/edu/ - Education

It isn't a really based on evidence. But there have been successful societies that have existed as democracies in so far as how communists seak. So I would say you can point to those historically.

>>7117
What societies?

>>7123
Well the two biggest examples that come to mind is the Paris Commune and The anarchist syndicalist collectivization of spain in 1936. Also you can point to Co-op's like Mon-Dragon and anything unionized basically that has a high participation turn out which is, basically, one step away from being run democratically.

I mean, it seems clear to me that it "works" and is more favorable to our interests as workers and as individuals.

>>7124
Those aren't societies, except maybe in the sense of a free association of people, i.e., a society of wine connoisseurs. I think we're on a different page of what society means. I was thinking of the totality of a stable social group in a given area which operates in a distinct and somewhat independent way relative to people in other areas.

>>7112
>What in dialectical materialism is the explanation for how communism, defined as a classless society in which workers democratically own/control the means of production, is likely or even possible.
They would not technically be "workers" at that point, just the people who do the work.
>Like, I can understand that contradictions are inherent in capitalism, but I don't really understand how the resolve themselves in communism.
Oh, that is a complicated subject. Understanding the nature of those contradictions is key. For example, the cycle of overproduction → speculation → crisis → new efficiency → back around again can only result in systemic degradation as it creates more waste and fewer avenues for high-profit rate investments. The trick is that this cycle is borne out of the very nature of commodity production, thus the only way to break it is to establish a system of production that does not engage in commodity production. To wit, production cannot be done with profits driving it.

There are other examples, of course. The falling rate of profit ensures the inevitable collapse of capitalist production, and the need to make up that production in other ways provides an impartive toward a new economic model. Old models like slavery-based production and feudalism are too inefficient and unproductive to function on a global scale, which is why capitalism was able to supplant them in the first place. The thing is, every sea change in the mode of production must be from a less productive mode to a more productive mode. Otherwise, it would simply be unable to take root against the reaction of the current ruling class. The only way to achieve a mode of production that is more productive that capitalism is is to do something new, something that is not limited by the profit motive; make no mistake–the profit motive is a limiting factor to production.

The difficulty with marxian economics is that there can be no "Basic Economics" curriculum to learn that makes ready sense of it all. It, like economics itself, is esoteric and not always intuitive. Crisis theory, which is essentially what we are discussing, can only be understood by understanding the underlying concepts–what commodities are, how they meet in the real world, how they are acted upon by social relationships between individual people, and how they in turn act upon those individuals. There is a reason that Capital is three gigantic books long and very difficult to read. They are absolutely worth reading, though. Don't take this stuff on faith. Learn the logic that underpins it.

>>7125
If you mean on a massive glboal social scale then no, but, that is true of any society that is envisioned beyond capitalism. The world now is never the world we wish to see that world become. However, arguably, these small examples can lend us some insight into the world we wish to see the current world become and can be used as a type of standard candle for the path forward. Not to mention historically increases in human freedom have lead to high standards of living.

>>7112
What you are asking for is more historical materialism.

Marx observed that once the technical material conditions were ready, class struggle tends to move societies from one mode of production to the next one. For example feudal agrarian society moved to capitalist industrial society when industrial tech came online and the bourgeoisie fought a class struggle against the aristocratic feudal rulers.

The reason for thinking that the working class inherits civilization is because the falling rate of profit will render the capitalist class an impediment to the development of the productive forces.

That means the ruling classes get overthrown when they no longer can advance the productive forces. That's a physics thing and it happens because newer and more advanced productive forces can generate more entropy. And our universe has a rule that configurations of matter that are better at generating entropy are more likely to exist, then those that generate less entropy. Life it self exists because living organisms are better at increasing entropy than dead rocks and mud. It's a statistical effect, that says once the technical basis for industrial society exists most of agrarian society gets replaced sooner than later.

Societies can also fail to move to a new mode of production and then the contradictions of the old system destroys it.
But not all societies fail and the ones that accomplish leveling up to the new mode of production will fill in the void left behind by the ones that failed.

>>7132
There was a lot more reason to be optimistic when Marx was alive and during the early 20th century. At this current point in time I would say that we are on the path to just ending in societal collapse rather than moving towards a communist society.

>>7127
Good answer, and I agree with how you spelled out the contradictions of capitalism. My question, however, stems from this:

>The thing is, every sea change in the mode of production must be from a less productive mode to a more productive mode. Otherwise, it would simply be unable to take root against the reaction of the current ruling class. The only way to achieve a mode of production that is more productive that capitalism is is to do something new, something that is not limited by the profit motive; make no mistake–the profit motive is a limiting factor to production.

I guess my question is: there seems to be two somewhat contradictory statements regarding a potential socialist/communist future. First, the next phase in the mode of production must be able to technologically/productively outcompete capitalism. Secondly, presumably an economic system not centered around profit would have to be centered around some other end. What would that end be, which when implemented is still able to outmode capitalism on a technical/physical basis, and doesn't form the basis of some hellscape in its own rite.

This is what my question specifically pertains to. What about dialectical materialism and world history since Marx's lifetime suggests the likelihood or even possiblity of the development of a a classless mode of production simply defined by empowered workers acting in free association?

marx's theory of the End of History is mapped from Hegel's Concept of the Spirit of Freedom moving to Absolute Knowing. where hegel sees geist (self-consciousness) coming into Reason (by a universal society), marx substantialises geist as Labour coming into self-possession.
it is basically a hegelian thesis as to the resolutions of Labour's contradictions, where it is held in exchange to realise its own object (alienation).
marx maps this from his myth of "primitive communism" where man is given to his species-being. basically, History ends by man's remembrance of his "natural" state of being.
pre-history = primitive communism
history = alienation of labour
post-history = (modern) communism
i disagree with this telos however, but that is still the gist of marxist anthropology.
dialectical-materialism comes into its post-marxist crisis with mao imo, where diamat becomes an ontological elaboration rather than a political strategem of bringing workers to self-consciousness. this philosophical dimension i am more interested in than the grossly political.

>>7663
But Marx doesn't really say that communism would be the end of history.

Marx makes a distinction between pre-history and history-proper. The end of class-society marks the switch-over. When class society ends that's when humanity will gain the ability of choosing it's path. That ability to choose is what makes it "proper".

If Marx had been alive in our time he would've scoffed at Fukuyama and told him that history begins when the workers start their rule and quipped How could it have ended when it hasn't even begun yet ?

I don't think Marx even believed that communism would solve all the contradictions, just the ones derived from economics.

>>7664
ive heard this claim before (that to marx, history only "begins" with the abolition of class society). can you please cite this?
engels in socialism: utopian and scientific speaks about the self-creation of Man under communism (a bit like situationist theory) and marx elsewhere describes self-knowledge having the dialectical structure of empirical science and that Absolute Knowing is in bringing Reason to political economy via central planning (where in capital vol. 1 he speaks on the abolition of surplus in the self-direction of labour to the production of use-values). thus marx's reversal of hegel is in seeing agency in the base of production rather than in the relations of abstract and conceptual society (although, class-consciousness is clearly this Thought given to praxis; in how Labour achieves self-consciousness, like hegel's geist).
hegel's Notion of The End of History is also alive in marx and engels' manifesto, where "history hitherto" has been a series of class struggles. to hegel, a thing is qualified in its Finitude (Being in-itself) by its Concept. marx giving Concept to History as a whole is his own movement toward its self-overcoming.
so i see marx and engels as thinkers of History-proper *as such*, where History must be given Concept for us to come into the self-consciousness of its Object (substance must become subject, as per hegel, where the immediate must be mediated for it to have self-determination in-itself, like marx's class-consciousness.)

Communism exists. The Communist mode of production is proven as best. See Communist China for the supreme example of Communism.

>>7665
I think it's this

<Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

It's in the preface of
<A contribution to the critique of Political Economy

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/date/index.htm
under 1859

>>7667
thanks
personally ive only read the capital trilogy, manifesto, critique of gotha program, jewish question and minor works, so dont have a whole schematic of marxism
my interpretation thus far still remains amateur and derivative, admittedly. i still pertain to my perspective though that marx is a hegelian, even if he "turns him on his head".
for example, marx sees labour-power as a commodity in the wage-labour relation as "progressive" (while being objectively brutal - in his own time) because this gives Labour its self-determination in the subjectivity of the worker, personally and collectively (by bargaining for this "natural price" in smithian terms). this means "substance is subject" as per the hegelian maxim, which is also his entire critique of political economy; as that which is mediated by the value-form (money). the economy is confined to the subjectivity of this medium of exchange.
anyway, i can ramble for hours..

>>7666
China is only communist in name.

They are capitalist

>>7676
That can't really be true when every major industry is nationalized.

>>7666
>>communist nazion
A splendid joke fiftoid, now face the swinhole.
>industry ist corporati-
BLAM

>>7666
>See Communist China for the supreme example of Communism.
China considers it self to be lower-stage socialism building towards communism. They have different words for it and they use more stages. So currently they are in the primary stage of socialism and by 2035 they want to be in the stage of moderately prosperous society they have more stages for 2050 and then 2080 and so on.


>>7676
>China is only communist in name.
No they call them selves socialist. which means not yet communist.

>>7677
>That can't really be true when every major industry is nationalized.
The communist party in china hasn't really nationalized that much, only the heights of the economy, and often it's only partially nationalized.

Anyway they kinda moved past the system of asserting direct governmental authority with the big official hammer in order to influence the direction of their economy. Companies above a certain size are required to have a Chinese communist party carder and they can influence investment decisions to a considerable degree. It's a novel approach where they went for political influence over surplus allocation.

These carders them selves are subject to what the Chinese call deliberative democracy, which means they have to seek out the approval from the people who are affected by the decisions they make. It's a little bit like the mass-line in Maoism, but a much more localized version, with considerable autonomy from the party hierarchy.

The Chinese have been decentralizing power, delegating more decision-powers downwards in the hierarchy. I think that was part of rejuvenation of society or something like that, i don't recall the actual name.

It's peculiar that it's official policy from Beijing. In all of history there has been a tendency of power-centralization, and when i say tendency i really mean an iron-rule. All systems centralized into bigger structures and socialist projects were no exception. Up until recently decentralization has never come from the center, so far it came because of pressure from below or because power-structures fail (like the fall of the roman empire)

The Chinese have obsessively analyzed the dissolution of the Soviet system and the collapse of the Soviet block that followed. My speculation is that they're hedging against that.

A philosophy does not make directly claims about history or truth. It asks how the answer would be found, and almost never is philosophy dogma or totalizing in the way you presume. "Dialectical materialism" wasn't even used in Marx's lifetime, nor was it identical with Marxism or unique to Marxism. Marx for his part described it as "my method" and mentioned his tutelage under Hegel. The explanation in Capital is not one requiring as esoteric philosophy. It is an explanation intelligible to any student of classical political economy. The point of contention wasn't whether Marx had the correct philosophy, but whether his claims described reality or anything the critics considered relevant. Marx in Capital is not suggesting any necessary cosmology where you only could use his super special cipher to know reality. You could make the same claims without "diamat" or any Hegelian baggage, or claims similar enough to come to the same conclusions about capital. But, to deal with the subject matter requires clarity of what classical political economy was really about, and that's where the confusion sets in. There are those who claim Marx's argument is that political economy was a pseudoscience, but I saw the argument not as that - because economics was never a "science" in the first place and was never presented as such except by bad economists that Marx among others ripped into. Science in the genuine sense had already established that economics is not a science, and the subject matter was entirely alien to science. I saw the real claim of Marx being that capital was not what it purported to be - that it was amoral and could not be made moral, and money itself could not be made moral. Value was not a moral consideration at all for Marx, while it was for classical political economy - that is, none of political economy makes sense unless there is some moral purpose or reason why anyone would agree to this exchange, rather than just taking stuff or extracting wealth "in kind". Adam Smith's arguments didn't pertain to the workers - in Smith's estimation, the workers were slaves and had no say whatsoever in their circumstances, and weren't "really human" in the fullest sense. If the workers were "manumitted" and made something of themselves, that's super, but workers as workers had no rights. They were chattel under the dominion of the King and the Poor Laws, and the American rebels were little better and engaged in some foolishness - foolishness which his faction and backers encouraged because the American cause was great for the Company, but in the end they were always fools to be used and abused and no more. Contempt for the Americans, most of whom were indentured servants or slaves, is an omnipresent fixture in capitalism. They despise the merchants of America, who were considered little more than jumped up gangsters into some freaky space alien cult shit, whose chief purpose in the world was killing Indians and selling opium. The Fabians emphasize the killing Indians and slavery part because they want to maximize that sort of thing, but conspicuously omit or made inadmissible the stereotype of Yankee dope dealers, since the dope came from the fucking Company.

Okay so with that out of the way, nearly everything you describe has nothing to do with socialism or commmunism as any proposition. You're describing a hyper specific unicorn as if it were a product in the supermarket of ideology, and yet this unicorn is never described as if it were something humans would actually use. This is intended and its a meme that was advanced because no one really believed in communism for a long time.

Even if you were seeking to describe this unicorn, or you were proposing those descriptors as a real situation which has nothing to do with historical communism/socialism, none of that requires a philosophical explanation of why it is natural and inevitable. For one, Marx never said "the perfect unicorn version of communism is inevitable and history will produce it with no volition whatsoever, yet the revolution will be bloody and I am the Evil Overlord Xenu". Communist parties were, like any political organ, active participants in history, and they always had programs written by the Party rather than an esoteric interpretation of unchanging dogma. So right there, philosophy and the theory don't make prophecies of that sort. Marxism was never predictive in that sense, and that's a common charge made against them. It didn't stop the stupider of them from hectoring others as if they did believe that, but most of that was the Marxist contempt for anyone they considered stupid or worthless, which is basically everyone who didn't get what this really was.

In the formation of their actual programs, and the platforms presented for the public - because this had to be handed off to actual people who had to make something functional - philosophy was far removed from the explanation. The Party theoreticians had to maintain fidelity to reality. Only when the wheels came off the bus - the 1950s and late 40s were the indicators that we were on the Evil Timeline - did the theoreticians retreat into kookville and turbocharged fads and pseudoscience, with the Secret Speech being so awful that good Soviet citizens had heart attacks after listening to such an abomination against history. It was that galling and insane.

The particular mental illness you're struggling with is anarchism, particularly Fabian-built philosophical anarchism. Let's deconstruct what you're writing. What does it mean to "democratically own the means of production?" If you think the answer is abasement to an abstract demos that will think for you, you're doing it wrong. Democratic control of the means of production is very very simple - the workers take their tools back, take the factories as theirs, take the land, take the bank. It does not entail a limited claim that requires an esoteric philosophical reading to justify it. If the question is about command and control, you're already framing it as an individual question. Collectives do not make decisions by some magic. People make decisions, whether they do so of their own accord for their own reason, or they deliberate and motions are carried jointly by agreement of some assembly. Nature does not "decide" anything. It has no concept of agency and did not need any.

The claims of communism were not about command/control and managerialism. How this is interpreted may vary, since you can establish a communist state much as it did where they basically did the same things the US did in the 20th century and saw the US as the model to emulate; or it may suggest a different technocratic norm than the one we got, which has been attempted sporadically. Communism at heart was a political question regarding the city and the commanding heights of the economy. Daily life under communism would not be inherently an inversion or violation of daily life in any relatively sane society, because the same imperatives are at work. Industry, labor, technology, science, all work as they would otherwise, because those were not directly political matters. If a politician cannot delegate this to workers, or the workers themselves took on political functions that were understood to be apart from daily and private life, they suck at politics and will be displaced by those who do get what politics is. Socialism, on the other hand, was not in the main a political proposal at all. The socialist proposal regarding the state is that the state would allow any of the social transformation to happen at all. Why the state would allow this is an open question, since socialism has nothing to say about political theory beyond perhaps judgement about the basic social units and institutions that would have any part in political life. Every politician came from a mother and father and had to grow just as any other human would, and politicians would in a sane society know that if workers are not capable of working, are not paid or are placed in onerous conditions incompatible with life, very soon there won't be any workers. A politician may embrace open democide, which is what ecologism is, and by 2000 this was so normalized that it's a wonder anyone still believes a political reform or revolution is possible. The idea that it could be different is so far removed from political thought, because all of the political ideas say the exact opposite - that all society that is not mediated by rulers is hereby abolished, "there is no such thing as society", and no argument for society-in-the-abstract can persist. For most of humanity, society is a menace to be avoided at all costs, and any potential of forming new social units only happens out of dire necessity, by whatever ad hoc arrangement are developed before the rulers come in to destroy them. There really is no alternative, at least not in the near future. Humanity's course, worldwide, is set. If there were going to be any other idea, where is it? The idea that the workers would have any control over their daily existence, let alone the means of production, has become inadmissible. You couldn't speak of democratic ownership in any meaningful sense if the idea that workers even have agency is inadmissible, and this has been glorified and exultantly shouted for over 50 years with all of the propaganda behind it. For the prior 50 years, this was merely implied, but there was enough need and want to pretend that society still existed.

I don't know how to fully cure your delusional belief that there is such a thing as society, or the ideology you don't really understand, nor do I have a "normal" to tell you what is what, and what you're supposed to believe. I have to believe that some of the things I write here got through to you, or at least began a line of inquiry. If you do, I advise you to keep that line of inquiry to yourself rather than engage with others, because the truth doesn't matter in this world. I try, because my life isn't going to be much. A proper explanation of all of the lies and how to deconstruct them would take far too long, and as a rule, any long explanation is tuned out and thought-policed, and those who protest too much are pulled aside and beaten for wanting anything to be different. That's humanity. That's the human spirit. Humans do not know anything else, and won't know anything else for a long time. But, if you begin to speak of what this has been, you're treated as if you're mad for saying what was common knowledge five years ago. You've already decided in your mind that it is impossible based on your skepticism that it is likely, and so I'm guessing your reasoning isn't destroyed, but you're stuck on the "contradictions" Hegelian horseshit. When a Hegeloid or Marxist talks like that, that is their version of saying "fuck off, retard". They have nothing but contempt for you after that, and they never change. They're dogmatic about that. German philosophy is a fuck. I'm not, though. I cringe every time I see that Germanic shit repeated, and I will say, I remain a proud racist when it comes to the German ideology.

Would you like to know more?