Poll of the Day > What's better: A democratic communism - or a capitalist dictatorship?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I am of course referring to 1970s Chile.

The US CIA helped force out the democratically elected communist Salvador Allende, only for him to be replaced by the tyrant Augusto Pinochet, who instituted sweeping capitalist reforms that made Chile rich..... by torturing and killing more than 3x the number of people that Saddam Hussein did through Operation Condor while avoiding trial by being friends with people in high places. (and the US weirdly absent)
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Capitalism combined with dictatorship is lose/lose.
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Democratic communism tends to work very well on the small scale, but gets progressively worse as the entity in question grows larger. Dictatorship in general tends to be terrible for the individual, regardless of economic system.

So the correct answer here is that both are probably equally terrible, only in different ways.

It's like asking which is better, freezing to death or burning to death. You might have a definitive answer to that question, but in the end you're still dead in both scenarios.
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Authoritarianism is bad period.

oh look, lok is up out of bed. you going back in, what, 20-30 mins or so?
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Theyre both bad, but the latter is worse
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Democratic Communism wouldn't work by nature.

Because Communism requires the government owns everything and distributes it evenly, and democracy is people voting for what typically benefits themselves the most.

That and the fact that every version of communism was actually a dictatorship in the first place because no government that owns everything is looking out for the people.

By Capitalist Dictatorship you basically mean China, who is officially on paper a communist government, who is of course, actually a dictatorship.
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Depends who is the dictator
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Wanded posted...

Depends who is the dictator

Exactly, "dictator" is not the absolute negative thing so many people think it is.
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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Wanded posted...

Depends who is the dictator

Exactly, "dictator" is not the absolute negative thing so many people think it is.

The general issue is a very large majority of people can't handle that kind of power and inadvertently become selfish assholes even if they weren't originally.
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Aculo posted...

oh look, lok is up out of bed. you going back in, what, 20-30 mins or so?

lol, I did go right to bed after making the topic... I just got back up
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Monarchs were technically dictators in a somewhat capitalistic kingdoms. And there were good ones out there.
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A democratic dictatorship.

But really I made the topic 'cuz I just watched the Donkey Biography
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A democratic comunism made up by responsible adults who adhere to specific intelligent principles could work quite well, for everyone.

There hasn't really been one mind you, but it could work.
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The capitalist dictatorship. The democratic-communist society will seem better for about 5-10 years until the inevitable collapse of the democratic side of the equation, and then you're left with something far more horrific than the capitalist dictatorship has been all along.
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Democratic socialism doesn't exist. Any country referred to as "democratic socialist" is either lying (if referring to themselves) or is being propagandized (if being referred to by another), and thus doomed to fail. The reason for this is that eventually, the model breaks down in one of two ways: Either the people vote for capitalism because they realize they'd rather have a chance at prosperity than suffer by default, thus ending the socialist element of democratic socialism, or the democratic element is lost, resulting in some form of authoritarian control, either through military influence (Nazi Germany), financial influence (the European Union), or social influence (think of the Chinese social credit system).

People refer to capitalism hyperbolically, but a core tenant of capitalism is a libertarian application of propriety. If there is any reason why you are more entitled to your own bed than I, then you are exercising a tenant of capitalism. You earned that bed and therefore you sleep in it. If I want a bed to sleep in, I have to earn my own. The reason capitalism is treated in such a binary manner is rooted in conflict theory--the idea that there may not currently be enough resources for everyone to provide his own bed, and therefore materials need to be appropriated by an exogenous force. Inevitably, that force will start hoarding the best materials for itself, leaving only scraps for the rest of us.

There will always be inequality. How do you define equality when building beds? You might say that everyone gets enough materials to build a 72-inch bed, but considering I'm 74 inches tall, don't I require 2 more inches' worth of material? If you give me 2 more inches' worth of material, then I have more, creating inequality. However, if you don't, then I am left without adequate bedding for myself and therefore, I am disadvantaged, creating inequality. Even in a "socialized healthcare" system as being proposed by many potential world leaders nowadays, there is severe inequality. These systems require tax input. Some would say everyone should pay $X a year in taxes to support it. Others would say we should all pay Y% of our income to support it. Inevitably, someone's going to get upset that everyone has to pay X or Y, but one guy is using more services than another, due to some form of illness. Most people who support either X or Y, however, just aren't that good at math, but that's another issue entirely.

So I'd rather live in a capitalist dictatorship than a socialist democracy because only one can possibly exist. The very fact that the dictatorship is capitalistic means that regardless of station, there is some form of mobility--some way of changing one's station, because of the correlation between input and output. It turns out a lot of people in such conditions aren't bothered by the meaninglessness of their votes (or lack thereof).
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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Exactly, "dictator" is not the absolute negative thing so many people think it is.

In concept, no. But in order for it to be anything other than negative, you basically need to have someone akin to the sort of enlightened "Philosopher King" Plato proposed. And those sorts of people are so few and far between in human nature that you're going to get a thousand examples of leaders abusing their power for every single example of a leader who uses that autocratic power for the greater good without doing terrible things (in a sort of "needs of the many outweigh etc etc" sort of situation).

And the worst part of dictatorship/autocracy in general tends to be, even if you DO somehow manage to acquire a wise and munificent ruler, they're eventually going to die, and whoever replaces them is essentially going to inherit the same framework of control, without necessarily being a noble a leader. Which means even the most positive dictatorships will almost always segue into negative ones over a long enough time span.

And that's assuming the positive dictator isn't so ineffectual due to their positive nature that they aren't overthrown or conquered by a more militant opponent, undoing their work.

Basically, humans suck, so most governments we come up with also suck.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's like asking which is better, freezing to death or burning to death. You might have a definitive answer to that question, but in the end you're still dead in both scenarios.

It's like asking which is better, dying of old age or being murdered. You might have a definitive answer to that question, but in the end you're still dead in both scenarios.

Depends on the dictator. Communism, on the other than, almost universally sucks and it often stays about "democratic" as a dictatorship. Free-market democratic republics are the only way to go.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's like asking which is better, freezing to death or burning to death.

I guess it's a matter of degrees, since the more extreme it is, the faster it ends. Granted, freezing tends to take longer so--

ParanoidObsessive posted...

You might have a definitive answer to that question, but in the end you're still dead in both scenarios.

D'oh!
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sveksii posted...

It's like asking which is better, dying of old age or being murdered. You might have a definitive answer to that question, but in the end you're still dead in both scenarios.

That's actually a flawed comparison, because in that case you're usually talking a difference of decades, which DOES make the two scenarios functionally different. Whereas I am suggesting two equally terrible and painful outcomes that operate on generally the same time scale.

Unless you change your parameters to be something like "Do you want to die from being stabbed to death or dying of painful cancer?" Because then you've equalized the two in similar fashion.

If anything, you're really just proving the point I was making in the first place - if someone asks "Do you want me to kill you one way, or this other way?", the best answer is actually "I would prefer that you don't kill me at all."
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

That's actually a flawed comparison, because in that case you're usually talking a difference of decades, which DOES make the two scenarios functionally different. Whereas I am suggesting two equally terrible and painful outcomes that operate on generally the same time scale.

Unless you change your parameters to be something like "Do you want to die from being stabbed to death or dying of painful cancer?" Because then you've equalized the two in similar fashion.

If anything, you're really just proving the point I was making in the first place - if someone asks "Do you want me to kill you one way, or this other way?", the best answer is actually "I would prefer that you don't kill me at all."

From the perspective of the universe's existence a time frame of decades is irrelevant, and therefore my scenario operates on the same general time scale. Furthermore, these outcomes could be perceived as equally painful and terrible.

On the other end of the spectrum, dying from a painful cancer isn't instantaneous. While being stabbed to death would imply that you'd be dead within hours if not minutes, you could live for multiple years with a painful cancer. Whether that extra amount of time is meaningful in a good or a bad way, if at all, would entirely be dependent on the person.

If someone were to ask you if you wanted to be killed one way or another way, stating that you would prefer not to be killed at all being the best scenario isn't true if for some reason you actually don't want to live.

What you view as scenarios that are equivalent is open to interpretation. You're interjecting your personal opinion and stating it as fact.

Its nuanced. It depends on the culture, economy, etc. Id probably take a capitalist dictatorship in a good place like Switzerland, where you can trust the government, while democratic communism in a busted country is more appealing.

capitalism is best with world trade
communism is best within a independent state
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Communism works worse the more people are governed by it, dictatorships work worse the more people the dictator gets to control. Pick your poison, they're both terrible for country-wide governance.
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