We're all familiar with those Twitter threads about what job you'd want after the revolution. On the other hand, you may have run into those annoying Marxists that scoff at any discussion about communism and call you an adherent of Lassalle for having any vision for the future. Well thankfully the users on this website are quite a bit more chill, so I'd like to discuss what we can realistically infer about life under communism.
By communism, I mean the following: the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established, private property has been abolished, wage-labor has been done away with, the economy is centrally planned using labor-time, and these developments have occurred all over the world. That is to say, lower-stage communism, or the highest development of socialism that is technically possible in the present or near-future.
Here is what I have considered so far. I can elaborate if the logic doesn't make sense, and obviously criticism is fine as long as you're not a Redditor about it.
- The end of economic depressions - well honestly you can do this and still keep the capitalists :some-controversy:
- The end of unemployment/reserve army of labor
- Higher quality of life - most people will be paid more for their labor, abolition of profit means less appropriation of surplus value (still need to do this for capital investment and taxes), abolition of private property and inheritance will mean more resources for the social commonwealth
- The disappearance of anti-immigrant sentiment - there would be no downward pressure on wages, and the increase of labor to the social pool that results from immigration would be more directly beneficial to the average person than it is now (that said, most causes of immigration would disappear and also there could theoretically be resource constraints)
- Increased productivity - the higher cost of labor will increase automation, drive down prices, and lower the amount of necessary labor
- Automation - capitalism can only exist by extracting surplus value, which you cannot do to machines; thus automation can only be completed under communism
- More big projects - long-term, capital-intensive projects are usually avoided by capitalists although the state sector of some capitalist governments sometimes picks up the slack; we could expect more (1000 nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion, high speed rail, etc)
- The end of many diseases - China kept COVID-19 at bay for 3 years but a communist Earth probably could have eradicated it with quarantines
- Sustainability - capitalism pretty obviously cannot fix the metabolic rift but if we get rid of profit then theoretically it's possible
Yeah, it's not unrealistic to have individual hopes, or an initial post revolutionary program. It's just unrealistic to expect them to survive contact with reality unchanged. It's dialectical materialism after all, not vulgar mechanistic materialism.
It’s sort of impossible for us to know, Marx and Engels themselves weren’t particularly interested in trying to predict what it would look like, they were more interested in analysing how to bring it about and the necessity of doing so.
I think one thing is for sure given the state of the climate catastrophe, any future communist society will have to embrace degrowth on a wide scale. In Marx and Engels time we could dream of a society unfettered from capitalism‘s shortcomings and anarchy of production, where the productive forces could be unleashed and we could hurtle towards FALGSC, but I think those ideas have to be tempered now by the fact that we need to undo centuries of damage done to the planet by capital.
I think one thing is for sure given the state of the climate catastrophe, any future communist society will have to embrace degrowth on a wide scale. In Marx and Engels time we could dream of a society unfettered from capitalism‘s shortcomings and anarchy of production, where the productive forces could be unleashed and we could hurtle towards FALGSC, but I think those ideas have to be tempered now by the fact that we need to undo centuries of damage done to the planet by capital.
I'm not sure that this is an "Either/Or" situation. Like, there is a real extent to which people are going to have to be willing to reduce their raw resource consumption, but a lot of that all really has to do with not using cars anymore, and eating meat & dairy much less frequently.
Conversely, a shit load of actual production & work needs to be done literally for the purposes of reconfiguring our material base (which is utterly dependent on cheap & widely available fossil fuels) over to something more... reasonable for lack of a better term. In order to make the continued functioning of industrial civilization even possible.
A lot more people work in education and medicine, since those are underfunded, globally needed, and require human labor. Also a long period where it's extremely common to work in construction, since building out green and nuclear power, railroads, and urban housing are all required to have a high standard of living while surviving climate change.
After the transitional period, I think we'll have to grapple with how to structure a shocking amount of free time. Every time I've napkin mathed it, I've ended up with a western standard of living requiring about ten years worth of labor at 40 hour work weeks, without further automation. I don't know if you structure that as retiring after ten years or one day work-weeks or two hour days or what.
The end of many diseases - China kept COVID-19 at bay for 3 years but a communist Earth probably could have eradicated it quarantines
Yeah this is the utopian project I'd throw my support behind. Let's do a global synchronized quarantine for two months, to eradicate the flu, cold, COVID, and a hundred un-named cruds. The biggest logistical obstacle is getting everyone adequately housed with a well-stocked pantry beforehand, which is already desirable.
I am interested in this napkin math... What sort of things did you look at to estimate it?
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Yeah, it'd be rad. Nothing sounds unrealistic, just a matter of getting there in time.
We'd spend all day calling each other liberals who are doing communism wrong
The immediate communist future is honestly not going to be that great for people within the imperial core as reparations need to be paid to the global south through labor-time. The global south aren't going to be able to rest their feet either as the entirety of humanity would have to struggle against the climate crisis and the mass extinction and suffering that comes with it. Whether humanity can even survive the climate crisis without billions dying depends on how soon global communism is even reached.
The disappearance of anti-immigrant sentiment
There wouldn't be immigrants. The word would disappear. With a one-world government, there wouldn't be any borders. People could move anywhere they liked. Total mobility. Wherever the state needed people to work, they'd be transported there. Obviously there would have to be a few restrictions to prevent whites from fleeing and gathering in settlements in some uninhabited land, but for the most part a whole chunk of vocabulary would be thrown away. Passport, illegal alien, immigrate, emigrate, citizen, all of them about as relevant as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Basically all you mentioned but you’ll probably still have people selling silly stuff on etsy with monopoly money
I honestly think we will see a new type of person emerge. Totally different values, totally different life goals, different new ways of understanding connections and relationships between people. I think we see new understandings in so many different facets of life, I think those understandings will be rooted in love (yes I know that sounds corny but I think in the communist future it wouldn't).
