That we should be striving for it even though it may take a while
Why
just wait. it will work. we promise.
no, don’t be critical of us not being able to give you any details. that’s mean. just trust us. we know better than you.
Works great until people become involved.
That being said, you can say the exact same about capitalism.
Only takes one person pissing in the punch bowl to make it a piss bowl.
i live in a “communist country” and communism does not exist
How do you mean?
there’s nothing communist about it. it’s as capitalist as anywhere else, with even less regulation than somewhere like the united states. communism is just a brand, like “democracy”. no government that im aware of is actually trying to create it or wants it to happen. the hammer and scythe is a symbol of heritage and that’s all.
Good on paper, never works in practice.
The classic line
I think it’s susceptible to the same problems we have now. Elites gonna form and do their thing. Whether they’re in the party or on the board of directors, the effect is the same.
I think we’re just way too naive about systems. We expect them to work for us without putting in any effort. We should stop focusing so much on systems and start focusing on communities and cultures.
The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation. You can’t achieve that by passing laws or writing a new constitution or whatever. You have to get buy-in from everyone.
The best societies have tight-knit communities and a culture of cooperation.
You’re describing high trust societies I think. (1).
Communism is old, and young. The principals of communal living are the oldest form of human organization. It’s also the most common form today if you count small groups like family.
But as an organizing principal for government, it’s a baby. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The Bolshevik revolution was in 1917. So the whole idea of communism is < 150-200yo. Compare to capitalism at this age and it’s all slavery and settler colonialism; the most massive redistribution of wealth through theft in history.
The logic that communism is a bad system because the Soviet Union should also condemn capitalism because the Dutch East India Company.
I would say the Soviet Union and the Dutch VOC were both bad for the same core reason: they were an ideological extreme. Capitalism is only a good system, if it is localized and regulated. Otherwise a small group of people will come out on top and exploit everyone else. But the same holds for communism, as clearly seen in any nation attempting communism, you inevitably get a dictator who will exploit the people for his or her own good. The difference is that when you weaken communism by implementing only parts of it, like universal healthcare, or unemployment benefits, then we call it socialism.
we call it liberal social democracy
While they share the common problem of dogmatism, I think that interpreting this as an issue of ideological “extremes” misses the point that moderatism is also an “extreme” - it dogmatically seeks stability of the status quo over conflict resolution, it “regulates” with an iron fist. Anything that becomes “ideological”, that holds something sacred, valued above oneself, can be hijacked by other people pursuing their own interests (or other ideological interests), and/or lead to contradictions between values and needs and desires.
Good in theory, problematic in practice. A goal to strive towards but not achieve.
The main problem is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is so easily corrupted into a regular ol dictatorship. It’s supposed to be a transitional period, but when that much power is in play, it’s hard for people to give it up - and even when they’re willing, they can just get ousted by less scrupulous people.
Making it safely through that passage is like a Great Filter of socio-economics
Are we talking actual idiologie communism, the Red-Scare Version, or what some people say they are but are actually totalitarianists or stalinists aka dictators with red paint?
Whatever you see it as.
No no to have a discussion about a topic we all need to know what exactly it is we are talking about
It needs guardrails similar to capitalism in terms of checks and balances and protections against abuses of power. And it needs to be an economic framework, with direct-participation democracy doing the political work.
We are at the technological threshold where a Republic is no longer needed as the primary interface of democracy, but such a direct-participation democracy needs to be paired with an electorate which is highly educated, places said education on a higher pedestal than wealth or power, and focuses on experience and meritocracy above all else. Most importantly, said population must have virtually no economically vulnerable people, as poverty nerfs intelligence by up to 15 points and dramatically reduces a person’s ability to think critically beyond their immediate day-to-day needs. Having a population that can see near-100% attention to national questions makes for an effective direct-participation democracy.
Essentially, the people vote directly on everything, and about the only “political apparatus” that exists would be those structures meant to carry out the will of the people and diplomats that interact with other countries. There would be no leaders or politicians, only people being the gears of government.
If a person is particularly passionate about a cause, they can champion it in public forums, going up against other debaters, but are not allowed to monopolize the forum in a career-like manner.
Plus, such a democracy would be reflected down into the worker’s collectives which would operate on virtually identical principles, only with scopes restricted to that collective.
There are other parts of the societal structure that could enhance said communism.
The legal system will need to be 100% apolitical and utterly divorced from the political structures or economic incentives. Lawyers become judges by courts of their peers, who examine their body of work and determine if the expertise is sufficient for the judgeship. Ideally they wouldn’t even be told who they are evaluating, their only opportunity is to recognize the work done through any anonymization done to it. Judges that misbehave can be removed either internally or by an external vote by the population at large. Laws can be implemented in either direction - from the population or from judgements - but must be approved by the people.
The police system needs to be a national system that cannot allow bad apples to just jump from precinct to precinct to avoid discipline (as per America), but must also be unarmed as a base unit. Only SWAT has the ability to carry more than restraints. Police are assigned to neighbourhoods to learn and integrate with the residents, as per Japan’s system. Trust is built by literally walking the beat and being an integral part of the community.
Any wider security forces (NSA/CIA/FBI) or military would be focused only on external and internal threats, and are highly constrained to only act in the best interests of the society as a whole, but are also under a sort of “prime directive” to not meddle in other countries except to blunt/neuter what they are doing in the first place. Military, in particular, would be primarily self-defence and international peacekeeping.
Both the military and the police and any other security forces would have a shadow council of randomly-chosen civilians whose entire purpose would be to criticize and constrain overreach, along with dedicated lawyers whose entire purpose is to advise on laws. All police and military members would have the ability to access JAG-style lawyers and would be protected when refusing to carry out illegal orders.
There is a lot more I could add, but imma gonna stop here.
Humans aren’t mature enough to handle it.
What do you mean
I mean, that the larger the group, the more assholes you will find in that group. Communism works great for families, and households. They look out for and support each other without keeping financial logs of who owes what.
Try to do that on a country wide scale, and there will be people whining that they don’t have enough, or they do too much, or that others deserve less, and they will lie and cheat and manipulate their way into getting more and more and more.
It’s a great system, far too good for us stupid, selfish humans to ever accomplish.
Speaking of maturity, when we were kids, my mother told me and my brother to share stuff, like split food in equal proprotions, because like… we’re supposed to be equal to each other. Guess why we have fights every fucking day lol. He always say its not fair or some shit.
A power vacuum, which immediately gets filled in by whoever can gain the most power the fastest, while keeping the communist title. Thus the “no true communist” arguing.
My opinion is that it works kind of okay in smaller groups where everyone knows everyone, but on a larger scale it always falls apart
Impossible economic goal for anything larger than a township and unbelievable susceptible to corruption as a one-party form of government. No nation has ever implemented it without a violent revolution and government that quickly turns into a dictatorship.
In short, a nice dream, but a shit idea.
That’s my opinion on it for the most part.
It’s never existed. Not in it’s pure form anyway. But neither has capitalism, or socialism either for that matter.
A theoretical system is always in some way perverted and coopted by the people implementing it. Humans are the weak part of the equation because humans are greedy and focused only on themselves and their own small group of friends/family. So scaling any political system up from theoretical to an actual national policy always ends up with a perverted form where one group ends up over another group despite the original theoretical intent of the system in question. That goes for Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, as well as religion too.
Humans suck and can’t have nice things without fucking them up.
yep. but every ‘true believer’ believes they are different and they totally wouldn’t be like that…
The truest truism that ever did truism is that “power inevitably corrupts”
I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.
Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.
Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.
However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.
DOB opens you up to ageism, but I agree that it’s probably the least problematic item. A lot of other trans spec people do NOT like hearing that they should avoid changing their sex on their ID / other documents unless passing is an immediate safety concern. I’m already highly uncomfortable that the government knows what genitals I had as an infant. I have no interest in giving them any more information on how I currently dress or how that might or might not be related to my current genitals. They just do not need to know. It’s proprietary information.
I do think there needs to be some kind of granular way to educate people on how to identify and disrupt abusive power structures. The problem is that society changes so rapidly that however abusive power structures are described is quickly adopted and DARVOed¹ by the person already in power to describe people they don’t like. The second you start talking about wokeness and cancelation they start wordspamming it into (hopefully just) meaninglessness.
This fight has gone on since before written history and will probably continue until long after we are dead. It’s the same way a niche anti-establishment death cult became a major world religion by just becoming a new oppressive regime. The message got taken and twisted to the ends of the powerful like all such messages do. No one has yet figured out a way to unambiguously preserve that meaning over time. If it’s even possible, it won’t be happening soon.
- Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim / Offender
Everyone I’ve ever met who lived under it says it’s was fucking awful. Not a single endorsement. That’s significant because even capitalism has boosters. Not communism.
I know several working class folks who grew up in the USSR who, while they admit it wasn’t perfect, were very happy with how things were then and - although some of them are now onboard the Pravda train to looneyville & love Putin and believe the Russian Orthodox church line that Ukraine is led by baby-eating, devil-worshipping, Nazi Pedophiles (not an exaggeration) - they admit things are much worse than they were then and place the blame squarely on moving away from communism & planned economy.
Because of strong social programs, they had access to good education, work & a high quality of life, and a level of recreation and leisure that seems wild to me as an American.
Communism is not a monolith. There are many tendencies. And YMMV depending on the folks in power, just like any system. Additionally, despots love to call themselves socialist/communist while doing nothing relating to seizing the means of production - look at Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) as an example.
Imagine if we asked folks “What’s your experience been like living in a capitalist regime”. Most people would think thats a weird question because of how many types of capitalist regimes exist - it’sa general economic framework, not a system of government. Your experience will vary wildly if you are from like rural Kenya vs the US vs Scandinavia.
Great point(s).
I’ve met quite a few people who say that although there were disadvantages, on average it was ok to live in Soviet Union after the 60s. If you asked around in Russia, there would even be those who praised it. Because there were some advantages like not bad free education and free medicine, for example. In some good times, you could even get a free apartment or a piece of land. And now, under capitalism, it is very difficult to earn an apartment in the most developed cities.
Historical context matters too.
60s Soviet russia was not the best in the world when it came to economic or human development, and certainly was not politically or culturally free in the slightest. It paled in comparison to the US or Europe- BUT if you had previously experienced the civil war, collapse of the empire, multiple widespread famines and total social upheaval, the pains of Stalin’s industrialization and then WWII… dear god, the relative stability of the 1960’s planned economy probably felt like heaven in comparison.
