CommunismRequiresViolence

So let's have gradual reform rather than sudden revolution.  Which blood bath did you have in mind for the British government?

How about the one in which they are persuaded of the rightness of it all, and decide to join up?  --Vitenka (And yes, all governments to date have been so born.  So what?  That doesn't mean it's a good thing) TexTrans?: what about not having a BloodBath? at all, but instead persuade everyone blah blah.  And yes, I agree that modern democracy was birthed in blood - but that doesn't make birthing something else in blood a good thing.

Still waiting for a clear explanation of what on earth you're on about here.  Are you just repeating "So let's have gradual reform rather than sudden revolution" in an obscure form, are you suggesting an answer to "Which blood bath did you have in mind for the British government?" or are you trying to say something else?

You can't have the end goal without the intermediate steps; ergo the end goal is morally as bad as any of the intermediate steps.

Why not?  Seriously - why are you sticking so rigidly to the 'it must happen this way' bit of the plan, rather than the endpoint.

Hence "state an alternative route" below.

If the endpoint was reachable by, oh I dunno, everyone on earth waking up one morning and deciding to live their life completely differently (yeah, a QuantumMiracle?, but...) then would the end goal be morally bad?  --Vitenka (EndJustifiesTheMeans? is a completely seperate moral argument)

We only need to consider things that are actually likely to happen.

That's just it. Getting there, according to Marx, requires "violence"; violence does not form part of the goals. I, too, fail to see that the means described in Marx's manifesto is the only possible means of reaching the Communist goals. - MoonShadow

So state an alternative route.

Hey, if I had a route for making the whole earth act as I wished, I'd be enacting it.  And telling you my plan wouldn't be a part of it.  With slightly less flippancy, persuading everyone that it is right and engaging them so that they see what they gain rather than lose - then move to it via the democratic method.  (ie. if >50% of active voters in Britain voted in a communist party, we'd be a communist country.)

<snip ad hominem and repetition of prior argument>

<snip ad hominem reply and repetition of prior argument>

I think this is going nowhere.  We refuse to agree.  Can we say that "The entire marxist plan requires violence" - as can be shown merely by reading it, and that the goal of the marxist plan is not a state of violence and that, therefore, that goal might conceivably be reached by means other than violence?  --Vitenka

You may say what you will. But don't say 'communism' when you mean 'the goals of communism'. Even if you think the goals of communism are social equality, etc etc, 'communism' is not those goals: it is one suggested way to achieve them. Communism is expicily not compatible with democracy. There are ways of achieving the same ends of communism that are, but those ways are not communism, because 'communism' as a term does not refer to the ends, it refers to a particular view of how the worker's state will come about and how it will be run.

No.  It means the end goal - the people living in a commune system.  TheMeansAreNottheEnd?.  The fact that we have only had one particular instance of communism come about (well, two - chinese and russian systems are different enough I guess) does not mean that is the enterity of the overall class of communism.  --Vitenka

No, it doesn't mean that, unless you intend to generalise so widely that words lose all their meaning and then it's no wonder that people misunderstand you and get into sidetracked arguments where both sides are talking about different things. If you want to talk about a subject, you have to use the technical terms in the right way, and 'communism', in the context of political philosophy, has a particular meaning that isn't just 'everybody sharing things'. You're free to use the word like that, of course, just like you're free to use any word to mean anything if you don't mind not being understood, but you'll have to then put up with people who actually know a little not understanding what you're talking about because you're using the words wrongly. In short you're right -- the means are not the end. And the term 'communism' refers to the means, not the end.

For instance, you could imgine a system founded on social equailty that included freedom of the press. Such a system would share the goal of comunism, but would not be communism because, as was pointed out above, communism as a system requires state control of the press.

You even admitted at the top of this section that you were continuing your 'misues of terminology': why defend what you acknowledge to be misuses? Why not just start using the terminology correctly? Then we'd all know what we were talking abotu and we wouldnt' have to get into these fruitless side-debates about what words mean what.

People have already tried to bring about communism through democracy - name a western european country without a communist party and then consider how many that do have one have even got close to actually establishing communism.  Given a choice, people in general simply do not want such a system.  Simply saying "if enough people voted for it it'd happen" isn't a route to communism; it leaves out the rather important step of explaining how on earth you persuade people to do so.

Even if you got your 51% of people voting for the communist party, how do you propose to enforce the disposession of the other 49% without violence?  If your end goal is communism you have to achieve this somehow.

Declare them a separate country and let them pick their own way. Make life as good as you can for the people that want to be with you, and watch the other lot flock over to you when they realise the grass is greener on your side. If the grass isn't greener on your side, perhaps the communism thing isn't really working out and you should try something else. - MoonShadow

Now suppose that 49% contains all the landowners, the owners of the industrual base, etc.  (Which would hardly be surprising, now, would it?)  You're left with land owned by the government and any nationalized industries (the latter not being very widespread these days).  I'm skeptical that you'd have a viable country (in particular, I think it'd be sufficient unviable that its failure would clearly be all to do with its lack of industry and land and nothing to do with whatever system of government it adopted).

Judging from my experience of living in Moscow, the public services were ubiquitous and subsidised to the point where the revenue made from sale of tickets was much smaller than the cost to run the service (~5p ticket got you from anywhere in Moscow to anywhere in Moscow; a single ticket on a suburban train to a village about as far away from the edge of Moscow as Cambridge is from London cost ~90p; the public taxi service, too, was subsidised, although I do not remember details); few or none would bother using your (for-profit, presumably) service because the public service is much cheaper to use and just as convenient; your business would falter for lack of customers and/or profit. In areas where the public service was not yet available, or for some reason not convenient enough, you would have a niche in which you could survive, and indeed some did (and were tolerated by the authorities - even in Moscow, there was a practice of drivers letting, e.g., shoppers hitch rides for a small fee if they were going the same way the drivers needed to anyway; this survived because it undercut the public taxis, and was tolerated); as the public transport network expanded and got cheaper (i.e. the goal came closer to being achieved) in each area, the private businesses in the area (usually shuttle bus services) mostly became non-viable and folded. Now that the public transport is no longer subsidised, private firms were once more able to compete, and a flurry of shuttle bus and taxi firms has reopened and even covers central Moscow. - MoonShadow

Adding to that: ~30-40% of the population were exempt from paying even the subsidised transport fees for one reason or another, for buses, trains, metro, trolleybuses and trams (but not taxis). This caused a massive social problem when the system broke down, as a lot of people were unused to the idea of actually having to pay for their tickets. - MoonShadow

So subsidy and not bothering with enforcement.  That former is fair enough, the latter is strangely unconvincing.

Why? - what's the point of enforcement when no-one bothers doing anything they need to be prevented from doing?  - MoonShadow

But you just said that they did bother.

As I said above, only in isolated places where there was a point bothering - i.e., where the system wasn't working yet. System working == no point trying to run your own transport company as you won't make a profit. The authorities - at least at the time I was living there - saw the survival of private transport in a location as a failure on their part and a reason to improve the system in that location, not something to forcibly stop.

I suppose that you wouldn't have inherited it from your parents, as there would be no inheritance mechanism and they wouldn't have been allowed to own it in the first place. Therefore, you wouldn't be expecting to inherit it, and would have found some other occupation before they died... Unless, of course, you are talking about a transitional period between systems. In that case, I would have thought that you would be allowed to keep farming there for now, possibly with some extra people who were moved in to help (more equable distribution of the populace, as you say), but that you would have no long-term claim over the land (abolition of property in land). Presumably, though, if you were made to leave your farm, you would be assigned another job instead, and there's little use in assigning someone a job that they're no good at. --M-A

That's just as a result of have rules/laws that need enforcing. It's always interesting discussing mechanisms of law enforcement with someone who absolutely believes in non-violence. "So how would you arrest someone?  Ask them nicely if they wouldn't mind following you to a police cell?  I don't think so..." --M-A

As a general remark, I'm always amazed at how many people are willing to argue about communism without even having skimmed the communist manifesto.

Secondary sources, frankly, make a damn sight more sense.  --Vitenka  Anyway, now I'v got a URL, I've read it.  That's all it took ;)

It doesn't even take that if you can be bothered to use [Google].

Ok, it also takes being reminded that I ought to read it.  Same reasoning behind GoRinNoSho and all the other historic texts I finally got around to reading recentlyish.  Though I can't help feeling, sometimes, that those works are on the web purely as an excuse, so that people can say "No look! See!  It's not a cesspool, it's got things like this!"  --Vitenka (Humm, though frankly I'd call the drivel of the crowd-agitating works of communism, drivel.  Seriously - have these people not heard of subtlety?)

I boggle that anyone would argue about communism without having at least looked at the communist manifesto.