The Fatal Flaw of Communism - by Frank Zappa

[Coito ergo sum]

Absolutely not. Only on a few Pacific island nations.

And, they live on average to 45 and shit in the woods.

[Seth]

To me left and right translates to societies organised around need or greed. I think which is which is pretty obvious. What we seem to have is somersetting sot of in the middle which swings back and forth between the two depending on prevailing conditions.

Which of course is a flippant and ignorant simplistic view of a more complex issue. The Left is not about "need" and never has been, as much as it likes to claim it is. It's actually about greed. It's about those who have less wanting to take stuff from those who have more because they don't think it's "fair" that they have less...even though the reason they have less is because they haven't earned more. The Right is actually about allowing people to keep and enjoy the fruits of their labor without it being taken from them, so in reality, Capitalism is closer to Marx's idealistic notions of the worker enjoying the fruits of his labor than either socialism or communism are.

Marx just use capitalism and the bourgeoisie as a stalking-horse for his ridiculous arguments without acknowledging that the individual worker who is "forced to sell his labor" is in fact engaging in capitalism by capitalizing his skills and abilities. The worker is not being "exploited" by the business owner at all, he's made a fair trade of his daily labor in return for a guaranteed daily wage. He does not have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune like the business owner, who risks everything in creating and operating the company, he does his eight hours doing productive labor and he gets paid what he's agreed his labor is worth, and he gets his paycheck whether or not the labor he does produces a profit for the owner or not.

The small craftsman, artisan or business owner is just another "worker" who invests management skills and money in creating a company as his form of labor, the fruits of which he ought to be entitled to enjoy...if and when there are any fruits.

A corporation is merely a highly socialistic business form made up of people who risk their capital to fund the company's efforts to produce products and profits and workers, right up to the CEO, who work at the behest of the investors, for an amount that the investors and the employees mutually agree they are due.

The investors face the risk of capital loss, and that capital represents the value of their own labor and the fruits of it, so they are entitled to greater rewards because of the risk they face of losing all their fruits...something the employees, right up to the CEO, do not face.

Marx's entire theory of capital and his entire socialist/communist fantasy is built entirely around one single foundational argument that, once destroyed, destroys his whole ideology: He bases all his arguments on the single bald assertion that capital risk is not "labor." Then on top of that foundation of sand he builds the rest of his flimsy edifice on the proposition that rents and interest are somehow immoral.

But capital risk IS labor because it represents the fruits of previous labor that are placed at risk in order to create the mechanisms that create wealth through free trade. Marx discounts this merely because he doesn't see the connection between capital and labor nor does he accept risk as a valid justification for profit. But that's just his conceit talking.

Communism will always fail because it demands that individuals give something in return for nothing. It requires that each person put more labor into the system than they get benefits out of the system, which inevitably drives labor input down to the lowest common denominator where everyone is only putting in the absolute minimum possible amount of labor in order to stay alive or qualify for the benefits.

No profit motive, no reason to work harder than minimally possible or input more energy to the system that one has to. And as a result, the system fails because it must, by its nature, become more and more authoritarian and tyrannical as less and less work gets done and more and more civil unrest bubbles to the surface as people deprived of anything but the basics, and soon enough not even that, begin to starve. To maintain order, the central power must impose harsh rules of behavior to try to force people to input more labor than they are willing to input on their own, merely to maintain the basic living standard for the society.

And then people begin to die wholesale, as the government liquidates those who don't input "enough" labor to the system, or those who object to the privation, misery and starvation.

Communism ALWAYS fails, and always will fail because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Communism cannot even begin to succeed without a powerful and corrupt central government, because that's the nature of human beings. Communism can never proceed beyond State Socialism and tight central control because to do so it would have to dissolve the very systems of power and control upon which the entire system depends for central planning and control, but without those rigid systems of control, the society quickly devolves into anarchy and war as competing groups vie for the available resources and try to make a profit (there's capitalism again, creeping back in) so that their group can have more than some other.

That's how human societal groups work, and Communism (and it's predecessor Socialism) fail to take that into account, so they always fail, just as we're seeing in Europe right now.

Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the natural economic model that human beings follow from the beginning of time.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Will we ever have Just-folks-getting-by-ism?

Aren't people free to be that now?

No.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"
Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the natural economic model that human beings follow from the beginning of time."

[Drewish]

"Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the natural economic model that human beings follow from the beginning of time."

I agree with Gawdzilla here.

"Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the only functional economic model that human beings have found sense the beginning of time."



There we go.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

[Drewish]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

Well the earliest gold and silver coins are from the seventh century BC. Evidence of wooden coins and bartering predate that be a few thousand years. If you're talking fine with living in a hut or cave with a tribe made up of your direct relatives, then no need for money

[Seth]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

I don't. Humans are essentially selfish and always look to their own survival over the survival of others, as a general behavioral rule. There are of course exceptions to this general rule including parental sacrifice and acts of altruism, but the general model of human behavior, like the behavior of literally every other living organism on the planet, is to seek out and obtain for their exclusive use those resources necessary for their individual survival as the first priority.

As thinking creatures, humans go further in acquiring those resources in excess of what they need at any given moment, so as to have a surplus of resources to get them through hard times. They may do this collectively, in order to create efficiencies in gathering resources, but each individual will claim the largest possible part of the resulting gather that they can manage to claim, through force or through social custom (which is just another way of saying "through force"), in order to enhance their own situation.

And where one individual gathers one type of resource (say, plants) and another individual gathers another type of resource (say meat), they will naturally trade between themselves what is excess to their needs in return for resources that they they don't have. And, they will always try to get the best "value" for their trade, maximizing their intake and minimizing their output of energy so that they can "profit" from the trade.

And that is free market capitalism in a nutshell. And that has been going on since humans first started walking upright, if not before. Certainly it's been going on since the beginning of recorded history. The very earliest cuneiform clay tablets found are inventories and accounts of merchants engaging in trade.

So, I'd say your doubt is misplaced.

[John_fi_Skye]

Lots of prejudice on here now, guys - as well as a fair bit of failure to read pretty clear English. Must be my Scottish accent.

[Coito ergo sum]

Will we ever have Just-folks-getting-by-ism?

Aren't people free to be that now?

No.

Huh... looks like it to me. You can be a guy who is just a folk getting by, or you can be a keep up with the Joneses guy. Nice to be free to do as you please. Or, maybe it would be better to make sure nobody can do anything more than "just get by." Much better, that.

[Coito ergo sum]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

Well, they couldn't be, since capitalism requires capital which requires a monetary system. Barter systems didn't have capitalism.

Moreover, for most of human history humanity lived under monarchical despotism, wherein a single person or an aristocracy owned the property and the means of production.

[Seth]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

Well, they couldn't be, since capitalism requires capital which requires a monetary system. Barter systems didn't have capitalism.

Sez who? "Money" is merely a representation of a quantity of goods at a particular value per unit. Nothing prevents "capital" from being the goods themselves.

If I say to you "I'll invest 20 tons of wheat I have in storage as my share of building a mill and bakery, while you provide the millwheel and ovens, and we'll share the profits (be they chickens or gold coins) equally," that's free market capitalism at work.

Moreover, for most of human history humanity lived under monarchical despotism, wherein a single person or an aristocracy owned the property and the means of production.

And yet within that structure, capitalism and free trade took place literally everywhere. Even in feudalism, the serf was allowed to keep a portion of the crops he grew, and could trade them with other serfs in free trade capitalism.

It's always been the case that those who have goods to trade in excess of their immediate needs will "capitalize" those goods to their advantage in a trade with someone who has other goods that he needs or wants.

[Coito ergo sum]

As usual, Seth, you redefine terms out of existence. Only you can try to make the argument that feudalism was actually capitalism.

Just because Joe Serf sold his cow to Sidney Peasant doesn't mean there was "capitalism." Capitalism isn't "buying stuff." Capitalism is an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production is held primarily or chiefly in private hands.

That wasn't the case in feudal Europe.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I seriously doubt the human race has been capitalist from the start.

Well the earliest gold and silver coins are from the seventh century BC. Evidence of wooden coins and bartering predate that be a few thousand years. If you're talking fine with living in a hut or cave with a tribe made up of your direct relatives, then no need for money

Homo Sap has been around much longer than that. 99% of our time on Earth we had no idea of what money was.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

"Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the natural economic model that human beings follow from the beginning of time."

I agree with Gawdzilla here.

"Capitalism and free trade endure because it is the only functional economic model that human beings have found sense the beginning of time."



There we go.

Define "functioning" - and for who's benefit does it 'function'.


Economic systems, like money itself, are ultimately artificial constructs, and thus at-the-end-of-the-day are only worth what they provide for people in exchange for individually and collectively participating in them - If people are getting ever diminishing returns from modern capitalism in exchange for giving more-and-more, than why should they keep the capitalist 'faith'?