Communism

Back in the middle of the industrial revolution, Karl Marx took a look at the way the working class were living and was not impressed. Clearly they were poor, and living hand to mouth in most cases, whilst on the other hand those with their hands on the means of production were extremely wealthy. These wealthy capitalists could not be challenged by the working class, unless the working class rose up in a revolution and took the wealth back from the capitalists by
force. Marx believed that once this was done everybody would live as one big happy classless family. He was totally wrong however, as was demonstrated by the first real-world implementation of Marxism which was to be known as communism.

In the communist system it is realised that all the rich people have their hands on the means of production. As a result they are in an unassailable position whereby the rich keep all the wealth to themselves and eveyone else gets the scraps from the table. Communism sought to address this by taking ownership of the means of production off the wealthy and collecting it all together in one place. These "collectives" of ownership needed to be controlled by someone - and that someone would be a representative of the communist state. So now you can see the clear difference. In the capitalist system all the means of production and hence all the wealth
is controlled by a small number of people and everyone else is a slave to the system. In the communist system all the means of production and hence all the wealth is controlled by a small number of people and everyone else is a slave to the system. See the difference? In the former case the people on top are called "capitalists" and in the latter case they are called "communists". Big deal. In fact you can already see that the capitalist system at least has the advantage that the power that goes with wealth is slightly separated from the power that comes from politics.

Now, it gets worse...

As I said, I believe society is like a living biological mechanism. If you take the head of that organism and swap it for a completely different head you are asking for trouble. The new head is unlikely to know anything that the old head knew. The patient is likely to suffer severe trauma during the operation. And yet that is just what a communist revolution does. Wise heads are despatched and replaced with fresh new, but unwise heads - and this is done wholesale.
Consequently nobody knows what they should be doing (but nobody wants to admit it). A lot of people are killed during the process of revolution.

And the problems continued, because it was not just the head of the biological mechanism that was replaced, but many of the internal organs were transplanted to, leading to rejection of those new organs...

Communism started to suffer from the Laws of Unintended Consequences. The point of a communist revolution was to make the employees better off by reducing the "inefficient" cut-throat competition of the capitalist system. The state would set the prices of production in order to alleviate the burden on the employees. The problems of this become obvious with farming. If you reduce the incentive to sell more produce but suggest that under communism farmers should not work so hard then the farmer will simply produce enough food for his own family and then take a long rest. This is a very bad thing. And when the communists realised that food production was falling they needed to do something about it. They couldn't blame their own system (due to the psychological problem known as an "escalated commitment to a failed course of action") so they had to blame the farmers. Obviously it must be a conspiracy. The farmers need to be oppressed. Send them to the gulag. Replace them with new "communist" farmers. The communist farmers don't know what they are doing so farm production falls again. It must be another conspiracy right? So more oppression and murder and imprisonment results. Production continues to fall and what is worse the employees are now working under the threat of the gun where previously under the capitalist system they were working merely under the threat of being layed off.

Communism appeals to the emloyees by reason of making their life easier, but inherently if you make their life easier then production must fall. If production falls then the employees must be materially worse off. To raise production without re-introducing the incentives that would lead to class distinction that communism attempts to avoid, you must resort to brute force. Simple.


The fact is that all revolutions of any kind are primed to expect resistance and primed to oppress that resistance by violence. Consequently the failings of a revolution will be seen not as failings in reality but as "resistance" which must be violently repressed.

You were probably taught in school that Stalin was a violent man that oppressed his people. But the reality is that communist revolution always results in failure, which is then perceived as "resistance" to the revolution, and this always results in continued violent repression of the people. Right now it is happening in Burma, and Cuba, and Zimbabwe and many other places. It is the idea at the base of these revolutions that is fundamentally flawed, which results in a need for the regime to impose its failed beliefs by force, which in turn means that there must be a violent oppressor at the top of the regime. If the leader of the regime doesn't fulfill that requirement by becoming increasingly violent, then the regime will tend to replace him with someone that is prepared to be a violent oppressor. This is why all these communist regimes have gone the same way. They are trapped in a mechanism of their own creation where the violence and oppression and failure are inevitable right from the start. Once again a "god" created from the mechanism of society.

Capitalism is bad, but communism is far worse, because it is fatally flawed and in the end can only be imposed by continued brute force.

But what of that flavour in between pure communism and pure capitalism we usually refer to as socialism? More about that tomorrow....

"Deus Ex Machina"

Before I delve into the politics and economics, I want to clarify what I mean by "Deus Ex Machina". It would be easy for readers to get the impression that I see society as some kind of robotic machine that creates a god, floating on the clouds and dispensing mystical thunderbolts. This is definitely not what I mean! I consider this machine as a biological entity with the "god" being a separate consciousness that is derived from society but has no physical embodiment. It is a function of group thinking, and I suspect that all groups with more than 100 members tend to suffer from it. Let me show you what I mean by analogy to the human body.

In the beginning there were single celled organisms. Each was a living entity in its own right, but these living entities did not relate closely to other single-celled organisms. We can imagine this as being similar to human society before language developed, before complex communication was possible.

Thanks to the process of evolution, the single-celled organisms changed their behaviour. Instead of dividing and separating into separate creatures, they clumped together to form colonies. This didn't happen as a planned, well thought out strategy. The single-celled creatures were not capable of such things. In reality it happened as an accidental response to the environment the single-celled creatures found themselves in. It seemed to work, and these multi-cellular organisms thrived. This is analogous to the period of human history where language first developed and communities formed.

The process of evolution continued. Multi-celled organisms developed into ever more sophisticated creatures where certain cells were tasked with specific functions within a much larger organism. Each single-cell continued to be a living organism in its own right, but with no understanding of its position within the creature it was a part of, and no awareness of the existence of such a creature. This is where evolution currently stands, and it is analogous to the evolution of human society, which reached its apogee perhaps around the time of the Egyptians. Complex societies formed where individuals might have very specific functions within a society that was sufficiently complex that no individual could fully grasp how the totality of society functioned.

It should be realised that evolution is not driven by the individual cells that make up the human body. These individual cells are unaware that evolution is happening, or that they are part of some larger mechanism. Are we aware that we are part of the creation of human history? The cells are not aiming towards a particular, worthwhile goal - and neither are we.

Those cells that are part of the brain may be part of the thought process of the human individual, but they are unaware of the thoughts of that individual. Similarly, those individuals in human society that have power and influence over the whole, are actually unaware that they are trapped within a larger mechanism and that their thoughts are just a small fraction of the thinking of the whole organism we call "society".

Naturally the human body is built up not merely of cells, but of separate key functions that relate to each other. Changing one of these key functions could prove fatal to the whole organism. Sometimes the importance of certain body parts is not immediately obvious. On the other hand, individual cells may die, but they act in parallel with many other cells and can readily be replaced.

In human society, political revolutions are analogous to performing multiple organ transplants. The trauma of the operation is liable to be fatal to the patient. For such radical surgery to have a chance of success, the patient must first be put on life support. But there may also be a temptation to do nothing at all to alter the running of society. Any change could prove detrimental. But by failing to grasp the reality that history is something that is being forced upon us as individuals by the thinking of "society" we fail to become truly free. We are slaves to "society" however that society is defined. The thinking of "society” as a whole may be leading us slowly towards disaster, without us even being aware of it. No single individual is actually in charge, although it may seem like there is. It may seem that there is a conspiracy to control us, especially when the outcome of government thinking seems out of tune with our own thinking - but there is no conspiracy. We, and our governments, are trapped by the thinking of "society" as a whole.

In my next post, I intend to apply this "Deus ex Machina" model to the behaviour of a large corporation, so that it should become more obvious how trapped we are within the organisational structures we create. Subsequently I will expand the concept to the societies we have created.