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by vidarh 4009 days ago
> Czechoslovakia was advanced capitalist country

Did it have sufficient over-production that redistribution would remove "common wants" for everyone?

As early as 1845, Marx set that out as a central criteria that would have to be met before a socialist revolution would have any hope of succeeding.

> We just don't like to share, as a species.

And in fact, this is a central aspect of Marx' argument for socialist revolutions: We don't like sharing, and so for the vast majority of workers, the only way of getting a reasonable share is to join up and force the upper classes to surrender their wealth.

Marxism is basically founded on two ideas: 1) Capitalism will eventually make production efficient enough to produce substantial surpluses. 2) Workers will only get "their" share by cooperating to fight the ruling classes, and if they don't they will eventually get marginalised as capitalist competition starts driving down employment and/or incomes.

Nothing assumes people wanting to share. On the contrary, the Marxist focus on revolution is basically based on the idea that there's no chance you'll get wealthy ruling classes to voluntarily give up their wealth.

1 comments

> Nothing assumes people wanting to share.

It assumes once workers won the surpluses won't decrease.

This turned out to be false assumption, because people don't like to share, so they don't work as well if they only get part of the fruits of their work, as they would if they got most of the fruits of their work for themselves.

Today they don't generally get a share of the surplus, so by your argument they should be working even worse.
In "the west" they get less than in 50s, but they still do.

The important thing is - salaries depend on their performance and on the demand for given product/service.