Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:03:23 -0500
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Produced by PhpWiki 1.3.2-jeffs-hacks)
Content-Type: application/x-phpwiki;
  pagename=OnCommunism;
  flags="";
  author=MattArnold;
  version=15;
  lastmodified=1103393003;
  author_id=MattArnold;
  markup=2;
  hits=22813;
  charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary

VirusPerspective

Communism is arguably one of the most peculiar memetic concepts ever conceived; its moment of triumph in the Russian revolution also represented its moment of defeat, since Marx had predicted that such an even could only take place in an advanced capitalist state like Great Britain or the United States rather than a semi-feudal country like Russia. In addition to this, it is far from clear as to what exactly the communist memeplex entails, since Marx entirely defined a communist state in terms of opposition to capitalism, and never described what a communist state would resemble in its own right.

Since the majority of communist experiments can be reasonably described as having been failures, the Virian perspective on such matters is to view them with scepticism. In particular, it may be observed that planned economies typically fail in trying to manage complex decentralised systems hitherto based on individual exchange through central control. As [FriedrichHayek] suggested, market exchange works because people value things differently, partly on the basis of knowledge of local conditions.  It is unlikely that this dispersed knowledge could ever be effectively collected and utilised by a central planning agency (see also [Austrian Economics])

As a further observation, communism may be considered guilty of a fatal conceit. Just as language is built on complex rules of grammar that we follow with ease but cannot necessarily articulate, the social order is built on complex regularities in our behaviour - common law, ethics, customs, manners - whose importance we only faintly understand. By contrast, the totalitarian disasters that have occurred when utopians attempt to redesign society according to their rational plan shows just how little we know about the workings of the complex system of rules on which the social order is based.

As such, a certain degree of scepticism is also required towards utopian idealism that is not constrained by pragmatic considerations:  see [OnFascism] or [OnUtopianism] for a description of a similarly totalising ideology. In this respect communism shares many of its characteristics with religion. For example, induction is useless with respect to either Christianity or Marxism; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data. Accordingly, it may be suggested that communism is little more than a corruption of dialectical idealism to dialectical materialism. In terms of 'doctrine' it is therefore unsurprising that both ideologies can be characterised as 'puritanical' and are founded on [morals of abstinence]. Others, such as Albert Camus, have suggested that communism is little more than an extension of the enlightenment ideal of progress.
