I'm looking for a scholarly or at least sane DU analysis of the 10 Planks of Communism

[LLStarks]

A .org or .edu site would be nice.

I can't for the life of me find a decent breakdown of the 10 planks with respect to perceived incidental adoption of said planks in the US.


1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

[miscsoc]

1. Most of those planks are just reformist 19th c. socialist boilerplate

Marx selected them by way of appealing to a broad audience.

None of them are Marxist inventions. They are just bread and butter proposals Marx included in the manifesto to try to appeal to the broader socialist movement.

I'm not sure what sort of analysis could be given regarding their adoption in the U.S, because insofar as those policies have been adopted there they have had fuck all to do with any sort of marxist ideology.

I've read quite a bit of Marx and to be honest I don't think he did a great deal of thinking when he compiled that list. He basically came up with his abstract grand theory of the course of history, then realised he had to tack some concrete policies on to appeal to more practically minded people so just scraped up a bunch of vaguely radical ideas in circulation at the time and ran with them.

[aquart]

2. A heavy progressive tax on people who own nothing?

And they wonder why I have no respect for this man. "Industrial armies" for agriculture. I think we call that agribusiness.

"Equable distribution of population." THIS MAN WAS AN IDIOT. Was he also planning to redistribute water and mining and arable land to different locations? Ah. I see he was. He seems to have had this bucolic every man cultivating his garden view of the world.

"Abolition of children's factory labor IN ITS PRESENT FORM". Say what? What form did he think would make it adorable?

People died for this. Because it looked better than what they had. And the people they were opposing were such greedy, selfish, entitled jerks.

[proteus_lives]

3. +1

Communism is ridiculous if you actually think about it.

[drmeow]

4. I think Communism can work

on a very small scale (just as a lot of theoretical economic system can work on a very small scale) - i.e., a few of the early American colonies type scale. But not a single of the various economic systems can possible work as theorized on a globalized scale.

What I value about Marx is that he was presenting a sociological theory as much if not more than an economic theory. He is taught in Sociology as one of the pillars of sociological thought - most pure economists are not. He and Engels gave us a language and framework through which to view the world. As with any philosophical thinkers and inventors, they pulled together pieces from lots of other philosophers and great thinkers who came before them or where their contemporaries. What they did manage was to pull things together into an accessible whole. I think of them as being similar to Freud. Freud was DEAD wrong about a lot of things but he revolutionized the way we think about emotions and behavior.

[proteus_lives]

5. You have a point.

Communism can work in one village but it breaks down when you add more people to it.

[drmeow]

7. I think you can even extend it

to a second or even third village (i.e., an inland village and a coastal village don't produce the same things but can mutually aid each other). Beyond that, not so much. Also, when you start getting into really complex manufacturing processes I think it also breaks down - there was a reason who capitalism came into being. I think the same is true of a pure free market economy. When its not hard to start up manufacturing and when you don't have the government artificially shoring up one company or industry over another, its a lot easier to "not buy" or take your business elsewhere. But when you get into multi-national corporations the free market completely fails. That's why a lot of the systems work on paper or in models but not in the real world. (Of course, they also fail to take into account the existence of psychopaths who are the majority of the people who run big business these days but that's a different story.)

[miscsoc]

8. I think Marx was great at describing the world around him

But his historiological speculations and utopian theorising about how to move beyond the status quo are frankly largely bullshit.

His descriptions often rose to the level of genius, his prescriptions and predictions were almost uniformly embarassing nonsense.

[miscsoc]

6. I don't think most of the victims of Communism

Were victims of this list as such. As I said it's largely a grab bag of 19th c. moderate socialist policies. 20th century capital c communism owed much more to the more theoretical abstract bits of the manifesto than to this section. I wouldn't deny the connection between marx and the atrocities of communism, but I don't think his advocacy of a progressive income tax and so on are the relevant bits.

[drmeow]

9. Marx failed to take into account

the lust for power. From a psychological perspective, the notion that you could have a controlled, short term dictatorship is patently absurd.

[miscsoc]

10. yeah. although lenin shares a lot of the blame there

in the way he elaborated and expanded upon marx's already deeply problematic concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"

[readmoreoften]

12. What's deeply problematic is that people don't know what the goddamn term means.

The term just means that the working class controls the state apparatus so that reactionaries can't get back into power like they did during the Paris Commune and after the Spanish Civil War. If the CNT actually TOOK POWER instead of rolling over, Franco wouldn't have taken over the state apparatus.

What we live under is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, the term 'dictatorship' didn't mean despotism at the time. It was a figurative term. No one was called "a dictator" back then. It just meant that the working class should seize the assets from the owning class and the royalty and abolish both owning classes and royalty.

I always wonder why the reactionary armies are never given an iota of responsibility for any of this. Let's see... the Bolsheviks come to power during WWI and 14 countries invade them. Why? Because they want democracy? Yeah, I don't fucking think so.

[miscsoc]

14. actually i retract the "deeply problematic" phrase

I don't have my Marx to hand and wanted to hedge my bets in case someone pointed out that something I thought Lenin had come up with was actually Marx's. I do stand by my objections to Lenin's implementation and (partly) theorisation of what the dictatorship of the proletariat actually consisted in.

[Unvanguard]

22. Not particularly. He understood the lust for power a whole lot better than many.

And got that utopian appeals to justice often fall on deaf ears in that context.

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not a dictatorship in the sense you are using it at all.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

15. Correct. It's the extreme rightists who want to conflate pro-poor policies and gulags. -nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. That is the propaganda understading of it

not the reality. He was in a continuity with Smith... and they realized that people who got a living wage, woudl be able to pay taxes for public services.

Trust me... actually READYING these things... is pointing to the heavy propaganda...

[Unvanguard]

21. These are not proposals for a communist society.

A heavy progressive income tax means exactly what you would think it means in our society. The agricultural proposal is indeed agribusiness-like, in that it is essentially a call for the industrialization of agriculture: that is entirely at odds with an "every man cultivating his garden view of the world", incidentally.

[surrealAmerican]

31. It didn't only "look" better than what they had ...

... it was better. Both the urban and rural poor were desperate. At least they could survive under communism.

[readmoreoften]

11. Try marxists.org. Those are not the "eternal" 10 planks of communism, just a 19th century

intervention that made sense at the time. Marxism isn't a religion, it's a method of examining material change. Many socialists/communists no longer hold to much of these, and some of these are perversions of the spirit of his ideas. (Marx was not a proponent of state capitalism, the state as a proletariat coup was supposed to wither away after revolutionary upsurge, not hang around for eternity. Moreover, very few Marxists today support state capitalism. I mean, it doesn't even make sense anymore.)

Another example of is mass industrialization of agriculture. Marxists are materialists-- that is outdated information; very VERY few Marxists support any kind of mass ag because to do so would defy material reality.

#4 was very era-specific.

You can't really look at Marx to gather what Marxists think, because Marxism is living/dialectical/historical. To really get a grasp of the arguments, you need to decipher between the facts and attitudes of the German SDP, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao. For example, (as I understand it) most contemporary Trotskyists don't consider North Korea or China to be Communist. Many Stalinists do. Some Maoists consider N. Korea but not China, etc. That makes a real difference in strategy and argument. I mean, whether or not you consider China a socialist state really sets the bar for what you're trying to engender in the world.

Just my 2 cents.

[miscsoc]

13. i second marxists.org

and I'd add Bernstein to the list of thinkers that are worth reading.

I have a lot of problems with "Marxism" as a movement, and shy away from that label because I don't like the cultish elements which developed among marxists even during his own lifetime. I do consider him a genius and the man who has contributed the most to my political perspective and general understanding of the world.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. Two things that caught my attention from reading Adam Smith

and I am far from done

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Yes he borrowed this from both Smith and Ricardo... and it is not just Marxist but quite Capitalist... the degree of separation is just in how much you tax, not whether you should

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Well Marx might have written this, but guess what? This was part of the plank for the Working Man's party of Boston back in 1824 and later adopted by the Grand Old Party in 1852.

In fact, public education also became part of the platform for the union movement in the United States throughout the 19th century.

Now this one is borrowed from Malthus in his essay on Population

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

So as you can see, Marx is in a continuity with Classical Economists... and in effect he is one of them... the last of them.



I realize that I am talking about something not popular, and that is... the idea that there is continuity of thought starting with the Enlightenment.

Oh and I'd be remiss

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

That was very much a REPUBLICAN value of the US Early Republic, which Toqueville went deeply into, as well the Physiocrats even much earlier.

Oh and much of this goes into Fourenism as well.

I hope this helps

but here are soem things for you to look into

Fournier

Physiocrats

Malthus

Ricardo

And of course Adam Smith

As well as the Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel.

[miscsoc]

18. I might add that Thomas Paine

The heroic rabble rouser of the american revolution, who the likes of glenn beck revere to this day, was one of the major early popular proponents of the progressive income tax. I wish I could find the tax proposal he had in the back of one of his later books, but the top marginal rates went up to ninety per cent or so.

I think it was in "the rights of man". he drew up an income tax proposal, complete with a table of like ten different brackets. This was in the 18th century. Anyone have this?

[nadinbrzezinski]

33. Yes Paine drew from Smith and Ricardo

it was in the water of the Enlightenment.

Hell the guy I wrote my thesis in... in Mexico... went into that in his papers too.

Oh and I'd be remiss, Smith drew heavily from Hume and Locke

[hfojvt]

19. I think you mean Fourier

google, at least, is not finding me an obvious "Fournier"

but this guy, is very cool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier

not to be confused with his older brother Joe who discovered global warming - in 1824!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fourier

[nadinbrzezinski]

34. And it became big in the US and Europe

including people adopting the lifestyle and founding colonies that failed miserably.

[Unvanguard]

20. These are not planks of communism at all, they are proposals for immediate reform.

Steps to begin the transition to socialized ownership. (Obviously, outside of that context some of them serve other roles.)

[bemildred]

23. There are no "planks of Communism", and if there were, these would not be them.

If you are genuinely interested in Communism as a political theory, you ought to go read the theorists: Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Mao, etc. There are lots of them. While you are at it, you could read some Socialists and Anarchists like Proudhon and Emma Goldman, and George Orwell had a lot to say about these issues too. Hardt and Negri's "Empire" is an interesting take on the present situation.

The list you posted sounds like ignorant wingnut blather - although some of the ideas there are good, for example abolishing child labor - but the list and particularly calling it "planks of Communism" stinks of Wingnuttery.

It is certainly true that Commie revolutionists have done some bonehead stupid things, but then Capitalist/Corporatist whore politicians crash the sytem every decade or two, so who is one supposed to choose? Does one prefer Chernobyl or the current oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Texaco?

[miscsoc]

24. I'm pretty sure that list is directly from the communist manifesto

Although I'll have a look

edit: yeah, here we go, they are near the bottom of this page here

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

They aren't specifically communist ideas at all, just mild reform proposals, but wingnuts love that bit of the manifesto because they can point to it and say "Marx was for that!" when they don't like some mild liberal policy. Of course they never mention the child labour bit these days but I'll wager they did when child labour legislation was passed in america.

[bemildred]

25. OK.

I still stand by what I said, i.e. there are no "planks of Communisn" and this stinks of Wingnuttery, and it doesn't sound to me like you and I disagree.

[miscsoc]

26. no, we don't. They are in no sense "planks of communism"

they are a bunch of short term reform proposals from the manifesto pamphlet.

[bemildred]

27. I never could get through the Manifesto. Tried several times.

Like most political polemics it is unreadable as exposition. Marx makes me think of Freud in some respects, came up with paradigm-shifting ideas (the unconsious mind in Freud's case), and then buried them in a cobweb of empty theorizing and dogmatic argumentation with their own schismatics.

[miscsoc]

28. I don't think I got much out of the manifesto

Re: Marx, I'd basically recommend buying a copy of Capital and then listening to the lectures by David Harvey on this site: http://davidharvey.org/ I've never read much of Capital - I've tried several times, like you said re: the manifesto. But Harvey directs you to certain sections etc, so it's good to have the book there.

Actually you can get the whole text online, anyway. I'd recommend to listen to a couple of the lectures and see what you think.

The approach he takes is one I'd imagine you might appreciate.

[sinkingfeeling]

29. Those 10 planks came directly from Ron Paul and the Libertarians. And are on RW and Tea Party sites.

http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html

[hughee99]

32. So they're NOT from Marx and Engels then? n/t

[Dr. Strange]

35. They are from Marx.

Ron Paul just copied them to inject his own comments.

[kentuck]

30. hit and run?

a plant?