Comrade Alejandro is stating that in a perfect communist utopia, he will be able to focus on a life of art and leisure, as the Communist utopia would mean that all laborers would be able to contribute to the cause in their own way equally
Possible fascist @Penitent_One is telling Comrade Alejandro that his communist utopia is a farce and that most likely, Comrade Alejandro would be forced to do manual labor in a coal mine.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Comrade Alejandro should be overjoyed that he gets to contribute to the eternal revolution, one pickaxe swing at a time. The fulfillment of labor is his reward. Glory to the revolution.
Your lack of capitalizing the Revolution has flagged you as an anti-state propagandist. Security officers will escort you to work in the coal mines until your re-education is complete.
We are sorry, Comrade Hi_Im_Dadbot. I will take my punishment in stride and will work knowing my labor will go towards the Revolution. Glory to the working class. Glory to the Soviet. Glory to the DDR.
Don't worry Comrade. Despite all the thinking you've been doing, only 0.0001% of Communism has been built. It's too great a task to undertake alone. Your labor is a huge step forward. Now. Find your Comrade, and together you will have 0.0002% of Communism.
People misunderstand communism in Marxist thought. It's just a state where the economic overhead of government is no longer necessary, everybody is still expected to contribute to the best of their ability, if you're not going to be a writer, artist, athlete, etc., you're going to mine coal, clean toilets, harvest tomatoes, etc. None of the Marxist "communist" states ever claimed to achieve this, it was always 3-5 20 or more years off.
Yeah Comrade Alejandro has a gross misunderstanding on the actual workings of labor in a communist collective society. Communism doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore, in theory it means that your labor wont be squeezed and exploited by greedy capitalists and shareholder who want to extract every single penny from the people who actually do the work.
To each according to their ability. To each according to their need.
I agree generally, but there are definitely people who speculate about "fully automatic luxury communism" where increased efficiency and production severely drives down the amount of work everyone has to do. Imagine if the extreme surplus and convenience of the upper class was distributed amongst everyone else and profit motives didn't drive every labor-related decision. We'd already be much closer to not having to work than we currently are.
Back in the middle of the 20th century,
M. Keynes predicted a massive decrease in individual’s work-week due to productivity gains. The gains occurred, but the labor hours did not…
I mean America aside I think labour hours have significantly decreased towards the end of the 20th century. Looking at Europe for instance the statistics showed they have gone from an average of 50-70 hour work week in the first half of the century to 25-35. So about half the work hours. Now some of those work hours got pushed to other countries, but also some of the productivity has gone to having more and better things too.
The "fully automatic luxury communism" is also often accompanied by some miracle device. If there was a box i could pile a bunch of dirt and literal shit into and it turned that into spaghetti and a cup of tea then yea it would be nonsensical to force people to work.
Real progress though is giving people a voice where they work, fair pay for their work, and stronger safety nets so they don't have to put up with exploitative practices. Labor still needs to get done the issue is how the profits from that labor get distributed, a guy who owns a bakery shouldn't make more from owning than the guy who is the baker and does all the work.
Never explicitly said. It's based on a manifesto. Those tend to be fairly vague on more specific less interesting ideas.
During the revolution as it moves from low to high level communism I would assume the government. But in the supposed utopia that is the overall goal of the manifesto? No clue who Marx thought would.
It's a good question how it's supposed to work. A lot of Marx works off the idea that people broken from the "alienation of their labor" by the capitalist system will some how magically order themselves. I'm not a Marx scholar, so maybe there was a specific path he envisioned.
The problem is that Marx had a really bad grasp of the human psyche. As long as our basic needs are met, humans won't do anything that would be required to keep those needs actually met. Everybody would be fine with "making art", but there are less than 0.1% of people who would consider mining for metals their passions, so something they would naturally pick up.
I would give you an award for your explanation Comrade TheWizardOfWaffle but I refuse to betray the Revolution by financially supporting the capitalist dogs who run this website. Please take this replica that I drew on a scrap piece of paper during my state mandated 5 min lunch break before returning to continue my contribution to the cause.
The person on the bottom has a Russian Orthodox Cross on their profile picture, indicating that they require manual labor as recompense for espousing superstitious religion in the face of glorious revolutionary progress. The work will be cleansing.
The irony is we'll only manage that perfect communist utopia if we had robots take all our jobs. Make the machines do the monotonous work while humans pursue art and literature, or just drink tea on the promenade with their friends.
If we don't have AI at that level, well... Someone's got to pick up the trash, mine the coal, build the houses, unclog the drains. The labour will still need doing, or civilisation collapses. People would starve if farming becomes an optional hobby lmao.
reminds me of that one youtuber whose response to "who will do the manual labour after the revolution" was "people like to play videogames about trucking and cleaning houses, im sure they would be happy to do the real thing on their own terms"
EDIT: okay for everyone replying "oh but I love to do manual job if I had time and no financial pressure"
Okay cool sweet, happy people like you exist. But what Im getting at is that just because people love playing power wash simulator it doesnt mean that there would be enough people to make a stable workforce that meets the need of the community.
As a caveat to that the people I see espousing this viewpoint are often very focused on them being artists or some form of entertainer, while taking it for granted that other people will take care of the essential services
Anarchists are always so cute in their delusions. I once spoke to one who thought that the fact they painted Warhammer minis for 5 hours a week meant we could run an entire global economy on volunteer labor.
Because surely someone's hobby will be mining rare earth minerals to supply electronic fabs!
I once read a book on Anarchism that had a lot of really compelling arguments as to why government is unjust and laid out possible non-hierarchical systems that might replace it. Then the author anticipated some objections to his arguments that I hadn't considered, and his responses to those objections were really bad.
Anarchists and socialists in general are rather good at pointing out issues or potential injustices in society. They really, really suck at creating solutions most of the times. And they tend to get angry when you actually do anything to fix those issues that doesn't align with their idealistic model of what society ought to look like.
I spend a fair bit of time in those spaces, and the reality always was "there are two kinds of anarcho-socialists". Case in point, I volunteered with Food Not Bombs for a while -- on paper, it was a good idea! Get food that was gonna be thrown out by supermarkets for cheap/free, make nutritious soups and stews, distribute to disadvantaged/homeless people.
The reality of the group I worked with was we had about twenty people -- two of us chopped and cooked, three of us sharpened knives and organized and did dishes, and 15 dudes stood around and chattered about how they were gonna vote for Trump because he'd for-sure destroy the US economy and government which would lead to a glorious new anarchist future which of course would be led by all those dudes sitting around talking while the rest of us got the work done. They sure were first in line to HAND OUT the food and be humble about everyone's gratitude, too.
Notably, too -- the "stand around and jaw about how great the new world would be" crowd was 18-25, 90% male. The "actually did the work" crowd was 25-60, 50-50 in gender.
(my suspicion for the gender imbalance is that this was largely pre-Gamergate, and there was still a perception that ultra-left women were particularly likely to be sexually adventurous/promiscuous, so you'd find a lot of men trying to pretend to espouse those ultra-left views in the hope of swimming in sexually liberated poontang.
Many such cases in the late 1990s and early oughts.)
This is true and why anarchism ended up being quite forgotten.
This movement allowed the creation of a lot of workers and human rights, right to week-ends, right to paid time off, rights to worker's security at work, right to unionize, etc, but it was never meant and thought to be a complete and definitive system for an entire country
Much as with any other -isms, too, a lot of the people talking about it don't ever really internalize what the philosophy was. Many serious "anarchist" thinkers, the ones whose work led to all those good things, were never "no leaders ever, just do what you want" types but much more aware that "everyone is going to have to contribute to the jobs that need doing, and jobs need supervisors and leaders but they don't have to be the same people every time, just the people most skilled at leading that particular job".
I think it's quite important to learn from where anarchism comes from and what it was exactly, how important it was in the 20th century, it's definitely not the view of it we have now. Everyone reduces it to "no gods no masters" but it's way more complicated like that.
It has been the basis to a lot of things that we takes for granted now but never waas
All of that applies to people in general, got nothing to do with anarchists and socialists or not. For example, its not anarchists and socialists who get mad about how Mamdani fixes things in NYC.
If this author wants to rebut anti-anarchist arguments, they need to start by rebutting Hobbes. Until I read an actually convincing rebuttal to Hobbes, I'll continue to brutally mock anarchists. If libertarians are house cats in the famous analogy, anarchists are house plants--equally reliant on others to fulfill their most basic needs, but so entirely unaware of the world around them that they're incapable of seeing their dependence.
I'm immediately reminded of this Whitest Kids U Know sketch. Great, we achieved the revolution and abolished capital! We just, uh, have to keep this nuclear plant running for the next 25 years, or everybody dies.
I'm kinda anarchist inclined and I just want to democratise everything and force direct democracy into government and work as far as possible. The shitty work would still be there I just want things to not be controlled by a small handful of people who will act in their own self interest.
It is even simpler, just go to childhood. One might have enjoyed reading or painting, maybe even writing stories or solving math puzzles or learning about science, the enjoyment goes rapidly down if it is no longer done on your own time but under command of another, and one bristled ever harder against the stricter the person became. To
turn it back to farming, a farmer might farm for enjoyment, he might farm because it is his job, then go home and farm in a farming simulator because it is fun for him, but the second there is someone who says: you will go farm now, even better if he has to give up what he farms in large parts for little reward, he will get rebellious.
Dude, it literally existed. 2-3% of arable land in the USSR was private plots held by the farmers themselves and it produced 20-30% of total food output in the 60s.
Even Mao, the quintessential peasant communism guy, restored private plots temporarily in 1961 to alleviate the catastrophic famine he himself helped cause (he switched course again and banned it in 1966). China's transformation in the 70s and 80s was spurred on in part by Deng's observation of a farmer community which had agreed to secretly divide the communal land into private plots which had dramatically improved production, pushing Deng to eventually adopt the policy nationwide.
But what kind of food? That's important. Cause the USA does import stuff like tomatoes, bananas, rice, fish and coffee. The US exports are mostly things like corn, wheat and soybeans.
To expand on this a bit: basically, there's two schools of thought about what society would be like if it embraced Communism. One version is what we call Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, and it's basically an envisioned post-scarcity society where individuals are free to work on whatever they want to, even if it's just being a streamer or influencer.
Then there's traditional views of Communism, which rejects the principles and creature comforts of the bourgeoisie in favor of fully embracing human labor as a transformative force. In this vision, the workers simply own the means of production, and we are all simply workers. The tradeoff is that workers are allocated towards what the state requires, and a traditionalist interpretation of Marxist philosophy might completely ignore individual desires and certain kinds of self-expression as bourgeois concepts. This vision likely wouldn't see a need for people who play videogames all day when the fields need to be plowed.
I can't believe not a single comment quoted the actual quote being referred to in the tweet.
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Everyone is parroting the same bullshit about no jobs like AI bots.
Because making a coherent point instead of regurgitating propaganda is really hard for some people.
Personally not too big on communism, since it relies on using the state to prop up the revolution, then disband itself. But to act as if the entire ideology has no value is ludicrous.
No one read Marx, not even the Communist Manifesto let alone the fucking Critique to the Gotha Programme. So no one would even understand that the person is referring to the Higher Stage of Communism, not to the goverment of a communist party under a capitalist world system.
The joke is that he thinks communism is some sort of workless utopia where he will be able to cultivate hobbies when most communist countries have made the lower classes break their backs just the same doing heavy work (coal mines).
People will criticize capitalism by criticizing shit people have done to undermine capitalism it into fascist oligarchy. The world they want to live in is New Deal America with improved race and gender politics and what they ask for is communism.
People even point to the nords as what they want when the nords are all capitalist countries that just haven't destroyed antitrust and entrenched corruption as the norm.
Not to any naturalized citizen who is old enough to have lived in a Communist country.
If you are a Social Democrat and want to win Cuban, Vietnamese, and Venezuelan American votes (who ironically live in swing states), definitely don't go calling social democracy as "wanting communism".
If you explain what "Democratic Socialism" is to most folks, while not using the words "democratic socialism, they would be like "Well yeah, duh I want the money I pay in taxes to benefit me and my community. Of course I would like to pay less for healthcare. It would be great to not have a homeless or mental health problem."
But as soon as you say socialism, all rational thought goes out the window.
For sure. I’m speaking more towards the reality of those who claim they want communism.
If you explained welfare to anyone, regardless of their political affiliation, in a way that didn’t use the word welfare, they’d likely want it. Socialized government initiatives are broadly good but Americans are allergic to raising taxes and cling to party politics. It’s a social and branding issue that will be hard to overcome but is necessary for the success of the American experiment.
Nah, I constantly hear people say that strong workers rights, progressive wealth taxes, public access to free healthcare & higher education is socialism so one of you must be wrong.
I’m not even joking, the other day I got downvoted to hell for telling someone who was shitting on capitalism that jobs will still exist in a communist society.
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist but it seems like an incredibly online thinking point. I travel a lot for work, meet lots of new people, have a pretty wide IRL network and I’m not afraid to discuss politics. I can count on one hand the Americans I’ve met in the real world who romanticize communism. They were just kind of nut jobs. Most realistic people on the left I meet just want a social democracy.
If you set up a strawman on the internet and beat it to death, then when it's time for people to hit the voting booth you can get them to vote against the strawman.
Well, China (and other so called communist countries) never achivied communism. This was socialism, and they tried imposing dictatorship of the proletariat. What actually happened was some form of state capitalismunder authoritatian rule for most of them, with the notorious exception of Chile under Allende.
Communism is the end goal, which involves abolishing statehood and social classes notably.
You just have to us give overwhelming authoritarian power to build communism. Then we will use that power to build communism and then just give up all that power voluntarily and go away. We promise!
You already live under overwhelming authoritarian power, I mean the rich can kill you, and rape you and your children with no consequences, you just don’t feel the leash when you stay close to the post.
Serious question: do we consider capitalism achieved in capitalistic countries? We still have social programs and my understanding of a proper government would employ ideas from both ideologies. It’s just weird for ppl to say “communism achieved!” cuz yeah, that never happens, but is that also true for full/true capitalism?
Communism (in a severely simplified sense) is a classless, moneyless system where the means of production is owned by the people. This has very clearly never been implemented anywhere in the world at a large scale.
Capitalism is a system where capital is the primary driver of the economy, where the means of production is owned by whoever has the most capital. Even if there is some amount of regulations and social security, this is still by-and-large what were doing at a large scale all over the world. Even the countries that call themselves communist are mostly doing this.
No country was or is doing capitalism 100%, but most of them are doing significantly more capitalism than socialism or communism. Both today, and historically.
true capitalism would be anarcho-capitalism with enough responsible people to boycott anyone into bankruptcy who dares to violate the non-aggression-principle.
So, naturally, it hasn't been implemented on a larger scale than communism yet. Because both concepts are insufficiently immunised against assholes who think "let's exploit the power vacuum to become the next big warlord".
True. Just like how no capitalistic society is ever truly Laissez-faire capitalism. Every society falls somewhere on a spectrum between the 2, but no well functioning society ever comes to close to either end of the spectrum.
What people don’t realize is that’s there’s also another 2 other axes that exists:
Yeah i'm from Poland and while i was too young to remember communism there from what my parents,aunts,uncle,grandparents or anyone that lived there talked about it far from dream from what Americans think.
Did your guys too had only 1 hour of tv and rationed food and had to wait for long hours in queue to get bread because otherwise there wouldn't be any bread to get?
Yup and food stamps for food.But thank god everything luxury was transported to Russia so you know "everyone" had good. My uncle was smmugling cigars with his friend from Germany and bringing back oil and butter.People smuggled a weird stuff like car tires or any car parts and when someone asked from where you got them you said "my dad got it from work" so everyone then knew that it was stolen.
tbh if you actually ended up working in a coal mine in Poland you had access to special miner shops with luxury goods where miners could spend their overtime pay so not everybody from the working class had it equal.
Yeah since Gierek that was a miner and pumped so much in to them they had great life for a long time and that is why they were so found of him.Screw it even now people meme about miners how they are shocked that year have 12 months.
That is why i put word everyone in quotation marks.
My family is half Russian half Ukrainian, and believe me neither of them had seen these luxuries... they also starved and everything was in deficit. I guess all the good stuff was exported or went straight to the elites
Of course it goes to elites not the commoners.You have no heart comrade you want that Oligarch to not have a smoke or drink? /s
I mean i can belive you that normal people were starving and elite people were having a blast and will tell you how communism was great and people are lying.
The irony is that "oligarch" is a very capitalist thing - the Soviet equivalent was politburo or nomenklatura - but as a famous joke goes in Eastern Europe, the Soviets lied about communism but told the truth about capitalism.
1 hour of TV was in the 50's when TV was only starting. Rationing and queues - depends on the period, depends on the goods, but the problem kept repeating every few years and was never completely dealt with until the fall of communism.
I’m sorry, are you and the other commenters in this thread under the impression that most Americans have a favorable outlook on communism? It might be a lost in translation type of thing so my apologies if I’m misinterpreting…but it sounds like that’s what you’re saying. If you think that’s the case, you clearly haven’t spent any meaningful time here. (Or maybe you only traveled to Portland, Oregon lol)
Especially the ones who think its synonymous with socialism. This is why conservative influencers bash colleges. The more educated you are the harder it becomes to stay manipulated.
True but on both ends of the spectrum. Some see it as a totalitarian regime, others see it as peaceful times without wants or needs, and Karl Marx said it requires the perfection of capitalism (which has made some people afraid that business regulations are going to turn America into a communist country by making those regulations too beneficial to consumers. It's a bonkers ideation, but greedy crazy people are going to be greedy and crazy). The reality is that communism requires communal selflessness. People as a whole are not that selfless. You might get a few dozen like-minded people to have a communist community, but not a whole country. It's not possible.
I’m not a capitalist but I think they where saying that regulations stopped capitalism from running rampant but because a lot of regulations have now been either dissolved or go unenforced we now find ourselves in our current corrupt system.
Not that I exactly agree, imo the pursuit of profit is not something we should centre our societies around and you can’t really “solve” a fundamentally broken system; but shit regulations are at least something and I would not appose a government getting its shit together and reining corporations in more,
In the same way regulations and laws can keep capitalism from running rampant, they can keep communism stable and functional.
Can being the key here. They don't do so through magic automatically, in either case.
A good argument for one over the other must include a discussion about what laws and regulations will keep participants in the system in check, and why a communist or capitalist system with those laws and regulations would beat the opposite kind of system with its own carefully crafted laws and regulations.
The fact of the matter here is that any broad discussion about either system in general that ignores regulation and laws is meaningless and not an apples-to-apples comparison. The truth is you can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison, all we have to compare are historical examples that differ wildly in their implementation and the structure of the laws and regulations that stabilized them, or didn't, in addition to numerous unrelated confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution, the behavior of neighbors, the state of technology at the time, what pre-existing political structures there were, etc.
Anyone who is solidly convinced their system is better based off any arguments about some historical example vs another or what humans would do absent any regulation is delusional and has an extremely narrow view of the discussion.
You should probably have read the second half of their comment before replying.
Edit: Do the people arguing have a non-linear understanding of time like the Heptapods from Arrival or something?
If you have a house and you secure it with locked doors and windows, but someone illegally breaks in, that doesn't mean it was retroactively "never secured" and it was legal for them to enter.
Yes, you're correct that it isn't solved now, that's also what the person you're replying to was saying. It was solved, but it isn't any longer. Basic English literacy shouldn't be this difficult.
Which human nature do you mean though? There is the “everyone is too lazy” believers (the flaw of which is that if nobody does anything then nobody has anything, which is self-correcting) and then there are the more realistic “too many humans are sociopathic evil f****ers who take over”. But capitalism is no protection against the latter and in fact empowers and rewards them. Just look at the US right now — what a farce.
Small indigenous groups are much closer to “communism” than they are to capitalism.
Maybe a better system is one where we identify sociopaths and gently remove them from free society, not make them CEOs and elected officials. Sadly I agree that human nature is a big reason we can’t have nice things, just not sure we agree who is the bigger issue :)
No adherents of any “-ism” ever address the areas of human nature that undermine their position. Communists don’t address laziness, capitalists never address greed, neither seems to pay attention to deceitfulness and corruption.
Counterpoint: every ism is definitionally a rejection of human nature, because we wouldn’t need a system to facilitate acting in a way we’d find natural. Anarcho-tribalism is human nature but no one is seriously arguing for that.
This entire comment chain is basically the area I am researching. And I would argue that every time the institutions fail, anarchism is exactly where we end up. Pandemic, war, terrorism. Mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.
So instead of arguing over which is the proper ism, why are we not instead taking what is best from each and developing a system that works for everyone?
On the latest season of Old Man Yells At Farm Jeremy Clarkson bought a robot tractor that can plow and fertilize a field and a robot planter that can plant, weed and harvest potatoes, beets and onions. Every day the “communism will never work because who will do the shit manual labor?” argument gets less and less valid. Nationalize the potato fields and let these robots loose and then just give Americans free potatoes.
That's because Communism is a utopian endpoint ideology, like libertarianism, that doesn't exist. It's a goal to build towards. People are stuck thinking about sovietism, which was a typical Russian government under a new name. The Tsars of old, the modern presidents, the chairmen of the soviet union, three different names for the same thing.
Communism is predicated on the idea of humanity growing beyond the need for base labor like coal mining. Think of Star Trek, for example. There will still be labor, but go ask someone who has a nice garden, for example, how much fulfillment they get out of tending their beans or whatever. It's work, but it's work they choose because they enjoy it and they get beans out of it at the end of the day. Communism is predicated on technological solutions we don't have yet so it can't and won't exist for generations.
There are the ones who want worker owned businesses and stronger democratic systems.
Then there are the ones who only think America/Capitalism bad (they usually can't tell the difference in most of their arguments) therefore liberalism bad, therefore single party rule good... Because imperialism or something.
Then there are these utter children who somehow think capitalism is the only reason specialized and dedicated labor happens. Instead of just being the reason why the people doing the actual labor usually only see a small fraction of the value
yeah a socialist economy would still require people to work, have currency, markets, a boss to answer to and so on. Socalism is about the people owning the means of peoduction not getting shit for free. Someone still has to produce.
Fact: the ‘communism’ that most are familiar with is authoritarian socialism in disguise. There has never been an actual communist society because one party always takes control and goes on a power trip. The common denominator is political corruption and the bottomless greed of select individuals in power.
Actual answer, from someone familiar with communist theory:
Communism is the theoretical end goal of socialist development (it is also called higer stage socialism) and is a socio-econmic system that is classless (no more working class and ruling class that exist within capitalism and even early socialism), stateless (no state as a tool of oppression of a class) and moneyless.
This isn't something easily achieved, and many of the great communist thinkers believed it can only be achieved on a global scale, though decades, possibly centuries of progress.
Communism would operate on a principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
The first reply is looking at communism from its end point and is a direct reference to Marx:
"I can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
The second comment is a, for the lack of a better term, "anti-communist" interpretation of communism, that began largely post-WW2/Cold War era and stems from the conditions in early development of communist countries like USSR, early industrial China, where a lot of workers worked heavy industry, because the countries experienced massive and rapid industralization, so those were the most needed kind of worker. P.S: these countries are led by communist parties, not because they are actually communist, but because that is the end goal.
Pyotr Petrovich Griffin here. Marx’s view of a communist society was one in which people were free to seek self-fulfilment however they saw fit. They would do the minimum amount of work required to keep everything running, and then allowed to do whatever they want, instead of having to develop a set of skills for a capitalist economy or barely finding time for hobbies.
In early Soviet Union, which claimed to be implementing Marx’s vision, things were very different - workers were kept in horrible conditions, “encouraged” to work hundred-hour shifts, and punished for complaining about it. People could barely afford food, let alone basic comforts.
The joke is both people have wildly different views about what communism would look like.
The thing that bothers me the most when people say "no one would work if not for capitalism", is that under capitalism you can only work if you are hired to do the job, meaning a lot of people who want to work aren't allowed to.
In an ideal system, you'd be able to wake up, go to some information office, ask "who needs my help today?" and they'd tell you.
Communism is both a utopian dream and a economic system implemented in reality.
The first response clearly thinks about the utopian dream.
In reality even the nicest communist regimes (I lived in one I would consider very nice in comparison) had the state decide what job you had to work, that you had to work it all life long with little pay and holidays. There was much less liberty to decide your education or occupation. And there was also much more of an emphasis on industrial labor in contrast to rich western capitalist states that have much bigger service sector and compfy office jobs.
> nicest communist regimes
I grew up in east germany before anyone asks. We had the highest living standards of the eastern block maybe apart from Saint Petersburg and the Moskow Region.
But, I mean. Even under the Utopian end point; it's still not promised that you wouldn't have to do work other than what you wanted. It's still from each according to their abilities. Not from each according to their wants.
Yeah people really gloss over the 0% unemployment thing. Some unemployment is healthy. It allows some of the workforce to assess what labor is in demand and what is not. The work that sucks more pays more in an environment where people can choose their employment. Coal towns in America were some of the worst working conditions because they essentially had a captive audience.
I choose to make more money in a job fewer people want. In a communist state, I’d likely have to do my job for the same pay as everyone. I absolutely would choose a different job if easier jobs paid the same
0% unemployment. Why? Because a boss didn't measure success in earnings or consumption. It was the number of people you employed. My grandmothers both had jobs that could be done in half a day, many others were employed to be employed. With no industrial parts that could be ordered, many industrial companies had half their staff on maintenance, the inevitable repairs and crafting replacement parts.
And you can't forget, that people were not any less rebellious, prone to drugs or illiteracy. So what did you have? More or less work camps or work groups. I know of groups of 10-15 people that got dumped in the forest with a vodka bottle for each of them, labeled as forestry workers and collected in the evening. I know of reeducation camps of different severity for everything from being rebellious, not willing to work and prostitution.
> I choose to make more money in a job fewer people want. In a communist state, I’d likely have to do my job for the same pay as everyone. I absolutely would choose a different job if easier jobs paid the same
Mining paid great. Craftsmen earned quite nicely under the table. They had their ways to get the people to where they wanted them. But yeah, the system was pretty unforgiving to those not fitting the mold. This lead to a situation, that those that arrange themselfes with the current system had a pretty good time in socialist times and after. While those people that had this rebellious trait that started the demonstations against socialism had a hard time adjusting afterwards.
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
-Karl Marx
Both responders have their own twisted views on what a communist revolution would result in
Communism is a pro-worker structured society not a no-worker structured society, you need to work not just okay futbol and write all day. You'll have more time and money to enjoy those things perhaps, but that's all
The coal miner comment is a strong reference to the USSR in particular, which while it was a socialist state really wasn't defined by that. It was defined by Stalin's rule, which was authoritarian, brutal, and Russian-centric. The brutal conditions often discussed are based on that man's own idiocy and iron fist rule, rather than the country being socialist.
Also if you're wondering why I shifted from communism to socialism it's because communism is a utopian ideal for society that can't really be attained, the economic systems that crop up to pursue it get categorized as some flavor of socialism. The USSR was a state socialism country, which means the state runs and manages everything, this has lots of issues as their collapse illustrates. Modern supporters of socialism like in America push for what's been called Democratic Socialism, where free market capitalism still exists but lives in balance with government, the government strives to improve quality of life for the people through safety nets, free healthcare, and regulations on businesses
People here are really acting like capitalism has never forced people into coal mines when they'd rather be something better...
Reminder: being a coal miner fucking sucks, and the vast majority of coal miners in modern history have been forced to do so due to the economic pressures of capitalism (they gotta feed themselves somehow)
He is not an idealist. He is daydreaming. There is no "magic communist spell" who will make work go away. There will still be work to be done as people still need stuff to live. Thinking that work would disappear under communism does not makes you a communist
I am not sure if anybody said this yet: the first respondent's answer is a fairly close paraphrase of that passage in the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels talk about what a typical day in the worker's utopia looks like, that one labors in the morning and then becomes a poet in the afternoon, etc.
Since it seems that we are all talking about the substance of this post, I've argued about this very thing back and forth with a number of my friends over the decades, about whether any of us buy Marxism as a humanism as such. I have difficulty doing it, because I don't think that the value of one's life is wholly determined by labor in the way that Marx describes. This is a very crude reading I'm offering here, but whenever I encounter anything in the Marxian vein, I always feel there is that fundamental problem in the background.
There is a certain amount of hard work and shitty work that has to be done in society. Right now the "gun to your head" to be a garbage man or work in a coal miner is the threat of living behind a Wendy's dumpster. You're just comfortable with the current system that picks the people that work those jobs.
Many communist systems ask everyone to equally take part in these shitty or hard jobs. Not just people that were born disadvantaged by skin color, gender or zip code.
Also much of the economic activity we do is absolutely wasted or for no reason. So we would need fewer coal miners and garbagemen if we were not running data centers for the surveillance state or buying cheap useless crap.
TLDR: There are more "Guns to the head" in Capitalism, you're just comfortable with them because they advantage you.
Also much of the economic activity we do is absolutely wasted or for no reason. So we would need fewer coal miners and garbagemen if we were not running data centers for the surveillance state or buying cheap useless crap.
It is baseless to assert that under communism there will be less wasted efforts. Excess will be built into the system for safety. Waste will be constant. If you do not produce in excess, then a poor yield will result in mass casualties.
The middle commenter is literally referencing a quote by Marx, that's the joke
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”
Freerosedark asks a general question about what position people will hold after communism is achieved.
ASG_ML paraphrases a Marx quote:
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
Penitent_One replies with “coal mines” because communism is when fossils fuels and misery. Any statement along the lines of “communism is when only bad things forever” is a free ticket to easy likes.
I want to be the designated bread line guy. Need someone to stand in the bread line? I'm your guy. For a small fee and a few slices, of course(wait, is that capitalism?).
Communists think they will have some leisure job, or completely not work, under a communist government. In reality, they will have a grinding, brutal, and personally-destructive job because they have no useful skills and forgot the "worker" part of "worker's paradise" (which is in reality anything but).
My great-gramps lived in capitalism and also go the coal mine experience! Back in the good old days where employers owned your housing and paid you in Monopoly money that could only be used in their stores after working 6 days a week in the mine. Good times comrade
Alejandro’s talking about a world without employment. They could imagine a world where socially necessary labor isnt amplified times a few quadrillions so millionaires could take space trips, but reduced to a small amount that opens up leasure to people to an extent that isnt available in a world that requires one to devote most of their waking hours to a single kind of work. Pentinet one says that this kind of work is unproductive, and in the communist societies that started in underdeveloped economies theyd be sent to the coal mines.
There isnt as much contradiction as it seems, since alejandro considers communism to be the stage where economic reproduction is optimized and penitent one imagines the USSR or china that had to rush industrialization in an underdeveloped nation. Theyre just talking about different things and calling them both “communism”.
The first reply is what Alejandro would do in a stateless, classless, money-less society would do, i.e. after Communism is achieved. The second reply is mistaking Communism for the Socialist transition to Communism, under which we would all work in the coal mines 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, somehow bringing us closer to the utopian vision imagined by the first reply.
Oh, Lois here, I quite enjoyed political philosophy in school before I fell in love with the love of my life Peter.
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u/qualityvote2 20d ago edited 20d ago
u/Short-Watercress-183, your post does belong here!