The final goal is a socialist, communist society in Japan, overcoming capitalism. But before that, we are taking a step-by-step approach. The first stage is to solve problems of labor and living standards according to people's demand.
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Akira Kasai, a Japan Communist Party member of the Diet’s House of Representatives. The party already has more than 400,000 members and people are joining at the rate of 1,000 a month. (BBC News)
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LFRAgain
And THAT'S pretty much the point where the wheels come off the buggy. How do you convince a populace that the efforts of every member are made essentially the same, regardless of work put forth? Ask the Chinese how that worked out under Mao. Ask the Russians how that worked out under Stalin.
Pure communism doesn't work. Pure socialism doesn't work. For either system to work as envisioned, human beings would have to instantly abandon their predilection towards simple selfishness. Not that selfishness on the surface is either good or bad. It just IS what we are as a living, breathing species. The single strongest driving force in us is the desire to further our bloodline – i.e., our individual DNA, and that translates, in many ways, to being selfish.
Pure socialism, e.g., practical altruism towards anyone and everyone, can’t work in this light. And to force people to relinquish all of the fruits of their labor in order to create some sort of mythical People’s Paradise stops being socialism and starts to become a dictatorship. Which puts us right back to the mess we started from a few thousand years ago.
But this isn’t to say that pure, unregulated capitalism is the answer either. As in anything, there needs to be balance.
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jonnyboy
selfishness is not quite the word i will use: i think people respond to incentives. there have to be adequate incentives offered to compensate people for their labours. in my opinion it is not valid to say that capitalism provides people with better incentives since many of the incentives people have dangled in front of them are false, illusory or unobtainable.
anyway, i think both capitalism and socialism are ideologies that are becoming dated. both are based around labour and we are fast entering an age, or in fact have already entered an age where labour might stop being the focus of most of our existences. read the bob black essay, the abolition of work
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