: I am not here to debate (yet) but merely ask a question. Under capitalism money (profit) is the driving force behind production and provides an incentitive to futher our technology, while increasing product quality. Under a communist regime what is the incentive?There is another incentive for production under capitalism that deserves mention here. It's what Marx called "use-value." People produce things, they make something of the world that wasn't there before, to use them. I build a cabinet out of wood, for instance, because I need a cabinet for my clothes. (The celebration of use-value is what makes Claire's posts so convincing.) Despite all the pro-capitalists have said in this Debating Room, people do sometimes actually produce things for personal use, today, without thought of profit.
There's another notion behing capitalism, as Marx observed and which Daniella names with certainty: "profit," or what Marx called "exchange-value."
Marx's idea of socialism was that "use-value" would someday replace "exchange-value" as the ONLY reason why people would produce things. This is the reason why Marx believed in this slogan of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Things we produce because we enjoy our abilities and because we need stuff are things we use. So, to get to your question: under socialism, people would produce things because people need things.
Now, in a capitalist system, money is the means whereby the things that people need are distributed to the people that need them. How would things be distributed, from their producers to their users, under socialism? Marx assumed that, with the disappearence of the laws of money, property, and the state itself, people would just share everything. But how could this happen without people being forced to share things? Forced sharing is a false kind of sharing, a kind of sharing that gets people to withhold something of themselves from society in order to avoid sharing. This is a problem Marx didn't confront: people would have to agree to the virtues of sharing in a way that would make sharing work.
But would sharing really get things from the people who produce them to the people who need them? What would motivate people to share everything in such a way? Capitalism, or more specifically the money system, is today capable of moving commodities around the world with astonishing speed. What motivation would socialism produce?
I don't have the answer to these questions. But I will say that if such a set-up were to work, almost everyone would have to agree to participate voluntarily, without being coerced. The omnipresence of coercion in Soviet regimes was what made them class systems, throwbacks to medievalism.
Do we produce things only because we ourselves need them, or can we be motivated to produce for others, and how far can that motivation be stretched? That's the big question to be asked about production for use. What kind of mutual association would motivate everyone to produce for everyone else? The best idea I've heard in this regard is that of a cooperative of cooperatives, the world as one big kibbutz.
Now what would a "communist regime" look like? It's good to keep in mind that Marx thought that "communism" was the movement that would lead the world to "socialism." The historical "communist regimes" have completely discredited the idea of a "communist regime," so that today it is really difficult to imagine how we can get from today's status quo to Marx's utopia of "socialism." The problem is that previous "communist regimes" were all rip-offs. People who don't like to share find it really hard to imagine socialism, for the word "communism" is a Latin cognate meaning "sharing," it's like the words "communal," "community," and "communication." So, even though the ideas of socialism and communism have been seriously wounded by historical events, they're still there, waiting until people produce some new social technology to USE these ideas (rather than when people merely produce physical technology for profit, as they SOMETIMES do under capitalism).