Current Events > C/D: Communism can work

(+) Yeah! (+)

All those times it didn't work, wasn't real communism. If they just try it my way, it would work.
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I mean, just because it works, doesn't mean it works well, so C
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Yes but it has to be REAL communism
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Deny, humans are inherently selfish.
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Good on paper. Bad in reality.
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It won't ever work.
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maybe within a voluntarist / non-coercive context

beyond that though, it's just an evil bloodbath
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It can work, though it's incredibly difficult in larger communities due to the raw logistics of it all requiring enough oversight to effectively render the ideal of communism non-existent. Realistically, though, it's an extreme on the political scale, and extremes in any direction are inherently unstable, and more importantly, the world is more complex than it was when society could effectively be divided into two classes. The better solution is simply adopting the best pieces of each system and throwing away the rest.

Not remotely possible for it to work. The entire philosophy is designed from the ground up to ensure the exact kind of corruption and tyranny that have come about every time it's been tried
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It CAN work, but people would have to stop acting like they normally would...
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It only works for small communities/villages, and even then they have to be so isolated from other communities that they have to literally depend on one another to survive.
On a nationwide scale, communism fails to work because people need an incentive to keep working. Communism offers people no incentive for working, and whatever content they produce automatically becomes the governments property.
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monkeysRfunny posted...

It CAN work, but people would have to stop acting like they normally would...

Meaning they'd have to give up three square meals per day and most of the other goods and services they're accustomed to having access to.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

monkeysRfunny posted...

It CAN work, but people would have to stop acting like they normally would...

Meaning they'd have to give up three square meals per day and most of the other goods and services they're accustomed to having access to.

Yes, basically.
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In extremely small scales only. Like single towns.

Muffinz0rz posted...

I mean, just because it works, doesn't mean it works well, so C

This. It does work... It just really sucks

In theory, communism could work if there was a benevolent dictator in charge. The same could be said for literally any form of government under those circumstances though. The closest anyone has come was Tito in Yugoslavia, but look at what happened not long after he died (a collapse and some genocide, for starters). It's highly unlikely even a successful communist state could have a good standard of living though, compared to somewhere with incentives.
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D because people suck
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It worked out great for Mao and Stalin. Not so much for the millions they killed. But those specific two guys did fantastic under communism!
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WSM Piru posted...

Deny, humans are inherently selfish.

This.

Obligatory post in topic about communism.

Reis posted...

Obligatory post in topic about communism.

Now that we've moved from a manufacturing economy to a service based economy what exactly are these "means of production"? I hear the communists on here saying it all the time and they sound like characters out of a circa 1800s Dickens novel
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ITT: people show how little they know about history and socialist theory
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D.
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On a really small scale, like 4-ish people.
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It wasn't that much worse than capitalism considering we also have people starving in forced labour, they've just been outsourced to the third wold. The USSR wasn't the huge gulag everyone thinks it was, and the West is not the land of success either.
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Grey_Locus posted...

It wasn't that much worse than capitalism considering we also have people starving in forced labour, they've just been outsourced to the third wold. The USSR wasn't the huge gulag everyone thinks it was, and the West is not the land of success either.

it's almost as though the US funding counter-revolutionary groups, killing/kidnapping/otherwise undermining the authority of democratically elected leaders, and installing fascist dictatorships, might have had a negative effect on the countries they targeted
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I believe a community founded on communism/Marism could work. I don't think a nation can.
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Why would you want it to?
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We should stop thinking in terms of "which of these ideologies works/is right" and start thinking in terms of "what are the goals/problems of our current system and what steps are needed to achieve/fix them."

I have become convinced that modern communists have personal problems that cause them to maintain their views in spite of all the dead bodies brought about by their philosophy. It's too generous to call communists today naive. You could say that about some of the communists 100+ years ago, before it was abundantly clear that attempting communism resulted in a horror show every single time.
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tennisdude818 posted...

I have become convinced that modern communists have personal problems

I agree. They seem irrational to the point of genuinely being mentally ill. The same could be said for neo-Nazis. I think they're all just unstable and miserable, looking for a solution to a problem they aren't necessarily acknowledging is there.
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averagejoel posted...

it's almost as though the US funding counter-revolutionary groups, killing/kidnapping/otherwise undermining the authority of democratically elected leaders, and installing fascist dictatorships, might have had a negative effect on the countries they targeted

Both sides acted questionably during the Cold War, so it's not relevant.

Let's leave politics aside for a minute. Economically speaking, both systems rely on a working class that is compensated poorly so that the rest can enjoy the products of their labour. In colonial times it was slaves, now it's sweatshops overseas. Comunism was an attempt to better distribute that wealth, but it didn't really turn out very different since they still had labour camps.
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It can work with a benevolent dictator AI. Otherwise, no. People who want power for the sake of power and lack the business sense needed to run a communist nation cause it to fail.
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For more of a direct answer to the OP, no it can't work. Ludwig Von Mises correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union because a society can't operate without market prices. Central planners simply cannot allocate resources efficiently even if they want to (as opposed to when they don't want to and end up giving resources to politically connected friends or purposely starving a population such as during the Holodomor).
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it would take a star trek-style replicator, and even then I'm not 100% convinced it wouldn't just turn electricity into the new currency.
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

tennisdude818 posted...

I have become convinced that modern communists have personal problems

I agree. They seem irrational to the point of genuinely being mentally ill. The same could be said for neo-Nazis. I think they're all just unstable and miserable, looking for a solution to a problem they aren't necessarily acknowledging is there.

Yeah it could be that they are looking for scapegoats for their own issues. Maybe they hate something about their lives and direct that hatred towards Jews in the case of Neo Nazis, or more successful people in the case of communists.

It can't be that communists genuinely care about the poor, because moving towards freer markets pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the developing world.
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Remember that time that people said capitalism spurs ingenuity

But that's genuinely false because advancement of technology in all fields and the creation of yet more fields has been consistent throughout the entire history of our species

Or that time that the united states had massive funding for medical research both in the public and private sectors for decades but Cuba, under embargoes, managed to create a working lung cancer vaccine that's affordable and available to all its citizens?
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monkeysRfunny posted...

It CAN work, but people would have to stop acting like they normally would...

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Dash_Harber posted...

It can work, though it's incredibly difficult in larger communities due to the raw logistics of it all requiring enough oversight to effectively render the ideal of communism non-existent. Realistically, though, it's an extreme on the political scale, and extremes in any direction are inherently unstable, and more importantly, the world is more complex than it was when society could effectively be divided into two classes. The better solution is simply adopting the best pieces of each system and throwing away the rest.

The bourgeoisie and the proletariat? Even in the 1700s, society had at least 3 (and sort of 4) divisions in classical France.
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Communism works in the minds of deluded teens.

Fuck no

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averagejoel posted...

Grey_Locus posted...

It wasn't that much worse than capitalism considering we also have people starving in forced labour, they've just been outsourced to the third wold. The USSR wasn't the huge gulag everyone thinks it was, and the West is not the land of success either.

it's almost as though the US funding counter-revolutionary groups, killing/kidnapping/otherwise undermining the authority of democratically elected leaders, and installing fascist dictatorships, might have had a negative effect on the countries they targeted

Governments don't exist in a vacuum
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communism is inevitable if the population keeps increasing as it becomes the only way sustain that population. All large insect colonies operate socially under what is effectively communism--but not all insects do. Things like flies basically will just do whatever the fuck they want, but ants and bees have a communist heirarchy and it's no surprise that when you find ants and bees they're always found in a much larger population than a cluster of flies.
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Death is a preferable alternative to communism
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Ivynn posted...

Death is a preferable alternative to communism

Sounds like an account bet to me

*tags as welch*
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Yeah but only if people aren't involved at all.

gunplagirl posted...

Ivynn posted...

Death is a preferable alternative to communism

Sounds like an account bet to me

*tags as welch*

Democracy is non-negotiable!
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EndOfDiscOne posted...

All those times it didn't work, wasn't real communism.

That's factually true.

But communism wouldn't work regardless unless it was extremely localized (a town of no more than 100 or so people).
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