Coyote wrote: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.
AFAIK wrote: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:
Candice Goucher and Linda Walton wrote: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.
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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.
Marx wrote: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.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!