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A few essays on communism

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Crash Course Socialism

Contents

If this is too long to read right now, I recommend /u/thedashrendar’s excellent summary of Capitalism, then coming back to this.

Crash Course Socialism

Surplus Value

Socialism is an economic and social system defined by social ownership of the means of production. (Workers democratically own and operate their workplaces, as opposed to private control of production aka Capitalism).

The means of production are non-human inputs that help create economic value, such as factories, industrial machinery, workplaces, large tracts of land, stores of raw materials, etc. The means of production are the means of life. Socialists refer to the means of production as capital, or private property, i.e., the things which give the people who own them power over those who don’t.

Private property in the socialist context shouldn’t be confused with personal property, such as your home, car, computer, and other possessions, which would be protected. Private property is in actuality another word for absentee property, whose ownership is claimed through title only (and not use), for the purpose of extracting rent from the actual users, occupants, or workers.

In a Capitalist society the means of production are owned and controlled privately, by those that can afford them (the Capitalist, aka those with Capital). Production is carried out to benefit the capitalist (production for profit). Workers are paid a wage, and receive that amount regardless of how much value they produce.

This price of labor power ( called the wage ) becomes a commodity like any other, whose value isn’t determined by how much real value the worker adds, but by the absolute minimum amount required for workers to sustain themselves and raise the next generation of workers ( called the cost of social reproduction ).

Socialists call this difference the surplus, profit, unpaid labor, exploitation, or wage theft.

Wage Theft = Worker Value Added - Wage Paid

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Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker’s wealth is dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist’s wealth is based on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply indefinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker’s yearly salary in a single night’s sleep.

For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and (living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.

A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax productive output as wages1. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do every day is stolen by Capitalists.

Capitalists use the surplus to push out competitors and gain market share, leading to the destruction of most small businesses, with just a few companies controlling our food, media, news, energy, transportation, and finances.

In the table below, both capital and surplus value are controlled by a company’s owners, who usually appoint a board of directors. This owning class (called Capitalists, or the Bourgeoisie) make up a tiny minority of the population.

Capitalist firm / Economy
Total Value Worker value added Surplus Value / Profit Other payments Owners, Shareholders, Board of Directors, Managers, Clerks
Capital Accumulation
Armed Enforcement Police, Military
Political Bribery
Advertising
Wages
Capital Physical assets
Intellectual assets
Money / Finance capital

Wage workers are completely dependent on selling their labor power to those in control of production in order to gain access to the necessities of life (money for food, shelter, clothing, etc). Its similarities to chattel slavery has lead many to term wage work as wage slavery, with voluntary employment being simply a false choice between one exploiter or another.

Technological advancements, instead of benefiting workers, result in decreased or stagnant wages, worsening bargaining power, or mass layoffs. For example, a machine that replaces 10 workers leads to their firing, resulting in a benefit for the machine owner, and an economic hardship to the fired workers.

Increase in profits due primarily to automation

The difference between these two lines is the surplus

The difference between these two lines is a measure of the surplus.

History, and Human Nature

Capitalism has nothing to do with human nature. People can be greedy, or cooperative, depending on the incentive structure and ideology of the socioeconomic system they live in, which is usually out of their control. For the vast majority of human history, small groups of people survived by foraging, growing, or hunting for food as a community, in a mode of life termed primitive communism. Communal sharing was essential to the survival of the group.

Markets likewise were rare, since communities tended to be self-sufficient. Rituals, harvest festivals, a group of elders deciding fair distribution, or communal decision-making accomplished what markets do today. Private property (and male-dominated societies) came into existence with the growth of large-scale agriculture and animal domestication (A historically male-dominated activity). These tended to be passed on to male descendants (which in turn required strict female sexual control, isolation, and increasing objectification), aggregating into fewer and fewer land-owners, and creating class antagonisms between an owning, and a working class.

In the modern day, there is the communism of the family, in which family members share freely with one another. There are community welfare organizations, food banks, as well as thousands of undocumented and unpublicized acts of kindness which show that cooperation endures even in spite of the individualism of the current dominant economic system. Popular phrases like, “Money is the root of all evil”, hint at our societal dislike of selfishness, and persist alongside the capitalist myths of the “self-made man”, and, “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” (which shows the power of capitalist indoctrination: in a nonsensical world, the impossible becomes possible).

Capitalism evolved historically out of feudalism and slave societies, all three being examples of class society, with a dominant ruling class receiving the surplus of a subordinate class.

Socialism as a diverse philosophy arose out of a criticism after the French revolution, in which a capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) seemed to merely replace feudal lords to become the new ruling class. At the same time, the exploited serfs were moved off the land (enclosure) and forced into the cities to become wage-workers.

Marxism is a socialist tradition, which places emphasis on the means of production, your relation to them, and the inherent class struggles involved between those who control the productive forces and those who don’t, as the primary force driving economic and social relations.

Value

Economic systems, such as Capitalism, don’t invent, create or build anything. Workers do (See Soviet Space Program). The “isms” only determine who gets compensated.

Nor does capitalism spur innovation; the pursuit of new ideas is fundamental to humanity, and takes place regardless of the economic system in place. Inventions like rocketry, the internet, space travel, GPS, mobile phones, vaccines, were all developed under public funding.

The labor theory of value (LTV) recognizes that our most valuable resource is time, specifically socially useful/necessary labor time. There is after all only a finite number of hours of work humanity can perform in a given day; and at least half of that value is going to a few absentee owners.

The labor theory was commonly accepted in the 19th century ( especially by Smith and Ricardo ), but fell out of favor as capitalist states began to cement economics as a discipline to justify the new status quo.

Most capitalist economists treat value like magic fairy dust: it can be created and destroyed with a thought. Many modern economists and economics professors serve a role akin to the priests during feudalism: treating value and rewards in idealist terms, rather than as scientific concepts, justifying capitalism’s immense inequality ( whilst often getting paid to promote it ), and demonizing other theories ( such as LTV ) as heresy.

Coming down to reality from idealist and subjective experience, value, like any other scientific concept, such as energy, is preserved in a closed system.

The labor theory of value has been proven empirically correct in recent decades, by comparing the amount of labor required in given industries, and the money output of those industries. For nearly every country with sufficient economic data, the correlation is > 95%.

Under capitalism, the subjective theory of value is based almost entirely on the supply and demand curve model which is unscientific, 2 since it presupposes more unknowns than knowns, and as such is useless at making any predictions. Capitalist value theories are based around utility, IE joy, which isn’t quantifiable, measurable, comparable, or falsifiable, and as such is useless as a scientific concept. Its greatest use is to allow the mega-rich to justify owning thousands of lifetimes of stolen labor.

The planned economies such as that of the USSR, while imperfect, often provided better social outcomes than its Western equivalents. Its publicly owned, planned economy brought it from feudalism to a world superpower, with the fastest growing economy of the 20th century, despite starting out at the same level of economic development as Brazil in 1920.

This video by Paul Cockshott - Going beyond Money, illustrates how it is currently possible to go beyond money, and to build a democratically planned, labor-time based economy for human needs, rather than private profit.

Risk

A common argument is that Capitalists should be rewarded for their financial risk. The only risk owners take is that of being forced to become a worker like everyone else if the business fails.

Risk also isn’t proportional to reward; Big Capitalists risk much less, and gain much more than smaller ones, just as wage workers risk starvation and homelessness if forces outside their control lead to their firing. The nearer the bottom you are, the greater your risks.

Slavemasters took financial risk in buying slaves, but that risk doesn’t negate the harm done to their slaves, or entitle them to their slaves’ labor output. Capitalist risk likewise doesn’t entitle them to a portion of their workers’ output.

The socialist argument is not that individual passive investors should still bear all the risk, it’s that they never should have been in a position to bear that risk to begin with, and only got there by exploiting workers. Society and workers should bear the risk, make the decisions, and own the means of production that their labor made possible.

Conformity

Socialism has nothing to do with conformity, restriction of artistic expression, or equality in abilities. It instead proposes economic and political equality through the abolition of classes, placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production. It is Capitalism, with its inherent class hierarchies, that imposes conformity on society through vapid consumerism, and through the authoritarian nature of capitalist firms themselves. A chain of command ensures that orders from capitalists drop like a rock, to dominate the actions of every worker.

Democracy

Socialists view democracy under capitalism to be an unrealistic utopia, better labeled as Bourgeois Democracy, or democracy for the rich, which socialists contrast with proletarian democracy. Under capitalism, political parties, representatives, infrastructure, and the media are controlled by capitalists, who place restrictions on the choices given to workers, limit their representative options to vetted capitalist puppets, and limit the scope of public debate to pro-capitalist views.

Bourgeois democracies are in reality Capitalist Dictatorships, resulting in legislation favorable to the wealthy, regardless of the population’s actual preferences. The Princeton Study, conducted in the US in 2014, found that the preferences of the average US citizen exert a near-zero influence on legislation, making the US system of elections and campaigning little more than political theater. Multi-party, Parliamentary / representative democracy has proven to be the safest shell for capitalist rule, regardless of voting methods or differing political structures, for countries as diverse as Australia, Japan, Sweden, the UK, the US, South Korea, or Brazil.

Examples of restrictions include a media and news monopoly, 2, the First Past the Post voting system (which enforces capitalist two party domination), gerrymandering, long term limits with no way to recall unpopular representatives, restrictions crafted to disenfranchise poor and minority voters, bills directly crafted by lobbyists and bourgeois lawmakers, voter suppression, electoral fraud, unverifiable closed source electronic voting systems, capitalist campaign financing, low voter to representative ratios, inconvenient voting locations and times, and most pervasive, candidate stacking. Most elections are performed before we ever get to the polling booth. In short, political democracy can’t exist without economic democracy.

The impossibility of Capitalist democracy to make a transition to working-class democracy is best shown by the phrase: Capitalists will not allow you to vote away their wealth. Pacifism, and elections have never been an effective means of disenfranchising the ruling class.

Communists propose building alternatives alongside of bourgeois democracy, with the goal of to replacing it with Proletarian democracy. Measures might include:

Late Stage Capitalism

During Capitalism’s growth period (early Capitalism), when there are new markets and labor forces to expand to, capitalism can appear stable for the richer consumers whose products are actually being produced by exploited, poorer workforces. Likewise, in a labor shortage, as existed in the newly industrializing US, capitalists have no choice but to keep wages high (and the rate of exploitation low) in order to bring in workers from other countries, and keep them from becoming subsistence farmers.

In the southern US, African slavery was used to solve the labor shortage, and keep exploitation high (since no wages were paid), and consumer products such as tobacco and cotton cheap. In order to take advantage of cheap labor, capitalists usually build production far away from where those products are actually bought and consumed, meaning that most consumer goods are shipped by ocean-freight, wasting energy and polluting the environment.

Since the 1960s, there has been a labor surplus, due to a decreased demand for workers due to computers and automation, and an increased supply of workers (women, and low-paid manufacturing and agriculture in less-developed countries). The extra, unemployed workers make up a reserve army of labor, keeping wages low, and desperation high. Increased worker productivity (due to computers and automation) mean that the surplus (the difference between worker productivity and wage paid), is historically higher than ever. This trend will only continue, and workers will naturally become more class conscious, as they see their exploitation increase, and their livelihood decrease.

Since workers have less money to survive, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and capitalists fight and wage wars over the decreasing surplus. Late stage capitalism refers to the extreme polarization of the two classes, the increasingly absurd and cruel ways our society copes and justifies such stark inequality, and the horrible things capitalism forces people to do to survive.

As the supply of labor outstrips the demand, it becomes cheaper to employ workers rather than to sink startup costs into innovative technology. Soon, the technological growth rate grinds to a halt (as of 2018 technological growth in Europe has slowed to ~1-2% per year), just as in ancient Rome, inexpensive slave labor lead to stagnant technological progress.

In actuality, capitalism is highly unstable, made up of a series of crises, economic bubbles, booms, and eventual busts, termed business cycles, that occur every few years with varying intensity, but with most of the resulting burden shifted to workers. The capitalist state often intervenes to prop up failing businesses, and bail out members of its own class.

Both feudalism and slavery were thought to be highly stable systems, and even they lasted hundreds of years until their eventual overthrow.

Defending the Status Quo

The reason why most people are reticent to read anti-capitalist literature, and discouraged from participating in the class struggle through unionism and political movements, is due to capitalist indoctrination, a capitalist monopoly on media, and police repression. Six companies control 90% of all media in the West.

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society (the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed, ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

The police in Western bourgeois democracies are the domestic enforcement arm of the capitalists, much like the military is the external imperialist enforcement arm. They are the hired goons of the elites of their given city, protecting their factories and workplaces from unionization and worker control, oppressing the poor and homeless, and keeping them separated from other workers by intentional impoverishment via legal means. Cops have a long history of killing workers and crushing unions.

Many of the largest corporations in the US, openly bankroll police departments, helping them buy surveillance equipment, defensive gear, and military weaponry.

The State, and Revolution

Private ownership of the means of production was established through force and private tyranny, and is only upheld through force. The state is a special organization of force used for the suppression of one class by another which (in capitalist society) exercises a monopoly on violence to forcibly maintain the right to private property. The modern state developed alongside the emergent capitalist system as the bourgeoisie seized political and economic control. It arises from the irreconcilable class antagonisms that exist in society.

The State, under capitalist society, which protects private property and upholds the capitalist mode of production, is an instrument wielded by the bourgeoisie to suppress the proletariat. So long as there are classes in society, a State (or any organization that uses force in the interests of a class) must exist.

Marxists aim to replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, with a transitional dictatorship of the proletariet, smashing the presently existing bourgeois state apparatus, and replacing it with a new state, constructed on the basis of worker power, destroying all the elements which exist to oppress workers, and safeguarding the ones that help workers. Once the proletarian state possesses political power and controls the means of production, it will wither away over time as it suppresses the bourgeoisie and moves toward a classless, egalitarian society. Eventually, the use of force is no longer necessary to suppress class antagonisms, because there are no classes, and the oppressive elements of the proletarian state wither away.

Socialism as an economic system is distinct from neoliberalism, as well as social democracy/Welfare state capitalism, which aims to band-aid the ills of capitalism while leaving the exploitation inherent in wage slavery intact. Social services provided by the capitalist-controlled state have nothing to do with socialism.

The Communist Legacy

Some Marxists say the regimes typically called socialist are more correctly defined as State Capitalist, since production was controlled by state bureaucracies who also distributed the surplus, rather than through the democratic input of workers. Other Marxists call them siege socialist, contrasting it with pure socialism, stating that siege socialism is a natural reaction to the external pressures of capitalist encirclement, and that pure socialism is an ideal which is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable. The US for example, has been involved in militarily crushing nearly every socialist attempt for the last 80 years, and installing right-wing fascist dictatorships (friendly to US interests) in their place. Needless to say, capitalist encirclement has a profoundly distorting affect on the building of socialism; very few attempts have survived US interventionism. This talk by Micheal Parenti is a good reflection on the soviet experiment.

The early stages of the 1917 Russian Revolution were far more progressive than is typically portrayed; Divorce was legalized, Homosexuality was decriminalized, land was distributed to the peasantry, banks were nationalized, control of factories was given to worker’s councils, the workday was shortened, wages were fixed at a higher rate, all elected officials could now be immediately recalled; it created mass literacy drives, free nurseries, communal kitchens, and laundries. 14 Western nations (including the US) sent troops to Russia to fight against the gains of the revolution.

Contrary to the popular phrase, Communism did work: within a few short years, the Soviet Union doubled its life expectancy, became a world super-power, and the second fastest growing economy of the 1900s. Other achievements include: near-zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70+ years (excluding WW2), near-zero homelessness, higher caloric intake than the US, 99% literacy, free education, free health-care (most doctors per capita in the world), free childcare, low poverty, and low levels of sex and racial inequality, not to mention the soviet space program’s achievements. 1

These achievements were possible due to efficient use of resources resulting from the lack of a parasitic capitalist class expropriating the majority of the nation’s wealth. Similar outcomes in other socialist countries prove that socialism did indeed work, and provided an alternative to the private property system. This is why it was intentionally and systematically attacked by Western capitalist nations.

The famines and economic hardship typically associated with communism in Russia and China, were partially a result of the painful process of industrialization, and the transition from agriculture to industry. It would be the case whether capitalists, communists, or enlightened rulers were in power. During England’s rapid industrialization, life expectancy in some cities was less than 30 years. This is the case with every country in the process of industrialization. Lysenkoism, and a period of droughts made the problem worse. The scale of famines were also exaggerated by capitalist historians, whose brinkmanship in quoting higher death counts is contradicted by the massive population growth of those countries. Even in spite of this, a look at a drastic increase in the life expectancy in the USSR should put to rest the notion of socialism as contributing to starvation.

Exaggerated death counts blamed on communism and usually attributed to Stalin or Mao are often due to Western historians attributing all deaths to the economic system (One stark example, is the US-state-run organization “victims of communism”, which counts German WW2 casualties as communist victims). This would be the equivalent of attributing deaths from the Dust Bowl to FDR. Yet UNICEF, RESULTS, and Bread for the World estimate that 15 million people die each year from preventable poverty, of whom 11 million are children under the age of five.

Even if we were to fully accept the Western propaganda that socialist regimes have killed 100 million people, then within 10 years, capitalism kills more children under the age of 5 than socialism did in 150 years.

The Communist Future

Communism is the highest developed stage of socialism wherein there is no state, no money, no class system. The means of production are owned by all and provide for everyone’s needs. There are also presumably high levels of automation so most do not have to work.

Many socialists point to directly democratic worker’s councils as an ideal way to organize production, with gift economies for abundant goods, and labor voucher economies for scarce/luxury goods. Here is an example of a moneyless, Cyber-Communist system, video.

Past and present socialist societies include - The Paris Commune, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, USSR, People’s Republic of China, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Laos, Belarussian SSR, Peoples socialist republic of Albania, Peoples republic of Bulgaria, the GDR, Hungary, the Democratic people’s republic of Korea, Mongolian people’s republic, and Cuba.

Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Reformist) socialism, Economic planning with labor vouchers vs. Market socialism, are a few debated topics within socialism.

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