Hi there, it's kinda my first post on this site, and it's strange to start from such a topic, but I would really like to discuss it with people interested in decentralized economies, for reasons that will become apparent if you read what I'll write.
First of all, I'll quote the only analytic comment I've read so far here, since it didn't seem to get the attention it deserved.
I think those who appreciate or advocate communism have given very little thought as to the practical application of this system, and think of only the promised gains; boy wouldn't it be great if everyone was even and wasn't self-interested, if everyone gave what they could and got what they needed--but these are humans we're talking about.
Everyone's looking out for themselves: it's how our ancestors made it, it's how their ancestor's made it, it's how every single chain of evolution down the line managed to make it: every altruistic being to have ever existed has perished as an individual entity, for those beings which were self-interested took more than those being which were not: the altruistic beings gave but did not get back, and the power gained by the self-interested organisms made it very easy to control the altruistic organisms.
Consider the history of communism: the idea, when it was first gaining traction, was that the communist society would be populated by the "new socialist man": this man, as described, would be the altruistic individual who, through cultural training, would be fully accepting of the gateway between capitalism and communism: socialism. In the societies in which socialism was attempted, in the pursuit of communism, this "new socialist man" never sprouted: it was the same old self-interested genes which every living being needs to thrive. The system was not designed for this manner of being, it was designed for some other non-existing creature, and as such problems arose: for example, in Soviet Russia--a failed socialist state--you were assigned by the state to perform a given job; people were not paid any more or less based on their performance, nor did they personally own any of the organizations they worked for (ironically), so wound up giving the absolute minimal effort required to get through the day. Usually this was not a job you particularly enjoyed; the state was not interested in you as an individual, you were simply a cog in the collective.
Performance levels of farms and factories plummeted; necessary parts to make things worked were of terrible quality, as the quotas being met were technically fulfilled, just not very well. Productivity plummets; all the capital gained from capitalism is drying up, and since people cannot simply go out in a market and fix what needed to be fixed--that was abolished, after all, along with money, and even if it wasn't abolished they were promised 'what they needed' anyway. Without a price system, nobody knows what's worth what anymore--this makes it impossible to care for finite resources: normally as supply dwindles and demand rises the price rises with it, a natural deterrent to overconsumption, but no such indication existed, so those resources were often spent frivolously, and that's compounded with poor worker performance.
The economy suffered tremendously; people were dropping like flies:
if they weren't dying from starvation, they were being killed by their own governments, dying in wars of desperation, and even being
genocided just because the men in power could. Needless to say, they had to go back to some form of partial free market activity to survive, and thus the Soviet Union is no more, and "communist" China is not communist, though its head political party claims to be, and a whole list of other socialist nations stopped being socialist; one would think socialism would've finally died there, but with the magic wand of public education, the lesson was lost on resulting generations who are yet ignorant of the horrors born from the abandonment of capitalism and its principles.
Whatever the methodology is to achieving communism, it's certainly not going to be met politically; politicians necessary demand more power to run a communist society, and the power difference goes entirely against the communist principle of a classless egalitarian society. The state isn't going to simply melt away, after all; once power is consolidated (i.e. monopolized) under one entity, why would they ever give it up? Again, the altruist loses, and the self-interested thrive. Just look at the political classes of North Korea and Venezuela: they thrive while their slaves perish.
But I'll be frank: even if communism were achievable by some other means--say, you create the "new socialist man" in a lab tube who is genetically programmed to act altruistically--they would be demolished by the self-interested people, just like the altruist's ancestors were before their lineage even got started. Altruists will always be taken advantage of, and from an evolutionary standpoint, it's a quality of weakness. A strong society is one which is full of self-interested individualists, as there is mutual respect between these "masters": a group of self-interested people create rules to help themselves--and thereby everyone else in the process. For example, if everyone agrees to the respect of each person's private property, everyone has the incentive to improve their own lives, to keep what they have rightfully earned, which vastly improves their productivity over the notion that their earnings will be seized "for the greater good." There is no stronger motivator for the base human brain than the notion that it will be overall improved.
Given this, why do people turn to communism in the first place? It is the exact same motivator: the individual believes they will gain from the promises made by communism; perhaps they envy the rich, and wish to partake in some of their wealth, their "deserved" slice of the pie--such payment will be enough motivation to make the communist system work, they imagine before ever having been through it. The individual, if short-sighted and ignorant enough, will believe there is everything to gain and nothing to lose, but the individual who is well-informed and who thinks far enough into the future will realize that there is nothing to gain and everything to lose.
As a post-script: there are many ideas on how to democratically implement a public-ownership system. The only ones I've seen which stood a chance at working out were those limited in scope to a single community (max 300-400 people.) A small, homogeneous community may very well perform better in a system of local public ownership, but this is very far from the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of a global communist system, which is usually what people refer to when talking about some kind of nationally-implemented socialist system (a stepping stone to the global communism)...one could say such individuals were...national socialists...what was the nickname for national socialists again? Well it seems they don't like the term Nazi and prefer to call themselves "democratic socialists" instead these days, but the ideas are all the same: tried and tired and beaten but still hanging on. Perhaps the Internet will help us put the idea to death once and for all.
Now, what we are doing here, is not advocating for past real governments who at some point clamed themselves to be socialist, we're not talking history here, but an ideology, witch, in Marx 's own terms, means an ''ideological struture'' in the people (the ''new man'', witch is at the end the same concept as Nietzsche) and an ''organic infrastructure'', witch is not only the economical distribution of the wealth, but the way we decide to handle production and even resources from a higher strandpoint.
Now, if you really want to talk about ''Communism'', you need to look at the context. Firstly, of a 19th century philosopher, who wrote about the emergent working class that was being grossly exploited, and divide his philosophical views from his political solution.
Than, you need to look at the situation of the so-called ''communist countries'' at the start of the 20th century. Young bourgeois in Russia direct the masses with an ideology that talks about them. In China it even really came from the masses themselves. They readapted what they believed communism to be and basically said ''this is what we need, these are the resources we have, let's sync all the efforts to reach the objective'', hence the 5 year plan. And it actually worked pretty well, if you consider that they managed to give something to eat to billions (literally, in China) of people, despite having 2 world wars and a couple of civil ones inbetween in their early stages, at the cost of killing millions of workers in the process. Then the situation in Russia escalated and it just became a dictatorship being at war with the US (not at all communist).
China is different. As a Chinese guy once explained to me, Liu Shaoqi second president of the Republic of China, said at the start of the '60s ''in order to make everyone rich, we need to make some people rich first, so that they can make others rich''. So, capitalism. You may know about the great migration of ''workers'' from the farmland to the cities that happens in China every year, about 300 million people, something that wouldn't have happened without a collective extreme cooperation, and a strong dictatorship to push people trough it. But I do believe they are still planning, someday, somehow, on redistributing that wealth.
After all, both countries took a large amount of dispersed people across a large country and made them ''productive'' in the most capitalistic way you can imagine, passing from a situation where both economy (mostly farmers in a poor land) and politics (aged absolute monarchies) were stagnating, filled the gap of a century of industrialization in 20 years or so, and they're now both competing supereconomies (again, in a purely capitalistic sense).
Cuba is its own little thing instead, it went from 40 years of US guaranteed dictatorship to 70 years of complete embargo. They do with what they have, but they have the highest alphabetization rate in the world.
On the matter of ''culturally imprinting people to be altruistic'', of course all communist regimes had their way of imposing the ''ideology'' that they thought was the most profitable in terms of PRODUCTION (Gulags, Chinese Cultural revolution). What they were dealing with, in the wrong way of course, was the problem of heavily changing either the infrastructure or the common ideology without having an appropriate counterweight in both.
I strongly believe that, if a more equally structured economy (in the broadest sense of the world possible) was enstablished, and people started living in there as a clean slate (in animal psychology, you would say, from the second generation of people who were born and only lived in that condition) they would be really quick to adapt, but, considering it from a politically pragmatic standpoint, you can phrase this point as ''should you change the structure to change the people or should you change the people to change the structure''?
Some of the modern implementations of communist-like ideas rely on smaller communities, just because it's easier to 1. group up people that believe the same as you do and 2. to create a new system with its own rules, witch gives you infinite possibilities (remember America?).
I for one think that a strong changement should come from the people, and now the world is dynamic enough for good ideas to be caught up and developed at massive scales, we should consider opening our views.
Communism is not about making the country a big industry so that we are all the most productive, and it does not need to negate individualism.
There is a pyramid in biology, witch I studied but I've never been able to recall the name of to find it again. It puts every animal species into orders of ''altruism'', and most importantly, of the
relational sphere they altruistically behave to. It can go from the individual, to mother-child (even excluding the father), to a small group of competing individuals in a group or different groups cooperating against each other, or there are cases in witch every exemplar of that species will cooperate with everyone else. Some even with other species.
The point is, for me, to abstract this concept to a point in witch you don't need to have a political struggle between classes and ideologies to redistribute wealth arbitrarily, but rather a functioning ecosystem in witch people consider their options (within complete freedom of choice, greater of the one you have with capitalism) working to enrich a more and more large community of people (you < your family < your relatives < your sphere of friends < your district < your city < your region etc...). And, from a political point of view, we should just try to enable this by creating a fair but meritocratic system in witch you do get your bigger part if you're better, but none is deprived of their ''margin'', to put it in trader words.
But this is all history, (and some psychology with it).
What we should talk about is the very IDEA of the communist/socialist way of thinking, and propose implementations instead of judging past ones.
In particular, I'd like to make you think about ''decentralized communism'', a term that I just invented myself.
In my opinion, the only reason politics need to exist is to mediate between economy and society. If you want to think about it purely economically, it's to keep real and economical value close. But, to take it further, it's about making sure everyone, even the poorest people, have what they need to survive.
I won't be talking about the ethics behind this a lot, but just think of this: how free is someone who needs to work at Mc Donalds to pay his rent, and (at least if he doesn't find a way to go around the system), live to work? Think about how many people's lives are controlled by money, the same thing you trade everyday to grow more and then go on to do your own thing.
Now, I don't believe that the solution can come solely from a monetary redistribution. What we need is a system that produces and provides basic products automatically, and sets the ''standard'' for people to grow on.
The basic problem with communist governments is that they were forcefully centralized. In order to coordinate the country, they needed to have it in their hands. Now the situation is different. Think, as an example, at how automation could be implemented stately to reduce wealth gap.
The same jobs I was referring before, the Mc Donalds cashier, the mechanical worker, could now be fully automatized. I always here the complain ''don't you think a manual job is respectable as anyone else?'', but I personally think working a job that a machine could do is even more demeaning.
The reason we can't implement automation right now is because it would take over those same jobs, creating an incredible social crisis in the present situation. These jobs need to exist only for someone to do them and get paid just what they need to survive. China is going around this, funding billions into automation, but they're just cheating by putting all of that production into export, with no real gain for the individual.
And this is where it gets interesting, and where I would like an opinion out of you, to the point in which if this post gets ignored I will be creating a new topic about it.What I think we should be looking at is a decentralized resource based economy, in which we have a definite supply of primal resources, a ''blockchain'' of ways to turn them into products, and an expected trend of REAL demand of the product themselves. I'm now looking into ways to structure a monetary economy around (and beyond) the original ideological standpoint of ''creating an infrastructure that provides people their basic needs'', which is something you can only do industrially.
Talking it from a cryptocurrency perspective (since I'm also looking for real means to achive this in a restricted setting), I would consider making a whole submarket of coins, each one with their own tie with a real product, their own trendlines and economical structures. This way, you could for example arbitrage the price of food to stay low, while maintaining the robotical field as a competitive investing market. What you would sell, at this point, wouldn't be the product itself, as much as the idea, the blueprint of real product you are trying to ''replicate on the blockchain''. The producing tools are automatized and free for everyone on the blockchain to use (with limits due to facts real resources are finite), like a big net of 3D printers witch get inputs from the blockchain itself.
I will not start talking now about the distribution systems, but I think you can see how ''communism'', as far as people who define themselves as communist right now, can be far more actual than the 18th century revolutionary ideology you're referring to.
Please lead the argument over to the future instead of the past.
As a friend of mine once told me, ''Capitalism is the best way to thrive in scarcity, communism is the best way to handle a wealthy nation''.
