This is the traditional argument against democracy by the way. See Discourses on Livy.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Do u think communism could actually work
- Thread starter Ryaaan14
- Start date
This is the traditional argument against democracy by the way. See Discourses on Livy.
If you're trying to say that The Soviet Union didn't achieve true communism, as laid out by Marx and Lenin, then sure. But at the very least they were trying to be communist. When people denounce communism by pointing at the USSR, they don't mean "Look how bad communism was!" if they understand the topic at all. Instead they're saying "Communism will never work because it will always be corrupted, like it was in the Soviet Union and every other attempted communist nation."
In other words, the Soviet Union wasn't communist, but the Soviets were communists. Does that make sense?
Please explain to me what Capitalism has done.As I said before, you can't compare capitalism to communism.
Communism can work when selfishness & greed no longer exist in all species...i said all species not just human beings.
Almost every species are selfish (self-protect before others) and greedy (the fear of death is the greed of life) in some way. Anyone that said they are not selfish or greedy are either lying, self-delusional or both.
So unless the collective consciousness are overwritten somehow to purge the selfishness and greed out of us, communism is but a pipe dream.
Almost every species are selfish (self-protect before others) and greedy (the fear of death is the greed of life) in some way. Anyone that said they are not selfish or greedy are either lying, self-delusional or both.
So unless the collective consciousness are overwritten somehow to purge the selfishness and greed out of us, communism is but a pipe dream.
yup. For communism to work is literally to achieve some sort of 'unity of consciousness'.
That is some Neon Genesis Evangelion's Human Instrumentality Project level of dickary.
There's plenty but the Irish famine I mentioned there is perhaps the best example because the whigs justified their actions with classic economics.
Communism can't work with humans... too greedy and corrupt. Great system just not compatible with humans sadly.
I kind of disagree with throwing out "human nature" as an argument before it's been established to mean anything. I dunno, people have been arguing about what "human nature" is(or if it even exists) for thousands of years, so I can't really presume to know what that is.
If we're talking about selfishness, then what about communism/socialism makes it less self serving? Private ownership of the means of production(capitalism) is worse for most people(myself included), cause most people aren't in a position of having property rights on a company and profiting off of it's employees, rather than working FOR one as one of said employees. If I'm being selfish, I want a system that's going to work for me as a normal ass person. That's just being realistic.
EDIT:
I don't think of Capitalism as a meritocracy. It rewards property rights far more directly than skill or hard work, and benefits a pretty minuscule section of the population at the expense of literally everyone else. Choosing to live in that kind of system to me seems less like selfishness and more like gambling at an Atlantic City casino.
If we're talking about selfishness, then what about communism/socialism makes it less self serving? Private ownership of the means of production(capitalism) is worse for most people(myself included), cause most people aren't in a position of having property rights on a company and profiting off of it's employees, rather than working FOR one as one of said employees. If I'm being selfish, I want a system that's going to work for me as a normal ass person. That's just being realistic.
EDIT:
I don't think of Capitalism as a meritocracy. It rewards property rights far more directly than skill or hard work, and benefits a pretty minuscule section of the population at the expense of literally everyone else. Choosing to live in that kind of system to me seems less like selfishness and more like gambling at an Atlantic City casino.
Last edited:
I think the disturbing part is less it won't happen/can't work 'its a pipe dream' etc, but more that as capital exploits and exhausts materials and human labor it will essentially eat itself. A planned economy is going to be the future wether we like it or not, especially with climate collapse looming in the horizon.
Question is will it be authoritarian or democratic. Hopefully democratic, and not some PRC nightmare.
Question is will it be authoritarian or democratic. Hopefully democratic, and not some PRC nightmare.
China was imperial capitalist to the core (with some State Monopoly) before it was a bit sidetracked.
Right now, whatever good that are happening is from them returning back to original state with some caveats
Last edited:
Communism only works if everyone agrees to have it work. So small communes have existed and lasted for a bit.
Fundamentally though it will never work for nations because it has no good way to distribute scarce resources among large amounts of people. Eventually a centralized authority has to handle that on such a large scale, and then it's a dictatorship.
Fundamentally though it will never work for nations because it has no good way to distribute scarce resources among large amounts of people. Eventually a centralized authority has to handle that on such a large scale, and then it's a dictatorship.
I think an issue here is that you might not be comparing these two as economic systems - as implied by the question "what capitalism has done", the Soviet system would have looked different if not for Stalin - there is nothing inevitable in communism as a system that means you will end up with a person such as Stalin on top of the pyramid, just like there is nothing inevitable with capitalism as an economic system that you will end up with Trump. Can American imperialism be dislodged for analytical purposes from capitalism? Can the Iraq war as a process be dislodged from capitalism? How that war and its aftermath played out has some very fundamental capitalist elements to it. But it is not as easy/straight road to make the correlation between capitalism and the Iraq war as it is to make between Stalin and the purges, but it helps if thinking about these things as economic systems...
Nah. It's idealistic and doesn't factor the human predilection toward envy, jealousy, etc which leads to the desire of wanting more and more.
Communism had only been in practice in some small towns across the USSR - ones that were self-sufficient (and quite isolated) with strong sense of community, but never at a large national scale.
However the pursuit of achieving communism has been disastrous at the larger scale, that is pretty obvious. It's something that should be done over generations, gradually. Suddenly upending an economic model and social framework doesn't work because these are way too complex systems, it's not like the revolutions that overthrew monarchies, as the transition isn't near as complex both in terms of government and economy. Upending capitalism in absolute is what Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties want (or any revolutionary socialist/communist party), and which is why they are rubbish and dangerous, and is just a path that history has already gone down before.
It takes small steps, for example you should first set your eyes on Works councils and Co-determination, this has been implemented in some countries, the most extensive implementation is in Germany (here's the English version). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany . If you are a country that isn't a social democracy yet, you should work on that first.
Any way, since I was too young to remember what it was like, most of my family lived in the DDR, and my whole life I have heard of the tough times they experienced, especially the paranoia regarding informants that the Stasi employed. When the USSR dissolved they moved westwards and many have never set foot in the eastern part again due to bad memories.
However the pursuit of achieving communism has been disastrous at the larger scale, that is pretty obvious. It's something that should be done over generations, gradually. Suddenly upending an economic model and social framework doesn't work because these are way too complex systems, it's not like the revolutions that overthrew monarchies, as the transition isn't near as complex both in terms of government and economy. Upending capitalism in absolute is what Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties want (or any revolutionary socialist/communist party), and which is why they are rubbish and dangerous, and is just a path that history has already gone down before.
It takes small steps, for example you should first set your eyes on Works councils and Co-determination, this has been implemented in some countries, the most extensive implementation is in Germany (here's the English version). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany . If you are a country that isn't a social democracy yet, you should work on that first.
Any way, since I was too young to remember what it was like, most of my family lived in the DDR, and my whole life I have heard of the tough times they experienced, especially the paranoia regarding informants that the Stasi employed. When the USSR dissolved they moved westwards and many have never set foot in the eastern part again due to bad memories.
Last edited:
is this another of this thread where everybody has a totally different images in mind regarding the same word?
Because the apple example makes no sense... sry
If you are talking about communism as in "workers owning the means of production", of course that would work, why wouldn't it? it's just a joint stock company and the workers are the shareholders, end of story.
If you are talking planed economy soviet style, even that would be somewhat easier to pull off nowadays since the internet and algorithms go a great length to solve the allocation of resources issue - but that has nothing to do with communism, 5-Year plans are a purely soviet invention, no communist writer has ever proposed something like that.
Because the apple example makes no sense... sry
If you are talking about communism as in "workers owning the means of production", of course that would work, why wouldn't it? it's just a joint stock company and the workers are the shareholders, end of story.
If you are talking planed economy soviet style, even that would be somewhat easier to pull off nowadays since the internet and algorithms go a great length to solve the allocation of resources issue - but that has nothing to do with communism, 5-Year plans are a purely soviet invention, no communist writer has ever proposed something like that.
Last edited:
I think it ultimately requires an authoritarian presence to enforce communism, and putting a human in that kind of position will never work well.
Well, yes, there's No Real Communism because Marx simply got capitalism wrong and assumed the proletariat would end up worse and not better. He believed the worker classes in the developed countries did not get poorer and poorer, but they got richer and richer. He believed the capitalist countries would devolve into dictatorships instead of generally becoming more democratic.
History showed that communism can only be founded in poor backwater countries except then it's not Real Communism(TM) lol. Bakunin is the only figure from that era who proposed a system that could feasibly achieve a functioning communist-ish state but I guess salivating over Marx is cooler so who cares.
Last edited:
I'm fairly sure Communism does have a way to deal with issues that arise, the problem is how do you hold those in the position to do something accountable under communism. In theory there will never be a reason to do so because everyone's doing it for the greater good. The problems come when people who abuse or don't understand the capacity of their office. At least with a system designed for offices and positions of power to change often, you minimize the issue. Communism is more problematic in that regard.
It does. This is a problem with arguments about communism and capitalism. In every example in history neither is pure, so it's all about the degree in which they pursued them and what the consequences were. To me it all boils down to Utilitarianism vs Deontology. Communism is an economic model built around Utilitarianism, for the greater good, everything serving to better the whole. While Deontology is much more in sync with capitalism, whether or not something is morally correct is more important than the output. If we agree laws serve as moral checks then in Deontology/Capitalism a company can get away with very wrong things, because morally it's decision was right.
With all that said Utilitarianism is by far the more infamous. The worst things in human history have been done in the name of the greater good. Holocaust 1 & 2, genocide and ethnic clensings all took place under governments with economies that followed an Utilitarianism framework. Capitalism on the other hand gets away with a lot of it, because issues caused by a Deontology framework are harder to trace. It can sometimes be decades before the outcome of an action that was morally permissible, but damaging to the whole come out. Lead poisoning, opoids, pollution, ect...
I'm pretty off topic at this point, but tldr I agree.
Nope, the only thing that would work is a Culture type government. We only need Minds and virtually infinite resources!
Nations that have attempted communism have had zero to little successs without embracing capitalism.
Capitalism has lifted far more people out of utter F grade poverty to a more C- poverty. Hate sweat shops all you want, but since being introduced in the 80s it has transformed many 3rd world regions from famine stricken agriculturally based hell holes to centers of trade and entrepreneurship with legitimate exports. Working conditions still suck, the pay is still laughable by American standards, and abuse is rampant. However, it is far better than starving to death like the previous generation did and in another 30 years things will be even better - to the point they will have their own companies to compete with American interests (see: S. Korea, Japan, and China following this path since the 1950s).
Also, anyone who thinks communism is better for the environment doesn't understand their history and rely solely on a fantastical theory.
Capitalism has lifted far more people out of utter F grade poverty to a more C- poverty. Hate sweat shops all you want, but since being introduced in the 80s it has transformed many 3rd world regions from famine stricken agriculturally based hell holes to centers of trade and entrepreneurship with legitimate exports. Working conditions still suck, the pay is still laughable by American standards, and abuse is rampant. However, it is far better than starving to death like the previous generation did and in another 30 years things will be even better - to the point they will have their own companies to compete with American interests (see: S. Korea, Japan, and China following this path since the 1950s).
Also, anyone who thinks communism is better for the environment doesn't understand their history and rely solely on a fantastical theory.
"Human nature" is the shittiest (yet somehow most common) argument imaginable.
What the fuck is "Human nature" and how does it apply to today's society? Do you honestly think Capitalism is the result of some immutable laws of nature, an inevitable end point for humanity?
Capitalism is every bit as aberrant to our base selves as Communism, yet it is maintained. Before that, Feudalism was similarly aberrant, yet it was maintained.
We are intelligent, social creatures. We are adaptable and malleable. The idea we are driven solely by some innate nature, a nature that will rebel against imposed societal order, is simply false.
What the fuck is "Human nature" and how does it apply to today's society? Do you honestly think Capitalism is the result of some immutable laws of nature, an inevitable end point for humanity?
Capitalism is every bit as aberrant to our base selves as Communism, yet it is maintained. Before that, Feudalism was similarly aberrant, yet it was maintained.
We are intelligent, social creatures. We are adaptable and malleable. The idea we are driven solely by some innate nature, a nature that will rebel against imposed societal order, is simply false.
Making sweeping statements about human nature with nothing to back them up is just human nature.
I agree that it's hard to see how it would work in practice. But I'm laughing at these posts propping up capitalism.
Like - yes Kirblar - I see your point. But take a step back, capitalism is literally the reason our planet won't exist in 100 years as we know it now and why we can't fix it. And that's without getting into how it drives inequality and cements racism through financial inequalities that are compounded through generations. Touting the benefits of capitalism strikes me as absurd.
Like - yes Kirblar - I see your point. But take a step back, capitalism is literally the reason our planet won't exist in 100 years as we know it now and why we can't fix it. And that's without getting into how it drives inequality and cements racism through financial inequalities that are compounded through generations. Touting the benefits of capitalism strikes me as absurd.
It's just the bourgeoisie hoping to cling to their economic position by universalizing and eternalizing their exploitation of lower social classes.
I agree, my post was a joke. 90% of thread has been people filling up the communism discussion bingo card, we're only missing VENEZUELA VENEZUELA VENEZUELA at this point.
It's not a question of whether or not it'd work, it's a question of how long class conflict will go on and if the working class will finally get fed up.
Recently I've come to attribute communism's historical failures to a reliance on revolution. What happened in many of the Arab Spring nations has led me from looking at revolutions with optimism to looking at revolutions with general disdain. Looking at those and other, older revolutions associated with either communism or capitalism (Russia, Cuba, France) has led me to conclude that revolutions trend towards authoritarianism, as newly formed governments turn to crushing counterrevolutionary forces in order to preserve their existence. In the case of the Eastern Bloc and the DPRK, it was a matter of an authoritarian regime (Stalin's USSR) setting up similarly authoritarian puppet states molded after itself.
I think gradually transitioning to a workers' state via implementing policies like codetermination in Germany is the only feasible path towards socialism.
Last edited:
Yes Marx's teleological tendencies are his biggest problem. This isn't a groundbreaking assertion.
This is the lazy induction I'm talking about. History doesn't show anything as evidenced by people making the exact same arguments against democracy in the early modern period.
What an incredibly reductionist strawman. Everyone with a brain has some problems with Marx, but acting like one of the greatest social thinkers we have and an absolutely seminal figure in the social sciences is only paid attention to because he is cool is obviously absurd and smacks of contrarianism.
Last edited:
I don't believe that's true.
On a small scale, you can find plenty of examples of collective thinking where an individual subsumes their own needs and desires for the benefit of the group. That's a typical family.
The problems are scaling that upwards, because when you're no longer talking about people you personally know, its easier to rationalise the individuals needs as more important than the anonymous strangers.
Contrasting Utilitarianism with Capitalism is utterly bizzare. Lockean liberalism is deontological but Bentham and Mill are both more sophisticated liberal figures and also ones that could hardly be understood to be somehow worse in general.
This is ignoring your rather bizzare attempt to find deontological approaches better than utilitarian ones based on utilitarian value judgements (not to mention more poor induction).