Comment on Why can't commies be commies without the power of the state? by doug

Parent Post: Why can't commies be commies without the power of the state?

doug · 2/25/2025, 9:51:29 AM · permalink

(had to split this up because I think I hit a character limit in the UI  
  
As a communist, I'll answer your questions in backward order:  
  
**What does Marx actually say?**  
  
Marx comes from the tradition of philosophers, most notably Plato, who in his Republic, pointed out the problems with Democracy and Oligarchy, saying that they both led to what the Athenians at the time most feared, tyranny. In the Republic, he describes the ideal society, where philosopher kings who seek only knowledge and harmony, are best suited for ruling as benevolent rulers.  
  
The French Revolution in the late 18th century, right after the American Revolution, was extremely influential in thinkers at the time, as the western world was coming out of old monarchies and into liberal democracies, with the vision of a better world order. However, soon after the French Revolution, many realized that although they had gotten away with the kings and the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie (which is why communists use a French word for the rich, not a German/Russian one) that orchestrated much of the revolution and took power simply replaced them, as living conditions for the masses did not improve significantly. Almost immediately, before Marx was even born, ideas of socialism started to arise, although they were not developed or were too utopian to be practical.  
  
Out of the German philosophers who dominated western thought during the late 18th and all throughout the 19th centuries, was the father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant. While Kant was technically a Christian, he introduced the idea that there's a limit to what we can deduce through reason, and what we can know about the metaphysical world, or anything outside of reality. Much of the Church's hold on the public, both Catholic and Protestant, was based on "because the Bible said so", but Enlightenment thinkers were not satisfied with that explanation and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason excited many at the time because it allowed for conceptualizing reality in buckets of the rational and the real, and the metaphysical and the ideal.  
  
Now out of this tradition came a philosopher named Hegel. Hegel, who was also inspired by the French Revolution and by Kant's ideas, formulated his own system, in which he theorized that things are always in flow and progress, and that in reality, cause and effect are not as clear cut as we think, and that there's a dialectical process in which events happen, where there's initially a thesis, and there's an antithesis in reality that pushes back onto that thesis, which levels out and gives us an eventual synthesis. An easy example is something like when you're playing tennis, your thesis is that if you hit the ball in a certain way, you'll direct it where you want it to go. But when the shot is off, that is the antithesis, and so your synthesis would be correcting the angle/strength/direction so that you are closer to the mark. This method of analysis is called dialectical materialism.  
  
He also hypothesized that there was a world spirit guiding reality towards progress, pointing out that throughout human history, we've developed better technology, better ideas, and more efficient and effective societies, pointing to the French Revolution as proof in his theory of optimistic becoming.  
  
Marx grew up in Germany in 1818 when much of these conversations were happening, and initially he was a follower of a group called the "Young Hegelians" which was an idealistic group that followed Hegel and were mostly left wing (by French Revolution designation), but after reading some philosophers that convinced him that idealism was not the proper way to go and that materialism, that is, the actual real conditions of the world, dictate history, not a "world spirit". Along with his rich friend, Friederich Engels, both theorized about communism, and synthesized many of the past theories about communism into a system that analyzed history with dialectical materialism or historical materialism.  
  
Essentially Marx hypothesized that throughout human history, societies developed based on their mode of production, which was based on their capital development at the time. In this context, capital means anything that can help you produce more commodities more quickly. So pre-civilization, for example, a tribe's "capital" would be their weapons, their homes, their hunting gear, their gathering gear, etc. This Marx calls, "primitive communism". As society developed into civilizations, and tribes conquered other tribes, slavery developed as a system, where the earliest civilizations needed significant man power to build out irrigation systems to support society. After the fall of the Roman Empire, a new system arose called feudalism, as now serfs were more half working for their lords/samurai/mandarins, half working for themselves as farming technology improved and allowed people more freedom. By the 1500s, primitive capitalism arose, as The East India Trading Company became one of the first stock investment companies ever created. This allowed for more efficient deployment of resources which sparked faster and more economic production, while providing enough time and leisure for more people to educate themselves and thus improve technology further, thus accelerating capital development. By the end of the 18th century, primitive capitalism had turned into the Industrial Revolution, as machines were being produced that made human production accelerate by orders of magnitude in just decades.  
  
However, just as many pointed out after the French Revolution the conditions were not better for many of the masses, and sometimes even worse, and the average life expectancy even in the most developed nation in the world, England, was around 30. Marx sought to investigate what the reason why things were so bad after the Revolution, after the King was removed. And Capital, his magnum opus, is the result of his research, poring over British economic tables and prices of wool and yarn in order to make an incredibly dense economic textbook that attempts to fully explain the capitalist system, and why it always goes into economic crisis (tendency of rate of profit falling) while also honing in on how workers are being exploited mathematically. Marx's insights alone even before Lenin came on the scene forced many governments to change labor laws and other restrictions because they couldn't deny their validity, stuff like the 8 hour work week and other sorts of pro-labor ideas come all from Marx, as one can kind of get a picture of what early 19th century industrial capitalism looks like from reading Charles Dickens' novels.  
  
There's many other things Marx says and comments on, but this seems like a good stopping point.

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doug · 2/25/2025, 9:52:59 AM · permalink

(part 2)  
  
**Why do commies think capitalism, an economic policy, and communism are the same?**

We don't. That's a common fallacy, in fact, we don't believe that capitalism is "bad", but that it is simply outmoded and obsolete. We also believe that capitalism was actually progress compared to feudalism, and that it was a necessary step to allow for communism to be even possible. That's why you see Russia and China, both semi-feudal economies, have to go through a stage of semi-capitalist development (NED in the Soviet Union, Deng opening up in China), in order to have the actual means of production to share. So you cannot actually go full communist, until you have first a stage of capitalist development, and THEN a stage of socialist development, which is where China is at now. Communism is the goal, but not the process.

**What is wrong with communists?**

You are probably thinking of people who call themselves communists, but are just another form of leftists. Even in the time of Marx, there were competing ideas of what was the "true" method for communism, during Stalin's time there was Trotsky, etc. Lenin distinguishes between these leftists, between "economists" and the "terrorists", which are in today's parlence, the DSA (social democracy liberals) and people like antifa (anarchists). However, Lenin points out the errors in both, as he calls the economists naive for thinking that they can team up with the bourgeoisie and get them to "be better" and produce socialism through reform, while he calls the terrorists idiots who make communist's job harder by creating random acts of violence that can be used by the ruling class as evidence that they need to be given even more power to stop chaos from happening. In essence, both are detrimental to communists.

Today's communists you see are all either grifters or federal operatives. During the 1960s during the Vietnam War, anti-imperialism and pro-communist sentiment started to become more prevalent, and the CIA/FBI used this time to infiltrate communist organizations and create a leftist "counterculture" (hippies) of sexual freedom and all this other garbage and nonsense that had nothing to do with communist ideology, but provided a release for leftist tension to dissipate. This is why you probably think communists are all gay and retarded, because the CIA literally manufactured and boosted cringe hippies to present that way. Remember, both the CIA and FBI were both created because of communism.

**Why don't commies understand they can get together and "do" communism?**

I don't fully understand this inquiry, but I'm assuming you mean communes? We don't "do" that because it's a pointless exercise and does not stop capitalist exploitation from happening.

**Why do communists need the government to force communism upon others?**

I'm assuming this misunderstanding comes from your earlier thought, that communism is a lifestyle and not a mode of production. But in actual communism, let's take the Soviet Union as an example, it's not that the government forces it onto them, it's that the Revolution and the masses wanted a new government over what they had previously. So Russia at the time of the Revolution was ruled by a Tsar who was much more brutal than his grandfather when he took over in 1894. He led Russia to a loss to Japan in 1905, and then during WW1, at least 5 million Russian casualties to the front line. Because it was a semi-feudal economy, but with a large territory, the Tsar had no incentive to develop their industry and just threw people into the highly advanced German military meatgrinder. There was already a revolution in 1905 that failed, but another rose in 1917 that was initially a bourgeois liberal revolution, but Lenin was able to gain enough momentum with the masses to orchestrate the first communist revolution, the October Revolution, and began the first communist nation in history. So it wasn't that the government forced communism upon the Russian people, it was that the Russian people preferred communism over having their lives being thrown away for a Russian Tsar's power and influence. It helped also that it was not as developed, as there was less of a presence of the Russian bourgeoisie, who were easy to corral.

**End**

At the end of the day, the CIA has worked extremely hard over the past 75 years to give you this version of communism that you so desperately hate, not because you know what communism actually is, but because you hate the version that was presented to you. I have had one of the most unlikely life paths towards communism. My parents named me after the Korean War General, Douglas MacArthur, a massive war criminal, I was a professional poker player and pursued a career in acting. But what changed me was actually READING what actual communists wrote, instead of trusting Fox News to tell me what communism is. So yeah, if you want to actually engage as a "free thinker", sometimes that means doing the hard thing and actually reading what people said and thought.  
  
At any rate, the DSA is not communist, they are expressly liberal. The PSL is a likely grifting front for leftists, while the CPUSA has been infiltrated since the McCarthyist era and is just a pawn of the Democratic party.

The only communist party I do support is the ACP, just constituted last year in July 2024, as I believe that this is the closest version to communism as in the Soviet Union and China.

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