suffering. Just like communism.

But you might notice the quote completely undermines your claim that Marxism is a “fundamentally illiberal vision.” The key phrase is “just as I have a mind.”

But think of all the other things he might have a mind to do, but he won’t be able to! Do you think it’s a coincidence that all his hypothetical activities are solitary and pastoral? He will not be able to interact with other people on mutually agreed terms, contrary to the will of the broader community. That’s what makes the vision sectarian and illiberal, and why that chosen focus is an evasion of the implication of his ideas, in just the same way that a happy Teutonic family on the Russian steppe (not pictured: Slavs) is an evasion. The positive vision doesn’t provide even a rough notion of how conflicting claims are resolved or social interaction regulated, it just wishes away the issue. And the actual ideas on this, even in their most idealised form (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”) are obviously illiberal in every sense of the word.

He will not be able to interact with other people on mutually agreed terms, contrary to the will of the broader community.

If the broader community isn’t consenting, then the terms aren’t mutually agreed upon. If you agree to work below minimum wage, that’s an interaction not just with your boss but with everyone else in the economy.

That’s what makes the vision sectarian and illiberal, and why that chosen focus is an evasion of the implication of his ideas, in just the same way that a happy Teutonic family on the Russian steppe (not pictured: Slavs) is an evasion.

Just like capitalists evade the implications of their ideas on the environment or workers. Lee@299 was right about this.

Which is not to say that capitalists are like Nazis. Just that neither capitalists nor communists are like Nazis.

But current redistribution programs are an instance of scaling up, and more and more people accept them over time without more authoritarianism. What can be ignored is the fact that “most Marxist strands were clear about this activity being pretty much a useful-idiot kind of thing”. This is not a judgment from Marx himself, who allowed that different sorts of emergences might occur in partial form.

“But current redistribution programs are an instance of scaling up, and more and more people accept them over time without more authoritarianism. ”

Current redistribution programs are liberalism, plain and simple. Left-liberalism / social democracy at best, neoliberalism at worst. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s a classic (and beneficial) form of liberalism to set up large-scale social insurance schemes, but look at how they pay out.

That’s the anti-liberal view, yes, which strikes me as a nightmare, but YMMV. But those who believe in that dream need to own it, not evade it. Show how a society where my every interaction is subject to potential community veto is a utopia, not elide it by positing a dream where no such interactions exist.

No, I didn’t describe the dream of communism because I am not a communist. I just pointed out that capitalism is also coercive, and describing interactions under capitalism as mutually agreed upon is a lie–you’re interacting with the community, but you aren’t giving them a veto. So when we argue between capitalism and communism, or the mixed economy, we aren’t arguing over whether there should be coercion, but over which kind of coercion would be the best.

People arguing for capitalism may be wrong or even using bad faith, but they normally claim that it benefits workers and the environment.

What is evaded is the coercion of workers and environmentalists. They may argue that those people will be better off–in the same way that techno-utopian socialists will claim that everyone will eventually be near-immortal in an post-singularity economy of nearly-unlimited plenty–but they don’t give them the option of rejecting capitalism or markets if they disagree.

Sorry, that should read, “the first general social insurance schemes, WHICH didn’t appear until begun under Bismarck,”

What I am trying to ask is, who cares? The “fact” that “it’s a part of liberalism now,” even if it were true, doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

If the capitalist system has inherent tendencies which lead to further transformation of the social relations in the future, then, classical liberalism certainly won’t have the intellectual firepower or moral gravitas to stop it. Far from it: is already on the skids, in attempting to justify the current morass.

Marx did not put the time off indefinitely. And he certainly wasn’t alone in this; he merely elaborated (and apotheosized) a feeling that was growing throughout the 19th century, starting from the late 18th. In those days, very very few people asserted that the emerging system of private capitalism was obviously a new steady-state for social relations. In fact I am straining to think of even one person who maintained that.

Today it is quite different, many people assert that we have found the golden key for all time (e.g. the Hayekian hypothesis). This idea too is a very recent social invention.

On the structural side, since Marx’s time we have seen: more flexibility for individuals to enter the division of labor where they see fit; more equalization of the incomes difference between most mental and physical labor; increased productive forces and indeed machines now designing machines (cf. the Grundrisse).

In addition we have seen the rise of redistributive institutions targeted to emergent needs that were not met by raw capitalism, and we have seen a reawakening of deep anxiety and resentment, after society was sold the phony neoliberal bill of goods and then it all went smash.

Well, Marx would have taken all of these as further emergences upon points that are explicitly laid out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. So I imagine that he would have judged that things have moved further along in the direction that he and just about everybody else in the 19th century supposed it would, (if anyone had asked them).

After all, they all probably had a better naive idea of the whole of the socio-psychological system than we naively do now, largely because they still had one foot planted firmly in the ruins of the older monarchic-aristocratic regimes, and thus some better perspective on how things turn out.

This is not to hold up Marx as the predominant authority either. I think that Schumpeter has the best update so far in describing, in concrete terms that avoid sociological jargon, the coming failure of capitalism in the book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). It needs a further tweak, but it doesn’t appear that anyone has done it yet.

If the broader community isn’t consenting, then the terms aren’t mutually agreed upon. If you agree to work below minimum wage, that’s an interaction not just with your boss but with everyone else in the economy.

That’s the anti-liberal view, yes, which strikes me as a nightmare, but YMMV.

Wait, you think minimum wage laws are an anti-liberal nightmare? Because that’s what you have committed yourself to. (Are you using “liberal” in the British sense?)

(This might be an extreme HTML fail…)

@ John Holbo

>Well, I think there’s a big moral difference between ‘it was a noble idea, but a catastrophe in practice’ and ‘it was an evil idea, hence a catastrophe in practice’. I don’t regard these as equivalent, morally, and I find it weird that you treat them as obviously equivalent. That is (I take it?) you not only do not distinguish between these yourself, you find it hard to conceive of why anyone would feel better disposed towards the first? That’s weird

I understand why someone would be better disposed to the good sounding idea that turned out badly than the bad sounding idea that turned out badly, but that’s a human cognitive bias, not good logic. In 1920, I’d have been extremely sympathetic to communists, I might even have been one myself. I would have been much less sympathetic to the Nazis. And even in the 50s, I might have been willing to be charitable to the people who were claiming that the problem was Stalin, not communism. But in the 60 years since then, all we’ve seen is more Stalinism. Whatever good will Communism earned by the the prettiness of its vision has long since been spent.

>If someone really convinced me that there was once some truly lofty, humane, fascistic ideal that was, tragically, derailed in practice, I would be consistency-bound to change my tune.

You should try reading what the Fascists wrote then. Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism is an excellent start. It’s energetic, positive, even progressive. It’s about the people fully expressing themselves through the state. You’ll hate it as much as I do, it’s a massive rejection of political liberalism, but that vision of everyone together marching arm in arm towards The Future! has enormous appeal on both the right and the left.

>But the dictatorship of the proletariat is not considered ideal. It is supposed to be a stage to be eventually transcended. A necessary evil, if you like.

Again, so was the messy business of clearing the slavs out of the steppe.

>Do you think that Marx was actually, intentionally running a ponzi scheme?

I think Marx was sincere, but that’s besides the point. Marxism, in practice, has proven to be a recipe for Stalinism, not a post-scarcity classless utopia. Some people pointed this out from the beginning, others denied it for decades. Some still deny it. Brett is saying that the the people who saw what communism truly was had insights that the fellow travelers did not, and that in future you should bear that fact in mind when considering future plans for post scarcity classless utopias. After all, who would you rather have give you advice on a new financial investment, the SEC which repeatedly cleared Bernie Maddoff of wrongdoing or Harry Markopolos, the independent financial investigator who repeatedly, and fruitlessly, warned the SEC that Maddoff’s numbers were impossible and provided documentation to prove it?

@Consumatopia

>You could tell similar stories about how pure capitalism/exchange doesn’t scale because of negative externalities, the tragedy of the commons, failure to provide for public goods, etc.

Those are market failures, not exactly problems with scale. As a rule, markets get more efficient as they scale up, not less.

>Did they offer people of other races a self-deportation option?….A non-Communist could, in principle, see the “error” of their ways and become a Communist. A non-Aryan cannot become an Aryan.

Actually, the Germans did try to arrange for a deportation option, and plenty of Jews did self deport and were encouraged to do so. they were taxed for doing so, but because of a capital control law passed prior to the nazi takeover. It was the communists that built walls to keep people from escaping the worker’s paradise. And quite a few people were murdered for being kulaks or the children of kulaks.

>Just like capitalists evade the implications of their ideas on the environment or workers. Lee@299 was right about this.

No, they don’t. The capitalists claim that capitalism will make life better for everyone overtime, and so far they seem to be right about that. Standards of living are rising just about everywhere. As to the environment, when did Marx ever address it? I have a hard time imagining Lenin ever even thought about it, and Stalin was downright eager to wreck it.

@Lee Arnold

>The contention of some people here (Cassander, Sebastian, Brett) seems to be that market capitalism is NOT an “enforced social norm”; is without “ugly conformist streaks”; does not “sort the worthy from the unworthy as one of the most important tasks”, and so on.

No one is claiming that. Human beings are communal creatures. Anything they do will involve those activities. But capitalism does them less than any other system. You dismiss degree arguments, but degree matters. Capitalism’s brilliance is that it rewards people for doing things that other people want, not what they want. It turns everyone into everyone else’s willing servant, in the christian sense. That’s a good thing.

>In reality, after increasing inequality for about 40 years, this whole system recently caused itself to have a complete financial crash, followed by a bailout which protected the general structure of the highest levels of capital ownership, followed by a huge recession in which austerity programs were enacted to whip the lesser mortals back into line.

I have problems with this narrative, but I’ll grant it. If this is as bad as capitalism gets, capitalism works pretty damn well. Recessions suck, but the communist equivalent of recessions was mass starvation. The socialist version is on display right now in Venezuela, it’s 70% inflation and shortages of food and toilet paper.

@Peter T

>Note that Conquest’s latest estimate for deaths under Soviet rule is 15 million. Hitler’s war in the east killed at least 25 million in the Soviet Union, 6 million Jews and several million Poles. His war in the west killed a few million more and, of course, 6 million Germans. War and genocide were central to Nazism: those happy Aryan farmers were raising sons to continue the campaign until all the world was Aryan and all the lesser races dead. That was the vision. There is a frame shift here.

Conquest’s 15 million is the lower bound of the things they can document. As for the war dead, the communists were responsible for a large number of those Soviet deaths. No one can say how many, but the Red Army reconquest of western russia and eastern europe was quite savage, and the Soviets had no trouble shooting people and blaming it on the Germans. Second, the Russian conduct of the war got a lot of people killed, it took a brave man to be a coward in the red army. Third, it seems rather unfair to blame hitler for both the soviet and german war dead. Surely Stalin has some culpability, no?

Rich Pulchalsky # 330: “Or, wait — is this a James Livingston ‘the left has already won, even though we don’t think so’ kind of thing?”

Certainly not.

Let’s try it a different way: Have you observed that “neoliberal corporatism” is fighting, not advancing, the welfare state? e.g. the hard fight against Obamacare in the US?

In your mind, is a redistributive policy required to completely destroy neoliberalism, in order to not become a part of neoliberalism?

Thus, are you the one who is really doing the redefinitional stuff here, to suit your purist priors?

Geo #322: “flabbergasted and exasperated at the widespread inability to distinguish ‘communism’… from… Bolshevism…”
Mdc #334: “Maybe some reading of “On the Old Saw…” is in order…”

There’s a bunch of problems here. This tribe went on about the term “reciprocity” for several thousand words, without a precise definition. In addition, there are reading comprehension problems, plus thinking by priors. “Disheartening” ought to rhyme with “frightening”; we could pull a couplet out of it.

At the end of the day, trying to get some here to acknowledge the disparate varieties and consequences of communism is probably about as hopeless as getting many westerners to acknowledge the disparate varieties and consequences of the Islamic faith.

They have a vested interest in painting all varieties as lunacy and zealotry, all proponents as True Believers, because it both justifies and obscures their own status as True Believers for another brand of zealous lunacy.

I think that the discussion is pretty bad, actually.

:^(

Well, I thought it was illuminating. But what is it about your co-op story that makes you so down on the discussion? I have some experience–not nearly as much as you I gather–with cooperatives also, having served on the board of a natural foods coop for a couple of years. I learned quite a bit I think, and the longevity of that business is a testament to the people and ideas behind it.

I think there is a certain combativeness in your history/conditioning that, you know, comes out whether it’s intentional or not. Certainly, I have some of that also. But where I would depart from some of the themes of this discussion is the invocation of broad generalities [liberalism/neoliberalism] as explanations/declarations of failure. You know, it isn’t some “ism” that has failed to do better. It’s people that have failed to do better.

And to repeat myself, sort of, I think there is an Archimedean lever staring us in the face. We just need to use it. The evidence is on our side.

John Holbo,

As this discussion seems highly interesting, I would like to re-apply for re-admittance to the Crooked Timber commentariat. I will promise to conduct my discourse more civilly and politely in future.

If heart surgery never worked, but instead left nothing but death im its wake, we’d assume that anyone who became one was a murderer, amd ignore their claims of good intent.

No, we wouldn’t retroactively assume that anyone who became a heart surgeon or advocated heart surgery before that record of failure became apparent was a murderer.

If those failed surgeons were concealing evidence, we would not assume that people deceived by them at the time were intentionally advocating murder.

Furthermore, that past heart surgeries failed doesn’t mean that some new technique could be invented by which they could be made to work. One can imagine an alternative universe in which failed heart surgeries were attempted in, say, the 18th century. Failure at the time would not imply that success was not possible after surgeons learned more.

Consumatopia, it was no secret even 70-80 years ago how nasty communism was, not to anybody who paid attention. And the time when anybody would be deceived about it by anybody but themselves is decades past. And yet, it is discussed here as though it were not a horror. I don’t see that as an innocent mistake today.

70-80 years ago isn’t when Lenin or Stalin took power.

“And yet, it is discussed here as though it were not a horror.”

Those who are discussing it as though it were not a horror are discussing a different communism than you are.

geo: “I’m flabbergasted and exasperated at the widespread inability to distinguish “communism” as its original exponents (Owen, Fourier, Marx, Bellamy, Morris, Kropotkin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, et al) and their successors (Luxembourg, Pannekoek, Korsch, Mattick, et al) described it, from the radically different set of institutions and authority relations that Marxism-Leninism created. The Bolsheviks professed communism […]”

This narrative says that things started to go wrong maybe by 1905? Maybe a few years earlier? Certainly by 1917. At any rate, this centers on Lenin.

I see a somewhat different narrative going back to the First International, where the Mutualists (and yes, the use of “mutualism” in this thread is just as wrong as every other political term) were the initially dominant force. They did not simply believe in scaling up. From here:

As G.D.H. Cole puts it, the French Internationalists, including Varlin, were “strongly hostile to centralisation. They were federalists, intent on building up working-class organisations on a local basis and them federating the local federations. The free France they looked forward was to be a country made up of locally autonomous communes, freely federated for common purposes which required action over larger areas . . . In this sense they were Anarchists.”

The rest of this story is somewhat better known. Bakunin joins in 1868, the Paris Commune happens 1871, Marx and Bakunin take differing lessons from it. Marx pushes for the constitution of the working class into a political party, and at the 1872 Congress there’s the split and the expulsion of Bakunin. That’s the time from which the assertions that Marxism is authoritarian and would lead to a new ruling class come from. You don’t have to wait until 1900-1905 and Lenin.

So no, it’s not that all Americans have been programmed to think that Marxism leads to piles of skulls. People can think that if they want to. I think that a bad mistake was made back when Marx was alive and politically active: it was his mistake.

Right-wingers, liberals, and anarchists of the world unite!

(I kid, I kid. I was going to respond to Holbo from way up but that seems vaguely hopeless now. I might still… In the meantime, would it help to distinguish communism from Communism and then spend the next 200 comments deciding which side Marx belongs on? Just a suggestion.)

I guess that you have the big battalions, bob mcmanus. Maybe you can pay Brett to borrow his .45.

At any rate, I’m not trying to convince people that the anarchist view is necessarily right. I pretty much assume that anyone still Marxist in 2014 is never going to change. What I’m saying is that there is an actual left interpretation of history that differs from yours, and that yelling at some conservative “why won’t you understand” is a good way of pretending that everyone who disagrees with you is one of those conservatives. But it’s actually not true.

“This is precisely analogous to what I would say about communism. It’s not that communism is badly motivated. It’s that the average communist does not turn out to be actually motivated by communism’s high ideals.”

I’m fine with that as a formulation. And again, I certainly haven’t read everything you’ve written so I apologize for forming an incorrect version of you in my head.

From my perspective the Graeber choice was horrible because the topic of mutualist or trust based underpinnings of economic systems is fascinating. But once he mislabeled it as ‘communism’ he willfully made the topic much more of a mess.

The exclusionary and potentially violent sides of communism were there from very near the beginning and expressed by both Marx and Engels. The dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t a pretty vision even if it could be achieved without violence. The end state of both fascism and communism is pretty enough for the survivors, but I wouldn’t have been one of the survivors in either type of state, so naturally I’m not very attracted to the idea.

@John Holbo

> Cassander is retorting that favoring values of life and flourishing over values degradation and death is a form of cognitive bias. Well, you can say that, but why can’t someone then respond like so: sure, Stalinism lead to death and degradation for millions, but being opposed to death and degradation is just a form of cognitive bias. Why should mountains of corpses be worse than happy people playing in the sun? This is nuts, of course. But it shows where Cassander’s argument is going wrong: he is treating absolute ends – like human flourishing – as mere instrumental means. They aren’t. Favoring good over bad, right over wrong, is not ‘cognitive bias’. Not unless you are a pure nihilist.

What I am saying is that anyone who is pro-communist is every bit as much in favor and death and degradation as an equally fervent Nazi. We aren’t talking about theoreticals here, communism has been tried, and every time it produced death and degradation on a massive scale. So did naziism. Since both produce death and degradation, the two should be treated equally. What they claimed they would produce in theory is irrelevent. That is not being ruthless about ends means calculation, it is simply getting the left to acknowledge the facts of history, and forcing them to judge communism on what it actually did, not on what it purported it would do.

@Consumatopia

>You may not be, but Brett, cassander, and anyone else comparing early Communists to 1920s Nazis definitely is.

I said explicitly, in this thread, that “In 1920, I’d have been extremely sympathetic to communists, I might even have been one myself.”

>As a rule, markets only work if communities and governments are intervene to make them work–to regulate externalities, ensure macroeconomic stability, and provide for public goods. “Scale” isn’t the issue for either capitalism or communism, it’s more a matter of incompleteness.

Right, which is why it’s impossible to buy illegal drugs in american prisons…..

Markets can be made to function better by the things you say, but they are most definitely not required.

>This is absurd. Of course we’re going to judge a heart surgeon who performs an operation with good intentions but a bad outcome differently than someone who stabs a knife into someone else’s heart for the purpose of murdering them.

If you call yourself a heart surgeon, and claim that you’re only trying to help, I will give you the benefit of the doubt. But if every patient you see dies, and you keep trying to operate on more and more people, after a while I’m just going to call you a murder.

This:

every contract is “an interaction not just with your boss but with everyone else in the economy”

does not imply this:

so society as a whole has a free-floating right to veto my private interactions.

The first claim is descriptive, the second claim is normative.

I was pointing out that contracts with “mutually agreed upon” terms can still be coercive. If you’re talking about people being “unduly coerced” into contracts, and you aren’t talking about someone literally pointing a gun at your face forcing you to sign, then you’re now agreeing with me.

Look, it’s simply the case that the contracts you agree to affect everybody else in the economy. You’re interacting with everyone. If you expect your contract to be enforced by the state, then your contract is interacting directly with the state! So if your normative claim (not mine!) is that interactions should be mutually agreed upon, then you’re forced to adopt the dystopic position. If by “community veto”, you mean that the committee elects a committee to evaluate each contract on a case-by-case basis for arbitrary reasons, then I agree that position is dystopic. I humbly suggest that rather than take this position, it would be better to modify that normative claim–as you just did with your caveats about “unduly coerced”.

Marge, I agree with you- in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory!

geo: “Wrong with what, exactly? Wrong with the major organizations of the left — yes, perhaps. But I thought we were discussing the question: when did attempts to realize the ideal of society-wide political and economic self-determination, cooperation, and (rough, approximate) equality — that is, to realize the communist ideal, as expounded by … well, by now you know who — begin to go wrong? And if so, then when exactly did those attempts take place?”

But this extended question seems very confused to me, geo. I know that nothing is at stake, that these are quibbling differences among a tiny number of egalitarian radicals, etc., but I’m still going to reply.

First of all, there’s a “society-wide” stuck in there. If you can only realize the communist ideal through a society-wide attempt, then you’ve already implicitly disallowed most of anarchism. A lot of anarchism is not revolutionary — oh, excuse me, “straw man” revolutionary — and depends on making small-scale attempts that are supposed to influence the creation of other small groups that gradually increase in number. From that point of view, attempts occur somewhere every year. Of course, these attempts are made much more difficult by the legacy of Marx — he directly denounced them, inspired generations of leftists who insist that leftist movements need to be animated by Marxist ideas, and produced an ideology suitable for successful takeovers of huge areas of the world which then failed dramatically, and whose advocates insist that they and anarchists are trying to do the same kind of liberatory activity.

But if you want to talk about large-scale attempts, bob mcmanus already mentioned two of them. It’s too bad that the repressive governments that he mentioned included the Bolsheviks, who directly destroyed the Mahknovites and betrayed the Spanish anarchists to destruction.

So Marx’ decision that the proletariat needed to take control of the state — along with his failure to theorize any actual limits on the power of the state — seems to me to be critical in all of these failures. And once again I’d put the year at 1872. The damage done has lasted nearly a century and a half.

“The fact that something may affect someone else doesn’t mean I’m interacting with that person.”

If you’re affecting me and I’m affecting you, then we’re interacting. That’s not a matter of politics, that’s a matter of fact. That doesn’t mean that everyone has the right to refuse every interaction, so stop slandering me (and for that matter Marx) with that nonsensical accusation. There is no simple formula for determining who should and shouldn’t be allowed to refuse interaction. Bob shouldn’t get to decide whether Adam and Carol get married. Nor should Carol get to decide whether Adam and Bob get married. Should the state get to decide whether Adam can marry a whole bunch of women (and have said marriage recognized by the state)? Liberals have taken both sides–divided between a desire to respect the autonomy of adults and the danger that normalized patriarchal polygamy could threaten that autonomy.

Or with the minimum wage, we think the state can prevent sub-minimum wage labor interactions. This surely isn’t because liberals think that Adam’s decision to work below minimum wage somehow coerces Adam–that is what would be illiberal, implying that we would be assuming we know better than Adam what is best for Adam. We prevent sub-minimum wage labor because Adam’s decision to work subminimum wage affects Bob’s capacity to work at minimum wage

Or take the case of racial discrimination. Liberals ban it not because whites are hurting themselves by only doing business with other whites. We ban it because they are hurting other people by not doing business with them.

None of this means that the state should appoint a central committee to give the thumbs up or down to each interaction at will. It just means that you can’t determine from the nature of “effect” or “interaction” alone which interactions and effects should be permitted.

You’re playing a funny game here in which your definition of “interaction” doesn’t require you to tolerate all private interactions (e.g. subminimum wage labor) but you also insist that my definition requires me to put a central committee in charge of everything. You’re allowed to separate your definitions and your normative conclusions, but I’m not. It does not make sense.

By the way, geo, I understand your exasperation at the confusion between Bolshevism and your strand of communism, but as you mentioned News from Nowhere up-thread (a book which I adore), I confess that I can’t imagine that you are not finding a measure of solace comparing this thread with the beginning of the book.

“Says our friend: Considering the subject, the discussion was good-tempered; for those present being used to public meetings and after-lecture debates, if they did not listen to each others’ opinions (which could scarcely be expected of them), at all events did not always attempt to speak all together, as is the custom of people in ordinary polite society when conversing on a subject which interests them. For the rest, there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions.”

And yet, this always manage to wrench my heart.

“If I could but see a day of it,” he said to himself; “if I could but see it!”

consumatopia – I am not interested in playing word games with you. I have made it perfectly clear what I mean by “interaction,” and it is a pretty standard use. Most people would not say that Adam and Carol getting married is an “interaction” with Bob, even if it might disappoint him. You don’t have to use the word that way, but it is pretty tiresome for you to object to my statements by implicitly redefining my words.

The liberal position is that only interactions need permission, affects do not. Bystanders only get to object on the basis of some specific harm (not merely the frustration of their wishes). I’m sorry you find this difficult, but I’m really not playing any funny games, nor have I mentioned any kind of central committee. Is there a name for this kind of trolling – “It’s very unreasonable for you to accuse me of Albigensianism” – or is it original to you?

I am not interested in playing word games with you

I’m not a Marxist, but your entire argument against Marx is built on nonsense word games.

I have made it perfectly clear what I mean by “interaction,” and it is a pretty standard use.

No, actually, it isn’t clear at all. And it’s definitely not standard, looking at a couple dictionaries, I can’t find any more specific definition applicable to this than “mutual or reciprocal action or influence”. You’re the one redefining words–it’s absurd to say that two men getting married today doesn’t interact with national politics. You might also say that two men getting married is none of our business, if we aren’t the two men in question, and you’d be right, but that’s not what “interaction” means (and if that was what interaction means, you couldn’t derive any ethical conclusion from it, because deciding what “our business” is already takes an ethical system for granted.)

The liberal position is that only interactions need permission, affects do not. Bystanders only get to object on the basis of some specific harm (not merely the frustration of their wishes).

The harm of discrimination is frustration of the wishes of the discriminated against. And note that some types of discrimination are totally permissible–we may force Adam to be nondiscriminatory in selling his house or hiring employees, but not in choosing his spouse or even his roommate.

No, I’m sorry. You can’t derive justice from the definitions of the particular words “interaction”, “effect” or “harm”.

Z: “But in the actual current existing world, not the world of 60 years ago, the town next to mine has had an uninterrupted string of communist mayors since 1935 to the present and has elected a communist representative. Where are the piles of skulls? The communist party was the second largest political party in France for two decades or so. Their most salient legacy is a single-payer universal health care system and a national monopoly on energy production. That can be debated, but it is emphatically not true that either lead to massive destruction and death.”

Well, here goes. I’m just going to behave as if I can have a reasonable discussion and disagreement with Z and / or geo and pretend that much of the rest of the thread doesn’t exist. I have to do similar kinds of things when I criticize Obama (“Doesn’t that mean that you’re a birther, like all the other people criticizing him?”)

Various people in the thread have brought up less-than-society-wide communist local governments and political parties. I don’t really want to go through all of them and figure which particular kind of communism each of them is / was. But it’s my contention that the Marxist tradition is particularly vulnerable to authoritarian takeover and collapse, because of essential parts of its theory. Aren’t local and democratic-party communisms insulated in part from this failure mode particularly because they aren’t society-wide? They essentially rely on liberal society for the controls on their own power.

They essentially rely on liberal society for the controls on their own power.

Rich! Did you just say something nice about liberalism??

mattski: “I make a distinction between utopianism which I think is both seductive and dangerous, and liberalism, by which I mean a belief in the process of democracy.”

mattski,, you asked upthread “what is it about your co-op story that makes you so down on the discussion?” It’s statements like this. You say that you’re on the board of a co-op, so do you attend board meetings and grimly think before each one “All right, this is utopianism. Seductive and dangerous. I’d better be on my guard.” No, I don’t think you do. And liberalism as “a belief in the process of democracy” just doesn’t really wash. What does that *mean*? Are you troubled that you’re on the board of the co-op without being a worker in it (which I assume you would have mentioned)? Should you be? Which democracy gets to decide about the operations of the co-op, and how do people get included and excluded? As someone in the Occupy group I was in wryly said about “consensus democracy”: “too bad those words are opposites”. These aren’t specifically liberal concerns.

Let’s imagine that you had a worker-owned and controlled co-op (not all of them are) in which the people in it could vote to do what they liked with the resources of the co-op, so they could e.g. decide to provide for unusual needs of co-op members to the limit of the co-op’s ability. Lo and behold you have worker ownership of the means of production, mutualism, communism etc. in some limited form. Is that utopianism, or is that pretty much an ordinary kind of arrangement that people could make and that no one would really object to? Is it invalidated because of its local context? (The workers certainly don’t own the “commanding heights” of the means of production, etc.) Those are questions that just aren’t well served by seeing this as an essential kind of difference between utopianism and liberalism.

“A positive vision of society doesn’t just mean ‘I foresee everyone being happy.’ It must necessarily posit a way to achieve that, a way for the inevitable conflicts of wishes and interests to be resolved. Communism doesn’t have any good solutions here, just a mixture of wishing away of the problem and illiberalism (‘a new man will emerge”/”from each/to each’).”

Salem, I don’t think this is really an accurate representation. I don’t know the history or the texts as well as some here. But as I understand it, Marx has in mind something like :

1) an expansion of liberalism’s democratic procedures into the economic sphere, so that there are no kings or priests in the workplace as well as in the political sphere; conflicts are resolved by hierarchies of representatives of workers who are ultimately answerable to workers. In this sense it’s not “wishing away” but wishing for more of something liberalism offers/claims to offer, and

2) a limitation of liberalism’s democratic procedures to wage-laborers by making the foundational level of representation not citizens but worker’s groups (the origin of the “soviets” of the U.S.S.R), thus excluding non-laborers from democratic power. The second part seems complementary to the first, because as we all known first hand, an economic ruling class can easily subvert democratic procedures. Here rather than “wishing away” there is just a restriction of liberal democratic procedures.

Maybe I’m wrong, so feel free to correct me, but *if* something like that’s what Marx has in mind, I don’t see why its more fundamentally utopian or unworkable than any other political and economic system that is “democratic” in a broader sense of the word. It expands some features already in practice, and contracts others.

But it’s my contention that the Marxist tradition is particularly vulnerable to authoritarian takeover and collapse, because of essential parts of its theory.

Oh, sure, I completely agree: despite its at the time revolutionary (in the intellectual sense) attention to class distinction, Marx neglected the inherently agonistic relation which exists between different type of capital (finical, intellectual, social, religious etc). That’s an intellectual Weltanschauung that essentially commits you to the belief (naïve and empirically incorrect, in my view) that the abolition (either by force, as in the leninist version, or gradually, democratically and peacefully, as in the geo version) of class distinction (in the marxian sense) would abolish social conflicts.

In fact, I believe that the reason even local communist governments in democratic societies have at best an OK track record (rarely better) and the reason gradual, democratic, peaceful adoption of a marxian society at a large scale is impossible within currently existing societies is precisely this oversight: in the long run, the very real conflicted interests that do not easily conform to the marxian framework come back to bite you. And conversely, to geo’s question (how could we “scale up the generosity, trust, forbearance, etc that sometimes characterize families or small voluntary communities to much larger societies”?), my preliminary tentative answer would be “by giving your utmost attention to the full variety of agonistic social relations and the anthropological and social conditions that have shaped them.”

An answer I venture could please Marx, were he a reader of CT.

John, quick question:

I think js.’s suggestion–if you don’t have measurement, you won’t have exchange–is pretty compelling. Would you accept his suggestion if we take it as given that the minimal requirement to have measurement is to be able to distinguish 0 from other quantities (or to be able to distinguish positive quantities from non-positive quantities)? In other words, if receipt is a black box, which I’m taking to be the equivalent of receipt without measurement, then what’s going on isn’t exchange. Yes, no, maybe?

(Also, I’m taking it that we’re talking about the situation “should I give to the community although I don’t know what I’ll receive?” . . . rather than “should we reward an individual although we don’t know what he’ll give?” Though perhaps I’m mistaken.)

Addendum to Rich P: Even with the occasional flare-ups which inevitably occur in these forums, I get a lot out of reading comments from the MANY smart, well-informed commenters at CT. I really enjoy the opportunity to participate in the discussion as well whether it’s agreeing, disagreeing or just musing. I sincerely hope you get some joy out of it too.

393: re measurement and exchange

Pretty sure Marx says that the moment 7 apples equals 5 oranges consistently over time and/or space you have a universal equivalent, money and capital. Even if there is no currency, the fact is that the abstract commodity has entered the market.

So in this sense it doesn’t work to look at an individual interaction or isolated exchange, but to look at multiple instances and examples, apples vs oranges in Paris and Brussels. And of course we could have coincidence, so then apples exchange belts in Paris and oranges exchange hats in Brussels. And approach a social analysis of a social phenomenon. Again you don’t need money, as long as you can’t posit some common denominator or universal equivalent, even carried in heads.

Value, which isn’t exchange-value/price or use-value/utility.

I thought of this analogy, regarding the conversation that John just summarized. The former East German state was formally the “German Democratic Republic.” To take that fact and say you can’t have a discussion about democratic republics, because democratic republics=Stasi, etc., is ridiculous and infantile.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., a democratic republic with plenty of skulls piled in its’ own past, there are politicians quite OK with not facing up to that legacy. Here in the state of Georgia, anodyne bills apologizing for the state government’s support of slavery and participation in the Indian Removal Act get nowhere, because “no one in this chamber voted for those things”, and the like. Confederate Memorial Day is still an official state holiday, though.

EDIT: “it’s easy to imagine barter systems that rely purely on implicit measures.”

To almost everybody, “communism” means the Gulag, and the Berlin Wall, and dissidents being disappeared, and all that.

By my reckoning, there are at least 500,000 citizens of the Paris area alone who have democratically elected self-identified communist local governments in 2014. 4,5 millions Frenchmen (or 13% or the votes) voted for a communist candidate in the presidential election. Where does your assertion that “almost everybody” equates communism with the Gulag live these guys? Could you at least qualify your statement with “almost everybody in the US” (that would be at least empirically true) or something like that?

Now, in the spirit of reaching js. targets of 800, here are a few thoughts about the original topic.

First, the communist slogan and reciprocity. Well, Marx and Engels themselves had something to say about it, why not look? They thought that an early communist society would be the triumph of reciprocity (“the individual […] receives back from society […] exactly what he gives to it”) and lest we missed the point, they have another go at it: “Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values.” So, reciprocity, pure and simple, and that according to Marx and Engels is a progress towards communism. But that situation of perfect reciprocity must be transcended (and by the way, not after the enslaving subordination to the division of labor, as Bruce Wilder seemingly thinks, but after said enslaving has vanished of course) and then, but only then, you get the famous slogan.

But it is highly interesting to understand why and how we get to this stage. The first remark of Marx is that the pure reciprocity slogan necessarily frames the individual in a single of its manifold identity (workers usually, but camper in the camping trip example). As such, the pure reciprocity formula is restrictive, and as such is (by nature)unequal. And now, but only now, comes the money quote: to Marx this is all obfuscation anyway because exchange in a marxian framework is a logically subordinated category to production. So, as written by Marx, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” is not only distinct from the lower communist phase of reciprocity, it is the utter logical rejection of it: it is the mindset that prevails when conditions of production will have changed so drastically that the notion of exchange, reciprocity etc. all subordinated, in Marx’s opinion, to the restrictive choice of one social identity and thus to the willing obliteration of all others, will have become meaningless. Read the all thing, as they say.

So from a marxian point of view, reciprocity and communism are very clearly distinct and confusing one with the other is the typical lingering effect of a mode of thinking that “bears the stigmata of the [capitalist] society.”

What about Graeber then? At first, it seems that Marx would be thinking he’s making a severe mistake in confusing baseline communism (mutualism in small scale arrangements) with communism in the marxian sense as implied by the choice of the slogan. But here, I think that one has to go beyond Debt (a popular book, after all, in all acception of the term) and read what he has to say for himself in other more scholarly works. In The False Coin if Our Own Dreams, Graeber very clearly outlines his goal: showing that far from being preconditioned to the existence of the higher phase communist society with radically different modes of material production of Marx (and thus residing in an indefinitely far utopian future), the capacity to envision an individual in the simultaneous reality of all her social interactions (and thus the capacity of actually realizing the “From each…” slogan in its marxian anti-reciprocity acception) is inherent to the anthropology of mankind because, and this is Graeber’s point, human anthropological interactions already function in the higher phase communist mode of Marx when social and symbolic modes of production (and not exclusively material ones) are considered.

So for Graeber, the slogan does not mean “I can fetch the water so I will, and when I’m hungry, someone will give bread” but probably something closer to “I, like any human being, have a need for symbolic interpretation of he social order around me, and that I will receive from others according to my needs; and, in turn, I will contribute to the extent of my ability to shape this symbolic order.” This, in Graeber’s philosophical anthropology, is baseline communism (and not a camping trip, though of course going on camping trips can be part of it) and this is why he chose to start the conclusion of his book with Eleanor Marx’s recollection of her father’s bedtime stories.

Where that leaves us to determine who gets to do the dishes is left as an exercise to the reader.

Interesting discussion. Still not much time, early release day, ice melt not working as promised. I can’t think of a topic raised here that I have an opinion on that I haven’t commented on in the past, usually on one of John H.’s threads, except for the measurement thing, and Graeber, who I’ve haven’t yet read, but the book discussion of whom I found pretty interesting.

“Also, I don’t see how the gestion of Bagneux or of the post-war energy production in France or of French naval construction in the 1950’s (all run almost single-handedly by communists) should be excluded from the track record of communism just because communism was not in a position of national power at the time.”

Because they weren’t able to do whatever they wanted? If I, an anarcho-capitalist, somehow got elected to the local city council, would that make that city an instance of anarchy? People can hold ideologies, and be put in positions of power, but that doesn’t mean that their ideologies are implemented, if somebody else is in a position to exercise some check on their activities.

Paris is not an example of communism. I’m sure there’s private property all over Paris, even, (Gasp!) privately owned capital.

“People calling themselves communists caused terrible genocide;”

Really, must you talk THAT way? If, every time people calling themselves “X” get the opportunity, they cause terrible genocide, if you’re sensible, you associate it with X, and stop taking people who call themselves X seriously when they say, “But, I’m not like that!”

Really, I get sick of “No true Scotsman!”, but if ever there was a case of it, it’s communists disavowing actual communism’s outcomes.

“That doesn’t work” is a contribution

Only if you have a fucking clue what you’re talking about…

“I could well have things tangled up although I’m still not seeing it.”

Wow. I’m speechless (and will remain so ;-)).

Q: Why do your waste so much of your — and our — time on them?

A: As my old science teacher used to say before we ran the experiment: do not speak of love! Do it!

JH, Ambassador of Love. Amen.

Question for Brett. Do you think communism could work on a small scale? What if the US designated a town somewhere in the heartland as an experiment in voluntary communism? Anyone who wants to can move there as long as they accept the charter. Is this logically impossible?

No true Scottish solidarity would be used for hatred!

Is it just me or is Rich really saying,

“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here” … ?

:^)

But then we’re just talking about co-ops, and things like that, which is not what people generally mean by “communism”. You’re talking about people accepting that most of society *isn’t* going to be run on the basis they like, just their little corner of it.

That’s actually one of the strengths of capitalism, that it permits other forms of social organization under it’s umbrella.

Mattski: No one here seems to be suggesting that small scale communalist or mutualist projects are impossible. We’ve all been in them even. But they aren’t ‘communist’ except in the sense that Graeber has a weird project of wanting to wrench the word out of its context and define all mutualism as ‘communist’. But there is no reason to do so when you have perfectly good words like ‘mutualist’. Hell he could even coin word. So he wants ‘communist’ for reason.

“Go off and get the bits of Marx and other communists where they ideologically advocate genocide. Not just advocating class war but advocating genocide as a good end in itself. ”

Strange that you think this is giving Brett the easy side of the deal. Essentially you are playing the true scotsman fallacy as argument. The two obvious flaws in communism (the real thing, not Graeber’s game playing with the word) is that it advocates class warfare but has trouble defining which class get privileged, and it posits a situation where you can’t be successful long term without taking over the whole world (a problem it shares with fascism). Both of those features are there from very early on. The problem is that both of those (especially together) empirically seem to lead to gulags and genocides. That is a flaw with deep within communism.

That isn’t a flaw deep within all communal projects. Which is why we should resist labeling all communal projects ‘communism’. Doing so either gives communal projects a bad name, or unfairly rehabilitates actual communist thought.

But then we’re just talking about co-ops, and things like that, which is not what people generally mean by “communism”. You’re talking about people accepting that most of society *isn’t* going to be run on the basis they like, just their little corner of it.

Well, actually we’re talking about a town or small city. So I think that makes a significant difference. A ‘communist’ municipality in the middle of a non-communist nation-state would be able to benefit from a free flow of membership into and out of the community and at the same time it is a large enough social structure to require significant local governance. To me that sounds like an interesting experiment.

I’d love to read a CT thread where someone actually defended (seriously, not in a trollish way) the positive scientific, cultural, social, military, etc achievements of the USSR.

I would be happy to defend the achievements of the USSR (in its post-stalin phase, to be clear), but it’s unclear to me whether John Holbo has been kind enough to un-ban me?

“They might as well have stated as premise #1 “Let’s assume that anyone who gets into power becomes a complete bastard.””

And they’ve proven right about this. People who get power over other people, people who’d try to get power over other people, do become complete bastards, almost without exception. A GOOD politician is the sort of person you’d be mad to trust babysitting your children. The bad ones run pedophile rings out of their offices.

“The whole setup makes no sense at all except as a jury-rigged contrivance to try to play power off against power. That’s what liberalism as developed in the U.S. is about; it’s not really about democracy.”

That’s exactly right: “Democracy” does not prevent people from being oppressed. At best, it assures that the oppressed are the minority, which is statistically better than the oppressed being the majority. You need something more to prevent the majority from oppressing the minority. You need to somehow limit what the majority gets to do.

And when you bring representative democracy into the system, (As is necessary in any but the smallest democracy.) it gets even worse, because you have to find some way of compelling the ‘representatives’ to represent somebody besides themselves. While they’re relentlessly trying to defeat whatever system you put in place to accomplish this!

Trying to design a government system on the assumption the people running it are just naturally going to do the right thing is utter madness.

[The Founders] might as well have stated as premise #1 “Let’s assume that anyone who gets into power becomes a complete bastard.” The whole setup makes no sense at all except as a jury-rigged contrivance to try to play power off against power. That’s what liberalism as developed in the U.S. is about; it’s not really about democracy.

It’s about both I would say. Is that so controversial? The process (the experiment) of democracy was advanced by the creation of the USA. It’s shortcomings are legion but there’s no reason to be blindsided by that fact. Certainly, whoever said, “a Republic, if you can keep it,” was prophetic. We’re not doing a very good job of keeping it.

A GOOD politician is the sort of person you’d be mad to trust babysitting your children.

This is Brett’s typical canned nonsense. Opinions differ, but I think Lincoln did some good. FDR did some good. JFK tried and was murdered for his efforts. I have met politicians who were very good people in my judgement. I think Elizabeth Warren is one such. But, there are plenty of decent people in government. I think Obama is a decent person, but he’s quite limited in what he can do AND he made plenty of miscalculations along the way. That’s the way it goes.

A big part of the reason, I think, for why the plutocracy is ascendent is we’ve been taught a convincing lesson by monied interests that democracy is charade, we’re helpless and disenfranchised and subconsciously the public has swallowed the lesson. The public doesn’t much believe in democracy anymore. So the range of attitudes is rage-despair-indifference.

That is one reason I keep trying to interest my allies on the left in the political assassinations of the 60’s. Because that’s where I think our spirit was broken. And the success of the cover-up of those crimes is proof that the plutocracy owns us.

Brett @444,

A communist nation would be a democratic nation, so your statement is really absurd. It would, in fact, be real democracy, including the economy, and it wouldn’t be through proxies. There wouldn’t be party reps. Each and every citizen would have equal say and equal power, and they would all be a part of one democratic polity. No proxies. No reps. Full self-governance.

That’s what communist theory and philosophy calls for. It calls for full emancipation for each and every citizen from both public and private concentrations of power, exploitation, abuse, appropriation, etc. Pretty much the entire point is to break up all power centers, public or private, to establish true personal autonomy within an egalitarian, democratic framework. It is the apotheosis of freedom and liberty. We would no longer work to make others rich. We, the collective, would work for the collective itself, instead of being a tool for ownership, as is the case now under capitalism.

None of the above has ever been tried, even remotely, outside of small scale communes, kibbutzes and Native American villages, basically. But it is “scalable.”

Brett #448,

No. It’s never been tried. Obviously. Again, communism is the absence of the state. You can’t have a communist state, by definition.

Your guilty of the following, basically:

A group of sociopaths gets together and calls themselves “birdwatchers.” They then go off on a spree of murder and other atrocities. They didn’t do any birdwatching, and their organization has nothing to do with birdwatching. You, however, want to tell everyone we can no longer talk about “birdwatching” without talking about that murder spree, which you now claim is the inevitable result of birdwatching.

Grow up.

[F]or Marx, under certain conditions of production, the phrase is not reciprocal in spirit. But, of course, we are not in those conditions at present. So the phrase IS reciprocal for us, now. Ergo, getting back to Graeber, baseline communism, in his sense, is a kind of reciprocity, for Marx. (I think that would be right?)

Not so fast with that ergo, John! And that’s because, as I wrote in 413, for Graeber (and in contrast with Marx) the fact we are not experiencing those conditions of material production is (mostly) irrelevant because we are (in his views) experiencing those conditions of symbolic production. So Marx would say that Graeber is talking about reciprocity (for the reasons you describe) but Graeber would deny it, because he advocates for a very idiosyncratic reading of Marx insight in which symbolic production is taken into account (Marx plus Mauss, as it were).

John,

Not sure how much you’re playing devil’s advocate here (and a bit of gentle, good-natured trolling), but I’m guessing quite a bit.

Well, anyway, I think communism’s responsibility for genocide is at least a significant as neoliberals’ responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s not responsible for genocide because it wasn’t even remotely a part of the Soviet or Maoist systems. They may have called themselves “communists,” but history has given us mountains of examples of people calling themselves one thing, while acting in ways that have zero to do with the meaning of that word, or its foundations.

If you go to a restaurant and order #5, which says 12 ounces of Filet Mignon, but you receive 5 ounces of liver instead, does it make sense to hold Filet Mignon responsible for your hatred of the meal?

I just wish Brett and others would at least attempt to demonstrate how communist theory inevitably leads to their conclusions, rather than reading events back into the theories long after the fact.

At this point we have had something over 700 country-years of variously communist regimes. This has included at least four major episodes of killing (Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine, the Khmer Rouge, the Great Leap Forward famine) and a great deal of repression. On the plus side a great deal of economic and personal development (education, opportunity), provision of basic needs, and a long list of artistic, intellectual and technological achievements. Not a happy story, but not an unqualifiedly nasty one.

Fascism and Nazism together notched up 35 country years. Maybe 70 if you include the fascist satellite regimes of the 40s. In that short time fascism and nazism produced four wars, trashed a large part of Europe’s cultural heritage and instituted at least three major episodes of killing; one of them still a byword for institutional evil. On the plus side, a very limited amount of technological advance, mostly in weaponry, and a couple of interesting minor art moments.

Brett and sebastian need a better local library.

I literally am having trouble understanding what you were getting it.

Well, take the case of complementary parental and filial duties I mentioned above: parents (are supposed to) take care of their children when the children are young, and children (are supposed to) take care of their parents when the parents are old. By your lights, is this a case of reciprocity?

Which system would more likely “inevitably” lead to that pile of skulls and the gulag? One based upon cooperation, sharing, use-value and allocation based on need, not greed? Or one based upon competition, exchange-value, hoarding, endless rounds of creative destruction, endless consumption, and the appropriation of labor surplus by the few?

Which system is more likely to lead to people tearing each other apart, as they fight over resources? One based on competition and the control of wealth, power and privilege by the few? One that creates scarcity for the many because the few hoard almost everything? Or one with a raison d’etre of providing for the needs of all? Providing at least enough. For everyone.

Right now, just 80 people hold as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion. As of 2016, in America, the richest 1% will, for the first time, hold more wealth than the bottom 99% of the country combined. And the richest 20% worldwide consume more than 85% of our resources.

To me, the answer is more than clear. If any “ism” inevitably leads to death and destruction, it’s capitalism. Its internal logic has that baked right in. And that doesn’t even count its obvious ecological destructiveness.

Geo #468,

Well said. I think you’ve consistently made excellent points in this thread.

And another riff off the metaphor I posted earlier: The one where the menu says it’s Filet Mignon but you’re served liver, so why blame the Filet Mignon?

Oftentimes people like Brett will say that our insistence on an accurate word/description for what happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China is just apologetics for what they did. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be saying I hate the liver too. Which I do. I despise what they did. For a host of reasons. They set back the cause of leftist philosophy for generations, by NOT practicing it in any way, shape or form, while the thing they completely avoided got all the blame. A truly democratic, egalitarian, use-value, needs-based system, with true equality and actual power-sharing for all — that is the furthest thing from what they did. But when people advocate for that, “Stalin!!!” is now the knee-jerk retort. In an actual socialist society, and then later with a communist one, Stalin is an impossibility. At least if it is to remain socialist or communist.

You can’t have a Stalin in a true democracy. And socialism IS democracy fully realized. Communism, which follows it, is true democracy realized, without state apparatus.

Rich,

People are quite comfortable talking about experiments with democracy, but if “it’s about both” then they should be just as comfortable talking about experiments in limiting democracy. Consensus, for example, is a way of limiting democracy, not a full expansion of democracy or something like that.

Two points. The US Constitution and the American revolution were a step forward in terms of democratic norms and institutions. Second, to say that consensus is a way of limiting democracy is to admit that democracy is open to interpretation. That is not some flaw to be pinned on ‘democracy’ in my view. Rather, it’s testimony to the inherent problems of governance. Or you could say, in simple language, the inherent difficulty of getting along when large numbers of people are involved.

There isn’t any way around that basic difficulty. It isn’t the fault of an idea or a theory.

“Leninism is clearly inspired by strains in Marx’s thought—I don’t see the point in denying this.”

I don’t see the point in blaming Lenin, because he’s so clearly an inheritor of Marx. The people saying that Bolshevism has nothing to do with the ideals of communism are just demonstrating that they have no idea how to keep their ideals from being hijacked again. It was pretty obvious long before anyone heard of Lenin.

js @471: Yes, of course, Lenin endorsed Marx’s ideas as he (Lenin) understood them. All I’m saying is that “communism” before Lenin was usually understood as radical democracy/the cooperative commonwealth/workers’ councils, etc. — a society at once libertarian and egalitarian. It was thought that only a society-wide uprising could realize it, and there was no idea of a self-appointed vanguard party seizing state power and suppressing political competition. The degree to which the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon democracy by the savage efforts of the capitalist powers (including the US) to crush them is a matter for historical debate. I don’t cut them much slack in that respect; I think they should have accepted defeat (and probable liquidation, like the Paris Communards before them) before abandoning the reliance on popular support which the communist ideal would have prescribed. Plenty of contemporary European communists, and even other Russian revolutionaries, thought so too.

But who cares what Lenin thought? The point is, if communism means the assertion of popular control over all aspects of social life (as it does, according to the people who thought up the idea), then Lenin certainly didn’t act like a communist.

And really, at this stage in history (and in this thread), who even cares what “communism” means? Let’s all spend the rest of the century saving the planet and getting everyone clean water and enough food, and then we can resume the discussion.

“Communism “is a socioeconomic system structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money,[3][4] and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.”

Suppose you hope to achieve this without class warfare, on a local level. Never mind whether this is reasonable or not. Are you, plausibly, a communist if you are ideologically committed to bringing about a state of affairs such as is described in the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry? I say you are. You say you aren’t, I take it?”

Of course they aren’t. The definition you offer would seriously mean that Marx, Lenin and Engels wouldn’t count as Communists.

You might as well use definitions of ‘Catholicism’ that say the Dalai Lama is ‘really’ a Catholic, but the pope isn’t. At that point you really should use another word.

Class struggle is an absolutely integral part of how communism is formulated *as an ideology*. You can’t take that out and still pretend you are talking about communism. John, you can’t narrowly insist on focusing on the ideology to the exacting exclusion of real-world results and then also insist on watering down the ideology. Dictatorship of the proletariat is part of ideological communism. It is right there in Marx and Engels. If you don’t want class struggle and you don’t want dictatorship of the proletariat, you don’t have much in common with the communism. Insisting on a definition of communism which would exclude Marx, Engels and Lenin is just Humpty-Dumptyism.

Democracy, democracy, democracy…wow, communism is just democracy? Well, maybe long after the revolution, but we need socialism (not quite social democracy or even democratic socialism) as a probable necessary stage. I actually expect this out of geo and I expect almost nothing from Plume.

We can go back before Marx to Proudhon: “Property is theft.”

No, as we are seeing as we write, in the privatizations of Greek ports and electric utilities, you really don’t get to communism through the reform of liberal capitalism. The Kochs are not going to let you vote their campaign contributions away, and the banksters will not hand over control. Liberalism and even social democracy is proving itself a bankrupt ideology, inevitably leading to mass immiseration. Inevitably. We are living through generations of liberal fail.

Talk as pretty as you like, the Marxists understand that first you must take their property, and then you open the polls. Short of horrific war, that is the only path, hopefully with somewhat less destruction than the liberals/capitalists/fascists (and I consider them very close to each other*) inevitably, inevitably will subject us to.

It isn’t pretty. It is revolution.

*I really don’t see why the Nazis aren’t considered a variant of liberal capitalism. It wasn’t as if all the GMbHs got nationalized, markets disappeared, and the rich were impoverished. I blame most of the 20th century dead, including Iron Curtain dead, on liberalism and capitalism.

Bob McManus: we’ve had “the Soviet Union wasn’t really a communist state” and now you come up with “Nazi Germany was really a liberal state”.

The twanging noise you hear if from the (quite elastic) English language being stretched past breaking point.

481: Private property (for more than a king) and some degree of free markets. Period.

Funny in a thread about definitions, nobody has noticed how the definition of “liberalism” has been mangled for centuries in order to ensure that nothing bad or wicked is possible under liberalism or ever been done by liberals. This is currently carried to a ridiculous extreme, so that the vast prison population or imperialistic foreign policy is somehow accomplished by minority “conservatives” over liberal resistance in our “liberal” United States. Liberalism cannot fail, hell it can’t be less than perfect, liberalism can only be failed.

Well, there’s “liberalism” and there are “liberals”. The same root word, but attached to very different things. Language is like that.

“Communism actually in place is so horrible…” Actually, not so horrible that 20% or more of the Russian population consistently votes to go back to it, communist parties were until recently a major part of the political landscape in France and Italy, the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban parties remain in power…

I have no particular brief for communism, but I really wish that sebastian and Brett could shake off their blinkers.

Plume: “No. It’s never been tried. Obviously. Again, communism is the absence of the state. You can’t have a communist state, by definition.”

Look, I could say, “Perpetual motions machines don’t work!”, and you might reply, “You can’t say that, they’ve never been tried!”

And I’d point out a whole bunch of ‘perpetual motion machines’ that had been built, and every one ground to a halt. And you’d say, “Aha! Then they weren’t perpetual motion machines, were they? Because a perpetual motion machine, by definition, would never come to a stop. So, perpetual motion machines have never been tried, maybe we ought to try one, it would solve the world’s energy crisis.”

That’s what this “Communism has never been tried!” line is like. Communism has been tried. It’s been tried tragically, horribly many times. It was never “communism” by the definition of communism communists use, because you’ve baked working into your definition, and communism doesn’t work. So it can NEVER be “tried” in the sense you’re talking, because it can’t work, and you’ve defined “trying” so as to include working.

John: “Brett, will you please state your position on this whole ideology = results point.”

In the beginning, when an ideology is new, and hasn’t been tried, you can separate intention of the adherents from results. Because, until it’s been tried, you don’t know what the results are going to be. In 1905, it’s possible to be a communist with good intentions, because you can think communism will produce good results. It doesn’t require willful self-deception.

Then an ideology gets tried, and goes horribly, horribly wrong. And, at this point, it’s still possible to distinguish the intention of the adherents from results, because it’s plausible some big mistake was made, or there’s some variant that would work. There might be a bit of self-deception going on at this point.

Then it gets tried again, and goes horribly wrong. And gets tried in a bit different way, and they actually build literal piles of skulls. And gets tried in yet another way, and death on a massive scale.

And, at this point, the space been adherents’ intentions and real world outcomes is paper thin, or gone. Because they know now what the results will be, and if they are still advocating the ideology, it’s perfectly fair to conclude they mean to achieve the results they must know they will get.

And, if they don’t “know” that they will get those results, then they’re deceiving themselves on an epic level, to the point where you just have to treat them like madmen.

And that’s where we are now, in regards to communism. Not at the stage of innocent ignorance. Not at the stage of plausible ignorance. We are, today, at the stage of willful, guilty denial or insanity.

Does that clarify the matter?

Peter T: “Fascism and Nazism together notched up 35 country years. Maybe 70 if you include the fascist satellite regimes of the 40s.”

Yes, one of the positive things you can say about fascism, is that it lacks the staying power of communism. Burns out fast. Whereas communism is a sort of Energizer Bunny of evil.

By Bellmore’s logic, capitalism doesn’t work either.

As is occasionally the case here, you don’t have to be remotely left-wing to find much of this discussion ludicrous, just non-American. Anyway here’s a link to Paul McCartney performing in Red Square:

because the communists can’t do everything they want.

Brett, you’ve defined ‘communist’ as someone who WANTS to disappear people, etc. Yet somehow I don’t think you really believe this. You mean that pot-smoking hippies who want to form a workers cooperative must necessarily also want your parade of horribles?

Aren’t you arguing that my Commie-ville, USA, scenario is impossible? IOW, could the people living in Commie-ville ‘have what they want?’ Be content? Why couldn’t they?

Blissful & instructive.

*The word ‘instructive’ should not be over-interpreted!

js: “If it sounds like I was “blaming” Lenin, then I just failed to write clearly.”

I was just giving you a bit of credit that it turned out you didn’t deserve. Leave morality aside, and of course Lenin was a complete failure. Never has anyone had such a lucky victory and turned it into long-term world-wide defeat so thoroughly.

To be clear, unlike Plume my definition of ‘communism’ doesn’t necessary involve liberalism or democracy, and also unlike Plume I would defend the whole ‘rule by an authoritarian, elite vanguard party’ type conception.

Functionally, communists ‘want’ to disappear people, etc, because they want a form of social organization which appears to alway involve such activities

So, a voluntary communist community inside a non-communist nation-state is impossible because the residents of Commie-ville don’t actually just want to live cooperatively. What they really want is to take over the world?

It’s just that they don’t realize that this is what they really want…

(?)

Pace mattski, Plume, and geo, it doesn’t take a bob mcmanus to spot the failures of liberalism’s arc of moral progress. Consider the even-handed foreign policy that gives us torture, black sites in Poland and the Baltic States, congressional sponsorship of bloody-minded lectures by Netanyahu, and the Department of Homeland Security. On the home front, consider the state governments of Arizona, Wisconsin, and now, it seems Illinois, with their impoverished schools, private prisons, right-to-work laws, open season on black teenagers, and even a black site in Chicago to match those of the CIA overseas, a black site which, mirabile dictu, seems to be run by some of the same people as the CIA’s were. Allow Bill Gates to accumulate half a trillion dollars, and the next thing you know he’s redesigning our entire education system to his own misbegotten commercial specifications. Let the likes of Carl Icahn decide our investment policy, and the next thing you know you’ll find one of them holding a gun on Tim Cook, and stuffing his pockets with the proceeds of Foxconn’s dark satanic mills. As for hapless Apple, it seems to me even Smaug could find better things to do with his treasure horde.

So in one sense, bob m has a point. If we’re not prepared to take their stuff there might never, ever be an end, short of a universal moral revelation, to the Koch brother’s self-righteous snickering as we’re all slowly, inexorably turned into part-time Walmart greeters. On the other hand, if it does come down to another civil war — one between bob’s revolutionary guard, say, and Brett’s ruggedly individual .45 — I have a feeling that the best that geo, Plume, mattski, and yours truly can hope to get out of it will be either a trip to the gulag, or a stint on a Georgia private prison chain gang. If so, we’ll hardly be able to claim that our fate has turned out to be inconsistent with what we already knew about the ironies of history.

“What they really want is to take over the world?”

That was true at least of William Morris – I remember reading him saying some such thing when I was a teenager and how he couldn’t be happy with his successes until all the world lived co-operatively and thinking myself that is an awfully big goal for a man to have and how he must accordingly have faced much disappointment. This was before I realised all the world has to act on climate change in the next couple of decades :/

It was a LOT of bunches of sociopaths, in different places, who called themselves birdwatchers. Russia, China, Cambodia…

Eventually, if every time birdwatchers get in a position where they can do what they want without outside constraint, they go on murder sprees, you have to conclude that birdwatchers are just generally sociopaths.

If the subject is “how to get there,” then, yes, we can do it without violence. I don’t want to “take their stuff.” They’ve already done enough of that to everyone else. Capitalism is all about “taking their stuff.” No one gets that stuff in the first place without, at some point in time, theft . . . and the ramifications of that original (or repeated) theft don’t just suddenly stop at one point in history. (We stole the land of the Native Americans, and they’re still paying the price for that to this day, and paying the price for the West’s invention, under capitalism, of the concentration camp, which William Everdell gives to Spain (Valeriano Weyler Y Nicolau), initially, with a h/t to Sherman and his march through Georgia. America then radically improved on Spain’s innovations during its rape and plunder of the Philippines, etc. )

The way to do it peacefully is to establish an alternative economic system which renders their dollars worthless. A non-violent war of attrition will work to wait the old guard capitalists out until they join the new economy as equal owners of the means of production. The only legal tender, the only legal form of commerce, would be the one we switch to — which is the case under our current capitalist control as well. The state backs only one form of legal, contractual commerce, and one kind of currency.

We completely delink funding for anything from revenues due to sales. We supply our own revenue stream, completely separate from individual commercial transactions. We own that pool of funding commonly, together, with equal shares and equal voices. It’s 110% independent of sales. So, little by little, the rich are left to illegal transactions, holding useless business property and dollars without any value. They can’t legally do business, and their dollars are worthless.

Eventually, they either join or leave.

No violence is necessary.

Brett,

Far more people have been slaughtered due to capitalism that all the Stalins, Maos, etc. etc. combined. It’s not at all close. The black book of capitalism dwarfs the one for so-called “communism.” You just conveniently ignore that.

Eventually, if every time birdwatchers get in a position where they can do what they want without outside constraint, they go on murder sprees, you have to conclude that birdwatchers are just generally sociopaths.

Kind of like unfettered gun ownership!

Let’s see what happens if Brett Belmore’s logic @487 et al is applied to Christianity. Viewed as a utopian ideology with a long history of practical political implementation, it can clearly be seen that Christianity has been tried many times. Piles of skulls have been a frequent result. With Catholicism, you have, to name but a few examples, the Inquisition, the Crusades, papal tyranny, corruption and the genocide of native populations in South America.

Some people objected to this particular implementation of the Christian ideal. Thus, the many reformation attempts, most famous of them being the Protestant reformation of Martin Luther, who claimed that Christianity as defined by the policies and actions of the Catholic church and the states under its control wasn’t true Christianity as defined by the actions and words of Jesus Christ. But the implementation of Protestantism also proved bloody and conducive to tyranny, repression, the 30 Years’ War, the genocide of native populations in North America, slavery, and so on and so forth.

I therefore assume that Brett Belmore defines Christianity as a murderous ideology that inevitably produces piles of skulls, and anyone claiming to be a non-violent Christian trying to uphold the ideals of Christ to be a madman at best and a latent mass murderer at worst, held back only by the confines and regulations of the capitalist society around them. Is my assumption correct? And if not, why not?

Sounds to me like Bellmore’s argument boils down to:

1. Communism, the theory, cannot work, because states claiming to be purely communist were dictatorships.

2. Capitalism, the theory, does work, even though states claiming to be purely capitalist were intolerable until they all became half-communist.

It looks to me like neither theory has worked in reality. Well duh. What is the problem here? In my neighborhood we figured this out, talking at recess on the school playground in 8th grade.

By “low bar for success,” I mean the allocation of goods, income and resources to the richest 20%, with most of that concentrated at the very top. For capitalism to be considered “successful,” all it needs to do is hide the suffering of the billions of people it fails — and/or forces into poverty, etc. If it can fool the average Middle Class American, European, Asian, etc. etc. . . . into thinking that everyone must be okay cuz they are . . . . it can essentially write off 80% of the world’s population and still claim “success.”

“Liberalism” basically deals with the richest 20%. Conservatives and propertarians are more focused on the 1%. Neither tends to really factor in the bottom 80% or more when they talk about “success.” It’s either “out of sight, out of mind,” or “IGMGFY.”

OTOH, a system with the goal of leaving no one behind — socialism/communism — has a much higher standard to meet. “Success” for it would entail no write offs, no forgotten peoples. The allocation of resources, social justice, compensation, would need to be across the board. We couldn’t simply pretend billions of humans don’t exist, or that they “deserve” their poverty.

Capitalism with the delusion of mitigating democracy attached is easier in the sense that it’s bar is set incredibly low. It can quite literally completely fail billions of humans and still be seen as “successful.”

Yeah, Rich, I hear you — and like everyone else here, I feel your pain. It’s true, I think, that if we do wind up with armed insurrections of one kind or other, they more than likely won’t be conducted by either bob’s or Brett’s factions, fantasies of Seeräuber Jenny and John Galt notwithstanding. This whole thread, of course, has been something of a tempest in a teapot, but it has at least identified the real conundrums, which are ancient. How, given the diverse motivations of millions of people, can we have an advanced technological civilization with informed participation on the one hand, and fair distribution on the other? Most of the necessary elements have been identified, but how they fit together is as much a mystery now as it was when the Enlightenment first opened the Pandora’s box of a rationalized polity, and in the process, more or less unwittingly, granted the crafty id the freedom to be all it could be.

With Catholicism, you have, to name but a few examples, the Inquisition, the Crusades, papal tyranny, corruption and the genocide of native populations in South America.

Plus, we get to burn heretics at the stake on a weekly basis!

Well, we did anyway.

Mattski, they still would like to do it, or have psychological need of talking about it, if Fox News is any indication. They just need an enemy, any enemy, or else their discourse doesn’t work.

engels doesn’t even read the links he posts. I was pretty amused to see how their long-term connection with the Bolsheviks helped the Greek Communists over the years, leading to their position of power in the struggle against neoliberalism today.

William,

On the other hand, if it does come down to another civil war

That’s not a way I would talk. I’m going to put my trust in non-violence.

Rich,

I’m willing to believe that Brett has a .45

Back in the day when I knew Brett from debates/harangues at Jack Balkin’s legal blog Brett was a proud machine-gun toter.

:^)

Plume #530, that is exactly NOT the answer to the question.

mattski @ 531

That’s not a way I would talk. I’m going to put my trust in non-violence.

More power to you then. Truly. For me, though, trust in this context puts too much of a burden on my already overtaxed cognitive skills. If being a good person requires of me that I indulge in a kind of willed schizophrenia, as in, say, Obama means well, but…, I’ll probably end up surrendering to the first overconfident asshole who kicks down my door.

I don’t know if you have already addressed this article, but I think it’s really excellent. Penned by the new finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist

Speaking of civil wars: He gives one very logical reason for trying to work with his oppressors. He fears a right-wing takeover in the face of a collapse of capitalism in the present or near future. I think he just may be correct. As much as I detest capitalism, I don’t think we leftists would achieve our goals by trying to bring down the system at present. It seems far more likely that the right would fill the power vacuum, with neo-Fascism or neo-Nazism.

Non-violent change, through a far more aggressive (and further) left-populism is the answer.

I was just giving you a bit of credit that it turned out you didn’t deserve.

Oh, good! The old J Thomas tactic of willful misreading as charity! How I’ve missed it. The thing is, I’m not saying what you think I’m saying. I’m not even saying the __kind__ of thing you think I’m saying.

thing, not think obviously, though the error is significative.

js: “The thing is, I’m not saying what you think I’m saying. I’m not even saying the __kind__ of thing you think I’m saying.”

Are you saying anything? What is it?

@Plume # 532:
Why is it, then, that people had to literally be forced into communes, and escaped as soon as they possibly could?

I should point that the only think I did was trying to present accurately Marx’s position and Graeber’s redefinition of it. In particular, the weird obscurities are all theirs

Yes—that’s what I meant! Sorry, I should’ve been more clear, but I meant that I agree with your rendering of the Marx/Engels position and how Marx understands the ‘from each…, to each…’ formula. Re “weird obscurities”, I was thinking of this:

“the individual […] receives back from society […] exactly what he gives to it”) and lest we missed the point, they have another go at it: “Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values.”

But I was misreading that, it’s not as weird as I originally thought.

Dan #546,

Not a good comparison. The tenets of Fascism were largely realized, before being overthrown. There was no real conflict between theory and its application. They were ultra-nationalist, rabidly anti-communist, anti-liberal, anti-democratic. They did in fact utilize the cult of the warrior and the idea of a heroic race. They did emphasize ethnic purity and scapegoated “the Other.” Obviously, they didn’t get everything they wanted, because singular leaders sent things in a direction those leaders wanted for themselves, not necessarily in adherence to the theories, always. But they were always pretty close. Fascist “thinkers” tended to believe they could use and control those leaders, and were often surprised at the difficulty, etc.

Communist theory, OTOH, is in direct conflict with what was done in its name. By definition. The Soviet system was top down, exceedingly hierarchical, power was not dispersed equally among the populace, there was no democracy and the people did not own the means of production. It wasn’t even a shadow of a shadow of a remote hint in accord with the theory. It was, in fact, an assault on that theory.

engels: “Oh dear. It’s an article about the KKE (which pace know-nothing American bloggers, remains a force within organised anti-capitalist struggle in Greece) from an informed, critical perspective on the Left.”

And as usual, you don’t read and you don’t think. I’m pretty happy citing that article as evidence that my views are correct, on the assumption that citing it means that people are likely to read it. The party’s own history blames its defeat on having to follow the priorities of the USSR either two or three times, and it was left with what the article calls “sectarianism” as its major barrier to actually accomplishing anything. Wow, is that an unfamiliar story about the few, mostly irrelevant parties that have lasted from that era.

“Exactly the same move you’re using to defend communism can be made here: after all, nothing about these doctrines entails the historical atrocities associated with fascism; it’s possible to cultivate ultra-nationalistic corporatism and an aesthetic of violence without actually engaging in it, invading your neighbors, or murdering Jews.”

This thread is so long I’m no longer sure, but hasn’t this been precisely what many people have been very directly arguing against throughout most of the thread?

Fascism in theory: “I explicitly support x.” And in practice: “x.”
Communism in theory: “I explicitly support *not*-x.” And in practice: “x”

John @ 442

I shouldn’t, but:

Now, thought-experiments are fairy stories? Who knew?

What does “is there an agent” even mean? Yes, there’s a person looking at the day’s contributions from all the group members and deciding what reward or punishment to dole out. I grant that my first and last paragraphs could be more fully flushed out.

I’m looking for a way to evaluate a criterion for exchange. Clearly, no one else is interested in how giving and getting would be evaluated in our future utopia, or at least that’s not the way the discussion is going. I think this lack of interest comes out in G.A. Cohen’s camping trip experiment, since as far as I can tell it’s entirely concerned with giving—with increasing production—and not at all with getting—with distribution. So, it kind of seems that what people are envisioning is that everyone works hard and trusts in the system, and maybe they get a bad deal, but it’s all good.

You’re talking about the moral affect associated with communism aka the golden rule, and that makes sense. But the moral affect associated with exchange seems to be opposed to that. The golden rule is about giving and once you ask “what do I get out of it,” you’re moving into the realm of exchange, and you have the wrong moral affect.

But silly me thought we were talking about societies and how they should administer production and distribution, not individual moral psychologies.

It’s worth acknowledging that, while big-C Communism did have some developmental successes bringing up agricultural economies to Western European standards (as Marx predicted was impossible and undesirable), and that big-C Communist parties have won elections in essentially liberal states like Greece and France . . . and that everything geo’s said about little-c communism is perfectly correct (and so is Sebastian when he deplores the habit of referring to all sorts of unrelated things as “communistic”) . . . in the US and some other Western states, the big-C Communist Party had a policy even before its near-total suppression in the 1950s of refusing to participate in the political process, at least openly. And so that’s Communism too.

Lee @24: Don’t refer to a book. Tell briefly how production and distribution is to occur, maybe in 140 characters

No book? “140 characters”? I’m disappointed in you, Lee. It’s an excellent question, though. For psychology, see Bellamy, Looking Backward, Morris, News from Nowhere, Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Callenbach, Ecotopia. For mechanics, see Callenbach, John Roemer, A Future for Socialism, David Schweickart, After Capitalism, Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward.

The moral/psychological prerequisite of socialism or communism is summed up, I would say, in this phrase from Looking Backward: “the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity.”

Yes, getting there will be a very long slog, and coercion of any kind would be entirely useless. But we have occasional intimations and prefigurings — see how we love one another in the CT community, for example!

geo: “The moral/psychological prerequisite of socialism or communism is summed up, I would say, in this phrase from Looking Backward: “the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity.””

I did think of contributing to Lee A. Arnold’s Twitter-sized request

“Commies didn’t have free bread, but they did invent free love”

but I thought maybe that didn’t have the high seriousness that his request demanded. I also thought of

“I’ll give someone an apple if they’ll just read this poem I wrote”

which nicely illustrates how sadism would persist under communism, and how it would still be connected to ideas of exchange.

Geo,

Thanks for that list. It’s a valuable addition to my “to read” list.

Geo, Hi, I once spent a couple of hours talking with Callenbach, so I’m happy he’s in there! I am optimistic that this era of obvious surfeit of necessities for all, prevented only by the current ownership structure, is leading to a change in attitude which is going to make the evolution happen more quickly than many now imagine.

I also think that the best book is Hazel Henderson, Building a Win-Win World.

Plume,

Thanks for the response. I’m sure there are leftists who are differently oriented regarding distribution, etc. I just keep seeing a similar pattern. Cohen seems mostly interested in persuading people to work (at least in what I’ve seen), and this seems compatible with the ideal “don’t ask what your reward will be, do the work without thinking of your reward.” Socialism is equated with being more moral, which is okay, and that’s a decent moral ideal. Then I see people recommending “joining groups” that do what you think is good, and saying their movement or group is going to make the world better. And when you ask how, they say something like “Socialism is about working in groups, you have to trust to the process, and not ask what’s in it for you.” And that, combined with people denying there are contradictions in Marx, or being cagy about what their “anarchism” consists in, makes me (paradoxically) actually distrustful.

“As the current government of Belarus (of which I’m quite a fan) likes to say, sausages are better than freedom.”

Yes, if there’s one thing the people of Belarus have been blessed with over the years it’s great leadership. (welcome back Hector ; ) )

Ronan,

Belarus has an impressively high HDI (much higher than the shambolic failed state to the south which had the so-called Orange Revolution), and it also has one of the lowest levels of economic inequality in the world. And never went through the post-Soviet economic catastrophe to the same degree that most of its neighbors.

Frankly, if forced to choose where to be born under the veil of ignorance, I would expect most knowledgeable people would say, better Dzerzhinsk than Detroit.

Organize society around the likely economic situation of the vast majority, rather than the exceedingly rare shot at the proverbial brass ring.

Sure, sounds good. But, I want to add, some people use that same argument in favor of the idea that women should all stay home with their children and cook meals for the family, and shouldn’t try to be equal in the workforce or in politics–because for the vast majority it isn’t feasible. Just saying.

Bianca #573,

Understood. But I would have thought the opposite would be the case. That a woman staying home, given the fact of flat or falling wages for the rank and file — forty plus years of it — pretty much requires two-income families.

As in, prior to neoliberalism’s ascendancy — at least for our brief moment of Middle Class boom times (1947-1973) — a single worker could make enough to support the family. That’s just not the case anymore. It takes two.

That said, I’d be opposed to anyone arguing that women should be forced to take a back seat in any realm, and not maximize their own potential. F that, etc.

Plume: In the economic realm, you’re right. In the symbolic realm, maybe it’s more complicated. In any case I don’t agree with that position–I don’t really even understand it–and wouldn’t be the one to build a defense for it.

Bolshevik art do[es] tend to emphasize the big men (and women) with big muscles

Tho not the early stuff. But beyond that, yes. Highly unfortunately.

Lee A. Arnold: ” I’m still not sure I understand what your complaint is. I think that the system is changing slowly, for a number of reasons. It forces itself. […] The thing is evolving into something else.”

You are the same Lee A. Arnold who replied “Certainly not” when I asked “Or, wait — is this a James Livingston ‘the left has already won, even though we don’t think so’ kind of thing?'”?

You gave the example of neoliberals fighting against, not advancing, the welfare state, as when they fought against Obamacare. Did they really? Brad DeLong opposed Obamacare? Big Pharma opposed Obamacare? (No they didn’t.) The health insurance industry also support Obamacare. If you’d like to study the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in the U.S. political system, then you’ll see that conservatives are not the same thing as neoliberals, and that there is no way Obamacare would have passed without support from neoliberals. Which is not surprising: something can be good for ordinary people on balance and still be good for capitalism. People got coverage; capitalism got everyone being penalized if they didn’t buy an insurance plan.

I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with “we don’t know it, but we’re winning” leftism, but if would be nice if you’d own up to it so we can discuss it. It uses three common tropes:

1. “Aren’t we all”

Aren’t we all workers? Really, when you come down to it, a tenured professor or a middle management person is a worker. Aren’t we all suffering in our own ways? So of course we have common things to come together around, even though these seem at first glance to not bear any relation to classic leftist theory.

2. Fun with words

When you protest a war, and that doesn’t succeed in stopping the war, you still made a revolutionary change because people afterwards seemed really motivated not to have people like you protest too much again. Therefore protestors are revolutionaries. Family camping trips are communism too.

3. Every day, in every way, it’s getting better and better

Look, productivity is going up, right? And people like us have had various cultural impacts and we do influence what happens. It’s intellectually lazy to say things like “smash the state” — instead, settle back and wait!

Rich #581, I think it would help if both you and Plume give us your logical theories of exactly why there must be a radical break, and why the change cannot be evolutionist.

Is it an emotional theory, a theory of emotional pollution or poisoning? That is, you think welfare state policies cannot lead to proper attitudes, are incapable of it, because they are in the employ of propping-up the capitalist system, and so ultimately enforce the wrong intentionalities and expectations?

It is a theory of emergent definition of relationship, so you think people need to hear, “This is now socialism,” so they can change their attitudes on a date certain, and en masse, or else it cannot , it will be diverted?

Is it something else?

DeLong was against a public option or single payer; he expressed on his blog the hope that the system could be market-based. Now it appears that he wants the insurers out of it entirely, because he has thought more about it.

Big Pharma opposed Obamacare because they got a sweet deal, but they’ll be on the chopping block next. Because Dean Baker is going to win that argument.

Similarly the health insurance industry got a stay of execution, knowing that the 2017 provision that lets states go single-payer (or whatever the state wants, so long as they continue comparable coverage) is the beginning of the end.

And that just means there’s fights to come. And so no, I don’t think the left has “already won”. I think it’s inevitable, but that is different.

As to why the left feels it needs a big parade with slogans, balloons and a band, maybe you can tell me.

Sorry to double post, but I missed this somehow: “And that just means there’s fights to come. And so no, I don’t think the left has “already won”. I think it’s inevitable, but that is different.”

I don’t see any large difference there. “Already won” is obviously meant rhetorically: I don’t know anyone on the left who thinks that we have already literally won everything. If we’re inevitably going to win, what good do the fights that you mention do? Is this like the invisible hand of the market, where as a whole it’s going to operate to point to leftism no matter what, but its operations require people to be rushing around doing things?

I have been thinking about a point 4) for this kind of theory: “As long as we show up, we’re sure to win”.

And, in re, the BB love-fest, above:

Thirty years as a shop steward, officer and committeeman in various capacities (including the presidency of USW Amalgamated 7686), etc., pretty much embittered me when it comes to any warmth of feeling for the BBs of the world who cravenly worship the ne0-fascist capitalist pigs that I despise with every fiber of my being. I know I should try to be nice about this, but it is too hard. I have given up.

WB 589

I know I should try to be nice about this, but it is too hard.

I don’t blame you one bit, William. I would add a couple of qualifying thoughts though. First, Brett is more complicated than at first meets the eye. I think he would probably not agree that about worshipping neo-fascists capitalists. But maybe he’ll respond to that.

The other thing is, most of the time Brett pisses me off royally and I’m sure the feelings are mutual on his end. So, I’m just jumping on an opportunity to express warmth precisely because these moments don’t come very often. Oh, and Brett has shown courage and honored us with his trust by sharing some difficult aspects of his life. I respect him for that.

“Marx saw it. I haven’t read everything by a long shot, so I could be wrong. But as I understand his general theory, it was a theory of evolution that used “class conflict” for the competition. But it didn’t necessarily mean instant revolution.”

Um. Maybe I’ll come back to the rest of this later, but you’ve read the Communist Manifesto, right? “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.”

Perhaps we should get engels back to disavow Engels again and explain how a revolution doesn’t mean a revolution. For that matter, maybe geo could look at section 3, “CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM”, and explain how it doesn’t denounce exactly what he’s been talking about. (geo says he’s talking about “Owen, Fourier, Marx, Bellamy, Morris, Perkins Gilman, Russell, and others.” The Manifesto mentions Fourier and Owen by name, and along with many uses of the word “fantastical”, there’s text like “Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.”)

So, as usual for this thread, you seem to be talking about a Marx that I don’t recognize. Which Marx decided “later” that he had to be a revolutionary after all?

Note that when I talked about 1872, I was talking about Marx the revolutionary, I was talking about Marx the statist, the authoritarian. It’s not merely a problem of rushing into a revolution — people can say various things about that pro or con — it’s attempting to take control of the state specifically because you want to use state power and you have no idea that there have to be any kind of real limits on that power.

Rich @593: maybe geo could look at section 3, “CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM”, and explain how it doesn’t denounce exactly what he’s been talking about … you seem to be talking about a Marx that I don’t recognize

I haven’t been talking much about Marx at all, Rich. I find the question of exactly what he believed at which stage of his career only very mildly interesting. I’ve been talking about a social/political ideal or vision of the cooperative commonwealth, to which Marx and all those other people mentioned (and many others, on both sides of the Atlantic) made their contribution. Marx’s comes mostly in his early writings, I think — the kind of thing quoted above about labor being life’s prime want, the realm of freedom vs. the realm of necessity, “from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs,” etc. Of course he said many other things — he was a vast, protean thinker, as you know. The fact that he disagreed with, even despised, other people who shared at least some aspects of his ideals and visions is hardly news, and only a puzzle if one is assuming that “communism” = “what Marx believed.” I certainly don’t believe that. I’m not even sure I believe that “Marxism” = “what Marx believed.”

As for evolution vs. revolution, I’m agnostic and believe that either can be the right strategy for a popular movement toward a communist society. It depends on how violently the ruling class resists democratically authorized radical change. My guess is that the bastards will resist it very violently, but you and I will never know: it will take many generations of patient persuasion and organizing before a large popular majority in favor of radically transformed social relations can be created. As I’ve said often, I’m a 25th-century utopian.

Also, Rich, I have strong left-anarchist leanings meself. Personally, I don’t see how it’s possible to be an anarchist and not want a “radical break.” This doesn’t compute for me. And while I wish I could flip a switch today and instantly change us to an egalitarian society, one that leaves no one behind, one that meets the needs of everyone and has “social justice” baked right in, I know it will take time, and that “evolutionary change” is a part of the puzzle.

In order to sustain revolutionary changes, they can’t happen instantly. There has to be a degree of transition, transformation, adjustment, adaptation, etc. etc. I agree with Yanis Varoufakis’ article I posted above. If we just blow up capitalism right now, the more likely result is the opposite of what we want. Far right forces would likely take over. We’d likely have neo-Fascism in place, instead of our egalitarian, democratic dream, etc.

So, to make a long story short: Yes, a radical break is necessary. And, yes, it will be evolutionary.

Rich, there are many mentions of “peaceful revolution” in Marx and Engels. I’ve read in many places that the CM was where the flip occurred. Of course that doesn’t make it true. If he started out his intellectual career with the idea that it had to be violent, I imagine that someone would have documented it by now. But as I wrote, I have not read everything, (I prefer the really short stuff!), and I never will.

“Rich, there are many mentions of “peaceful revolution” in Marx and Engels. I’ve read in many places that the CM was where the flip occurred. ”

OK, thanks. Maybe it’s a deficiency in my own Marxology, but I’m using to thinking of the CM, in 1848, as early. He only met Engels in 1844.

geo @595:

For what it’s worth (and it’s not worth much), the ‘from each…, to each…” formula comes from the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, I’m pretty sure. So, it’s “late” Marx, I guess. I suppose I only point this out because as a big fan of the Grundrisse and Capital Vol. 1, I find the valorization of the “early” Marx vaguely off-putting.

605: If anything, the narrative is that the shift is the other way around, that the disappointments of 1848 and 1871 led a disillusioned M-E to seek better means of preparing the ground for workers, including the Internationals and the idea of parties.
I don’t think Marx ever limited himself to peaceful, evolutionist revolution, a) because he wasn’t the one to tell the proletariat how to free themselves, and b) although he did accept working with parliaments for social improvement, it was always tactical and never with the idea that socialism would be achieved that way.

Gramsci, and especially Trotsky’s strong opposition to the Stalinist Comintern
Popular Front
policy of the thirties is a decent place to start looking. So, if you believe in alliances with bourgeois liberal parties, you are essentially a Stalinist. Just kidding.

Marx actually lived through a revolution, with all the excitement and disillusion that usually entails. Engels actually took up arms in the cause and was shot at.

General attitudes to war and violence have changed radically since Marx’ time. Most people then thought something like “peace is good but war has its moments too”; it was not seen as an unmitigated evil. So theorising that the revolution would maybe need to be violent did not conjure up the same horrors that it does for us. But for Marxists the question was and is empirical: a peaceful revolution is better but maybe not possible.

Fascism, and even more Nazism, attached a positive value to violence for its own sake – both see war as a form of social exercise (good for the body and the mind!). This led fascist Italians, Germans, Spaniards and others to rush off to where the action was, commit atrocities and mostly die pointlessly. The break between Fascism and Nazism is the stress Nazism placed on racist biology and the struggle between races. Fascist prefer war, but they can also fly planes through hoops of fire if no war is available. Nazis need war. So the dead Ukrainians, Poles etc are inseparable in the philosophy from the kinder, kuche.

js 607,

Do you mean that was the work where Marx first borrowed the phrase to insert into his own writings? Because while some trace it back to the Old Testament (a variation on the theme), it at least is more properly attributed to Louis Blanc, roughly 25 years before Gotha.

In a way, it’s a clumsy wording of something that might lead to many different interpretations. The discussion of reciprocity and exchange may be overthinking a much simpler maxim. It’s more likely, IMO, just a protest against unfair compensation, inequality and mal-distribution within society . . . . with its antidote being something on the order of “we do the best we can, within our individual limitations and capacities, and we receive what we need to make a decent life.” But receiving what we need isn’t necessarily contingent upon our being “productive” in the eyes of all of society. Marx’s comment about the far distant horizon of communism tells me he wasn’t calling for any kind of chained-to-the-assembly-line quid pro quo . . . when he says:

In communist society, the opposite: no one is locked into an exclusive circle of activity and each can form in any branch of his choice and is the company that regulates the general production and allows me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon to take care of livestock at night and devote myself to criticism after the meal, as I want, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic

The above strikes me as “anarchist” in a sense, and at least left-libertarian. I just don’t get any sense of a strict adherence to reciprocity and exchange, here, and it seems anti-authoritarian to me as well. It’s quite idyllic, etc and a thousand light years away from the Soviet Union.

“This is just elementary bad logic, Sebastian.

No one is saying that belief in the need for class struggle is incompatible with being a communist. I’m merely pointing out that it isn’t necessary. To put it another way, ‘Suppose you hope to achieve this without class warfare’ is not semantically equivalent to ‘suppose you define ‘communism’ as the hope to achieve this without class warfare.””

Words have meanings. Really they do. And I want to be sure I’m understanding you. Are you really saying that common ‘definition’ of communism excludes Marx and Engels? Again if you’re playing the Humpty-Dumpty game that far, why not just call it Thatcherism? Seriously. Why invoke Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin?

“OK, there’s a lot of space between this claim and ‘Marx was always only for violent revolution’”

Argh. The violent revolution quotes are well known and from very early on. Is ‘revolution’ even a word an 18th century person would use if they meant it to be peaceful. (I don’t know, but why don’t I push that research off to you?).

“Circling finally back: this is the sort of discussion that, it seems to me, the likes of Brett, Cassander and Sebastian are, ironically, excluded from. You can’t possibly discuss whether communism is inherently tainted by resentment so long as you believe, falsely, that it is just one big impulse to murder and has no cognitive or even emotional content beyond that.”

Now I begin to suspect you just don’t even read what I write, but rather pick up one or two words and riff of that. My whole argument all along has been that whatever the utopia content of the positive hoped-for end point of communism, there are basic enough flaws in the philosophy which lead to the communist horrors when anyone tries to put them into practice.

If you squint as hard as you are willing to for communism, nearly all of the utopias look the same at the end: “everyone left is happy with each other and lives in peace”. If you are willing to yadda yadda yadda all the middle part for all of them, they get there. My point all along is that many of the central features of what makes communism distinct as an economic philosophy (i.e. class warfare, universalism, attributions of false consciousness) lead quite easily to the horrors. The horrors shouldn’t be shocking because their seeds are embedded in the philosophy.

That isn’t the same as saying that all ideas and critiques by Marx of capitalism are wrong. Many of them were brilliant.

You want to twist me into saying that “nice people living together” leads to the gulag. But communism doesn’t mean just “nice people living together”. That is clearly Thatcherism, right?

Sebastian@619: whatever the utopia content of the positive hoped-for end point of communism, there are basic enough flaws in the philosophy which lead to the communist horrors when anyone tries to put them into practice

Actually, although I asked you and Brett way up thread to make just this argument, I don’t recall that you have — sorry if I’ve missed it. Here you do make what looks like an argument when you say that “what makes communism distinct as an economic philosophy (i.e. class warfare, universalism, attributions of false consciousness) lead quite easily to the horrors. The horrors shouldn’t be shocking because their seeds are embedded in the philosophy.” The problem is, though, that “class warfare” and “attributions of false consciousness” (I’m not sure what you mean by “universalism”) are not part of an economic philosophy at all; they’re part of a political strategy (in the case of class warfare) and a sociological analysis (in the case of false consciousness). It’s entirely possible to believe that a large society based on cooperation, universal access to basic resources, and democratic governance of economic as well as political life (i.e., communism (as Bellamy, Morris, Russell, et al would have defined it) could someday be given institutional specification, without having any opinion one way or another about class warfare or false consciousness.

Moreover (though irrelevantly), advocating class warfare and invoking false consciousness do not lead inevitably to the Marxist-Leninist horrors we all recognize. Class warfare, by the rich against the rest, is simply everyday life in capitalist society; self-defense by the rest is long overdue, and whether it takes a violent form will depend entirely on whether the rich violently resist popular movements for radical change — which, as is plain to anyone who knows the first thing about American and European history, they invariably do. And false consciousness describes perfectly well the upside-down views of the contractors and laborers I work with who blame all their troubles on immigrants and liberal politicians. The iniquitous uses that Communist regimes made of what they called “false consciousness” is another matter entirely.

I hope you won’t think it patronizing if I say that I’m genuinely grieved that you’re so upset with many of us in this thread. You’re entirely right, of course, to abhor the results of Marxism-Leninism, in Russia, China, East Europe, Vietnam, Cuba, and everywhere else it’s taken power. (Although engels and others do have a point about some of those regimes having some positive accomplishments, those accomplishments don’t excuse all the oppression, violence, deceit, and deprivation.) But surely you know that nearly everyone here agrees with you about that? And surely you don’t believe that anyone who’s spoken up for the original communist ideal in this thread — Plume, mattski, Holbo, me, whoever — has a grain of sympathy for those regimes or an undemocratic bone in his or her body? We may have driven you half-mad by splitting verbal hairs; we may have made a mess of arguing our case; but surely you don’t believe that we’d make a charnel house of society, whatever our theories?

Geo #621,

You continue to post excellent thoughts on the subject.

This is especially good:

The problem is, though, that “class warfare” and “attributions of false consciousness” (I’m not sure what you mean by “universalism”) are not part of an economic philosophy at all; they’re part of a political strategy (in the case of class warfare) and a sociological analysis (in the case of false consciousness). It’s entirely possible to believe that a large society based on cooperation, universal access to basic resources, and democratic governance of economic as well as political life (i.e., communism (as Bellamy, Morris, Russell, et al would have defined it) could someday be given institutional specification, without having any opinion one way or another about class warfare or false consciousness.

And you further nail with the point about “class struggle.” The rich have been waging class war on the rest of us for a long, long time, but it’s only called “class warfare” when we fight back. Instead of blaming the victims of that war, perhaps their critics should consider stopping the warfare waged on us from above. IMO, most people who complain about this fighting back are either very rich themselves, or shilling for the rich. Having an issue with economic self-defense (and the desire for self-determination) is absurd if they’re not on Team Plutocracy. And, yes, you are absolutely correct. There is no need for violence — at all — if the rich stop their war against us. It’s up to them. If they willingly stop hoarding the vast majority of wealth, land, income, access and power and share it, then there is no need for any violent “class struggle.” But they never have been willing to do this. They always push things to their limits and beyond.

If it comes down to the real thing, and goes beyond rhetoric and dreams, it’s on them. It’s on their greed, their stubbornness, their theft from workers, their insistence of greater and greater and greater control of resources, access, etc. etc.

Me? I’m in favor of non-violent struggle all the way. But I don’t speak for anyone but me.

In pretty much all of these kinds of discussions, Team Plutocrat pretty much always ignores stats and data, and just repeats their mantra about the supposed “freedom and liberty” capitalism brings. They never say for whom, and at what cost. They just keep repeating their mantra. And the silly one about “lifting people out of poverty.” Again, this is a very small percentage of society, with a far greater portion being thrown into poverty to make this possible, and various governments and democratic institutions really doing the the legwork for most of that uplift. It wasn’t capitalism. Ever. On net, it’s crushed, killed, enslaved and beaten into submission far more people than it’s ever helped.

So, for once, don’t ignore the stats. Address them. Address the stats on inequality. Like the fact that just 80 human beings now hold more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion people. Any economic system that produces such a massive imbalance is an epic failure.

Or, the fact that by next year, in America, the richest 1% will hold more wealth than the rest of the country combined. The top 1%, all by itself, will hold more than half of all wealth in America. The “bottom” 99% will hold less than the top 1%. Again, any economic system that produces that is an epic failure and shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

To further sharpen the snapshot we get from those stats: We have a median income of just 28K, roughly, for individuals, and just 52K for households. A household can contain several incomes at the same time. When an economic system produces individuals who makes several billion a year, while the mid-way point is just 28K . . . . . that system is an epic failure.

And the above doesn’t include poverty stats, or the impact of capitalism’s war against the environment, or the fact that it needs trillions of dollars in bailouts repeatedly just to stay afloat, or the endless wars to keep its shipping lanes open.

It’s pretty amazing that the same people who support the actual, observable horrors of capitalism in practice have a problem with communist theory — something that has never gone beyond the commune, the kibbutz or the Native American village in the modern world.

Also #626,

There’s the inevitabilism that Lee A. Arnold was talking about, in a different form. So hold on, it looks like the nice, kindly communist ideal has become a historical analysis, and that analysis says: we should defend ourselves; we won’t be violent unless the rich violently resist our movements for change; the rich inevitably do.

This assumes that “communists” are alone in making “class struggle” an important part of their platform, etc. That would be a major mistake. In one form or another, the acknowledgement of “class warfare” being waged from the top down is common across the political spectrum. It appears that it’s much more common on the left than the right, but we hear tea party activists complaining about “crony capitalism” as well. And from liberals to the furthest reaches of the left, including left-anarchists, this is a common concept. If merely discussing “class struggle” leads inevitably to violence, then a host of people from across the spectrum — and their particular ideals and philosophies — would be implicated. It’s far from being just “communists.”

It really doesn’t make sense to implicate any of them. The fault lies with the rich.

Rich,

I know about anarchism, having strong left-anarchist leanings meself. And, again, I have yet to read a single comment by you that even slightly resembles anarchist thought. You sound much more like an apologist for the capitalist status quo to me. Though I may have misread you. I’ll admit that readily if the evidence warrants it.

My conception of anarchism comes from many sources, but to wrap it up in short order, I agree with Chomsky’s take in this video. I’m pretty much on the same page as he is on most everything:

http://www.c-span.org/video/?316460-1/book-discussion-anarchism

As for your insistence that communist theory leads inevitably to the Soviet Union, I absolutely disagree. For a host of reasons. First off, contrary to Marx, I see nothing as historically inevitable. Second, inputs in X environment will result in different outputs in Y environment. Context is everything. What happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China will never happen again, even in Russia and China. The context has changed radically. The players have changed. All of the variables have changed, there and around the world. And, beyond that, as mentioned already, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and company actually waged war against communist and socialist theory/ideals/principles. They didn’t even remotely implement them. They left out THE most important aspects of both:

Full, participatory democracy and equal ownership of the means of production by every citizen.

They installed State Capitalism within a top down structure of dominance and control by the few over the many. This is the opposite of socialism and communism, etc. And communism is the absence of the state.

Rich, that is exactly what I advocate for. Small scale, communal arrangements, linked to other small scale, communal arrangements, with power being dispersed to all individuals, equally. All of this in a context of full, participatory democracy and economics. All of this in an egalitarian frame. And I don’t want the state to replicate itself along current lines, either. Far, far from it. My own vision would be local democratic councils, rotating in and out, working cooperatively with other local democratic councils, with rotating regional and national councils as well. A constitution in place, detailing human rights, civil rights, etc. etc. for everyone. But most of the day to day “governing” being left to individual communities.

Every citizen would do his or her time on all three levels. Local, regional and national. Say, a four year commitment, total. One for the local, one for regional and then two for the national. Then they would go home. No elections. Just lottery picks.

And within businesses, a similar idea. Worker councils, rotating in and out of leadership. All of this designed to prevent the establishment of permanent workplace, local, regional or national power centers. All of this done to prevent the establishment of “classes,” period. And because it’s rotational, it’s not really a “state,” at least as we currently think of it.

Communist theory is quite similar to the above and has “left-anarchist” thought and ideals built in as well. IMO, you’re too locked into one narrow aspect of Marx, and assuming that the Soviet and Maoist systems, etc. etc. represent “communism.”

They don’t. Again, they waged war against communist theory.

“No, Sebastian, a substantial portion of your argument has been that we cannot talk about the utopian content. ”

Really? My comments are 49, 223, 279, 280, 348, 359, 433, 477, 478, and 619.

If you stretch, maybe 282 means that. And BTW Graeber isn’t talking about the utopian content right? He is talking about mutualism in the present and past and labeling it ‘communism’.

And remember, you are responding to my comment agreeing that whatever communism’s alleged ideal endpoint, there are internal flaws which end up making the nasty stuff super likely. You were suggesting that wasn’t what I was saying.

So would you mind pointing out the substantial portion of my argument that relies on forbidding talk about utopian content while I was failing to suggest that there are internal flaws in the way communism operates which lead to the bad stuff despite their alleged good desires? Is it 279 that set you off? Because at worst that is me being mistaken about the desired utopia, not me trying to shut off talk about it.

I certainly said that utopia focus ends up not being interesting, because if you focus laser-like on the utopias while flying up to two or three sentence wikipedia summary levels of abstraction they don’t give you much to work with.

Certainly it’s better for that purpose than bob mcmanus’ approach, which has the defect of leaving out the idealism.

I don’t consider it a defect at all. I avoided this thread for a long time, because it appeared that Holbo and friends wanted to play at a pretty high level of abstraction, and Marxists abhor that. “Marx is all over the place on X?” Of course, it always depended, depends, will depend on the concrete material situation, and general rules are the stuff of, precisely, bourgeois idealists seeking external justification.

Ukraine is running out of food. If I am in Kyiv, the baker has full shelves, the children are starving, after asking real nice, and trying other means, do I grab a loaf to feed the kids, perhaps even involving a punch in the nose? Maybe a tough call, but I definitely will not commit in advance to a universal principle of property rights, non-violence, and feel comfortable in myself while the children die.

If I am hostile around here, it is because I take y’all seriously (geo is ambivalent) and believe in your non-violent promises not to “take their stuff” and so I seriously believe that in that particular situation you will let the children die for your principles and ideals. History of liberals and moderates jumping over to the side of order and state violence during crunch times of crisis confirms my instincts.

bob #637,

I want no one left behind, and the allocation of goods and access made universal yesterday. I don’t want to have to wait through decades of incrementalism, either. But I think what you’re calling for just wouldn’t accomplish any of that universal relief, and would more likely lead to a Fascist takeover from the chaos involved. Rather than a successful leftist revolution, I think it would open the doors for the various Golden Dawns, etc.

How would you channel those forces who would go to the stores to take the bread they need? Ironically, that’s where your “idealism” kicks in, in a strange sort of way. That you think a far more militant stance on the horrors of our current system would actually be focused on alleviating the suffering of all, and not on something else entirely. What would prevent what you’ve unleashed from ignoring universal suffering and need entirely, replacing it with brand new centers of power hoarding wealth, access and resources all to themselves? That may well lead to an even larger contingent of the suffering, etc. etc.

bob #640,

I know you’re being snarky. And I also know you know I’m not “liked here.” So that’s a rather odd premise for the rest of your post.

Regardless. I also oppose following the rules or the status quo, which is why I want to help build a completely different alternative to all of that. It’s not about “acquiescence” to convention, norms, “the system.” I despise the current system with every fiber of my being. It makes me nauseous. It’s about actually getting it done, achieving the goals of universal access, sustainability and everyone having at least “enough.” I just don’t see how what you’re suggesting would get there.

Again, I think you’re being hopelessly idealistic in your belief that you could ride the tiger to universal emancipation via force of arms. I fully understand the desire to cut through all the bullshit and just do it. This must have been what Bush was thinking while negotiations were going on to secure Hussein a place in another country. He probably said, “Fuck it. We’re bombing them into the stone age.” But look where that got us.

Again, how would you manage what you’ve unleashed? How would you make sure it was done in the service of an end to suffering?

Again, how would you manage what you’ve unleashed? How would you make sure it was done in the service of an end to suffering?

Since you want to feel all responsible and shit, you can be the boss.

I have said over and over that I don’t feel comfortable telling people more desperate than me what to do. It is the fact that most of you want to preach to the subaltern (no, mustn’t be violent) that makes me hostile and despairing. I just want to give them permission, tell them I won’t judge, or just shut up and let them talk.

Oh, while you were weighing the consequences, the children died.

Oh, while you were weighing the consequences, the children died.

How dreadful of us to turn up our bourgeois noses at the maximalist mayhem all good kids crave.

For what it’s worth, I agree with Bob MacManus much more than Plume.

Things are going to get worse before they get better, and I suspect that capitalism is going to get worse and worse until the whole thing comes crashing down in an apocalyptic conflagration. And after that, we get socialism.

Hector, I hope we get real socialism.

But there is no guarantee in that. We could have its opposite, Fascism. And right now, it would seem that the right is far better positioned to take advantage of chaos and power vacuums than the left. The left has been pretty much routed and forced to the margins since the early 1970s, with the right ascending since then. And it has the money and the arms as well.

I’m just not sanguine that some inchoate, all out revolution will lead to the desired result: Full democracy, in an egalitarian frame, with no one left behind. I fear a different world would be upon the next generation.

John #648,

I consider myself a (eco)socialist, with left-anarchist leanings, not a communist. It’s probably a minority take, but I see communism, at least in the modern world, as the utopian extension of socialism — its never to be reached horizon. Primarily because the main thing that differentiates it from socialism, in my view, is the absence of the state. This absence of the state also is the last step in ending any remnant of a ruling class or classes period. The ideas I’ve put forward before of a rotational democracy . . . might strike some as a “state,” and I can see that, though I think it does get us about as close as we can get to its absence. It gets us about as close as possible to the absence of classes, especially the ruling class, which I think should be our goal. And it’s the moral thing to do. No more class divisions. None.

Socialism, if it sticks to its principles and reason for being, means full participatory democracy, with the people, all the people, owning the means of production, together, not through proxies, not through representatives, but literally. All of us would literally own the means of production with absolutely equal shares and say. Communism is the next step in the process after this becomes so much the norm, so natural, so internalized for us, that we can then take off the training wheels and go it alone. That then becomes the apotheosis of true self-governing. Fully realized socialism is just this side of that, without quite going there.

I see communism, in that sense, as a beautiful goal, but I also don’t see it as practical in the modern world. It’s what I wish comes true for future humankind, but I suspect there will always be the need of a state, primarily because our societies have become so complex and there are so many of us. One of the reasons why I want us to go back to old-style local economies, with use-value instead of exchange value, with C-M-C commerce instead of M-C-M, is to get us back to at least a shot at taking that next step. Simplify. Radically. Go back to artisanship. Craftsmanship. Individual artistry and away from mass produced crap. Personal quality of goods and services. The end of corporations and the indifferent and desensitized and depersonalized mode of capitalist relations. End capitalism period. As if it had never existed.

And I actually think this is doable, over time. I definitely think it’s necessary, just, moral and right. Communism, OTOH, is likely not possible or doable, at least given current complexities. If we could get there, I fear it would be of short duration, primarily because outside forces would take advantage of the absence of that state to violently implement something wildly different, as they establish their own governing body, etc. etc.

Beyond all of that, I still don’t think any of the people hating on the idea of communism have even remotely demonstrated that it leads to evil, that it must do so. There is no logical pathway from baseline communism to the gulag. It doesn’t exist.

Plume,

I will just say that I find your radical democracy, abolish-the-state business to be totally unappealing as well as unrealistic. The socialism I support is definitely of the elitist, vanguard-party, Soviet variety. I see most people as basically similar to children, who need a strong State, run by a vanguard party, to rule them. The big question is whether they will be ruled by a right wing elite (that rules them for the good of the capitalist class) or by a left wing elite (which rules over them for their own good).

Hector, #653,

Perhaps my own #651 was TLDNR, because it basically addresses your complaint.

That said, to me the problem is severe hierarchy and “bosses.” Those are key aspects of all that ails humanity. The best society, IMO, would be the one that flattens the pyramid to the degree possible (egalitarianism), and negates the power of bosses by making sure they can never be permanently fixed in that position. Others here have misread me as advocating for leaderless, rudderless commons. No. I think rotational forms of leadership best, so there is no chance to reestablish class divisions and the concentration of power. We would still have leaders. Or, one might say, facilitators. But they would always be temps.

Keeping it dispersed, spread out among the entire populace, in equal measure — I think that’s the way to prevent oppression, bullying, the destruction of personal autonomy, etc. etc.

As for your own ideas: I want no part of what the Who sang about: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” We can do much, much better than that.

Plume,

See, the advantage of my brand of socialism is the basic idea has been tried, I just want to tinker around the edges and get better people (i.e. Good Men) into charge. I.e. something somewhere between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and modern day Belarus. Brett Bellmore and Cassander may not like the results, but they can’t deny that such a system is at least possible to construct. You want something entirely new and untried, and there’s no reason to believe what you want is even possible.

Sebastion H #658,

It is false to assume that communism must include revolution, a concentration on “class struggle,” or “false consciousness.” I think you are assuming that “communism” must always already be “Marxist-Leninist.” This is a false assumption. Communism predates Marx, goes beyond him, sometimes counters his thought, and he said next to nothing about how communism would work in practice anyway — and there are a host of communists who differ with even that.

Graeber is right to talk about small “c” communism. Again, this predates Marx and goes beyond him as well. The Soviet and Maoist systems had nothing whatsoever to do with socialist or communist theory, but I could see someone using “Communism” as a shortcut. But never, ever, not remotely, communism. In reality, the Soviet system and the Maoist system were State Capitalist systems . . . and SINO or CINO. Socialism in name only, or communism in name only.

Perhaps an analogous situation would be Political Islam versus Islam proper, though even there, we find more Venn diagram overlap that Communism and communism. With the latter, the sector of that overlap is virtually nonexistent. It’s in name only.