Seeing some of the zingers in the comments here, now seems like a great time to plug my “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. Read up, comrades!
If it’s not the CIA it will be a coup from some smart ass****e high ranked in the military/party.
Humans are to greedy to live in a socialist peaceful world.
That doesn’t make any sense, though, greed has a larger impact on Capitalist systems as its the main mover and driver.
Yeah, I remember how my grandfather and everyone he knew fought tooth and nail just to stop America from dismantling communism in eastern Europe!
Oh, wait, he didn’t. Everyone celebrated when it fell.
And then 7 million people died, and most people feel they were better off under Socialism and wished it continued.
Because no one who experienced it thought hmm is briliant, yeh nah, socialist policies are needed but not any form of totalitarian communism
Most people actually preferred Socialism over modern Capitalism in post-Soviet states. Socialism works better than Capitalism, and was more democratic.
Nah communism is shit, same with trickle down economics… you can have a bit of capitalism and a bit of socialism in a healthy mix of free trade economy with regulations.
Like we do in Europe, because if you do not regulate the free market it’ll stop being free in a generation. Like it’s happened in the US.
Oh boy, another batch of centrists coming in from the Reddit shitstorm… This one oblivious to the fact that far right parties are gaining traction all over Europe.
Sir, this is lemmy. Moderate politics are highly upvoted and deeply resented here.
if you do not regulate the free market
Wtf are you talking about. There is no such thing as a free market.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Europe is sliding into fascism too, just not as quickly. Regulating capitalism treats the symptoms and not the disease, and so it can only ever bring temporary relief. The problems we are experiencing now are not the product of a broken system, they are the inevitable result of capitalist economics, no matter how restrained.
Fascism vs communism is a prime example of a false dichotomy.
This isn’t true, though. You can’t have a “little bit of Socialism” and a “little bit of Capitalism,” Socialism and Capitalism are descriptors of overall economies. Regulation in a Capitalist system is still Capitalism, Europe in particular is Imperialist (and increasingly moving to fascism as they fade from relevance in the global stage).
Socialism, on the other hand, absolutely works, and is why the PRC is overtaking everyone else at the moment.
Yeah, or like they do in China.
Unfortunately for many parts of the world, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to go full socialist or not, if you get in the way of multinational exploitation and neocolonialism, you’re gonna get couped. There’s no shortage of left-leaning non-socialists who have also been targeted by the CIA. Like Guatemala, where they just wanted to do basic land reform so farmers could work their own land, but Chiquita didn’t like that so it became the origin of the term “Banana Republic.”
What do they do in China, exactly? It looks like single-party fascist corporatism. If it’s communism, why do they have a rising number of billionaires and worse conditions for workers than many european countries?
China has a Socialist Market Economy. Large firms and key sectors like steel and banking are nearly entirely under public control, while there are a large number of self-employed people. They actually have a falling number of billionaires in the last couple years.
As for worker conditions, Europe is Imperialist and many European countries act like landlords, and China is still a developing country, though rapidly developing.
Needs v wants
Needs: healthcare, utilities, public transport, even a minimal but quality food source. Even to the point of utilitarian but working phones/devices. State ownership where profits are minimal but go back into the state. The services aren’t necessarily free, but are run without massive shareholder payouts.
Wants: upgrades and luxuries. iPhones, treat foods, nice cars, silk bedding and those ridiculous marshmallow shoes everyone loves. Regulated but free market.
Now all your basic needs are covered by the community together. You could probably live a simple life with very little income. If you want luxury or fancy, feel free to work too get it.
I have been trying to put together a document that attempt this concept of ensuring the survival of people, while making money into something used for lifestyle upgrades. Also, heavy emphasis on wealth limits and preferring people over corporations. IMO, corporations are great for personal interests, but are beyond terrible when it comes to the wellbeing of people. Thus, we should make having a job optional, but rewarding.
UNIVERSAL RANKED INCOME
Europe has the whole “pretend we’re better than everyone else” into “kill all nonwhites” bullshit going, better kill em before they hitler again
This is a sane take. This is the only form of economy that actually works with great success.
No, Imperialism doesn’t actually work well and is failing, meanwhile Socialism is still working and on the rise, such as in the PRC.
We are seeing the capitalist West’s descent into fascism. The direct proof of the 1930’s maxim, “fascism is capitalism in decay” between the AFD, Orban, Erdogan, Starmer being basically indistinguishable from a Tory, Macron pulling a Hindenburg by using the presidential power to appoint a prime minister that will unify the center-right liberals with the far-right to prevent the left from having any power in government, and Meloni being an acceptable, reasonable western leader because she follows through with whatever US foreign policy is on offer. We are seeing a direct breakdown because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (law of diminishing returns, applied to profit, if you are a child that believes in neoclassical economics). So profit has to be sought out by purely national protectionism and reshoring since there is not a growing pie, but you just have to claim a greater slice of the pie. Capitalism on any sufficient timescale is Fascism, the destruction of WW2 and the Marshall Plan reset this “diminishing return on profitability” so that we are reaching the same state of the 1920s. But since there isn’t a strong socialist movement we have to modify Gramsci’s assessment. “The old world is dying, a new one is completely stillborn, now and forever is the time of monsters”
Is-ought fallacy? Understand me correctly, I like the EU system, but to pretend that it’s the end of history and that we’ve reached perfection in this space is wrong.
Like we do in Europe
This is the only form of economy that actually works with great success.
sarcastic french laugh
Unless the population pyramid is destroyed, but that won’t happen right?
I think the problem with Communism and Capitalism, is that both were implemented in the first place without specific goals or structure. Those things got added on later, such as the 5 year plans or how lobbying works.
IMO, we will need a v2.0 Constitution in the future, designed not only to address political issues, but also create fiscal rules. Things like universal benefits and healthcare, how much people should be payed, wealth limits, workers voting for their leadership, and so on. This, like the Magna Carta or the French Revolution, will require force in order to displace the ways of old.
It will suck, but conflict seems inevitable. Might as well make the most of it, and forge a new way forward.
This is just Utopianism, repackaged. Communism was planned, but you can’t just design a system in a lab and implement it through fiat, which is why you must regularly adapt to your materil conditions.
Money is imaginary. It was invented for the purpose of saving time through pure convenience. Why not go a step further, and sacrifice some profit for the sake of giving everybody some security and agency? What efficiency we lose, we get back in people being able to enjoy the fruits of civilization. Money only has value if people agree that it does, and we should apply that understanding towards redefining the purpose of money: luxuries.
The elite have hoarded the value of what workers have provided to society, and then consistently throws those same workers under the bus. Your “material conditions”, is just unfettered abuse.
Also, the system I laid out? It gives political agency to ordinary people, because they can protest and strike without losing their home or starving. This takes away the greatest tool of coercion that capitalism wields against workers. That is way more valuable than raw profit, because people can oppose bad actors in society. Like Schuemer, or Trump himself. Same goes for shitty workplaces - people can genuinely wait for a better job. This will force many bad companies out of business, because people want to be treated humanly.
I’m a Communist, so as a Marxist I reject Utopianism, as that has never worked. You cannot make a system through fiat.
It doesn’t matter what ideology. If the people running it are rotten, any system can be corrupted.
So then the solution is to decentralize so everyone is running it.
Communism by any other name would smell as sweet
A co-operative ?
It’s simple: teach everyone to make everything they need for themselves, so they can’t be expoited
Sure bro lemme teach my aunt to make her insulin, her own needles, her own glucose test strips and all that cheers
Maybe we should all specialize, and pay each other with our own goods, or better yet, a sort of representation of goods we all agree is valuable, so you can get one persons goods with anothers.
Kinda seems unfair that somebody’s aunt should have to purchase insulin she needs to survive, like she shouldn’t have to work harder to have the same lifestyle as someone without a disability. Maybe we should just give her the insulin she needs to survive, and compensate the people who make it out of some sort of common pool of resources everyone is required to contribute to, in order to distribute the costs more fairly.
When I was younger, I tried to design an universal constructor.
Unfortunatelly, I was using Roblox studio to do this.
How’s that for insanity?
I also carved a log with a knife, hacking off pieces in an attempt to make a 3D printer
Like how people were gifted ability to have more knowledge at their hands than previous generations and rapid communication, and then came to the conclusion that the earth is flat, vaccines are poision, and facism is holy?
Humans are dumb fucks. They will inevitably fuck up even the most perfect utopia they arrive in short of some mass hive mind brain washing Equilibrium style. i don’t hold that high an opinion of human society.
Leave the world to the animals. Humans are a failed experiment and a virus to the world.
Start from yourself
Something something darwin
What does Darwin have to do with enslavement of the human species?
Deeply anti-materialist take.
Can you explain how you disagree? Is it about incentives to be corrupt (or against) depending on the system?
If you believe in great man theory™ and think that all political developments happen because one person can magically steer entire countries and the world, in geo-political terms, or idealists in thinking that if you have the correct ideas, you can magically steer the entire rest of the world to whatever you think, by having the correct thoughts. Then your theories of political developments are non-materialist, like this comment is objecting to. The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
People in this context appears to be plural, thus I don’t see how Montreal_Metro’s take is Great Man Theory.
The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.
Ultimately, any system is operated by mere mortals who will arbitrarily reward and punish people based on their own bias, morals and desires. Systems only work so long as the people manning them follow the rules. Systems only last if the people running it punish rule breakers.
According to all of history, corruption, apathy, and pure human greed and ingenuity will gradually eat away any system, economic and political, until it collapses. Only for the failing system to be replaced by a “better” system, which begins the cycle again.
The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.
The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Did the system that created the conditions people find themselves in come first. Or did the people running the system create the conditions that they find themselves in?
It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.
They didn’t seem to express an argument or value judgment in their comment regardless of their actual opinion.
Don’t feed the troll.
I am not that person, but I guess you wouldn’t like the ambassadors of fascism to be efficient and competent.
Worker owned cooperatives would go a fair way to seizing the means of production.
Kinda. They are nicer to work at, but aren’t what Marx is talking about, as they still retain classes due non-coop people having different property relations to those in the coop.
I am a communist by heart, but I know that social market economy is the way to go, at least for now.
Kinda? China has a Socialist Market Economy, and this is building up the productive forces dramatically, but not every country will work the same way or have the same path.
I want that Star Trek future, please!
And it often comes into being because of a CIA financed coup
It’s like the chicken or the egg question.
When has the CIA ever financed a communist coup?
not the same thing but this may be related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
Never … the communists / socialists / democratic groups usually reacted because of a CIA financed coup
And right after opressing and killing thousands of peole, while causing some famine on top!
Oppressing the former oppressors is necessary, and famine was ended, not caused, by Socialism.
Yeah, capitalist Britain, France, and America were terrible in their use of famines and genocides. The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s land and food.
Almost as if every economic system is capable of causing famines and genocides.
As someone who lived through a communist regime, I never know wether I should laugh or cry at children of your kind.
Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.
You don’t seem to understand that most of the civilised world does not practice american capitalism, and that communism has been proven time and again to not be any alternative to it anyway. It’s always easier to be an ignoramus with a dream I guess.
American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren’t American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn’t repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren’t. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as “Western Nations”, nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can’t be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so “anti-Semitic” a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can’t be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.
Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng
No they haven’t.
China did not abandon Communism, they pivoted from their Left-deviationism that was based in idealism, not materialism.
China
China is still Socialist.
What does it mean though? China’s gini coefficient is higher than Europe’s, and they have a growing number of billionaires.
Socialism is a Mode of Production determined by having public property as primary. In China, large firms and key industries are firmly under public ownership and control, and they actually have a falling number of billionaires in the last couple years.
Indonesia, Chile, West Germany, Congo, Iran, Bengal, Guatemala, Nicaragua…
Even without interference communism can never work, it’s not how human nature works, it relys on everyone being on the same page which will never happen
it’s not how human nature works
where is human nature defined?
this is a thought-terminating cliche, not an my argument to be taken seriously
How does it rely on “everyone being on the same page?” What gave you that impression?
It’s in our genetics to engage in a perpetual exponential quarterly growth and make our decisions based on the benefit it brings to our investors. Any caveman could tell you that smh…
E: my god it’s a hyperbolically absurd take in memes and even with the caveman comment I still need to /s apparently…
No, cavemen were very egalitarian. This is because back then, you couldn’t hoard much of anything - food spoils quickly, sex requires your partner to like you, and personal possessions were things like tools or the odd bit of clothing. It was when wealth could be preserved, such as livestock, stored grain, jewelry, and eventually coinage, that wealth became an hereditary thing.
This is why a future economic system has to be designed to prevent the excessive hoarding of wealth. Not too little, nor too much. Humans weren’t evolved to be free of consequence, especially from each other.
If you ran humanity in thousands of simulations how often would we end up in the same capitalistic situation?
this rather shows the untestability of the hypothesis. this is no test at all.
What an interesting question. I have no idea what the answer is, but the question is bloody great.
Far less often than we end up with communalist hunter gatherers and early agrarian communes and evidently for a much shorter time. Does that mean feudalism can never work? Capitalism is never at any point of productive development possible?
If you’ve never studied an economics text (a real, materialist one, not fucking graphs with conveniently simple and clean cut rules that never seem to apply and zero fucking statistics) then try not to speak so authoritatively on economics.
Your words make no sense to me. If you want to convey ideas use the common tongue. It feels like you have some neat ideas though.
Edit: Can anyone please decipher what this guy said?
people share goods and culture naturally. the prevailing historical models are cooperative. anticooperative, competitive societies are rare.
So many it would be hard to count, at least 4 or 5. But numbers don’t really go much higher than that. Any caveman could tell you that.
No, but greed and envy is. That’s why humans have written so much in the last thousand years about greed and envy.
Anthropology doesn’t support the idea that humans are incapable of being communal.
capitalism, of course, where utility is only allowed to exist as the unexploited byproduct of a scam, cannot fail. it can only be failed.
I don’t disagree with you, but the person you’re responding to didn’t mention capitalism?
you’re right, they could be a monarchist instead. that’s much more sensible.
What part of communism relys on everyone being on the same page?
It’s right there on Karl Marcos’ “All About Capital”, basic economics commie
Haha no communism can force you to go against your evil “human nature” so you have to aid the collective people, who mostly have a good human nature
Kind of some level of any system isn’t it? In short if a system has a means to power that can tweak the rules. Inevitably will result in one group ceasing the rules, turning them to raise how much they can tweak them, and ensuring they continue to be tweaked in their favor.
Communism relies on a possibly impossible starting point. Theoretically if the starting point were reached, it seems the most sustainable. Whether it’s possible to reach that starting point is the great mystery.
Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head here. It’s interesting to think about how even though communism could theoretically be the best system, it could mean nothing if we don’t know how to meet the conditions to achieve it in the first place.
There’s never been any real communism. If a country has money then it is inherently a capitalist society .
What if a country has money but you also need monthly issued talons to get most goods?
What no theory does to an mf.
I don’t think money makes a society inherently capitalist, money predates capitalism by a loooong time, but I agree that if it has money it isn’t communist. It can be on its way to communist, a transitonary state, and depending on your definition it can be socialist, but communist is explicitly a moneyless, classless, stateless society. So, yeah, if it’s got it money, it’s not communist, but saying it’s capitalist is to create a false dichotomy of there only being fully realized communism or capitalism, with nothing outside of or in-between the two.
Eta: replied to the wrong person in the thread. Whoops. Meant to reply to the original commenter on this thread.
I hope this comes across as a genuine question, despite the thread itself getting a little jacked up. Like many of us, I’d like to find better systems of governance / better solutions to the problem of needed / beneficial coordination.
How does a communist society as you’ve described defend itself against opportunistic, hierarchical forces that would subsume and control it? What is the (de-coordinated? If you’ll accept my term?) answer to such a problem, pragmatically?
Oh Lord, ask someone smarter than me! Lol. I was clarifying terms more than anything else. Communism is an end stage, an eventual goal. That’s the big sticking point between anarchists (hi!) and communists. Communists believe in capturing the state so that it can be transformed and eventually wither away to become a communist society, anarchists believe in dismantling the state and creating communism directly. There are other differences, including how we define terms such “the state,” but that’s the jist.
I guess firstly, I should probably out myself that I’m not a Marxist leninists, but more along the lines of a syndicalist or platformist. Council communist is a semi appropriate term. I also don’t believe the same system that would work in rural Tennessee would be viable for urban New York. I believe in democratic, worker control. Consensus democracy and direct democratic control. The trouble is, I, and many others, don’t believe that communism is possible in just a single area. It would be subsumed, attacked, overthrown. It, by necessity, must be either a world wide movement to achieve True Communism™, or it would need to be isolated, insular, and completely or near completely self sufficient. The latter option is, frankly, kind of shit, and in my opinion, when combined with more authoritarian means and the “capture the state” side of things, leads to dictators and shitty conditions.
The comment your replying to (or meant to) has to be being purposely dense. There is obviously a difference between being a communist, having a communist party take power, and “achieving” communism. No one with a brain would think the OOP was talking about the last use of the word in that sentence.
It’s a common “dumb guy that thinks they’re being smart” take because they haven’t actually ever read a book in their life. They just read the definition of communism once.
Communist can run a society that is not yet achieved communism. Not sure if you’re being purposely dense or not.
Also, currency does not define a society as capitalist. We’ve have currency long before capitalism ever existed.
also, primitive societies tended to be pretty communist. you need to build to delusions like capitalism.
I read this as communism has never failed
trvth nvke
