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Unread 20 Dec 2005, 17:27   #43
Dante Hicks
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Join Date: Jun 2001
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Re: I'm thinking about joining the Communist Party

Quote:
Originally Posted by mist
my understanding of communism (which may well be flawed, infact, i'd be surprised if it isn't) stems partially from that infamous quote about each working to their ability and receiving to their needs. for this to happen, people have to be willing to work to their ability in return for the covering of their needs. madi's point that people are basically selfish (and other assorted 'bad' things) implies that this won't work, as they'll either try and do less work, or want more reward, or a combination of the two. as such, this would seem a problem. just because morally providing for everyone makes sense doesn't mean that people will do it, or agree with your morals.
We've discussed this various times on this forum, but essentially one can say the following :

1. How people behave now is not necessarily how they'd behave in different circumstances. This is a truism of course, but if we look at prior civilisations (or different cultures) people behave in entirely different fashions, depending on the social/economic system in place. So it is difficult to look at how people behave under capitalism and then abstract that to how they'd behave under post-capitalism.

2. Having said that, it's clear there are probably enduring traits in human behaviour (possibly based on evolution, or just byproducts of our biology, whatever). This is basically what's being alleged here - that people are "selfish". OK, fair dues - but what do we mean by this?

So far people seem to say "People will do things in their own personal interest". But then we also seem to be saying that people are also capable of helping others (e.g. their families, clans, or friends). There are even examples where people help complete strangers of different ethnicities/cultures/etc, when they feel like it. Which kind of weakens the whole use of the word "selfish".

Will there be people who want more physical possessions in an alternate society? Almost certainly. Does that matter particularly? Not really. It's easy to imagine a variety of systems where people could have incentives / disincentives from certain behaviour - this is an iron rule of society, I'd say. But these aren't things we're going to somehow project out of the mind, there'd need to be a wide range of social experimentation I'd wager.

People seem to have some ridiculously simplistic notion of how social change would or might operate. As if one day all the shops would stop paying their workers and giving their produce for free and then be surprised when everything collapsed. Shockingly, that's not quite how things would work.
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