Date: Thu Apr 21 2005 11:03
trotsky (Fatty, 6:45) ID#248269:
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i agree with much of what you say...but this:
"They say they aren't mature enough for true communism. It is a long process that will take hundreds of years to accomplish. Meanwhile they are going to make a strong nation that cannot be threatened from the outside again so they can develop the maturity of spirit to build a true communist state."
is simply erroneous thinking. as von Mises has shown already in 1922 , a communist system can not work, regardless of the 'maturity of spirit' of the people involved.
since communism lacks the market's price mechanism, it can not possibly allocate resources efficiently, and is thus doomed to fail - even if all the people making up such a state are saints or buddahs in spirit ( which they of course will never be ) .
it is also IMPOSSIBLE for a communist system NOT to be oppressive - again, regardless of whether the people establishing it are blue-eyed idealists or power-hungry tyrants ( usually they are the latter, but the point is actually that it DOESN'T MATTER ) . this is because the state becomes the sole owner of the means of production in communism, which necessitates expropriation of all private property. this has to be done by force, since no-one is likely to give up his property willingly. even in the extremely unlikely case that of the 1.5 billion people 1.2 billion prove to be saints who willingly accept that from now on, all decision-making will be in the hands of a well-meaning clique at the top and are prepared to renounce their property , the other 300 million will have to be oppressed. even if only ONE person needs to be oppressed to achieve this spirtually mature , doomed to failure, communist state, repression will have to be institutionalized via the law.
anyway, the ( pretty obvious imo ) issue of unavoidable repression aside, in a hypothetical case where EVERYBODY agrees to willingly forfeit their property , the resulting system would still be faced with the impossible task of managing resource allocation. the economy would quickly decline to subsistence levels, and once the previously accumulated capital stock was used up and / or had decayed, it would collapse just as all communist economies have thus far.
obviously China's political leaders have recognized this fact, which is why they have discarded communism in favor of capitalism. a modern day example at the other end of the spectrum is North Korea, where a strictly Stalinist leadership has chosen to keep the country's economy on a nearly pure communist path, with the result that the country is now among the most poverty stricken in the world, with famines a regular occurrence and the system only being held in place by the most brutal repression imaginable.
maturity of spirit can NOT alter this outcome. communism is both evil AND unworkable.
the idea that it 'can work if only it is done right' is a Marxist myth used to justify adherence to the philosophy.
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