A significant flaw in communist ideology

[matrixmann]

A thing that communism in the past definitely didn’t achieve - and which you could consider a task to rack one’s brains about for its adaption to the modern days and to the future: Freeing humans from the need to go working and earning money in order to finance a living.
Communism made the conditions of working takeable, even partly comfortable, for the workers, but it didn’t develop answers for a scenario when the workers won’t be needed anymore - when machines become fully able to replace them or when tasks are finished and needs for goods are covered for a while.
Last but not least, it didn’t develop an idea for when the point in time will be hit that the earth’s human population increases to such numbers that the enhancement of production won’t be good for the nature of the planet anymore as well as there will be no increase in workforce anymore proportional to the population growth because it isn’t needed for covering the demand of goods and services. (Or, in other words: Communism contains no idea what to do in case of human overpopulation - when children start getting born for which there is no task in society waiting for them when they’re grown up.)
If you still base a society upon everybody having a job to do grocery shopping and maintaining a place to live, then this is a major flaw when it comes to the future awaiting mankind now in the 21st century - overpopulation and ecological disasters.

Comments

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

Even though I was born in communist country and I was living in it for a while – I had not been taking all the communists doctrines seriously, we all were like playing games on all the levels, so I was never reading some fundamental books of Marx, Lenin or others, so I have no clue what communists were pretending they are going to. I think, the idea of communism was excellent for several groups – for Germans and Anglo-Saxons to get rid of Russia as the super power country, for Jews in Russia to get to the top, for poor Russians to change something in their lives but Not Germans, not British, no Jews, no poor stupid Russians, I do think, were never thinking far from their close goals. What people will do when they will not have a need to work…? Is it ever possible? When you have no need for money, money is getting cheap and with the laws of society other things are starting to play the role of values of change – pieces of art, time, health whatever and people will be working always. If you look on our days there are many jobs which people of past would have called not working…

[matrixmann]

I get in touch here and there with what's written in the "doctrines", or rather call them "the big books of this", but I never read them myself because - one reason is lack of time, another is: "All people who once start to read these don't do anything but quoting any random line from it in every life situation from then on.". And I don't want to turn into any of these, I feel like I've already had that in my life with someone else's words.

And... one thing in between that disturbs me very much is this making a God out of "work".
There are so many conditions in life that can render you unable to follow that - that make can "working" your least concern.
So, what's it worth - a system that bases your value as a person or creature not on money, but on your capability to perform a certain task or on the general skillfulness of your hands alone? Doesn't that aim for the same outcome?
If you don't have any of both - neither money, nor skill -, what then? You're going to get forced to something or excluded from society or executed for being useless?
All of that, I think the old doctrines don't answer in a satisfying way. It's because they're from former centuries. They're not adapted to a world where humans make their own performance superfluous. Or where the world will be so overpopulated that, if all would get a propper job, it needed the resoures of 7 planet earths to make that daily compulsion possible until death.

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

To write more correctly what I am trying to say – is that all the human activity which goes beyond the main surviving is not work, no matter if people are doing it even when they are going into debts – music, art, even science at some point and nobody feel workless with doing it, instead all are getting very tired at the end of a working-smoking hard day… I think, that it was one of the main problems of USSR which had led to its bankruptcy is that many people in USSR were actually not working but showing the work cause we were not having a real competition… People were going to work every day, to communicate, to do something but they were not interested to do products, so our USSR communist answer to the times when people will not need to work had got very obvious – the system will collapse. But in real world not in some kind of Utopia, as I mentioned in previous comment, this will never happened because people will like always what they couldn’t afford and this fact will make some new analog of money which you will pay and hence you will need to do something or to donate something…

[matrixmann]

I think here you have to see differences between varying mentalities in differing geographical areas, in differing communist states.
German mentalitity was like - you needn't really whip them into going to work, they did that all by themselves. Delivering quality in that also once was a virtue that came with it. Like - "if starting to do something, then do it properly and not just half the quality needed!".
I don't know how to put this... The English term "Honest Fritz" very much suits here as a description.
Of couse this attitude is a development - these days, those German quality virtues slowly disappear because of the market not caring about quality anymore, but quantities...

But - just as a comparison: As far as I already got it, in Russia you didn't ever start with nearly as good conditions. You maybe had your parts of the populace willing to work and do it properly, and then, on the other hand, you had your part of the population which wanted to live like the nobles - rich and living like in the lap of luxury without doing anything.
This part is also highly prone to corruption because they don't care however they achieve their main goal, just that they get there and after that, they live like "après moi, le déluge".

Early communism tried to start to change that.
That's why Stalin is viewed that controversially in his historical meaning - one fraction hates him, another supports his politics back then.
Because, under him, it was being tried to get it into the attitude of Russian population "don't soft-soap me, just do your fucking job properly!". To put an end this social culture of steady corruption and where everybody does Цапцарап in order to enrich themselves without regard for what it may do to the rest of the local community.
The point why he's despised internationally in this aspect is because there was so much force and voilence being used to achieve this.
But, at least, I understand it that way what he was trying to install in the heads of the population. He was trying to change the average Russian social culture - to make the country arrive in the 20th century, erase terrible shortages of the past which had climaxed at the end of the reign of the Romanovs and to lay down the mental ground for the country to maintain its state of "wealth" (seen from extreme poverty) which they had built since the beginning of the revolution.

With Stalin dying inevitably, in 1953, the main force for driving that forth extinguished, nobody picked this mentality fight up in that intensity anymore, so... old habits came through again, piece by piece. This "soft-soaping my lord, so maybe I can live in the lap of luxury as his loyal servant" and stealing whenever possible instead of getting honest and regard "wealth" as something that must be built by somebody in order to obtain it.