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Do u think communism could actually work
- Thread starter Ryaaan14
- Start date
In fairness, several communist nations, such as the USSR and China, did actually significantly advance their economies overall. Doing so involved killing a bunch of people and sending a bunch more to labor / reeducation camps, but they did move their economies into the twentieth centuries. It was one method of industrialization, albeit an especially brutal one.
I think people are too selfish and care too much for their family to exist in a society that is essentially stateless and in which everyone receives the same compensation (or whatever it would be called under communism). It would descend into Animal Farm eventually.
It was also incredibly inefficient and led to their economies falling behind the west, which is why both countries embraced capitalistic reforms and saw great improvement. In a dark irony, it appears that the attempt to move so quickly to representative democracy in Russia (a country with virtually no history of it) may have been a well-intentioned mistake (in terms of overall well-being), as the government's fell back into authoritarianism that's followed the attempt underscored the weakness of democratic norms and institutions.
The irony is that this roughly translates to "communism won't work because it'll devolve into capitalism".
Of course Communism can work. And it will, eventually.
Naturally, the US and the type of thoughts it breeds ("capitalism is the system that works" as the world quickly and literally dissolves into ruins around them) will be its biggest obstacle.
Naturally, the US and the type of thoughts it breeds ("capitalism is the system that works" as the world quickly and literally dissolves into ruins around them) will be its biggest obstacle.
In practice, they tried already. The outcome was 150 million human casualties with on-going lasting effects to this day, but second time's the charm, right?
Were the means of production commonly owned in Soviet Russia, the most basic qualifier for Marxist "communism"?
I think it'd be more accurate, though less blithely popular, to say all historical attempts to transition the modern nation state into communism in the 20th century and beyond has thus far failed to produce communism as Marx described it. Occasionally due to internal politics, occasionally due to external interference.
I think it'd be more accurate, though less blithely popular, to say all historical attempts to transition the modern nation state into communism in the 20th century and beyond has thus far failed to produce communism as Marx described it. Occasionally due to internal politics, occasionally due to external interference.
Communist society, as Marx defined it, requires a population that is driven by altruistic and intellectual desires rather than selfishness and a need for survival. So, uh, yeah, once we've created a society where greed is a crime on the same level as child murder, we'll surely get there.
Maybe you should. It'd help you see how myopic your original comment was.
Capitalism is going to crush that number once climate change kicks in.
Or, how about we chalk up all the deaths from exposure due to homelessness, famine, and lack of health care. Are we counting US imperial/colonial-ism as well? The pocketbooks at the top love a good war.
Doesn't change the fact what I said about communism, unless the point you are making somehow disproves what I said.
As long as hard work is required for mankind to advance, I think we need the carrot of capitalism to motivate the masses. Once we've achieved the singularity and robots can do literally almost everything, then communism can work, but until then, harnessing our primal competitiveness for the greater good remains the most viable option.
I'm of the opinion that capitalism is rather misunderstood as a concept in the public consciousness, though. Capitalism, as a system in which competition for capitalism is maximized, is inherently a balance between socialism and free market; more a middle ground than an opposite from communism. Libertarian unregulated free market bullshit isn't capitalism any more than Marxism is, which is why it results in wealth consolidation and reduced competition.
I'm of the opinion that capitalism is rather misunderstood as a concept in the public consciousness, though. Capitalism, as a system in which competition for capitalism is maximized, is inherently a balance between socialism and free market; more a middle ground than an opposite from communism. Libertarian unregulated free market bullshit isn't capitalism any more than Marxism is, which is why it results in wealth consolidation and reduced competition.
I would like to remind everyone that before humans invented, you know, governance, tribes were internally altruistic and democratically governed, almost communal in a sense. Possessions were shared among the tribe, all labored, all contributed to common wellbeing. Main problem was in-tribe cooperation did not extend to out-tribe relations. We invented government mostly to expand and conquer.
I think most people born today are ill equipped to perceive others as part of their tribe so obviously I would not build a communist utopia (in which all of humanity is one tribe) with any of you people but I think it can be taught to and fostered in children who've not been raised to become a cog in the capitalist machine. If we ever solve the problem of perceived scarcity that's another avenue to workable communism.
I think most people born today are ill equipped to perceive others as part of their tribe so obviously I would not build a communist utopia (in which all of humanity is one tribe) with any of you people but I think it can be taught to and fostered in children who've not been raised to become a cog in the capitalist machine. If we ever solve the problem of perceived scarcity that's another avenue to workable communism.
This is quite absurd. Why go to such lengths to whitewash capitalism? Middle ground capitalism is just the social democratic model (Nordic model™). There seems little sense in arguing that the Nordic model is the platonic ideal of capitalism considering, you know, that it proceeded from mercantalism rather than originating it. You've determined social-democratic capitalism is most "moral" form a capitalist society can take, and thus it must be the "true" form of it, and then retrofitted history to support your argument.
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It will have to work because communism will be our only option once most jobs become automated.
Not our only option. Corporatocratic serfdom is another possibly, although I assume most people here (barring the very rich users) won't be happy with that.
Alright Ryaaan14, I have been at work selling my labor to bourgeois pigs all day and I haven't read basically anything that has been posted in this thread already so apologies if any of this has been covered.
Your initial question revolves around whether communism is compatible with human nature. Already we are making a lot of assumptions with such a question, such as "communism is this or that" and "human nature is real". So before we go any further, we have to discuss this issue.
First of all, human nature. Outside of basic survival instincts, "human nature" does not exist. It is an ideological concept which just so coincidentally is used to prop up the notion that capitalist-style property and exchange systems are the default settings in human interactions. In former ages, "human nature" could mean that some were born to rule and others were born to be ruled. It could mean that it was nature's law for women to be subservient. "Human nature" means whatever the ruling class wants it to mean, because it serves to reinforce existing societal norms. In fact, what people find "natural" is merely a reflection of what they find normal and that just has to do with what kind of world you're already born into.
Humans evolved as social creatures. Yes, we are individuals with the ability to think for ourselves and have our own wants and desires. But we did not evolve to be greedy oraltruistic specifically. We evolved to survive, and outside of very few people, survival works best in a collective environment. Beyond survival, we want to not be bored and be comfortable.
The key factor underpinning this is production. How do we survive and how do we distribute what is produced to survive? When we look into production, which is the absolute bedrock of all cultures, societies, and civilizations, we understand how human relations both to other humans and to products themselves are tied into control of production.
If it is "human nature" to be greedy, how did humans survive for literally hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers without falling to pieces? Why were they even communal hunter gatherers in the first place and not enterprising stone age capitalists selling each other arrowheads? The answer is simply because human relations develop in accordance with stages of production. Scarcity of resources requires humans to act in certain ways to get what they need and beyond that what they want to be not bored and be comfortable. But how those interactions actually develop depends on how production is structured.
So first we had hunter gatherers. Everyone had to share to survive. This is what is referred to as "primitive communism", and if we are to claim that human nature is real and based on our evolution, then we would have to say that since primitive communism dominated mankind for most of its history, humans are naturally communists. This is all very oversimplified by the way, but I want to make the ridiculousness of the assertion obvious.
Eventually humans developed agriculture. With that, suddenly we had a lot more food available, but also a lot more work to be done to maintain crops. With a population boom and less people needed to make food, specialization became possible (or rather, more possible than before - structures like Gobekli Tepe demonstrate that specialization was possible though probably rare prior to full on agriculture). Farmers have to plant themselves at one spot to tend to their crops, and that requires irrigation. Gone are the days of wandering about the grasslands. Now territory must be defended. The strong become chiefs. They are supported by the shamans who say that they are ordained by the gods to protect the group and its harvest. A state is built to organize crop tending and distribution, with the divinely appointed chief-king at its head. Relations between males and females become static to reinforce this system - men fight and die when they don't harvest. Women work the farm too but otherwise take care of all the "house stuff" and pop out more future farmers and soldiers, thus instilling in people ideas about what is masculine and feminine. Cities are built. Slaves are taken in war to further build and to make sure things don't fall apart. Civilization is born.
Suddenly, the egalitarian life of humanity has been crushed and replaced with stratified, destructive, sexist, xenophobic, imperialistic states. And these states propagate their existence by promoting ideologies favorable to them. What is "human nature" is now different than what it once was.
Meanwhile, take a look at the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in the Balkans, a Neolithic culture that was settled but had not quite developed into a state. I'll let Wikipedia describe it since it does it pretty well:
Well, what do we have here? A multi-thousand year culture with little to no stratification, lots of sharing, and little history of violence. The reason? Abundance. The CT was situated in a spot where they had basically everything they needed. When humans have what they need, they turn out fine.
This is all a long winded way of saying human nature is bullshit and what really drives human relations are MATERIAL CONDITIONS. Material conditions dictate the constraints under which a society can form, and once that happens, there is a struggle between groups over controlling production. One group comes out on top and the others don't. This is how classes form. There are always classes that own and classes that work. In feudal times, it was the nobility who owned and the serfs who worked, with the bourgeoisie growing up in the middle as merchants. Today the bourgeoisie has overthrown the aristocratic right to rule and created their own servant class, the proletariat.
So, having said all that, we today have capitalism. What is capitalism? Capitalism is a specific socio-economic arrangement in which private individuals control the means of production - the stuff that makes stuff. They sell the stuff that is made for profit in a market for the purpose of further accumulating more capital to continue the cycle. However, the capitalists do not perform the labor themselves. They perform some labor, but they do not do it all - to be able to continue to expand, since capitalists must expand to deal with competitors, they must hire workers to perform the labor for them. The workers do not own capital (I mean, they might own some stock, but that means pretty little) and only have one thing to trade to the capitalists - their labor. They must do this to survive, because the capitalists control everything else - food, housing, clothes, etc. It's an unequal trade. The government may step in and provide some services for people who fall to the wayside but this is only done to provide a bandaid over what is factually a coercive economic system in which the capitalist holds most of the power - work or die. And the government typically is controlled by allied with those very capitalists.
But workers do in fact have the potential for power, because while they might individually be nothing, collectively they are everything. They could stop the levers tomorrow, if they chose to do so. They lack the legal power over capital but they have physical power over it. Perhaps, maybe, one day, they could simply take it for themselves. Produce for themselves. Get rid of the capitalist middleman parasite who runs things from the top for himself.
To put it simply, socialism is when the working class controls the means of production. Without the capitalist class, workers are free to organize production how they want, for their own purposes. Socialism is not perfect - it grows out of capitalism after all. Communism is beyond that, when production has increased to such a point that we are living post-scarcity at which point exchange of goods no longer makes any sense.
Now, there are plenty of logical and valid questions and arguments about how socialism/communism can or cannot function. Human nature is not one of them. The most reasonable arguments stem from the history of the 20th century communist movements. I do not blame anyone for being skeptical when the historical record is fairly bleak. It would take an extremely long time to go through every individual communist movement's failings, so let me focus on the most famous example - the USSR. And before I even get to that, let me remind you that past success or failure is no guarantee of future success or failure. If you look back at the late 18th century, "democracy" doesn't look too hot - in the US we've got a white supremacist classist republic and in France we've got total chaos. Yet here we are in a world where "democracy" has supposedly won.
Anyway. The USSR developed out of specific and peculiar historical circumstances. According to Marx's theory, socialism would first emerge in the most developed capitalist states because that is precisely where the most disastrous capitalist crises would occur (see the Great Depression for example) and where the class struggle would be most sharpened. However, the European states had caught on to the rising proletarian movement and begun providing various welfare services and enforcing regulations to keep the capitalist ship from sinking. And this did pretty well since it made the capitalist state, completely barbaric in its natural form, much more efficient and nicer to live in. The wealth that allowed this sort of stuff to happen of course came ultimately from colonized countries but that wasn't a primary concern for most unions, who were interested in getting better deals for their particular members. It was however an important deal to many socialists, who were strongly anti-imperialist. As Marx supposed, revolution had to be worldwide to succeed due to the all-encompassing grip of capitalism.
Early 20th century Russia was not the ideal place for socialism. Russia had only a few decades prior ended literal serfdom. Most of its population were peasant farmers, not factory workers. It was only in 1905 that they became a constitutional monarchy. Capitalism had not yet fully grown there and the bourgeoisie had not yet even become dominant. Even socialists within Russia acknowledged this - the Menshevik faction for example believed they had to work with the liberal bourgeoisie to complete a bourgeois republican revolution before they could even feasibly move on to socialism, because - as per Marx - socialism emerges out of the class struggle within capitalism. Capital must first build up the world of production before workers can become a unified class and seize the means.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks disagreed with the idea that Russia wasn't ready.
To make a very long story short, the Bolsheviks took advantage of Russia's collapsing political situation after the masses overthrew the czar during World War I. They were genuinely popular with a lot of the proletariat but they were not dominant among voters and sort of had to weasel their way into a majority over the Social Revolutionary party. The civil war that ensued against the anti-socialist White Army basically wrecked Russia, and to solidify power after an assassination attempt on Lenin's life the Bolsheviks banned "factions" among socialists which led to the creation of the unified Communist Party. With the country in smoking ruins after the war, the Communists adopted the New Economic Policy, which was basically state capitalism, to rebuild productive capacity before they could attempt to transition to socialism. When Lenin died there was a three way factional split between Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin over how to move forward. Bukharin wanted to keep on with the NEP, Trotsky wanted to push forward with revolution across the continent, and Stalin wanted to focus on "building socialism in one country" which both orthodox Marxists and Trotsky's followers considered impossible. Stalin won out through his power maneuvers and went on to force the USSR through massive and rapid industrialization at the expense of a ton of lives.
The important thing to recognize here is that not only is none of this communism, it wasn't socialism. Socialism is predicated on workers' democracy but the soviets (workers' councils) had been totally hijacked by the party, with every other faction being banned. When you think of "Communism" you're probably thinking of a big one party state where the government uses inefficient input-output tables to allocate production and tell people what to do. The fact that Stalin called this socialism does not make it so. Communism doesn't even have a state!
The Soviets did attempt to overcome capitalist market dynamics and it worked, sort of, for heavy industry, but not well at all for consumer goods. This is simply because the economic planners at Gosplan were in over their heads. In a modern economy there are simply too many things to keep track of, and the Soviets were working without computers. But with the rise of AI and automation, that may yet entirely be feasible.
The USSR failed because it was an inefficient command economy slapped together to try to brute force its way to socialism. With the destruction of the proletariat in the civil war, the party apparatus inserted itself in the proletariat's place as the revolutionary force in society. That didn't work out too well since the party is not the people. This is the intelligentsia making itself more important than the actual workers. This method spread worldwide because the Soviets were the dominant socialist state and everyone tried to emulate them (or were put in power by them). Usually this happened in other states that were likewise agricultural or underdeveloped due to colonialism. In other words, the material conditions were not right.
Today, the entire world is increasingly becoming netted together under advanced but decaying capitalism. Automation is around the corner and can either serve the masses or serve the wealthy few. And climate change is going to wreck us if we keep letting markets have their way.
Communism is not inevitable but there has probably not been a time in history yet where it is more feasible.
Your initial question revolves around whether communism is compatible with human nature. Already we are making a lot of assumptions with such a question, such as "communism is this or that" and "human nature is real". So before we go any further, we have to discuss this issue.
First of all, human nature. Outside of basic survival instincts, "human nature" does not exist. It is an ideological concept which just so coincidentally is used to prop up the notion that capitalist-style property and exchange systems are the default settings in human interactions. In former ages, "human nature" could mean that some were born to rule and others were born to be ruled. It could mean that it was nature's law for women to be subservient. "Human nature" means whatever the ruling class wants it to mean, because it serves to reinforce existing societal norms. In fact, what people find "natural" is merely a reflection of what they find normal and that just has to do with what kind of world you're already born into.
Humans evolved as social creatures. Yes, we are individuals with the ability to think for ourselves and have our own wants and desires. But we did not evolve to be greedy oraltruistic specifically. We evolved to survive, and outside of very few people, survival works best in a collective environment. Beyond survival, we want to not be bored and be comfortable.
The key factor underpinning this is production. How do we survive and how do we distribute what is produced to survive? When we look into production, which is the absolute bedrock of all cultures, societies, and civilizations, we understand how human relations both to other humans and to products themselves are tied into control of production.
If it is "human nature" to be greedy, how did humans survive for literally hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers without falling to pieces? Why were they even communal hunter gatherers in the first place and not enterprising stone age capitalists selling each other arrowheads? The answer is simply because human relations develop in accordance with stages of production. Scarcity of resources requires humans to act in certain ways to get what they need and beyond that what they want to be not bored and be comfortable. But how those interactions actually develop depends on how production is structured.
So first we had hunter gatherers. Everyone had to share to survive. This is what is referred to as "primitive communism", and if we are to claim that human nature is real and based on our evolution, then we would have to say that since primitive communism dominated mankind for most of its history, humans are naturally communists. This is all very oversimplified by the way, but I want to make the ridiculousness of the assertion obvious.
Eventually humans developed agriculture. With that, suddenly we had a lot more food available, but also a lot more work to be done to maintain crops. With a population boom and less people needed to make food, specialization became possible (or rather, more possible than before - structures like Gobekli Tepe demonstrate that specialization was possible though probably rare prior to full on agriculture). Farmers have to plant themselves at one spot to tend to their crops, and that requires irrigation. Gone are the days of wandering about the grasslands. Now territory must be defended. The strong become chiefs. They are supported by the shamans who say that they are ordained by the gods to protect the group and its harvest. A state is built to organize crop tending and distribution, with the divinely appointed chief-king at its head. Relations between males and females become static to reinforce this system - men fight and die when they don't harvest. Women work the farm too but otherwise take care of all the "house stuff" and pop out more future farmers and soldiers, thus instilling in people ideas about what is masculine and feminine. Cities are built. Slaves are taken in war to further build and to make sure things don't fall apart. Civilization is born.
Suddenly, the egalitarian life of humanity has been crushed and replaced with stratified, destructive, sexist, xenophobic, imperialistic states. And these states propagate their existence by promoting ideologies favorable to them. What is "human nature" is now different than what it once was.
Meanwhile, take a look at the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in the Balkans, a Neolithic culture that was settled but had not quite developed into a state. I'll let Wikipedia describe it since it does it pretty well:
Well, what do we have here? A multi-thousand year culture with little to no stratification, lots of sharing, and little history of violence. The reason? Abundance. The CT was situated in a spot where they had basically everything they needed. When humans have what they need, they turn out fine.
This is all a long winded way of saying human nature is bullshit and what really drives human relations are MATERIAL CONDITIONS. Material conditions dictate the constraints under which a society can form, and once that happens, there is a struggle between groups over controlling production. One group comes out on top and the others don't. This is how classes form. There are always classes that own and classes that work. In feudal times, it was the nobility who owned and the serfs who worked, with the bourgeoisie growing up in the middle as merchants. Today the bourgeoisie has overthrown the aristocratic right to rule and created their own servant class, the proletariat.
So, having said all that, we today have capitalism. What is capitalism? Capitalism is a specific socio-economic arrangement in which private individuals control the means of production - the stuff that makes stuff. They sell the stuff that is made for profit in a market for the purpose of further accumulating more capital to continue the cycle. However, the capitalists do not perform the labor themselves. They perform some labor, but they do not do it all - to be able to continue to expand, since capitalists must expand to deal with competitors, they must hire workers to perform the labor for them. The workers do not own capital (I mean, they might own some stock, but that means pretty little) and only have one thing to trade to the capitalists - their labor. They must do this to survive, because the capitalists control everything else - food, housing, clothes, etc. It's an unequal trade. The government may step in and provide some services for people who fall to the wayside but this is only done to provide a bandaid over what is factually a coercive economic system in which the capitalist holds most of the power - work or die. And the government typically is controlled by allied with those very capitalists.
But workers do in fact have the potential for power, because while they might individually be nothing, collectively they are everything. They could stop the levers tomorrow, if they chose to do so. They lack the legal power over capital but they have physical power over it. Perhaps, maybe, one day, they could simply take it for themselves. Produce for themselves. Get rid of the capitalist middleman parasite who runs things from the top for himself.
To put it simply, socialism is when the working class controls the means of production. Without the capitalist class, workers are free to organize production how they want, for their own purposes. Socialism is not perfect - it grows out of capitalism after all. Communism is beyond that, when production has increased to such a point that we are living post-scarcity at which point exchange of goods no longer makes any sense.
Now, there are plenty of logical and valid questions and arguments about how socialism/communism can or cannot function. Human nature is not one of them. The most reasonable arguments stem from the history of the 20th century communist movements. I do not blame anyone for being skeptical when the historical record is fairly bleak. It would take an extremely long time to go through every individual communist movement's failings, so let me focus on the most famous example - the USSR. And before I even get to that, let me remind you that past success or failure is no guarantee of future success or failure. If you look back at the late 18th century, "democracy" doesn't look too hot - in the US we've got a white supremacist classist republic and in France we've got total chaos. Yet here we are in a world where "democracy" has supposedly won.
Anyway. The USSR developed out of specific and peculiar historical circumstances. According to Marx's theory, socialism would first emerge in the most developed capitalist states because that is precisely where the most disastrous capitalist crises would occur (see the Great Depression for example) and where the class struggle would be most sharpened. However, the European states had caught on to the rising proletarian movement and begun providing various welfare services and enforcing regulations to keep the capitalist ship from sinking. And this did pretty well since it made the capitalist state, completely barbaric in its natural form, much more efficient and nicer to live in. The wealth that allowed this sort of stuff to happen of course came ultimately from colonized countries but that wasn't a primary concern for most unions, who were interested in getting better deals for their particular members. It was however an important deal to many socialists, who were strongly anti-imperialist. As Marx supposed, revolution had to be worldwide to succeed due to the all-encompassing grip of capitalism.
Early 20th century Russia was not the ideal place for socialism. Russia had only a few decades prior ended literal serfdom. Most of its population were peasant farmers, not factory workers. It was only in 1905 that they became a constitutional monarchy. Capitalism had not yet fully grown there and the bourgeoisie had not yet even become dominant. Even socialists within Russia acknowledged this - the Menshevik faction for example believed they had to work with the liberal bourgeoisie to complete a bourgeois republican revolution before they could even feasibly move on to socialism, because - as per Marx - socialism emerges out of the class struggle within capitalism. Capital must first build up the world of production before workers can become a unified class and seize the means.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks disagreed with the idea that Russia wasn't ready.
To make a very long story short, the Bolsheviks took advantage of Russia's collapsing political situation after the masses overthrew the czar during World War I. They were genuinely popular with a lot of the proletariat but they were not dominant among voters and sort of had to weasel their way into a majority over the Social Revolutionary party. The civil war that ensued against the anti-socialist White Army basically wrecked Russia, and to solidify power after an assassination attempt on Lenin's life the Bolsheviks banned "factions" among socialists which led to the creation of the unified Communist Party. With the country in smoking ruins after the war, the Communists adopted the New Economic Policy, which was basically state capitalism, to rebuild productive capacity before they could attempt to transition to socialism. When Lenin died there was a three way factional split between Stalin, Trotsky, and Bukharin over how to move forward. Bukharin wanted to keep on with the NEP, Trotsky wanted to push forward with revolution across the continent, and Stalin wanted to focus on "building socialism in one country" which both orthodox Marxists and Trotsky's followers considered impossible. Stalin won out through his power maneuvers and went on to force the USSR through massive and rapid industrialization at the expense of a ton of lives.
The important thing to recognize here is that not only is none of this communism, it wasn't socialism. Socialism is predicated on workers' democracy but the soviets (workers' councils) had been totally hijacked by the party, with every other faction being banned. When you think of "Communism" you're probably thinking of a big one party state where the government uses inefficient input-output tables to allocate production and tell people what to do. The fact that Stalin called this socialism does not make it so. Communism doesn't even have a state!
The Soviets did attempt to overcome capitalist market dynamics and it worked, sort of, for heavy industry, but not well at all for consumer goods. This is simply because the economic planners at Gosplan were in over their heads. In a modern economy there are simply too many things to keep track of, and the Soviets were working without computers. But with the rise of AI and automation, that may yet entirely be feasible.
The USSR failed because it was an inefficient command economy slapped together to try to brute force its way to socialism. With the destruction of the proletariat in the civil war, the party apparatus inserted itself in the proletariat's place as the revolutionary force in society. That didn't work out too well since the party is not the people. This is the intelligentsia making itself more important than the actual workers. This method spread worldwide because the Soviets were the dominant socialist state and everyone tried to emulate them (or were put in power by them). Usually this happened in other states that were likewise agricultural or underdeveloped due to colonialism. In other words, the material conditions were not right.
Today, the entire world is increasingly becoming netted together under advanced but decaying capitalism. Automation is around the corner and can either serve the masses or serve the wealthy few. And climate change is going to wreck us if we keep letting markets have their way.
Communism is not inevitable but there has probably not been a time in history yet where it is more feasible.
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It might work somewhere like a space station, where not following the established rules can literally kill you and everyone else.
No, and it will never ever work. This is a factual statement because human beings are subject to greed and lust for power. The desire to be better then peers will always be something we can't shake off as a species. Communism requires a perfect balance of how much power each person gets. As soon it tips in someone's favor it falls apart with disastrous results. The people themselves will eventually be oppressed, and the people after the power will eventually corrupt everything about the system. There is just no avoiding it. Some people here suggested AI taking over, but that's also subject to corruption as well. We haven't even seen how an AI actually behaves in these complex matters. I certainly will never put my life in the trust of a machine that I know nothing about.
Excellent post. Now watch it be ignored by all the woke libs that populate this forum.
The main problem with communism, in my mind, has always been that its big champions in any country that went in that direction did so while creating a cult of personality around themselves and bent communism to their ideals. Lenin, Stalin and Mao have doctrines named after them for how they did it and being the champions of communism in their respective countries made them seem godly to the people who followed them. Castro was another example, though he didn't have an -ism to his name that I know of.
Take that shit out of communism where the movement begins with a singular personality who leverages it to gain personal (often dictatorial) power, then maybe it'd go somewhere palatable. After all, true democracy and communism aren't inherent opposites per se.
Take that shit out of communism where the movement begins with a singular personality who leverages it to gain personal (often dictatorial) power, then maybe it'd go somewhere palatable. After all, true democracy and communism aren't inherent opposites per se.
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But Venezuela though!
Jk, great post and educational. I always learn more when I read your posts
The only way communism would or could ever work is Scientists create an AI capable of doing this or one that spawns 'naturally'. Even then, it's putting a lot of faith on the scientists involved not to make themselves "more equal" than others (For obvious reasons that they can work on the AI of course!)
Are you sure that you're talking about Communism? Communism is utopia, it will never work.
In Communism:
1. there's no money,
2. you can get everything you want for free,
3. you're not obligated to work if you want.
In result, just a few selfish people will ruin this system pretty fast.
Because you need "perfect" people for this system, otherwise it won't work. That's why Communism is utopia.
Was it utopia when humans crawled down from trees and engaged in building society based on mutual aid and free association without class or political stratification, and democratic governance for the common good?
I guess you could say it was utopia precisely because of those things, huhm.
There was in some form. Who was smarter and stronger - was a leader of tribe.
They were leader on the sufferance and consent of the people they led (because no matter how strong or smart they were they could not physically overpower all the tribe), which is a far cry from how it works today. I still don't get the eugenics argument though; the idea that we need perfect (by what metric?) people for us to once again reclaim the purest form of democracy that was our ancestors' prerogative.
We're not discussing capitalism or whataboutism, but rather if communism could be successful.
This one's a bit of a doozy because "socialism with Chinese characteristics", despite what the CCP politburo would have you believe, is neither socialism or communism anymore than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy or a republic.
If anything the relative stability of China provides a positive example for state capitalism.
A stable government/economic system needs to be able to withstand this. And the movements we've had so far have been very vulnerable to outside and internal pressure.
I have the same problems with communism that i have with anarchism (and libertarianism). We have cities of 20+ Millions, we have areas with super high population density even in non-urban environments. Bigger power structures will emerge and a completely egalitarian society that stays that way in an equilibrium is an unreachable utopia (not that it can't be better than today). I say this as someone that's a big fan of bottom-up democracy, despite some inneficiencies it brings.