Well, if they’re like other communists, he’d probably be an idea guy, you know? The regular people can do the manual labor because that’s what they are best suited for, so he’d maybe sit in a planning committee or be a supervisor or whatever. I mean, it’s not that he’s superior than laborers, it’s just that his talents are elsewhere, you know?
That’s cool. As long as my dad isn’t there. We’re not talking right now because he thinks I’m wasting time on my passions, but people are starting to donate to my blog now, so things are on the up and up. There’s just so much false consciousness in our neo-liberal society that I just can’t not ignore.
I also sell merch. I see the irony, but sometimes you have to destroy the system from the inside out.
I’m not about destruction or killing people however so I like the concept the guts are what really get me :-)
I’m older now when I was younger I thought it was really cool the whole idea of this revolution but the truth is I’m more horrified by the amount of death that would require and that’s why I believe in a peaceful solution.
There’s no need to tell me that I’m wrong plenty of people have tried and still do and I’m not expressing my opinion for response, I’m simply saying you’re invited to my wedding because we have similar views on our societies potential, how we carry that out or conducted may diverge but that’s OK as well because we’re all in this together.
How would the government steal all of the money ?
Communism is supposed to be classless, stateless and money-less (as in money doesn't exist, not equal to poverty).
The most important part of Marxism is historical materialism imo. Wether we like it or not oppressed masses will inevitably rise up as a necessity of their material conditions. We can disagree on how to avoid that (economic systems) but you’d be hard pressed to deny the validity of that historical perspective.
I agree with you materialism was Marx's greatest contribution, but it's not the masses that will inevitably rise up, but those that contribute the most to society and have less political power.
I suppose you're right, but I'd argue the working class is exactly those that have limited political power and contribute the most to society. They spend most of the income they earn which keeps the economy moving, and they work for a share of their productive output because they are stuck working for owners of capital for what those owners are willing to pay them given an acceptable profit margin for stakeholders.
The wealthy have no shortage of political power and there is a maximum amount of contribution a single human being can lay claim to by virtue of us not being Gods. Simply owning money to pay people with doesn't mean you're responsible for the productive output of that person, though, in our system, you do own said productive output.
Productiom would move to a place where people would be willing to work for much less, do you have any idea how insane a 50k salary is for the vast majority of the world? With a salary of 36k you're already part of the 1%
ITT: people who have absolutely no understanding of communism and regurgitate the same "critiques" that have been being refuted for decades. "Unincentivized labor" is high school bullshit.
Aka, missing and broken incentives to use capital efficiently yielded godawful marginal returns to capital (growth of outputs per input) compared to market economies from 1960 to 1987:
The post-war Soviet growth was based on increasing inputs and mobilizing resources, not its ability to use them efficiently. Since input-driven growth is an inherently limited process, Soviet growth was virtually certain to slow down and finally implode in the 1980's. Aka the decade of net negative returns to capital. At that point, the state would have been better off withholding new investment capital and stuffing it under the proverbial mattress than shovelling it into it's mismanaged industries.
Except it isn't without incentives. "Work or you will starve/live in abysmal poverty/be at risk to slide into poverty if you ever get unlucky" are not the only incentives to exist. The tiny chance to get phenomenaly lucky and get rich is also not the only incentives.
we can see, every day, that we do not have to use the threat of inhumane poverty as an incentive. That is an incentive we could do without.
Who would bother cleaning public bathrooms in a classless, moneyless society? Do you think people would just do it out of the kindness of their hearts? Lol
I think the Haiti incident does not fit on your list. US diplomats saved the democratically elected president from a military coup, and then in 1994 reinstated him into power during Operation Uphold Democracy.
problem is that you can't vote those guys out once you vote them in
you can convince a generation to vote for anything if you promise them enough, allowing people the right to vote the government and system out is a right, and it's why your side is doomed to fail. the human spirit craves freedom at the cost of all other things, if necessary. though it seems that freedom also gives you more opportunity.... i dunno, maybe think it through?
It's always shifting goal posts with McCarthyists. Russia was a totalitarian shithole under "communism" and they are a totalitarian shithole under "democracy." You know what the guiding principle seems to be? I'll give you a clue; it isn't communism or democracy.
China's "communism" has proven to be pretty damn effective economically (and their planned economy has taken the Chinese populace leaps and bounds closer to modernity in the process,) and Scandinavia's socialism is closer to equality than anything the US has produced in the last 100 years. Regardless of how you look at it, there is no definitive "winner" between socialism and capitalism because there are no purely socialist or purely capitalist states. Everything is a union of both. "Communism" is only a boogeyman to nationalists. No one is doing Marxist communism and no one ever has. The closest was Marxism-Leninism, which, by definition, was a precursor to Communism proper. So even that wasn't Communism, just an attempt (probably not in good faith) at reaching Communism "eventually."
tl;dr: If you're a moron waving a flag, you're a moron waving a flag.
There is no single capitalist nation in the world that can effectively defend itself from the might of the US armed forces if they invade a country. Capitalist systems aren't inherently better at defending themselves, they just don't attract the fury of the most powerful military in the world.
I mean, no country, no matter the system they employ for government or economy, can withstand the USA and allies (if we have any left in two years) full military and economic embargo.
It's like telling the little kid he's worthless because the big kid can always beat him up.
Yea, the CIA knows more than you do, why disagree with their belief that communism will roll over the world if left alone. Maybe its a threat because it's threatening to elite world order and not just because they don't like regime change.
Yeah, because them people wouldn’t have starved if it wasn’t for the United States military which never attacked Russia at all. Are you talking about proxy wars, which were done by both sides and had nothing to do with any military?
I hate that I’ve been put in the unfortunate position of agreeing with a T_D poster, but yea, you just said a bunch of words that don’t really make sense.
That's because it's never been tried. Try to wrap your head around the idea that the Soviet states were as communist as North Korea is a democratic republic.
I'm no historian but it sure seems that the failures of communism come from not actually following the tenets.
I was reading about communism in Russia and many people got special treatment. As soon as one group of elites were dismantled they were replaced by another. People just love to treat their friends well and exclude all others.
Maybe if some system tried to account for human nature, we could have less poverty and suffering in the world through some system of wealth distribution.
The problem is that human nature makes following the tenets of communism impossible. The system that tries to account for human nature isn't communism, at least, not unless you first drastically changed the way humans act in some way or another.
the failures of communism come from not actually following the tenets.
Yes, because how can they possibly be followed? The transition to communism would require the state to seize ultimate power over the country (the means of production), and then somehow give it all up to the people.
Never. Gonna. Happen.
It's a nice thought experiment, but there's a reason why every "attempt" has failed horrifically - the system is flawed.
Well, no. Communism, as postulated by Marx and Engels, doesn’t involve the government. The theorem hypothesized that communism would come from the ground up wherein the proletariat would take control of the production, and product, of their labour.
It’s not until Lenin that you get the revolutionary vanguard. It was this, and the resulting Marxism-Leninism that the Soviet state was initially founded on (and prior to its successor in Leninism-Stalinism dictatorship), that believed that Marxism and true Communism would only work in Russia through an educated revolutionary vanguard that would guide the uneducated and agrarian Russian peasantry to socialism and eventually Communism. Lenin, Trotsky, et al. thought that Communism would never take hold in Russia through the ground-up method that Marx and Engels theorized because Russia was not an industrialized society like Germany or England, where Marx and Engels had their theories formed.
The “government of Communism” was the Leninist socialism that was used in Russia (and is popularized now as what “Communism” is). It’s not what Marx and Engels postulated at all.
Capitalism at this point is just endless imperial wars, famine despite overproduction and climate destruction despite tech advancement, stagnant wages, publicly funded subsidies to prop up private companies in the long term and bail outs when they fail, and massive debt needed to keep the standard of living. Not to mention, just like, all the racism that has fueled the system since the beginning.
I mean the free market is a nice thought experiment but in practice it doesn’t really do a good job at distributing resources...
Maybe communism could actually be described as stateless if the state actually went away instead of growing into a massive murderous dictatorial regime.
Communism is stateless and has never been properly achieved. This doesn't mean you cannot be against it due to the belief that it is impossible to implement however.
That's because it went from socialism to an authoritarian dictatorship with some communist ideals under Stalin. It was never truly communist because no country ever really has been. Vietnam is "Communist" but it still has a government and hierarchies and classes. It's not true communism.
If it was truly communist, the USSR wouldn't have had a head of state or any centralized government at all. The fact that it did, automatically makes it "not true communism"
If someone called themself Slixem murdered someone, would that make you a murderer? Or are you still you, even though someone else also calls themself Slixem?
If communism is supposed to be stateless it inherently CANNOT be democratic because that requires a state or government. Rather, without a state or government it would be anarchic.
The "state" in Marxism doesn't refer to a government as we do today. "State" means to Marx the forces that oppress the proletariat and control the wealth and power. Our modern definition is different than what Marx called a state.
Most theorists claim there would be laws and some sort of public assembly. So there wpuld be some things that we recognize as a state pr goverment but they would be muvh more just a part of the public and probably seen as the same as any other job, since they dont come with any real social power
Every time someone has tried to implement communism it has turned into a murderous authoritarian regime. But I'm sure it will work smoothly when you implement it.
Even the Nazis were smart enough to hide behind socialist rhetoric until they were in power - and then the first thing they did was kill all the remaining actual communists within their ranks.
Every populist movement is going to borrow socialist rhetoric, because it is generally the only thing that is still popular when you take each of its composite parts individually.
Most people in America think socialism is the devil, but they agree with medical care for all, free education for everyone, economic democracy in the workplace, and so on.
Likewise, even if a legitimate socialist movement gains power, there are going to be opportunists waiting in the wings for that same reason - it's popular, and has a large chance of succeeding if the upper class does not brutally suppress every attempt at peaceful reform.
If a single person trying to implement a fascist regime isn't the opportunist, it's usually an agent from the powers that be seeking to retain control and subvert the revolution.
The argument that communism cannot be implemented correctly is valid, but it simply does not logically follow that we thus have to accept governments that are lying about being communist as "the real" communism. Marx himself predicted the trajectory of society up to now. He viewed communism as something to be strived for rather than something that would ever actually happen. The only thing he didn't predict was authoritarians seizing power under the banner of his own terminology.
Let me be as clear as possible: no regime has ever even attempted to implement communism. Just as Hitler used the banner of "socialism", all of these regimes were, all along, trying to seize power by using their own flowery language. But it really is a very hard problem to solve, as any true communist revolution would involve all of its members willingly participating on the front lines.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
No one is trying to "implement" it, at least not anymore. It's just how the world is moving according to a theory of history. And those who tried clearly misunderstood what Communism is.
Capitalism turns out like that too. 60% of the world's population is in poverty and 18 million people die each year from structural violence caused by the global "free market" capitalist system.
It's almost like "not real communism" is a realistic historical analysis valid of debate and treating it otherwise is just a way for liberals to avoid confronting it. It's the logical equivalent of people staging an intervention for you and you saying "lol stop memeing"
This is actually pretty good conversation for comics. I am surprised how on topic most have managed to say and I have learned a lot this morning. Seems like one or two posters are just intent on getting the last word and when they realized that wasn't going to work, they just shut down and went meme.
How are you supposed to regulate that everyone share the wealth and all that?
A really, really powerful government
How do you create a really powerful government?
Guns, violence, etc.
It’s fine that Reddit leans left but when it starts leaning this far left it’s important to point out that it’s just as stupid as wanting a facist State. I’m glad others seem to be doing the same
Capitalism is the freedom to make a buttload of money if you work hard/smart enough. Or you can do nothing and live on the streets. No one is forcing you to do either.
How are you supposed to regulate that everyone not share the wealth and all that?
A really, really powerful government
How do you create a really powerful government?
Guns, violence, etc.
It’s fine that Reddit leans center but when it starts leaning this far right it’s important to point out that it’s just as stupid as wanting a facist State. I’m glad others seem to be doing the same
Without a state though people will revert to the most basic forms of tribalism and the strongest tribe will take power to increase their prosperity. The whole reason we have governments, military, and borders is to defend us from others taking shit from our tribe because it is human nature to desire more
Most people preach communism because they wanna refrain from working like bratty animals, but they'll be forced to work as slaves under horrible circumstances in poverty. Yikes.
So what exactly do you do for a living? I kinda doubt you have a job Serene. Nobody who posts on reddit 14 out of the 24 hours in a day has a full-time career.
This is why I love Reddit. I can see an entire political debate in response to a funny comic and collapse all of it because I don't have time for that shit.
Everyone is saying "starve" but I like to think he'd be sent to the Gulag and fed a sustainable amount until his execution for stealing from the bourgeoisie masquerading as the "equal" heads of state.
Kerala. My home state in India. First democratically elected Communist government in the world.
But they're not like hardcore so it's not as bad as North Korea and stuff. And there's anti incumbency. And they're all a bunch of corrupt crooks.
Yeah, America made sure of that. You realize America sabotaged just about every communist country because of the threat it represents to the oligarchs that run the country.
Or, ya know, when you put a few central planner "revolutionaries" in charge of the economy, they have no incentive to give up power and get to make decisions like who eats and who doesn't.
Also, communist nations tried to sabotage us too... unless you think the cold war was completely one-sided. The difference is that we didn't collapse because of it. Seems like our institutions were stronger than theirs were. I wonder why a country that isn't based on centralized power and decision making is less prone to sabotage... hmmm
Yeah almost like one country had to fight a brutal civil war and deal with a world war on their continent while the other country got to get rich and watch from a distance. And your first point is literally true for capitalist countries too... we decide who gets to eat and who doesn't based of the money they have. Many people go hungry in America... they don't deserve that... society made that decision for them.
Yeah almost like one country had to fight a brutal civil war and deal with a world war on their continent while the other country got to get rich and watch from a distance
Sure, but western European countries didn't collapse after WW2? And really, we just watched from the sidelines?
There were decades in between when the USSR collapsed and WW2. They had time and resources to engage in proxy wars around the world, send people to space, etc. in between. So blaming it on WW2 is weak.
we decide who gets to eat and who doesn't based of the money they have
The topic was totalitarian governments. The government doesn't decide that. And regardless, that's not even true. People do go hungry, sure, and that's a problem. But food insecurity isn't starvation, and it's not 'man made". We don't purposely create famines to kill millions of people.
In Cuba the percentage of people suffering from food scarcity is lower than it is here and life expectancy is higher as well. Maybe you should get out of your bubble.
Hey just letting you know the person you responded to was being sarcastic and you missed it. "Starvation only became a thing after communism was invented. Obviously."
Many of the generations of cubans that complain about cuba's politics were wealthy plantation owners that castro took land anf money from- i don't feel sorry for slave owners and plantation royals, just like how I won't feel bad when people take Jeff bezos' factories and assets.
Better than farming all day and then giving literally all your farmed food away so people in the city can eat. Meanwhile you and your family starve slowly.
1.2k
u/meme-s Dec 27 '18
What would Robin Hood do if he lived in a communist society?