The Berlin Wall

[kahljorn]

totalitarianism and authoritarianism are where one person, or a group of un-elected people run every aspect of people's lives.

I disagree with you about needing that to reach a communist society, it's the total opposite I think. As for the rest.. it's 2:30 am. I'll get back to you.

That may be the case, but that isn't what Marx thought.

A "free state" is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it; and today, too, the forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the "freedom of the state."....The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically.... Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Zhukov]

Originally Posted by kahljorn

That may be the case, but that isn't what Marx thought.

Marx never mentions a totalitarian or authoritarian rule. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't sound as harsh and nasty when you figure that most people are proletarian; it just means a rule of the working people. We currently have a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". The "transitional period" mentioned there is Socialism. Marx doesn't actually coin the term, it was used later. Talking about not wanting a "Free state", he is talking about an unfetted state, a free market, a state or a government that rules the people with freedom, rather than the other way around. The state can't be free, it has to be run and ruled by the people that live in it. This in no way means that oh shit we have to live in a dystopian reality with no freedom. It's a state run by the dictatorship, a dictatorship of working people.

No, people don't get to choose their own job ("I want to be a pilot!") or live like a king... nobody is really promising that, are they? Money still exists and people can still die of hunger and preventable illness. There is still a huge difference between rich countries and poor countries. The point is to lessen these things over time by putting the means of production in the hands of a democratically run state, rather than private individuals.

As far as no unemployment goes, I am not going to download your link, but I guess it was pretty dumb to say "no unemloyment". I guess "officialy no unemployment" is closer. A group of ex-soviet citizens living in America is hardly a great basis for your study, but I can concede the point. You can have a massive city where everyone would be put to work, and then you could have a village where nobody had a job. You could have an East German town built around a tire factory where everyone had a job, and you could have a town built around a tin mine in Kazakhstan that just closed, and people would be out of work for months. I'd be pretty certain though, that it was easier to have and keep a job in the USSR than in the USA at the same time period. Especially since if you didn't deem yourself useful you would have just been conscripted into the army. Anyway, I retract my comment.

As far as "greed is hard wired into our brains and genes"... I would have thought that that argument would have died once scientific learning into DNA and the human genome became mainstream.

[kahljorn]

Marx never mentions a totalitarian or authoritarian rule. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't sound as harsh and nasty when you figure that most people are proletarian; it just means a rule of the working people.

I'm about to go to bed, so more in the morning:
During the revolution, what would happen to people, organizations, businesses and political parties which support bourgeois values or which support the bourgeois class?
What would the government do if people started talking about a return to bourgeois values?

How could a commune really function well unless everybody is doing what the commune says, with absolute obedience to it? And how will the commune, as a whole, do anything but have total control over everything? including the ideology of its constituents?

Really, I don't see how the government could manage an entire commune without it being a huge bureaucracy. How are they going to keep track of resources what needs to be produced and when and in what quantity and with which raw materials allocated to it?
It seems to me that communism requires such a drastic level control over the slightest details of economic and industrial control-- and such a high degree of cooperation between its individual parts -- due to the fact that they don't have a natural force such as the almighty hand influencing which things will be produced and why and when and for what purpose.
If communism doesn't have the level of control required to manage all of these things, then it will likely fail. As such, it needs to have absolute control in order to make all decisions, and each individual in the system needs to cooperate with these decisions absolutely.

No, people don't get to choose their own job ("I want to be a pilot!") or live like a king... nobody is really promising that, are they?

No but what I'm saying is that this is an example of "total government control."

The point is to lessen these things over time by putting the means of production in the hands of a democratically run state

Well, I'll just say it, since when has democracy really solved anything?

A group of ex-soviet citizens living in America is hardly a great basis for your study

From what I saw, since it was just an abstract, they arrived at their data by extrapolating it from soviet documentation/statistics (although obviously they weren't directly related to unemployment). i would respond to some other stuff you said, but since you conceded, i suppose its unnecessary.

anyway that turned out longer than i thought and i dont even know if it made sense. Good night. lol nm i edited shit

[Zhukov]

No, I think I know what you meant.

During "the revolution", what happens to people supporting the other side? Well, anything. Nothing. Whatever. There is no eternal communist law telling anyone how you should treat people with different views. During the Russian revolution the people that supported the counterrevolution started a civil war where millions of people where killed. The red army had a lot of white supporters executed. The Kronstadt uprising (a sailor rebellion against the bolsheviks) led to about 1500 or so getting executed, and maybe another 1500 being freed, or freed after several years in the gulag. Lenin stated that the whole affair made him very sad. Those were very harsh measures for harsh times. "to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs", ha, that's a Lenin quote from the time.

We live in more civilised times, perhaps, and there is no mass execution of people that don't support the bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "support". Supporting the bourgeois class often amounts to assassinating proletarian leaders, launching military coups, or invading a country.

What would the government do if people wanted a return to a capitalist economy? If people wanted that then they would vote for it.


OK. How would a commune function if everyone wasn't doing what they were told? Just like now, when nobody does what they are told. The "government" and the "commune" are one and the same, it's not a council of elders dictating how people have to run a factory; it's factory workers dictating how it runs. If it rund badly then they are out of a job. There is no clear layout for this - a socialist society - but it wouldn't be too far past how society functions now. People elected into positions of responsibility as far as roads, defense, budget etc, but their focus is on society rather than money because their interests don't lie with the bourgeois class. They are not paid anything over an average wage to be there, so anyone looking for a career with good money is going to have to change their ideals. Things smaller than national interest would be run locally, like they are now.

Allocations of resources and money... geez, I don't know, a minister for resources perhaps, and a hundred people to help him/her.

When things are run in the interest of society rather than corporations, that's where the difference lies, and in a more democratic and accountable system itself.

Democracy is essential. If you have a beuracracy running everything by itself, they get corrupted, they start to run things for themselves rather than for society. With no democracy then things get left undone or get out of control because a beauracracy can't control an entire nation without legitimate feedback and honest opinion from the peope that live there. You get a shop full of vinegar but no bread, and people get pissed off, and the whole thing falls apart.

[Dimnos]

Originally Posted by kahljorn

During the revolution, what would happen to people, organizations, businesses and political parties which support bourgeois values or which support the bourgeois class?
What would the government do if people started talking about a return to bourgeois values?

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/17168