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Isn't Communism very similar to your perfect world? All the people were provided for and they worked for everyone and everyone was equal. However, that didn't w

Isn't Communism very similar to your perfect world? All the people were provided for and they worked for everyone and everyone was equal. However, that didn't work out too well. In any system, some folk will always squatter and some will always attempt to gain power/advantage. Your world sounds too much like Atlas Shrugged.

ubernostrum 11y ago
The thing to realize here is that the number of humans who need to do work building/operating/maintaining the machinery that keeps everyone taken care of decreases over time. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a point in the future where most of the time, zero direct human work is required in order to provide for all humans. The issue is getting over the mental hurdle of enabling such a society. The technology is actually pretty straightforward, but the politics of it is full of people who just can't stand the idea of that filthy leeching parasite, he doesn't work as hard as I do, why does he get anything at all! He doesn't deserve it! Which in turn is an artifact of an economic system that's already firmly in the past of many developed nations (i.e., one in which all people needed to work constantly in order to produce enough to keep themselves alive). Of course this is a fundamentally irrational position to hold when one already lives in a society that's content to let people who never work a day in their lives have all their needs taken care of (see: inheritance). It also disregards the fact that many people who have everything literally handed to them from birth still feel a drive to try to do something meaningful with their lives. There are trust-fund parasites who don't do anything, of course, but it certainly isn't 100% of them. Plus, it's pretty well empirically established that humans do get bored and seek things to do even when they have no life-sustaining work left to perform (see: retirement).
- taneq 11y ago
  I think we're already past that point, if we define "provide for all humans" as "provide shelter, food, and clean water." However, "provide for humans" is a moving target which is actually interpreted as "provide a living standards not significantly worse than average." These days that includes providing running hot/cold water, range of healthy food, air conditioning, electricity, TV, internet, some form of motorized transport, health care, clothing, etc. etc."
- Fjolsvith 11y ago
  Frankly, I don't see that this is perfectly reasonable to expect. TANSTAAFL. Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property. Without personal property rights, people will stop producing for others and society will fail. Why would I be willing to trade my load of firewood to you for your butchered hog? I'd just take your hog and not bother with providing you a share of firewood. And, in that system if you came around to get a share of my firewood, you'd disappear. I believe that if a person doesn't have their needs met, they just don't deserve to have them met. (I'm not talking about a moralistic judgement here. Its more like the universe has just arranged itself in response to the unlucky person's actions.) For example, 3 years ago, I got a hammer and a saw and started building a shed. I sold it and bought the materials to build another. I sold that one too. Today, I own a company that manufactures sheds and employs a few people. I'm now much better off than I was because I decided to take advantage of people willing to buy my product. I now have employees who build my buildings and I profit from them, too. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, because several of my employees were unemployed and needing work when I hired them. What's fair about Capitalism is that anyone has the opportunity to make something work. If a person doesn't want to take advantage of this and better their lot, then I believe they have no right to bitch about us making money and having nice things. Let them suffer paycheck to paycheck.
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. The question is: what happens when most or all of the food and energy is being produced not by human labor, but by fully-automated processes? Why would, say, a farming robot care whether someone is "freeloading" off its labor? What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property. The idea of a post-scarcity society is not incompatible with the idea of personal property. It is incompatible with continuing to believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, water, medicine, and possibly other things should be apportioned on a "did you earn it" basis, because that notion dates to a time when it truly was necessary for each person to put in continual effort to ensure enough of those things were produced. These things are no longer super-scarce and no longer require anywhere near the effort to produce that they used to; society should adjust in response to that change. There is no logical reason, if the capability exists to automatically produce sufficient basic necessities for every human being, why every human being should still have to do a make-work job in order to prove they "deserve" those things. And you could still have all the capitalism you like for anything that isn't a basic necessity; the basic life doesn't have to be one of luxury, just one free from worry about things like food and shelter; the currency of such a society would need to be tied to something other than control of basic-necessity resources, but finding alternative bases for currency is something people already do for fun.
dublinben 11y ago
>However, that didn't work out too well. When was communism actually implemented, that it didn't "work out too well" in your opinion?
- chc 11y ago
  Do you mean "actually" or "perfectly"?
- pink_dinner 11y ago
  sigh do we really need to have this discussion and dou you actually think communism would ever work? The problem is that pesky human nature gets in the way.
  - mentando 11y ago
    Yeah, in theory it is awesome, but it just does not work in real life...
    - mruniverse 11y ago
      I think even in theory it's not awesome. What is awesome is a system where everyone benefits when everyone is self-interested.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's not awesome, it's poison. Cooperation > competition, and artificially forcing everything to be expressed in terms of the latter is cancerous to society. Ignoring conscience and empathy is wasting the in-born qualities that allow us to be more efficient in groups.
  - fucking_tragedy 11y ago
    The same problems that plague capitalism plague communist implementations. In power structures, things are great if you're part of the class that receives political favors and not so great if you're not. In capitalist societies, capital owning classes have the time and resources to be the political class. In previous communist societies, party and administrative members were the political class.
Matumio 11y ago
Communism is much more focused about workers and equality. Just providing the bare basic needs for everyone, without expecting them to work or live in a certain way, is a very different concept. What if all basic goods can be produced with hardly any human labour? A rich enough society can be so far beyond those basic needs that forcing anyone to work for survival can only be explained as a form of punishment.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>Isn't Communism very similar to your perfect world? All the people were provided for and they worked for everyone and everyone was equal. However, that didn't work out too well. A system where everybody was equal was never tried. A system where the necessities were guaranteed was tried - in the Soviet Union - and it was, by and large, very successful. It was successful enough, in fact, that Western elites responded to it in the 50s by implementing similar guarantees - NHS, social security, medicare, etc. (McCarthy's witchhunts and the Vietnam war weren't the only responses to communism). What made the Soviet Union finally unable to keep up economically was the prohibitive cost of the arms race and declining oil export revenues, not the lack of capitalist profit motives.
- arethuza 11y ago
  I really don't think the UK NHS was created in response to anything the Soviet Union did - the Labour movement in the UK had a long history long before the Soviets were around. The NHS actually shows the power of democracy over an elite - after all the 1945 election removed Churchill and voted in the socialist Attlee government. Attlee was so effective as a leader that even Thatcher spoke highly of him: 'Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the Nineties, he was all substance and no show.' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1194059/A-giant-man-Clem-Attlee-stood-decency-duty--stark-contrast-todays-MPs.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1194059/A-giant-ma...
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    On the idea that it was all about Atlee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory Do you think the fact that the UK NHS funding model closely followed the existing Soviet NHS model was a coincidence? The Tories fought long and hard in the 40s to make the proposed new 'cover everybody' system insurance based (something like Obamacare I guess) and ultimately didn't prevail. They used all sorts of scare tactics that would seem very familiar today. A large part of that failure was Labour being able to point to the Soviet Union (not yet enemies of the highest order) and go "look, we can achieve the same success in curing infectious disease that they did".
fucking_tragedy 11y ago
No. Welfare programs are not communism or socialism. The single defining characteristic in both ideologies is the degree of which labor owns its means of production (the resources, facilities and tools needed to do a job). Welfare programs do not even begin to touch on who owns the means of production. Communism implies a stateless society after a period of power by labor that is devoid of private ownership of the means of production. Supposedly, this transitionary period should do away with class. According to theory, once class is no longer a factor, the state is no longer needed. Welfare programs, again, do not touch on this at all. You've read too much Ayn Rand.

ubernostrum 11y ago

The thing to realize here is that the number of humans who need to do work building/operating/maintaining the machinery that keeps everyone taken care of decreases over time. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a point in the future where most of the time, zero direct human work is required in order to provide for all humans. The issue is getting over the mental hurdle of enabling such a society. The technology is actually pretty straightforward, but the politics of it is full of people who just can't stand the idea of that filthy leeching parasite, he doesn't work as hard as I do, why does he get anything at all! He doesn't deserve it! Which in turn is an artifact of an economic system that's already firmly in the past of many developed nations (i.e., one in which all people needed to work constantly in order to produce enough to keep themselves alive). Of course this is a fundamentally irrational position to hold when one already lives in a society that's content to let people who never work a day in their lives have all their needs taken care of (see: inheritance). It also disregards the fact that many people who have everything literally handed to them from birth still feel a drive to try to do something meaningful with their lives. There are trust-fund parasites who don't do anything, of course, but it certainly isn't 100% of them. Plus, it's pretty well empirically established that humans do get bored and seek things to do even when they have no life-sustaining work left to perform (see: retirement).

taneq 11y ago
I think we're already past that point, if we define "provide for all humans" as "provide shelter, food, and clean water." However, "provide for humans" is a moving target which is actually interpreted as "provide a living standards not significantly worse than average." These days that includes providing running hot/cold water, range of healthy food, air conditioning, electricity, TV, internet, some form of motorized transport, health care, clothing, etc. etc."
Fjolsvith 11y ago
Frankly, I don't see that this is perfectly reasonable to expect. TANSTAAFL. Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property. Without personal property rights, people will stop producing for others and society will fail. Why would I be willing to trade my load of firewood to you for your butchered hog? I'd just take your hog and not bother with providing you a share of firewood. And, in that system if you came around to get a share of my firewood, you'd disappear. I believe that if a person doesn't have their needs met, they just don't deserve to have them met. (I'm not talking about a moralistic judgement here. Its more like the universe has just arranged itself in response to the unlucky person's actions.) For example, 3 years ago, I got a hammer and a saw and started building a shed. I sold it and bought the materials to build another. I sold that one too. Today, I own a company that manufactures sheds and employs a few people. I'm now much better off than I was because I decided to take advantage of people willing to buy my product. I now have employees who build my buildings and I profit from them, too. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, because several of my employees were unemployed and needing work when I hired them. What's fair about Capitalism is that anyone has the opportunity to make something work. If a person doesn't want to take advantage of this and better their lot, then I believe they have no right to bitch about us making money and having nice things. Let them suffer paycheck to paycheck.
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  Food still has to be produced. Energy still has to be produced. All that stuff has to be paid for somehow or the producers stop producing for the freeloaders. The question is: what happens when most or all of the food and energy is being produced not by human labor, but by fully-automated processes? Why would, say, a farming robot care whether someone is "freeloading" off its labor? What you think of as a mental hurdle I see as a way of discerning what is mine from what is yours. Show me a developed nation where a person actually doesn't have any personal property. The idea of a post-scarcity society is not incompatible with the idea of personal property. It is incompatible with continuing to believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, water, medicine, and possibly other things should be apportioned on a "did you earn it" basis, because that notion dates to a time when it truly was necessary for each person to put in continual effort to ensure enough of those things were produced. These things are no longer super-scarce and no longer require anywhere near the effort to produce that they used to; society should adjust in response to that change. There is no logical reason, if the capability exists to automatically produce sufficient basic necessities for every human being, why every human being should still have to do a make-work job in order to prove they "deserve" those things. And you could still have all the capitalism you like for anything that isn't a basic necessity; the basic life doesn't have to be one of luxury, just one free from worry about things like food and shelter; the currency of such a society would need to be tied to something other than control of basic-necessity resources, but finding alternative bases for currency is something people already do for fun.

dublinben 11y ago

>However, that didn't work out too well. When was communism actually implemented, that it didn't "work out too well" in your opinion?

chc 11y ago
Do you mean "actually" or "perfectly"?
pink_dinner 11y ago
sigh do we really need to have this discussion and dou you actually think communism would ever work? The problem is that pesky human nature gets in the way.
- mentando 11y ago
  Yeah, in theory it is awesome, but it just does not work in real life...
  - mruniverse 11y ago
    I think even in theory it's not awesome. What is awesome is a system where everyone benefits when everyone is self-interested.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's not awesome, it's poison. Cooperation > competition, and artificially forcing everything to be expressed in terms of the latter is cancerous to society. Ignoring conscience and empathy is wasting the in-born qualities that allow us to be more efficient in groups.
- fucking_tragedy 11y ago
  The same problems that plague capitalism plague communist implementations. In power structures, things are great if you're part of the class that receives political favors and not so great if you're not. In capitalist societies, capital owning classes have the time and resources to be the political class. In previous communist societies, party and administrative members were the political class.

Matumio 11y ago

Communism is much more focused about workers and equality. Just providing the bare basic needs for everyone, without expecting them to work or live in a certain way, is a very different concept. What if all basic goods can be produced with hardly any human labour? A rich enough society can be so far beyond those basic needs that forcing anyone to work for survival can only be explained as a form of punishment.

crdoconnor 11y ago

>Isn't Communism very similar to your perfect world? All the people were provided for and they worked for everyone and everyone was equal. However, that didn't work out too well. A system where everybody was equal was never tried. A system where the necessities were guaranteed was tried - in the Soviet Union - and it was, by and large, very successful. It was successful enough, in fact, that Western elites responded to it in the 50s by implementing similar guarantees - NHS, social security, medicare, etc. (McCarthy's witchhunts and the Vietnam war weren't the only responses to communism). What made the Soviet Union finally unable to keep up economically was the prohibitive cost of the arms race and declining oil export revenues, not the lack of capitalist profit motives.

arethuza 11y ago
I really don't think the UK NHS was created in response to anything the Soviet Union did - the Labour movement in the UK had a long history long before the Soviets were around. The NHS actually shows the power of democracy over an elite - after all the 1945 election removed Churchill and voted in the socialist Attlee government. Attlee was so effective as a leader that even Thatcher spoke highly of him: 'Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the Nineties, he was all substance and no show.' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1194059/A-giant-man-Clem-Attlee-stood-decency-duty--stark-contrast-todays-MPs.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1194059/A-giant-ma...
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  On the idea that it was all about Atlee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory Do you think the fact that the UK NHS funding model closely followed the existing Soviet NHS model was a coincidence? The Tories fought long and hard in the 40s to make the proposed new 'cover everybody' system insurance based (something like Obamacare I guess) and ultimately didn't prevail. They used all sorts of scare tactics that would seem very familiar today. A large part of that failure was Labour being able to point to the Soviet Union (not yet enemies of the highest order) and go "look, we can achieve the same success in curing infectious disease that they did".

fucking_tragedy 11y ago

No. Welfare programs are not communism or socialism. The single defining characteristic in both ideologies is the degree of which labor owns its means of production (the resources, facilities and tools needed to do a job). Welfare programs do not even begin to touch on who owns the means of production. Communism implies a stateless society after a period of power by labor that is devoid of private ownership of the means of production. Supposedly, this transitionary period should do away with class. According to theory, once class is no longer a factor, the state is no longer needed. Welfare programs, again, do not touch on this at all. You've read too much Ayn Rand.