Doesn’t create a global and national elite of rich people
For a long time I’ve seen communism, as in: planned economy, and no ruling class (the latter the USSR failed to achieve, it seems) as the solution. But nowadays I don’t know.
I don’t know if marxism in it’s original form is enough to explain society, and I don’t think anarchist communism, collectivism, mutualism whatever can work on a large scale. Social democracy doesn’t seem like it’s enough, either.
I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.
Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.
Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.
I’m not quite sure how to reply to that, because you make some good points. I flatly disagree that communism can’t work. It’s like saying Capitalism couldn’t work because for a whole century the French revolution was failing before 1789. Which is not even the first humanity’s attempt for a capitalist system, but the first well known one. We still have ways to go and failed attempts to try to get it right.
However, the most important thing in my eyes is to learn from the past. Being in a country that was surrounded by communism, tried, and was refused help from the then socialist states, I know very many people that still look back to those times with fondness. From my country and neighboring ones that were parts of the socialist block. But all those implementations had their problems and these same people would be the first to admit that. Our job is to go through all that history and judge it with clear heads, see where it went wrong and how or why, so in the next attempts we’ll fail in a different way, until we get it right. Similar to how every socioeconomically system did so far.
I don’t care about Anarchy or Socialism or Trotskyism or whatever, as long as it gets us to the end goal of a classless system without economic or power elites that see us as data nodes to profit off. Each of those approaches has its pros and cons and there are many others as well.
But saying it failed so we best move on, because the first handful of attempts went wrong is not going to bring any change whatsoever.
Yeah I get you. But it’s important to realize that we’re talking about much more than a handful of attempts. I see the value in learning from history and iterating on processes to try and get better over time. But if we’re honestly striving for the best system for humanity, what we shouldn’t do is say, “I really want it to be communism so let’s just assume that must be the right answer and keep trying it over and over again until it works.” At some point you do have to be willing to try something new.
It’s my opinion that communism has had more than a fair shot and has been eliminated from the running. But I am also not so crazy as to immediately disregard some new communist paradigm that theoretically works in some new way that is designed to fix the problems that continually appeared in communist systems historically. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it presented yet. And it’s also not what these “western teenagers” (as the meme calls them) are advocating for. They use language and symbols characteristic of very specific brands of communism that were massive historical failures in terms of preserving human rights and eliminating poverty and class divisions.
I disagree about the part of enough attempts and fair share, but honestly, I don’t care much. Could very well be something completely different and as long as it kept the basis of no inequality, no ruling elite, free education and medical care and so on, I’d be in. I just haven’t found anything that does that even half convincingly.
My belief is that similar to how back in the 18th century, they couldn’t see past the following system, namely capitalism, we can’t see and plan for past a classless system now, which for the moment is communism, regardless of the path there. That doesn’t mean that societal evolution will stop there.
It’s also an oppressive police state where huge portions of the population live in poverty and endure awful working conditions. Oh and they’re actively engaged in genocide against a minority ethnic group. But sure if we just ignore all the downsides it’s great.
I think you must have inferred something from my comment that I didn’t actually say. I didn’t say every communist country ceases to exist. I also didn’t say that communism can’t generate a large economy.
What I said was that it has a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals, where those goals are economic equality, and elimination of poverty and class divisions. Most open pro-communists today have an additional goal of increasing access to basic human rights which communism has historically failed at as well. I did mention that some communist states have failed outright.
In the case of China, which you alluded to, note that China deliberately weakened their communism in the 90s as part of a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist principles designed to stimulate growth. Specifically, agriculture was de-collectivized, Chinese business were opened to foreign investment, permission was granted for entrepreneurs to start businesses, state-owned industries were privatized, and many price controls were removed. By 2005, the private sector was responsible for 70% of China’s GDP. There is no reason to believe that China’s economy would be anywhere near as large as it is today absent these reforms.
But is that what you personally want out of your system? A large economy? Is that what matters most?
No one said Marxism was all done and finished out of the box… feel free to workshop it as needed since it’s barely been attempted to put into practice at all.
Well, neo-marxism is a thing, but I have barely seen any movements based around it. Sometimes it seems that the intellectuals that build these new ways of understanding society don’t really care about putting it into practice, so that’s another thing.
What do you mean “now what?” lol. Assuming an American-centric or Euro-centric point of view, they would use their extremely expensive military armaments that can’t be purchased in large quantities by private organizations, and crush the rebellion. The government is the government because they have a monopoly on violence.
I mean, really. Their money is in banks subject to the oversight of the countries they’re trying to raise an army against. People may be relatively cheap, but they still need to be paid quite a bit to attempt to fight the military head on. Freeze their accounts and they’re screwed. Musk’s entire fortune isn’t even a single years worth of funding for the US military, and even if all the billionaires pooled their money it would take years to accumulate the excess hardware that is allowed to be sold and then train their PMCs on hardware. Years that they wouldn’t have if a bill was passed to cap wealth inequality.
We may yet reach the corporate dystopia where businesses can directly challenge governments, but we’re not quite there yet. At least not in the first world. Russia may have shot itself in its confusion, but that’s because the rich already are the government there.
That’s a bit of an arbitrary figure. Also wealth isn’t really money as much as it is things.
Take a house, for example. You only really need one. The monetary value of the house depends on a few factors, but it’s primary value is that it gives you shelter. It probably fluctuates in monetary value but the actual value doesn’t change. If you cap wealth based on monetary value, how do you deal with homes in different places that are valued differently? I think it’s going to be more complicated than it seels at first glance.
Assuming you mean dollars, since everyone on the internet is American. 10mil seems like a lot all together. But if you had to feed your entire family for the rest of your life on 10mil you might struggle, depending on where you live.
Maybe you mean 10mil income per year and not overall wealth. That’s different, but I can understand this. A progressive tax system could impose a cap of sorts but tax avoidance (the legal kind) would render it useless.
I don’t have any answers, just felt like continuing the thought train.
Western politics already has a vehicle in which to accomplish your 3 bullet points called regulation. The problem is children in charge and the voters apathy to hold their feet to the fire.
People should get mad, not at each other but at their “masters” that aren’t supposed to exist. The powers that be want us to argue amongst ourselves
A really good perk in Eastern Europe is that the brief period of communism flattened inequality and nationalised all infrastructure, and both have been kept under democracy and capitalism. Which means that those countries now kinda have the best of both worlds. Although with the snowballing of wealth that is inevitable under capitalism (unless regulated), it is a question of if, and not when, that starts to change.
Do you know of a community to discuss this? I feel like people stop criticizing economic systems once they benefit from it, and so people just default to communism or capitalism without actually considering the game theory behind it all.
There is no such thing as no ruling class, and generally, anyone who sells you that is aiming to become the ruling class themselves. In the best case scenario, they want to be a benevolent dictator, and we might have seen a few people get close to that over the course of history but no benevolent dictatorship lasts longer than two generations and many fail even sooner than that. In the worst case, they are just riding on this political train and aim to be a not so benevolent dictator themselves.
Any system that does not account for human nature and build an incentive structure that guarantees the maximum possible equality/equity while assuming everyone involved is selfish is a system that’s ill suited for humanity. And if you force an ill-suited system, someone will inevitably swoop in and use it for their personal gains. Like as bad as our current system is with wealth inequality, the soviet system had an even slimmer and richer elite, they just hid it well.
I agree with all of your goals, but we need to do this the smart way, and that involves setting the priority exactly as your list goes and actually accounting for how people behave. The result might not be perfect, but we can do better than we do currently, I think that should be the goal rather than going for perfection and falling for snake oil on the way.
I seriously believe we must build an A.I. to replace human leadership since we proved time and time again that we are corruptible, and that when that happens you start getting your poor and elite classes and rampaging exploitation of resources and its refusal to imorove to better technologies and processes (ie oil companies). We need something avobe humans to administer resources and solve politics since we just made both into ridiculous games that are alreaddy fixed so that everybody , exept those that a where winning already, loosses. I believe that the survival of the human race hinges on this.
I honestly just want a system that
For a long time I’ve seen communism, as in: planned economy, and no ruling class (the latter the USSR failed to achieve, it seems) as the solution. But nowadays I don’t know. I don’t know if marxism in it’s original form is enough to explain society, and I don’t think anarchist communism, collectivism, mutualism whatever can work on a large scale. Social democracy doesn’t seem like it’s enough, either.
I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.
Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.
Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.
I’m not quite sure how to reply to that, because you make some good points. I flatly disagree that communism can’t work. It’s like saying Capitalism couldn’t work because for a whole century the French revolution was failing before 1789. Which is not even the first humanity’s attempt for a capitalist system, but the first well known one. We still have ways to go and failed attempts to try to get it right.
However, the most important thing in my eyes is to learn from the past. Being in a country that was surrounded by communism, tried, and was refused help from the then socialist states, I know very many people that still look back to those times with fondness. From my country and neighboring ones that were parts of the socialist block. But all those implementations had their problems and these same people would be the first to admit that. Our job is to go through all that history and judge it with clear heads, see where it went wrong and how or why, so in the next attempts we’ll fail in a different way, until we get it right. Similar to how every socioeconomically system did so far.
I don’t care about Anarchy or Socialism or Trotskyism or whatever, as long as it gets us to the end goal of a classless system without economic or power elites that see us as data nodes to profit off. Each of those approaches has its pros and cons and there are many others as well.
But saying it failed so we best move on, because the first handful of attempts went wrong is not going to bring any change whatsoever.
Yeah I get you. But it’s important to realize that we’re talking about much more than a handful of attempts. I see the value in learning from history and iterating on processes to try and get better over time. But if we’re honestly striving for the best system for humanity, what we shouldn’t do is say, “I really want it to be communism so let’s just assume that must be the right answer and keep trying it over and over again until it works.” At some point you do have to be willing to try something new.
It’s my opinion that communism has had more than a fair shot and has been eliminated from the running. But I am also not so crazy as to immediately disregard some new communist paradigm that theoretically works in some new way that is designed to fix the problems that continually appeared in communist systems historically. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it presented yet. And it’s also not what these “western teenagers” (as the meme calls them) are advocating for. They use language and symbols characteristic of very specific brands of communism that were massive historical failures in terms of preserving human rights and eliminating poverty and class divisions.
I disagree about the part of enough attempts and fair share, but honestly, I don’t care much. Could very well be something completely different and as long as it kept the basis of no inequality, no ruling elite, free education and medical care and so on, I’d be in. I just haven’t found anything that does that even half convincingly.
My belief is that similar to how back in the 18th century, they couldn’t see past the following system, namely capitalism, we can’t see and plan for past a classless system now, which for the moment is communism, regardless of the path there. That doesn’t mean that societal evolution will stop there.
At least we are disagreeing respectfully :)
😂😂😂
yes vietnam no longer exhist indeed north vietnam never once succeeded
consider reading a book and touching grass
those who read know
the largest economy in the world is a socialist state dedicated to working towards communism ⚒️🌍
It’s also an oppressive police state where huge portions of the population live in poverty and endure awful working conditions. Oh and they’re actively engaged in genocide against a minority ethnic group. But sure if we just ignore all the downsides it’s great.
I think you must have inferred something from my comment that I didn’t actually say. I didn’t say every communist country ceases to exist. I also didn’t say that communism can’t generate a large economy.
What I said was that it has a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals, where those goals are economic equality, and elimination of poverty and class divisions. Most open pro-communists today have an additional goal of increasing access to basic human rights which communism has historically failed at as well. I did mention that some communist states have failed outright.
In the case of China, which you alluded to, note that China deliberately weakened their communism in the 90s as part of a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist principles designed to stimulate growth. Specifically, agriculture was de-collectivized, Chinese business were opened to foreign investment, permission was granted for entrepreneurs to start businesses, state-owned industries were privatized, and many price controls were removed. By 2005, the private sector was responsible for 70% of China’s GDP. There is no reason to believe that China’s economy would be anywhere near as large as it is today absent these reforms.
But is that what you personally want out of your system? A large economy? Is that what matters most?
No one said Marxism was all done and finished out of the box… feel free to workshop it as needed since it’s barely been attempted to put into practice at all.
Well, neo-marxism is a thing, but I have barely seen any movements based around it. Sometimes it seems that the intellectuals that build these new ways of understanding society don’t really care about putting it into practice, so that’s another thing.
synthetic left
the latest scientific materialist work was recently released by my favorite social worker
Xi Jinping
its definitely being put into practice today
Maximum Wealth should be set to 10 million. At that point you’ve won at wealth and every penny after that should go to someone else.
Root of the issue is that there is no way to achieve this. People with money hire an army, now what?
What do you mean “now what?” lol. Assuming an American-centric or Euro-centric point of view, they would use their extremely expensive military armaments that can’t be purchased in large quantities by private organizations, and crush the rebellion. The government is the government because they have a monopoly on violence.
I mean, really. Their money is in banks subject to the oversight of the countries they’re trying to raise an army against. People may be relatively cheap, but they still need to be paid quite a bit to attempt to fight the military head on. Freeze their accounts and they’re screwed. Musk’s entire fortune isn’t even a single years worth of funding for the US military, and even if all the billionaires pooled their money it would take years to accumulate the excess hardware that is allowed to be sold and then train their PMCs on hardware. Years that they wouldn’t have if a bill was passed to cap wealth inequality.
We may yet reach the corporate dystopia where businesses can directly challenge governments, but we’re not quite there yet. At least not in the first world. Russia may have shot itself in its confusion, but that’s because the rich already are the government there.
Who is in government with rank enough to authorise this violence, but doesn’t have the above-$10M to lose?
That’s a bit of an arbitrary figure. Also wealth isn’t really money as much as it is things.
Take a house, for example. You only really need one. The monetary value of the house depends on a few factors, but it’s primary value is that it gives you shelter. It probably fluctuates in monetary value but the actual value doesn’t change. If you cap wealth based on monetary value, how do you deal with homes in different places that are valued differently? I think it’s going to be more complicated than it seels at first glance.
Assuming you mean dollars, since everyone on the internet is American. 10mil seems like a lot all together. But if you had to feed your entire family for the rest of your life on 10mil you might struggle, depending on where you live.
Maybe you mean 10mil income per year and not overall wealth. That’s different, but I can understand this. A progressive tax system could impose a cap of sorts but tax avoidance (the legal kind) would render it useless.
I don’t have any answers, just felt like continuing the thought train.
Western politics already has a vehicle in which to accomplish your 3 bullet points called regulation. The problem is children in charge and the voters apathy to hold their feet to the fire.
People should get mad, not at each other but at their “masters” that aren’t supposed to exist. The powers that be want us to argue amongst ourselves
It’s not children in charge, it’s old ass white guys who depend of screwing everyone over to maintain their standard of living.
Age and skin color especially don’t matter when you a corrupt politician taking corporate bribes.
A really good perk in Eastern Europe is that the brief period of communism flattened inequality and nationalised all infrastructure, and both have been kept under democracy and capitalism. Which means that those countries now kinda have the best of both worlds. Although with the snowballing of wealth that is inevitable under capitalism (unless regulated), it is a question of if, and not when, that starts to change.
Do you know of a community to discuss this? I feel like people stop criticizing economic systems once they benefit from it, and so people just default to communism or capitalism without actually considering the game theory behind it all.
Sadly, no, I’m not aware of any place where this is discussed.
join the party mate
There is no such thing as no ruling class, and generally, anyone who sells you that is aiming to become the ruling class themselves. In the best case scenario, they want to be a benevolent dictator, and we might have seen a few people get close to that over the course of history but no benevolent dictatorship lasts longer than two generations and many fail even sooner than that. In the worst case, they are just riding on this political train and aim to be a not so benevolent dictator themselves.
Any system that does not account for human nature and build an incentive structure that guarantees the maximum possible equality/equity while assuming everyone involved is selfish is a system that’s ill suited for humanity. And if you force an ill-suited system, someone will inevitably swoop in and use it for their personal gains. Like as bad as our current system is with wealth inequality, the soviet system had an even slimmer and richer elite, they just hid it well.
I agree with all of your goals, but we need to do this the smart way, and that involves setting the priority exactly as your list goes and actually accounting for how people behave. The result might not be perfect, but we can do better than we do currently, I think that should be the goal rather than going for perfection and falling for snake oil on the way.
I seriously believe we must build an A.I. to replace human leadership since we proved time and time again that we are corruptible, and that when that happens you start getting your poor and elite classes and rampaging exploitation of resources and its refusal to imorove to better technologies and processes (ie oil companies). We need something avobe humans to administer resources and solve politics since we just made both into ridiculous games that are alreaddy fixed so that everybody , exept those that a where winning already, loosses. I believe that the survival of the human race hinges on this.
How would such an AI be created and how would it work?
that’s a question for the scientists to answer, we just have to watch their incentive structures and verify that they’re doing their peer review