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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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Very good. Capitalism just externalizes all of its negatives so it looks better if you don't count those.
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Jan 21, 2017 13:50
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:35 |
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If you wanna be my lover, You have got to give, Taking is too easy And also is the nature of the bourgeoisie.
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Jan 21, 2017 14:36
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Some of them had feathers.
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Jan 21, 2017 17:32
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White Rock posted:Dinosuars had feathers because of libertarian socialism? You can't prove otherwise.
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Jan 21, 2017 18:18
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:Communism is so 1917, the intelligentsia is all about Communalism now. There are two new letters, and they indicate an evolved political philosophy that is less susceptible to corrupting influence, please get with the program, comrades. *Comalrades.
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Jan 22, 2017 02:13
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Hogge Wild posted:In this system who would decide which person works as a farmer and which person as a blogger? Generally I believe anarchists like consensus decision making.
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Jan 23, 2017 13:34
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I don't think communists actually have a problem with currency because it's quite useful, they have a problem with the distribution of it.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:44
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gobbagool posted:Communism, anarchism, primitivism, all great and successful ideologies that a certain subset of goons seem to think will solve their problems like that they can't get a date or fit through the door without turning sideways All are primarily criticisms of Capitalism and hypotheses for alternatives. The alternatives may or may not be correct and do not entirely agree with each other but all are largely unified in their criticisms of the status quo, which are accurate, and demand a solution.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:54
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gobbagool posted:they demand a solution like you demand that donald trump listen to you on whatever your pet issue is That... What? What does that even mean?
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Jan 23, 2017 22:11
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gobbagool posted:"Global capitalism demands a solution" is what I was responding to. Ineffective internet leftists are always "demanding" things just to see reality go in the exact opposite direction. I can see why you guys are mad all the time, i mean you go to all the trouble to come up with words, and the global economic system has the unmitigated gaul to just strait up ignore you like you're not even there I don't think you understand. Capitalism is predicated on constant growth, the world, being of finite size and finite resources, simply cannot support it indefinitely.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:18
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gobbagool posted:oh, so you're either a freshman at college communist, or a middle aged angry-because-your neighbors-have-more-than-you communist. ok, sorry, I shouldn't have engaged What on earth are you on about?
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Jan 23, 2017 22:20
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gobbagool posted:sorry, you seem like a serious fellow. How about this, since you've obviously thought at great length about the failings of capitalism. Can you explain why communism never actually works outside of internet forums or college debate classes? Bonus points if you can avoid the terms "eternal science" and "...didn't actually practice communism" Well, Communism does specifically refer to the final idealized society, and definitely nobody has managed that yet. What you usually have people practicing is some variety of socialism, the proposed method whereby the state takes control of the means of production and supposedly runs it for the benefit of the people while using some sort of democratic oversight as a check. The USSR didn't do particularly well on the democratic part because the government centralized power after the revolution because they were worried (justifiably) about being toppled either by other nations or by the wealthy people they were fighting against. That didn't really ever resolve itself and it retained an awful lot of centralized power, probably most exemplified under Stalin. That is socialism, but it's not the only form of it, just as, say, you can have capitalism under a nominal democracy, social democracy, or all out plutocracy. Broadly, socialism hasn't really been tried a huge amount, not least because the US is run by rich people and makes it its mission to destabilize or invade everywhere that tries it. There's lots of ways it might be approached and hell, socialism isn't even the only possible alternative, anarchists definitely don't agree with it.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:35
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Cicero posted:It's almost like the government also completely running the economy inevitably leads to more authoritarian behavior because you've concentrated basically all the power in a country into a single entity. Depends how you define "single entity" really. If control of the "single entity" is properly distributed among everyone then that is surely preferable to the current approach, where the bulk of the power is concentrated into a few people who are rich enough to own everything. Unless your argument is literally that democracy is bad then democratic control of the state and state control of everything which impacts people's lives materially is surely preferred to democratic participation in the state, state control of some things, and plutocratic control of everything else including major parts of the democratic process. Also as I said the desire to place power in a few people was a deliberate choice made in response to perceived external threats, not an automatic result of having a powerful government, a government can have as much democratic participation as it wants to, regardless of how much control it has over what happens in the country. Or at least if you ignore the damaging effects of wealth on democratic effectiveness anyway. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 23, 2017 23:58
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asdf32 posted:This is marxist psudoreligion, not reality. Haven't we gone over this before? No idea but it's patently correct, captialism exists to extract wealth from the labour of others and concentrate it, this is inherently unsustainable unless you have infinite space to grow into because eventually all the wealth will be concentrated and the system will collapse.
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Jan 24, 2017 02:28
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asdf32 posted:Or that doesn't happen and the system continues. I will assume for now that you're one of those marxists that doesn't understand what profit means. Hint: socialist economies have it too. Profit can be defined several ways but for, say, nationalized rail, the profits would be invested back into proviidng the rail service because the point of the industry is to provide the service. As opposed to privatized rail where the profits are extracted from the system and the operators go begging the government for money to pay for everything they don't want to pay for. You cannot constantly seek to extract and accumulate wealth from a system and predicate your entire economy on being able to do that because that only works as long as there is a constant expansion of things to be exploited to produce wealth. OtherworldlyInvader posted:So what's your opinion on the ongoing collapse in Venezuela, and if/how it relates to socialism? No clue, don't know anything about Venezuela. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 03:17
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asdf32 posted:Christ. Profit is a label for money which is no different than "tax", "fee", "tariff" or "wage". It's no more "extracted" or unsustainable than any of those other labels for money which all come from and get spent in the economy Except that is explicitly not the case under Captialism, that's what the word basically means. That people use ownership of things to extract a portion of the value of others' labor which they then concentrate. A capitalist will probably invest back into their property but they will also accumulate vast sums of wealth that simply sit, doing nothing, or being traded among the ultra wealthy but not actually participating in production of material things for the use and benefit of the majority of people. You're the one trying to jam the word profit in there, frankly I don't see a need to. It matters not a jot whether the wealth comes from profit, what matters is simply that property law supported by the force of the state allows those with lots of money to demand a portion of others' labour in exchange for the basic necessities of life. That is immoral, and not sustainable when that wealth is simply put in private hands because our society clearly shows that private hands cannot be trusted to use that wealth to the greatest benefit of the people who actually produced it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 03:37
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Eh, I'm pragmatic, I entirely agree with Marx's analysis of the failures of Capitalism and democratic socialism has brought some of the finest institutions in my country so I think there's plenty to recommend it without being overly tied to any particular implementation of it. It hardly needs to be ideal in order to be an improvement.
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Jan 24, 2017 04:08
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Well more specifically Capitalism will fall, what it's going to be replaced by is open to debate. Communism was just proposed as the preferred choice.
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Jan 24, 2017 15:58
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There isn't really a "good" answer to the immigration question because whatever you choose has problems. Personally I would say that immigration should be allowed as much as a country can manage and that the state should invest in its immigrants to help them integrate but that's pretty heavily determined by my belief that there's a humanitarian imperative to do so.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:23
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Hogge Wild posted:What are internationalists? People who think that the concept of nations is a stupid one, and that workers in all countries share common cause. Well, I mean that should probably be true of all communists but some communists are OK with using nationalism as a unifying ideology to facilitate creating a socialist state, and others will pragmatically use national government because it's what we have. Some commies though think that's moving too far away from the whole "workers of the world, unite" thing and believe that only international co-operation can truly change things for the better and given historical precedent I would probably suggest they're onto something. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Jan 25, 2017 |
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Jan 25, 2017 15:27
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hakimashou posted:is the 'death toll of capitalism' literally every person who has ever died at the hands of anyone who wasnt a communist lol I mean, that's how the death toll of communism works.
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Jan 27, 2017 05:36
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Commie NedFlanders posted:open sourced projects like wikipedia show that decentralized open participation projects can work PLEASE PLEDGE £5 A MONTH TO KEEP THE SYNDICALIST UTOPIA ALIVE.
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Jan 27, 2017 18:37
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lol if you think that democracy can coexist with private ownership of the means of production.
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Mar 5, 2017 17:33
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Smudgie Buggler posted:How do you keep things communist without a state? In theory the same way you keep things Capitalist, by having everything in your society work to shape everyone's view in that context and block out less desirable positions. Smudgie Buggler posted:How are you going to tax and redistribute any more of the Capital that might accumulate than social democratic states already do without killing the incentive to produce? By making the motivation to produce something other than personal enrichment.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:35
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Yeah but how do you do that without a mechanism of mass coercion (i.e. a state)? It isn't the state particularly that ingrains capitalist thought into us, it's the fact that we already live in a capitalism-dominated society. We have the very wealthy and they own everything and we have to sell our labour to them to live and we aspire one day to be like them. It is that presence of capitalism that shapes our thought, not the presence of the state. If we lived in a society where from birth we were expected to participate in communal labour because it is considered a moral good to do so, and not doing so is considered wrong, and all our friends, family etc live this way, and where everyone regards capitalist organization as theft from the true builders of communal prosperity, then I think we would believe differently, again with or without a state. The transition between them where you still have counterrevolutionary elements trying to restore the old system is difficult, sure, but that's a different question from "how could a communist society not devolve into capitalism immediately without a state" A transitional society certainly could but I think you've about as much probability of devolving into feudalism in a capitalist society, assuming a stable society.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:49
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Well a lot of people don't agree with that whole "socialism in one country" thing.
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Mar 6, 2017 14:07
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Cicero posted:Wait, so is the alternative "entire world adopts socialism simultaneously" or something? Marx's alternative was that the world would, at some point, become so unworkable as a result of the predations of capital, that people would have to overturn it. It does not guarantee that Communism would replace it, but it argues that Capitalism with its quest for endless growth and further exploitation, and reliance on automation, would eventually either run out of places to grow, or automate so many people out of work that they would no longer have a place in a capitalist society as workers and would be forced to demand an alternative. And that Communism is the most desirable alternative. Marx argued that the revolution would start by necessity in the most industrialized parts of the world as the workers reached a point where they could no longer physically live under capitalism. The Leninist divergence from this is that the USSR was not industrialized and he tried to adapt Marx's theories to work in an agrarian society and in a single country, hence the development of the vanguard party to lead the non-proletarian farmers into socialism. It has a lot of problems.
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Mar 6, 2017 14:38
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There's a difference between being the, well, vanguard of an internationally popular movement and being in direct conflict with the biggest economic powers on the planet.
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Mar 6, 2017 14:54
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Capitalism was a material threat to Monarchy and one which Monarchy was not equipped to deal with, democracy as implemented serves to give power to the bourgeoisie, which makes sense as they are also the material powers in the world.
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Mar 6, 2017 15:02
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Not necessarily, as I said Marx explains that Capitalism is inherently unsustainable, he does not say that Communism is going to automatically replace it, only that something will. It is possible that Communism will have to compete with other alternative ideologies rather than Capitalism directly. In either case, Communism again is an ideal, it makes no pretensions of being easy to implement, merely that it is a desirable goal.
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Mar 6, 2017 15:15
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Rich people own stuff and use that to get money out of people who don't own stuff, madness...
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Mar 26, 2017 01:38
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hakimashou posted:SK or NK? Uh I think you're find it's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea so clearly Democracy is the problem there...
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Mar 26, 2017 02:33
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hakimashou posted:a crusade to make everyone a robber or a victim of robbers leads to the worst atrocities in human history. But enough about Capitalism?
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Mar 26, 2017 02:38
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I don't actually think anyone seriously disagrees with Marx's analysis of Capital, they just don't like the implications. I've never actually seen someone try to suggest that ownership doesn't allow the owner to control those who do not own things in exchange for money.
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Mar 26, 2017 02:57
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asdf32 posted:And lol that you still don't get why you get compared to goldbug idiots or whatever on the opposite end of the spectrum. I wonder if Marx might have had anything to say about the possibility of there being other forms of power than private ownership of things, and possibly even advocated for them? We will never know I'm sure, it's not like he wrote it down.
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Mar 26, 2017 04:05
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The mad dog of the moderately social democratic left.
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Mar 26, 2017 23:30
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Bulgogi Hoagie posted:it also fractures your country into tiny pieces or forces you to switch to a free market model in the long term so that's good Because megacorporations aren't a thing.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:06
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I mean sure there are companies with employees numbering several times the population of iceland that somehow don't operate on some kind of per-building feudal system but central planning clearly cannot work on a national level.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:41
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I'm not sure the nazis were necessarily the bolshevik fan club. Like that seems up there with "palestinians convinced hitler to do the holocaust" in terms of stupid ideas.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:39
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:35 |
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Uh, Marx is not remotely mystical. It's literally called dialectical materialism for a very good reason.
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Mar 30, 2017 01:46
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