Friday, November 27, 2009

Communism - theory and practice

Source: Wikipedia

Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general.

Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only becoming possible only after a socialist stage develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the various communist states which had government ownership of all the means of production and centrally planned economies. Communist regimes have historically been authoritarian, repressive, and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power.

As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism; a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[6] Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism.

Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class (proletariat), who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class (bourgeoisie), to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions. The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarcho-communism) also exist.

Karl Marx never provided a detailed description as to how communism would function as an economic system, but it is understood that a communist economy would consist of common ownership of the means of production, culminating in the negation of the concept of private ownership of capital, which referred to the means of production in Marxian terminology.

2 comments:

World Holiday Tours said...

It is an insightful article!

Many Thanks, Mr Tan !

Steve Wu said...

Communism is mostly and precisely the mechanism we find operating in families, where working parents support economically non-productive children and sometimes grandparents. Scaling it up to a village of several hundred, e.g. an Amish community, may still be feasible. However, communism does NOT work, at least in any society of significant size.

Why? Communism requires altruism in a pervasive and structured manner; it goes against human nature. Stalinism and Maoism have amply demonstrated that such ideologies discourage individual motivation and are general impediment to progress, economic or otherwise.

This is not to say that capitalism is the only alternative. We have witnessed how capitalism WITHOUT sufficient regulation has failed spectacularly (there are other ills). And it will happen again, simply because governments have failed to learn the basic lessons. We should see a major backlash to the latest round of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

But it is not really a dichotomy; the acceptable solution is likely to be somewhere in between. Think about Bill Gates and what he is trying to do with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a positive example. People tend to focus narrowly whenever resources appear limited and hence they perceive the need for politicking.

Indeed, astronomers will classify our civilization as a sub-Type I population, one which is not yet able to utilize properly the resources of a single planet. We shall look forward to the day (it's too late for us, maybe for our children, if not for our children's children) that we as a species graduate to Type I, then to Type II (complete and proper utilization of our sun and the other planets in the solar system) and onward to Type III (complete utilization of our galaxy).

In this light, the present conflicting issues are really insignificant and indeed meaningless.

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