What is Communism?

I'm not if it's possible to satisfy Lazy's desire for Pot Noodles. Perhaps I should have started this thread with a different title: "Communist project destroyed by Lazy's Pot Noodle fetish!"

I don't think it's clear at all that the human species will keep growing. In fact, part of the achievement of communism will be humanity finally taking full, conscious control of all its biological, economic and social powers. Being able to regulate our own reproduction in a fully conscious manner is obviously part of this. As a sidenote, it's a common observation that rapid population growth takes place in impoverished environments. Today, most of it takes place in the Third World. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conclude that battling over-population and poverty are, in some respects, part of the same battle.

I'm not sure some of the questions you have asked actually have a ready answer. They will require the combined technical and administrative skills of the entire world proletariat to reorganise production to both satisfy human need and to do it on a sustainable basis. Communists are class conscious workers - they won't necessarily have an understanding of how to build a worldwide energy grid for example, or know if putting solar panels on residential housing is really a cost-effective form of energy generation.

What we believe is that it is the working class that constitutes the only force in society that has either the interest or the capacity to eliminate capitalism while synthesising its achievements into a new, higher form of human society.

Following on the last two posts, I agree that abundance means an abundance of use values.

There are all sorts of other incredible wasteful practices in capitalism that absorbs horrific amounts of labour and resources that could be given up to fulfilling true human needs.

For example, advertising and marketing has become a bloated cancer on society. 50% of the price of many products is actually to cover marketing costs. For example, the high price of drugs is justified by the pharmaceutical industry as covering the cost of "research". Yet the industry actually pays twice as much on marketing every year as on research! Much of the work of building the new society will revolve around reorganising production away from that kind of useless crap.

However, I do think that our preoccupation with Ipods and cars betrays the fact that we live in one of the islands of relative prosperity in capitalism's sea of misery. For a couple of billion people on the planet, the advent of communist abundance will mean their children won't die of starvation.

Mind you, a part of me admires the sheer energy and genius that the bourgeoisie put into keeping their collapsing system limping along. Imagine that human resourcefulness, energy and ingenuity harnessed for the satisfaction of human need!

It also looks like the ICC are planning a public discussion forum on the topic of this thread.

http://en.internationalism.org/node/1840

I think this would be excellent opportunity for participants on this thread to discuss these topics face to face. I certainly intend to go.

Communism i.e. the world economy planned and utilised at a global level for human need can only come into being once a certain level of technological and social development has been met.

The fundamental foundations for this have been provided by capitalism which has created a world economy. In fact, capitalism has largely created this abundance. For example, world agriculture produces more than enough to feed the world population - but half the world population can't afford to buy the food and therefore lives in a permanent state of semi-starvation.

There is thus a contradiction between demand (in terms of hungry people) and market demand (hungry people who can afford food). As a result, agriculture everywhere is in crisis: every year tonnes and tonnes of food is destroyed in order to prevent a collapse in prices, the state pays farmers subsidies to let land lie fallow i.e. they're paid not to produce.

For marxists, communism became truly historically viable around the beginning of the 20th century. Capitalism had exhausted its progressive role in building the foundation for the future society and was now an obstacle to human progress. Our failure to destroy it has now let it evolve to such a point where it has now become a threat to the survival of human civilisation, perhaps even the human species.

Obviously communism will not be a miracle society. There is only so much iron in the world and therefore only so many things that can be made from iron. Similarly, the human population cannot expand forever as the ecosytem has limits - although improved technology may expand those limits, who can say? But a rational, planned use of resources, the achievement of a stable and sustainable human population etc. (best summed up as what Bordiga called "a living plan for the human species"), will be key components of the communist future.

Errrm, every year more and more farms collapse because there's no market for their products? It does seem to be a semi-permanent item on the news. Not to mention BSE, Foot & Mouth, exacerbated by the farming methods in use, efforts to cut costs, etc. Not to mention the devastation in the developing countries where the rural economy is collapsing and more and more people turn to growing drug crops to survive. I don't think agriculture is any more stable than the rest of the economy.

How very Malthusian! The problem is reality disproves this statement. Every year, food production becomes more sophisticated and efficient - every year, on average, the food poverty of the general mass of humanity seems to increase. Is this not a contradiction?

Of course it constitutes a crisis, especially when situated within the general context of capitalism. Whether the general economic crisis will drive the proletariat towards a revolutionary confrontation is another question - although the current series of class struggles around the globe seem to suggest the proletariat is getting off its knees. As it develops its struggle, it will be forced to confront the "crisis of political theory and public support" that you believe communism suffers - if the proletariat fails to recuperate the communist project, its struggle can have no future and will be crushed.

You don't find the contrast between ever increasing production and ever increasing poverty a fundamental component in capitalism's contradictory evolution? And religion never seemed to dissuade those old feudal lords from gorging themselves to death on the produce of their malnourished serfs!

A profound question!

"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." - The Communist Manifesto

Even without a revolution, capitalism can still collapse in on itself and take human civilisation with it. In fact, unless the proletariat successfully manage to destroy it and build a new society this is exactly what will happen. This is not simply a matter of hundreds, thousands, millions of human beings dying in a most horrible fashion, although that is bad enough. It's about a collapse of civilisation far more profound than that of the Roman Empire that will have repercussions for generations of human beings. No sonnets ... no equations ... no pot noodles! Just the whole of humanity reduced to eking out a living in horrific circumstances. Not only is civilisation threatened, the worse case scenario of capitalist decomposition could possibly threaten the future of the human species, perhaps even the entire ecosystem of the planet.

We can already see the beginnings of this process happening today as described here:

"Capitalism today is therefore painting a clearer and clearer picture of what the descent into barbarism would look like: a civilisation in full disintegration, torn apart by storms, drought, plague, starvation, irreversible poisoning of air, land and water; society turned into a hecatomb by murderous internecine conflict and wars that leave entire countries, even continents, in ruins; wars which further poison the atmosphere and which can only be made more frequent and devastating by the desperate struggle by nations, regions, or local fiefs to preserve their cache of dwindling resources and necessities; a nightmare world where the last remaining castles of 'prosperity' clang iron gates against the encroaching hordes of refugees fleeing from war and catastrophe; in short, a world where the rot had set in so far that there would be no turning back and where capitalist civilisation finally sank beneath a quicksand of its own making. This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today; the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes. The only question remaining is whether socialism, the proletarian revolution, still remains a living alternative." - Point 10, Resolution on the International Situation, 14th Congress of the ICC.

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/106_intsitres.html?PHPSESSID=ae92776bd64ddc673a26a0dd4df07500

Quite right, they aren't. Contradictions provide the dynamic force of capitalism for good or ill. But today, those contradictions drive forward the system's mortal crisis.

In what way does it exist in name only? Don't two progressively brutal World Wars, two profound periods of economic crisis (with one lasting over thirty years and still going on today), a Cold War which offered a real threat of nuclear obliteration, and the contemporary catastrophe of the "war on terror", demonstrate that capitalism has been in crisis for rather a long time?

Is there really no crisis at all? Or is it one capitalism can recover from?

If capitalism doesn't really exist, then why do you think the bourgeoisie or the working class do. After all, part of the definition of capitalism is the existence of these two classes. The existence of one implies the existence of the other.

What about the exchange of the commodity of labour between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?