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Comment by sebastianconcpt | Hacker News Reader

Comrades don't need to indoctinate when is way easier for them to just censor by making illegal everything they don't like. Didn't Maduro in Venezuela told its minions a month ago to prosecute twitter users who expressed dissent? He even inspired them to put them 30 years in jail. What we are seeing here is the instantiation of that strategy in internet messages. That doesn't mean that it is not their normal for every other aspect in society. Remember this the next time that The Economist, Time magazine or New York Times tries to talk about "the wonders" of communism.

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The Communist Party does not practice communism - it never has. They are no more communists than the DPRK is democratic. Communism was co-opted very early on and became just another form of authoritarianism.

Yes, this can't be stressed or repeated enough!

The Soviet Communist Party was/is rather like Scientology. At the noob level, in the Pioneers (a lot like US Boy Scouts) it was all about ideals/ideology and honor. At some point, you realized that members got nice perks. More money. Access to stores that carried better food and stuff. And eventually, as you got into higher-level leadership, you started to get that it was all bullshit.

did you ever stop to wonder why every communist state ends up the same? is it possible they misunderstand human motivations and psychology and will always devolve to authoritarianism?

>did you ever stop to wonder why every communist state ends up the same?

Communists have. Anarchists have. I know you're using the question rhetorically, it deserves an answer. Some say that it lies in praxis - the method in which lower-stage Communism is established; some say that it is because of Lenin's praxis, that is, Marxism-Leninism, not Marxism or Communism in general; some say that it is because the state must immediately cease during revolution (this is the position of the anarchists); some say that it is because of poorly maintained democratic models and incorrect transfers of power; some say that it is because of the action of counter-revolutionaries within the party.

It could also be what you said. But I do not think it is nearly as simple as you are making it; arguments have been advanced for the reasons I have mentioned. Where are yours?

I've come to believe that all political systems at greater than community scale end up as kleptocracies. Because power corrupts. And because people are readily manipulated. Especially when so much data is available, and propaganda can be individually targeted.

I used to think that things would improve after the singularity. But Hannu Rajaniemi's novels have disabused me of those fantasies. It could well get worse. The masses become slave minds. Subprograms, basically.

So it goes.

Most systems ended up that way, communist or not. It's more of a human thing really.

We have yet to try communist.

Actually we even have yet to try democracy.

All we manage to do now is a decent amount of freedom, comfort and peace for a lot of people in the same place. It is an achievement, but nowhere close to the terms we like to label our systems with.

It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature. Attempts to force human nature to conform to the ideals of utopians in power leads to tyranny and misery. We should bear this experience in mind when looking at our own utopian projects. It's easy to mock China's defiance of human nature, but it's much harder to look in the mirror ask whether we've gone too far in our own pursuits of "justice".

>It's because utopian projects are at odds with human nature

This asks the question - what isn't at odds with human nature? Why do you think that utopian projects are necessarily at odds with human nature? Marx and Engels were sociologists, and in fact many modern sociologists are Marxists too. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's some indication that the "human nature" argument needs looking into.

And it has been looked into. Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School, wrote a book called Escape From Freedom in which he details the investigation of the human condition and attempts to identify what human nature is and to what extent it is malleable. The idea that "human nature" is suited to our current mode of production is as he notes a little fallacy stretching back to Freud's time.

The nature of humans is at least in part influenced by their environment. The mode of production we currently see (capitalism) is part of our environment. Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances? Perhaps Marx himself would agree with both you and I here:

"The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." — Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach, III"

To "human nature" I say firmly: human society.

The Frankfurt School is fundamentally post-modernist in its approach, and I reject its ideas that the truth has more to do with domination and less to do with objective reality.

Ultimately, human nature derives from evolutionary biology, which in turn comes from fundamental aspects of game theory. That's why, if we contact aliens, I don't think they'll be as alien as some imagine: their society will be driven by the same fundamental generic imperatives that constrain our own and should be recognizable. We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.

> Are not changed men the product of changed circumstances?

And changed circumstances also arise from changed men, all the way back to homo erectus. Human nature is mutable: genes and culture co-evolve, but with time lags far longer than a few generations that utopian social engineers imagine. Human nature does change over long time scales, but for our purposes, it's immutable.

Might some alternative organization of society do a better job matching our immutable-on-short-time-scales human nature to our technological environment? Sure: it's conceivable. But there's no reason to suppose that the particular forms of societal reorganization that utopians advocate fall into this category.

Historical evidence, on the contrary, suggests that collectivist societies are actually further from the optimum than our present structure, which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice. It's a unique kind of hubris to imagine that you can do better than the distributed choices of billions over centuries.

You're right: sociologists have "looked into" societal reorganization. So have biologists. When we listen to the biologists, we get elegant theories that make sense of both our observations and our failures to remake societies for the better. When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.

> To "human nature" I say firmly: human society.

We are not blank slates.

>We're primates, not pure energy beings that we can reprogram at will.

Nobody doubts this; my point is that our current mode of production has a very strong effect on how we go about our daily lives and the attitudes that it influences; we have overcome "human nature" in many circumstances, but that's irrelevant because it's clear that the way people behave is to do with how they are raised, what kind of attitudes are imbued in them; for Marx labour is not merely something that people do, but it's something that we do which makes us human; thus the changed characterstic of labour, which comes in through the base of society influences the superstructure. I don't know why you seem to be clinging so much to the idea that human nature is as we see it now; Fromm notes for example that "human nature" has changed, such as the arising of the general desire for fame that has only been seen since the 14th century. Yet many would say this is human nature. Do you not think that historical analysis is important here? Socioligists have more of a place to describe exactly what human nature is rather than biologists and the empiricists whose only data is restricted to what they can see here and now. This is too narrow.

>collectivist societies

Communism is the epitome of individualism, the free association of people. All society hitherto is collectivist by definition, man is not an island, he is formed and forms everything around him in the effort to make it non-alienated.

>which we arrived at through millennia of trial-and-error and free choice.

No. Capitalism is no more a natural phenomenon than the Russian revolution's spurred State socialism was. Look at the enclosure in Western Europe and the laws which led up to it, the functioning of the State and how its function has changed. Your idea that we are simply in a natural point which has not been forced in any way, that capitalism is the highest form of development, ignores that history is not linear, and that systems win because people push them. Capitalism comes in to the world 'soaked in blood' as Marx puts it.

>When we listen to the sociologists, we get the holodomor.

Analysis of our society does not bad economic planning and/or genocidal killing make. When we listen to sociologists we also get revolutionary Catalonia and universal health care in the civilised countries.

Because communism rests on abolishing property. Practically, you can't abolish ownership without a de-facto authoritarian police state. That follows naturally from the idea of "seizing the means of production" - you can't do that if the capitalist next door pays more money than your cooperatively owned factory where nobody really owns anything, because people will just choose to sell their labour to the highest bidder. So the only option is to make owning things illegal.

In the USSR this is exactly how things worked - you absolutely could not own .. stuff. I mean, you could buy shoes and those were your own shoes, but you couldn't buy, say, a factory. You couldn't buy land to build a factory. Heck, you couldn't buy land, period. You could not choose to live off the land, because all the land belongs to everyone^Wthe state. You worked where you were told (based on education), when you were told, the salary for your position was set in stone, and the fruits of your labour were divided fairly - half to the top members of the party, half again to the middle managers, half again to good friends, and the rest to all the other members of the party (everyone is a member of the party, not being a member of the party is illegal).

This form of government can work and if you remove the corruption element and actually manage it intelligently, it can work incredibly well, and I'll bet you a million dollars there are plenty of people who will love a form of government that removes all choice from their lives.

That said, the form of government, that is probably most close to what Marx envisioned, is maybe direct democracy, with corporations that don't have CEOs, but where decisions are taken again via direct voting (N.B. I might be talking out of my ass here). Those kinds of corporations do exist, but the practice hasn't caught on widely.

When you boil it down, we don't want people to be serfs. The ideal is that everyone captures the full value of their labour, without trampling over the rights of others, and that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy a high standard of living. Getting there requires a really careful balancing act, where you give the people in government just the right amount of power, so that factory owners &c. can't oppress their workers, while at the same time it's not so much as to swing back to an authoritarian system with monarchs and serfs. Currently we call this "democracy" and the economic system "capitalism", but I would like people to not think in magical words and focus on the actual essence of problems and solutions.

I think that a fundamental aspect of that we are yet as individuals within our societies to understand the implications of Nash equilibria (and other significant economic theories).

In any functional communistic society I think that it would need to be taught from a young age in order to provide the populace with a near inate understanding of just how damaging selfish individual motivations can be (when applied on a global scale).

Because so far every communist state has been created by violent revolutionaries side stepping the democratic process. The type of people who join a party that wants to shove the beliefs of 10% down the throats of the 90% are inherently authoritarian. Its no wonder they never become real democracies once they have total power.

I believe is has to do with the competitive winner takes all economic system that these governments evolve within. It breeds distrust, which leads to authoritarianism.

I'm not sure this argument works -- many democratic states (including the US) were also created by violent revolutionaries.

The american colonies were not democratic, they needed a violent revolution to create a democracy. There was no peaceful mechanism for them to take power.

Russia and China were already democracies before the authoritarian parties took over. They could have peacefully taken control in elections if they were able to convince the voters. But instead they disbanded the legislatures and stopped having elections.

"Russia and China were already democracies before the authoritarian parties took over."

Russia was not[0]. One of the key reasons that laid foundations for revolution there was wide discontent of nobles and their arrogance towards common people.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarist_autocracy

The people overthrew the Tsar and had one free election:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly_e...

The authoritarians (bolsheviks) didn't like the results (thought the people weren't conscious enough yet to be trusted to be democratic) and disbanded the democratic assembly. Instead they used their own assembly made of up representatives indirectly elected via small local groups where they controlled the voting by force. Which caused a civil war in which the authoritarians won.

The authoritarians were just more organized and better at violence.

An interesting history fact I didn't know -- thank you. But I doubt one election, which results were immediately negated anyway, is enough to call Russia "a democracy". It looks like it was just a (failed) attempt of bolsheviks to get an international legitimacy.

I mean, it doesn't exactly help that the US happily destabilizes any budding, non-capitalist state and installs a puppet of their own...

Actually, I believe that all states end up the same :(

Correct, a bandits cult with good marketing/gamification (ideology).

The land distribution and collectivisation I think we're communistic - you're right it's very early on.

I think the Khmer Rouge were communistic too - everyone became a farmer. The city people can't farm properly and died.

That said, there are modern Communist projects which rely not at all on agrarian population; they believe that education should be tailored to fit the current mode of production; for a view on this, you may be interested in Paul W. Cockshott's Towards a New Socialism in which he elaborates what a society might look like under lower-stage Communism and what methods can be used to get there, and how an economy might be organised.

Communism is nothing about farming or peasantry - this was largely a Leninist invention to apply to the feudal society of pre-revolutionary Russia, and strengthened by Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese revolution. Marx, to my knowledge, had no support for the idea, nor did his contemporaries or predecessors.

And of course it makes sense in context. ('It' being changing an agrarian capitalist society to an agrarian communist society - clearly the natural progression.)

No true Scotsman?

No, NTS applies to cases in which an additional qualifier is added to an object after a claim made by someone in order to disqualify that object from being a Scotsman. In this case, it is not the case - Communists of many stripes, even the some who follow Marxism-Leninism have been critical of the CPC and DPRK. Even the Maoists themselves disavow Chinese Communism after Deng's reforms. Left-communists have always been critical even during the Soviet Union's time. Socialist George Orwell was critical of the Soviet regime. Anarcho-Communist Kropotkin was critical of the Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks were critical of the Bolsheviks, etc. The list goes on.

In short, a great many Communists have not supported the Soviet CP nor the Chinese state, from their inception all the way to now. I've yet to see any evidence of an NTS fallacy.

Since when has The Economist ever been pro-communist? They don't even like Piketty.

>Remember this the next time that The Economist, Time magazine or New York Times tries to talk about "the wonders" of communism.

Could it be that, if they talk in favour of it, they have a different idea of Communism to you? Modern Communist academics do, we must investigate the ontology of Communism; a good read on this is from Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. Most modern academic Communists believe that we must search for what happened, how to prevent it and how to move past it, to say nothing of the various splinters and brothers in the Communist family tree - anarchism, Communailsm, democratic Socialism, etc.

If you do reading on Communist literature since about 1950 you'll see they have occupied themselves with this investigation, the very one you are accusing them of ignoring.

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