<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Havell @ Jun 8 2006, 10:02 PM) [snapback]235349[/snapback]</div>
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<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rlbell @ Jun 8 2006, 10:48 PM) [snapback]235347[/snapback]
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You are suggesting that we can move our economic dynamics back to our tribal past, without rolling back anything else.[/b]
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A switch to Communism is not a move back, but a move forward. Marx wrote extensively on the way societies change from one system to another, and he built up a model of the progression:
Primitivism -> Slave Society (eg, Ancient Rome) -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Communism
While Communism may have much in common with Primitivism, the implementation and practice are very different.
One of the key differences is specialisation, little specialisation can take place in a primitive society due to the very low level of technology and small groups of people. In a Communist society, however, the scale is far, far larger; and there is a high level of technology (this is another thing that Marx suggested, that each of the systems above require a given level of technology, and once that level is reached then the system will coem to pass).
Communism does not advocate a move back to primitive tribal life, there is far more to it than that.
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It is not communism that is a step (several, really) backwards, but going back to a time before money. Adding and drawing resources from a common pool is simple if you are living in a small, self-sufficient economy, like a tribe of hunter-gatherers or agrarian village. Now, we are no longer entirely self-sufficient, even at the level of the nation-state. Right now a problem is that a lot of goods are contributed to the pool by chinese labourers, but are drawn from the pool by americans. Right now, the task of figuring out how to move the correct amount of goods from China to America is handled by market pressure-- american consumers are willing to pay, so the chinese are willing to ship.
An international pool is unwieldy. It is too difficult for everyone to go to one pool. If we have a multitude of local pools, we now need some system for shipping goods between pools in a way that does not have goods mouldering at the wrong place. While capitalist free market economics is a less than ideal method of distributing the goods, it does have the virtue of being implementable in the face of human frailties, like greed, and it encourages attempts at efficiency.
Centrally planned economics have always failed when the need to claim that it worked became more important than making it work.