Can you leftists explain exactly how a classless society is maintained. Will there not be an intrinsic tendency towards hierarchy of some socioeconomic kind? How do you stop that?
Could this work in a multicultural society? Do you think all races have equal civil and cognitive abilities? Do you have to be an egalitarian to be a leftist in the sense that the races aren't different? How do you keep classes from forming along racial faultlines?
it will work by a lack of class and the such
It isn't maintained, the conditions that gave rise to classes have been abolished, so rather, classes are no longer maintained.
How? Private property is what causes socioeconomic hierarchy.
Doesn't matter.
We don't expect for there to be classes to begin with so at most i would expect people hanging out mostly with their own race, which is ok
In your view, what are these conditions and how do you go about changing them so that class disappears?
But let's say one race becomes crippled by a certain drug addiction or some circumstance that makes them less of contributors to the community. Can you not see a sort of "class" divide popping up from things other than monetary inequality.
Private property. Through nationalization of all productive forces and universal employment.
You know the CIA pushed drugs into the ghetto, right? Right?
Its a hypothetical. The main question is "Can a form of class not become present through facets other than personal wealth?"
Class is not about "personal wealth", but about your relation to the means of production. A person who works 14 hours/day will gather more wealth than someone who works 6 hours/day, but they are still both working class.
So I should be allowed to own nothing? How are my needs met with respect to food/housing? How small of productive force before the govt owns it? If I catch 3 fish, can I keep them?
Well if the one that makes more money makes smart choices with that money, he will be able to afford an improved standard of living compared to his "classmate" that earns far less for working less.
Also, I'm now confused why if class is only your relation to the production, why private property must go away for a classless society. You guys give really short and sometimes conflicting answers so I aplogizr ahead of time if I have trouble understanding your points.
Nobody works and everybody takes from those who are industrious and smart. What could possibly go wrong if penalize hard work and ingenuity and promote laziness and idiocy? Sounds like a real recipe for utopia. Marx was a genius. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
Marx performed an extensive analysis of the capitalist system that numbered in the thousands and thousands of pages. You however haven't even bothered to read a single page of his to make sure you're not misunderstanding/misrepresenting his works. Compared to you, and most of the right-wing, Marx really was a fucking genius
No, you should not be allowed to own property that is used to extract surplus value from other workers. In lower phase communism we distinguish between personal and private property, personal property being commodities for consumption, like food and gasoline. Housing will likely be free and guaranteed each worker by the state.
The problem with this question is that it doesn't really matter. Industrial society as built by capitalism has made all small enterprice obsolete. No one in either a socialist or capitalist society can personally gather the required resources to "build a succesful company" without extracting surplus value from a work force.
Yes.
Going to post some paragraphs from Critique of the Gotha Program here
"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations,but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect,economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (afterde ducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as inthe exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equalamount of labor in another form.
Cont.
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity,otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the presentcase, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.
Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and soforth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, on ewill in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structureof society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the divisionof labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
We already live in a classless society, have you turned on TV lately?
The historical bread lines and mass starvation of USSR tell me all I need to know about Marx's failed theory.
I mean, when I google "bread lines" the first results I see are about the Great Depression. And when I googled about food production about the USSR, all I see are graphs outlining the huge increase in food production during thte Soviet Union.
Any country that has to independently industrialize itself can only do this at massive human costs. We should congratulate communist states on getting it over with so quickly. Especially since this meant they were ready to fuck up the Nazis when the time came.
That being said, the economic organization of socialism has little to do with Marx's project. He conducted an analysis of capitalism, not socialism.
this is a bait thread
Grand displays of the supremely beautiful liberatory bloodshed, the conquest of millions by the sword of democracy's forces, the absolute destruction of the old institutions and absorption of their social duties.
Then why do you keep coming here? You know those propaganda stories are full of shit.
There's a genuine concern here. Any society that is to persist must be able to reproduce itself. In dialectical terms, what OP is asking for is the negation of the negation, the point at which socialism stops being a mere negation of capitalism and turns into a distinct social order that perpetuates independently from the revolutionary project.
I'm wondering how Zig Forums would answer that concern. The posts until this point haven't been very good.
no.
The USSR had a greater number of calories consumed by the average person than the US.
The average Russian still consumer 700 fewer calories per day than they did in the USSR.
Just because the shelves are full of bread doesn't mean everyone has bread to eat. At least bread lines ensure everyone gets their fair share.
Which is better?
The central planner knows there will be a bread shortage and so they restrict the amount of bread each person can get by cutting the loafs in half. Everyone gets bread, but they get half as much as they would usually get.
OR the big box retailer knows there will be a bread shortage and so they double the price of bread. Everyone who can afford it can have as much bread as they want, but now a large number of people can't afford bread at all!
Half this thread seems to be jumping around the idea of labour valtures (hope i spelled it right please correct if not). If x works 12 hour but y works 6 how is there labour accommodated? This is still I believe inside a currency based economy! First off the need to work as automation comes, will go down its reasonable to assume most all will work less (while simultaneously doing more). So large disparitys in individual input wont likly be a thing. Op here is thinking more on a if (labor amount = value amount) both in a relation were the more of one means you get the other. In a centralized planned economy the goal shouldnt be what i think Op thinks it is. That being forced material equality that the state gives you and you have no choice in. The centralized state should be the collectives(all humanity aka the workers) slave. Its only purpose is to see fit that the housing food and resources for human happiness are meet. The individual through the collective should be able to say to the state ive done my work its up to you to provide its fruit. The state is then there to see were you get your personal property( were your home goes different from private as described above by its personal use not for exploitation) your food… you decide these things(to your preferences "all get to") if the state doesnt provide you with the materials for a quality living standard you can get similarly effected people and you strike seeing as how you own the mean of production and in turn the real power of the state. The state becomes a massive catalog for the resources of living were you can get what you want out of it. The only block is those trying to get excessive amounts in unreasonable ways something thats decided by the collective. Point is no one reasonable thinks all will want the same!!! To me the point of socialism is to have it to were the collective has the mindset and power to meet the needs and wants materially of the individual.
exactly literally couldnt say it better
You seem to operate with a liberal conception of class. Class in Marxist writing doesn't mean income group, but a fundamental distinction in how you obtain a living. The goal is to delete some of the methods of obtaining a living, just like what happened with the role of the slave owner in the US. Of course, when that thing happened with the slave owners they were bitching about it, talking about it like the end of the world. Likewise, landlords won't have a nice chat with us and an open debate in the market of ideas, they will throw shit like it's the end of housing in general and they will be quite effective at throwing shit, not because of their numerical strength or clever arguments, but $$$.
Lefties say: Land and buildings will be owned and run by the public. There will be no land speculators fleecing the public. People will pay a fee for the rooms they occupy and the fee will be directly and transparently related to the operating costs of housing and the infrastructure around it, there will be no private entity leeching off tenants. A person acting as a landlord will be persecuted as a criminal.
To a Marxist, your question looks like this:
Classes are created and maintained by their vulnerability to being exploited. Once it becomes impossible to exploit people classes are gone forever.
Initially one would ban exploitation (with state power), to do that politically one would change the economic relation so that exploitative practices would become blatantly obvious, Paul Cockshott for example recommends to over print money with labor-time-content so exploitation would be visible to everybody when they get their paycheck. Other aspects are stuff like debt-traps are easy to end if you remove the ability to use force for collecting debt, as well as creating debt-jubilees. Other measures measures are changing currency tokens from being circulatory money that represents a commodity towards labor-tokens that represents labour. There's more, but consider this to point at as actives measures against mechanisms for exploitation. Aditionally there is the need for creating structures that make it incredibly hard to reintroduce the mechanisms for exploitation, while maintaining the non-exploitative economic relations be relatively effortless, so that even relatively passive avoidance behaviour is sufficient for individuals to not become subjugated by exploitation schemes. To understand this consider that capitalists seek out leverage over the necessary inputs of people that are related to reproducing their existence as well as seeking out entitlements over the output of labor power that can be exploited. You can increase the hurdles against this not just via different socialist economic structures, but also via physical material reality, where it becomes physically difficult to withhold needs. Consider that if you had a food replicator you could no longer be coerced to work for somebody else's profits, to be able to afford food. If you build up enough of those structures and manage to defend them against destruction by wars etc. The attack surface for sucking out surplus into privatized entitlements schemes will shrink, and eventually will become too small to be used to boot-strap new exploitation schemes. This will have compounding effects, people that are not desperate are incredibly difficult to be moved towards fighting wars, so destroying the structures that disable exploitation will become harder. On a another more organic level, consider job-satisfaction reports are usually less that 10% if you consider this to be a proxy for alienation, you can figure that the current social order is upheld by very few people. If you can mange to get non-alienated work to be the norm it might be that this order would become extremely stable based on the assumption that people are more likely to continue an activity that is not alienating to them. And from the perspective of a class-less society it might look like class-based societies as being unnaturally imposed, living on borrowed time.
How do you prevent classes from emerging anyway
Like, what if some gang hoards all of some resource and guards it violently unless they are paid in some other resource
Star Trek I guess
If any hierarchy were to arise, it won't one out of economic necessity. Nobody is against natural hierarchy (if any exist) but rather artificial ones supported by force.
communism is end of history when class struggle ends, so it will happen naturally with time.
There would not be a sacristy of resources for gangs to hoard in communism.
[spoiler] Plus everyone would be armed anyway.
but what about muh toothbrush?
checkmate commie
as long as the smartest black guy is smarter than the dumbest white guy, racism is hypocritical and should be abolished
class divides happen because ppl distance themselves from the ppl they are exploiting, by building large nansions far away from ghettos and factories for example
this would not be possible when there is no wealth extraction and the housing situation is controlled by the ppl
but yes, there still could be racism under socialism, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, cause racism undre capitalism is 100 times worse
