Ask Lemmy

I hate the excuse "we haven't found the right version of communism" that communists use to explain away why no communist countries have succeeded.

That's not an accurate representation of the position at all.

A communist society is a theoretical concept. You can't just become a communist society through a revolution. If you have a feudal society and then have a revolution, you now have a new leadership structure of a feudal society. If you have a capitalist society and you have a revolution, you have new leadership of a capitalist society.

When society says a country is communist, what society means is the country is run by a communist party. A communist party is an organization that aims to build communism from the current state of their society. It's never been done before.

So communists are not saying that we haven't found the right kind of communism. We're saying that communism is arrived at through empirical, iterative experimentation. And the reality is that feudal and capitalist societies also emerge through a process of empirical iterative experimentation, it's just not described that way and it's not deliberately theorized about by the leadership. Communists parties are very self conscious and self aware. They know that there is no answer to "what will communism look like?" yet. They know the job is to iteratively build towards the key goals of eliminating class distinction, eliminating the profit incentive, and eliminating privatization of wealth. How that happens is in the realm of the experimental.

One of the core properties of man is wanting more, wanting better, why not exploit that property and let people accumulate more, get better stuff, as long as it is done in a regulated manner?

This is an argument from a mystical concept of human nature. I could easily retort with the statement that one of the core properties of man is having limited capacity for things (limited stomach size, limited time, only 2 hands, only 2 eyes and one area of focus, etc).

But all of human society, including primitive communist societies, used the human drive for progress to solve social problems. It's just that in class society, wealth is arranged such that only the minority hold the wealth and power and they use that wealth and power to capture the drive for progress and channel it into maintaining their positions of power. This is obvious when you think about war and jingoism. The king is threatened by another king. He needs someone to fight the other king, but he won't do it personally. So he has to get you to fight. But that would make your life worse. So he has to convince you that the other kingdom's people are evil barbarians who want to take everything from you. Now you have to balance the risk of becoming a soldier versus the risk of losing everything by not becoming a soldier.

Human drive for progress is ever present. Under communism, the human drive for progress is taped to make society as a whole better. Before we get to communism, that will mean salaries. After communism, we're not entirely sure what that means. It probably means vouchers for additional privileges, more leisure time, etc. basically everything you want money for, you would just get that thing you want without the need for a market system of rationing.

Tax the shit out of the rich, but let them have their high score board so they can brag to eachother.

This doesn't solve the problem. The rich, with their high scoreboards, control the governments. That's how liberal democracy with private property works. The rich started the governments. It was the rich merchants that wanted liberal democracy so they could have power as well as riches. They raised militias and killed kings and then built societies that elevated the merchants to positions of power. That's done now. They aren't going to let you use the governments their class made to remove them from power. They'll allow high taxes if it'll get you to stop fighting for a generation or two, and then they'll use their power to accumulate wealth in other ways. At the end of the day, they control the majority of the planet's resources and they can starve you out if you don't like it.

My point is this, the world isn't equal, there are hot areas, there are cold areas, there are wet areas, there are dry areas, there are areas with beautiful views, areas with nothing interesting to look at outside.

Yes, that's why communism is an experimental process that each country will go through differently.

Say you build thousands of identical apartment, some will be colder than others, some will have more moisture, should an identical apartment with an amazing view be more expensive than an apartment with a view of a brick wall?

Perhaps we're thinking on different scales here. A single building can hold thousands of apartments. We're trying to solve the problem of housing for billions of people. It's impossible to build identical apartments for all of them.

But yes, your point is well taken and not something that people don't understand. There is an infinite amount of complexity in the world and a doubly infinite combination of personal preferences and aversions associated with that complexity.

People should be able to prioritize what's important to them and they should have those needs met. There are limited resources and limited resources need a mechanism of rationing.

But with apartments, let's look deeper. If you want to have a chance at getting an apartment you like, it needs to be available. The more we have of something, the easier it is to get. So what if we overbuilt housing? The problem with overbuilding housing only exists under capitalism. Apartments go unrented and landlords lose out on profits. Worse, abundance lowers prices since supply outpaces demand, so keeping a balance between supply and demand keeps profits high. Capitalist media has been dunking on China for years for over building housing, saying it's tanking their housing market and prices are falling and so many apartments go unrented.

Which would rather have? An abundance of very cheap choices so that you aren't competing with a mob for each apartment and driving the prices through the roof. Also, remember that in the USSR, even though salaries were low, housing still only cost 10% or less of monthly earnings. We're talking about completely different scales here.

My point is that even in a "true" communist system there inequallities that can't really be quantifiable, yet absolutely matter.

We know. That's why we say communism can be described as "from each according to their ability, to each according their need". We don't distinguish between needs like food and water and needs like variety and sunlight and music and leisure time and self expression. They're all needs.

Communism is not a program of everyone gets the same thing. This idea comes from one of the easier experiments to run while trying to build communism - mass produce a single thing, get economies of scale, meet the needs of the many. Food insecurity is climbing incredibly in the US, but to take the examples of Russia and China, they were experiencing famines every 4 years and 2 years, respectively, before their communist revolutions. One of the first goals was to feed all the people consistently and reliably. They ran lots of experiments - mass production, pest control, mechanization, etc. They failed a few times before getting it right. But eventually the average Soviet citizen was getting more calories than the average US citizen, and the bottom of Soviet society was significantly better off than the better of capitalist society.

The communist movement is greatly aware of the variety of needs and desires of the human species and far from denying those things, it is attempting to create a society where everyone gets their needs met, no one is homeless or impoverished, no one is driven to crime because they need to feed themselves or their family, etc .