[AFAIK]

To date what is the closest humans (2 or more) have gotten to practicing, "From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs"?

The family unit?
Hunter Gather tribes?

How confident are you that it can be achieved on a larger scale?
Industrial, urban societies are very alienating.

[Heisenberg]

I'm not an expert on this, but I'd say the Soviet Union and Cuba are examples of socialist states (although not communist)..

Hunter-gatherer societies are by definition not communist in the Marxist sense, because they are pre-industrial (and even pre-agricultural). They are examples of what is called "primitive communism".

It's also worth pointing out that Marxism is not a set of "ideals", but a way of analysing history. I'll leave it to other members to go into detail though, because as I said, I'm far from being an expert.

[Coyote]

Non renewable resources are finite and thus scarce by definition. Land space is scarce and this scarcity is felt very acutely in some areas.

Renewable resources are only renewable if the rate of production matches or exceeds the rate of consumption. This is why whales are now protected from the profit motive. Reduce demand in an attempt to ensure a supply is maintained.

Before Rockefeller, very little oil. Oil for the rich!

After Rockefeller, too much oil. Oil for the poor!

Game. Set. Match.

[AFAIK]

Enjoy your cheap oil in the middle of nowhere unless you can afford to pay $8 per day to drive in central London. Also off street parking spaces cost more than apartments in many neighborhoods.

[Coyote]

Enjoy your cheap oil in the middle of nowhere unless you can afford to pay $8 per day to drive in central London. Also off street parking spaces cost more than apartments in many neighborhoods.

Meh.

You speak of costs associated with government. Those costs aren't Rockefeller's fault, are they?

[The Immortal Goon]

You speak of costs associated with government. Those costs aren't Rockefeller's fault, are they?

Ugh, it's also costs associated with geography. Basic physics mean that it's harder to get resources out of areas in which they are created or refined.

Further, this point is moot anyway as no communist claims that things were better before capitalism. We just dare to suggest that things in history change. These kind of arguments made by capitalists are akin to screaming that everything is perfect now and nothing will ever change again. It has no historical basis on which to stand upon.

To date what is the closest humans (2 or more) have gotten to practicing, "From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs"?

The family unit?
Hunter Gather tribes?

This is what Marx and Engels called, "primitive communism." It's the period in history that we know today as the paleolithic. As per the current World History textbook out now:

The conditions of foraging economies decisively influenced all dimensions of the human experience during the paleolithic era. For instance, because of constant mobility in the search for food, a foraging economy virtually prohibits individuals from accumulating private property and basing social distinctions on wealth. In the absence of accumulated wealth, hunters and gatherers of paleolithic times probably lived a relatively egalitarian existence. Some scholars believe that this relative social equality also extended to relations between the sexes, because all members of a paleolithic group made important contributions to the survival of the community

The main idea, and it's still supported today virtually everywhere, is that after agriculture came about our mode of production completely changed. Once you get agriculture how one lives life differs completely, and this is something that is difficult to argue with. You have surpluses, professional soldiers, sharper classes, and this whole, "primitive communism" falls away.

So in a sense, you're right to identify these as the closest to such a system.

However, Marxists are not romantics that look fondly at the past. Again, the idea is to build upon history as it moves along. There is no going back, even if people thought ti was a good idea. We look at how things worked and continued to work and then attempt to work things out from there.

Very briefly (and I am throwing a lot out while going over this):

1. The early agricultural societies are better organized and have more people and expand out. Since agriculture basically sucks, and you need to keep expanding it with more people, you very quickly get slaves that become the backbone of agricultural production for a very long time.

2. This is moved around quite a bit and perfected, but large agricultural societies all base themselves on slavery to produce the bulk of their most important goods (which is the land) and continue to expand out.

3. In large successful societies in antiquity, their expansion and very success led to issues:
3a. The ruling class began to fragment along regional lines.
b. Foreign invasions became more frequent and increasingly bad.
3. As other things collapsed, class struggle would break out as serfs rebelled against a teetering system.

4. These things were put together and, smaller, more unstable systems of landlords came to run things in a system that became known as feudalism. This was rather expansionist and reliant on various things, but the mode of production reflected the class relation that came from antiquity—the landlords and their relation to the land. Serfs worked the land (sometimes with slaves); nobles protected the land in exchange for the surplus made by the serfs; the clergy and king benefitted from all of this.

5. This system, in East Asia, Europe, Africa (and to a lesser extent in the Americas and India, it's something that's endlessly argued) breaks down as it develops a certain amount of professionals that don't live off the land, but off of goods being brought and forth from other areas. These people become increasingly rich and powerful in the feudal times and then...

6. They overthrow the feudal system in various ways until they themselves are running things. In this new dynamic we are not worried about how you are tied to the land, but what the land produces and how that can be bought or sold. The people that had related themselves to the land, now relate themselves to creating, processing, or moving goods from the land. This is a brief and necessarily flawed description of capitalism.

The capitalist will stop here and say that all change will now stop and everything is perfect. The Marxist will not only admit, but promote the idea that things are better for more people in capitalism than they were under slavery. However, this does not stop history. Just as feudalism had changed the way people think of themselves and become successful enough that another class became more important, so capitalism has and will (or we'll all die and things will be barbarous and terrible).

All we do is acknowledge that these things exist and that, as a whole, more material goods are produced more efficiently with each turn of history. There will be another one. This is not a bad thing.

---

How confident are you that it can be achieved on a larger scale?
Industrial, urban societies are very alienating.

As mentioned above, I'm as sure things will be changed on a larger scale as I am sure that the sunlight will negate the night around me at this moment. While it's possible everything will get worse and we'll degenerate into some nightmare version of industrialized feudalism as the libertarians promote—I still think things will get better as, even in the darkest possible times, history still moves forward and people won't put up with a lie in history for long. Now, this said, we could also all be nuked or a meteor could fall for the sky, or marked with explosive nanoites or some other damned thing. So this isn't a sure thing we can sit back and wait for.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Industrial societies can be alienating. Though I won't bore you with it, Marxism largely started as a way to combat alienation.

[AFAIK]

Thankyou for that summary TIG. I'll take a look at that pdf.

[Leninist]

To date what is the closest humans (2 or more) have gotten to practicing, "From each according to his abilities. To each according to his needs"?

The family unit?
Hunter Gather tribes?

How confident are you that it can be achieved on a larger scale?
Industrial, urban societies are very alienating.

As to being achieved on a large scale, communism really only works that way. Look at Cuba. They've clung to socialist economics for a long time, but since the end of trade with the USSR, they have been in a real squeeze. Why? well the right says Marxism, the left says the blockade. The fact is though, that at this point the Cubans' biggest problem (economically, not necessarily socially) is that they can't create a sustainable economy with almost no one but the Chinese daring to go through the blockade. And since the Chinese are the only major manufactures to do so, they can unload even crappier stuff on the Cubans than they do on us.

But I think you want a more theoretical application. again yes, we can do it. As you said, a large industrialized society can be alienating. The solution in my opinion is large amounts of accountability and transparency in the system. This may seem obvious to most people, but the fact is that it was a lack of these things which caused Mao's great leap forwards to fail. The premise was goo, industrialize China, but if you research it he had some crazy stupid ideas, and no one could tell him. Even when they failed, people lied rather than tell him it was his ideas that were the problem. The fact is that historically, publicly owned economies function very well at first, with high productivity from enthusiastic people, but then problems happen and no one wants to admit they do, and that leads to shortages, corruption, etc. Both Stalin and Mao and many other Communist governments have worried that if they admit their mistakes, they'd lose legitimacy, but in reality they still lost it behind the scenes.

It is theoretically possible to have a grassroots centrally planned economy, really it just means checks and balances (I am an American communist) to ensure that political power is not overly concentrated. The system of soviets which were initially used in the Soviet union would be a example to look to. There is of course the fact that those still let Stalin take power, but that has a lot to do with Russian history, bad luck, and a lot of well planned corruption on the part of Stalin.