What is it with these commie types that they believe communism will leave everyone to become hippies who can do whatever they want and all required resources just magically arrive when they need.
It really is watching children believe in Santa Claus
Capitalism for when there is scarcity (building hi-tech for example) state controlled “socialism” for things needed by everyone (schools, hospitals, roads, internet) seems like a smart start.
Food could go under capitalism if heavy regulated, govt can sponsor art etc. Vote for what suits you.
Yeah and no more lobbying or mega rich(like 10M€ max until at least everyone can eat, read and go to the hospital for free).
The thing is, when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place to curtail their power and to protect the poor. For example, electricity used to be nationalised in my country until a few years ago. The state company in charge of it would seek to stay near the floating line, not to make profits, and power was very affordable. Before the pandemic, it got privatised and prices went through the roof, we’re talking 1000% increases in some cases, because now they had to make money for the shareholders.
This could only work if the people were very conscious and politically educated, so that they could prevent these things from happening. But just one bad generation can see those hard earned protections and rights erroded.
Exactly. That’s why simply regulating capitalism won’t work. It has been regulated before, and eventually, little by little, greed wins out, politicians take bribes to lower regulations, and this tension raises again until we earn back what we lost. Rinse and repeat. It’s not sustainable.
when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place
The solution there is to not let ANYBODY get that wealthy. Tax the shit out of the rich until their net worth is in an acceptable range. Let’s say that we set a minimum level. If you don’t meet that level, government helps you. Helps you with a house, food income, etc. Then allow the richest person to be worth 10x that of the poorest. If your worth goes over that, taxes will rise to 100%. You simply don’t earn anything more until your worth lowers.
Its a very rough idea, but its just to, well, get the idea. Communism does NOT work, never has, never will. It requires stripping all freedoms, loads of coercion, lots of horror and terrorizing of the population to make it work. Too many people always dream of working in a vegetable garden under communism. Are they really THAT naive? Are they 5? Dear god, read some history.
I fully agree with you that capitalism, as its currently running unhindered, is a BAD thing. It needs to be limited, curtailed BY A LOT. But in its core its not bad. It gives people the freedom to trade directly, unhindered by government to get things done in the most efficient way. And like it or not, its a success story. Its why the west became as dominant as it is. Leaving people free to do things the way they want to do it is nice AND efficient. Problem is that you need to put limits, like “Don’t dump industrial waste, you make it, you recycle it” which now we don’t. THAT is the problem
Capitalism didn’t get the west wealthy. That was all the colonialism and imperialism taking wealth away from other places through slavery and exploitation. Capitalism just profited off of the fact Europe was already rich and powerful to further that divide.
Historically socialists have been better at utilizing scarce resources. Look at the 50 percent economic growth per decade achieved by soviet centralized economic planning before calculators and machine learning were a thing.
IDK but I feel like the winners of WW2 didn’t really need to put a strain on anything to go forward extremely easily compared to before.
I don’t think you can judge how the superpowers advanced in the 1950-60-70 having the control over about everything versus how it is today. Also personally I’d like everyone to be included, not just the west + this or that but Africa, south America, etc. etc.
Pretty sure I got it from growth crystal, a very dry economics book. I dont remember by which metric but you could probably find it within the first few chapters.
I think you need to look in his ass, where he pulled that number from. These communist types really believe all this nonsense and just handwave all the famines, civil terrors, or just the fact that no communist system ever became a success. its all just for the common good, right?
I’ll partially repaste a reply I posted to another post for you. Communism SUCKS at resource management because one centralized corrupt system doesn’t know shit about what its doing whereas capitalist systems allow individual people to get the most efficient solutions possible. IT. WORKS. Yes, there are problems, fix those problems. Read the following. don’t TL;DR; because if you do then you just don’t care about reality, you just want to should slogans
why are so many people starving?
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
You’re literally blaming all these societies for famines where intense external causes are cited. And capitalism kills 20 million people a year, currently. Also, read Victorian holocausts
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands.
20 million deaths a year.
You know the Soviets came up with a lot of the tech that led to smartphones, with the rest of it coming from publicly funded research?
Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
Isn’t trying to reform capitalism dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies?
You mean its impossible to tax people? Because it is. You just need better politicians. “There is no middle ground” is no argument, because there is. You just have your fingers in your ears shouting “LALALALALAA I CANNOT HEAR YOU”.
Communism is a laughingly naive argument. There are no communist success stories. There are loads of torture horror porn stories though, if you’re willing to read history. Maybe watch a good movie! Get “The chekist (1992)” somewhere. Then sit in a closet in fetal position for about a week or two (I never managed to finish it, its horrible, but a great movie nontheless) and when you come out maybe, just maybe you can understand a little bit about what communism really entails
We’re a dying species on a planet that will heat up until we’re all gone, do I really need another horror story ?
You mentioning the chekist is just the old and tired whataboutism where you point out horrors committed by the Soviets to justify your point of view.
I could give you horrific stories where people were tortured and/or killed because of corporate greed and/or imperialism. What good will that accomplish?
Will hearing that people were locked inside a sweatshop while it caught on fire change anything about your view of capitalism ?
People falling in poverty because they can’t pay medical bills, killing themselves because of their job, getting tortured for information they don’t have, seeing their leaders get overthrown and living in a military state because of that.
Are you capable of seeing the horrors wrought by capitalism, not just those in the past but also those we see every day, and answer the question “Would that have happened if the redistribution of resources was fair ?”
If you want a movie recommendation “Sugarland” (2014), it’s just a fun movie about sugar, showing how insidious and pervasive capitalists can be, don’t worry no torture porn here but you’ll still feel like shit at the end.
I mean, if they want to, sure. Point is society wouldn’t be reliant on that since everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek. I don’t care if somebody wants to set up a tomato farm or a donkey ranch or whatever on the side, as long as they don’t exploit or mistreat anyone.
Logistics would be the job dedicated to moving goods and services around to the place they need to be in. It’s not something that would appeal to most but it is a critical job in any modern society.
Until you spend thirty five minutes explaining to the receptionist for the intermittent carrier why rerouting through Chicago makes no sense when carrying freight from NYC to Hoboken NJ.
You act like there wouldn’t be multiple plans submitted with obsessive communities arguing about best practices and min/maxing efficiencies before accepting routes.
I see you have never dealt with trucking companies before. I had a truck puck up in St Louis in June one year and break down in FL for three weeks delaying the arrival in NY for several months. There’s no need for the truck to be in FL because that’s not a direct route and we had filled the truck but that’s how dispatch directed it.
Why would you need to hire someone? If it’s a farm meant to provide food for people then it’s commonly owned and the people who work there are state employees, the purpose of the farm being to make food, not profits.
If it’s something you do because you want to and out of passion, then why would you hire anyone? Sure, you might want some help, but then you just get people who are passionate about it as well, and you share the produce. Like a community garden.
Are you dense? I said everyone would have a regular job like they do now for 20 hours a week, except with more control over the workplace. The farm mentioned is something you would do in your free time because you want to.
So a farmer just stops working on their farm after 20 hours and then goes home (to their farm, because they live in a farmhouse) and just ignores their starving animals because he has a different hobby and can’t work more than 20 hours a week? Or does he have to hire people to work the rest of the week, which goes against your views (capitalism)? Or does he work for free outside of those 20 hours to not spoil his harvest and kill his animals? Or does he somehow split the work from the 20 hours off and sell those to the government and then sell the rest to another market (which is again capitalism)? Or are you just a dumbass that doesn’t understand anything about how the world works?
What you describe is controlled capitalism. People can decide themselves what they want to do and try to get things done in the most efficient way directly without government interference.
The problem current capitalism faces is that there is too little control, too much allowance for monopolies, that sort of shit. Tax the crap out of the rich, limit what you can do “if you create polluting materials, you have to recycle them yourself”, “you cant corner more than 10% of a market”, etc, but allow people to freely do what they want to do. That would be capitalism, actually.
everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek
Yeah that is not how society works, that is not how anything works at all. You don’t work 40 hours a week just to make somebody rich even richer. If they could pay you only for 20 hours, they would. You work 40 hours because you CAN have a job which is because they need somebody to do that work. If they don’t need you, they won’t pay you for nothing dummie. If you work on something not required, congrats, you have a dumb boss that wastes resources and you lucked out. Most people just have normal jobs that NEED to be done. Just saying “lets do communism and we only work 20 hours a week” is beyond naive. Reality is “Lets do communism and half of us will starve to death!”
I would suggest you look into socialism more because it seems to me you are mistaken in some aspects.
Capitalism is the economic system in which individuals can own the means of production themselves, so basically an entrepreneur owns a company and everyone working there are employees with no or very little ownership over the business.
Socialism is the economic system where the workers themselves own those same means of production. What you think of as socialism is most likely the Marxist-Leninist version implemented in the USSR.
Their thought process went like this: the people all own every business, but if everyone was the boss, nothing would get done. So they considered that since people, at least on paper, vote for their leader and the state supposedly represents the people, then if the state owned all businesses it would basically be the same as if everyone owned those businesses. The issue here is that the politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions regarding those businesses, being human themselves, will tend to skew them towards their own interests. Personally, I still think it is better this way than having billionaire leeches that drain the wealth from multiple countries, but that’s besides the point.
This isn’t the only socialist system imaginable, though. It could be as simple as the workers that are employed somewhere get a share of the company for as long as they work there instead of wages. That way, you get paid a portion of the profit, and as a shareholder, can vote on decisions about the business. It’s important though that only people who work there get those shares, no outside investors or sketchy things like that to take away the power from the people. There’s no business owner in this since everyone basically owns their workplace and bosses are democratically elected. This is market socialism, you’d still have market forces and all that entails, and I think it would be the easiest change to make if we wanted to give up on capitalism.
Then there’s syndicalism, in which unions and syndicates own their sector or industry and manage them themselves. Every worker joins the union when they get hired, and they vote for stuff like leadership, rule changes, charters and the like. These syndicates then coordinate with eachother to ensure everything is working as intended and produced at the rates they are needed at.
As for the 20 hour workweek… it’s very reasonable if you look into it. Each one of us not only has to work hard enough to earn for ourselves, we also have to earn for those who are unfortunate and cannot work through taxes, which is a good thing, but we also have to work hard enough to earn for the leeches doing nothing, like the billionaires on top. Every employee has to get paid less than ehat they’re worth, since if the employer would give them every bit of money they produce, they wouldn’t be profitable. And that’s not even getting into people working jobs that don’t help society at all, such as landlords, insurance agents, marketing people, etc. If everyone worked in fields necessary for society to function, we would all work 20 hours a week.
They I have good or bad news for you, depending on your stance. We don’t. You may, depending on the company which you work for, but generally speaking most people don’t.
Yes, yes, YES. Capitalism is evil, pitchfork and torches! Reality check: Capitalism is also the very big reason why you have a computer on your desk or in your hands in the shape of a phone to write about the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is at its core about the freedoms to share and acquire resources in the most efficient way possible. Does it have big BIG problems with runaway effects where a single person can suddenly pheewwww shoot into the sky and start resource hogging? Absolutely. Should that be legally limited and curbed? Absolutely! Is that currently done well? Absofuckinglutely not!
But none of that means that “communism will save us”. Dear god, please please don’t be THAT naive, don’t believe in santa claus.
If you want to spend your free time in a commune to help hippies or whatever it is that you want to do, I applaud you. Seriously, well done. But you WILL have to work for a home. You WILL have to work for food, and that computer you have in your hand to curse the evils of capitalism. And you have to work so that when we all do that, that resources get moved over the world so that the farmer gets his equipment that he needs to farm the grains that he sends to a supermarket that gets bought by a baker which you then buy in the shape of a bread loaf… We all work together.
Again, is there a shit tonne of abuse going on? Of course. Nobody denies that. Is that abuse being curbed? Nope. Should we hang the ultra rich that have been abusing this system? Nah, lets not hang people. I’m not for violence. But should we tax them 100% of their income until their posessions are within a reasonable range? Absolutely.
But communism is not the answer, please learn some history about the “successes” (meaning ALL failures, no exceptions) of comnunism. Read about the famines, the suppression, the torture, the corruption and the crap that comes with that to make it work. I like my freedom. I don’t need piles of cash and people generally should not be allowed to have piles. You do that with laws and taxing and enforcing. Lets focus on that instead.
Look, capitalism clearly does not work. Everything Marx and Lenin ever wrote about capitalism has come true. It is destroying our world more and more every day. Whatever you might say about communism, we do not know for a fact that it will ruin the lives of everybody, involved or not. No matter how bad you might claim communism is, it isn’t the thing that’s currently destroying our societies. So it is by definition better than capitalism.
Ah yes, because everything you do is to meet societal needs and not to make more money for the 1%. That’s why 34% of wealth in Canada goes to the top 1%.
Then tax the crap out of them. Communism is NOT the answer, its the cause for an order of magnitude more suffering than capitalism will ever be able to cause. These sesame street types that really believe that communism will give them a vegetable garden to work in just should stop using the internet. You are using a frikkin mobile phone, a device that is the frikking epitome of capitalism and science to bitch about the evils of capitalism (and loads of people do the same with science too).
Turn in your mobile phone and go live on a hippie farm (or in a cave) and die of horrible preventable diseases, if that is what you wish, but you don’t get to have it both ways.
Yes, capitalism has a shit tonne of problems that MUST be solved, totally agree. The wealthy should be taxed up to a 100% of income once their income and net worth surpasses a certain level. Just cap it. We should have free education, free healthcare, basic rights on homes and food… A socialist system BUILT ON A CAPITALIST SYSTEM. That is because capitalism, at its core, is allowing people the freedom to trade in the most efficient way possible by themselves. THAT IS STRENGTH and that is the very reason why the west currently rules just about everything. Yes, having it run loose with no restrictions (as we currently try to do for some fucked up reason) is bad, VERY bad. Still not communism bad, though. I 100x rather have our current fucked up capitalist system over living in the fun communistic countries of the USSR (hello famines!), China (heeelllooooo famines with millions of victims!) or Korea (helloo!!!) or… Well, you get the gist. I’m not even talking about the government policing that comes with it.
Captialism has problems, absolute. FIX THEM. Don’t go jackoff over systems that are known for misery, famines, death camps, and just general failure.
How many famines do you think occured in China and Russia prior to communism? How many people do you think died because of famines in the decades prior to communism?
Famine in late 19th century/early 20th century China and Russia were a fact of life. They’d come ever few years, kill a few million, and then leave. That had been the case throughout history because subsistence farming isn’t exactly a very robust system. How many famines do you think occured in the decades before the communist party took power?
How many famines would you guess occured in the decades after the communist party took power in Russia or China? What do you think the odds were that those famines would have occured with or without communist party intervention?
The Christ was a literal bearded, sandle wearing, hippie that told y’all to go live in communes and protect each other and The Earth, but I guess your omnipotent, omniscient God doesn’t know what he’s taking about.
I love how you just assume that capitalists/socialists are all Christians lol
The fuck do I care what a 2000 year old prophet claimed about an even older warrior god from the middle east?
Im sure that 6000 year old ancient Jewish patriarchs definitely knew the god of the entire universe and it just happened to be the god they selected from their pantheon to be the best god. It’s almost like everyone thinks their god is the biggest god, and none of them have ever proven to exist.
The Christ also is fictional, as is whatever god you’re talking about Were you talking about Apollo, perhaps? Mars? Shiva? Khaless?
In any case, you’re talking about people living in the stone age, dying every day of horrible preventable diseases. Things that were resolved mainly through capitalism, but I guess nobody likes to think about that, can’t admit that “bad thing” can do something positive too, now can we?
Animal farm wasn’t specifically about communism, though. The lesson was that any well meaning revolution/societal restructuring will inevitably get hijacked by a smaller group that wants to use it as an opportunity to grab power and seize control. No matter what said group calls themselves, they’re most likely going to end up as the same aristocracy/oligarchy that the revolution fought against.
It’s exactly what happened in the Soviet Union but it’s also potentially what could happen in any other revolution.
Exactly. It’s not an anti-communist book. It was written by a left-libertatian/anarchist, Orwell, who though alongside anarchists and communists in Spain.
Dude literally took up arms for socialism. Reactionaries have no critical thinking and historical analysis skills.
If production stays low, we WILL be forced to lower the age of workers from 9 years to 7 years. Work harder, your kids lives depend on it (if you’ve been given a permit to have kids, of course!)
Yeah, and distributing resources efficiently is one of the core strengths of capitalism, its the reason why capitalism is so successful.
No, I’m not saying capitalism is perfect nor that it doesn’t cause suffering, nor that it does not need a shitload more limits than it has right now, but communism is NOT known for its efficiency, nor for letting people just do whatever the hell they want to do. Communism forces people to do what the boss says, if you don’t like it you can go to a gulag. If you’re talking about “Communism gives people the freedom to find the most efficient ways of distributing resources” then you’re kind of confusing that with Capitalism.
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
We just removed the child tax credit which made child poverty soar. The most “pro-union” president forced railroad workers to take a shit contract in December instead of allowing them to strike.
I have already addressed the Soviet famine. The root cause was a crop blight and Stalin’s lax response ultimately worsened it.
As for china and north korea - any reason to believe the communism they don’t live in is the cause of that? Your own quote claims north korea mainly suffered because the USSR failed to supoort them.
Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off
Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.
Capitalism is good at raising production, generating lots of products very quickly and efficiently. But it’s notoriously terrible at actually distributing resources in a fair way. Like, that’s it’s biggest weakness and the things it’s worst at.
Communism has the opposite issue of not usually being able to make enough things in the beginning, which is why Marx thought it would happen in already industrialized nations, not poor peasant states like Russia or China.
In all likelihood they would be neither. With modern technology, we don’t need a large percent of the population farming. I realize communists typically eliminate the intellectuals and kulaks—those who would actually have useful knowledge—first, but the smart things would be to have the current farmers keep farming. You’d likely be assigned to a factory to manufacture widgets for the rest of your days.
No it’s a “theory” that has not been demonstrated to hold up and isn’t granted a lot of respect in political science circles.
While certain aspects can be shared, such as a greater appreciation for authoritarianism, the actual beliefs are so incredibly different and the people drawn to them are so different that the “theory” doesn’t work.
At what point does it discuss horseshoe theory? They seem to talk about the holocaust vs the soviets which isn’t really what horsehoe theory purports to be about (and again the horseshoe theory is complete bullshit)
You are unfamiliar with the altright if you think hexbear is at all right. They are leftists and many are revolutionary leftists but no one there for long is altright.
For fucks sake this al, comes about from the ChapoTrapHouse subreddit getting banned.
I see the world in a two dimensional way where people are placed into one of two camps based on a single characteristic;
Have they called for my death.
So I don’t give a shit what they (or anyone else) has to say about their political leanings. It’s all the same trash, and I lack the respect necessary to differentiate them.
So yea I say they’re alt right. If that upsets you, too bad.
Wouldn’t owning cows as an individual be a form of theft in the USSR of the 1920s? Wouldn’t they be the collective’s cows and if you made them “yours” you were stealing?
Both can be offensively violent but the types of people drawn to either vary widely. For example I cannot say I know any socialists who were individually racist (as opposed to racist by virtue of being American as structural racism runs deep).
If I kill its because I’m defending myself, if you kill its because you are violent!
Say both sides…
Are you seriously trying to say that communist governments haven’t committed mass murder on an industrial scale just to fortify their power structures?
The system encourages those people to engage in the arms race for the next killer app to earn boatloads of money and win the game of capitalism. Finding people who are genuinely interested in maintaining the infrastructure that makes any of that possible is the problem.
Do they eliminate intellectuals? The USSR and China seem to have avoided this. I don’t believe most nations did this other than Cambodia and I will never see that shitshow as socialist.
In the USSR it was kind of mixed. If you were at all associated with the old regime you were fucked but tbh a lot of them weren’t super sympathetic anyway.
In China, lol. They fucking murdered everyone who knew anything and then suffered horribly for it. Of course, even then they might have been somewhat okay except Mao thought he knew better so they got the Great Leap Forward and stuff like the Four Pests campaign.
And the part where they believe to have any freedoms whatsoever IS realistic?
Or the part where they believe to actually be alive and not die in the next famine is realistic?
What is it with people over on lemmy.ca with the most dense, thoughtless takes on everything? I swear I’ve never seen a comment from someone who’s on lemmy.ca that made me think, “this person’s head is screwed on properly.”
Meaning? You think that the world should be communist and then we’d all be happy working in our vegetable garden?
I’m responding like that because I get so many facepalmingly stupid responses from people who actually really believe that with communism they would get freedom. I don’t even know how to respond to that, because its so mind bendingly stupid. They complain about all the starvations in capitalist countries.
WHERE!?
I can point to countless famines in communist countries with millions upon millions of deaths. But capitalism? Its currently riddled with problems, yes, we need to do better, tax the shit out of the rich until they are at normal levels… But famines? In a democratic capitalist country? Where?
Its just mind blowing that people can be THIS dumb. Read some frigging history for your own sake.
Wasn‘t Marx idea that communism can only exist once industry has been automated to such a degree that an individuals contribution is not mandatory anymore?
We might reach that point of technological advancement. within the next 50 years with the raise of AI. What we make of it is a completely different matter…
What is it with these commie types that they believe communism will leave everyone to become hippies who can do whatever they want and all required resources just magically arrive when they need.
It really is watching children believe in Santa Claus
If we didn’t all work to produce excess wealth for the super wealthy, we’d have 20 hour workweeks. People can do a lot with that extra time.
Yeah I don’t think pure communism is the answer, but neither is pure capitalism.
Let’s find a compromise between “equality” and “fuck you, all for me”.
That’s just a false compromise argument promoting a middle ground that doesn’t exist
Capitalism for when there is scarcity (building hi-tech for example) state controlled “socialism” for things needed by everyone (schools, hospitals, roads, internet) seems like a smart start.
Food could go under capitalism if heavy regulated, govt can sponsor art etc. Vote for what suits you.
Yeah and no more lobbying or mega rich(like 10M€ max until at least everyone can eat, read and go to the hospital for free).
The thing is, when someone starts getting very wealthy, they inevitably errode the checks and balances put in place to curtail their power and to protect the poor. For example, electricity used to be nationalised in my country until a few years ago. The state company in charge of it would seek to stay near the floating line, not to make profits, and power was very affordable. Before the pandemic, it got privatised and prices went through the roof, we’re talking 1000% increases in some cases, because now they had to make money for the shareholders.
This could only work if the people were very conscious and politically educated, so that they could prevent these things from happening. But just one bad generation can see those hard earned protections and rights erroded.
Basically, it only works if you can keep greedy people from expressing their greed. Evidently, not happening right now.
Exactly. That’s why simply regulating capitalism won’t work. It has been regulated before, and eventually, little by little, greed wins out, politicians take bribes to lower regulations, and this tension raises again until we earn back what we lost. Rinse and repeat. It’s not sustainable.
Its a very rough idea, but its just to, well, get the idea. Communism does NOT work, never has, never will. It requires stripping all freedoms, loads of coercion, lots of horror and terrorizing of the population to make it work. Too many people always dream of working in a vegetable garden under communism. Are they really THAT naive? Are they 5? Dear god, read some history.
I fully agree with you that capitalism, as its currently running unhindered, is a BAD thing. It needs to be limited, curtailed BY A LOT. But in its core its not bad. It gives people the freedom to trade directly, unhindered by government to get things done in the most efficient way. And like it or not, its a success story. Its why the west became as dominant as it is. Leaving people free to do things the way they want to do it is nice AND efficient. Problem is that you need to put limits, like “Don’t dump industrial waste, you make it, you recycle it” which now we don’t. THAT is the problem
Capitalism didn’t get the west wealthy. That was all the colonialism and imperialism taking wealth away from other places through slavery and exploitation. Capitalism just profited off of the fact Europe was already rich and powerful to further that divide.
Historically socialists have been better at utilizing scarce resources. Look at the 50 percent economic growth per decade achieved by soviet centralized economic planning before calculators and machine learning were a thing.
IDK but I feel like the winners of WW2 didn’t really need to put a strain on anything to go forward extremely easily compared to before.
I don’t think you can judge how the superpowers advanced in the 1950-60-70 having the control over about everything versus how it is today. Also personally I’d like everyone to be included, not just the west + this or that but Africa, south America, etc. etc.
This was before ww2, during the great break.
Look at this where? In which metric are you measuring economic growth?
Pretty sure I got it from growth crystal, a very dry economics book. I dont remember by which metric but you could probably find it within the first few chapters.
Cool, I checked out Growth Crystal and it looks like a PowerPoint presentation at a timeshare pitch.
I think you need to look in his ass, where he pulled that number from. These communist types really believe all this nonsense and just handwave all the famines, civil terrors, or just the fact that no communist system ever became a success. its all just for the common good, right?
Consider not assuming everyone on the internet is a guy. Also consider reading the English translation of growth crystal.
… What?
I’ll partially repaste a reply I posted to another post for you. Communism SUCKS at resource management because one centralized corrupt system doesn’t know shit about what its doing whereas capitalist systems allow individual people to get the most efficient solutions possible. IT. WORKS. Yes, there are problems, fix those problems. Read the following. don’t TL;DR; because if you do then you just don’t care about reality, you just want to should slogans
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
1: Russian famine: about five million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922 (famine caused directly by communism)
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine (Famine caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Communism is awesome!
3: Chinese famine: 15 to 55 million deaths (yay!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine (Caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism a nice side effect of communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chekist < I F*$#king double dare you to watch that movie about the non existing upper class of bosses
In conclusion?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
You’re literally blaming all these societies for famines where intense external causes are cited. And capitalism kills 20 million people a year, currently. Also, read Victorian holocausts
20 million deaths a year.
You know the Soviets came up with a lot of the tech that led to smartphones, with the rest of it coming from publicly funded research?
Isn’t trying to reform capitalism dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies?
You mean its impossible to tax people? Because it is. You just need better politicians. “There is no middle ground” is no argument, because there is. You just have your fingers in your ears shouting “LALALALALAA I CANNOT HEAR YOU”.
Communism is a laughingly naive argument. There are no communist success stories. There are loads of torture horror porn stories though, if you’re willing to read history. Maybe watch a good movie! Get “The chekist (1992)” somewhere. Then sit in a closet in fetal position for about a week or two (I never managed to finish it, its horrible, but a great movie nontheless) and when you come out maybe, just maybe you can understand a little bit about what communism really entails
We’re a dying species on a planet that will heat up until we’re all gone, do I really need another horror story ?
You mentioning the chekist is just the old and tired whataboutism where you point out horrors committed by the Soviets to justify your point of view. I could give you horrific stories where people were tortured and/or killed because of corporate greed and/or imperialism. What good will that accomplish?
Will hearing that people were locked inside a sweatshop while it caught on fire change anything about your view of capitalism ?
People falling in poverty because they can’t pay medical bills, killing themselves because of their job, getting tortured for information they don’t have, seeing their leaders get overthrown and living in a military state because of that.
Are you capable of seeing the horrors wrought by capitalism, not just those in the past but also those we see every day, and answer the question “Would that have happened if the redistribution of resources was fair ?”
If you want a movie recommendation “Sugarland” (2014), it’s just a fun movie about sugar, showing how insidious and pervasive capitalists can be, don’t worry no torture porn here but you’ll still feel like shit at the end.
And then surely people will start doing logistics for your fantasy farm in their free time right?
I mean, if they want to, sure. Point is society wouldn’t be reliant on that since everything necessary for society to function would be taken care of during the said 20 hour workweek. I don’t care if somebody wants to set up a tomato farm or a donkey ranch or whatever on the side, as long as they don’t exploit or mistreat anyone.
Logistics would be the job dedicated to moving goods and services around to the place they need to be in. It’s not something that would appeal to most but it is a critical job in any modern society.
Set it up with a nice graphical interface, label it “Logistics Simulator 2024” and you’ll have people fighting each other for the privilege
Throw some drone trucks in there and baby, you got a stew going.
Until you spend thirty five minutes explaining to the receptionist for the intermittent carrier why rerouting through Chicago makes no sense when carrying freight from NYC to Hoboken NJ.
You act like there wouldn’t be multiple plans submitted with obsessive communities arguing about best practices and min/maxing efficiencies before accepting routes.
I see you have never dealt with trucking companies before. I had a truck puck up in St Louis in June one year and break down in FL for three weeks delaying the arrival in NY for several months. There’s no need for the truck to be in FL because that’s not a direct route and we had filled the truck but that’s how dispatch directed it.
It’s also 24/7 so there’d be people working weird hours. Capital gets that work done even in communist countries (capital or direct coercion).
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Why would you need to hire someone? If it’s a farm meant to provide food for people then it’s commonly owned and the people who work there are state employees, the purpose of the farm being to make food, not profits.
If it’s something you do because you want to and out of passion, then why would you hire anyone? Sure, you might want some help, but then you just get people who are passionate about it as well, and you share the produce. Like a community garden.
Removed by mod
Are you dense? I said everyone would have a regular job like they do now for 20 hours a week, except with more control over the workplace. The farm mentioned is something you would do in your free time because you want to.
So a farmer just stops working on their farm after 20 hours and then goes home (to their farm, because they live in a farmhouse) and just ignores their starving animals because he has a different hobby and can’t work more than 20 hours a week? Or does he have to hire people to work the rest of the week, which goes against your views (capitalism)? Or does he work for free outside of those 20 hours to not spoil his harvest and kill his animals? Or does he somehow split the work from the 20 hours off and sell those to the government and then sell the rest to another market (which is again capitalism)? Or are you just a dumbass that doesn’t understand anything about how the world works?
What you describe is controlled capitalism. People can decide themselves what they want to do and try to get things done in the most efficient way directly without government interference.
The problem current capitalism faces is that there is too little control, too much allowance for monopolies, that sort of shit. Tax the crap out of the rich, limit what you can do “if you create polluting materials, you have to recycle them yourself”, “you cant corner more than 10% of a market”, etc, but allow people to freely do what they want to do. That would be capitalism, actually.
Yeah that is not how society works, that is not how anything works at all. You don’t work 40 hours a week just to make somebody rich even richer. If they could pay you only for 20 hours, they would. You work 40 hours because you CAN have a job which is because they need somebody to do that work. If they don’t need you, they won’t pay you for nothing dummie. If you work on something not required, congrats, you have a dumb boss that wastes resources and you lucked out. Most people just have normal jobs that NEED to be done. Just saying “lets do communism and we only work 20 hours a week” is beyond naive. Reality is “Lets do communism and half of us will starve to death!”
I would suggest you look into socialism more because it seems to me you are mistaken in some aspects.
Capitalism is the economic system in which individuals can own the means of production themselves, so basically an entrepreneur owns a company and everyone working there are employees with no or very little ownership over the business.
Socialism is the economic system where the workers themselves own those same means of production. What you think of as socialism is most likely the Marxist-Leninist version implemented in the USSR.
Their thought process went like this: the people all own every business, but if everyone was the boss, nothing would get done. So they considered that since people, at least on paper, vote for their leader and the state supposedly represents the people, then if the state owned all businesses it would basically be the same as if everyone owned those businesses. The issue here is that the politicians and bureaucrats who make decisions regarding those businesses, being human themselves, will tend to skew them towards their own interests. Personally, I still think it is better this way than having billionaire leeches that drain the wealth from multiple countries, but that’s besides the point.
This isn’t the only socialist system imaginable, though. It could be as simple as the workers that are employed somewhere get a share of the company for as long as they work there instead of wages. That way, you get paid a portion of the profit, and as a shareholder, can vote on decisions about the business. It’s important though that only people who work there get those shares, no outside investors or sketchy things like that to take away the power from the people. There’s no business owner in this since everyone basically owns their workplace and bosses are democratically elected. This is market socialism, you’d still have market forces and all that entails, and I think it would be the easiest change to make if we wanted to give up on capitalism.
Then there’s syndicalism, in which unions and syndicates own their sector or industry and manage them themselves. Every worker joins the union when they get hired, and they vote for stuff like leadership, rule changes, charters and the like. These syndicates then coordinate with eachother to ensure everything is working as intended and produced at the rates they are needed at.
As for the 20 hour workweek… it’s very reasonable if you look into it. Each one of us not only has to work hard enough to earn for ourselves, we also have to earn for those who are unfortunate and cannot work through taxes, which is a good thing, but we also have to work hard enough to earn for the leeches doing nothing, like the billionaires on top. Every employee has to get paid less than ehat they’re worth, since if the employer would give them every bit of money they produce, they wouldn’t be profitable. And that’s not even getting into people working jobs that don’t help society at all, such as landlords, insurance agents, marketing people, etc. If everyone worked in fields necessary for society to function, we would all work 20 hours a week.
They I have good or bad news for you, depending on your stance. We don’t. You may, depending on the company which you work for, but generally speaking most people don’t.
Yes, yes, YES. Capitalism is evil, pitchfork and torches! Reality check: Capitalism is also the very big reason why you have a computer on your desk or in your hands in the shape of a phone to write about the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is at its core about the freedoms to share and acquire resources in the most efficient way possible. Does it have big BIG problems with runaway effects where a single person can suddenly pheewwww shoot into the sky and start resource hogging? Absolutely. Should that be legally limited and curbed? Absolutely! Is that currently done well? Absofuckinglutely not!
But none of that means that “communism will save us”. Dear god, please please don’t be THAT naive, don’t believe in santa claus.
If you want to spend your free time in a commune to help hippies or whatever it is that you want to do, I applaud you. Seriously, well done. But you WILL have to work for a home. You WILL have to work for food, and that computer you have in your hand to curse the evils of capitalism. And you have to work so that when we all do that, that resources get moved over the world so that the farmer gets his equipment that he needs to farm the grains that he sends to a supermarket that gets bought by a baker which you then buy in the shape of a bread loaf… We all work together.
Again, is there a shit tonne of abuse going on? Of course. Nobody denies that. Is that abuse being curbed? Nope. Should we hang the ultra rich that have been abusing this system? Nah, lets not hang people. I’m not for violence. But should we tax them 100% of their income until their posessions are within a reasonable range? Absolutely.
But communism is not the answer, please learn some history about the “successes” (meaning ALL failures, no exceptions) of comnunism. Read about the famines, the suppression, the torture, the corruption and the crap that comes with that to make it work. I like my freedom. I don’t need piles of cash and people generally should not be allowed to have piles. You do that with laws and taxing and enforcing. Lets focus on that instead.
Look, capitalism clearly does not work. Everything Marx and Lenin ever wrote about capitalism has come true. It is destroying our world more and more every day. Whatever you might say about communism, we do not know for a fact that it will ruin the lives of everybody, involved or not. No matter how bad you might claim communism is, it isn’t the thing that’s currently destroying our societies. So it is by definition better than capitalism.
No, you would be working 12 hours per day every day in uranium mines.
Ah yes, because everything you do is to meet societal needs and not to make more money for the 1%. That’s why 34% of wealth in Canada goes to the top 1%.
Wall Street:
Then tax the crap out of them. Communism is NOT the answer, its the cause for an order of magnitude more suffering than capitalism will ever be able to cause. These sesame street types that really believe that communism will give them a vegetable garden to work in just should stop using the internet. You are using a frikkin mobile phone, a device that is the frikking epitome of capitalism and science to bitch about the evils of capitalism (and loads of people do the same with science too).
Turn in your mobile phone and go live on a hippie farm (or in a cave) and die of horrible preventable diseases, if that is what you wish, but you don’t get to have it both ways.
Yes, capitalism has a shit tonne of problems that MUST be solved, totally agree. The wealthy should be taxed up to a 100% of income once their income and net worth surpasses a certain level. Just cap it. We should have free education, free healthcare, basic rights on homes and food… A socialist system BUILT ON A CAPITALIST SYSTEM. That is because capitalism, at its core, is allowing people the freedom to trade in the most efficient way possible by themselves. THAT IS STRENGTH and that is the very reason why the west currently rules just about everything. Yes, having it run loose with no restrictions (as we currently try to do for some fucked up reason) is bad, VERY bad. Still not communism bad, though. I 100x rather have our current fucked up capitalist system over living in the fun communistic countries of the USSR (hello famines!), China (heeelllooooo famines with millions of victims!) or Korea (helloo!!!) or… Well, you get the gist. I’m not even talking about the government policing that comes with it.
Captialism has problems, absolute. FIX THEM. Don’t go jackoff over systems that are known for misery, famines, death camps, and just general failure.
How many famines do you think occured in China and Russia prior to communism? How many people do you think died because of famines in the decades prior to communism?
Famine in late 19th century/early 20th century China and Russia were a fact of life. They’d come ever few years, kill a few million, and then leave. That had been the case throughout history because subsistence farming isn’t exactly a very robust system. How many famines do you think occured in the decades before the communist party took power?
How many famines would you guess occured in the decades after the communist party took power in Russia or China? What do you think the odds were that those famines would have occured with or without communist party intervention?
Tax them how? With the government they own?
The Christ was a literal bearded, sandle wearing, hippie that told y’all to go live in communes and protect each other and The Earth, but I guess your omnipotent, omniscient God doesn’t know what he’s taking about.
I love how you just assume that capitalists/socialists are all Christians lol
The fuck do I care what a 2000 year old prophet claimed about an even older warrior god from the middle east?
Im sure that 6000 year old ancient Jewish patriarchs definitely knew the god of the entire universe and it just happened to be the god they selected from their pantheon to be the best god. It’s almost like everyone thinks their god is the biggest god, and none of them have ever proven to exist.
The Christ also is fictional, as is whatever god you’re talking about Were you talking about Apollo, perhaps? Mars? Shiva? Khaless?
In any case, you’re talking about people living in the stone age, dying every day of horrible preventable diseases. Things that were resolved mainly through capitalism, but I guess nobody likes to think about that, can’t admit that “bad thing” can do something positive too, now can we?
Right? Somebody never read Animal Farm.
Sure, the current system is fucked, but it’s tied and proven that Marxism doesn’t work. We need a middle ground.
Animal farm wasn’t specifically about communism, though. The lesson was that any well meaning revolution/societal restructuring will inevitably get hijacked by a smaller group that wants to use it as an opportunity to grab power and seize control. No matter what said group calls themselves, they’re most likely going to end up as the same aristocracy/oligarchy that the revolution fought against.
It’s exactly what happened in the Soviet Union but it’s also potentially what could happen in any other revolution.
Exactly. It’s not an anti-communist book. It was written by a left-libertatian/anarchist, Orwell, who though alongside anarchists and communists in Spain.
Dude literally took up arms for socialism. Reactionaries have no critical thinking and historical analysis skills.
I’m sorry do you think that the point of animal farm is that the animals shouldn’t have revolted in the first place?
That book was written by a socialist.
deleted by creator
Enough farmers, here’s your pickaxe. You’re going to farm coal.
Fuck that! Your little children and old grand parents can mine coal! You need to build our rail line!
If production stays low, we WILL be forced to lower the age of workers from 9 years to 7 years. Work harder, your kids lives depend on it (if you’ve been given a permit to have kids, of course!)
“Whatever they want” is creating and distributing those resources, but I suppose labour is magic to you.
Yeah, and distributing resources efficiently is one of the core strengths of capitalism, its the reason why capitalism is so successful.
No, I’m not saying capitalism is perfect nor that it doesn’t cause suffering, nor that it does not need a shitload more limits than it has right now, but communism is NOT known for its efficiency, nor for letting people just do whatever the hell they want to do. Communism forces people to do what the boss says, if you don’t like it you can go to a gulag. If you’re talking about “Communism gives people the freedom to find the most efficient ways of distributing resources” then you’re kind of confusing that with Capitalism.
If capitalism is so efficient at distributing resources, why are so many people starving?
Also, yet another “communism is when capitalism”. Communism wouldn’t have an upper class of “bosses”.
Also, pointing to socialist states as proof communism has leadership is laughable. That’s not communism. It’s socialism. At least do some research.
There are loads of reasons for people starving, but in democratic capitalist countries, people typically don’t starve. Don’t agree? Name one. There is poverty in the US for sure and capitalism in the US is an absolute shitshow, nobody would deny that. But people in the US rarely starve to death.
Wanna talk starvation? Lets talk starvation! Warning: All following links are wikipedia but have stomach churning content. Here be dragons, but please do read because you need to learn. Also note: All the following is from within the last century.
1: Russian famine: about five million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–1922 (famine caused directly by communism)
Quote from that page: The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism (especially prodrazvyorstka). It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
Fun quote: canibalism
Communism is awesome!
2: North Korean famine: estimated between 600,000 and 1 million deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine (Famine caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: Economic mismanagement and the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly. A series of floods and droughts exacerbated the crisis. The North Korean government and its centrally planned system proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster.
Fun quote: uses of words such as ‘famine’ and ‘hunger’ were banned because they implied government failure
Communism is awesome!
3: Chinese famine: 15 to 55 million deaths (yay!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine (Caused directly by communist government policies)
Quote: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people’s communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation’s planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Fun quote: Cannibalism, AGAIN
Communism is awesome!
Want to know more?
… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. What are you? 5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekism a nice side effect of communism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chekist < I F*$#king double dare you to watch that movie about the non existing upper class of bosses
In conclusion?
Communism sucks and causes nothing but suffering. There is not even a fucking silver lining about it and people need to stop hippy-dippying communism. Its fucking evil.
Yes, capitalism as it currently runs is fucked up with problems. But at its core its the driver of success that got you your mobile phone in your hands. Use that mobile phone to fix those problems instead of dreaming of perfect mass murdering societies.
We just removed the child tax credit which made child poverty soar. The most “pro-union” president forced railroad workers to take a shit contract in December instead of allowing them to strike.
I don’t even know where to begin. That entire comment is full of lies i have debunked before. This is exhausting.
9 million per year. The number that starve due to capitalism.
I have already addressed the Soviet famine. The root cause was a crop blight and Stalin’s lax response ultimately worsened it.
As for china and north korea - any reason to believe the communism they don’t live in is the cause of that? Your own quote claims north korea mainly suffered because the USSR failed to supoort them.
Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.
Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.
Yes, capitalism is insanely efficient at its real purpose - funneling wealth to the top.
Capitalism is good at raising production, generating lots of products very quickly and efficiently. But it’s notoriously terrible at actually distributing resources in a fair way. Like, that’s it’s biggest weakness and the things it’s worst at.
Communism has the opposite issue of not usually being able to make enough things in the beginning, which is why Marx thought it would happen in already industrialized nations, not poor peasant states like Russia or China.
It seems like they believe they can be a gardener vs a farmer. That’s the only bit that I see that isn’t realistic.
In all likelihood they would be neither. With modern technology, we don’t need a large percent of the population farming. I realize communists typically eliminate the intellectuals and kulaks—those who would actually have useful knowledge—first, but the smart things would be to have the current farmers keep farming. You’d likely be assigned to a factory to manufacture widgets for the rest of your days.
deleted by creator
I wonder if there’s a term for how the far right and the far left tend to be similar…
I believe it’s holocaust trivialization
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
No it’s a “theory” that has not been demonstrated to hold up and isn’t granted a lot of respect in political science circles.
While certain aspects can be shared, such as a greater appreciation for authoritarianism, the actual beliefs are so incredibly different and the people drawn to them are so different that the “theory” doesn’t work.
I’m calling horseshoe theory holocaust trivialization. Well, I’m linking to a Jewish holocaust expert doing that.
At what point does it discuss horseshoe theory? They seem to talk about the holocaust vs the soviets which isn’t really what horsehoe theory purports to be about (and again the horseshoe theory is complete bullshit)
deleted by creator
Which one is defensively violent? Hexbears said I should get nuked and they claim to exist on the left (they present as alt-righty if you ask me)
deleted by creator
Well I don’t get threatened with nuclear annihilation everyday. I guess it was a weird one-off event (haha; I am being sarcastic).
You are unfamiliar with the altright if you think hexbear is at all right. They are leftists and many are revolutionary leftists but no one there for long is altright.
For fucks sake this al, comes about from the ChapoTrapHouse subreddit getting banned.
I see the world in a two dimensional way where people are placed into one of two camps based on a single characteristic;
Have they called for my death.
So I don’t give a shit what they (or anyone else) has to say about their political leanings. It’s all the same trash, and I lack the respect necessary to differentiate them.
So yea I say they’re alt right. If that upsets you, too bad.
LOL
The irony here is that if you actually had two cows in the late 1920’s USSR you’d catch a bullet.
deleted by creator
Ronald Reagan, famous time traveller.
Wouldn’t owning cows as an individual be a form of theft in the USSR of the 1920s? Wouldn’t they be the collective’s cows and if you made them “yours” you were stealing?
deleted by creator
Both can be offensively violent but the types of people drawn to either vary widely. For example I cannot say I know any socialists who were individually racist (as opposed to racist by virtue of being American as structural racism runs deep).
Horseshoe theory is bullshit
Say both sides…
Are you seriously trying to say that communist governments haven’t committed mass murder on an industrial scale just to fortify their power structures?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
There is but horseshoe theory is not well regarded in political science circles because it hasn’t held up.
“Horseshoe theory”
Eh, so do Communists but they just eliminated them on industrial scales.
deleted by creator
Assuming technology didn’t take a dive bomb that would be automated fairly quickly as well, look at how much robotics already does in manufacturing.
Most people would be reassigned as IT and programmers, robotics technicians, etc. If it was actually done properly.
There’s already like 10 times as many programmers and whatnot then there need to be. Look at how many duplicates apps there are for everything.
More likely they would be booted out as well
The system encourages those people to engage in the arms race for the next killer app to earn boatloads of money and win the game of capitalism. Finding people who are genuinely interested in maintaining the infrastructure that makes any of that possible is the problem.
deleted by creator
Do they eliminate intellectuals? The USSR and China seem to have avoided this. I don’t believe most nations did this other than Cambodia and I will never see that shitshow as socialist.
USSR despised and fought the Intelligentsia, sending them to gulags
They got to the moon using what people exactly?
In the USSR it was kind of mixed. If you were at all associated with the old regime you were fucked but tbh a lot of them weren’t super sympathetic anyway.
In China, lol. They fucking murdered everyone who knew anything and then suffered horribly for it. Of course, even then they might have been somewhat okay except Mao thought he knew better so they got the Great Leap Forward and stuff like the Four Pests campaign.
You are fucking kidding, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
And the part where they believe to have any freedoms whatsoever IS realistic? Or the part where they believe to actually be alive and not die in the next famine is realistic?
I see very little realism here…
What is it with people over on lemmy.ca with the most dense, thoughtless takes on everything? I swear I’ve never seen a comment from someone who’s on lemmy.ca that made me think, “this person’s head is screwed on properly.”
Your username is “KillAllPoorPeople” and you’re talking about peoples heads not being screwed on properly. Lol, ok
It’s a joke, calm down.
I mean, it WOULD solve a LOT of problems! And ethics arnt very important to extremists, whether right or left
deleted by creator
Everything you read online is serious and totally not ironic.
Meaning? You think that the world should be communist and then we’d all be happy working in our vegetable garden? I’m responding like that because I get so many facepalmingly stupid responses from people who actually really believe that with communism they would get freedom. I don’t even know how to respond to that, because its so mind bendingly stupid. They complain about all the starvations in capitalist countries.
WHERE!?
I can point to countless famines in communist countries with millions upon millions of deaths. But capitalism? Its currently riddled with problems, yes, we need to do better, tax the shit out of the rich until they are at normal levels… But famines? In a democratic capitalist country? Where?
Its just mind blowing that people can be THIS dumb. Read some frigging history for your own sake.
Wasn‘t Marx idea that communism can only exist once industry has been automated to such a degree that an individuals contribution is not mandatory anymore?
We might reach that point of technological advancement. within the next 50 years with the raise of AI. What we make of it is a completely different matter…
deleted by creator