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Is Communism good? This poll is closed. |
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375 | 66.25% |
| No |
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191 | 33.75% |
| Total: | 523 votes | ||
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RBC posted:Being educated is a waste of human potential? Misspending an education studying marxist critical theory in the social sciences is a waste of human potential I mean.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:13
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RBC posted:Being educated is a waste of human potential?  look who's talking!
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Mar 31, 2017 23:13
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RBC posted:Being educated is a waste of human potential? Saying that you are educated again and again and expecting it to impress somebody only points towards a sort of simplistic mind. So far you have proven that you can maybe construct a sentence, sometimes.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:14
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steinrokkan posted:Mr. OwlFancier says that it is impossible for socialists to win if there are extant capitalists who do not with a socialist victory. So presumably the only way forward is either a violent revolution (like that has ever helped anybody) or the spontaneous combustion of everybody not on board with full Communism now. Or, possibly, the steady change of society to one where capitalism is sufficiently untenable that it becomes impossible for a critical mass of people to buy into.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:15
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OwlFancier posted:Or, possibly, the steady change of society to one where capitalism is sufficiently untenable that it becomes impossible for a critical mass of people to buy into. So why are you complaining if the capitalist hegemony we are going through ATM is part of the master plan?
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Mar 31, 2017 23:16
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steinrokkan posted:So why are you complaining if the capitalist hegemony we are going through ATM is part of the master plan? Because it incurs a horrific human cost, and I am not able to shut that out.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:18
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hakimashou posted:This is a good thing though, you don't want people seriously considering going back to Nazis or Communists. Capitalism has killed more people than both those ideologies combined though.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:38
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Benjamin Arthur posted:Capitalism has killed more people than both those ideologies combined though. Also nazis were capitalists and were enabled into power by center-right liberals.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:40
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There's no difference between Nazis and Communists. Just different colored flags, incidental differences in which people they hate and murder. Same people deep down.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:41
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hakimashou posted:There's no difference between Nazis and Communists. Just different colored flags, incidental differences in which people they hate and murder. Don't you support the death penalty?
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Apr 1, 2017 00:42
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hakimashou posted:There's no difference between Nazis and Communists. Just different colored flags, incidental differences in which people they hate and murder. Benjamin Arthur fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 00:45
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OwlFancier posted:Don't you support the death penalty? What can I say, it's complicated. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3811398
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Apr 1, 2017 00:50
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hakimashou posted:What can I say, it's complicated. Are you sure it doesn't just make you a miniature nazicommunist?
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Apr 1, 2017 00:52
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OwlFancier posted:Are you sure it doesn't just make you a miniature nazicommunist? Yeah I am sure.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:59
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hakimashou posted:Yeah I am sure. States killing their own citizens is bad. Unless its a capitalist state disproportionately killing a racial minority. Then its complicated.
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Apr 1, 2017 01:03
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Benjamin Arthur posted:States killing their own citizens is bad. Unless its a capitalist state disproportionately killing a racial minority. Then its complicated. If you say so!
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Apr 1, 2017 01:13
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It should be obvious to any intellectually honest person that the average socialist is in no way responsible for the horrors done in the name of socialism, much like the average religious person is in no way responsible for the horrors done in the name of their religion. You probably would not want to give central power to a bunch if true believers ungrounded in reality, but I hear that being moderately religious is still considered a cool&good feature of a politician, since it implies some moral fiber and people generally agree with the good parts of Christian values. Well, guess what? Despite Communism existing, the majority also agrees with the good parts of socialist values (even if they don't believe that socialists are the best candidates to implement those values). Similarly, I'm annoyed by the whining about Corbyn's Labour. UK has a de facto two-party system much like the USA, which means that a huge part of the electorate is a hostage to more popular interests at any one time. The New Democrats and New Labour made people with socialist value systems hostage to a soft-neoliberal value system by hijacking the very parties they had been voting for for decades. The people that hijacked Labour back and selected Corbyn through a majority democratic vote, how are they not entitled to that? Because centrists who can vote for either party and as such didn't vote on who should lead Labour, don't like Corbyn's policies or person? I call bullshit, it was the very people who care most about what Labour is, the people who had had nobody to vote for for 30 years, who hijacked the party. I'm sure that if the centrists give a gently caress, they'll join the party and vote Corbyn out rather than becoming tories or libdems or whatever. If Labour falls out of favor because there aren't enough people with socialist ethos to sustain them with a socialist leader, that's democracy in effect. Whereas telling a double-digit share of the population to fall in line and give their votes to soft-neolibs is completely against the spirit of democracy. It seems to me too that the Marxian ideal of communism is too utopian and relies on unverifiable assumptions about people, making it mostly a religion. Neither is Marxian economics useful for predicting anything, it just reminds us that you can should analyse economies based on how well they serve the people participating in them rather than concentrating on how well they maximize an abstract number. The number is only important insofar as increasing it actually increases general welfare. And non-bullshit economics influenced by Marx very much does exist, those economists are the ones warning us about letting the FIRE sector grow too large and so on. Econ is in fact not incompatible with most central socialist ideas (democratic control over money, employment and workplaces rather than a capitalist class making economic decisions and living on profit). Nothing except ideology says that capital has to flow from capitalists that are entitled to profit on their capital. Just that it would be a shame to replace those self-organizing capitalists with a system of distribution that works even worse. What this essentially means is that there's a lot more economic good the left can do to improve the lives of people than try to set the stage for some new utopian mode of production, as foretold by a bearded man in the 19th century.
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Apr 1, 2017 08:17
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I have a paper from 201X something where Marxian economists were still trying to solve the transformation problem or a throughoutly shameful empiric analysis trying to show that this or that correlated with something Marx said. No matter how much dressing you put on it, a logically inconsistent theory is no basis to build a research program on. And that's why Marxian econ has not produced any fresh research and is basically just trying to justify its existence. There's just no impactful Marxian econ research to be found, and imo that's because it's dogmatically based on a incorrect theory. Compare that to mainstream econ. In the 90's, everyone was hot about equilibrium refinements to reduce the number of possible equilibria. Then, experimental econ started and showed that people do not play refinements, but they play Nash with irrationalities. And so all that high-theory equilibrium refinement died and nowadays there are extremely few people who are experts in it. Instead, everyone moved to behavioral econ and equilibrium concepts which are even less demanding than Nash. Of course the left doesn't understand this, as they see themselves as victims of some centrist conspiracy in econ. Nevermind that every field of econ has seen paradigm shifts that went completely against the classical approaches, incorporating sociology, psychology, biology, physics... econ is now behavioral, non-rational, experimental, network based, complex systems, non equilibrium based, agent based, evolutionary, incorporates status, social values, social identities... The point being is that Marxian econ is by definition fixed on one dogma and its basis is flawed. But instead of moving on and improving a theory, people just try to salvage the paradigm. It's research with the conclusion in mind. There's no conspiracy. There's gigantic departments like PSE, which is ranked #6 econ department in the world, and that place is left as hell. The reason Marxian econ doesn't succeed there just as anywhere else is because it is just bad research. Bad articles, bad arguments, dogmatic research with no contribution. Marxian econ is as dead as perfect markets, super specific equilibrium concepts and Neoclassic RBC Macro models. Just that Marxists don't see it. Instead of wasting all that intellectual potential, people could of course move on and try to find answers to actual questions of today. But they don't. uncop posted:It seems to me too that the Marxian ideal of communism is too utopian and relies on unverifiable assumptions about people, making it mostly a religion. Neither is Marxian economics useful for predicting anything, it just reminds us that you can should analyse economies based on how well they serve the people participating in them rather than concentrating on how well they maximize an abstract number. The number is only important insofar as increasing it actually increases general welfare. And non-bullshit economics influenced by Marx very much does exist, those economists are the ones warning us about letting the FIRE sector grow too large and so on. Social welfare functions are never an accurate representation of a complex demand system. Optimizing social welfare is about efficiency. A system can be efficient and also totally unfair and morally undesirable. Those are just different questions, and that's why nowadays so few people in economics make strong cases for political-economic systems (except when they are bought). If we could design an efficient planned economy, the question whether to implement it or not simply would not be economics, it would be politics. But as long as we have no solid proposal on that matter, it's just natural that economists are skeptical. Research however does ask the question if a centralized system is more or less efficient than a decentralized system, and to what degree that is implementable. And these things truly matter for a communist, or at least they should, because a non-planned economy also has inefficiencies associated with it, as does inequality and concentration of capital. But all that is a fart in the wind because Marx believed that communism comes first, and by definition it solves all human conflict and incentive problems, because literally all inter-human issues are created solely by alienation of workers. That is why no Marxian will ever need develop an understanding of whether centralized mechanisms are good or not, or how to structure a planned economy, or how to solve incentive issues. Because for Marxians, all that can be improvised until we reach full communism, at which point none of these things matter. In reality this means of course that the left will never have a workable program that people can actually believe in, except the endless opposition to inexistent strawmen like "marginal theory" or whatever. As long as Marxists dominate the intellectual left, there can be no progress. Instead, the saviors of the left are classically trained economists making a quick buck on some sensationalist books full with standard models. Left parties all over the planet are losing, all socialist countries are doing capitalist reforms or are basically collapsing, and the right is on the rise again. Edit: imagine for example an actual good paper published in AER stating: "Here's a precise argument why thing X in communism is actually more efficient than X in a market". That would be cool&good, and no one could say anything about. Hell, instead of communism, call it "centralized, transfer-sharing system" and you don't even need to content with ideologists. The issue is of course that Marxists dominating communist theory don't even know how to make such an argument. They only thing they understand is: "Capitalism is bad, hence communism must be better". It doesn't really occur to them that this is not how to make an argument, and that it is not an argument at all. Instead, one needs a research program showing step by step all the little things which are actually better in centralized allocation. But that's apparently too much work. Truth is, that sort of research program would take years. And it would take a lot of smart people. And that just doesn't jive with Marxists, because a) communism first, solutions later and b) all smart people are busy trying to solve the transformation problem. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 16:03
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That is a really good effort post. Communists would respond to something like that by putting you in a concentration camp or just killing and disappearing you.
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Apr 1, 2017 21:13
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caps on caps on caps posted:It's research with the conclusion in mind. That's the heart of it. It's not science and it can't be science. It's not right and it can't be right because it's not a legitimate framework for discovery to begin with.
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Apr 1, 2017 23:34
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Looks like we got ourselves a kulak here, boys.
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Apr 2, 2017 00:09
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the trump tutelage posted:Looks like we got ourselves a
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Apr 2, 2017 00:28
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If we want to judge economic systems by only their mass murder, communism has a long way to go to catchup with capitalism. Capitalism committed the genocide of two continents, enslaved another, and colonized two more all for the benefit of europe and their descendants.
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Apr 2, 2017 03:23
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Moridin920 posted:The one and only public referendum in the USSR was in 1991 and nearly 78% of the population voted to preserve the USSR, That is honestly surprising to me. How open/free was the voting in that referendum?
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Apr 2, 2017 04:30
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tekz posted:That is honestly surprising to me. How open/free was the voting in that referendum? More open than the 1996 elections when we intervened to fix the election and stop the populace from reelecting the communists. Of course the revisionists in this thread who want to pretend communism is some insane genocide philosophy would paper over this fact.
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Apr 2, 2017 04:34
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Fiction posted:More open than the 1996 elections when we intervened to fix the election and stop the populace from reelecting the communists. Of course the revisionists in this thread who want to pretend communism is some insane genocide philosophy would paper over this fact. It's not revisionism to point out that Naziism and Communism are insane evil ideologies of murder and genocide. It's the main notable thing about them. It's revisionism to claim they aren't. Evil, sick, and ugly revisionism.
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Apr 2, 2017 04:44
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NNick posted:If we want to judge economic systems by only their mass murder, communism has a long way to go to catchup with capitalism. Capitalism committed the genocide of two continents, enslaved another, and colonized two more all for the benefit of europe and their descendants. At least capitalism never trumpeted its moral purity and righteousness to everyone while massacring, causing famines, and imprisoning political dissidents. No one ever proclamed that they were conqering or colonizing for capitalism, they did so for political, personal, or economic reasons. Communists happily justified every reprehensable act they did via communisms utopian vision. And so communisms utopian vision was drenched in blood and famine, as its zealots used it as a defence for every crime committed.
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Apr 2, 2017 05:13
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"capitalism" isnt even an ideology, its just the normal way people do things. Part of the mental illness of communism is that it lumps everything not-communist together as some kind of rival ideology. It's one of the reasons they are such brutal murderers. Seeing someone in 2017 with a hammer and sickle isnt any different from seeing someone in 2017 with a swastika. Hearing someone say "i am a marxist communist" isn't any different from hearing someone say "I am one of Hitler's Nazis." hakimashou fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Apr 2, 2017 |
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Apr 2, 2017 05:16
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hakimashou posted:"capitalism" isnt even an ideology, its just the normal way people do things. 
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Apr 2, 2017 05:21
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hakimashou posted:"capitalism" isnt even an ideology, its just the normal way people do things. It's incredible but you manage to get progressively more wrong over time.
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Apr 2, 2017 05:25
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[quote="Pharohman777" post=""470940811"] No one ever proclamed that they were conqering or colonizing for capitalism, they did so for political, personal, or economic reasons. [/quote] What the gently caress do you think capitalism is?
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Apr 2, 2017 06:14
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I'd say the problem is that the definition of "capitalism" regularly gets stretched for the purposes of rhetoric. Is it capitalism literally every single time someone acts out of a profit motive? It seems like statements such as "5 continents killed or enslaved because of capitalism" are using that kind of uselessly broad definition. You might as well just tally up every death ever since ancient times to "capitalism"
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Apr 2, 2017 06:15
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Capitalism consists of all motives and reasons other than the motives and reasons of communists. When communists commit genocide, brutal repression, or murder it is ok, because they are doing it for communist reasons and for communist motives, and not capitalist ones. There was a time when this thinking was serious and cost many good people their lives.
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Apr 2, 2017 06:23
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To answer the OP's question: Yes. Topic locked.
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Apr 2, 2017 06:48
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