[lit-ideas] Re: What is the difference between ...

--- On Tue, 3/11/09, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>The kibbutzim movement in Israel was founded
> and operated as pure communist societies for a while -- I
> don't know if any remain so.  

It hardly took "The Communist Manifesto", or any works by Marx, Engels or Lenin 
as its key text though. So? A managerless amateur soccer team might be 
described as "communist" on this basis, as might a leaderless group surviving 
in the wild. It is the totalitarian state-controlled form of "communism" that 
was being discussed, not any kind of non-state, co-operative venture. 

> There's nothing
> inherently democratic about capitalism.  Indeed,
> capitalism has never backed away from fascism when fascism
> suited its needs -- which has been rather frequent in the
> last 300 or so years.  

If capitalism means a "free market system", then a "free market system" stands 
opposed to a state-controlled economic system. What can occur is a hybrid where 
within a state-controlled economy the state allows some free market activity. 
But the greater the free market economy, the less (almost by definition) the 
state-controlled economy. And the free market economy depends on consumer 
choice [rather than the consumer getting only what they are given by the diktat 
of the state]. It is possible to have a consumer-choice-based economy within a 
one-party state or other undemocratic system - and it has been suggested this 
is what China, for example, is moving towards. So a free market economy of 
sorts can be combined with a political system that is undemocratic - but 
whether such strange bedfellows can co-exist easily or longterm is not 
something shown by Russia or China, and the kind of free market economy 
permitted in China might be better described as a
 series of state-licensed free markets rather than a general free market that 
is underpinned by laws and the rule of law. 

It seems to me, btw, that democracy is more important than whether the economy 
is free market or state-controlled - or, more precisely - since no economy is 
ever completely free of state control, it is more important that we can get rid 
of the government by elections than is the extent to which the government 
controls the economy. In this way, the democratic political system has primacy 
over the economic system because we can use that political system to change the 
economic system (from state-controlled to free, or vice-versa, as we see fit).

Donal 

D



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