Official Kiwi Farms Communism Thread

[An Idle Observer]

Karl Marx's criticisms of capitalism are largely correct but in practice communism doesn't work because utopia will never be a thing.

Marx was a trust fund baby who had no idea what he was doing. In all seriousness, Marx critiquing capitalism is like writing a strongly worded letter against heroin to combat your life-ruining addiction and calling it a day after injecting some more. Even if you correctly identify heroin as doing anything in this situation, you'd be so comically wrong in your execution of solving it that nothing of value could ever be saved from it in the wake of the 5 other things you break or screw up in the process.

In particular, Marx's materialist focus just plain breaks his follow-through by fiat given human beings do not respond entirely in terms of material conditions. He calls religion the opiate of the state simply because he doesn't understand what religion even is for humanity and so calls it an opiate pretty much as a snarl word. Without the materialism, all of the other things he wants to build off of just fall apart, and it's one of the reasons Classical Marxism is a dead ideology. Without a class rise up after WWI, he was one of those doomsaying prophets a day after doomsday having not predicted doomsday, meaning you need revisions. Take your pick between Gramscian subversion, Leninism, or Sorellian co-option of tradition on the road to classical fascism, but at this point, you have ceased being classically Marxist.

 

[Meriasek]

Is there anything good about this ideology?

No other ideology kills as many communists as communism.

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

I love introducing western commutards to actual east europeans and russians.

 

[Super Mario Brothers]

Communism as in a classless, moneyless, stateless society, can technically happen but only on... really small scales. Like, primitive tribe scales. I suppose if everything was eventually automated, it could happen, but it won't happen in my lifetime, and could take thousands of years, so why bother about that?

Countries like the USSR and China industrialized very rapidly from feudal societies in a very short amount of time. The USSR also had women's rights before the west did. (Women worked instead of depending on a man.) Also built + supplied housing. The USSR also became a major power only following behind the US. Obviously these countries eventually ended up reintroducing capitalism anyway.

I can mention all of its flaws (political suppression, no free speech, material shortages, etc.) but that feels redundant.

I'm sleep deprived.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Communism as in a classless, moneyless, stateless society, can technically happen but only on... really small scales.

This is a bit of a reductionist understanding of communism, and has led to many of the common misconceptions about it. To Marx, communism is a dialectical process that grows out of capitalism.

The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.

Socialism, in one form or another, already exists in many societies. It's not necessarily stuff like cooperatives or communes. For example, in the Soviet Union, one of the things they did was open public laundromats and nurseries for children. Socialism and communism are interchangeable terms that essentially describe the process of society moving away from private ownership to public ownership. Marx believed this was already happening naturally because of capitalism needing to solve the growing problems of proletarianization (unemployment, low wages, poor working conditions, old age). Much of his writing was done at a time when many people, in the Western world, did not have things such as workplace protections, pensions, social insurance, or even the right to strike or form a union.

 

[Super Mario Brothers]

This is a bit of a reductionist understanding of communism, and has led to many of the common misconceptions about it. To Marx, communism is a dialectical process that grows out of capitalism.

The point still stands that a large scale of communism won't happen in my lifetime, so I don't worry too much about it. Anything that exists on a communist scale is too small to matter.

Socialism and communism are interchangeable terms that essentially describe the process of society moving away from private ownership to public ownership.

I wouldn't call them interchangeable. Socialism is a lot more attainable than communism is. Even if you want to go by what Marx specifically said, socialism is just a stepping stone towards communism.