- 23 Jun 2014 00:19
#14426146
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
Communism is supposed to be a classless, stateless, moneyless, international society, with common ownership of the means of production, but some peculiarities in Marxism lead me to believe that it does not have to possess ALL of these characteristics at once in order to be communist.
These peculiarities are the concepts of "primitive communism", and "pure communism". If it can be said that primitive tribal society was communist, then we already have an example of a non-international form of communism, since tribes defended territory against each other, and did not share things in common across tribes unconditionally. In addition, if socialism gradually evolves into pure communism by maximizing each of the aforementioned foundational elements, then it follows that there are communisms which are less pure.
The very concept of pure communism means that communism is not a unitary concept depending completely on the fulfillment of one particular characteristic, and that therefore systems which fulfill the major production changes of communism may be considered mostly communist.
What, for example, would we call a national state in which there existed a classless, moneyless order, under common ownership of the means of production? Is this merely socialist? Is the line between socialism and communism even clear cut? I think Marx says that the socialist mode of production is occurring under the authority of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and that if the economic conditions for communism were imprinted into the social fabric of society (materialism means our way of thinking will become more communist), then the state would wither away, and national boundaries would collapse, since the state only exists for class reasons.
However, this isn't a deterministic foregone conclusion, since states can exist for moralistic/idealistic reasons which might deviate from standard Marxist thinking. How then would we describe these hypothetical states which have achieved all the economic conditions for communism internally, while still presenting a national barrier against the world? Primitive communism seemed to exhibit these characteristics, since there was said to be common ownership, but it was segmented into competing spheres of common ownership, due to family/blood/racial and religious ties.
(As an aside: doesn't historical materialism imply that you can be both a communist and a reactionary at the same time in the form of primitivist ideology?)
These peculiarities are the concepts of "primitive communism", and "pure communism". If it can be said that primitive tribal society was communist, then we already have an example of a non-international form of communism, since tribes defended territory against each other, and did not share things in common across tribes unconditionally. In addition, if socialism gradually evolves into pure communism by maximizing each of the aforementioned foundational elements, then it follows that there are communisms which are less pure.
The very concept of pure communism means that communism is not a unitary concept depending completely on the fulfillment of one particular characteristic, and that therefore systems which fulfill the major production changes of communism may be considered mostly communist.
What, for example, would we call a national state in which there existed a classless, moneyless order, under common ownership of the means of production? Is this merely socialist? Is the line between socialism and communism even clear cut? I think Marx says that the socialist mode of production is occurring under the authority of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and that if the economic conditions for communism were imprinted into the social fabric of society (materialism means our way of thinking will become more communist), then the state would wither away, and national boundaries would collapse, since the state only exists for class reasons.
However, this isn't a deterministic foregone conclusion, since states can exist for moralistic/idealistic reasons which might deviate from standard Marxist thinking. How then would we describe these hypothetical states which have achieved all the economic conditions for communism internally, while still presenting a national barrier against the world? Primitive communism seemed to exhibit these characteristics, since there was said to be common ownership, but it was segmented into competing spheres of common ownership, due to family/blood/racial and religious ties.
(As an aside: doesn't historical materialism imply that you can be both a communist and a reactionary at the same time in the form of primitivist ideology?)
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.