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Is Communism good? This poll is closed. |
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| Yes |
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375 | 66.25% |
| No |
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191 | 33.75% |
| Total: | 523 votes | ||
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I think it should be obvious that full employment policies did in fact not cause labor to slack off at work any more than NAIRU-targeting economic policies. Is there a reason to believe that socialist full employment would function differently from Keynesian full employment? Tragedy of the commons also has the requirement that the individuals have private property that they accumulate by abusing their common property. In worker directed enterprise, it's the company rather than you as an individual that gets the short-term gain when you abuse the company, so the workers have no incentive to compete on who gets the most squeezed out of the company for themselves before it breaks down. It's actually the opposite historically, capitalist enterprise is more fragile. You can also have effective organization without hierarchy: organize the roles democratically, through negotiation or in a round-robin fashion between capable candidates. Techniques for this have been successfully pioneered by real organizations, partially even in low-hierarchy capitalist companies. Basically communism may be utopian and the leap from capitalism to it can fail in a myriad of ways, but from capitalism to a basic market socialist system? Just give the workers right of first refusal on company sales and offer loans to worker collectives on the condition that they reform their company as socialist. Start a huge investment program in socialist enterprise that freed them from paying bank interest rates. I doubt that anybody except the bourgeoisie would feel threatened by that or want to roll it back, especially if you did it during an economic downturn. What I'm really saying is that people hate the values of capitalism and keeping up the veneer of capitalism being the only efficient system is the main reason that capitalism stays as the dominant way to do business in a democratic society. The capitalist class is a leech that would cause the eventual defeat of capitalist enterprise against socialist enterprise in fair competition, and they know it. Just extrapolate from that, and communism is good. Otherwise my argument is just a pipe dream that makes ridiculous assumptions like a meaningfully democratic capitalist society and the liberal state consistently attempting to equalize the starting positions of promising businesses rather than propping up a few bourgeois clients. uncop fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Jan 28, 2017 |
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Jan 28, 2017 12:06
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I wonder how communist a country would become over time just by establishing a direct democracy. Randomly draw a statistically representative sample of people every couple of years and provide them the knowledge resources required to make decisions. Do the same for municipalities and throw some referenda into the mix. Or maybe instead of emulating the current house of representatives system, have public servants and citizens' associations identify problems and draw task-specific workgroups of workers that have a stake in the problem that they need to solve. For one, it would be a lot tougher to legally buy the loyalties of politicians that are selected randomly and often, cannot campaign for re-election and can't believably shift careers or start giving $100k speeches to bankers right after their stint. I know Switzerland is a normal liberal country, but citizens are mostly limited to voting there instead of actually proposing solutions that get discussed and polished with the help of the public apparatus before being put to vote.
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Mar 5, 2017 01:19
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You can distribute power, that's what democracy is theoretically all about. A central planning apparatus doesn't imply a single party state. The planners would be public servants without power to enact anything without the support of the power structure, be it centralized or distributed.
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Mar 5, 2017 16:33
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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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