this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
2095 points (97.4% liked)
Memes
45628 readers
1153 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think fundamentally most people would agree with that. The problem with communism though is that it’s not just a staple of the USSR. There is something on the order of 48 countries that have experienced state-sponsored communism in relatively recent times and it has never once succeeded in achieving these goals but tends to exacerbate poverty, class division, and government oppression of human rights, if not resulting in completely failed states.
Some will read this and assume I am advocating for capitalism. I am not. Asserting problems with communism does not imply capitalism is perfect or even good. But if we do choose to abandon capitalism, the wrong decision is to move to a system with a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals over dozens of historical attempts. As the meme suggests, many Eastern Europeans are old enough to have personal experience with those failures.
Where communism can work well is on a smaller, voluntary scale. When people choose to get together and establish their own rules for pooling resources, small communities can sometimes live quite satisfactorily this way. But no, if we are willing to call capitalism a failure based on its history we have to be honest enough to say the same thing about state-sponsored communism.
I'm not quite sure how to reply to that, because you make some good points. I flatly disagree that communism can't work. It's like saying Capitalism couldn't work because for a whole century the French revolution was failing before 1789. Which is not even the first humanity's attempt for a capitalist system, but the first well known one. We still have ways to go and failed attempts to try to get it right.
However, the most important thing in my eyes is to learn from the past. Being in a country that was surrounded by communism, tried, and was refused help from the then socialist states, I know very many people that still look back to those times with fondness. From my country and neighboring ones that were parts of the socialist block. But all those implementations had their problems and these same people would be the first to admit that. Our job is to go through all that history and judge it with clear heads, see where it went wrong and how or why, so in the next attempts we'll fail in a different way, until we get it right. Similar to how every socioeconomically system did so far.
I don't care about Anarchy or Socialism or Trotskyism or whatever, as long as it gets us to the end goal of a classless system without economic or power elites that see us as data nodes to profit off. Each of those approaches has its pros and cons and there are many others as well.
But saying it failed so we best move on, because the first handful of attempts went wrong is not going to bring any change whatsoever.
Yeah I get you. But it’s important to realize that we’re talking about much more than a handful of attempts. I see the value in learning from history and iterating on processes to try and get better over time. But if we’re honestly striving for the best system for humanity, what we shouldn’t do is say, “I really want it to be communism so let’s just assume that must be the right answer and keep trying it over and over again until it works.” At some point you do have to be willing to try something new.
It’s my opinion that communism has had more than a fair shot and has been eliminated from the running. But I am also not so crazy as to immediately disregard some new communist paradigm that theoretically works in some new way that is designed to fix the problems that continually appeared in communist systems historically. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen it presented yet. And it’s also not what these “western teenagers” (as the meme calls them) are advocating for. They use language and symbols characteristic of very specific brands of communism that were massive historical failures in terms of preserving human rights and eliminating poverty and class divisions.
I disagree about the part of enough attempts and fair share, but honestly, I don't care much. Could very well be something completely different and as long as it kept the basis of no inequality, no ruling elite, free education and medical care and so on, I'd be in. I just haven't found anything that does that even half convincingly.
My belief is that similar to how back in the 18th century, they couldn't see past the following system, namely capitalism, we can't see and plan for past a classless system now, which for the moment is communism, regardless of the path there. That doesn't mean that societal evolution will stop there.
At least we are disagreeing respectfully :)
😂😂😂
yes vietnam no longer exhist indeed north vietnam never once succeeded
consider reading a book and touching grass
those who read know
the largest economy in the world is a socialist state dedicated to working towards communism ⚒️🌍
It's also an oppressive police state where huge portions of the population live in poverty and endure awful working conditions. Oh and they're actively engaged in genocide against a minority ethnic group. But sure if we just ignore all the downsides it's great.
Nor is it, in fact, the largest economy in the world by any measure.
In what world is a country with billionaires and an autocratic ruling class in which the workers decidedly do not control the means of production, "socialist"?
you aint a communist i couldnt gove a rats booty what yoj believe
go watch some mpre fox news
I think you must have inferred something from my comment that I didn’t actually say. I didn’t say every communist country ceases to exist. I also didn’t say that communism can’t generate a large economy.
What I said was that it has a 100% failure rate of achieving its goals, where those goals are economic equality, and elimination of poverty and class divisions. Most open pro-communists today have an additional goal of increasing access to basic human rights which communism has historically failed at as well. I did mention that some communist states have failed outright.
In the case of China, which you alluded to, note that China deliberately weakened their communism in the 90s as part of a series of economic reforms that introduced capitalist principles designed to stimulate growth. Specifically, agriculture was de-collectivized, Chinese business were opened to foreign investment, permission was granted for entrepreneurs to start businesses, state-owned industries were privatized, and many price controls were removed. By 2005, the private sector was responsible for 70% of China’s GDP. There is no reason to believe that China’s economy would be anywhere near as large as it is today absent these reforms.
But is that what you personally want out of your system? A large economy? Is that what matters most?
mate you really twisted yourself to trying to explain two unequitable things.
china literally #1
Another interesting point is whether we attribute the successes and failures of a state on it's particular social, economic and political situation or it's ideology as the root cause of anything. Most people, when they agree with an ideology, will attribute the good things to the ideology and the bad things to specific circumstances, and the opposite with ideologies they do not agree with. The more nationalist Americans will tell you that Cuba is poor because it is communist, and that Bush invaded Iraq either because he was corrupt or because he was promoting freedom. However there's also the argument that Cuba is poor because it is sanctioned to hell by the US, and that Bush invaded Iraq because of American capitalist imperialism. Which one of these you agree with pretty much entirely depends on your ideological opinions rather than what actually happened, and as far as making a valid argument either one is at least a coherent point.
The reality is that you have elements of both the fundamental ideology and the specific political circumstances in every social outcome you see. Which is an idea quite fatal to most of the rhetoric you see nowadays and part of why it's impossible to have any political discussion with people you have fundamental disagreements with.
Western politics already has a vehicle in which to accomplish your 3 bullet points called regulation. The problem is children in charge and the voters apathy to hold their feet to the fire.
People should get mad, not at each other but at their "masters" that aren't supposed to exist. The powers that be want us to argue amongst ourselves
It’s not children in charge, it’s old ass white guys who depend of screwing everyone over to maintain their standard of living.
Age and skin color especially don't matter when you a corrupt politician taking corporate bribes.
I mean it does matter, because of who is doing the bribing
Either way. Still arguing with ourselves. If we can agree there's less to talk about and only action remains
Yup, society isn't real and everything sucks because of single individual actions that have devastating effects (/s)
Maximum Wealth should be set to 10 million. At that point you've won at wealth and every penny after that should go to someone else.
That's a bit of an arbitrary figure. Also wealth isn't really money as much as it is things.
Take a house, for example. You only really need one. The monetary value of the house depends on a few factors, but it's primary value is that it gives you shelter. It probably fluctuates in monetary value but the actual value doesn't change. If you cap wealth based on monetary value, how do you deal with homes in different places that are valued differently? I think it's going to be more complicated than it seels at first glance.
Assuming you mean dollars, since everyone on the internet is American. 10mil seems like a lot all together. But if you had to feed your entire family for the rest of your life on 10mil you might struggle, depending on where you live.
Maybe you mean 10mil income per year and not overall wealth. That's different, but I can understand this. A progressive tax system could impose a cap of sorts but tax avoidance (the legal kind) would render it useless.
I don't have any answers, just felt like continuing the thought train.
1st, don't read to deep into this, It's not even a pipe dream is a barely thought that crossed my mind but ain't smart enough to even process in any meaningful way, but thought it would be ok to vomit here.
I mean total wealth including houses, cars, personal belongings, clothes, groceries, bank accounts, shares at some company, pocket change, everything. Yes, I was thinking dollars. It could be per person. And yes, it's a VERY arbitrary number, but it could be adjusted.
It would be like a rolling cap, if you're at the limit, you could buy food, and after you eat it, that expended budget would be available for you to earn more money again.
Root of the issue is that there is no way to achieve this. People with money hire an army, now what?
What do you mean "now what?" lol. Assuming an American-centric or Euro-centric point of view, they would use their extremely expensive military armaments that can't be purchased in large quantities by private organizations, and crush the rebellion. The government is the government because they have a monopoly on violence.
I mean, really. Their money is in banks subject to the oversight of the countries they're trying to raise an army against. People may be relatively cheap, but they still need to be paid quite a bit to attempt to fight the military head on. Freeze their accounts and they're screwed. Musk's entire fortune isn't even a single years worth of funding for the US military, and even if all the billionaires pooled their money it would take years to accumulate the excess hardware that is allowed to be sold and then train their PMCs on hardware. Years that they wouldn't have if a bill was passed to cap wealth inequality.
We may yet reach the corporate dystopia where businesses can directly challenge governments, but we're not quite there yet. At least not in the first world. Russia may have shot itself in its confusion, but that's because the rich already are the government there.
Who is in government with rank enough to authorise this violence, but doesn't have the above-$10M to lose?
To authorize repelling a slowly gathering military coup? That's an incredibly low bar to commit treason, since honestly, even at the highest levels military bureaucrats aren't going to be much wealthier than 10 mil. Unlike Congress, there's a much closer eye kept on the finances of military leaders because they're paranoid about foreign nations bribing them. It's physical national security, which is one of the few areas that money doesn't hold absolute power.
Even if they stood to lose a few million, there are plenty of genuine patriots, as well as people smart enough to realize that overthrowing the government by force does not mean the law instigating it gets repealed, but that the entire legal structure of the United States is no longer functioning. That's fifty different militias reporting to states, Naval, Army, and Marine branches with hundreds of billions of dollars in ordinance that's explicitly empowered to not follow unethical or illegal orders. It'd be a disaster for the coup throwers unless they managed a movie villain level simultaneous takeover of the Pentagon.
I'm not saying a coup is impossible, but the idea of rich people successfully overthrowing the American government by "hiring an army" is so cursed to failure that I almost don't know where to even start. Could they cause unprecedented chaos and potentially kill a large portion of the government? Possibly. Could they succeed? Absolutely not.
Also, this whole chain completely ignores the fact that Congress would never set the cap at 10 million. I doubt they'd set it at a hundred million. My bet would be one billion, where it wouldn't actually affect any of them. Were they to actually pass a 10 million dollar cap, the world would be such a different place that we wouldn't need to worry about a handful of grumpy generals inciting treason.
No one said Marxism was all done and finished out of the box.. feel free to workshop it as needed since it's barely been attempted to put into practice at all.
synthetic left
the latest scientific materialist work was recently released by my favorite social worker
Xi Jinping
its definitely being put into practice today
A really good perk in Eastern Europe is that the brief period of communism flattened inequality and nationalised all infrastructure, and both have been kept under democracy and capitalism. Which means that those countries now kinda have the best of both worlds. Although with the snowballing of wealth that is inevitable under capitalism (unless regulated), it is a question of if, and not when, that starts to change.
There is no such thing as no ruling class, and generally, anyone who sells you that is aiming to become the ruling class themselves. In the best case scenario, they want to be a benevolent dictator, and we might have seen a few people get close to that over the course of history but no benevolent dictatorship lasts longer than two generations and many fail even sooner than that. In the worst case, they are just riding on this political train and aim to be a not so benevolent dictator themselves.
Any system that does not account for human nature and build an incentive structure that guarantees the maximum possible equality/equity while assuming everyone involved is selfish is a system that's ill suited for humanity. And if you force an ill-suited system, someone will inevitably swoop in and use it for their personal gains. Like as bad as our current system is with wealth inequality, the soviet system had an even slimmer and richer elite, they just hid it well.
I agree with all of your goals, but we need to do this the smart way, and that involves setting the priority exactly as your list goes and actually accounting for how people behave. The result might not be perfect, but we can do better than we do currently, I think that should be the goal rather than going for perfection and falling for snake oil on the way.
You need to ask for a little more or you'll get all that but at the price of a corrupt and abusive regime.
Do you know of a community to discuss this? I feel like people stop criticizing economic systems once they benefit from it, and so people just default to communism or capitalism without actually considering the game theory behind it all.
join the party mate
I seriously believe we must build an A.I. to replace human leadership since we proved time and time again that we are corruptible, and that when that happens you start getting your poor and elite classes and rampaging exploitation of resources and its refusal to imorove to better technologies and processes (ie oil companies). We need something avobe humans to administer resources and solve politics since we just made both into ridiculous games that are alreaddy fixed so that everybody , exept those that a where winning already, loosses. I believe that the survival of the human race hinges on this.
How would such an AI be created and how would it work?
that's a question for the scientists to answer, we just have to watch their incentive structures and verify that they're doing their peer review
I think that such A.I. should be build with the principles of sustainability of resources, the preseevation of human and animal life inluding but not limited to mental health, phisical health, fullfilment, and perception of freedoom. When it comes to penalties while i would like to get rid of any type of penal system i understeand its nececity due to people being people, so i would like for that system to focus on rehabilyitation rather than punishment as long as its possible and if not then just on keeping bad actors from causing any more harm into society. It should distribute resources to the human populance according to their necesities when it comes to basic needs being housing, energy, plumbing, food, medical suplies and services, clothing, transport, entertainment, social fulfilment, etc. when it comes to other things like nicer furniture, software, specialiced tools or anything on the frivolous nature or customisation then it shouldnt be a problem asking the a.i. as long as requests are reasonable since resources should be exploited sustainably enough so that this tyoes of needs could be fullfiled, like what i mean is "i whant a wooden table like this design i found" would be fullfilable request and not " i want a chair that looks like this made out of plutonium" since plutonium is toxic and should be used with care and only for cientific and energy producing porpuses. It should have as a goal to automate as much labor as posible, from agriculture, metallurgy, transport,etc. all the way to accounting, administration, executive decisions, software design, and even science, in the way as to research technologies and other fields for the benefith of humanity be it medical, technological or even space travel, all of this would leave humans to pursue more recreative activities like self fullfilment, socialising, pursuing artistic endeavours like music, painting, literature, cooking, plastical arts, teather (traditional or movies) and cientific research and studying, or just living it with their loved ones, friends or alone in the woods, if anyone whants to labor because they hate themselves (i mean in an ironic way) then they very much can. Also while it would sound bad, it should have control over all weapon and defence systems in the world and have the ability to create more if the need arises and be able to operate them at discretion in case of an external attack on humanity. It should also be able to better itself and self preserve and be abble to feel love for humanity but in a good way so that it doesnt turn against us. Look what im proposing is that we create god pretty much since its the only way we are gonna survive global warming and end war between ourselves for ever. But since your comment is givving me the vibes of being in a condecending manner in the: "AHA GOTH YA DAM LIB" sence, i dont think you are gonna read any of this and if you do you are probably gonna argue that i didnt tell you exactly step by step how to build an A.I. overlod so to that i tell ya of course i wouldnt because i dont know how since im just some dumb dumb on the internet, and while i would like to work building A.I. thats kinda far away from me at this point in my life. And if the down to upvote ratio on my original comment and your response is telling of anything, then its probably gonna validate any point you are gonna trow against mine since im the unpopular one and every one is gonna be able to rule me out as some jerk with a wrong opinion so have fun with that i guess.
Sorry for bad english.
THINK AGAIN YA DAM LIB XD
In all seriousness though, I can understand your desire for utopia and for technology to solve all our problems (I desire those things too!), but I think people generally view those two desires as naive. The world's problems usually don't have simple solutions, AI is still somewhat of a new area of research with its own potential dangers, and putting all your stock into AI solving our problems ignores the very real solutions that could be implemented sooner rather than later.
But don't beat yourself up too much over meaningless internet points, learn about what you're interested in more! If AI is your cup of tea and you want to learn more about the potential issues with creating super powerful AI, I can strongly recommend the channel "Robert Moses AI Safety". Particularly his videos about The Orthogonality Thesis and Mesa-Optimizers.