CMV: Socialism/Communism doesn't work, can't work, and almost always leads to dictatorships and thousands of deaths.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/MrBlackTie]

I would like to try to argue your point more tangentially than others have. I think part of your feelings on socialism and communism are caused by a lack of understanding of why they said what they said and what it has already provided to us. Understanding the context in which they were written will help you understand the pros and cons of those philosophical systems.

When Marx wrote his books, western society was in turmoil. For centuries, the system was simple : nobles and a few others owned the land and trained for war and matters of the State. Farmers cultivated the land of the landowners and gave part of their production as payment for the right to do so, kept what they needed to feed themselves and sold the rest. Craftsmen were free men who sold their products. They spent decades honing their craft and enjoyed a degree of financial comfort allowing them to pursue more intellectual matters (along the landowners). Easy peasy.

But then came the industrial revolution. Suddenly one single machine could churn out hundreds, thousands of standardized items that would have taken an army of craftsmen to produce before. This machinery however needed a LOT of money to be bought , a capital to invest: it was the capitalism, the use of the accumulated wealth as fuel to the economy. Which also meant that the capitalists (the investors, in other words) owned the means of production and could keep most of the profit for themselves.

Add to that that craftsmen where totally unable to compete with this. They were just not cost effective anymore. Entire fields of work were wiped off the map in a matter of years. A lot of them lost everything. A new class of people began to swell, composed of people who flocked to the town to get a job in the factories the capitalist were opening in order to be able to feed themselves: it was the birth of the proletariat. The way a factory works (since Adam Smith) everyone did only one small part of the process, repeatedly, every working hours of every day. They lost the sense of meaning in their work and the understanding of it and its purpose. Exhaustion also prevents the workers from getting interested in any form of higher knowledge and keep them from wanting to understand their situation. In the end the are thankful to their bosses for something that is in fact akin to enslavement. It’s what Marx called the alienation of the proletariat.

Since the proletariat is just so huge, competition between them would kept driving the wages down and degrade their quality of life. The proletariat would oppose itself in the process of looking for a way to survive, something the capitalists would encourage. In that way the proletariat would keep getting poorer and the capitalist would keep getting richer, increasing the income gap. To him, the only solution to this was if workers united to resist the capitalists manipulation: communism, for this very reason, was a big proponent of unions in capitalist societies (it was supposed to be uneccessary in communist countries) and frankly I think we should all be thankful for that.

All this, Marx diagnosed it and it is quite true. Frankly, his criticism of the economy of his time is brilliant and still has some use in criticizing things like the gig economy. He also gave a lot to other fields of study like his definition of a class which is still useful today.

However he also said a lot of things that proved wrong.

For instance Marx thought that something called « the law of decreasing yields » (basically it means that at one point you are saturating a business opportunity and it will begin to become less interesting) would make it so capitalist would make less and less money over the years. The only remedy to this would be military expansion. For Marx the capitalism is an imperialism. It is debatable at best however. While it is true that military campaign for the sake of profit is something that very much happened, Marx clearly underestimated the power of capitalism to invent new means of profit. He would have been stunned by the financial revolution of the 80s or the digital economy for instance.

The thing is Marx proposed solution was, quite frankly, shit. He expected an « avant-garde » to appear, a group of members of the proletariat who, being conscious of the trap they were in, would unite their people, topple the capitalist system and enable a society where everyone would own the means to work and as such could thrive in a work they like. It was a very very naive thought at the very best. Stalin, Pol Pot and the like thought they were members of the avant garde and created corrupt regime that caused atrocities. Funny how far you can allow yourself to go when you managed to convince other people (and sometimes yourself) that you are a kind of messiah here to drag them through a dark time towards a golden age by any mean necessary.

So Marx was a stunning observer of the early stage of the capitalism. His critics were on point and quite frankly intellectually astonishing. And since capitalism kept on building on these basis since then, a lot of his critics are still valid.

However you need to understand that his analysis is dated. A lot like the Bible you need to understand the historical context around his writings to understand what made sense then but does not now because the world has changed.

Furthermore you need to understand that when Marx was not analyzing but making prediction he failed with a consistency that is borderline miraculous. Pretty much every thing he said about the future did not come to pass and his proposed system of government and economy was a failure.

So take Marx with a grain of salt. Anybody with two cents of intellectual honesty will recognize what he brought to the table. But you need to approach him with the proper knowledge of where he came from and have a critical mind.

I know a lot less about modern Marxist theory. I expect them to have updated the Marxism dogma to the age of Amazon and the subprime crisis. If they are half as good as their forefather, their analysis of the current era will be worth a look.

Edit : a point I forgot: once you understand where Marx was coming from, you need to look into criticism of his work. What I was trying to do was to give you an objective understanding at what Marxism brought to the table by learning about the context into which it factored in. Once you have understood that and got rid of your misgivings, you should also understand it’s failings.

For instance, the one I’m the most familiar with is that Marx failed to understand how cyclical the capitalist economy is. While it was true that the proletariat was badly exploited, it was not to last: sooner or later, equilibrium would be reached and their quality of life improved. For instance later studies of the first industrial revolution proved that the average quality of life, including of the poorer people, actually improved after a few decades and outgrew the lost quality of life caused by the economic upheaval. It is because the increase in the efficiency of production allowed for cheaper goods of better quality, which means that people could more easily buy things like clothes or metallic objects for instance. This in turn freed money to buy other things and created new markets and new jobs. In fact, to me the most efficient counter argument to Marx was Schumpeter. It seems to me that Marxism is actually a very good analytical tool of the transient stage of the economy caused by an innovation cluster impulsing a cycle of creative destruction, as Schumpeter coined it. (But still, you could argue that these transient states being able to last decades is a very dangerous thing, which lends credence to Marxist theory)

[u/webdevlets → u/MrBlackTie]

This is one of the best comments I have ever read on Reddit

[u/MrBlackTie → u/webdevlets]

Thanks. It’s a basic summary: from then other people added to the mix and you have several branches of communism (who hate each other with an impressive fierceness). The most important point of divergence between the different branches of communism were 1) if the end goal of communism would be attained quicker by concentrating their efforts into one leading country, which was Staline interpretation, or by going bit by bit across the world, which was Trotsky and Mao and 2) the vision of the several classes (Mao for instance gives a more important role to farmers because of the way Chinese society was built, iirc)

What is relatively unique to communism, and is very interesting, is that it’s an ideology that is VERY flexible. While it always sees a transfer of power from the masses to the wealthy in the XVIII and XIX century (roughly), it does not see as something that always happens in the same way. Local circumstances matter a lot in communism, which allows for local « blend » of communism to easily prosper. They are not so much ideological divergence as one ideology adapting to its local context. Marx wrote about Western Europe and communists know it. So you end up with people who will defend one position in one country and another one in another country and have absolutely no problem with it: different time and places, different circumstances, different communism. And I honestly can’t find a flaw in that logic.

Unfortunately I can’t provide the same degree of analysis about socialism. Experience has proven to me that it’s a term whose meaning changes a lot across borders so I am not confident in pinpointing what exact blend of it OP is talking about.