Harmatten wrote:The text claims that state monopoly is capitalist, not that communism would not have monopolies.
It was in response to you writing, in part:
[quote=Harmatten"]Collective benefit significant - education -, the term too long - roads -, etc). Otherwise, for regular markets, it tends to easily rot into inefficient and unfair corporatism, opposing all needed changes. This is because those collectives have no incentives to improve the result and their survival is guaranteed by state monopolies. [/quote]
In short, your assertion was that collectivization does not work, and that big collectives could only be maintained by state monopolies. Thus, a socialist system would have some kind of state monopoly system. I refuted this. Your response is to underline this. Fair enough.
I am not claming that capitalism works perfectly, that everyone has a chance, that billionaires deserve their ranks or other stupid things. I am just saying that the system is obviously more functional than dysfunctional.
No Marxist would disagree, from a historical perspective.
Marx and Engels wrote: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?
But everything changes. We Marxists study how things change and why. We use a dialectical model and study the material in order to do so. We acknowledge things that are true, but look to how things change and why.
Capitalists seem to be content to cross their arms and insist that either nothing will ever change again or that nothing has ever changed. That feudalism and the neolithic were capitalism. This is simply not true. Which leads me to...
How can you claim that there is no reason that communism would be less efficient if you don't even know how goods would be produced? It seems to me that you're more concerned about how to share and control wealth rather than producing it. Isn't it exactly what we encounter in deficient regimes and leaderships?
We can look at these change and predict certain things. The main thrust, and the links posted all go into it if you're actually curious, is that every system has a certain amount of inefficiency in it. This you acknowledge about capitalism above. These inefficiencies create contradictions, these contradictions result in creating a new system. Capitalism was so successful at what it did that it came close to globalizing, for instance, but while the bourgeoisie are tethered to the national governments that they control-they can move through the world and set up factories or businesses globally with impunity. The proletariat, that produces the goods, all have the same relationship to the same companies throughout the world, but are restricted to their movement. Thus, we have a contradiction. A new system would sweep this away.
So far as the deficient regimes and leaderships, as you call it, they actually tend to fail because they become rigid about what socialism will look like in specifics. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and many others were honest about what they could accomplish. Lenin, for instance, scoffed at the idea that the Soviet Union was even a Workers' State, let alone a socialist (by definition this is international) state:
Lenin wrote:...ours is a workers’ state with a bureacratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition. Well, is it right to say that in a state that has taken this shape in practice the trade unions have nothing to protect, or that we can do without them in protecting the material and spiritual interests of the massively organised proletariat? No, this reasoning is theoretically quite wrong. It takes us into the sphere of abstraction or an ideal we shall achieve in 15 or 20 years’ time, and I am not so sure that we shall have achieved it even by then. What we actually have before us is a reality of which we have a good deal of knowledge, provided, that is, we keep our heads, and do not let ourselves be carried awav by intellectualist talk or abstract reasoning, or by what may appear to be “theory” but is in fact error and misapprehension of the peculiarities of transition. We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers’ organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our state. Both forms of protection are achieved through the peculiar interweaving of our state measures and our agreeing or “coalescing” with our trade unions.
Stalin and his ilk, to whom I assume you are referring, did the opposite and claimed that they were completely socialist, and thus everything they did was socialist, and thus there was no problems.
When you ask me, or any other Marxist worth his or her salt, what a socialist regime will look like exactly we hedge toward Lenin. It will be international. But how does it develop? Is it after a war? After an economic collapse at the top? A, "weak link in the chain of capitalism," like Russia was? The third world? The result of a new organization after a meteor hits the planet? These things are important because we study systems and change within those systems. To ask us just to tell you the specific process in building a car in twenty, a hundred years is as petty as demanding a capitalist to do the same and denying the possibility of capitalism for failure to anticipate a change in technology.
Property in substance has always existed. Most animals do experience ownerships, a dog or a cat has *its* territory and *its" food bowl. This is very natural.
Personal property, arguably always has. Private property, on the other hand, has demonstrably not always existed.
One of the key victories in the Plantation of Ulster, for instance, was the British taking huge plots of land and then giving it back to the Ri or Mael they had just defeated. There was a dual purpose in this-the first was a show of power. The second was that the land changed condition. You explained:
The only thing that changed is that now we write that on paper, have a police to enforce it and we extended it to intellectual property (although, again, the idea is quite natural to some extent).
The fact that land, which had always been, was reduced to a concept on paper that an individual - even a Ri or Mael - owned was completely novel. It utterly transformed the way that Ireland had been run. But Ireland was hardly unique in this, it was a revolution slowly taking place as the beginning of capitalism itself stirred. The most famous example is almost certainly the Europeans encountering the Americans. The concept of making land, or anything else, an abstraction that existed on paper in the possession of one individual that owned the thing was as lost on the American of the 1500s as it was the Irishman of the 1100s.
Even something as basic as a bowl, in the feudal period, was not so much yours as that of your family or status. The way we tend to think about heirlooms today, something you hold onto until it passes down to someone you're tied to-never yours, depriving you of the right to sell or destroy it-this is how all things were for the vast majority in feudalism.
The idea that we always had a consumer culture, or that our ideas of property were always the same is demonstrably false. It's again arguing that capitalism will always exist because nothing has ever changed. Instead, we look at how things have changed.
He stated that hierarchies would be shifted (and this is true). But humans would not be satisfied with equality, there will always be dominants and dominated.
You should read the link, but this doesn't even make sense with your argument.
Harmatten wrote:You can argue that it is a good thing that all people are equal. But they will not be, not as long as humans are human.
I sent you to Marx, and now you're arguing some kind of circular logic that your misreading of Marx agrees with you, so Marx is wrong. I don't even know what you're trying to say beyond arguing for the sake of arguing.
Again you're focusing on the details rather than the essence, what matters is that Marx's reasoning is what I tried to explain to you earlier. Now he didn't mention quotas, but you have to have quotas if you remove currency.
So you're going to condemn Marx for something you made up. And I can't speak of specifics for this kind of abstraction. I have directed you to links on the philosophical if you desire.
"Morale" may be bad choice of words from me. Ethics if you prefer. You're defending communism based on the idea that it could make everyone "equal" (not really but please don't digress on details) without asking whether this repartition could really profit you.
I have read this forward and backward and can't make heads or tails of it. So you're not accusing me of using morality only, but something equally as abstract like ethics if I prefer, which I don't. What are you specifically referring to when you want to debate me talking about equality? You conjured an imaginary argument out of thin air to fight, then fought it, then admitted you made it up, and want to discuss it further. What are you talking about?
So, basically, according to Lenin, greed, dominance and such will end up disappear?
Sorry it will not happen, humans will be humans.
No, basically, according to Lenin, the conception of property will disappear. From the citation that you supposedly read:
Lenin wrote:The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such a high state of development of communism at which the antithesis between mental and physical labor disappears, at which there consequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social inequality--a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.
I already went through a good deal of the transition of property into capitalism above; Lenin goes through some of the changes.
More nitpicking, yay. The point is that people have always took a part of their production to increase their future production. From paleolithic to whatever stupid regime you want to consider.
It's not, "nitpicking," to point out you are wrong. You have sufficiently expanded the definition enough to make your argument meaningless.
Here's Engels talking about how labour creates wealth from even before the paleolithic.
This will be my last discussion with you. This goes nowhere and I feel like I am discussing with a wall.
If that's what you want.
Lucky wrote:This definition is just wrong.
Damn that wily dictionary and its leftist bias!