What Exactly Is Wrong With Communism?

GREED.

Everyone wants bigger, faster, harder, more more more than their neighbours.

GREED.

Democracy does not work. Look at the inequalities in the USA - DREADFUL POVERTY - HUGE WEALTH - and that is called a Democracy ?

Land of the Free ?

What a joke that is.

 

With respect to communism, I would say that it unfortunately lacked the teething time period needed to grow and evolve properly and attaining a level of proper stability, learning from its mistakes, and so on, along with proper effective leaders to guide it there.

Communism started with great leaders like Lenin and Leon Trotsky . Leon Trotsky, who was a brilliant leader should have been the automatic choice after Lenin, but was put to exile by Stalin who usurped power after Lenin's death. Stalin was an incompetent leader and made a mess of the experiment which Marx and Lenin started. His purges did much to damage communism than all the efforts of the western powers. Same with Mao.

The stern opposition by the western capitalist powers also did not help matters much.

 

In order to be a capitalist you have to have capital...I assume that you an average Joe, and since you are you do not have any capital and therefore are not a capitalist. Capital is surplus-value in motion, put to the market to increase its value. Capital is not money in your bank to be used up in buying food, shelter and the basic necessities of life.

However, capitalism cannot exist without you, you are essential for its existence. Capital must extract surplus-value from the laborers, who are not only alienated from their own nature, but are compelled to sell their labor-power to the capitalist as a mere commodity. The wage-slave meets the possessor of capital in the labor market and once the capitalist buys his capacity to work he owns that capacity for a working day just how he owns any other commodity. And he puts it to use. Along with the capitalist buying the raw materials, instruments of production etc., he puts his commodity of labor power to work to.

The laborer's commodity- his labor-power- is bought and paid for by a wage. This wage is determined by the socially necessary minimum needed to sustain him as a worker, to allow him to regenerate his capacity to work again the next day. The minimum wage he is paid is represented in money form, the price of the bundle of commodities required to sustain him and his family.

But since the laborer can do more work than the value of the commodities given to him, represented as a wage, and is greater than the requisite to regenerate his labor power, he works part of the day for free to the capitalist. This is the only way he can make a profit.

Let's assume that the money price of these means of subsistence averages 3 dollars a day. Therefore the laborer receives 3 dollars a day from the capitalist as his wage. For this the capitalist puts him to work for a 12 hour shift.

Let's assume our laborer is a machinist and has to make a part for a car in a car factory and he finishes making this part in his 12 hour shift. The raw materials supplied to him by the capitalist to make this car part costs him, lets say, 20 dollars. Let us say the tools, their wear and tear, the fuel, oil etc., that the laborer uses up in the production of the car part is 1 dollars. This makes up 24 dollars our capitalist has laid out for these commodities (3 dollars for labor-power, 20 for the raw materials for the car part, and 1 dollars absorbed into the process by the wear and tear of the tools he used to produce the car part).

But the capitalist calculates that on an average he will receive for it, the finished car part, a price of 27 dollars. This is 3 dollars above his out lay, or capital he put down for production of the car part.

Where do the 3 dollars the capitalist pockets as profits come? According to economists, products are sold at their true value, corresponding to the necessary quantities of labor embodied in them. The 27 dollar car part represents its true value crystallized in it. But of this 27 dollars, 21 were dollars that were values already existing before the laborer, the machinist, began to work; 20 dollars for raw materials, and 1 dollars for the tools, oils, and fuel etc. that were used up in production. There remains 6 dollars, which have been added to the value of the raw material

His 12 hours labor has created, according to this, a new value of 6 dollars. But the laborer only receives 3 dollars.

For the laborer the value of the 12 hour shift is 3 dollars, but to the capitalist the value of the 12 hours is 6 dollars.. His 12 hours, a new equivalent of 6 dollars of value is created. Therefore in six hours the new value of 3 dollars is created-the amount the laborer receives for 12 hours of work. For 12 hours he receives the equivalent of 6 hours. He works half the day free for the capitalist.

The production cost of labor then is really only the cost of the living laborer him self, i.e. the bundle of commodities require to sustain his capacity for work and his family according to social necessary conditions in a given society.

So as soon as labor, or work, begins it ceases to belong to man, but to the capital. Labor power is a commodity nor more or less than sugar. "The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales."

In our example, by the capitalist giving the laborer 3 dollars in wages, "the worker has exchanged his commodity, labor-power, for commodities of all kinds, and moreover, at a certain ratio. By giving him [3 dollars], the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing, so much wood, light, etc., in exchange for his day's work."

 

i think it dosnt get any bigger than china and they are doing ok. now like a typical american i am not up to date on the easts political and social inner workings but i know more than my average neighbor (you wont believe how many times i heard someone insist Chinese and Japanese are the same thing)
now china is finally opening up a little bit...because like frank said "people like to own stuff" i heard bag carriers have assistants because there just isnt enough jobs to go around.

now
why i think it dosnt work is because there is no incentive to create. i can site china here too, they dont create they seem to just steal other countries ideas so maybe thats why they are doing well on the surface (we wont mention the low pay and high suicide rate).
But for a relatively free country that is communist, what is the incentive for bill gates to create windows when he can make the same amount of money just doing the bullshit computer work he was doing before. maybe this is more of why capitalism works. you can get rich creating something people want. in communism you cant so there is no incentive to do so.

i am talking out my ass here though, this is all just my perspective.

 

Primitive tribes noted 12,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture that civilization resembles a flock of chickens. Its the simplest possible memory centric systems logic around which any social beings can organize in large numbers and explains such things as why one in five Americans has consistently insisted that the sun revolves around the earth. It also means civilization resembles Three Stooges slapstick where the money and guns do most of the talking worth listening to and explains the failure of communism. Love thy neighbor just doesn't cut it when the entire world is ruled by money and the gun which is why countries like the Soviet Union were more organized around enforcing equality then promoting love and understanding.

In contrast, many primitive tribes don't even have words for things like greed and a few like the !Kung of South Africa never even had a word for guilt until the white man came and forced them all onto reservations. They really just had no use for the words with the !Kung having an estimated serious theft, rape, or murder once every four hundred years or so. Communism and its frequent use of dialectical philosophy is merely a modification of the same rule of the gun explaining why both Stalin and Mao killed people by the tens of millions in the name of brotherhood.

 

It simply does not work.

 

The main problem being America ...... it won't allow a communist state to succeed.

 

Shoot the 4th guy ...... problem solved ...... it worked for Stalin!

 

It depends on what you mean by "communism" and "wrong". Communism can mean any of three things: (1) a communal arrangement similar to that practiced in certain tribal societies, religious communities, utopian collectives and hippie communes which operate according to the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his neeed"; (2) the ideology of Marxism or Marxism-Leninism, in which communism is the final stage of social development after passing through a prior socialist stage; and (3) a label preferred by certain real world societies, like the USSR, Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Pol Pot's Cambodia, etc.

Re comunism as a communal arrangement, whether it's right or wrong depends on how much you value equality versus individuality. The basic fairness and egalitarianism of communal systems appeals to some, but the sacrifice of individuality is a price others wouldn't want to pay. I personally find such arrangements stifling. Re communism as an ideology, it rests on an economic determinist theory of history and social development emphasizing class conflict, political revolution, establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat during a socialist stage during which the capitalist class is liquidated, and the final transition to a classless society and pure communism. Communists like to call this "scientific socialism" but the science is questionable and a certain amount of violence and coercion seems to be an unavoidable part of the process. Re real world communism, as practiced in so-called communist countries, none of these are, or are likely to become, truly communist in the ideal, utopian sense of the word. The U.S.S. R. under Stalin became one of the most brutal totalitarian societies in human history. The apparachiki (party bureaucracy) held a disproportionately large share of the wealth, status and power, and the system eventually collapsed under the weight of its ossified bureaucracy. The communist societies of our own time seem basically to follow the same pattern. Pol Pot's Cambodia became a sadistically repressive dystopia. Korea after World War II embarked on what was essentially a controlled experiment. The South got capitalism while the North got a Dear Leader. The South enjoys a thriving industrial economy, while the North Koreans are building nuclear weapons and the people are near starvation. Communist China went through the horrors and thought control of the "cultural revolution", but is now practicing essentially state capitalism complete with more billionaires than the United States. None of these real world societies have been able to get by without lots of repression.

 

Great idea, bad execution.

 

I meant to reply to this a while ago

I dont think China was really economically successful until they shifted to more of a mixed economy in the 80s. Their government still acts very much like a communist one party ruling class but something like 70% of their economy is within the realm of the private sector.

 

Communism works just fine in places like Tahiti where bonds of kinship enable effective shaming of slackers, and its a basic a sustinence economy.

How well this translates to a modern nation of millions with modern infrastructure is open for debate.

 

China is essentially state capitalist, with more billionaires than the U.S. It combines highly authoritarian party control and a managed economy with a patchwork of considerable privatization. Mao would turn over in his grave!

 

But for the most part the population goes along with it.

 

As does ours with our system, as did the populations of any empire and dictatorship you can name.

 

Mondragon is a good example of a successful worker owned corporation. It has 74,000 workers with 12 billion in revenue and is 75 years old. The highest paid employee can earn no more than 5 times the lowest paid in the company. Compare that with normal large corporations where CEOs earn hundreds of times more. There are alternatives the capitalistic mode of production.
Mondragon Corporation - Wikipedia

 

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Such a system discourages abilities and encourages needs. Human beings are simply not that selfless, we have a need to work toward making our own lot in life better, sometimes at the expense of the system.

 

When people are taught to value the reward over the effort, they will find it difficult to imagine a society where the reverse is true.

 

And when people are taught to value effort over reward it just doesn't stick. Ask any Russian.

 

Well, it depends if the effort is worthwhile.