[Eran]

How can you be certain a socialist economy is impossible?

Economic calculations are the rational steps taken to decide how to most efficiently produce desired goods from available resources.

Beyond very small, self-sufficient economies, economic calculations require the rational comparison of alternative means of producing functionally-similar end-goods. Even under given technological know-how, there are near-infinite permutations of alternative production processes.

Choosing between them requires comparison of the relative efficiency of different production alternatives. And since each production alternative uses a different mix of incommensurable resources (labour of different skills, various raw materials, land, time and intermediate machines), an agent making such decisions needs to be able to compare the total cost of different baskets of resources.

How do you compare 100 hours of semi-skilled labour against 1 ton of steel? How do you compare the use of 1 acre of land for a month against 10,000 KWH of electricity?

In a market economy, the answer is given by prices. Prices convert each resource to a common unit (money), allowing comparison of the cost (or value) of different combinations of production choices.

But meaningful prices can only emerge through the negotiation of independent buyers and sellers. When all the means of production are owned by the same entity, there are no independent buyers and sellers to negotiate prices. Without prices, one cannot rationally weigh the different cost associated with production choices.

Thus in a completely socialist economy, no rational choices can be made regarding production alternatives.

[KlassWar]

A command economy distorts prices from market efficiency because the goal is not market efficiency per se.

The goal is for production to accomplish policy objectives. Let's imagine that a developing country decides it wants to get everyone in the working masses a hybrid vehicle. The publicly owned cars industry tests several designs and chooses the most cost-effective (perhaps a few models for a few different types of vehicle). They start churning out cars and handing them at a prearranged order price for the consumer cooperatives to sell. They don't need to make a profit because they've got a subsidized budget. If a policy goal goal is equipping people with energy-efficient vehicles ASAP, money is injected and them cars are produced even if they're gonna be sold at a loss.

On a free-market economy this is anathema, but in a socialist economy it happens all the time and it's not the end of the world. You only need to make sure wealth is not being destroyed on aggregate. It's a bit trickier to do efficiently, sure. And yes, a planned economy that's mismanaged will probably go broke. But a capitalist economy will also go broke: Since the bourgeoisie controls the political process, the ruling class can, to an extent, privatize profits and socialize losses. Once this ois factored into business calculations, it gives economic actors plenty incentive to do the very things that will destroy the economy.

[Eran]

The publicly owned cars industry tests several designs and chooses the most cost-effective (perhaps a few models for a few different types of vehicle).

You almost skipped over the point I was making.

How would the car industry compare the cost of the various designs, if there are no prices for the means of production (raw materials, labour time, etc.) required for the different designs?

This is the essence of the point I am trying to make. There is no way to choose amongst several designs based on cost, because there is no cost information available.

You only need to make sure wealth is not being destroyed on aggregate.

How can you tell whether wealth is or isn't destroyed? Doing so requires comparing the value of the inputs into the production process to the value of the outputs. But if the value of the inputs is unknown (again, no prices for the means of production), how can anybody tell???

And yes, a planned economy that's mismanaged will probably go broke. But a capitalist economy will also go broke: Since the bourgeoisie controls the political process, the ruling class can, to an extent, privatize profits and socialize losses. Once this ois factored into business calculations, it gives economic actors plenty incentive to do the very things that will destroy the economy.

What you call "capitalist economy" I would characterise as a "mixed economy", and agree with your assessment. Fortunately, the society I am advocating wouldn't allow intervention of the political process in the economy. There would be no "corporate welfare" or bailouts using public money. When a corporation losses its capital, it goes bankrupt. Its management is replaced. Importantly, the losses aren't socialised, but are restricted to its owners.

It is obviously true that corporate owners can make mistakes just as easily as central planners. The difference is that corporate owners know when they have made mistakes, are "punished" for their mistakes, and will eventually lose their role in the economy if they continue to make such mistakes.

By contrast, central planners (and government enterprises everywhere) cannot tell whether they have made (economic) mistakes. Even if they did, there is no mechanism that forces mistaken decision-makers out (note the continued major role of Dodd and Frank played as regulators even after the spectacular regulatory failure they presided over).

[ingliz]

Economic calculations are the rational steps..

"Rationality is only perfect when relevant information is perfect, and that includes knowledge of the consequences of actions. However, the consequence of actions not yet taken does not exist at the moment of choice. Thus, direct knowledge of objective and publicly assembled consequences of still available options for action is logically impossible."

According to your argument, it would seem that a capitalist economy is an impossibility too?

[KlassWar]

How can you tell whether wealth is or isn't destroyed? Doing so requires comparing the value of the inputs into the production process to the value of the outputs. But if the value of the inputs is unknown (again, no prices for the means of production), how can anybody tell???

In actual practice, I'm assuming producers will buy equipment, hire prople to maintain infrastructure, pay bills and pay wages, You divvy up by the number of widgets our produced, then you add whatever you're actually paying per-widget. Once you factor in transportation and distribution and those post-production expenses, you get your total cost-per-widget. Sell enough widgets to consumers above that price, the public-run company is profitable. If you're subsidized due to some sort of policy, it can stay afloat even if it doesn't.

Resources are used, manpower is employed, wages and bills are paid in some form of currency. Price and cost are no more real and no more abstract than in on a capitalist economy.

In the old days of slow computers larger than a building and little-to-no mass communications, it was damn hard to plan an economy since you could have no idea of what consumers actually want to buy.

[The Immortal Goon]

In actual practice, I'm assuming producers will

This is the important thing here. We don't live in a socialist system, and thus can't conjure the specifics any better than a Roman can talk about fiat international capitalism. We can see the inconsistencies in capitalism, see how relations with the material have existed in past and present, and assume certain things. However, as Ingliz pointed out before, these are things that need to be analyzed as part of a democratic program. Not imposed and worshipped as true ideological gospel made flesh.

[Turning Point]

In actual practice, I'm assuming producers will...

Although we can "assume" how socialism will work (in the abstract sense), there are inklings of socialism-in-practice throughout the entirety of the 20th century.

Both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China provide pivotal examples as to how socialism will work for the 21st century.

No doubt 21st century socialism will be different due to a variety of complex, if not unpredictable factors but the essence will be similar.

I'm in no way arguing for "state-capitalism" (a label I've never been very fond of to describe 20th century socialism) or the single-party state model.

When I say the essence will be similar however, I mean to say that there are certain factors from past revolutions and previous attempts at creating post-revolutionary societies that offer glimpses into 21st century socialism.

In revolutionary Soviet Russia, following the formation of the new Bolshevik-led government after the Second Soviet Congress, we saw how in a nation such as Imperial Russia (an empire nicknamed the "prison house of nationalities") the national question would play itself out.

In many countries globally the national question is either ignored or a topic of hot debate. Can it not be said that in especially large countries or countries incorporating one or more smaller nations (in the objective sense) that if revolution does break out, nationalist independence movements such as was seen in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War may break out?

I think considerable weight may be put to such a notion. Although, as Marxists, we cannot truly "predict" such occurrences, past experiences do hint at both present and/or future occurrences involving the national question.

As for the PRC and it's revolution where popular (peasant) power was established in the villages and where in the late 1940's communist party branches were formed in villages across northern China and eventually nationwide, the bureaucracy could already be seen despite serious attempts at limiting its power on at least a local, village-by-village basis. (it is notable that the early communist party branch formed in Long Bow village was, according to Hinton, only 30 members strong and composed percentage-wise of 80% land-poor peasants and/or hired laborers while around 20% owned land, but were not part of the landed gentry or the rich peasantry, of which there were none inside the actual branch) Can it not be said that socialism in the 21st century will have to deal with a bureaucracy too?

My point is that A) we shouldn't simply ignore past attempts at building socialism and that B) The past does indeed give us genuine pointers as to what socialism in our own century will be like.

How can you be certain a socialist economy is impossible?

A socialist economy is far from "impossible." The Soviet Union and the PRC has shown us what is possible even on a limited scale.

We know from history that the early Bolsheviks upon assuming power in November of 1917 (going by the new calender in use by 1918 in Russia) sought to create a functional system of workers' control of industry. However, and even Lenin conceded this, a general lack of education amongst the workers and a variety of other factors led to a system of state control, which in theory would compensate for the lack of workers' control.

By now, in the 21st century, are we to deny that workers in the modern sense are "incapable" of managing their workplaces, at least on a limited scale? After all, education, technology, etc. are much greater especially in the developed world where we've gone a long way since 1917.

My two cents.

[oppose_obama]

Yes workers are unable to manage their own workplace. Let alone the fact it is not their workplace but whoever owns it workplace. Secondly people are morons.

[KlassWar]

Yes workers are unable to manage their own workplace. Let alone the fact it is not their workplace but whoever owns it workplace. Secondly people are morons.

Workers are quite able to manage their own workplaces, as the existence of a cooperative movement for the last coupla centuries has proven. Most of the population is neither illiterate, technologically challenged nor innumerate, which were challenges back in the day.

As for whose workplace it actually is, in practice it belongs to whoever the guys with the guns say it does. If the guys with the guns are capitalist police, the factory belongs to the owners. If the guys with the guns are a communist militia, you can bet yo ass them factories gonna belong to the proletariat.

[Eran]

According to your argument, it would seem that a capitalist economy is an impossibility too?

There is no such thing as "perfect rationality".

My point is much less philosophical. It is akin to the difference between navigating with a map and without one. People navigating with a map can still get lost, and those navigating without one can still end up at their desired destination.

Capitalists navigate with a map provided by the information content in the relative prices of various goods and services, from land and labour to final consumer goods. Those prices allow apples-to-apples comparison of different production choices.

Central planners in a non-market society, on the other hand, navigate without a map. Without meaningful prices, they lack the information required for making rational (as opposed to intuitive) choices.

In actual practice, I'm assuming producers will buy equipment, hire people to maintain infrastructure, pay bills and pay wages

Buying and selling requires independent owners of the goods bought and sold. If all the means of production are publicly-owned, there are only internal-transfers, never purchases or sales.

I am arguing that economic calculations are impossible if all the means of production are publicly owned. I am NOT arguing that a system in which all productive enterprises are employee-owned is similarly impossible.

[ingliz]

It is akin to the difference between navigating with a map and without one.

In practice, stamokap and state socialism are two sides of the same coin.

It seems we both journey without maps

[Eran]

If I understand "stamokap" correctly (I had to look it up), you may well be right.

However what makes you think my journey has anything to do with state capitalism is beyond me. I am an anarchist, with specific aversion to all forms of state intervention in the economy.

And while no Western nation is anywhere near state monopoly capitalism in general, certain industries (e.g. health care, education, infrastructure) do exhibit effective state monopoly.

And indeed, in those areas, the state's ability to rationally allocate resources is severely hampered, with intuition and (more often) political pressures.

[The Immortal Goon]

Capitalists navigate with a map provided by the information content in the relative prices of various goods and services, from land and labour to final consumer goods. Those prices allow apples-to-apples comparison of different production choices.

I am an anarchist, with specific aversion to all forms of state intervention in the economy.

And here we are back at the beginning. The "relative prices of various goods and services, from land and labour to final consumer goods." In the model when this was applied that had built into it, "aversion to all forms of state intervention in the economy," opium sold for more money than food; what food there was made could be sold for more money elsewhere, and famines amongst the many begin to dot the map as the wealthy wallow in resources.

Desperate, starving people driven to rebellion by the prices of goods and services do their best to destroy the tyranny you "non-statists" build, and in order to survive it's to the weapons to rule over piles of bodies under jack-booted soldiers.

And while the people that brought the term, "laissez faire" into English and were able to reform it and starve the Indians, Chinese, Irish, Scottish, Ottomans, Native Americans, and others before having to send troops into crush those that denied their ideas is something you've danced around and tried to excuse as being the imperfect reality to your perfect idea; this is a pattern repeated throughout history whenever free marketers get their chance, right into cuddling up with the fascists to defend them:

The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time.

This moderation is the result of the fact that traditional liberal views still continue to have an unconscious influence on the Fascists...

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

Friedrich von Hayek loved Pinochet and the violence and terror that went into slaughtering the innocent in the name of the market:

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period, " only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal preference, " he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.

So loved was Pinochet's torture chambers and death squads by free-market anti-government libertarians, that they invited its architects into their embrace as avatars of small government and capitalism. Milton Friedman's legacy at least understands the bloody record and now advocates that:

Democracy Is Not The Answer

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere, and it poses major problems specifically for libertarians:

1) Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan, the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! Even Ron Paul, who was enormously popular by libertarian standards and ran during a time of enormous backlash against the establishment, never had the slightest chance of winning the nomination. His “strong” showing got him 1.6% of the delegates to the Republican Party’s national convention. There are simply not enough of us to win elections unless we somehow concentrate our efforts.

2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest candidates) who will not abuse their office can’t sell favors, thus have fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic disadvantage in an election.

Libertarians are a minority, and we underperform in elections, so winning electoral victories is a hopeless endeavor.

Emergent Behavior

Consider these three levels of political abstraction:

Policies: Specific sets of laws.
Institutions: An entire country and its legal and political systems.
Ecosystem: All nations and the environment in which they compete and evolve.

Folk activism treats policies and institutions as the result of specific human intent. But policies are in large part an emergent behavior of institutions, and institutions are an emergent behavior of the global political ecosystem.

And so we're left talking about the hypotheticals you throw out in an attempt to cover up what leading libertarians have long since figured out before disseminating their lies: capitalism is incompatible with liberty. You can go ahead and keep saying in yourself that in your dream world it is. But actual experience says otherwise, libertarian elites say otherwise, and common sense says otherwise.

[KlassWar]

I am arguing that economic calculations are impossible if all the means of production are publicly owned. I am NOT arguing that a system in which all productive enterprises are employee-owned is similarly impossible.

In an economy where there are consumers (and possibly consumers' cooperatives), publicly owned enterprises and worker-owned enterprises, whatever exchange system they got in practice will be the basis of economic calculation. This basis might be more or less efficient than a traditional market, but real-world markets aren't perfectly efficient either and it doesnt' cause the immediate collapse of the capitalist system.

[Eran]

I'd like to stress that the calculation problem is only an issue when buyers and sellers (e.g. of raw materials) are effectively arms of the same entity (e.g. "the public", or the state).

As long as the transactions are "arms-length", i.e. negotiated between broadly-independent buyers and sellers, the calculation problem doesn't exist.

[Eran]

In the model when this was applied that had built into it, "aversion to all forms of state intervention in the economy," opium sold for more money than food; what food there was made could be sold for more money elsewhere, and famines amongst the many begin to dot the map as the wealthy wallow in resources.

Not quite. The examples you gave are of situations in which government ceased to intervene in the economy, but only after using its force to assign unjust property titles to its favourites.

Neither I nor any libertarian advocates preservation of arbitrarily-assigned or violently-acquired property rights.

And so we're left talking about the hypotheticals you throw out in an attempt to cover up what leading libertarians have long since figured out before disseminating their lies: capitalism is incompatible with liberty. You can go ahead and keep saying in yourself that in your dream world it is. But actual experience says otherwise, libertarian elites say otherwise, and common sense says otherwise.

Really? This coming from a Marxist?

How difficult would it be to demonstrate the contradiction of Marxism and liberty, freedom and prosperity by observing past Marxist elites and self-proclaimed Marxist societies?


Mises, writing in 1927, viewed Fascism as better than Communism. A very sensible position at that point in history.

As for the quote from the Cato Institute, I fail to understand the point you are trying to make. I readily admit that I too do not believe "Democracy is the answer". Neither did revolutionary Marxists.

[ingliz]

If I understand "stamokap" correctly

I am not sure that you do.

The Marxist-Leninist thesis is that the state in the age of ever increasing concentration of capital in 'monopoly enterprises' necessarily becomes a tool of big business.

Big business, having achieved a monopoly or cartel position in most markets of importance, fuses with the government apparatus.

You seem to have it backwards.

[Turning Point]

I readily admit that I too do not believe "Democracy is the answer". Neither did revolutionary Marxists.

Revolutionary Marxists have historically argued that bourgeois democracy isn't the answer to the world's problems due to the fact that that form of government is inseparably bound up with capitalism.

Marxists during and after both the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions believed that a soviet, or proletarian democracy would serve as a higher form of democracy then was possible in a parliamentary bourgeois democracy because it encompassed and no doubt accommodated a greater majority of people then a parliament allowed for and would thus be truly representative, with direct elections, a free press, a workable system of recalls for all government officials whom were to be held accountable to their local soviets, etc.

The type of state that the Marxists under Lenin were aiming for was that of a commune-state. After the October Insurrection overturned the Provisional Government, many laws and decrees were passed throughout the year 1917 which were designed to go along with such a state, many of which, such as with land reform decree and with the formation of the Red Guard, were already in place by then (workers' control of industry, the formation of a popular workers' militia called the Red Guard, decrees on the 'national question' and on land owning rights for the rural peasantry, etc. were further strengthened by being officially recognized and utilized by the new Marxist-led state)

The present system of government in use throughout much of the world today (parliamentary democracy) cannot be boiled down to simply that of a "democracy," a description which doesn't fit well with parliamentary democracy in practice.

At best it is a form of highly limited democracy, with an emphasis on private property and on free trade which even then is a very crude definition.

How difficult would it be to demonstrate the contradiction of Marxism and liberty, freedom and prosperity by observing past Marxist elites and self-proclaimed Marxist societies?

You obviously lack a clear understanding of such Marxist societies which arose first in the Soviet Union and later across a third of the world.

As I have said in previous posts, the red base areas in rural China during the civil war possessed a large decree of autonomy from the Communist Party of China, having their own independent administrative Peasant Associations (which had their own freely elected officials at the village-level), as well an an independent popular peasants' militia separate from the Red Army/People's Liberation Army which drew it's ranks from the great mass of poor, landless peasants and which replaced the oppressive Peace Preservation Corps in the villages.

Women were allowed to own their own plots of land and housing, and with that they soon became more economically independent and were thus able to challenge men in village society through their own Women Associations, while the phenomenon of a truly independent female population capable of challenging male-dominated society was not seen for decades in the U.S. around the same time (the '40's through the '70s prior to Mao's death and the coup orchestrated from within the communist party that eventually restored capitalism)

Furthermore, the early Soviet bureaucracy under Lenin could hardly be said to be "elite." Luxuries were few if non-existent while even high-up officials such as Lenin ate simple foods and lived an otherwise simple life. Only under Stalin were bureaucrats actively rewarded, and even then their existence as government officials were far from considered "wealthy" or "elite" by modern European or U.S. standards.

It is abundantly clear that capitalism has been maintained throughout the entirety of the 20th century through violence and even terror in such far-flung places as Nazi Germany, Chile under Pinochet, U.S.-influenced Cuba under Batista, United Fruit Company-era Guatemala, China under Chiang Kai-Shek, etc.

It is furthermore clear that modern-day 21st century capitalism cannot maintain it's current existence of wastefulness without further uses of state-terror and authoritarianism. Greece, Spain, and to a certain extent the U.S. have already resorted to heavy-handed tactics of crushing popular protests and of enforcing harsh, if not barbaric austerity measures aimed at rolling back the capitalist welfare-state and labor rights gained through decades of class struggle by workers.

The point of socialism on the other hand is to strengthen and increase democracy while dividing up the immense wealth of the rich and scattering it across the bottom most layers of class-based society. In China, a literal cornucopia of wealth (housing, land, and everyday common goods) was created in Long Bow village by taking from the rich and giving it to the lowest layers of society for the benefit of the vast majority of the village populace.

Under capitalism the rich in China horded grain, goods, land, etc. often causing famines. Socialism in China sought to eliminate such a phenomenon through massive and radical wealth distribution based on human need. This was the essence of the 1949 Chinese revolution.

Mises, writing in 1927, viewed Fascism as better than Communism. A very sensible position at that point in history.

20th century Fascism came 'naturally' from the failed socialist revolutions in Germany and Italy. Both governments under Hitler and Mussolini rose to power through violent coups and both governments exploited the failure of the revolutions by imprisoning and/or killing off the left-wing.

To desire such a twisted form of government is naive and you clearly have little to no knowledge on how fascism actually worked or what it entailed as a philosophy and as a ruling government in practice.

To heck with Fascism and it is disgusting that you would even claim that Mises view was "A very sensible position at that point in history."

My hands are tired now from typing. My two cents.

[The Immortal Goon]

Not quite. The examples you gave are of situations in which government ceased to intervene in the economy, but only after using its force to assign unjust property titles to its favourites.

The emperor selling his land to companies is using force and creating "unjust property titles?" How else would you do it?

Neither I nor any libertarian advocates preservation of arbitrarily-assigned or violently-acquired property rights.

Further, how would you assign land property in the first place? Nobody made it, claims on every partial of land on the planet can go back a thousand directions to who is entitled to use it. How do you propose it be divided out in a "just" way without using force as a means of securing the "just" claim?

How difficult would it be to demonstrate the contradiction of Marxism and liberty, freedom and prosperity by observing past Marxist elites and self-proclaimed Marxist societies?

No self-proclaimed Marxist society ever viewed itself as having succeeded, not by a long shot.

Mises, writing in 1927, viewed Fascism as better than Communism. A very sensible position at that point in history.

As for the quote from the Cato Institute, I fail to understand the point you are trying to make. I readily admit that I too do not believe "Democracy is the answer". Neither did revolutionary Marxists.

Turning Point covered this well.

To cry at the feet of people killed clutching their property while nodding approvingly at undesirables being thrown in to gas chambers and their possessions given to Aryan-Supermen as a means of staving off the masses enacting a fair distribution of goods is obviously horrifying. Further, I'm not sure why you see this as "a very sensible position" while doing your best to say that laissez-faire within the British Empire shouldn't be supported by non-statists like yourself because it was too statist.

Also, as Turning Point mentioned, the entire point of Marxism is the liberation of the masses. It's obvious that capitalism abhors democracy, and thus the majority of the people. I just rarely see the libertarians admit they want an iron heel on the neck of the poor, the vast majority of the world.

Or, if you are legitimately curious about Lenin:

We have seen that the Communist Manifesto simply places side by side the two concepts: "to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class" and "to win the battle of democracy". On the basis of all that has been said above, it is possible to determine more precisely how democracy changes in the transition from capitalism to communism.

In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.

The correctness of this statement is perhaps most clearly confirmed by Germany, because constitutional legality steadily endured there for a remarkably long time--nearly half a century (1871-1914)--and during this period the Social-Democrats were able to achieve far more than in other countries in the way of "utilizing legality", and organized a larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere else in the world.

What is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been recorded in capitalist society? One million members of the Social-Democratic Party - out of 15,000,000 wage-workers! Three million organized in trade unions--out of 15,000,000!

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

But from this capitalist democracy--that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through--forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards "greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.

Engels expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as the reader will remember, that "the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist".

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people--this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

The expression "the state withers away" is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.

And so things have expanded further. India remains a problem because the emperor sold his land to British companies, which traded without government intervention-and for the libertarian this is bad because it did not go far enough. The starvation of untold millions and millions can be waved aside for the demand of more of the same! You, perhaps, think the elite profiting from the interactions and the expansion of funds in London was worth this untold suffering of people across the planet.

Concentration camps set up across the world to forcibly murder people upset with capitalism are "very sensible" but it is the Marxists, who fight to remove such foolishness from the root instead of compromising with such "sensible" action that hate freedom in your mind.

It is, perhaps, worth pointing out that the libertarians are notorious for their newspeak. You seem to be promoting a horrifying fascist dominated future, devoid of theoretical and real rights for the vast majority of the population, in order to protect the wealth of the few. I knew this was a latent belief of the libertarian—I did not expect it to be explicitly stated.

[Turning Point]

Great post, The Immortal Goon.

You seem to be promoting a horrifying fascist dominated future, devoid of theoretical and real rights for the vast majority of the population, in order to protect the wealth of the few...

In the U.S. at least, Libertarians are content with letting the poor stay down while they complain of the abuses of the state/government, arguing that under "real capitalism" there would be no state yet the free-market would exist however with no exploitation.

When in reality and in practice the state tends to be wedded to capitalism in of itself. The two entities have worked hand in hand since the American Revolution to crush the great mass of American people through their "laws," as for example after the revolution it was against the law to form a labor union as the union theoretically represented a "conspiracy" to undermine the interests of the employer. (my source: the excellent history book There Is Power In A Union by Philip Dray). Even when they were declared to be legal (and only after much struggle by the working class, primarily spearheaded by female mill workers), labor unionists attempting to form them were murdered, often with the active consent of local government, which sought to routinely break strikes by workers against corporations.

And when the Paris Commune was crushed in 1871, authorities in New York crushed a peaceful yet militant demonstration of New York's working-class for fears that they would form a "New York Commune."

Fast forward to the 1920's, and Palmer was raiding suspected communists and/or activists for fears that socialist revolution would break out in America! And all this prior to Stalin, the gulags, and the Cold War. (for which there was a second Red Scare)

It becomes highly evident that capitalism as we examine history allows for only limited democracy, and cries for a furthering of democracy (and for socialism) either reaching death ears or are violently crushed in the interest of maintaining the present system.

Hence why we're living in an absurd world where it's "okay" to force austerity down the throats of working-class members and to crush the Occupy Protests with bogus legislation (anti-camping laws, etc.) and through heavy police actions as those same politicians the world over speak so casually of "democracy" and "freedom" as if such words are merely catchwords.

After all, according to those same politicians, communism "failed" and/or was "totalitarian" and that there is thus no alternative to capitalism.

History called, it's calling bull crap on that!