4 ms·

Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, bu

by natrius 11y ago

Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, but you also have to prove that they won't lead to the deaths of millions.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shootings, poor literacy rates, high drug use rates, etc etc.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
  - collyw 11y ago
    What is the US median wage? All I ever see are SF developer salaries on here, which are way higher than most parts of Europe.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      There's a choose your statistic problem, but it is ~$28,000 or $29,000 (that's based on the estimated median individual wage among employed persons (which I think wage implies employment)). https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 I guess income inequality measures result in less favorable comparisons than basic measures of wages.
- natrius 11y ago
  I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.) I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for the white majority, so we've got most of the trappings of a social democracy for white America. Why would Americans use the state to benefit all people when Americans aren't even willing to put agents of the state on trial when they kill unarmed black people?
  - iofj 11y ago
    First thing that needs to happen to social cohesion in America is stopping focusing everything on race. Yes, minimum wage affects different races differently. But so does everything else. And one thing I'm pretty sure about : the rich are pushing down minimum wage for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with race. Even if the people involved are racists, it still would have little to do with why this is happening. So race is absolutely not relevant to this discussion. The way this works is that money is being used to make a subgroup of our society desperate enough to do whatever a number of rich folks want them to do, no questions asked. Nobody really cares who's in this subgroup, as long as it's not them and they're sufficiently desperate. So can we please shut up about whether the amount of melanin in the upper epidermis of some subgroup of the poor is small, medium or large and start talking about the economics at work here ?
    - natrius 11y ago
      The reason I mentioned race is because so many people around here want to ignore it. To ignore it is to ignore the reality that most Americans do not relate with minority groups. Bad news in a minority group is like bad news from the other side of the planet. If your solution to a problem requires unity, you probably need to find another solution. America is not united.
    - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
      You seem to accept that the powerful elite will work to push down wages (broadly including providing healthcare and the modern social democratic benefits) but are ignoring the possibility that the quickest and easiest way for them to achieve this is to divide and conquer the poor by race, and its working beautifully for them.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not most. 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. And how is the US so different from a social democracy? Massive transfers of wealth to the poor, strong regulations, large government influence in industry, and of course democracy, with strong protections against a "murderous crazy dictator".
  - collyw 11y ago
    "Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better.." No it doesn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_health_care_outcome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_heal...
  - DanBC 11y ago
    The US does well on cancer, but that's because cancer is mostly a disease of old age and the US spends a lot of public money via medicaid on older people. > 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. There's a lot of illiteracy in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.[2]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jqm 11y ago
You don't have to prove that ideas won't lead to the deaths of millions at all. Right now there are a bounty of ideas floating around, many the basis of whole civilizations and governments which very possibly could lead to the death of millions if left to finish course. And nary a peep.
MisterBastahrd 11y ago
Communism never happened. Communist propaganda happened.
- clarky07 11y ago
  haven't we mostly proven that communism isn't a thing that can work given human nature?
  - collyw 11y ago
    This is a dumb argument when the alternative also involves the exact same human nature.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    What do you believe communism is and how do you believe it goes counter to human nature? It's an impossible thing to discuss without nailing down exactly what it is you are talking about as most people haver wildly diverging ideas of what it implies. But most people seem to tend to think that communism requires some kind of pure altruism to work (and to be fair, there have been socialist and communists that also believed that), but a central aspect of Marxism is the opposite: The working class must learn to value its own work and not buy into the subjective moralism of the capitalist classes (that tend to ascribe virtue to wealth: if you're rich, it is generally assumed to be an indicator you have worked hard, while poverty equally is suspect), but be willing to grab the proceeds of their labour. Marx spent a considerable amount of time ripping to shreds early "utopian socialism" (Fourier, Owens et. al) for failing to understand this amongst other failings. The very insistence of revolution as the mechanism for social upheaval in Marxism is explicitly that Marx did not believe that the ruling classes would be willing to give up privileges willingly even in the face of election defeats, and so once a sufficient working class majority comes into being, sooner or later there would be conflict. An egalitarian system according to Marx is a desirable, advanced stage of society, but it will come into being, he argues, not because it is the right thing, but because it is the only possible next step: the working classes can only overcome the power of the capitalist classes through sheer numbers, and can unite only because capitalism eventually creates a situation where carving up the pie equally becomes a net improvement for a rapidly growing majority: The rational choice for most of us to maximize our own wealth is an equal distribution the moment the majority of wealth is health by a minority of people, because most of us will otherwise be in the majority that receives less (and for this reason he was insistent that a socialist revolution would fail if attempted somewhere not advanced enough to allow redistribution to eradicate poverty - if it instead merely spread poverty out, class struggles would resume).

by natrius 11y ago

semi-extrinsic 11y ago

Have you heard of social democracy, i.e. taking those ideas and not implementing them by being a murderous crazy dictator? It's working out just fine for the countries which are consistently ranked as the best to live in in the world. As opposed to the US, which is closer to third world status when it comes to things like low median wage, little to no maternity leave, expensive and poor healthcare system, school shootings, poor literacy rates, high drug use rates, etc etc.

maxerickson 11y ago
US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
- collyw 11y ago
  What is the US median wage? All I ever see are SF developer salaries on here, which are way higher than most parts of Europe.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    There's a choose your statistic problem, but it is ~$28,000 or $29,000 (that's based on the estimated median individual wage among employed persons (which I think wage implies employment)). https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2014 I guess income inequality measures result in less favorable comparisons than basic measures of wages.
natrius 11y ago
I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.) I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for the white majority, so we've got most of the trappings of a social democracy for white America. Why would Americans use the state to benefit all people when Americans aren't even willing to put agents of the state on trial when they kill unarmed black people?
- iofj 11y ago
  First thing that needs to happen to social cohesion in America is stopping focusing everything on race. Yes, minimum wage affects different races differently. But so does everything else. And one thing I'm pretty sure about : the rich are pushing down minimum wage for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with race. Even if the people involved are racists, it still would have little to do with why this is happening. So race is absolutely not relevant to this discussion. The way this works is that money is being used to make a subgroup of our society desperate enough to do whatever a number of rich folks want them to do, no questions asked. Nobody really cares who's in this subgroup, as long as it's not them and they're sufficiently desperate. So can we please shut up about whether the amount of melanin in the upper epidermis of some subgroup of the poor is small, medium or large and start talking about the economics at work here ?
  - natrius 11y ago
    The reason I mentioned race is because so many people around here want to ignore it. To ignore it is to ignore the reality that most Americans do not relate with minority groups. Bad news in a minority group is like bad news from the other side of the planet. If your solution to a problem requires unity, you probably need to find another solution. America is not united.
  - ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    You seem to accept that the powerful elite will work to push down wages (broadly including providing healthcare and the modern social democratic benefits) but are ignoring the possibility that the quickest and easiest way for them to achieve this is to divide and conquer the poor by race, and its working beautifully for them.
merpnderp 11y ago
After government transfers, the bottom income quintile in the US makes more than in the UK and many other wealthy nations. Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better, with a less healthy more diverse population than just about every other country (the top ten hospitals with the best cancer survival rates are overwhelmingly in the US), maternity leave may not be mandated, but is available to many if not most. 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. And how is the US so different from a social democracy? Massive transfers of wealth to the poor, strong regulations, large government influence in industry, and of course democracy, with strong protections against a "murderous crazy dictator".
- collyw 11y ago
  "Looking at heart disease and cancer, the US does better.." No it doesn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_health_care_outcome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_heal...
- DanBC 11y ago
  The US does well on cancer, but that's because cancer is mostly a disease of old age and the US spends a lot of public money via medicaid on older people. > 98% of the US has completed at least 5th grade. There's a lot of illiteracy in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States > The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." Further, this study showed that 41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.[2]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jqm 11y ago

You don't have to prove that ideas won't lead to the deaths of millions at all. Right now there are a bounty of ideas floating around, many the basis of whole civilizations and governments which very possibly could lead to the death of millions if left to finish course. And nary a peep.

MisterBastahrd 11y ago

Communism never happened. Communist propaganda happened.

clarky07 11y ago
haven't we mostly proven that communism isn't a thing that can work given human nature?
- collyw 11y ago
  This is a dumb argument when the alternative also involves the exact same human nature.
- vidarh 11y ago
  What do you believe communism is and how do you believe it goes counter to human nature? It's an impossible thing to discuss without nailing down exactly what it is you are talking about as most people haver wildly diverging ideas of what it implies. But most people seem to tend to think that communism requires some kind of pure altruism to work (and to be fair, there have been socialist and communists that also believed that), but a central aspect of Marxism is the opposite: The working class must learn to value its own work and not buy into the subjective moralism of the capitalist classes (that tend to ascribe virtue to wealth: if you're rich, it is generally assumed to be an indicator you have worked hard, while poverty equally is suspect), but be willing to grab the proceeds of their labour. Marx spent a considerable amount of time ripping to shreds early "utopian socialism" (Fourier, Owens et. al) for failing to understand this amongst other failings. The very insistence of revolution as the mechanism for social upheaval in Marxism is explicitly that Marx did not believe that the ruling classes would be willing to give up privileges willingly even in the face of election defeats, and so once a sufficient working class majority comes into being, sooner or later there would be conflict. An egalitarian system according to Marx is a desirable, advanced stage of society, but it will come into being, he argues, not because it is the right thing, but because it is the only possible next step: the working classes can only overcome the power of the capitalist classes through sheer numbers, and can unite only because capitalism eventually creates a situation where carving up the pie equally becomes a net improvement for a rapidly growing majority: The rational choice for most of us to maximize our own wealth is an equal distribution the moment the majority of wealth is health by a minority of people, because most of us will otherwise be in the majority that receives less (and for this reason he was insistent that a socialist revolution would fail if attempted somewhere not advanced enough to allow redistribution to eradicate poverty - if it instead merely spread poverty out, class struggles would resume).