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A moderate neo-Marxist probably accepts the following.
1. The history of the way human societies are organized is largely explicable in terms of class conflict, where one group of people accrues power to itself in order to dominate and live off the backs of others.
2. The very concepts that govern our thinking about the way society is organized are themselves largely a product of the system of economic/political relationships we find ourselves in. The concepts of the ruling class tend to predominate and be regarded as self evident. For example the idea of private property came into being with the rise of the mercantile class - such a notion would have been quite alien to people living in a feudal economy.
3. Capitalism is an unsustainable economic system which relies on fostering expectations among the majority which can never ultimately be realized. It will destroy itself (or us) since it ignores certain fundamentals, like the limits of the environment, in order to sustain economic growth (on which the system depends to sustain itself). It also contains the seeds of its own destruction since the technologies it develops and spreads (such as IT and automated production) tend to undercut any stake the workers have in the system. In the one case by providing them with the capacity to effectively organize and share information outside of the control of the ruling class, in the other by rendering their labour superfluous and destroying their stake in the system.
4. Capitalism tends to encourage people to live off capital rather than by working. In a sense it penalizes those who produce the goods we enjoy by rewarding people who do not work at all by means of an imaginary social convention called money. People who live off investments or rents do not contribute anything real to the economy and rewarding them is essentially giving them something for nothing.
5. Capitalism tends to produce massive inequalities because the working class have only their labour to sell and this is treated like any other commodity. The market does not care whether or not people starve to death or die young as long as there is labour to buy. The corrective mechanism for oversupply is obviously the elimination of workers by either death or reduced fertility.
6. A communist system would attempt to correct for these failures of the market as best as possible - mainly by making decisions about the allocation of resources much more responsive to democratic decision making than private capital.
7. An social/economic system which treats people as commodities rather than ends in themselves, is by definition morally wrong. Democracy treats people as ends in themselves, capitalism as commodities since capitalism only recognizes workers as labour.
8. At some point in the development of capitalism the system will collapse under its own weight, just as previous forms of economic organization have done. At that point the rules will change since people will realize that the norms of the old system won't work. If you want to understand what this will be like consider how hard it was for Europeans to convince native peoples to regard land as a commodity and how natural it seems to us. If the point holds then there will come a time where people will regard the capitalist system as governed by superstition and will marvel at how people could have been so dumb. That is why the arguments that communism goes against human nature are flawed, since they fail to recognize that a great deal of what is natural to us is due to class consciousness (see 2.) If it is possible for pre-capitalist peoples to change their ways so radically, there is good reason to believe that capitalism can be overcome.
1. The history of the way human societies are organized is largely explicable in terms of class conflict, where one group of people accrues power to itself in order to dominate and live off the backs of others.
2. The very concepts that govern our thinking about the way society is organized are themselves largely a product of the system of economic/political relationships we find ourselves in. The concepts of the ruling class tend to predominate and be regarded as self evident. For example the idea of private property came into being with the rise of the mercantile class - such a notion would have been quite alien to people living in a feudal economy.
3. Capitalism is an unsustainable economic system which relies on fostering expectations among the majority which can never ultimately be realized. It will destroy itself (or us) since it ignores certain fundamentals, like the limits of the environment, in order to sustain economic growth (on which the system depends to sustain itself). It also contains the seeds of its own destruction since the technologies it develops and spreads (such as IT and automated production) tend to undercut any stake the workers have in the system. In the one case by providing them with the capacity to effectively organize and share information outside of the control of the ruling class, in the other by rendering their labour superfluous and destroying their stake in the system.
4. Capitalism tends to encourage people to live off capital rather than by working. In a sense it penalizes those who produce the goods we enjoy by rewarding people who do not work at all by means of an imaginary social convention called money. People who live off investments or rents do not contribute anything real to the economy and rewarding them is essentially giving them something for nothing.
5. Capitalism tends to produce massive inequalities because the working class have only their labour to sell and this is treated like any other commodity. The market does not care whether or not people starve to death or die young as long as there is labour to buy. The corrective mechanism for oversupply is obviously the elimination of workers by either death or reduced fertility.
6. A communist system would attempt to correct for these failures of the market as best as possible - mainly by making decisions about the allocation of resources much more responsive to democratic decision making than private capital.
7. An social/economic system which treats people as commodities rather than ends in themselves, is by definition morally wrong. Democracy treats people as ends in themselves, capitalism as commodities since capitalism only recognizes workers as labour.
8. At some point in the development of capitalism the system will collapse under its own weight, just as previous forms of economic organization have done. At that point the rules will change since people will realize that the norms of the old system won't work. If you want to understand what this will be like consider how hard it was for Europeans to convince native peoples to regard land as a commodity and how natural it seems to us. If the point holds then there will come a time where people will regard the capitalist system as governed by superstition and will marvel at how people could have been so dumb. That is why the arguments that communism goes against human nature are flawed, since they fail to recognize that a great deal of what is natural to us is due to class consciousness (see 2.) If it is possible for pre-capitalist peoples to change their ways so radically, there is good reason to believe that capitalism can be overcome.
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