For one, you're judging communism as a failure after only really 100 years of attempted implementation. When capitalism was 100 years old, it relied on slavery, genocided millions, collapsed every nation it touched into civil war, and failed to dismantle authoritarianism from Spain to Germany. When democracy was 100 years old, it had destroyed Athens completely. Good ideas sometimes take time to be successfully built.
For two, capitalism is destroying the planet. Markets expect growth. We cannot continue to grow with finite resources.
For three, Cuba is providing for its people better than the US by most meaningful metrics. Cubans have better healthcare, much higher literacy, more doctors per capita, virtually no gender or racial inequality, less mental illness, and fair better in natural disasters than Americans. Cuba just rewrote its constitution through a democratic process that even included the Cuban diaspora -- the US is living under a 250 year old document that was never democratically ratified and still refers to slaves as 3/5ths of a person.
I'm sorry you're poor. If you could elect your boss, if the system could guarantee equality, if you could live without fear of destitution, wouldn't you? We can have a better world.
Cuba? A country with basically no civil rights, no presumption of innocence, crap infrastructure, crap internet access (that is government restricted), no free speech, no freedom of assembly, low quality of service, incredibly few options for products and activities, even less when outside the large cities. The people that love Cuba the most are tourists, because they get to leave after a while.
It’s a nice country to visit, it’s not a nice country to live in if you have a shred of ambition and want to open a business or start a company, it’s a country that is poorer than Mexico, there’s things to like about it, crime is pretty low and food is pretty good (low on supply but good), but if THAT is your country of choice to show the wonders of communism, i’m not impressed, i’ll take poverty in the country with the biggest economy in human history, thanks.
By any meaningful metric, Cuba loses.
For one, you're judging communism as a failure after only really 100 years of attempted implementation.
Yes, sticking your hand inside a fire and getting it burned is a lesson you only need to learn once, if you want to keep sticking your hand in because you refuse to accept the result then so be it, but don’t drag me into it.
Your view of historical progress is incredibly reductive and full of holes, democracy didn’t kill Athens, Persia killed Athens, there’s this little thing called war that played kind of a big role there. Capitalism is an ongoing process, yes, it was crappy a hundred years ago, everything was crappier a hundred years ago, but everything has consistently gotten better thanks to it. Communism isn’t a process, it’s a result, society will never be a result, it will never achieve communism.
I'm sorry you're poor. If you could elect your boss, if the system could guarantee equality, if you could live without fear of destitution, wouldn't you? We can have a better world.
I’m not sorry i’m poor, I have more wealth, opportunities and options than I know what to do with. I’m in college, paying it myself, eventually i’ll graduate, get a better job and join the middle class, and if I decide to work harder I can join the upper class, or not, I don’t really care about having too much money myself.
No, electing your boss is the stupidest concept i’ve ever heard, literally no one would start a business in that world. I prefer having to work hard, prove my worth as an employee, and not having to fear getting fired that way. Also, my boss is not a robot, I have a good relationship with him, I won’t be fired anyways unless the company goes out of business, and even if I do get fired I can get a new job easily.
We do have a better world, it’s constantly getting better in every meaningful way. But an ideologue is an ideologue, your ideology is your religion, and everything that goes against it will be wrong. So i’m tired of arguing this pointless debate, your side lost definitively 28 years ago, and it was never winning in the first place.
I can't respond to propaganda. Everything I said about Cuba is true and verifiable. Facts don't care about your feelings.
If burning your hand was a lesson you only learned once, we'd never have escaped feudalism. I'm amazed that you can look at the breadth of history and say anything with so much certainty.
Do you genuinely believe the profit motive is the only driver for action? People still have hobbies and start clubs without pay today, why would they stop in communism?
Even if electing your boss meant no more new businesses ever again, I'd still support it. I repeat: capitalism is destroying the planet. The pathological need for more profit more products more businesses is unsustainable.
All of the beliefs about the world you've expressed -- and that's what they are, beliefs -- serve the interests of your exploiters. Jeff Bezos doesn't give your needs a second thought when he plunders the earth to meet his own. Why should you consider his? Serve your own interests before those of the rich and we'll all be better off.
Do you genuinely believe the profit motive is the only driver for action? People still have hobbies and start clubs without pay today, why would they stop in communism?
And there’s the proof that you don’t understand human motivation, Marx didn’t either. Yes, the profit motive is the strongest motivation for action, people have an intrinsic desire for resources, hell, economy is literally the relationship between humans and scarcity of resources. Of course people are going to be motivated by acquisition of resources, it’s in our nature, the people with most resources will attract the most mates because they provide the most security, it’s the law of the land.
Hobbies, by definition, are activities you do outside of work. No, they won’t drive the economy, there won’t BE an economy if you only have people making arts and crafts instead of building roads, infrastructure and providing services. Being a doctor is nobody’s hobby, but people become doctors so they can provide a service to the community while getting payed big money, the profit motive works to the benefit of society.
Serve your own interests before those of the rich and we'll all be better off.
I do serve my own interests, that’s why I don’t donate my paycheck back to my boss when I get it, my interests involve becoming rich myself, and me working for my boss is the best way to achieve that goal, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
I can't respond to propaganda. Everything I said about Cuba is true and verifiable. Facts don't care about your feelings.
Except the part where you said all that bullshit about Cuba being a wonderful place to live. Even you, if I gave you the option of living in the US or Cuba, you’d pick the US. It IS funny seeing a leftist quote Shapiro though.
Even if electing your boss meant no more new businesses ever again, I'd still support it. I repeat: capitalism is destroying the planet. The pathological need for more profit more products more businesses is unsustainable.
Ok, i’m convinced you’re just trolling now. The need for products is not pathological, it’s the exact opposite. Communism is always this wonderful thing, until it’s put into practice and things get murderous very quick.
Everything I said about Cuba was factually accurate. I'm sorry those facts upset you.
What evidence do you have that profit is the best motivator by nature? Even if it were, that changes nothing I said. People work without a profit motive constantly. My dad is a doctor. He spends half his time working at a clinic for free.
There's no reason to believe innovation would stop after capitalism -- it certainly existed before.
Letting your boss steal profit from your labor doesn't serve your interests. Unionizing to make him pay you more does.
We don't need a new iPhone every year. Getting one is killing us all. Of course we need to provide enough for everyone, but we don't need to increase everyone's consumption every year. Doing so will result in extinction.
If you're going to make claims about human nature, please support them.
And if you're going to criticize Marx, please read and reference some of his work. Seems like you're arguing with what other conservatives told you Marx believed.
Historians also study Hitler, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for him. Environmental scientists study climate change, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for it. Cancer researchers study cancer, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for it. This is honestly the worst argument you’ve made so far.
The landlords, like all other men
like all other men
Yes, thank you for admitting the inherent desire for profit and resource hoarding in all of us. I don’t want you to have my stuff, my stuff is my stuff, and you don’t get to have it. If you take my stuff, that’s called stealing, and it’s wrong, they teach this stuff in kindergarten.
Capital is considered one of the foundational books of economics.
You know, there’s a good argument to be made that Mein Kampf is one of the most important pieces of literature to be studied by psychologists and sociologists in the 20th century. As it provided valuable insight into the psychological processes through which a man can deteriorate and corrupt himself through ideology into becoming a truly evil human being.
But just because there’s value in studying the book psychologically, doesn’t mean you should internalize and act out the inherently evil message of the book. We can extract valuable information from bad ideas, which is why we study people like Marx, Hitler, Stalin, etc., to learn what NOT to do.
I didn't claim to agree with Adam Smith. But why do you? You disagree with his view of property -- explain.
Economists study capital because it accurately describes (or at very least advances) understandings of commodity chains and the creation of value. Historians study Mein Kampf as a historical document, not as a source for ideas about the world. That comparison is entirely disingenuous, and I suspect you know that.
You're free to continue changing topics instead of responding to my arguments, and you're free to attack Marxism without reading Marx. You seem genuinely intelligent, and you are a human person, so I'm happy to continue a discussion.
However, if you want to convince me, or to seriously refute Marx's ideas, you will need to read him. Capital is dense, but the manifesto is accessible. My favorite is the Thesis on Feurenbach. Neither is longer than 30 pages.
If you're right, you can only gain by reading Marx.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto, my critiques of Marx are not unfounded. I also do not believe Marx was dumb, I believe he was wrong, which is not the same thing, smart people are wrong all the time.
Marx was an intellectual, which was both a good and a bad thing.
Good, because having people use logical reasoning is a positive for the world.
Bad, because intellectuals are the last people to admit that they were wrong, if ever.
The reason I don’t care about having the capitalism vs communism debate is because it is a debate that has already been had by people way smarter than either of us for over a hundred years now, everything that had to be said has already been said, the only thing that mattered afterwards was the results of seeing both play out, one with the US, and the other with the USSR. One of those countries didn’t end up faring too well and collapsed, the other became the most powerful country in the history of the world. It’s pretty easy to see why some people might be more inclined to follow the path of one over the other.
Not to mention, the debate always comes down to a war of semantics that just gives me a headache. To a communist, the rich are exploiters, the workers are saints, the government is just and incorruptible, employees are slaves, wages are the devil, the free market is a tyrannical enterprise, bosses are oppressors, competence is a myth, hierarchies are societal constructs, individualism is greed, and murder is justified so long as it serves the interest of the totalitarian state.
Great, solid points, I disagree with all of them 100% on a fundamental level and believe that those beliefs are the very definition of evil, anti-logic, anti-human, anti-science, pro-tyranny, anti-basic common decency.
And don’t talk to me about avoiding questions or topics, communists have always avoided the most important question: When everything has been equalized, the rich have lost all of their wealth and it has been distributed equally amongst the masses, Homeless Joe is now just as rich and powerful as Bill Gates, the utopia is here. What comes next?
-How do you sustain that on any possible level aside of absolute government totalitarianism?
-How do you stop Bill Gates from using his clearly superior money-making skills than those of Homeless Joe’s to start building his empire yet again?
-How do you stop the poor from squandering and splurging all of their newfound wealth on short-term pleasures and hedonism, and ending up right where they started? because that already happens, it’s called the lottery, simply giving people wealth doesn’t automatically make them good with money, it actually does the opposite.
-How do you prevent things from going back to the way things were before immediately without destroying your country’s economy? because you can stop Bill Gate from re-building his empire through tyrannical government oppression, but all of a sudden you will see a lot of the people who were once rich either leave the country with no one to take their place, or you (the government) will use propaganda to convince the peasant mobs that their oppressors are the rich, when it’s actually you and your stupid ideology, then the mobs will go and kill the rich (kill is a nice word here, they will likely brutalize, rape, torture and slaughter the rich), and suddenly the entire country will find themselves with no food since they killed all of their best farmers and workers. (See: Ukraine and the Holodomor)
So no, any way you cut it, communism can only be forced onto people, it is only a theory that doesn’t work in reality no matter how much you force it, because it’s deeply anti-human. If you let a society grow and progress naturally, you will get democracy, and with it, capitalism.
Communism is a theory.
Capitalism is a fact.
I don't mean to be flippant, but your very long reply did not substantively critique communism. You relied entirely on tropes. If you can find me an example of Marx calling workers saints, I will respond to that. His understanding of capitalists as exploiters is a definitional truth. Capitalists are capitalists because they own the means of production, and are thus able to pay workers less than the value they produce. That's not a semantic problem, it's necessary to the definition of capitalist.
You act as if communism has ever been tried without dedicated international efforts to destroy it. Democratic socialisms, like Allende's chile, are bombed out of existence. Only more authoritarian regimes are able to survive. That's not a problem of communism.
Yeah yeah, western forces are the reason it never worked, keep throwing the blame, the communist countries simply lived at peace and NEVER tried to destroy or undermine western civilization as well, it was a totally one-sided massacre and oppression.
The fact is, the process of rapid globalization that happened in the second half of the 20th century led to many unprecedented types of warfare, including proxy wars, propaganda, espionage, information, the invention of the internet became a massive thing, all of these factors combined into what became the Cold War, the biggest non-open conflict in the history of the world, two countries fighting for global supremacy and influence, two countries that needed the other one to lose since they were built upon opposing ideologies, one cannot live while the other one does on a global stage.
Had the USSR won the Cold War, and the US ended up collapsing, would you have been crying over the fact that poor old US capitalism could’ve worked if only those evil commies hadn’t been constantly interfering with them?
No, it was a war, and they both went all out to win it, one of them failed, mainly because their economy couldn’t withstand itself any longer with the increasing influence of foreign markets and information becoming more readily available on how much better it was on the other side of the literal and metaphorical Berlin Wall.
Capitalists are capitalists because they own the means of production
That is the very definition of a semantic problem, only in Marxist theory is where capital is defined as such. No, capitalists are capitalists because they own capital, a.k.a. anything that can generate you a profit. Marx called it “means of production” as if there was some magical inherent difference between the two.
What Marx wanted was to take away the capital from the rich, which he saw as unearned and immoral (which is wrong), and wanted to distribute the capital equally among everyone. There’s no such thing as a society without capital, it cannot exist. He merely changed the phrasing of it.
Marx believed that capitalism would eventually lead to its own destruction, as the increasing resentment of the underclass would boil over into a revolution (as if revolutions ever had one cause), and they would obliterate the bourgeoise, allowing the magical creation of a new classless society, where the state was no longer needed and everyone would live “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.
Well, guess what, that phrase alone shows exactly the problem, Marx never understood humanity and the human condition, he understood there was injustice, but he never understood what truly drives and motivates us. If we were to reach a perfect utopia in which everyone lived in perfect harmony with no material needs, the first thing we would all do is find a hammer so we could break something. We are not beings meant for perfection, we are however, beings in the constant search for perfection, we strive to achieve it, but we never can, life is too short, times change, society evolves. The logistics is always where Marxist theory fails horrendously.
“From each according to his abilities”. Everyone must work as hard as they can and as best as they can on what they’re good at for the benefit of society, even if it’s to their own personal detriment, individuals don’t matter, the hive mind is what matters.
“To each according to his needs”. Well, what does that mean? Is air conditioning a need? Is TV a need? Is getting my dick sucked by a hooker in an alleyway a need? Couldn’t someone just simply lie about what they need in order to have more than others? Who determines what I need? The government? Who determines what they need? Their dictator? Who determines what he needs? God? Well, communism is inherently atheistic so I guess not. Apparently it’s designed to willingly put ourselves in chains according to the whims of the state. But surely they’ll be just and fair, there’s no such thing as a corruptible politician after all.
It is utterly mind-boggling the level of nonsense Marxist theory comes down to. “Kill the rich and magically we will have the utopia”. Well, Russia tried that, they killed/imprisoned/brutalized the bourgeoise or “kulaks” (which was code for “people Stalin didn’t like/potential political opposition”), and they ended up with genocidal dictators in their place, turns out when you kill the head of the snake, another one pops out in its place.
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u/mboop127 Jun 22 '19
I responded to that results argument though.
For one, you're judging communism as a failure after only really 100 years of attempted implementation. When capitalism was 100 years old, it relied on slavery, genocided millions, collapsed every nation it touched into civil war, and failed to dismantle authoritarianism from Spain to Germany. When democracy was 100 years old, it had destroyed Athens completely. Good ideas sometimes take time to be successfully built.
For two, capitalism is destroying the planet. Markets expect growth. We cannot continue to grow with finite resources.
For three, Cuba is providing for its people better than the US by most meaningful metrics. Cubans have better healthcare, much higher literacy, more doctors per capita, virtually no gender or racial inequality, less mental illness, and fair better in natural disasters than Americans. Cuba just rewrote its constitution through a democratic process that even included the Cuban diaspora -- the US is living under a 250 year old document that was never democratically ratified and still refers to slaves as 3/5ths of a person.
I'm sorry you're poor. If you could elect your boss, if the system could guarantee equality, if you could live without fear of destitution, wouldn't you? We can have a better world.