>>7112>What in dialectical materialism is the explanation for how communism, defined as a classless society in which workers democratically own/control the means of production, is likely or even possible.They would not technically be "workers" at that point, just the people who do the work.
>Like, I can understand that contradictions are inherent in capitalism, but I don't really understand how the resolve themselves in communism.Oh, that is a complicated subject. Understanding the nature of those contradictions is key. For example, the cycle of overproduction → speculation → crisis → new efficiency → back around again can only result in systemic degradation as it creates more waste and fewer avenues for high-profit rate investments. The trick is that this cycle is borne out of the very nature of commodity production, thus the only way to break it is to establish a system of production that does not engage in commodity production. To wit, production cannot be done with profits driving it.
There are other examples, of course. The falling rate of profit ensures the inevitable collapse of capitalist production, and the need to make up that production in other ways provides an impartive toward a new economic model. Old models like slavery-based production and feudalism are too inefficient and unproductive to function on a global scale, which is why capitalism was able to supplant them in the first place. The thing is, every sea change in the mode of production must be from a less productive mode to a more productive mode. Otherwise, it would simply be unable to take root against the reaction of the current ruling class. The only way to achieve a mode of production that is more productive that capitalism is is to do something new, something that is not limited by the profit motive; make no mistake–the profit motive is a limiting factor to production.
The difficulty with marxian economics is that there can be no "Basic Economics" curriculum to learn that makes ready sense of it all. It, like economics itself, is esoteric and not always intuitive. Crisis theory, which is essentially what we are discussing, can only be understood by understanding the underlying concepts–what commodities are, how they meet in the real world, how they are acted
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