From Bryan White
Occasionally, I like to revisit ideas that I disagree with, to see if I can find a reason to reconsider my position. It’s a wonderful thing when something compels you to change your mind. It’s like a whole new area of the game board opens up. Suddenly there are all these fresh opportunities. It’s how you grow. It’s how you learn. It’s how you advance in complexity as a person.
For instance, when I sat down with Kant a few months ago, I really wanted there to be something to it, something I’d missed. Even if I wasn’t entirely convinced of his thesis, I hoped to at least find some way of looking at it that had some kind of utility. What if space and time and mathematics and causality really were just transparent overlays on the Magnavox Odyssey of existence!? I would have to rethink everything! What a grand adventure that would be! But no, there didn’t appear to be anything to it. It all rested on a blatant evasion, like a shell game swapping the nut from epistemology to metaphysics right under the marks’ noses while they all stood there with their mouths gaping. No, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see that happen.
But I’m sincere in what I’m saying. Naturally, I tend to stay in the comfort zone of what I believe and what I’m familiar with. Don’t we all? But every now and then, the impulse hits me to delve right into the heart of what seems like a horrendously bad idea and see if maybe, just maybe, there might be some merit to it. What an amazing thing that would be! To have to rebuild the world all new! I’m starving for something different. Who wants to go on believing the same shit all their lives? But there has to be something to find there, something convincing. That’s the catch. It just doesn’t work otherwise. I’ll put just about any idea on the tip of my tongue, but I have to think long and hard before I actually swallow it.
So, currently, I find myself thinking about communism.
Specifically, I’m intrigued by the Marxist notion that the endgame is a society where you no longer need a government in place, where everyone abides by the communist system in a voluntary capacity. I’ve always found this to be laughably paradoxical. How do you get a society of dozens, let alone billions, to share everything in common without some sort of administrative entity to admonish everyone to share or to determine the most equitable and efficient distribution of the things to be shared? But since many people who seem reasonably intelligent consider this to be a feasible outcome, it may warrant deeper consideration.
First, maybe we can reverse engineer this utopia in a thought experiment by removing the concepts of money and property rights and then reshuffling the deck of society and smoothing over the resulting rough edges until we get something resembling a working communist system. After all, I would imagine that communists would still want us to have all this “stuff”, to still be a thriving and advancing and prosperous civilization, even with the same possibilities for innovation and invention in our unforseeable future. They just don’t want us to be at each other’s throats competing and bargaining for these things. So fine, we start by razing the economic fences.
Okay, so you still have your job. You don’t get paid for it, but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t have to pay for anything. The stores are all still there (although, I suppose we can’t call them stores. Maybe “supply outlets”?), and you can just go and get whatever you want. The first question that stares you in the face as you’re lying there in bed on the first morning of this brave new world is: why bother going to work? There’s no one to make you go to work, and there’s no one to stop you from taking whatever you want from the sto… the supply outlets.
Well, I suppose this is the first of many situations where your new high-minded communist ideals will kick in. You realize that being able to take whatever your heart desires from the sto… the SUPPLY OUTLETS *grunt* is a pretty sweet deal, all things considered, and you have a vested interest in keeping this system afloat and doing your part. So, you get out of bed and gladly go to work, doing … whatever. You’ll want to do the best job you can so that you’re doing your upmost part. So presumably you’ll do the thing you’re most passionate about and most qualified to do, just as the people who serve you lunch at the supply outlet mega- multi- something or other are presumably doing as well. Hopefully, someone has a real passion and talent to voluntarily do sanitation work.
Okay, but then what’s to stop you from grabbing fifteen Cadillacs in fifteen different shades of pink and eating lobster and steak every night? What’s to stop the neighbors from snatching the keys to the Cadillacs right out of your hands and going on a joyride and turfing up your lawn? After all, you don’t really own the Cadillacs. Heck, you don’t even really own your lawn. And besides there’s no one to really stop them. Again, high-minded communist ideals to the rescue! You all realize it’s such a sweet deal so you don’t take more than blah, ba, blah, blah, blahhhhh.
So, basically what I’m seeing is like some kind of economic honor system. Not only do you have to rely on people foregoing their personal and immediate gratification in favor of a vigilant faith that maintaining the utopia at large will always serve their best interests, you also have to expect them to know how to precisely gauge their efforts and desires for the greater good of this incredibly immense and complex system. Filet mignon is good three times a week, but four times would be an over indulgence that would cause society to fold like a house of cards. It would be like throwing all the parts of a well-oiled machine into the air and expecting them all to land exactly where they should, to fit together in midair and all start running at once, and then just walking away and not sticking around to keep any kind of an eye on it. People believe this can work?
I know I’m being flippant (mostly to make this post entertaining), but I’m really trying to take the idea as seriously as I can. It’s just hard to take it very seriously*. Admittedly, my understanding of communism is rudimentary and superficial, and I’m considering delving further. Maybe there really is some wild way it all works. What an adventure that would be!
*Honestly, it only seems to get worse if I take it more seriously. How do massive group undertakings, like building a factory, get organized on the fly? How do the resources for it get allocated? By who’s initiative is it undertaken? A less charitable reading would be that communism is a looting mentality couched in intellectual jargon. It’s a strategy for SEIZING a productive civilization, but it has no strategy for building, let alone maintaining one. But I’m trying to keep an open mind. I’m trying.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Bryan, sorry for overlooking this till you nudged me. Great post, I instantly pressed the “publish” button. WordPress doesn’t notify me, I have to look .
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Your description of communism sounds more like anarchism to me than marxism, but I never studied either with any enthusiasm. As for Kant, my curiosity was dulled within minutes, so I can only admire, as ever, your tenacity and grasp.
I confess to having been seduced by an “alternative society” in the early Sixties (Beatniks, hipsters, Kerouac, GInsberg, etc) and again in the early Seventies (“The Aquarian Age”, hippie communes, then Indian gurus).
But all of these were non-materialistic. They defied technology, modernity, all the machinery of “Babylon”. I would have joined the Rastas too, if I had heard of them. For years I loved the music of Bob Marley etc without having a clue as to where they were coming from.
And as for Cuba, I tried to learn what it is really like from my granddaughter Manuela who went there with a group of other home-educated youngsters. Her father, born 1966, endured his parents’ anarchist-freak-hippie-Aquarian-commune-Guru years to become an extraordinary landscape gardener, homoeopath, community activist on behalf of the less-educated and less-privileged, leader of “dads’ group” activities and many more eccentricities.
Anyhow Manuela told me that in Cuba doctors get paid the same as everyone else, which I thought was brilliant, because as you suggest, Bryan, the best society will surely be one in which we use our talents from the love of practising our skills (like most artists) and the joy of generosity to others.
But then I never, for some reason, desired cadillacs and so forth, even if the guru did.
And my ideal society would be based on the village, with pretty much no private transport. Everyone would share responsibility for everyone else. And I’d have liked it if technology never evolved beyond that of the nineteen-fifties. Which again, and I could curse myself for it, betrays a lazy sense of reason & a preference for dreaming over practicality.
Except in small projects which can be completed in a day. On these I like nothing more than to raise my game, and that of others, in competitive striving. So that “our village”, however defined, may be the best it can be.
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Well the communists I’m hearing this from tend to be anarchists as well, so that would explain it. But they maintain, naturally that this was Marx’s original vision. Supposedly he always meant for the final form of “true” communism to be stateless. Haven’t read Marx, so I can’t attest to this.
Since writing this other day, I had some time to think about it. Basically, I’ve concluded that, setting aside communism or any other kind of -ism, to think that there is some way of arranging society so that you can eventually remove all constraints of law, government, and authority, and still expect it to keep its shape like a jello popped out of a mold, that you can count on everyone, everywhere, at all times to adhere to exactly where they belong in the jello, always to know precisely how to operate in the way that most effeciently preserves the jello, to always, always, always, defer their interests in exactly the right way to the advantages afforded by the jello, to never take advantage of any the numerous, expedient, readily available opportunities that might be immediately beneficial to the person but ultimately harmful to the jello as a whole, to think that such a thing is possible is gloriously bold, and yet at the same time, absolute batshit insanity.
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Also, I don’t want fifteen Cadillacs either, but us patting each other on the back for the modesty of our appetites is beside the point. For such a proposed system to work, NO ONE, nowhere, ever, could ever want fifteen Cadillacs.
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Also, also, from what I understand, the only thing “extraordinary” about homeopathy is thinking that it works. You seem to have a life filled with kooky people, Vincent. Maybe there’s more of them over there. If only human beings possessed a faculty for discerning hopelessly dumb ideas, a tool or set of tools, a BOX of tools, you might say!
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Okay, that was a cheap. I admit it. Now I’m being snide and smug.
It’s just that it’s irritating to hear about people shaking their magic bottles of water or flying off to communist pest holes to revel in the “great experiment.” I feel like there’s a perverse disregard for reality. it’s makes me feel like this aversion to reason stems from a resentment towards anything that dares to suggest that donning a skirt of banana leaves and doing an interpretive dance in the backyard just might not make it rain.
I also feel like maybe there’s some charmed living behind it. A lot of the rest of us don’t have the luxury of exploring our stupidity so extensively. Some of us have to actually have to be careful about what we do and what we believe will work to keep us alive.
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See, there’s a difference between people that put on the banana skirt because they think it will work, because they don’t know any better, and the people who know damn well that it won’t, and yet they put it on anyway, saying, “Look at me. I’m learning from the Natives! Aren’t I so humble!? Aren’t I so enlightened!?”
And also, why SHOULD doctors only get paid the same as everyone? It’s a lot of work to be a doctor. You have to actually know what you’re doing, really know. It’s funny when people say things like that. It’s like they’re being generous on the doctors’ behalf. Well, golf clap for you. What a noble gesture!
The point in the post wasn’t so much that things SHOULD work that way; it’s that it’s ludicrous to expect them to.
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That’s probably a good 15-20% more acid in the above replies than there should be. I apologise for that. My daughter did something today that really put me in a foul mood, and I can’t seem to shake it. Still, I stand by my points, if not my guns.
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I’ve fixed those typos you mentioned in one comment, now deleted. What you say about homoeopathy is exactly my point too. But I take the view that almost everyone has absurd ideas, there’s no point holding that against them.
And as for that, some of the most renowned philosophers & scientists have fallen for daft ideas, like Linus Pauling, all sorts of intellectuals who went to the Soviet Union and fell for it at the time, Noam Chomsky in later life, Richard Dawkins, anyone who thinks flights to Mars, manned or unmanned, are worth the money.
I know what you mean about the 15-20% more acid. I’ve been like that in the past week too, and not for anything I could blame on anyone else.
Above all, I’m not intending to decry reason, which like you I associate with feet-on-the-ground sanity. I’m confessing personal flaws, and slowly with help of wifely patience, and friends like you, learning to be more sensible & perhaps meet the rest of the world on a more equal footing
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I supposed that’s true. I’ve entertained my share of absurd ideas now and then.
But homeopathy feels less like entertaining an absurd idea, and more like being a deliberate charlatan. Like running a psychic hotline.
I didn’t know what homeopathy was until a few years ago. I think maybe it’s a bigger thing over there. I seem to recall that it’s even given some official legitimacy of some sort. And yet when I heard what it was, it sounded about as effective as trying to knock the stars out of the sky by throwing rocks at them.
I wonder if it’s one of those sorts of things where only the practitioners are usually initiated into the technical details of how it “works”, while the average lay patient just understands that something mediciney is being done.
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Don’t know why “charlatan” got the spatial treatment.
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And to bring it back to the topic of the post, this is where a communist might say, “Well see what people do for money? They invent whole branches of quackery to defraud people!”
But they have it ass backwards. Money is simply a point system, a way of keeping accounts straight when you’re dealing with civilization on a large scale, beyond the scope of a village (and even in a small village, I’m sure there’s a point where a loose association of unaccounted trade and a free use of common stores breaks down.) It’s a way of keeping track. You earn points by doing something or making something or contributing something that someone considers valuable enough to exchange their points for, and you in turn use your points for the things you consider valuable enough to exchange for them. Yes, there are people who are going to do unscrupulous, dishonest, things to try to cheat the point system. But to blame the point system itself, to think that you’re just going to make an honest woman out of everyone by throwing out the point system is insanity of a feces smeared on the wall and lying naked on the stone floor and gnawing holes into your flesh order. You not going to get MORE honesty out of people by just throwing everything into a chaotic free for all. Why would anyone possibly think that?
Although they like to cite these instances of fraud and greed, I strongly suspect that it isn’t ultimately the UNfairness of money that really bothers communists; it’s the calculable fairness of it. It’s the cold metric of it.
It’s sour grapes. It’s like this guy I worked with that was having trouble getting a loan because he had a bad credit score, and he told me that “credit scores are bullshit.” Well of course they are when you have a lousy one. But when you have an impeccable credit score, it’s nice to sit down with a lender that doesn’t know you from Adam and have access to a nice simple way of showing them, “Yes, I have my shit together. You can trust me with your money.”
This is where a communist (and the occassional disgruntled co-worker) might cry “That’s not fair!”, but that isn’t actual unfairness; it’s a whiny child’s definition of unfairness.
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And as I indicated in the post and my first comment above, it isn’t just a question of honesty. Even if we could assume that everyone was honest and doing their utmost to be fair in what they contributed and what they consumed, you’d still be leaving people with no way of knowing where they stand, what kind of checks and restraints they need to put on their consumption, what and where they need to be contributing their efforts and how much.
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Our current Queen and others in her family have homoeopathic doctors attending them, I don’t know how far back this goes. There is plenty on the Web about it. One has to admit she’s in good shape for 92 and Prince Philip likewise at 97. I don’t know if he subscribes to that also.
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Yes, and again looking at your original post above it seems clear to me that neither Marx nor anyone else could have rationally thought through his notion of the endgame. A quick bit of Googling reveals this from Wikipedia:
You’ve certainly hit that one on the head.
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Yes, it’s my understanding that when communists say things like, “True communism has never been tried”, it’s this withered away stage that they’re referring to.
They’ve created a wagon with square wheels, and someday, SOMEDAY, they’ll get it up to enough to speed that they can let go of it and let it coast off into the eternal sunset on the perpetual power of its own momentum. Until then, millions have to keep starving and dying trying to push these wagons in one country after another.
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And the real insidious thing is that it gives them rationale. Someone accuses communism of being totalitarian and they can retort, “Oh no, no, no. It just totalitarian AT FIRST. Once we have the real thing up and running, it’s all lollipops and free punch for everyone.” And they really genuinely believe this.
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I say all this, but I really am intrigued by the audacity of the notion itself that an arrangement like this could actually be made. It’s like I’m biting my tongue, screwing up my eyes, and putting on my best “I’m paying attention” face, and going, “Okay, tell me more then.”
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I guess wanting to believe is just part of the human condition, like various other flaws in our make-up, such as the difficulty and danger of women giving birth compared with the other animals. See my next post for example.
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Karl Marx was a wise old bird who had many blind spots, but who also understood better than anybody else of his time how a market economy made money the measure of all things.
Profit-and-loss ought to be, as Bryan says, an accounting item that provides a reality check. But it isn’t. It has become the supreme value, superseding all other values. As The Communist Manifesto said:
Constant revolutionizing 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.
Source: Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1)
His main blind spot—to get that out of the way first—was that he had absolutely nothing of value to say about how a better society should be organized.
His idea was that the workers should take over, private property would be abolished and everything would fall into place. We know that this didn’t work.
But although he had no cure for the ills of society, he was a good diagnostician.
One of his key ideas was the idea of alienation—the idea that, under capitalism, people do things that have no meaning for them, or even that go against their values, just in order to earn a living. Of course people were just as alienated in the old Soviet Union.
He did not invent the idea of class struggle. But those who came before had a very simplified idea of how things worked—as a struggle between “the few” and “the many.”
Marx described in granular detail how things worked—how small shopkeepers, for example, had different interests than owners of large manufacturing plants, but both were aligned against propertyless wage-earners.
He was also good at following the money trail in the politics of his time. He was so interesting as a political analyst that he was a regular contributor to the New York Tribune in the 1860s.
He was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln probably read his writings. It would be interesting to know what he thought of them.
Marx also understood “ideology”—how people rationalized the interests of their social class as the basic principles of society.
Upton Sinclair expressed this concept in a later generation when he said, “It is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
He agreed with Hegel that there could be such a thing as a predictive science of history. This is a big mistake, in my opinion. But he did gave good insight into the main historical event of his time, which was the power shift from the landowning aristocracy to the moneyed bourgeoisie.
He was an atheist who did not thing that religion was either true or important. That, too, is a mistake, in my opinion. But his statement that religion was “the opium of the people” is misunderstood.
Opium in his time was a commonly-used painkiller and was not feared as an addictive drug. Here is the full quote: –
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Source: Opium of the people – Wikipedia
Another misunderstood quote is that the ideal society is one that draws “from each according to his abilities” and gives “to each according to his needs.” The misunderstanding is confusing “needs” with desires.
In a family, each member contributes according to their ability and receives according to their needs. A strong young worker probably contributes more than he receives; an ailing elderly grandmother probable receives more than she contributes—but nobody complains about this.
Similarly, in a volunteer fire company, each member of the company does what they can to carry out the firefighting mission, and each receives what they need to do the job.
Now the family is united by love and the firefighters are united by a common sense of mission. How much can this be scaled up to encompass most of society? I don’t know. I’m a pretty selfish person, myself, so I’m not a good person to ask.
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Well, I don’t think that acquiring material wealth needs to be considered the supreme value in someone’s life unless they make it the supreme value. And if someone is inclined to feel that way, I don’t think that communism is going to breed that out of humanity. I also think someone should be free to feel that way if they want to, and I don’t think that capitalism is necessarily the “bad influence” on these impulses that it’s considered to be. Marx may not have invented “class struggle”, but capitalism certainly didn’t invent human greed and ambition.
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I don’t think acquiring wealth is the supreme value for most individuals, but maximizing profit is the supreme value for for-profit corporations, and, in my opinion, the rest of society—government, universities, “non-profit” organizations—are imitating the corporate model. Not everything is like this, of course.
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And you make a good point about how economics works on a family level, and sometimes even on the level of a small community. But that also goes to show that there are already unofficial, ad hoc, customs in place in society to smooth over some of the colder rough edges of the economy at large. I’m not sure that scaling them up and making them official would necessarily be a good thing, anymore than I would want to seem them scaled down and everyone reduced to the calculus of cash even at the interpersonal level. There’s something mechanistic at either extreme. These things should come from generous places of the heart, not rubber stamped forms of bureaucracy.
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