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> Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
by 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>Capitalism is freedom. *freedom for the property owner. Which is why it can facilitate a slave trade, property is a limitation of freedom.
- jbreckmckye 9y agoYou can have private trade without civil rights and personal freedoms. Was segregation-era America not capitalist?
- theseatoms 9y agoNot if certain people aren't allowed to privately trade.
- jacalata 9y agoAt that point you're just arguing that capitalism has never existed, so perhaps you should use another term for your "true Scotsman" version to reduce confusion when talking to people who use the common definition.
- jbreckmckye 9y agoYou sound like a modern-day Marxist denouncing Leninism as nothing but a "perversion" of socialism.
- marcosdumay 9y agoPrivate trade, yes. Free trade, not so much. There is a reason why slavery was abolished on the brink of capitalism birth. It's because capitalism depends on free trade, not just any kind of it - the freer the better it grows.