Is Communism good?

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Is Communism good? This poll is closed.
Yes	375	66.25%
No	191	33.75%
Total:	523 votes

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Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Kilroy posted:

Note that under this regime the company ends up making better long-term decisions. Sounds good to me.

Got nothing against worker co-ops, but it seems like if it was a more effective means of running a company long-term then there'd be more of them, no?

# ¿ Jan 21, 2017 11:19

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

asdf32 posted:

No, communism doesn't solve third world poverty.

Obviously the communists just didn't commune hard enough.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2017 11:53

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Flowers For Algeria posted:

Worker ownership of the means of production is democratic, whereas capitalist ownership of the means of production is dictatorial.
I'd rather live in a democracy than a dictatorship.

Communism is democratic, which is why communist states are always non-democratic. They just keep using up all their democracy juice on worker ownership of companies, there's none left for letting those workers freely assemble or vote.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2017 11:54

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I thought consensus based decision making had to be unanimous? And then anarchists wouldn't really believe in forcing someone to accept a decision like that anyway, right?

# ¿ Jan 23, 2017 17:48

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

forkboy84 posted:

No? And sometimes, depends on the anarchist.

If it doesn't have to be unanimous, how is it different from regular democratic voting?

# ¿ Jan 23, 2017 18:55

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Agnosticnixie posted:

"Anarchism is a failed system, why it can't even withstand a concerted assault by three fascist empires single-handedly with the full might of two spanish provinces"

Anarchist communities have never gotten big enough to be a serious threat/competitor/rival to even regional powers. It's almost like

Shibawanko posted:

Information technology is bad for people and if communism means returning to some less sophisticated technological state where we drive bikes and simple cars and don't mine coltan (and of course, it does not) I only want it to happen more.

Simple cars were less reliable and a lot more people died per mile driven because they were also death traps. Also good luck mitigating global warming without either advanced clean energy or a mass die-off of humans.

OwlFancier posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2017 23:48

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

gohmak posted:

I think the theory goes that capital by its very nature will coalesce with fewer individuals thus eroding socialist institutions. The model you speak of benifits disproportionately societies in which capital resides and niavely assumes no systemic incentives to erode that contract.

In spite of its large number of wealthy capitalists, the long-term trend of the US still looks like steadily more socialism over time. Obamacare added a bunch more subsidies for individuals to get healthcare, and even though the GOP has the presidency and both houses of congress, they're very hesitant to replace it with something that will obviously screw over the poor.

Don't get me wrong, I know they're still going to try, but the fact that it's taking them so long to unveil a plan is indicative of how careful they know they have to be about it.

Also if you look at polls on how Americans feel about 'socialism' and 'capitalism', it's clear that the younger people are increasingly comfortable with 'socialism' and don't treat it as a boogeyman nearly as much as earlier generations did.

Ardennes posted:

How do you get capital outside of development countries without greatly reducing the quality of living of workers living there (ie free trade)? It is an open question.

What's a "development country"? Do you mean developed countries or developing countries?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2017 15:26

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Cerebral Bore posted:

Social Democracy is unworkable in the long term because Social Democratic parties inevitably get coopted by capital and turned into milquetoast liberal parties who proceed to dismantle all the accomplishments of Social Democracy.

People keep saying this is happening in western European countries, does the data bear that out? Like, if that was happening, you'd expect taxes as a % of GDP to be steadily going down, right? Is that occurring?

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 13:52

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

Well a lot of people don't agree with that whole "socialism in one country" thing.

Wait, so is the alternative "entire world adopts socialism simultaneously" or something?

asdf32 posted:

Really ancons? I missed that detail.

I tend to hold marxists in just slightly higher esteem than libertarians specifically because the existence of a state makes their theories potentially possible. lol with no state.

Most libertarians believe in a state, just a relatively minimal one that would mostly be police + courts + military. A libertarian state is probably possible to make, it would just be a miserable dystopia.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 14:33

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

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.

Yeah I'm aware of that backstory, but I don't think it really answers my question. Like even if he was right about capitalism eventually collapsing, surely one could infer that the revolution would still happen one area at a time, over a very long period of time; it would have to at least temporarily coexist with existing capitalist nation-states. A similar scenario is how over the last couple hundred years we've seen most of the world transition from some kind of autocracy to some kind of democracy, but it's taken a really long time; if every fledgling democracy depended on its neighbors also being democracies then they never would have taken off in the first place.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 14:48

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

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.

I mean, if communism is really so much better than capitalism for most people, for the non-capitalists, shouldn't it also be a vanguard for an internationally popular movement?

But that question is really kind of irrelevant; ultimately if communism is going to exist the way communists want it to, it will have to at least initially manage survival while capitalism exists also.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 15:12

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

BrainParasite posted:

The few times Anarchy has been put into practice, things seem to have gone pretty ok until someone with a lot more military power decides to end things.

An ideology that falls over the instant someone looks at it the wrong way isn't terribly useful. The most fundamental problem with anarchism is that it's hard to fight wars without a state or something like it.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2017 10:41

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Command economies probably could be more effective using modern technology, but a) their economic weaknesses seem to usually stem from ideological stubbornness/blindness (with the price controls that Ardennes brought up being a good example), not lack of access to the right tools, and b) the bigger problem is that every country with a fully socialized economy and every country with a government that's trying to get there, always seems to become authoritarian (Venezuela being the latest example). Capitalist countries have a variety of successes and failures with democracy, but communist countries always seem to fail at permitting actual representative government.

Yuli Ban posted:

The communism we got in the 20th century was a disaster, but I believe that was due to it being part of the Bolshevik tradition. Since the Bolsheviks and their successors managed to establish the first major communist state (which is an oxymoron!), it makes sense that they're promote states like them and other revolutionaries would model themselves after what works.

Thus, syndicalism, mutualism, market socialism, et al never got their chance to work. Bolshevism is part of the authoritarian tradition of "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and my belief (which you're free to completely disregard since I'm wrong about just about everything) is that authoritarianism is like the 'dominant allele' of human social/economic production. You can't have authoritarian government and an libertarian/democratic economic system (or vice versa). Sooner or later, both become authoritarian. Hence why anarcho-capitalism isn't going to work and why Chavismo and Titoism collapsed so spectacularly. If you have a democratic government and economic system, you're much more likely to see success.

Without a state, a foreign power can easily roll over the nation or entity or whatever you want to call it. There's a reason you don't really see anarchist societies existing outside of like little hippie communes that still tend to indirectly depend on the wider society that does still have a state.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 13:00

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

White Rock posted:

It's their problem of dealing with externalities of production, such as the wellbeing of the workers (and later on, environment) that is critiqued, and that the inevitable accumulation and concentration of wealth into a single point is inherently destabilizing.

Absolutely those are problems, which is why 'capitalist' economies inevitably have some regulations and redistributive mechanisms on top. Very few people want completely unrestrained markets.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 13:32

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ardennes posted:

Nevertheless, there is a broader issue of revolutionary states tending toward authoritarianism in the first place because of initial "siege mindset." Someone mentioned the Bolsheviks "ruining the idea" but ultimately there was very little way for whatever faction that came out of the Russian Civil War (if not most extremely bloody civil wars) without becoming authoritarian. People tend to mention Kerensky as the "last hope of Russian democracy" when Kerensky himself was an autocratic. In all honesty, even if the revolution didn't happen first in Russia, the state it happened to most likely would have suffered a similar spiral especially as foreign government openly invaded it.

But there have been revolutions that have resulted in democracies as well, the US being an obvious example. And there are examples of socialist states trending towards authoritarianism even without a revolution, like Venezuela, which as you know went from being a relatively functional democracy to being a democracy in name only at this point. And yes I'm aware you could talk about things specific to Venezuela in particular, but when you're looking at the overall trend and seeing a 100% failure rate at being/remaining democratic it's silly to pretend it's just a bunch of one-offs rather than a pattern.

The obvious takeaway to me is that communist states become/remain autocratic because most people don't really like full communism and if they were democratic they wouldn't stay communist for much longer. It's the same reason even though a lot of Americans nominally agree with the idea that "a government is best which does the least" in practice people actually like a lot of specific things the government does, which is why there aren't any developed libertopian countries. It's not a conspiracy, it's just that very few people really want extreme ideologies. Heck you could point to the recent GOP healthcare debacle as an example of this, half the country is down for "get government out of healthcare!" until it comes time to actually get government out of healthcare and suddenly it's "whoa hold on a minute you mean that my family would lose coverage? Huh actually maybe don't do that".

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 18:49

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

The US was a bunch of boojie twats getting pissy about paying their taxes and that set the tone for the entire nation for apparently the rest of time.

Yeah and I don't want to whitewash the fact that initially it was only democratic for white land-owning males but that still beats not being democratic entirely, considering the time period.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 19:00

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

It did mean that (white male) Americans were self-governing rather than subject to a monarch. That in and of itself is a huge improvement.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 19:01

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

OwlFancier posted:

Nobody is self governing as long as they are subject to selling their capacity to labour to Capital in order to not die.

The No'est True Scotsman. "Doesn't count as self-governance as long as you don't also have FULL COMMUNISM NOW".

# ¿ Mar 31, 2017 19:28

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