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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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Like posadism, for instance, the kinkiest of all far left tendencies.
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Jan 22, 2017 12:50
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 16:43 |
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Syndicalism > communism imo. Organise from the bottom up, take direct control of the means of production rather than ceding them to a state proxy to hold them on your behalf.
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Jan 22, 2017 14:13
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Capitalism is good if you like mass graves and vicious political repression, bad if you like freedom, prosperity, and good outcomes.
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Jan 24, 2017 02:42
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Oh yeah, who did Cuba genocide? (The rich don't count) edit: Also, Vietnam, who did Vietnam commit genocide against? Be mindful that if you're going to keep bringing up mass killings, the list of massacres and genocides committed by capitalists, monarchists, fascists, imperialists and other reactionaries only grows and grows and the repressive and murderous communist regimes of the 20th century are hardly exceptional if that's the only criticism people can bring to bear. People starve under capitalism, people are rounded up and killed by death squads or obliterated by air strikes or drone strikes, political leaders are assassinated, people are disappeared to extraterritorial blacksites. If communism is supposed to be qualitatively worse than the status quo because it's historically meant to have been more repressive then other systems that idea is patently false and the evidence is all of human history. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 10:09
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:What are your historical examples of capitalist countries devolving into feudalism and communism? If feudalism/communism is the natural equilibrium can you demonstrate several example states which have settled into feudalism/communism from a capitalist system? If again feudalism/communism is the natural equilibrium, what force overcame that equilibrium and made feudal European states liberalize their economies over the last half a millennium, and caused the former USSR states and PRC to embrace aspects of capitalism over the last half century? Define feudalism. If feudalism is predatory landlordism by a moneyed elite with military support that lords over a class of proletarian subjects who sell their labour in order to pay rent to the people who own the houses they live in, I reckon there's quite a few capitalist nations regressing to feudalism right now.
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Jan 24, 2017 22:20
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gobbagool posted:sure, I mean if you define capitalism as "everything I dont like" and communism as "fantastic stuff, all of it" then it's real easy to back into whatever your stupid point of view is Well, come up with a better definition of feudalism and interpret yourself how it does or doesn't apply to modern societies. You know, rather than empty calory shitposting.
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Jan 24, 2017 22:24
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Play posted:There's a reason capitalism is essentially the "default" system of economics. It is natural to humans and naturally aligns with our sense of ownership, fairness, etc. Y'wot? It is not in any way natural, nor does it in any way align with common notions of ownership or fairness, that 8 people in the world hold the same wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. Capitalism is a global system of perverse incentives that is entirely artificial and is maintained through abuse of state power and corporate hegemony. It's not been corrupted, it's working entirely as designed.
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Jan 24, 2017 23:59
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those chairs posted:do people itt actually dislike the idea of a communist civilisation, or just the attempts certain states in the 20th century made to try and get there? It does seem that most of the critics in this thread consider communism to be marxism-leninism and its offshoots and nothing else, so they're basically Horselord but coming at it from the other direction. Because of this they end up critiquing just one egregiously centralised and authoritarian brand of socialism and even then are mainly critiquing authoritarian governments in general rather than socialist ones in particular.
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Jan 25, 2017 11:20
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Oh, poo poo, the human nature argument, marxism's only weakness. Pack it in, boys, the past 150 years of revolutionary struggle have been for naught.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:10
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hakimashou posted:The struggle for communism is like a person who believes that if he manages to saw all his own arms and legs off with a chainsaw, he will sprout wings and be able to fly like a bird, and then blames the ultimate failure of his project on his inability to saw off that last arm. This is a good analogy. The last arm being the arm of the state. 
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Jan 26, 2017 23:33
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asdf32 posted:No it's not and it's something communism needs to figure out. Didn't I mention earlier that under capitalism 3.5 billion people worldwide are collectively poorer than the richest 8 people? Also you're doing that dumb thing where you conflate "communism" with 20th century marxist-leninist (and offshoot) regimes as if that one singular authoritarian current of revolutionary socialist thought is representative of all radical left wing practice.
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Jan 27, 2017 02:17
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A capitalist system is defined by the working class's relation to the means of production, as is a communist system. Things like healthcare, social security and state intervention in the economy can exist in both capitalist and communist societies and are more explicitly associated with social democracy than anything else, they're nice to have but are often irrelevant to the larger question of who holds the economic power in a given society. The soviet project, with its concentration of political and economic power in the hands of an elite, came no closer to realising communism than nazi germany came to realising socialism. The Soviet Union was also avowedly democratic, but was manifestly not so. Just because something claims to be the embodiment of an idea does not mean it is representative of that idea and we should not conflate the Soviet Union with the many competing models for communist organisation. Marxism-Leninism's successes in the twentieth century were due to the same factors that constrain it from actually realising a communist society: its authoritarianism, its retention of the Westphalian nation-state, its necessary compromise and co-dependence with the capitalist nations of the world, the siege mentality that created the worst paranoid excesses of Stalinism - all these things are inextricably intertwined with Marxist-Leninist thought and undercut much of whatever progress it actually made. In a modern context, after the fall of the Soviet Union, socialists and communists must look at the Soviet Union as a model of what not to do. Rather than defend or rehabilitate it, it's imperative to actually understand how and why it failed and incorporate those lessons into a new model going forward, one that is actually equipped to deal with the new circumstances of the 21st century, in which labour power and mass politics are all but dead, identity is atomised and deterritorialised and the voracious, shambling carcass of capitalism co-opts and appropriates all revolutionary ideas in a bastardised form from the very moment of their utterance. Which is a bit of a big ask, since our generation grew up as world communism was collapsing, social democracy was falling into retreat and the new neoliberal order began asserting itself as the only model through which we can understand our reality. The left is great at critique, it can find the problem in anything. The real problem is the poverty of imagination we have now in looking at solutions, our worldviews almost from birth are coached into a capitalist realist mode of thinking that constrains us from seeing beyond its horizons.
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Mar 2, 2017 20:42
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asdf32 posted:The irony to me is that communists are sure the current democratic system is corrupted by the current economic elite but thinks the solution is to remove half the checks while concentrating economic power further while ignoring that when this was done in the past it ended up as bad as that sounds in exactly the ways you'd expect. This is a load of strawman bollocks. Not every stream of communist thought wants a Soviet Union style dictatorship of the proletariat concentrating wealth into the hands of the state. The main point of communism is that industries should be owned collectively by the workers and of the many potential ways of realising this goal centralised state planning is but one. Collectively owned and run industries and services can even function perfectly compatibly with a market economy. Quite simply, as things stand corporations are only answerable to their shareholders. If they were collectively owned by, and thus directly answerable in a meaningful way to their employees, their customers and those effected by their business practices most of the worst excesses of capitalism would be decisively put to bed right there and then.
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Mar 5, 2017 06:19
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asdf32 posted:Except not at all. Walmart's shareholds could order stores painted pink and stocked with nothing but Anime which is power, but they'd be out of business in a year after customers stopped shopping there. That's power too. Wrong again. If somebody's shopping regularly at a big box store like Walmart do you really think he has that many alternatives in the first place? What if every store chain paints their walls pink or something equally ludicrous, like for instance, sourcing their wares from cheap third world factories and moving jobs out of the country? If every competing business becomes qualitatively and ethically similar, as they tend to be in situations where they control similar market shares, consumer choice doesn't allow the market to self-regulate like you claim. asdf32 posted:Smudgie is exactly right that you can't actually deal with the problems communists want to solve without centralizing power. Competing cooperatives for example ultimately still have profit motive and do nothing to address inequalities or exploitation of others. If the employees own and have democratic control over the business practices of their company they can act much more effectively agaisnt their own exploitation than they can through bullshit like consumer choice.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:08
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asdf32 posted:Capital is not important to the exclusion of everything else (like every other form of power). Relationship to capital and the means of production is literally one's relationship to what makes life viable and liveable. If I can't eat because I can't get a job or I'm not payed enough, my life is on the line and that's solely due to my relationship to capital, which is the basis of all power relations in human society.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:28
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hakimashou posted:But hasn't history shown us over and over that destruction of an imperfect society leads to a worse society than before? Figures that you think, for instance, that beating the confederacy and abolishing slavery is a bad outcome.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:32
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asdf32 posted:Yes but if you want a better example of having no power over capital look to the soviets who did a fantastic job preventing the average person from effectively controlling it. The problem with the soviets was precisely that the people did not directly, collectively control the means of production. The state did and explained it away with hand-wavey bullshit about being the proxy through which they maintained ownership. Marxism-leninism was bad and poo poo, it does not encompass all possible methods of realising a communist society. Just because marxism-leninism failed does not mean there aren't other ways of realising the objective, which most agree is a desirable one even if they won't concede to its realistic viability.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:49
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Flowers For Algeria posted:And at the bottom of the pile of bad ideologies, is everything you believe in, hakimashou. He doesn't actually believe in anything though.
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Mar 26, 2017 13:19
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Not to be that guy, but would you mind awfully supporting any of your bullshit with some evidence and/or argumentation like a grown loving adult.
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Mar 27, 2017 00:27
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Central planning can work, but the Soviet Union's implementation of it was clunky at best and hamstrung by corruption and waste. We're in a far better position now in terms of technology to make it work, but I'm not entirely sure a completely centrally planned topdown command economy or the like is necessary or indeed desirable. I don't trust the state to collectivize and administrate the economy any more than I trust corporations to do so, I reckon collective ownership and administration should be undertaken directly by an organized workforce otherwise you just end up with an unaccountable, bureaucratized elite running poo poo into the ground or abusing it to pad their own pockets.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:01
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The bolsheviks were a bunch of backstabbing, paranoid, powerhungry assholes in the years immediately after the civil war and no-one should earnestly attempt to rehabilitate that poo poo because it does the case for communism more harm than good.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:22
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 16:43 |
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Stalin was quite reactionary and authoritarian for an avowed communist, to be fair. I mean, the dude didn't like jews or gays, turned a blind eye to Beria and Yezhov's excesses, made exemptions for the Georgian Orthodox church because his mammy was religious and all kinds of stuff like that. If he was some austere, ideologically pure agent of ruthless revolutionary zeal it'd be one thing, but Stalin the leader was just a right wing strongman wrapped in a red flag at the end of the day, very much a prototypical Putin.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:53
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