Hacker News Reader

Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

You're conflating communism and authoritarianism. Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It's just that in the 20th century those who were murderous autocrats used Communism to convince their (often poor) countrymen to give them power and they killed people in service of that power.

Communist and Socialist governments were a popular vehicle for getting poor people to join an uprising in the 20th century and despots took advantage of that.

Maybe that's a distinction without a difference given that we've never really seen a non-authoritarian communist government. But communism has only been around for a century, so it's not out of the realm of reason that there'll be a Communist government that isn't brutal at some point. We certainly have somewhat Socialist governments that treat their people well right now.

View on HN

> Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people.

Elimination of exploiting classes and abolition of family are two things that certainly require massacring people. If you see any other realistic means of achieving these two points of Communist Manifesto, am all ears.

From the Communist Manifesto:

>The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

If one were dead-set on following he original principles of communism, which I don’t necessarily recommend, as the world has changed a bit since they were published and new ideas have sprung up since then, I think the best method would be as follows:

1. Support workers’ rights without settting up separate political entities or telling people what to do.

2. Make and support great free software so that the most valuable things in the world are free from private control.

But that's not communism.

Socialism is about workers rights, sure. Communism is about abolition of property, the proprietor class and abolition of family (since it's a wealth accumulation instrument).

> The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

Notice how it is very specific about "working-class". It's not coincidental.

Of course I’m not promoting orthodox Marxism here, but it was generally his view that capitalism’s purpose was to catalyze the development of the means of production in preparation for socialism. If that’s the case, we can argue about when they are sufficiently developed to warrant a socialist revolution, but I could argue that conditions are not yet right for it and we first have to reach the point where resources are much more available than they are today. At some point in the future, when we have a healthy asteroid mining industry, fully automated industry, and human genetic engineering, social classes and traditional families will likely no longer be as relevant, so let’s try to reach for that before we implement full communism.

Marx' view was that communism is the next stage of social-historical development after capitalism and as such is unavoidable due to build up of internal contradictions in the latter. He did envision the transition to be revolutionary and violent, however, and ensuring class struggle wasn't meant to be bloodless.

Socialism was viewed by communists as "fake news" if you will, a fad to distract oppressed working class from building a communist society. FWIW I personally don't find socialism objectionable across much of the continuum of bilateral social compromise it represents. It also seem to have defused most of the tension present in late 1800s-early 1900s.

My reply above was to the common "No True Scotsman" retort to criticisms of Communism. We have at least two societies that did sincere attempts at following tenets of Manifesto, i.e. including both elimination of proprietors and family: early Bolshevik Russia and Khmer Rouge. Internet Communists find the appalling outcome hard to advocate and instead focus on criticising the implementation.

Those are perspectives grounded in history, but I think you’d have to qualify socialism in that case as “market socialism” or “democratic socialism” as it’s understood today.

Marx did lay out socialism as the next stage to follow capitalism but didn’t provide detail about how it was to work, which led to the various types of socialism we have today. Still, many argue that these are all essentially vanguard movements for the communist ideals you laid out: the abolition of private property, social classes, and even the family. This is still the source of a lot of skepticism about the effects of these types of systems. Even without the revolutionary ideology, socialism as it’s implemented today seems to be breaking dependence on traditional social structures.

It's been a while since my Marxism-Leninism class so caveat emptor, but I believe the role of socialism was limited. There supposed to be transitional phase from coercive proletarian state to truly classless society aided by "socialist mode of production", but not much after that.

The socialist and social-democratic (as you correctly put it) movements promoted socialism as end-game within bourgeois/capitalist social framework and were viewed as adversarial.

And clearly there are ongoing changes in social fabric but it's hard to attribute them to socialist movements alone more than to e.g. technological, agricultural or medical advances.

Socialism and communism are often used interchangeably, but communism almost always refers to the end state, while socialism tends to encompass both the transition and the end state. It’s a little hazy even to Marxists. This might help clear it up:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch06.h...

Anyway, the type of socialism you’re referring to is associated with the cooperative movement which led to things like mutual insurance and credit unions. I fully support these types of systems in which people with common interests and a common communitry create structures to support themselves. I think this is the best way to create structures with community-based values that compete with for-profit industries which don’t always represent their customers.

Let's not forget Mao, he sure killed quite a few people as well.

Sure. Am just not certain he ever tried abolition of family, having only a cursory knowledge of Maoism. Given that he was disciple of Stalin (who assumed power long after USSR ceded on these attempts), suspected he did not.

> Elimination of exploiting classes and abolition of family are two things that certainly require massacring people. If you see any other realistic means of achieving these two points of Communist Manifesto, am all ears.

I mean if you want to strictly adhere to the Communist Manifesto then you're probably going to end up with strike and violence in some form. That still doesn't mean you have to massacre people to evenly distribute property and wealth. That could be done through a judicial system if a government was so inclined. It just so happens that autocrats prefer massacring people. That has been true of capitalist dictatorships as well as communist ones. Communist dictatorships killed far more people to be sure.

If you want to look at Communism as a very strict system that can only exist in the way that Marx conceived then yeah you'll probably end up with bloodshed. But every sort of political system has a number of different interpretations and modes of implementation. The Communist governments we've seen thus far have taken a few different forms so it's entirely possible that a more benevolent form of Communist government will take root somewhere. I just don't think mass killings is a key component of Communism as a system. Mass killings were how Communist autocrats seized power and maintained power.

> That still doesn't mean you have to massacre people to evenly distribute property and wealth.

The point of Communism isn't to evenly distribute property and wealth. It's to eliminate property ownership completely, and prevent further accumulation of wealth by individuals. The commune part of Communism.

> I just don't think mass killings is a key component of Communism as a system.

It's not an end goal, but an unavoidable instrument if you want to rob people of their property or destroy their families. Historically, there was not much voluntary cooperation.

> The point of Communism isn't to evenly distribute property and wealth. It's to eliminate property ownership completely

No, just non-public ownership of the means of production (at least in Marxism and those forms of Communism whose approach on this point follows Marxism, which is not all of Communism); this is a frequent point of confusion in criticism of Communism because Communist literature and theory uses a different definition of “private property” than non-Communists are used to, which both leads to both accidental confusion of people not familiar with this fact, and intentional misrepresentation by dishonest critics who are fully familiar with the difference but expect that their audience is not.

I need some really substantial Marx citation on that, because in the Communist Manifesto, chapter II, he says:

> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Marxist view of property is that as a manifestation of capital, which can be converted between freely. If you allow private property, you allow its inevitable emergent concentration (e.g. via bourgeois family), and hence amassing of capital and means to exploit other people.

Private property and personal property are distinct in socialist and communist thought.

I would still insist on a Marx quote where he draws the distinction. Not a late 20th century interpretation with benefit of hindsight.

The distinction between property generally and bourgeois property, and the statement that Communism aims for the elimination of the latter and not the former is in the paragraph of the Communist Manifesto immediately preceding the one your quote is drawn from.

“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.”

Again, “private property” in Communist theory is narrower than the usual capitalist understanding; particularly, neither consumer goods nor money insofar as it cannot be exchanged for a proprietary interest in the means of production in a society which has progressed to the socialism stage as envisioned by Communism are necessarily included in “private property”. (And, even personally held means of production that cannot be converted to bourgeois property because of controls on engaging wage labor are frequently not sought to be banned in practice—which may be contrary to Marx’s statement on private property, but is consistent with the focus on borgeois property which is explicitly it's underlying motivation.)

>Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people.

It requires either jailing or massacring people who own any property and don't want to give it up, and any people who choose to exchange goods and services with each other.

The difference between jailing people and massacring people is HUGE though.

I do think it's very difficult to get around the problem of people not wanting to give up private property when a society shifts into Communism. But in the future when/if automation can provide a very high standard of living with far less labor inputs, maybe it will become something viable in some form without massive heavy-handed coercion.

I think varying forms of somewhat Socialist democracies will probably win out in the next century or so, but it's very hard to predict given that some potential advances in technology could dramatically reshape economies and governments.

Communism isn't real Communism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com