I have never seen it functioning outside of theory and doubt that it can. I like social democracy with a lot of regulation.
Where have you seen capitalism work? Or what are your metrics for “it works”? And which states do you consider being failed communist states? And why did they fail in your opinion?
Capitalism works pretty well for me…
Ok. and surely there’s nobody that could say the same about communism?
Well, everyone seems to think communism hasn’t been effectively enforced in any country. So, no, nobody could say that and keep that argument valid.
If you look at countries like Cuba, I’d argue that it’s working pretty well considering the circumstances.
Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors per 10k capita (95), their life expectancy was constantly rising until covid happened.
The biggest issue they have is being isolated by the USA, which also enforce that isolation across the northern hemisphere.
Its ironic you bring that up considering Cuba is one of the worst developed nations to be a doctor.Yeah and those doctors make 60 bucks a MONTH. They have to work abroad, or hold second jobs. Even when they work abroad a huge percentage of the money is funneled back to the government. They have a tremendous problem with corruption. Electricity is out constantly. They also have a horrific track record with political prisoners and massive human rights abuses in said prisons. They have zero freedom of speech and can be put in prison for even participating in threads like this one. I’d say thats a poor example.
Well, in the US you can easily get into ICE camps if you look like you could be not white enough, if you study medicine you’ll start your life with hundreds of thousands in student debt (that you won’t get rid of, even with a bankruptcy), and I’d argue that the current US administration is as corrupt (or worse), so I am not sure what you’d be looking for in a Country to consider it better or as good as a capitalist country?
it’s worked effectively in small socially isolated religious communities with rigid social codes. Amish, Kibbitz, etc.
Ah, but all those states aren’t TRUE capitalist states. That’s why we can’t point to a successful example.
That’s funny, because Capitalism doesn’t even work when you try to make it less agressive by implementing rail guards.
But sure, looking at states like the USA makes me believe that Capitalism is doing good!
Works great until people become involved.
That being said, you can say the exact same about capitalism.
Only takes one person pissing in the punch bowl to make it a piss bowl.
That we should be striving for it even though it may take a while
Why
just wait. it will work. we promise.
no, don’t be critical of us not being able to give you any details. that’s mean. just trust us. we know better than you.
Communism is old, and young. The principals of communal living are the oldest form of human organization. It’s also the most common form today if you count small groups like family.
But as an organizing principal for government, it’s a baby. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The Bolshevik revolution was in 1917. So the whole idea of communism is < 150-200yo. Compare to capitalism at this age and it’s all slavery and settler colonialism; the most massive redistribution of wealth through theft in history.
The logic that communism is a bad system because the Soviet Union should also condemn capitalism because the Dutch East India Company.
I would say the Soviet Union and the Dutch VOC were both bad for the same core reason: they were an ideological extreme. Capitalism is only a good system, if it is localized and regulated. Otherwise a small group of people will come out on top and exploit everyone else. But the same holds for communism, as clearly seen in any nation attempting communism, you inevitably get a dictator who will exploit the people for his or her own good. The difference is that when you weaken communism by implementing only parts of it, like universal healthcare, or unemployment benefits, then we call it socialism.
we call it liberal social democracy
While they share the common problem of dogmatism, I think that interpreting this as an issue of ideological “extremes” misses the point that moderatism is also an “extreme” - it dogmatically seeks stability of the status quo over conflict resolution, it “regulates” with an iron fist. Anything that becomes “ideological”, that holds something sacred, valued above oneself, can be hijacked by other people pursuing their own interests (or other ideological interests), and/or lead to contradictions between values and needs and desires.
i live in a “communist country” and communism does not exist
How do you mean?
there’s nothing communist about it. it’s as capitalist as anywhere else, with even less regulation than somewhere like the united states. communism is just a brand, like “democracy”. no government that im aware of is actually trying to create it or wants it to happen. the hammer and scythe is a symbol of heritage and that’s all.
It’s never existed. Not in it’s pure form anyway. But neither has capitalism, or socialism either for that matter.
A theoretical system is always in some way perverted and coopted by the people implementing it. Humans are the weak part of the equation because humans are greedy and focused only on themselves and their own small group of friends/family. So scaling any political system up from theoretical to an actual national policy always ends up with a perverted form where one group ends up over another group despite the original theoretical intent of the system in question. That goes for Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, as well as religion too.
Humans suck and can’t have nice things without fucking them up.
yep. but every ‘true believer’ believes they are different and they totally wouldn’t be like that…
The truest truism that ever did truism is that “power inevitably corrupts”
Good in theory, problematic in practice. A goal to strive towards but not achieve.
The main problem is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is so easily corrupted into a regular ol dictatorship. It’s supposed to be a transitional period, but when that much power is in play, it’s hard for people to give it up - and even when they’re willing, they can just get ousted by less scrupulous people.
Making it safely through that passage is like a Great Filter of socio-economics
A power vacuum, which immediately gets filled in by whoever can gain the most power the fastest, while keeping the communist title. Thus the “no true communist” arguing.
My opinion is that it works kind of okay in smaller groups where everyone knows everyone, but on a larger scale it always falls apart
Like many other systems, works well unless some people are assholes whoops
People that fund resistance, blockade and embargo people instituting it, in order to “prove” it doesn’t work, for example. People who tear down the few institutions and restraints in their own states to prove government doesn’t work, for example.
Hmm… What about… decentralized communism
I mean, what’s stopping a power vacuum in that case either?
It sounds problematic, but I’d be intrigued to hear your take, if it’s a fleshed-out idea you have.
It needs guardrails similar to capitalism in terms of checks and balances and protections against abuses of power. And it needs to be an economic framework, with direct-participation democracy doing the political work.
We are at the technological threshold where a Republic is no longer needed as the primary interface of democracy, but such a direct-participation democracy needs to be paired with an electorate which is highly educated, places said education on a higher pedestal than wealth or power, and focuses on experience and meritocracy above all else. Most importantly, said population must have virtually no economically vulnerable people, as poverty nerfs intelligence by up to 15 points and dramatically reduces a person’s ability to think critically beyond their immediate day-to-day needs. Having a population that can see near-100% attention to national questions makes for an effective direct-participation democracy.
Essentially, the people vote directly on everything, and about the only “political apparatus” that exists would be those structures meant to carry out the will of the people and diplomats that interact with other countries. There would be no leaders or politicians, only people being the gears of government.
If a person is particularly passionate about a cause, they can champion it in public forums, going up against other debaters, but are not allowed to monopolize the forum in a career-like manner.
Plus, such a democracy would be reflected down into the worker’s collectives which would operate on virtually identical principles, only with scopes restricted to that collective.
There are other parts of the societal structure that could enhance said communism.
The legal system will need to be 100% apolitical and utterly divorced from the political structures or economic incentives. Lawyers become judges by courts of their peers, who examine their body of work and determine if the expertise is sufficient for the judgeship. Ideally they wouldn’t even be told who they are evaluating, their only opportunity is to recognize the work done through any anonymization done to it. Judges that misbehave can be removed either internally or by an external vote by the population at large. Laws can be implemented in either direction - from the population or from judgements - but must be approved by the people.
The police system needs to be a national system that cannot allow bad apples to just jump from precinct to precinct to avoid discipline (as per America), but must also be unarmed as a base unit. Only SWAT has the ability to carry more than restraints. Police are assigned to neighbourhoods to learn and integrate with the residents, as per Japan’s system. Trust is built by literally walking the beat and being an integral part of the community.
Any wider security forces (NSA/CIA/FBI) or military would be focused only on external and internal threats, and are highly constrained to only act in the best interests of the society as a whole, but are also under a sort of “prime directive” to not meddle in other countries except to blunt/neuter what they are doing in the first place. Military, in particular, would be primarily self-defence and international peacekeeping.
Both the military and the police and any other security forces would have a shadow council of randomly-chosen civilians whose entire purpose would be to criticize and constrain overreach, along with dedicated lawyers whose entire purpose is to advise on laws. All police and military members would have the ability to access JAG-style lawyers and would be protected when refusing to carry out illegal orders.
There is a lot more I could add, but imma gonna stop here.
Our current socioeconomic system is basically built on many intersecting hierarchies of coercion, oppression and control - i.e. some measure of power you can use to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. A few examples of those hierarchies include patriarchy, religious authorities, the state, and capitalism.
All of those hierarchies must be abolished. If any of them remain in place, then you will end up with exploiters and the exploited. Eventually, this will stratify over time, as we’ve seen through history a number of times - the rich get richer, accumulate wealth and power until it becomes unbearable, then the current ruling class are overthrown and replaced by a new ruling class.
We need to NOT create a new ruling class. We need to abolish the ruling class and NOT EVER REPLACE THEM.
That’s the mistake made by communism in the USSR - replacing the existing ruling elite with another ruling elite. No matter how cool and revolutionary the leaders of the revolution are, as soon as they have power, they WILL be corrupted by it.
So the solution to our shared problem is anarchism. We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Humans are the most co-operative animals in the world. We don’t act like it, because the powers that be discourage us from co-operating. Because if we co-operated, we’d immediately realize the problems we have are coming from above.
We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.
I guess the major question is who redistributes the resources without a hierarchy? If no one can exert their will over another, how do you take resources from the wealthy?
Genuine question, what happens in an anarchist utopia when your neighbors decide that they like your land? If you fight back en masse, doesn’t that involve creating a military with a hierarchy that’s ripe for seizing power? How can you maintain the social organization for building fighter jets or aircraft carriers or spycraft without those being taken over and used against the people? If you just don’t, what happens when your neighbors are a global superpower that has all that?
It seems even more impractical and idealistic than Communism, which at least has an answer to that.
There’s a lot of questions in there, and I’m genuinely really sorry to say, there’s way more than I can hope to address with the limited amount of time and energy I have, but I think you’re imagining an “anarchist state” or something like that - that’s still thinking with a non-anarchist mindset. There is no country to invade, there’s an amorphous blob of land, which I suppose another nation could attempt to impose itself upon, but in that case, all the working class needs to do is overthrow the new would-be autocracy. Why would a standing military force be more effective than an informal, organized resistance, fighting for their own land? You’re imagining pitched battles and the like, instead imagine trying to occupy land where there’s not really any clear military targets, but everywhere you attempt to impose control, your soldiers end up getting shot, stabbed, or having molatov cocktails thrown on them/their vehicles. Militarism does not protecting the people who live in a country, they’re a tool of the ruling class to fight other nations. This is just my opinion, though - ask ten anarchists, you’ll probably get twenty answers. We believe in creating a better society through consensus, which makes it a little tricky for anarchists to talk about solutions to specific problems on an individual basis.
I’d recommend you check out the anarchist FAQ if you have more questions - https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html
That makes sense, except that a very simple solution to the “how do I occupy the land” is “kill everyone there”, since an anarchist place thing would most likely have less developped firepower since, like you said, militarism sucks for everyone not on top. Thing is, I do really agree with the principles of anarchism, and I think we should strive for a greater devolution of power. Just, maybe in a different way than what’s often presented.
If we made an anarchist society and we all get wiped out by genocide, at least we would die as free men and women, fighting for our homes and our lives. In the present we die as slaves and give our lives to increase shareholder value.
People are so scared of uncertainty, and all of these “what if” questions are just thinly veiled fear and insecurity. I get it. But if we want to live in a better world, we need to find the courage to act.
I personally am fully capable of leading a fulfilling life, it’s what I’m doing right now.
I’m not throwing that away to be more “free”, it’s simply not worth the risk for me.
I will work to get my current society towards more like what I want it to be though. Remember, the UK went from absolute monarchy to democracy without a revolution, if they were able to do that it’s possible to do the same with other systems.
None of us are free until all of us are. If you’re happy benefiting from slave labor, I don’t have anything more to say to you.
The key for any successful politically and economically equalized system… Is circular oversight. Committees arranged to observe and contribute to each others decision making. Shared and necessarily equal responsibilities.
Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.
Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?
It goes beyond oversight, it needs to be a flat structure, where no one person has authority over any other person. It’s not enough to create three groups, give them all power, and have them all watch over each-other, for example, because that would also inevitably lead to corruption. The only thing that can guarantee freedom, peace, justice, and equality for all requires the abolition of all power structures. We need anarchism.
But I can assert power over you by threatening you with a baseball bat. If I get a group of buddies with bats, we become the power structure.
You can’t eliminate power structures forever, they arise spontaneously in a population. You can’t abolish power structures because abolition requires a power structure to enforce.
The best you can do is devise power structures with multiple layers of accountability. So long as some people are bigger, stronger, meaner than others, power imbalances will exist. If you don’t have a structure to regulate those imbalances, warlords and mafiosos will make their own.
You’re missing a few major pieces of the puzzle here - why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place? Most crime is a result of inequal power structures to begin with. If all of our needs are met, why would we choose to be violent? Some crimes of passion may occur, but that’s not likely to create any hierarchies.
If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way - in fact, in a much easier way, since they won’t have anywhere near as much pre-established power.
Revolution is not a single, one-off event. Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.
why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place?
Some people are greedy, or jealous, or just want to be in power.
If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way
That seems like circular logic that hand-waves the intrinsic difficulty of the task as a trifling detail. You’re assuming a solution exists, and then assuming that solution can deal with any new threats.
Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.
That just leaves the tricky transition period. What do we do in the meantime? I think a single generation is massively underselling the timescale, what you’re describing is likely to take a century or more. You can’t build a system off of humans suddenly having heretofore unobserved commitment to the collective good.
We’re berry-picking primates advancing too fast for our nervous systems to keep up. Anarchism is a nice utopia to think of, but it isn’t much comfort for people living today.
Seems like your mind is made up! I think this is just going to be one of those “agree to disagree” situations. The answers to your objections can be found in the Anarchist FAQ, I’d recommend learning more about it before dismissing it!
On the contrary, my mind is constantly open and I’ve read quite a bit. But what I’ve read generally falls into three categories:
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Totally hand-wavey, concerned more with guiding principles than actionable models. No attempt is made to describe how to devise a non-hierarchical system that fulfills the needs of the people.
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Delusional, based entirely on people suddenly being way more cooperative and efficient in group decisions than they’ve ever actually been observed to be en masse.
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Inconsequential, “non-hierarchical” is abstracted so far that most modern democracies could be described as such after relatively minor reform. These seem the most practical to me, like the proponents actually considered the mechanics of how the system would work in the material world.
I’m not trying to dismiss it, but everything I’ve read either makes it sound like a fantasy, or a minor change.
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I think it’s susceptible to the same problems we have now. Elites gonna form and do their thing. Whether they’re in the party or on the board of directors, the effect is the same.
I think we’re just way too naive about systems. We expect them to work for us without putting in any effort. We should stop focusing so much on systems and start focusing on communities and cultures.
The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation. You can’t achieve that by passing laws or writing a new constitution or whatever. You have to get buy-in from everyone.
The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation.
You’re describing high trust societies I think. (1).
Humans aren’t mature enough to handle it.
What do you mean
I mean, that the larger the group, the more assholes you will find in that group. Communism works great for families, and households. They look out for and support each other without keeping financial logs of who owes what.
Try to do that on a country wide scale, and there will be people whining that they don’t have enough, or they do too much, or that others deserve less, and they will lie and cheat and manipulate their way into getting more and more and more.
It’s a great system, far too good for us stupid, selfish humans to ever accomplish.
The easiest bullshit answer to why anyone doesn’t like a thing:
tHeY jUsT dOn’T uNdErStAnD it!”
I don’t see what this has to do with my comment.
Speaking of maturity, when we were kids, my mother told me and my brother to share stuff, like split food in equal proprotions, because like… we’re supposed to be equal to each other. Guess why we have fights every fucking day lol. He always say its not fair or some shit.
if people actually studied it in college, you wouldnt be so quick to supporting it without knowing the ins and outs of the system. people/tankies fantasizes it alot, without actually reading the whole meaning behind it. thats why fall very easily for the extremes of politics.
The reason lots of manifestos, communism, bell hooks, whatever, are these 50 page outlines is because… well fleshing out the details would quickly make the idealism of the utopia collapse.
Notice how they never talk about enforcement mechanisms? yeah… they just make this weird assumption that everyone will be happy and free by following the ideals and nothing bad will ever happen or there will be any disagreement about those ideals.
Everyone I’ve ever met who lived under it says it’s was fucking awful. Not a single endorsement. That’s significant because even capitalism has boosters. Not communism.
I know several working class folks who grew up in the USSR who, while they admit it wasn’t perfect, were very happy with how things were then and - although some of them are now onboard the Pravda train to looneyville & love Putin and believe the Russian Orthodox church line that Ukraine is led by baby-eating, devil-worshipping, Nazi Pedophiles (not an exaggeration) - they admit things are much worse than they were then and place the blame squarely on moving away from communism & planned economy.
Because of strong social programs, they had access to good education, work & a high quality of life, and a level of recreation and leisure that seems wild to me as an American.
Communism is not a monolith. There are many tendencies. And YMMV depending on the folks in power, just like any system. Additionally, despots love to call themselves socialist/communist while doing nothing relating to seizing the means of production - look at Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) as an example.
Imagine if we asked folks “What’s your experience been like living in a capitalist regime”. Most people would think thats a weird question because of how many types of capitalist regimes exist - it’sa general economic framework, not a system of government. Your experience will vary wildly if you are from like rural Kenya vs the US vs Scandinavia.
Great point(s).
I’ve met quite a few people who say that although there were disadvantages, on average it was ok to live in Soviet Union after the 60s. If you asked around in Russia, there would even be those who praised it. Because there were some advantages like not bad free education and free medicine, for example. In some good times, you could even get a free apartment or a piece of land. And now, under capitalism, it is very difficult to earn an apartment in the most developed cities.
Historical context matters too.
60s Soviet russia was not the best in the world when it came to economic or human development, and certainly was not politically or culturally free in the slightest. It paled in comparison to the US or Europe- BUT if you had previously experienced the civil war, collapse of the empire, multiple widespread famines and total social upheaval, the pains of Stalin’s industrialization and then WWII… dear god, the relative stability of the 1960’s planned economy probably felt like heaven in comparison.
I object to the term “capitalism”. The correct term is “classical liberal” (modern liberals are something else with very little in common). I boost capitalism because it is a result of freedom, and that also informs when I will limit my support for capitalism.
Capitalism isn’t a result of freedom at all, it’s actually the opposite. There are many examples I could give, but a simple one is land. There was a time where nobody could own land, it was considered a shared, public resource, that anyone could make use of. Under capitalism, land is made private, and restricted people from roaming there. The freedom of one person to own land is inherently taking away the freedom of others to roam or use that land.
Capitalism incentivizes hoarding as much wealth and power into as few hands as possible, encourages our most selfish, anti-cooperative impulses, hampers innovation, and inevitably leads to fascism.
And communism is worse. China boasts a greater population percentage of poor than America does. And has the same 1% controlling the most wealth.
I’m an anarchist. I advocate for anarchism. I’m not a fan of China at all. But Capitalism is way worse than anything China is doing. Capitalism is why we have kids working in sweat shops, conflict minerals being mined in war-torn countries, colonialism, slavery, and fascism. World War 2 was directly caused by capitalism.
As a rule, I generally don’t take seriously, anything that follows:
I am an anarchist
…unless it’s followed by the rest of the lyrics.
In his book, Anger is an Energy, Johnny Rotten says:
“That line, ‘I wanna destroy the passerby,’ I was talking about all those kinds of people, the complacent ones that don’t contribute, that just sit by and moan and don’t actually do anything to better themselves or the situation for others. The non-participating moral majority. I just thought ‘passerby’ was a better phrase, gets to the point quicker. Rather than use twenty-two words, just one nailed it rather well.”
Neat.
The foundation of classical liberalism is “life liberty and property”. The ability to own land is a large part of that.
There is no capitalist society, but many of them are versions of classical liberal - while the two have much in common there is a major difference at the core.
Every classical liberal society is also inherently capitalist. If your society is based around private ownership of the means of production and generating profit, you’ve got a capitalist society. Capitalism is the bedrock underlying liberalism. You’re basically saying “we do not drive motor vehicles, we drive cars”
You have the relation backward. Liberalism underlies capitalism.
Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberal values. If the rights of the individual and equality are important to you, then you should oppose capitalism, because it is responsible for creating the greatest inequality humanity has ever seen, and for creating the most oppressive regimes the world has ever seen. Fascism is capitalism taken to it’s logical conclusion.
Fascism is capitalism taken to it’s logical conclusion.
I think you’re probably right about this, as evidenced by…well, everything. But can you flesh this thought out, if it’s something you’ve thought about in detail? It’s just interesting to me to read more on that connection.
Again, I’m a clasical liberal. capitalism is a strawman so you can make arguements like the above. In some ways what I support looks like capitalism but only because and where it is a concequense of clasical liberalism.
note that I need to specify clasical liberal above. Modern liberals are different form us in many complev ways
Liberalism is a type of capitalism. It’s hard for me to understand why people can’t grasp this concept. It’s not a difficult one.
You have it backwards. liberalism came first and underlies capitalism.
the difierence is important because we e do capitalism because of liberalism - freedon - and not a devotion to capital.
You appear to be using the term “capitalism” in a confusing way. From etymonline:
The meaning “political/economic system which encourages capitalists” is recorded from 1872 and originally was used disparagingly by socialists.
Words can change meaning and all that, but when people complain about capitalism, they don’t mean what you’re talking about. You seem to mean something like “well-regulated free market”, and other people mean “broken, exploitative system that worships greed”
That is why I object to capitalism - it is defined to be whatever socialists want to demean without reguard if that is even what is happening, if it is acceptable because of other benefits. It assumes capitalists are fine with corruption.
When in reality we are liberals who understand rule of law.
Good on paper, never works in practice.
The classic line
