Well, I never thought I'd see the day libcom was posted up on here. I spend a bit of time on their forums about 10 years ago - used to be a bit of a bearpit, don't know what it's like now.
The archive is interesting, though. A lot of material from outside what you'd strictly call libertarian communism, but just niche even within the already niche worlds of anarchist/Marxist/etc theory.
(Thought I'd better post something before it gets flagged to the bottom of the ocean.)
For a great and concise introduction to Libertarian Socialism here is a classic Noam Chomsky lecture from 1979 called The Government of the Future, in which he gives a justification for Libertarian Socialism, or Anarchism, as the natural and correct form of government for advanced industrial society from the classical liberal ideals of the enlightenment. He also compares the competing economic and social ideologies, laissez-faires capitalism, state capitalism and state socialism.
I have been reading in the press about how the NSA, the CIA, the FBI etc. want an encryption backdoor in everything Americans use, so we can be spied on at will. I don't see why this isn't totalitarian and somehow anarchism is. Anarchism means no state, whereas totalitarianism means total state control, yet you're saying no state control means more state control. It makes no sense.
> "Those of us with nothing to sell but our labour power"
This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match.
So, if the value (benefit? effectiveness?) of our work is measured by our ability to be creative, how does one reconcile that with pure labour valuation, which is evocative of the standard-dollars-for-hours exchange?
I'd be interested to hear from any self-professed communists about this.
Not a communist, but having ideas isn’t labor, execution of ideas is.
In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier.
The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).
I'd argue, in this regard, there is nothing qualitatively different about being an IT worker compared to any other occupation or any other time under capitalism. Marx never considered labour power to be a purely physical act. Otherwise technology alone would be a source of value, too. Of course, we are the only source of value because of our innate creativity, our ideas; our hands or interaction with others, merely sets it in motion.
The qualitative difference is that today it is trivial for a "knowledge worker" (which includes a software developer) to control his or her own means of production (basically a laptop and an internet connection).
In Marx' time, the means of production was a factory or large areas of arable land, and those weren't, and generally still aren't, possible for individual workers to own. This situation gave the owners of those means (capitalists) undue negotiating power over the workers -- hence collective ownership of the means of production by the owners.
In the first paragraph, I'm purposefully steering clear of the word "own" since there are grey areas, what with binary driver blobs on the computer, and especially the fact that you never meaningfully "own" your internet connection and many of the services you rely on. Yet I would argue that this is a very (quantitatively) different situation from the worker/capitalist class struggle of Marx' time.
Now you've basically made people wary to respond to you in fear of being labeled commies ;)
HN is supposed to be a forum for entrepreneurs but many of the visitors here are hired workers doing stuff for BigCos and that means trading our ability to close tickets for money. As a junior engineer you are told: "here is this nagging bug, go fix it", and as you become a senior you may hear something more glorious like: "ok we are going to expand to this new market so our system needs to scale tenfold. go figure how to do it" and reap some substantial material benefits along the way but it's really the same thing. Sure the whole process requires creativity and novel ideas in the small but nobody cares about your ideas in the large. I guess much of the sympathy for the workers' ideals of old comes from growing appreciation that we are in fact the lever - wielding great power but unable to do something meaningful with it.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher.
I considered myself a communist when I was younger, and would say I'm politically agnostic now. I don't think you can reconcile it with a pure labor valuation, you have to reject it. Tech people see crazy amounts of money concentrated into the hands of a small number of organizations, and at the same time pretty horrible poverty in the global south. It seems natural to connect the two, tech sweatshops producing the devices software we write runs on, and see global redistribution of wealth as a healthy productive way to even those things out and technology as the means to do so. With that being said, I think drawing on failed Marxist experiments is not the way to get people to jump on board.
> This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives. It really doesn't matter if the designer is one person or a committee of the proletariat. That's an NP-ridiculous problem.
In the fact of that, I'd rather individuals make decisions about their own lives.
Haha, I've often had that thought myself. Add to the above the fact that human behavior is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any software system ever designed.
I'm not sure to what extent they are adhering to the "Labour Theory of Value", but 'labour power' is a relatively esoteric concept from Marxist economics. In Marxists economics, labour value is the full price of goods produced with that labour and labour power is the stuff that employees get paid for, and it is traded. The difference is exploitation. It gets into a lot of hair splitting as classical economists poked leaks into Marx's theories and he adjusted.
The big difference between classical and Marxist economics is that Marxist use labour as the fundamental unit of value while classicals use utility as the unit/definition of value.
I'm far from a Marxist, but I've read Das Capital. Interesting read from a history of ideas perspective.
Not a self-professed communist, but is not generating and applying ideas labor? Labor is not simply putting fingers to the keyboard. How would one reconcile ability to be creative with pure labor valuation, in a manner similar to dollars-for-hours exchanges? Why not simply measure the return on those ideas? If your work brings in $5000 a month, for example, that is the value of your work, of your ability to be creative.
Who is misrepresenting? In 1962, the USSR had markets where people exchanged rubles for potatos, just as in the 1962 USA, there were markets where people exchanged dollars for currency. Not much difference marketwise, other than the currency.
I'm not knowledgeable about history of the Balkans, so I've actually googled. Tito is traditionally portrayed as a mild and benevolent dictator, because he had a split with Stalin and it was beneficial during the Cold War.
However, looking a bit further reveals massacres between 1945 to 1947. The Wikipedia article about his secret police has "A List Of People Assasinated" by them...
And since we are talking about cherry-picking, this is a problem I have with people claiming to be "on the left": this selective blindness to obvious horrendous crimes by the regime and abuse of power that these things lead to.
That was state socialism, not a true communist society. Any form of repression, coercion and control are condemned by anarchists / libertarian socialists. The USSR was certainly a state which was did of that.
The reason why the USSR was trumpeted as socialist was that it suited both sides' propaganda to do so. For the Americans, to vilify socialism, and for the Russians to give their rule the appearance of genuine socialism. When both of the major propoganda systems in the world agree on something it's bound to become a popular conception.
But let us not also forget that hundreds of millions starved in non-communist India, which suffered terrible famines up to 1948.
South and Central America was a horror chamber throughout the 1950's-1980's under violent brutal capitalist dictatorships supported by the USA. Many Asian countries too.
The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
It's not funny. It's also got nothing to do with Libertarian socialism, which is simply a a democratic economic system. The USSR was a system with concentrated power which directed from above.
Right wing Marxists such as Bolsheviks have always had deep divides with left wing Marxists and anarchists.
There's no "no true Scotsman fallacy" there, given that the structure of the regime did not even fit any of the definitions of communism that the regime itself gave.
Not even the Bolsheviks saw the USSR as a communist society. In fact, long after their coup, even Bolshevik ideologues were arguing about how many generations it would take before communism might be possible in the USSR.
Lenin, on introducing NEP in 1921 expected it to need to be in place for decades before even trying more far reaching socialist policies, much less communism.
"The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty."
Indeed, absolute world poverty has halved over the last 30 years because of state-socialism. Oops sorry, it was capitalism that halved poverty, not socialism. What a mistake to make!
"The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty. " - Modern China's rise has come Capitalism, and liberalisation of the markets.
Nope it really wasn't. There was massive chaos during the economic upheavals of Mao. But the reduction in poverty is still an impressive achievement subsequently to that. Compared to countries like Brazil, South Africa etc which also had the oppurtunities to reduce poverty but it has increased and the economic disparity is worse than ever. Even the USA has increasing poverty.
Well you're right, forced Stalinist style collectivization was a murderous failure. The poverty reduction was still made by a communist regime was the point I was trying to make. It's a poor example for what I'm trying to prove, Voluntary collectivization would be what I endorse. More like the kibbutzim of Israel.
The communist ideology resulted in that in the same sense that the capitalist ideology resulted in the genocide of Native Americans, the creation of largest imprisoned population in the world, and centuries of slavery.
Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist states survived without forgetting to feed their own people.
Guatemala prior to the US-sponsored coup that radicalized che guevara and solidified in his mind the conviction that socialism couldn't work democratically when capitalist imperialists had no respect for democracy.
Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acres (91,000 ha) of uncultivated land.[47] ...
The overthrow of the Arbenz regime cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. In speaking about the coup Guevara stated:
"The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company."[54]
Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened.[57] Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."[58] "
just some context for the old refrain of "communism always leads to us capitalists whining about democracy." for you folks i dare you to read the next 40 years of Guatemala's peaceful capitalist history!
You can spare me the Che Guevara fanboyism. I was born in the Soviet Union and had to read the biography and the history of the Cuban revolution (the soviet version of it, at least). One would think, that having been blessed to be born in a communist country, I'd reap all of its benefits. But surprisingly, it wasn't the capitalist imperialists, who have sent my great grandparents to a prison camp in Siberia never to be seen again just for owning a cow. And surprisingly, it wasn't the dastardly capitalist imperialists, who have murdered 7 million of my compatriots through an induced, and surprisingly very geographically concentrated famine. One would think that grain is transportable, but there you go: apparently not. No, it was the benevolent communists.
But you know what? There's this country called Guatemala, that for 10 years was kind of doing OK, and was a liberal capitalist society. But let's call it communist for the sake of the argument. They tried confiscating (not buying out, but straight out taking away) property from a very powerful player, after which the capitalist imperialist player started arming and training 500 men and telling fibs about the president on the radio. The 500 men failed militarily, but the army decided to surrender anyway. All of that cannot of course be evidence of a deeply embedded social instability and political apathy, but clearly shows that democracy doesn't work. We weren't talking about democracy at all, but there you go. So, yeah, if you disregard all of the above, we super-duper promise that Guatemala could have become a communist utopia. This "could've" of course invalidates all the deaths and misery communism inflicted upon the world in the extremely short period of time it existed, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it isn't related to the endemic abuse of power and corruption that seems to follow it all the time, and totally works. We promise. Especially when it allows western people, who have never stood in a 3 km long line for toilet paper and have never gone hungry in the 20th century to feel morally superior by accepting 1st-world-guilt, yet being able to absolve oneself from any moral responsibility by shifting the blame to a cabal of disembodied corporations.
I don't give a shit about che guevara. I care about understanding history and context and why things happen and stopping modern-day massacres by capitalism, not communist boogeyman arguments that are older and tireder than me.
They won't write those things in the books on communism, but it's telling that when Stalin and Mao went "off the book", 100 million working class people had to die. And of course, anywhere that descends into anarchy results in a dramatic rise in deaths.
And the only communist states that survived without forgetting to feed their own people were the ones bankrolled by the USSR, for example eastern Europe and Cuba. The two biggest ones that did survive, the USSR and China, did in fact forget to feed their own people for a long time.
Well I guess because communism, unlike nazism, doesn't have hatred hardcoded in ideology.
On the other hand there is difference between theory and practice, you can have any ideological system, but if you depend on totalitarian dictator everything can fall apart - You depend on mood of that person/party.
Well I guess because communism, unlike nazism, doesn't have hatred hardcoded in ideology.
Bullshit.
That the hatred is on the much more versatile axis of class instead of race doesn't make it any less vile. You don't rack up a 20th century record of a bare minimum of 100 million slaughtered without exercising a lot of hatred.
You assume that the slaughtering was based on class. I don't think this is true. A lot of the killing was just about maintaining political power, just like in any dictatorship, whatever the official ideology.
You also need to consider what class means. It's basically behaviour: you are upper class if you exploit others. In that lens, it becomes ok to hate the upper class, but the upper class can change, it's not hated based on something inherent to the people that make it up, like "race".
When I said hatred I meant 'Kill black people, jews, ...' directly in their ideology. So, can you guess what would happen if they won? Half world extinguished in few decades.
Communism has executed exactly 0 people. Communism is just an economic system, don't confuse it with the totalitarian dictators who may have used it. America has murdered, tortured, and committed genocide and terrorism against countless people, but that's not directly related to the economic system.
Capitalism has been responsible for slavery, sweatshops, child labor, pollution, etc. On the other hand, it also brought us the iPhone, so it's not all bad ;)
Communism is system that via implementation details tends to result in totalitarianism.
If you have a central place to plan the economy to distribute via need, that place is going to be heavily concentrated in power. And due to human nature that tends to be abused.
Capitalism, and markets don't have a central place to plan to economy. Power is decentralised via companies, and production controlled via market incentives. You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
Your theory is absolutely correct but in practice the corporations and government represent a very substantial concentration of power and resources in the control of very few, plus they are allied with each other. Government often helps large corporation via bailouts, tax breaks, subsidies etc. and large corporations inform government and even fill it's ranks. Essentially we have a system of state capitalism not laissez-faire capitalism. This makes it very difficult for small companies to compete freely in an open market.
Slavery was de-centralised evil on a massive scale. The genocide of the Native Americans was largely decentralised, as part of the "cost" of land acquisition. Global warming has de-centralised causes.
Relying on people (government or corporations) to do the right thing won't work. You need a system that cannot fail by design. Some checks and failsafes to guarantee the worst cannot happen at the government or individual level.
As an example you can look at studies tackling accounting fraud. Whether the accountant is managing thousands or billions of dollars doesn't change his/her odds of stealing from the company much. Adding a second accountant to sign off on large purchases and check each other does.
"Slavery was de-centralised evil on a massive scale. The genocide of the Native Americans was largely decentralised, as part of the "cost" of land acquisition." - Most of which would solved with property rights, and rights of the individual.
Most advocates market economies really support those.
> If you have a central place to plan the economy to distribute via need, that place is going to be heavily concentrated in power.
And this is why there is a left/right split within socialism, where the left wing - anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists/libertarian communists, and a wide range of people using similar terms - argue for decentralisation and voluntary association as essential to safeguard the success of a socialist revolution.
You will also find that a portion of these ideologies argue for market mechanisms to various extents. There is nothing inherent in socialism that demands central planning. In fact, in most left socialist ideologies there would be no central organ with the power to impose central planning.
Even right wing socialists like the Bolsheviks were ambivalent about centralised planning to begin with, and initially did so out of pressing needs: They imposed strict planning initially during the civil war because a lot of people - the vast majority of who had either voted for other socialist parties (SR and the Mensheviks both did vastly better with the peasants than the Bolsheviks did) or the bourgeois parties in the 1917 elections - didn't exactly go out of their way to help provide resources to the Bolshevik government. But as soon as the threat of the civil war was over, Lenin introduced "New Economic Policy" that liberalised the economy substantially, undid a lot of the centralisation and allowed for a limited market economy. Lenin indicated he believed NEP, or variations, would need to be in place for decades. It was Stalin that led the extreme centralization under the Bolsheviks, after Lenins death.
But in any case: In the case of the Bolsheviks, the abusive concentration of power started with their coup d'etat against the democratically elected socialist government after the Bolshevik losts the preliminary elections in 1917, not with their subsequent changes to the economic system; by then it was far too late.
> You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
And this was a central aspect of the left/libertarian socialist/communist/anarchist groups criticism against groups like the Bolsheviks and theories like Lenins "democratic centralism" and idea of a "vanguard". It's a debate that raged already from the 1850's, and continued as the Bolsheviks and their associates started murdering left communists together with everyone else opposing them.
> People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children".
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?
Why do people think it's ok to say they're christians, despite the genocides carried out in the name of God?
Because they can see that their beliefs have minimal relation other than a name and somewhat shared history with the philosophies behind those genocides.
Should we write off the term "democracy" because of places like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea?
Libertarianism is hugely flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. I don't think anything incorporating hugely flawed philosophies is ever going to be a good idea.
I have read the whole thing and I was really surprised that they didn't mention anything about individualism or non-authoritarian decentralized governance given the "libertarian" label in their name and unless I'm mistaken, they sound more collectivist-leaning than individualist-leaning and this is very troubling esp. for communists as they tend historically to favor heavy-handed measures to reach or realize their political goals even if it means to oppress and intimidate their opponents.
BTW: I'm a leftie myself but very skeptical of collectivists and statists whether on the right or the left.
As others have said the term 'libertarian' has historically and outside the USA had much more 'collectivist' connotations and early on bore much more resemblance to anarchist and communist movements- it recognized that controlling property and capital (or having it kept from you) was a factor in your individual liberty, could be used to force you to work, etc.
libertarian communist is to put it crassly an attempt to re-brand and re-merge the anarchist and socialist traditions (which are much more diverse than mao and stalin) and to remove the supposed schizm between libertarianism and communism. not to propose any single template but to stop taking for granted the current social/political/economic orders and explore new ways of organizing society, etc.
To be clear this libertarianism has nothing to do with libertarianism as it's called in the USA, which essentially is an extreme protector of individual property rights.
After reading the page it looks like a lot of communism and very little libertarianism.. Why is libertarianism mentioned? To me libertarianism requires at least giving people the freedom to buy and sell while this libcom site argues "the problem is that everything has a price".
This definition of Libertarianism should not be confused with what is called Libertarianism in the USA, which is an extreme protector of individual property rights. It is confusing because this definition arose originally in Europe and understood to be a form of socialism, not at all like the American definition.
Classical libertarianism is libertarian communism. The term libertarianism originates with the French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacques back in the 19th century, and was championed by groups like the Socialist League in the UK (which was supported by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx amongst others).
Modern-day right-wing libertarianism is the new kid on the block.
Basically in the late 1800's the main split between anarchists and communists in the First International was not predominantly their end goal.
E.g. consider the famous concept of the "whithering away of the state" (coined by Friedrich Engels, but Engels attributed the idea to Marx): that given that according to Marxism the state is predominantly a tool of class rule, and that communism by their definition is the stage of society where there no longer are any classes, the state will cease to have a political purpose and will "whither away". So anarchists and communists agreed the state was a tool of oppression and that this oppression must be removed, and that the state will eventually disappear.
The split was over methods. How to get there. The anarchists generally favoured a quicker, more immediate, dismantling of the state (whether by taking control and orderly dismantling it, or by rising up and destroying it), while communists generally favoured an intermediate transitional stage. In Marxism the intermediate stage is socialism: A phase where the proletariat is meant to take control of the state (hence the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast with Marx description of capitalist democracies as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"), and for the first time wield it as a weapon of the majority against the minority, and use it to remove the class differences. So communists traditionally saw the state as a tool for the working class.
Eventually this lead to the split of the First International, where Marx came out victorious, and most of the anarchists left when Bakunin was thrown out. Not long after, new libertarian socialist/communist tendencies started "filling the gap" in the International left by the anarchists.
The extent of support for a strong state varied greatly amongst people who called themselves communists, leading to screeds like Lenins "Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder", which targeted exactly libertarian Communists which opposed his ideas of a vanguard.
> according to Marxism the state is predominantly a tool of class rule, and that communism by their definition is the stage of society where there no longer are any classes, the state will cease to have a political purpose and will "whither away"
So who runs the justice system, commands the military, and protects the rights of the citizens?
The key defining aspect of a state is that it has sovereignty vested in it: Power flows from the state down, no matter how who controls the state is determined. It then becomes a weapon of those who control the state, which is never the population as a whole (at best it might be a majority). This is its political purpose.
The state also serves administrative functions, but the existence of these administrative functions do not rely on the state any more than current supranational organs rely on a single world government handing down power: They can continue to exist by having their power delegated from below.
The difference, of course, being that when you are dependent on having your power delegated from "below", you need to thread much more carefully.
No. Classical libertarianism would be of a "left wing" type, as libertarian was a word used on the left since the 19th century. Only in the post-WWII US did some on the right begin using the term.
No, the problem is that everything has a relative value and someone needs to figure out what that value is. In free-market capitalist societies (and I'd argue in the other ones as well), money serves as an important heuristic for value.
More concretely, do we, as a society, produce more fuel efficient cars or do we produce electric ones? In a free market, it's clear the one that sells will be produced. In a controlled economy, the process is murkier and runs through bureaucracies (and therefore lobbyists) and possibly lawmakers (and therefore more lobbyists).
So free market capitalism is really a form of crowd-sourced decision-making. Alternatives would need to invent a working model that can prioritize (in the face of difficult facts, even) in an egalitarian way, balancing the needs of different interests.
I read through the linked page. I didn't see anything describing how that would work, even in the Chomsky link.
It is a strange thing to use cars as an example of a free market. The government just bailed out the auto industry. The government bailed out Chrysler with loans and government contracts in the 1970s as well. The auto industry lobbied for and got massive public subsidies for highway and road construction, while lobbying against mass transit, or just smashing it like GM did with NCL. Not to mention the federal government reviving Depression-racked Detroit's fortunes when the industrial plants began having tanks roll out during WWII. The auto industry never wanted to operate in a "free market".
This is basically a reboot of Marx's 19th century ideas with a trendy fresh look. In fact, he predicted this stage (which he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat") in the evolution of "Political Economy" that will, in his mind, eventually lead inexorably to "True Communism." [0]
His "theory of alienation"[1] pretty accurately describes the angst that motivates the "workers" to want to move away from the Capitalist system of production and explore ideas such as libcom.org.
For those with an interest, you should read Das Kapital...Marx was a true intellectual powerhouse and his chops were both deep and wide.
IMO, It all sounds very good in theory, but always seems to always fail during implementation, like a bad software project,
The history of attempts with Communism shows little in the way of success as far as providing "the masses" with an increased standard of living and overall happiness, so I'll always be wary of such proposals.
Personally, I believe Sartre's Existentialism better describes the human condition, although even he eventually adopted Marx. in lieu of Capitalism, which will, I believe, always be hated by the intellectuals.
> read Das Kapital...sounds very good in theory, but always seems to fail during implementation
What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".
Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.
Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).
We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?
If you want both Liberty and Community to emerge as the dominant platform, you are going to have to explore other avenues than legislating it or convincing people of it. You are going to have to re-align incentives. It is going to have to emerge through a catallaxy of people pursuing different goals. This can be done by creating a society where:
1. Money spent in and around the community brings more benefit than money spent in a far off place.
2. Success at a higher level of administration is dependent on the success of lower levels of administration(probably also controlled by the the flows of voluntary tax revenue).
Even then, the type of 'communism' that develops won't be a top down variety that we saw fail miserably in the 20th century, but a bottom up version that is highly anti-fragile and able to move very quickly to take advantage of volatility.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe archive is interesting, though. A lot of material from outside what you'd strictly call libertarian communism, but just niche even within the already niche worlds of anarchist/Marxist/etc theory.
(Thought I'd better post something before it gets flagged to the bottom of the ocean.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLDQGdKyh7s&index=1&list=PLE...
Edit: here is the text of the lecture if you'd rather read it. https://libcom.org/library/government-future-noam-chomsky
Do you have a similar great and concise introduction to Nazism or other related extremist totalitarian ideologies?
Also worth looking at the concept of inverted totalitarianism, by Sheldon Wolin.
I have been reading in the press about how the NSA, the CIA, the FBI etc. want an encryption backdoor in everything Americans use, so we can be spied on at will. I don't see why this isn't totalitarian and somehow anarchism is. Anarchism means no state, whereas totalitarianism means total state control, yet you're saying no state control means more state control. It makes no sense.
It's not good to put words into other people's mouth. PlzSnow never said anything about less state control meaning more state control, for example.
This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match.
So, if the value (benefit? effectiveness?) of our work is measured by our ability to be creative, how does one reconcile that with pure labour valuation, which is evocative of the standard-dollars-for-hours exchange?
I'd be interested to hear from any self-professed communists about this.
In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier.
The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).
In Marx' time, the means of production was a factory or large areas of arable land, and those weren't, and generally still aren't, possible for individual workers to own. This situation gave the owners of those means (capitalists) undue negotiating power over the workers -- hence collective ownership of the means of production by the owners.
In the first paragraph, I'm purposefully steering clear of the word "own" since there are grey areas, what with binary driver blobs on the computer, and especially the fact that you never meaningfully "own" your internet connection and many of the services you rely on. Yet I would argue that this is a very (quantitatively) different situation from the worker/capitalist class struggle of Marx' time.
HN is supposed to be a forum for entrepreneurs but many of the visitors here are hired workers doing stuff for BigCos and that means trading our ability to close tickets for money. As a junior engineer you are told: "here is this nagging bug, go fix it", and as you become a senior you may hear something more glorious like: "ok we are going to expand to this new market so our system needs to scale tenfold. go figure how to do it" and reap some substantial material benefits along the way but it's really the same thing. Sure the whole process requires creativity and novel ideas in the small but nobody cares about your ideas in the large. I guess much of the sympathy for the workers' ideals of old comes from growing appreciation that we are in fact the lever - wielding great power but unable to do something meaningful with it.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives. It really doesn't matter if the designer is one person or a committee of the proletariat. That's an NP-ridiculous problem.
In the fact of that, I'd rather individuals make decisions about their own lives.
The big difference between classical and Marxist economics is that Marxist use labour as the fundamental unit of value while classicals use utility as the unit/definition of value.
I'm far from a Marxist, but I've read Das Capital. Interesting read from a history of ideas perspective.
People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children".
So why do people think it's OK to say they're a communist?
How many people were executed by organs of the state, including prematurely dying in forced labor camps, is a much more relevant metric.
No, it's a metric that perfectly reinforces the argument if that's the only metric you cherry pick and insist people use.
However, looking a bit further reveals massacres between 1945 to 1947. The Wikipedia article about his secret police has "A List Of People Assasinated" by them...
And since we are talking about cherry-picking, this is a problem I have with people claiming to be "on the left": this selective blindness to obvious horrendous crimes by the regime and abuse of power that these things lead to.
The reason why the USSR was trumpeted as socialist was that it suited both sides' propaganda to do so. For the Americans, to vilify socialism, and for the Russians to give their rule the appearance of genuine socialism. When both of the major propoganda systems in the world agree on something it's bound to become a popular conception.
But let us not also forget that hundreds of millions starved in non-communist India, which suffered terrible famines up to 1948.
South and Central America was a horror chamber throughout the 1950's-1980's under violent brutal capitalist dictatorships supported by the USA. Many Asian countries too.
The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Ah. the "No true Scotsman fallacy". It would be funny it it weren't for the countless millions of tortured and murdered women, children, peasants...
Right wing Marxists such as Bolsheviks have always had deep divides with left wing Marxists and anarchists.
Not even the Bolsheviks saw the USSR as a communist society. In fact, long after their coup, even Bolshevik ideologues were arguing about how many generations it would take before communism might be possible in the USSR.
Lenin, on introducing NEP in 1921 expected it to need to be in place for decades before even trying more far reaching socialist policies, much less communism.
Indeed, absolute world poverty has halved over the last 30 years because of state-socialism. Oops sorry, it was capitalism that halved poverty, not socialism. What a mistake to make!
Before the market reforms china, wasn't... great.
From what I know it was the collectivisations of farmlands that caused great famines.
When land rights were re-established, poverty was reduced. People had an incentive improve the land.
Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist states survived without forgetting to feed their own people.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56590
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#Guatemala.2C_.C3.8... :
Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democratically elected government that, through land reform and other initiatives, was attempting to end the latifundia system. To accomplish this, President Árbenz had enacted a major land reform program, where all uncultivated portions of large land holdings were to be expropriated and redistributed to landless peasants. The biggest land owner, and one most affected by the reforms, was the United Fruit Company, from which the Árbenz government had already taken more than 225,000 acres (91,000 ha) of uncultivated land.[47] ...
The overthrow of the Arbenz regime cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialist power that would oppose and attempt to destroy any government that sought to redress the socioeconomic inequality endemic to Latin America and other developing countries. In speaking about the coup Guevara stated:
"The last Latin American revolutionary democracy – that of Jacobo Arbenz – failed as a result of the cold premeditated aggression carried out by the United States. Its visible head was the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a man who, through a rare coincidence, was also a stockholder and attorney for the United Fruit Company."[54]
Guevara's conviction that Marxism achieved through armed struggle and defended by an armed populace was the only way to rectify such conditions was thus strengthened.[57] Gadea wrote later, "It was Guatemala which finally convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism. By the time he left, he was sure of this."[58] "
just some context for the old refrain of "communism always leads to us capitalists whining about democracy." for you folks i dare you to read the next 40 years of Guatemala's peaceful capitalist history!
But you know what? There's this country called Guatemala, that for 10 years was kind of doing OK, and was a liberal capitalist society. But let's call it communist for the sake of the argument. They tried confiscating (not buying out, but straight out taking away) property from a very powerful player, after which the capitalist imperialist player started arming and training 500 men and telling fibs about the president on the radio. The 500 men failed militarily, but the army decided to surrender anyway. All of that cannot of course be evidence of a deeply embedded social instability and political apathy, but clearly shows that democracy doesn't work. We weren't talking about democracy at all, but there you go. So, yeah, if you disregard all of the above, we super-duper promise that Guatemala could have become a communist utopia. This "could've" of course invalidates all the deaths and misery communism inflicted upon the world in the extremely short period of time it existed, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it isn't related to the endemic abuse of power and corruption that seems to follow it all the time, and totally works. We promise. Especially when it allows western people, who have never stood in a 3 km long line for toilet paper and have never gone hungry in the 20th century to feel morally superior by accepting 1st-world-guilt, yet being able to absolve oneself from any moral responsibility by shifting the blame to a cabal of disembodied corporations.
/s
So, you're OK with communist massacres?
And the only communist states that survived without forgetting to feed their own people were the ones bankrolled by the USSR, for example eastern Europe and Cuba. The two biggest ones that did survive, the USSR and China, did in fact forget to feed their own people for a long time.
On the other hand there is difference between theory and practice, you can have any ideological system, but if you depend on totalitarian dictator everything can fall apart - You depend on mood of that person/party.
Just guessing ;-)
Bullshit.
That the hatred is on the much more versatile axis of class instead of race doesn't make it any less vile. You don't rack up a 20th century record of a bare minimum of 100 million slaughtered without exercising a lot of hatred.
You also need to consider what class means. It's basically behaviour: you are upper class if you exploit others. In that lens, it becomes ok to hate the upper class, but the upper class can change, it's not hated based on something inherent to the people that make it up, like "race".
Communism: kill millions of poor people for their politics.
Fascism and communism are the same thing, if you define them by how many poor people they torture and murder.
Capitalism has been responsible for slavery, sweatshops, child labor, pollution, etc. On the other hand, it also brought us the iPhone, so it's not all bad ;)
If you have a central place to plan the economy to distribute via need, that place is going to be heavily concentrated in power. And due to human nature that tends to be abused.
Capitalism, and markets don't have a central place to plan to economy. Power is decentralised via companies, and production controlled via market incentives. You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
Relying on people (government or corporations) to do the right thing won't work. You need a system that cannot fail by design. Some checks and failsafes to guarantee the worst cannot happen at the government or individual level.
As an example you can look at studies tackling accounting fraud. Whether the accountant is managing thousands or billions of dollars doesn't change his/her odds of stealing from the company much. Adding a second accountant to sign off on large purchases and check each other does.
Most advocates market economies really support those.
And this is why there is a left/right split within socialism, where the left wing - anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists/libertarian communists, and a wide range of people using similar terms - argue for decentralisation and voluntary association as essential to safeguard the success of a socialist revolution.
You will also find that a portion of these ideologies argue for market mechanisms to various extents. There is nothing inherent in socialism that demands central planning. In fact, in most left socialist ideologies there would be no central organ with the power to impose central planning.
Even right wing socialists like the Bolsheviks were ambivalent about centralised planning to begin with, and initially did so out of pressing needs: They imposed strict planning initially during the civil war because a lot of people - the vast majority of who had either voted for other socialist parties (SR and the Mensheviks both did vastly better with the peasants than the Bolsheviks did) or the bourgeois parties in the 1917 elections - didn't exactly go out of their way to help provide resources to the Bolshevik government. But as soon as the threat of the civil war was over, Lenin introduced "New Economic Policy" that liberalised the economy substantially, undid a lot of the centralisation and allowed for a limited market economy. Lenin indicated he believed NEP, or variations, would need to be in place for decades. It was Stalin that led the extreme centralization under the Bolsheviks, after Lenins death.
But in any case: In the case of the Bolsheviks, the abusive concentration of power started with their coup d'etat against the democratically elected socialist government after the Bolshevik losts the preliminary elections in 1917, not with their subsequent changes to the economic system; by then it was far too late.
> You can have evil people as heads of organisations but their power tends to be limited.
And this was a central aspect of the left/libertarian socialist/communist/anarchist groups criticism against groups like the Bolsheviks and theories like Lenins "democratic centralism" and idea of a "vanguard". It's a debate that raged already from the 1850's, and continued as the Bolsheviks and their associates started murdering left communists together with everyone else opposing them.
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?
Because they can see that their beliefs have minimal relation other than a name and somewhat shared history with the philosophies behind those genocides.
Should we write off the term "democracy" because of places like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea?
BTW: I'm a leftie myself but very skeptical of collectivists and statists whether on the right or the left.
libertarian communist is to put it crassly an attempt to re-brand and re-merge the anarchist and socialist traditions (which are much more diverse than mao and stalin) and to remove the supposed schizm between libertarianism and communism. not to propose any single template but to stop taking for granted the current social/political/economic orders and explore new ways of organizing society, etc.
Are we going to have to start using the words "classical libertarianism" soon? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism#Meaning...
Modern-day right-wing libertarianism is the new kid on the block.
Basically in the late 1800's the main split between anarchists and communists in the First International was not predominantly their end goal.
E.g. consider the famous concept of the "whithering away of the state" (coined by Friedrich Engels, but Engels attributed the idea to Marx): that given that according to Marxism the state is predominantly a tool of class rule, and that communism by their definition is the stage of society where there no longer are any classes, the state will cease to have a political purpose and will "whither away". So anarchists and communists agreed the state was a tool of oppression and that this oppression must be removed, and that the state will eventually disappear.
The split was over methods. How to get there. The anarchists generally favoured a quicker, more immediate, dismantling of the state (whether by taking control and orderly dismantling it, or by rising up and destroying it), while communists generally favoured an intermediate transitional stage. In Marxism the intermediate stage is socialism: A phase where the proletariat is meant to take control of the state (hence the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast with Marx description of capitalist democracies as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"), and for the first time wield it as a weapon of the majority against the minority, and use it to remove the class differences. So communists traditionally saw the state as a tool for the working class.
Eventually this lead to the split of the First International, where Marx came out victorious, and most of the anarchists left when Bakunin was thrown out. Not long after, new libertarian socialist/communist tendencies started "filling the gap" in the International left by the anarchists.
The extent of support for a strong state varied greatly amongst people who called themselves communists, leading to screeds like Lenins "Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder", which targeted exactly libertarian Communists which opposed his ideas of a vanguard.
So who runs the justice system, commands the military, and protects the rights of the citizens?
The state also serves administrative functions, but the existence of these administrative functions do not rely on the state any more than current supranational organs rely on a single world government handing down power: They can continue to exist by having their power delegated from below.
The difference, of course, being that when you are dependent on having your power delegated from "below", you need to thread much more carefully.
No, the problem is that everything has a relative value and someone needs to figure out what that value is. In free-market capitalist societies (and I'd argue in the other ones as well), money serves as an important heuristic for value.
More concretely, do we, as a society, produce more fuel efficient cars or do we produce electric ones? In a free market, it's clear the one that sells will be produced. In a controlled economy, the process is murkier and runs through bureaucracies (and therefore lobbyists) and possibly lawmakers (and therefore more lobbyists).
So free market capitalism is really a form of crowd-sourced decision-making. Alternatives would need to invent a working model that can prioritize (in the face of difficult facts, even) in an egalitarian way, balancing the needs of different interests.
I read through the linked page. I didn't see anything describing how that would work, even in the Chomsky link.
His "theory of alienation"[1] pretty accurately describes the angst that motivates the "workers" to want to move away from the Capitalist system of production and explore ideas such as libcom.org.
For those with an interest, you should read Das Kapital...Marx was a true intellectual powerhouse and his chops were both deep and wide.
IMO, It all sounds very good in theory, but always seems to always fail during implementation, like a bad software project,
The history of attempts with Communism shows little in the way of success as far as providing "the masses" with an increased standard of living and overall happiness, so I'll always be wary of such proposals.
Personally, I believe Sartre's Existentialism better describes the human condition, although even he eventually adopted Marx. in lieu of Capitalism, which will, I believe, always be hated by the intellectuals.
[0] http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/marxs_vision.php
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".
Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.
Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).
We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?
1. Money spent in and around the community brings more benefit than money spent in a far off place. 2. Success at a higher level of administration is dependent on the success of lower levels of administration(probably also controlled by the the flows of voluntary tax revenue).
Even then, the type of 'communism' that develops won't be a top down variety that we saw fail miserably in the 20th century, but a bottom up version that is highly anti-fragile and able to move very quickly to take advantage of volatility.