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> communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open Wait, what? Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy.

> communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open Wait, what? Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. It has nothing to do with open or closed in principle, and in every implementation it has been aggressively closed in terms of information flows and decision making.

jacquesm 17y ago
> Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Communism in principle has absolutely nothing to do with the flow of information and/or decision making, and its implementations have only very little to do with its basic ideas. A true communistic government has never even been tried, we've only seen a 'new boss same as the old boss' approach to communism with one batch of fat cats replacing another.
- mbreese 17y ago
  I believe that Communism is largely an economic system with politics being aside effect of the economic model. For example, the opposite of Communism isn't democracy, it's capitalism. And actually, in the purest sense, Communism is completely about decision making. According to that bastion of scholarly thought Wikipedia: "Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. But that's one of those theory and practice things... great in theory, horrible in practice.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  >Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Like most ideologies, the term "communism" is gooshy enough to mean whatever you want it to mean - but at heart, communism is concerned with the matter of who owns and controls the means of production. It's a form of government insofar as the decision on who gets to control the means of production is ultimately a political decision. Communists believe the people should own and control the means of production - but every real-world implementation has used government as a proxy for people. I suppose it's possible to run a communist society via direct democracy on a very small, local scale; but good luck trying to scale that up to the national or even regional level. At some level you need to adopt some kind of more or less representative government. In the case of communism, the track record is definitely skewed toward the "less" end of the representation spectrum. In other words, your claim: >A true communistic government has never even been tried... is a straightforward No True Scotsman fallacy. It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values. If you can't implement an ideology without discarding the very principles that define the ideology, it's a broken ideology.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    "It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values." To define American-style conservative and liberal philosophy as what the Republican and Democratic parties and their politicians do is ridiculously simplistic. The parties are just coalitions of interests and voter demographics, not philosophies - you might as well talk about what direction a plate of spaghetti points at. And as for conservatives' "political system" - whose? Do you mean evangelicals and other theocrats, PNAC neocons, populist teabaggers, or Lew Rockwell/Ron Paul fans? We're not talking remotely the degree of unity imposed by the Politburo and Comintern upon the global communist movement when it comes to either US party. In a bipolar system, both parties must be big tents or be crushed by the bigger tent. Elected officials are not (and Bush was not) advancing a single "conservative" or "liberal" ideology; they're trying to please various power blocs who agree or disagree with them on different issues. Bush's failures highlight the failure of particular policies and ideas, but they don't say much about the ideas of self-described "real conservatives" who thought Bush was a ridiculously free-spending, anti-federal, protectionist, power-consolidating, Big Government guy long before Iraq. (No more than Obama's decisions indict the ideas of supporters who disagree with him on those decisions, certainly.)

jacquesm 17y ago

> Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Communism in principle has absolutely nothing to do with the flow of information and/or decision making, and its implementations have only very little to do with its basic ideas. A true communistic government has never even been tried, we've only seen a 'new boss same as the old boss' approach to communism with one batch of fat cats replacing another.

mbreese 17y ago
I believe that Communism is largely an economic system with politics being aside effect of the economic model. For example, the opposite of Communism isn't democracy, it's capitalism. And actually, in the purest sense, Communism is completely about decision making. According to that bastion of scholarly thought Wikipedia: "Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. But that's one of those theory and practice things... great in theory, horrible in practice.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
>Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Like most ideologies, the term "communism" is gooshy enough to mean whatever you want it to mean - but at heart, communism is concerned with the matter of who owns and controls the means of production. It's a form of government insofar as the decision on who gets to control the means of production is ultimately a political decision. Communists believe the people should own and control the means of production - but every real-world implementation has used government as a proxy for people. I suppose it's possible to run a communist society via direct democracy on a very small, local scale; but good luck trying to scale that up to the national or even regional level. At some level you need to adopt some kind of more or less representative government. In the case of communism, the track record is definitely skewed toward the "less" end of the representation spectrum. In other words, your claim: >A true communistic government has never even been tried... is a straightforward No True Scotsman fallacy. It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values. If you can't implement an ideology without discarding the very principles that define the ideology, it's a broken ideology.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  "It's no different from "real" conservatives distancing themselves from the Bush administration because the implementation of their political system ended up violating most of its ostensible core values." To define American-style conservative and liberal philosophy as what the Republican and Democratic parties and their politicians do is ridiculously simplistic. The parties are just coalitions of interests and voter demographics, not philosophies - you might as well talk about what direction a plate of spaghetti points at. And as for conservatives' "political system" - whose? Do you mean evangelicals and other theocrats, PNAC neocons, populist teabaggers, or Lew Rockwell/Ron Paul fans? We're not talking remotely the degree of unity imposed by the Politburo and Comintern upon the global communist movement when it comes to either US party. In a bipolar system, both parties must be big tents or be crushed by the bigger tent. Elected officials are not (and Bush was not) advancing a single "conservative" or "liberal" ideology; they're trying to please various power blocs who agree or disagree with them on different issues. Bush's failures highlight the failure of particular policies and ideas, but they don't say much about the ideas of self-described "real conservatives" who thought Bush was a ridiculously free-spending, anti-federal, protectionist, power-consolidating, Big Government guy long before Iraq. (No more than Obama's decisions indict the ideas of supporters who disagree with him on those decisions, certainly.)