Communism
Us baby boomers grew up with the spectre of looming communism. Even after McCarthy was repudiated we lived with the Cold War against communism for decades. I remember air raid drills when I was in grade 9 during a Cuban missile crisis as if hiding in the basement would shelter against nukes.
One idea I had about communism, presented with a sneer, was that it was based on the idea of "From each according to ability and to each according to need". The sneer was because at the time countries that claimed that sort of creed were communist dictatorships that obviously (it was said) didn't live up to it. Stalinist Russia and the gulags were fresh in memory. The movie Dr Zhivago made the badness of Stalinism vivid.
But I always thought that "From each according to ability and to each according to need" was an excellent idea. I figured that would be the outcome under the capitalist system too. At the time I didn't realize how incompatible with capitalism that idea is.
Later I read some of Marx's work and even more commentary about his work and Marx was no Stalinist. I read that one of the contradictions of capitalism is that the techology wouldn't work without a very highly educated workforce. He figured the day would come when the workforce would just stop taking orders from capitalists and run things in the worker's interest. That would be a revolution and after that society would evolve in a different way. Government would wither away and we'd all live in peace and harmony.
(Cues Here Comes the Sun from the Beatles)
Lenin interpreted Marx as advocating a proletariat (workers) vanguard organizing to take over the state. He organized Bolsheviks to take over Russia when the Czarist regime collapsed as the best way of advancing Marx's idea. They organized in Germany and then moved to Russia to take over.
Lenin and comrades succeeded in taking over the czarist state. But their revolution was very far from the sort of revolution that Marx envisioned. Marx envisioned a proletariat that at one point could just step in and take over the means of production. Lenin was running a peasant revolution against the czarist state. Very different situation.
Other communist revolutions in places like China and Cuba faced the same problem. They all faced furious resistance from the capitalists. That kind of situation leads to a totalitarian state. Not particularly my idea of progress though I do think that the communist revolutions materially improved the lot of both workers and peasants.
Socialism became the carrier of Marx's good ideas In democratic counties socialism evolved into democratic socialism - socialist ideas implemented in countries with strong democratic foundations and traditions. The difference between socialists and communists is the difference between a democracy and a totalitarian state.
Marx was a scholar and scientist. He studied objective data in the British Museum Reading room.
Lately the Capabilities Approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has expanded Marx's ideas. They ask, what capabilities does a person need to have a good life in a society. They've devised a tool that will evaluate a society according to the capabilities it provides it's members
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach.
Communism is decried because it is totalitarian and that totalitarianism doesn't really work.
On the one hand he ran into strange economic problems as Stalin found with his 5 Plans. If the Plan encouraged, say, nail production by paying according the weight of nails shipped the factories switched to makin big spikes. if rewarded according to the number of nails made then factories started making mostly little nails.
On the other hand he ran into the problem that his underlings were terrified to tell him that his Plan's weren't working. Stalin grew paranoid about people sabotaging his good work.
The great irony of Trumpists calling socialist communist is that Trump et al are much more totalitarian than the Democtats will ever be. And the are running into the old totalitarian problem - the people at the top have no idea what's going on.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.