Well the same things that affect elected officials in a democratic government affect communist or socialist governments and would affect a maxist government.

Human nature is greedy.

Oh, and self serving

It does work, to a certain point. The problem is, a business is, legally and accounting-wise, an entity unto itself. It stops working in the best way when those parts tip the seesaw away from the folks that are part of it.

Oh for sure it works sometimes. Usually in small communities. Local co-ops for example.

Eventually when real dollars start being traded someone wants a bigger piece of the pie though.

I think the evidence shows that is not true, or we would be long extinct or not the rulers of this planet... well, the mammal rulers. Some may be that way, but the vast minority. Even they cooperate most of the time and enjoy doing so.
Walk through your town and just observe. Do not judge.
I do this a LOT (actor). Most are kind and cooperative and enjoy being so 99.999% of the time.

In those small communist communities, the inventors, innovators, dreamers and those who excell... leave. (or are crushed)

rkz, you can see what you want. I know what I see.

That was a fun fantasy novel then.

You must not drive very much. :p

Communism/Socialism is not based in envy?
What is it then?
Guy invents something or a way of doing his/her work so that they have more free time to work on other things and are more productive.
They have excess.
Their neighbors say "heeeyyyyy look at what you have and I'm still working".
So person 1 sells excess or invention/method so they can have excess time/work too.
Later they invent more, but the others do not.
Eventually, and this DOES always happen and is when Communism/Socialism happens.
The neighbors say... "wait a min." they have the stuff, their land, just like us, and our money because they keep selling stuff to us... that's not fair!!". (they are incapable of seeing that... no, they refuse to see that they choose to buy the products, inventions, and sell what they do to person one and did so on day 1, have yet to build, invent, etc, anything on their own to reduce their work or create anyting new to open new demand).
Envy, all of it.
BTW... on another point that will come-up.
There is not one nation on this planet that cannot stop buying from the US tomorrow.
Cuba has only two embargoes, none of the other hundreds of nations deal with them because their system is corrupt and sucks, like all of Communism and Socialism. If that was not the case they would be fine without us.

No, it was a political treatise. He was a political/economic philosopher. Are you suggesting philosophers only ever write about what they personally intend to achieve/fight for?


Your description of how communism/socialism works is too simplistic. It does not take into account exploitation by an employer-class, of an employee-class. That is what socialism seeks to redress. It's not about someone being terribly hard working and all those people who aren't as hard working or inventive, wanting to take away the fruits of his hard work.

What a tiny set of spectacles from which to view the world: it's all about the exploitation.

Could it be that in the 150 years since Marx made his point, there has been an industrial revolution and the "end of scarcity", which means it's really, really difficult to exploit someone that way who doesn't want to be exploited?

I think he would shred his original treatise in view of the amount of plain old suffering his school of thought has caused the human race. Even the fucking Chinese are going Capitalist as much as possible, and generating wealth that's pulling them out of poverty.

I actually agree, in part, with this. My point was that Marx's theories and the socialist movements of the mid 19th/early 20th centuries were based on a different paradigm to the one we live in. In some cases people have drawn on those theories and created something as abominable in its own way as the worst ravages of industrial Manchester. In other cases, people have drawn on those theories, to initiate a workers movement and force the pace of change within a broadly capitalist economy, and in doing so won things like employment rights, and fair wages.

Marx was a theorist and philosopher. He did not engineer a revolution. As for Engels, have any of you ever read his descriptions of working and living conditions in the industrial North of England? When Marx and Engels were writing, they were writing primarily with England in mind, as the likely start of anything. At that time, England could, potentially, have been subject to a revolution and the necessity for change was never more apparent than in the great textile towns of North. That was an instance, of a small class of men, who in creating great wealth, exploited a much larger and more vulnerable class, to the point that whole communities of men, women and children were reduced almost to the status of dumb beasts. This wasn't done innocently, the writing of the time show an ideological approach, where the need for workers not to have an opportunity to pace themselves, or work independantly was voiced as a means of preventing moral decline. The use of children, first heavily indoctrinated into the Mill owner's methodism, was widespread and served to further weaken the hand of the working man. All done, with the assistance of employer-weighted legislation from the government.

Marx's theories were appropriate to a time and place. The Bolsheviks and mensheviks in Russia, saw in those theories an answer to a level of oppression that the modern day would see as shameful. Such revolutionary movements, have the misfortune of being made of people. People fall out, disagree on direction and intent, wage petty wars, and are happy to act on theories with a disregard for the individuals concerned. It's part of that revolutionary mindset I think, to stand outside of the society, in order to view the whole thing. Makes, often, for people who care greatly about the overall picture, without true regard for those who live inside it.

So?... that is what it ends-up doing. Unfortunately, many of the things we do with one intent ends up with other consequences.

DanaC, if I were your social sciences teacher I would give that paper a failing grade. Socialism, whether it overtly says so or not, merely replaces an employer-class with the official class, and the exploitation merrily continues otherwise unchanged -- if anything, worse, with Throne and Mammon conjoined, and paying in fiat currency too. Ask anyone with a memory of day to day Soviet life.

You'd protest immediately "But we'd make laws to prevent exploitation!" Oh sure, you could and would. Make laws by the bushel, regulations and policies by the tome until the shelf is full and appendixes, revisions, and addenda are stacking up on the floor at the shelf's end, all to hedge about the actions of the official-employers... and in the process, quietly kill flexibility, creativity and initiative, hardly aware that that is what you're doing in an attempt to craft omnicompetent policy.

This is known as central planning and it actively prevents economic performance. For an exact parallel, see "work rules" -- a body of regulation that prevents work being done. This is why the Soviet Union fell, you know; the belief that Gosplan was something necessary sucked all the vitamins out of the economy, engendered distortions so severe it was rather a wonder the production of Kalashnikovs and missiles wasn't affected. Maybe it was, and we just don't know for sure. State Socialism did not have an economy so much as it had a Frankenstein's monster galvanized into something like motion at every Five Year Plan.

This is why my lifelong advice to any socialist is: dump socialism. Start with a clean sheet and base it all on the individual -- absolutely nothing happens until some individual does something. I'd further tell them there is no such thing as the Collective: the nearest you can come is individual people moving in close coordination towards a desired goal, and you can only expect this to be a temporary thing.

Then it would seem to be about absolutely nothing at all, if you are to be believed. Since big-S Socialism never raised altars to Nothing ("Is Nothing sacred?"), but instead encouraged worship of other things, like Party, I don't see any reason to accept this statement as true either.

The State that flatly refuses to rob Peter to pay Paul, even if it would appreciate the full support of Paul, is a State (in a state) of very little corruption. The usual way a state suffers creeping decay or a collapse of its economy is through some party or another voting itself the treasury or some portion thereof. Forcible seizure of the treasury is also a corrupting option.

Soviets did not enjoy/suffer socialism. That's a cold war misnomer.