Has there been any real critical refutation of the idea that communism is inevitable? I remember Rosa saying that if you are a Marxist, then you MUST necessarily believe that it is inevitable as a matter of science, but…
Idk… Couldn’t capitalism just keep collapsing and reforming? Or extinction? Or a different economic structure emerges?
Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?
I bring this up because I wonder if the European ideological strain could die out as it ceases to be relevant. Indigenous groups have economic and societal structures that defy categorization. Anarchists like to claim these structures, but they’re not.
It seems like there’s an inexhaustible number political structures that could emerge rather than communism.
The idea thst animals can go extinct was new as hell during Rosa’s time. Fucking Andrew Jackson literally thought if they looked hard enough they’d find mastodons out there cause if God wanted a species dead he wouldn’t have made it in the first place. If you add the knowledge that yes, we can all die and there can be no more people ever again, the inevitability of communism is less scientific for sure. Given a long enough time span, I’m sure we would eventually get socialism but that’s no longer on the table.
I’m not a theory head, but I feel like what is being proposed is an end point where all contradictions have been resolved and there is no conflict between classes (or classes at all) and history moves in this direction through that inherent conflict/opposition.
So it can take form in whatever way, but the eventual outcome in the long view of history will be the same, whatever it is called or thought of as.
I don’t think capitalism can keep collapsing and reforming forever. Extinction is possible (nuclear war, maybe climate change), and different economic systems are possible. The key thing is that as long as there are contradictions, there will be change. Under capitalism the biggest one is within the mode of production: capitalists organize labor in a way which results in great inefficiency and suffering, and this produces a class of workers who are incentivized to change the system. The longer capitalism goes on, the larger and more definite the working class becomes, sharpening this contradiction. Eventually something has to release the pressure: socialist revolution (likely via a DoP, which will have its own contradictions to work through on the way to communism), or a reconfiguration of classes into some new arrangement which will result in a different kind of conflict than bourgeois-proletariat. Social upheaval can blow off steam without fundamentally changing class relations, but pressure will just keep building up and it’s unreasonable to expect infinite, e.g., BLM outbursts to never turn into something more. Nukes may kill us all at once, but I think it’s likely that even though climate crisis will cause vast devastation, this will increase class conflict and therefore opportunities to resolve these new contradictions.
the way I see it, all societies fall into
some class is in control (nobility = feudalism, bourgeoisie = capitalism, workers = dictatorship of proletariat, etc). resolving contradictions can lead to communism
there aren’t coherent classes. communism (primitive or otherwise)
the theory of marxism can be applied perfectly fine to indigenous societies. go down and see if there are classes and what they’re doing in the same way as e.g. Mao in Hunan. you may very well find that there is not a proletariat! marxism doesn’t say that there will always be a working class, just that capitalism builds one
Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?
Well communism isn’t gonna emerge with a snap of the fingers, but what is guaranteed as long as we have classes is that there are going to be people who figure out what’s going on. Those are the ones Lenin said must struggle in order to get to communism. Marxism was discovered in European context, but it applies just as well whenever you’ve got classes and I don’t see any reason why it won’t keep getting rediscovered in different contexts if the original strain goes extinct.
Rosa is the author of “The Accumulation of Capital”, which was called something like “theory of the automatic demise of capitalism” and opposed in the USSR.
The book basically says that capitalism is impossible because equivalent exchange of value means there’s nobody to buy the products, and survives by appending more and more regions to the capitalist system, which allows unequivalent exchange. Lenin (and later Soviet Marxists) opposed it for being anti-revolutionary. It downplays the internal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the nominally anti-imperialist external contradiction analysis (which in itself is bad for framing it as a matter of fairness), and that devalues the revolutionary class struggle, even if that certainly wasn’t the intention (“automatic demise of capitalism” implies there’s no historical need for that), ironically it was also used for opposing national liberation movements under the pretext of it being impossible to strive for national interests without having to become an imperialist (this is basically KKE’s “Imperialist Pyramid” line).
Sadly, this means there’s plenty of “Luxembourgist” social fascists.
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.
I think the problem here is defining what communism is supposed to be, or what constitutes these “political structures.”
For Marx the “political structure” stems from the mode of production, what we usually call the base. In a very shortened form, it’s the interacting between productive forces, means of production and the property regime (and all its consequences). As Capital tries to multiply itself, capitalism has shown a development of the complexity and productivity of the means of production, along with requiring workers that are able to deal with this complex production (specifically, this is dealt with by having multiple people act in unity towards a single product), in other words, developing the productive force. As capitalism develops, it accumulates property under a central command while simultaneously making it a collective tool. So, in capitalism’s specific case, we’re dealing with private property that is only used by a capacitated collective.
The developing self-consciousness and organization of this productive collective pressures the regime of private property, which will strike back violently to keep existing, in the specific form of blunting the collective organization at all costs, as well as pushing back against the superstructure reflexions of these changes (i.e. fascism). If the self-conscious productive collective is victorious, it has been through a period where: the means of production have been transformed; the productive forces have been transformed; the property regime has been transformed. Thus, we have a new mode of production, and a new “political structure.”
This is the tendency of capitalism. But notice that this assumes a more or less constant development of technology, for example. What if climate catastrophes hit too hard too fast in the coming years? Parts of civilization could be severed from eachother, and develop in different ways, depending on what exactly gets destroyed. Would an electricity-starved modern nation still develop factories as we know them? Or would property get fragmented again? What knowledge and techniques would be lost or gained? That we can’t predict.
Barbarism
Has there been any real critical refutation of the idea that communism is inevitable? I remember Rosa saying that if you are a Marxist, then you MUST necessarily believe that it is inevitable as a matter of science, but…
Idk… Couldn’t capitalism just keep collapsing and reforming? Or extinction? Or a different economic structure emerges?
Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?
I bring this up because I wonder if the European ideological strain could die out as it ceases to be relevant. Indigenous groups have economic and societal structures that defy categorization. Anarchists like to claim these structures, but they’re not.
It seems like there’s an inexhaustible number political structures that could emerge rather than communism.
The idea thst animals can go extinct was new as hell during Rosa’s time. Fucking Andrew Jackson literally thought if they looked hard enough they’d find mastodons out there cause if God wanted a species dead he wouldn’t have made it in the first place. If you add the knowledge that yes, we can all die and there can be no more people ever again, the inevitability of communism is less scientific for sure. Given a long enough time span, I’m sure we would eventually get socialism but that’s no longer on the table.
Okay, but has anyone proved this wrong?
We haven’t looked in most of the deep sea yet.
Atlantian mammoths
I’m not a theory head, but I feel like what is being proposed is an end point where all contradictions have been resolved and there is no conflict between classes (or classes at all) and history moves in this direction through that inherent conflict/opposition.
So it can take form in whatever way, but the eventual outcome in the long view of history will be the same, whatever it is called or thought of as.
That makes sense
In the same way that capitalism moves from disequilibrium to disequilibrium, couldn’t humanity just keep hopping from conflict to conflict?
i’m not familiar w good critical refutation.
I don’t think capitalism can keep collapsing and reforming forever. Extinction is possible (nuclear war, maybe climate change), and different economic systems are possible. The key thing is that as long as there are contradictions, there will be change. Under capitalism the biggest one is within the mode of production: capitalists organize labor in a way which results in great inefficiency and suffering, and this produces a class of workers who are incentivized to change the system. The longer capitalism goes on, the larger and more definite the working class becomes, sharpening this contradiction. Eventually something has to release the pressure: socialist revolution (likely via a DoP, which will have its own contradictions to work through on the way to communism), or a reconfiguration of classes into some new arrangement which will result in a different kind of conflict than bourgeois-proletariat. Social upheaval can blow off steam without fundamentally changing class relations, but pressure will just keep building up and it’s unreasonable to expect infinite, e.g., BLM outbursts to never turn into something more. Nukes may kill us all at once, but I think it’s likely that even though climate crisis will cause vast devastation, this will increase class conflict and therefore opportunities to resolve these new contradictions.
the way I see it, all societies fall into
the theory of marxism can be applied perfectly fine to indigenous societies. go down and see if there are classes and what they’re doing in the same way as e.g. Mao in Hunan. you may very well find that there is not a proletariat! marxism doesn’t say that there will always be a working class, just that capitalism builds one
Well communism isn’t gonna emerge with a snap of the fingers, but what is guaranteed as long as we have classes is that there are going to be people who figure out what’s going on. Those are the ones Lenin said must struggle in order to get to communism. Marxism was discovered in European context, but it applies just as well whenever you’ve got classes and I don’t see any reason why it won’t keep getting rediscovered in different contexts if the original strain goes extinct.
Rosa is the author of “The Accumulation of Capital”, which was called something like “theory of the automatic demise of capitalism” and opposed in the USSR.
The book basically says that capitalism is impossible because equivalent exchange of value means there’s nobody to buy the products, and survives by appending more and more regions to the capitalist system, which allows unequivalent exchange. Lenin (and later Soviet Marxists) opposed it for being anti-revolutionary. It downplays the internal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the nominally anti-imperialist external contradiction analysis (which in itself is bad for framing it as a matter of fairness), and that devalues the revolutionary class struggle, even if that certainly wasn’t the intention (“automatic demise of capitalism” implies there’s no historical need for that), ironically it was also used for opposing national liberation movements under the pretext of it being impossible to strive for national interests without having to become an imperialist (this is basically KKE’s “Imperialist Pyramid” line).
Sadly, this means there’s plenty of “Luxembourgist” social fascists.
I think the problem here is defining what communism is supposed to be, or what constitutes these “political structures.”
For Marx the “political structure” stems from the mode of production, what we usually call the base. In a very shortened form, it’s the interacting between productive forces, means of production and the property regime (and all its consequences). As Capital tries to multiply itself, capitalism has shown a development of the complexity and productivity of the means of production, along with requiring workers that are able to deal with this complex production (specifically, this is dealt with by having multiple people act in unity towards a single product), in other words, developing the productive force. As capitalism develops, it accumulates property under a central command while simultaneously making it a collective tool. So, in capitalism’s specific case, we’re dealing with private property that is only used by a capacitated collective.
The developing self-consciousness and organization of this productive collective pressures the regime of private property, which will strike back violently to keep existing, in the specific form of blunting the collective organization at all costs, as well as pushing back against the superstructure reflexions of these changes (i.e. fascism). If the self-conscious productive collective is victorious, it has been through a period where: the means of production have been transformed; the productive forces have been transformed; the property regime has been transformed. Thus, we have a new mode of production, and a new “political structure.”
This is the tendency of capitalism. But notice that this assumes a more or less constant development of technology, for example. What if climate catastrophes hit too hard too fast in the coming years? Parts of civilization could be severed from eachother, and develop in different ways, depending on what exactly gets destroyed. Would an electricity-starved modern nation still develop factories as we know them? Or would property get fragmented again? What knowledge and techniques would be lost or gained? That we can’t predict.