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As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens wh
by jbreckmckye 9y ago
As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens when we change that variable.
The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
- nostromo123 9y agoAs someone who has grown up in a communist Eastern European country, I would have to disagree. This "experiment" cost many people their lives, simply for ideological purposes. By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!" Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice. (I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
- jrs95 9y ago> Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
- jbreckmckye 9y agoYou seem to have missed my second paragraph. Also - you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union.
- jerf 9y ago"you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union." And after. Arguably the problem with Communism isn't so much that it is entirely impossible, but that it is entirely possible for it to scale much past 50-100 people, making it an exceedingly poor choice to try to structure a country's governance with. (And generally even by the 50 person mark the strains are seriously setting in and the community frequently still becomes unstable and disintegrates.)
- jbreckmckye 9y agoMaybe no society that suits our instincts can scale like that? Perhaps we are just meant to live in thirty-strong groups.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 9y agoIf that's your qualification for a "failed experiment," the Atlantic slave trade proved Capitalism a failure before these people were born.
- jbreckmckye 9y agoStrictly speaking wouldn't that be mercantilism? But I get your point, just substitute any of the human catastrophes of the nineteenth century.
- jrs95 9y agoEquality wasn't an explicit goal of that system though. It was for communism, which never achieved it at any significant scale. My comment was less about it being a failed experiment though, and more about whether or not it was "worthwhile".
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Equality wasn't an explicit goal of that system though. It was for communism, which never achieved it at any significant scale Well, thats kind of unsurprising, since all the actual attempts to implement “Communism” on a national scale threw out the prerequisites in Marxism on favor of the (notionally transitional) elite ruling class of Leninist vanguardism (an adaptation to allow bypassing capitalist democracy entirely, because—viewed generously—the Bolsheviks and their successors were too impatient for Marxism.)
- yters 9y agoUnrestrained capitalism, yes.
- theseatoms 9y agoIn what world are capitalism and slavery coexistent, even hypothetically? They're opposites. Capitalism is freedom.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
- jelll 9y agoHow was it worthwhile when communists today haven't been deterred by the horrors of the system before?