[Dagoth Ur]

You're talking about Communism. That's when we've overcome the disasters that result from division of labor. There won't be a concept of a Doctor or Painter in communism.

[Husky]

Whenever I hear the abolishment of division of labor I always think back to the Milton Friedman analogy "No one knows how to make a pencil." (Referring to how almost every unique material forming the pencil came from a distinct location in the world - the graphite, wood, saws to cut the wood, etc - and that these different cultures all co-operated all in their own interest, despite probably hating each other if they ever met or speaking different languages).

This has always perplexed me about communists; their scorn for division of labor is an absurdity, economically speaking.

[Dagoth Ur]

The division of labor is what enslaves us. Instead of us being able to really use our time we're forced to focus on one angle of one profession and then wait around until you're needed. Its what commodifies workers and alienates them all at the same time.

As for the pencil idea: why does anyone need to spend their whole lives making pencils?

[The Immortal Goon]

This has always perplexed me about communists; their scorn for division of labor is an absurdity, economically speaking.

I know. Historically it always works out if one area specializes in something completely. Say, Oregon becomes specialized in producing wood for pencils and other materials. Then when, say, a housing boom ends and people aren't building houses of furniture to put into houses, and paper and pencils are at a historic low amount of production, Oregon is fine. Because the division of labor is part of everything else.

Oh wait, it's a disaster for everyone as the dominos start falling and all specialized areas collapse due to such divisions.

Environmentally, it's always been good for everyone too and hasn't done a thing to force division based on what it does to everyone else:

The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected. The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude for correcting the possible bad results of this primeval type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted, common ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, led to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes. Thus the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, since production was no longer restricted to providing the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has been put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing today in Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect – inasmuch as it is a question of the usefulness of the article that is produced or exchanged – retreats far into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling.

Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years’ industrial cycle – even Germany has had a little preliminary experience of it in the “crash”; that private ownership based on one’s own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers

That's not even getting into the other half of it, with alienation.

Nor is it to say that it's all bad. The Communist Manifesto, and other writings, celebrate the progressive achievements that the division of labor has achieved in creating a single planet where everyone is connected.

We Marxists just aren't religious fanatics though. For the capitalist, it has to all be good or bad, or you're going to insult the Invisible Hand.

The Invisible Hand is always right. We must always adjust our attitudes to be fanatical about it and try to get the Invisible Hand to like us.



Those pesky communists keep talking about, "facts," and look at the material world and explain things without condemning anything as morally good or bad—instead of just screaming a shrill devotion to an abstraction.

[Husky]

Just to correct you, Dagoth Ur, no one is making pencils (quite literally). People are supplying items going towards the final production of the pencil, and then the resources are arranged at a factory and transformed into the final product. hence, without international co-operation, pencils are almost impossible to manufacture as not one area contains all the graphite, clay, wood, molten wax, etc.

But let's not take something that might seem unnecessary or irrelevant like a pencil. Many of the luxuries we enjoy today, like this laptop I'm using, my bottle of cologne I purchased yesterday, your fridge, etc almost ad infinitum were only possible due to international trade and division of labor.

As for the pencil idea: why does anyone need to spend their whole lives making pencils?

Why do you think the people of South America supply the wood? They needed a saw to cut the tree down, why would someone provide them with the saw? Steel was needed to make the saw, who provided it and why? The rubber came from india most likely, why would they provide it? Because it is in everyone's interest. the global market makes productive efficiency possible, but even more, it fosters harmony and peace between peoples of the world. I don't think the people from South America and India would like each other, but they co operate through the production process.

Why did you buy your computer? It was in your interest, and allowed you to fulfill your desires. Such is why people participate in trade.

[The Immortal Goon]

Why did you buy your computer? It was in your interest, and allowed you to fulfill your desires. Such is why people participate in trade.

Exactly.

Dagoth Ur, I hope that you feel foolish now.

There is only one reason why people participate in the market: to fulfill their desires.

[Husky]

Wow. Nice pictures. You really obliterated me there.

I actually live in a country where sweatshops are. Once a company withdrew from the country, the workers started protesting that they would be unemployed now.

You self-righteous westerners don't seem to understand that these people depend on this employment.

Let's look at their options before the greedy, monocle-wearing capitalist arrives:

1) Engage in no activities and starve
2) Become self employed
3) Engage in illegal activities e.g: prostitution

Now, the capitalist arrives

4) Work for the capitalist for a fixed wage

The capitalists' arrival benefits these people tremendously. And, in the long term, these people are much better off after the arrival of foreign factories. China's rise as a superpower, the slashing of global poverty statistics, all of these are based on "sweatshops".

Bangladesh's export industry consists of 80% garment exports. What would happen if these factories left Bangladesh's economy? What would happen to the people's well-being?

[Conscript]

You self-righteous westerners don't seem to understand that these people depend on this employment.

No, we realize this and have identified it as the problem. The national bourgeoisie in the third world is largely crippled and can't hold a candle to international, state-sponsored giants. The best answer is nationalization and greater state direction in the economy as only the nation-state can properly serve national interests, having foreign capital be a near-constituent is not. Unfortunately, thanks to imperialism this is the most dangerous path to take. So a lot of nations pick the more peaceful option of whoring themselves out.

[Husky]

And the solution is that the workers must violently seize the factory they work for, ey Comrade?

[Conscript]

And do it elsewhere too so capital doesn't flee and withhold the fruit of the labor from the laborers in a blackmailing fashion.

[Husky]

withhold the fruit of the labor from the laborers

You have completely destroyed that phrase's meaning and its implications. It is used to justify self ownership and thus private property, the very thing you want to abolish.

[Dagoth Ur]

The product of a man's labor is bartered (in the sense that he who doesnt work doesnt eat) even in communism. The barter just happens to actually be beneficial to both parties always. It is the capitalist who steals the product and calls it his Right as Owner.

As for the pencil (again): *sigh* okay so why do these people only cut wood, produce wax, graphite, etc? Are you really claiming that specialization is natural or good? Tell that to the banana republics and oil shiekdoms.

[The Immortal Goon]

Wow. Nice pictures. You really obliterated me there.

I actually live in a country where sweatshops are. Once a company withdrew from the country, the workers started protesting that they would be unemployed now.

You self-righteous westerners don't seem to understand that these people depend on this employment.

Let's look at their options before the greedy, monocle-wearing capitalist arrives:

1) Engage in no activities and starve
2) Become self employed
3) Engage in illegal activities e.g: prostitution

Now, the capitalist arrives

4) Work for the capitalist for a fixed wage

The capitalists' arrival benefits these people tremendously. And, in the long term, these people are much better off after the arrival of foreign factories. China's rise as a superpower, the slashing of global poverty statistics, all of these are based on "sweatshops".

1. Do you really think people were sitting there in squalor, having no idea how to take care of themselves before capitalism was invented and came to wherever? Honestly, that for 99% of human history, everyone was just yearning for capitalism to come and tell them what to do? That they engaged in "illegal activities" with "no activities" and "starved" and just sat there doing these things on an island or wherever...hoping beyond home...that some day, a nice white man would come and tell them how to engage in activities, stop starving, and stop engaging in illegal activities?

What an utterly absurd notion.

2. Communists, as has been mentioned, do not deny the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie. We do not moralize and say one thing is better than the other because of whatever thing we choose is good or bad:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Where we look at things and see, objectively, what happened, you invent a history in order to support your feelings.

Bangladesh's export industry consists of 80% garment exports. What would happen if these factories left Bangladesh's economy? What would happen to the people's well-being?

We're the ones saying this shouldn't even be an issue. You're saying it's great that it's a problem. Until now for some reason.

[Husky]

I'm not being sarcastic, but thanks for that Marx and Engels quote.

[Conscript]

You have completely destroyed that phrase's meaning and its implications. It is used to justify self ownership and thus private property, the very thing you want to abolish.

Are you now realizing words and phrases can be used differently? I don't care how libertarians use 'fruit of labor' honestly, because if you're anything to go by they think that's profit and property is intrinsic to self-ownership. Talk about entitlement.

[QatzelOk]

I don't quite get why this is confusing.

I think I do. It's because working for other people has become so common that most people can't imagine any other way to live.

At the time of the genocide of the natives in North America (manifest destiny, etc.), "working for another person" was the definition of "slave."

When the natives had "slaves," it meant that these people answered to a boss.

No one else did.

Western European man was domesticated like a dog before being trained to hunt non-dogs all over the earth.

[Technology]

The thing is, even if the Marxist analysis still makes sense in today's world, the actual activist moral conclusions of the Communist Manifesto do not.

The modern professional who works without ownership of means of production and is earning 100s of thousands of dollars may well be a proletariat, perhaps having his labor used in an uneven relationship to earn more money for a higher position of someone who actually owns means of production, and this may well be consistent with the Marxist view of the world. The problem that actually keeps being dodged in this thread is what this means in a revolutionary sense and why it's relevant to people politically. You can analyze it in a detached way with Marxism and say that in the modern era it is more possible to be rich and yet a proletariat and poor and yet a bourgeoisie, and this is perfectly consistent and causes no contradictions with Marxist analysis, but what you can't do is claim that this justifies the same call to action that it did before because the make up of the proletariat and bourgeoisie matter to people.

In other words, the modern class structure is still amenable to Marxism, but not to Marxist Communism. The analysis does not break down, but the moral conclusions change because the structure of what's being analyzed has changed.

Communism is relevant to working class people because they are generally poor, and being poor correlates to not owning means of production, and having to work for others, but as Marxist themselves know, it is not dependent upon it. Marx takes an academic approach, but he then emotionally declares certain kinds of relationships as being exploitative, and bad, requiring that we change those relationships, whereas the poor masses who are attracted to Communism are not academicians by en large, and simply translate what Marx is saying into "eat the rich!", imagining an increase of their wealth through evening out, never factoring in their relationship to their means of production, only their struggle in life.

This means that when you eventually have societies in which proletariat can be relatively rich, the emotional narrative that makes Communism attractive suffers, as professional proletariat fight against the idea of changing the property regime and the way we work so as to protect their monied interests as they'd rather make more money than have ownership of production and be poorer. It's further weakened by the popularity of modern left-liberalism, which is actually interested in whether people are rich or poor rather than their relationship to production, a strong welfare capitalism or social democracy making Communism redundant, any popularity it has based on the misconception of the Marxism analysis behind it as being a kind of "super left-liberalism" that lets the poor eat even more rich, proletariat or no. Marxist analysis may not be dead, but Communism is, or at least exists now popularly in name only, with only a fringe holding the analytical dialectical fort, and alienated from the poor who once gave them the political traction sufficient to create nations.

[The Immortal Goon]

The fact is that alienation still exists, even in "the best," circumstances. One is still alienated from the labour, which someone else is buying from the proletariat, one is still alienated from the rest of society—as he is dependent upon someone else's wishes and expectations; one is still alienated from himself as he watches his production become alien to him and given to someone else; and on and on.

Further, there is the instability in finite material resources that the inefficiencies in capitalism (which is market based instead of resource based) continue to make worse.

Finally, there is the big problem of general instability in capitalism. Things seem good right now in comparison to feudalism. Further, we tend to diminish the falling standards that are coming up beneath us as a generation used to working longer, harder, and less securely for less money. But even if we do continue to disregard the spiral we're still in, there are issues when things do go well:

Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.

So the central problem is the idea that this becomes some kind of Marx getting really emotional. It's not that at all. It's studying the dialectic of history and how it interacts with people in general. Even if the proletarians are not educated in their own emancipation, then to paraphrase Trotsky: they may not recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit them to escape from its net.

Eventually, it is going to continue to find contradictions that will be negated through the enforcement of barbarism, or its negation through the creation of socialism.