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> Not a true Scotsman, eh? No, accuracy. If there's a raft with "YACHT" scribbled on it in permanent marker, and you call it a yacht, and I correct you that it
by fao_ 9y ago
> Not a true Scotsman, eh?
No, accuracy. If there's a raft with "YACHT" scribbled on it in permanent marker, and you call it a yacht, and I correct you that it is, in fact, a raft, then my correction is not an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy. To date, there haven't been any 'true' communist states. For that to be so, the workers would have had to hold the power. It is trivial to prove that in most self-professed communist countries, the workers have not held the reigns of power.
For example, in Mao's China only 11% of the communist party consisted of working class people. In Cuba, the working class never held power -- it was a revolution solely of the upper echelons (Actually, the way the revolution was performed was quite clever, I'd advise you to read about it, it's quite a marvel of strategy :)). In the USSR, for a short time, the workers held the reigns, however this was quickly made not the case. And -- to paraphrase Cliff -- if the state truly consisted of and gave power to the workers, the workers would have fought against the destruction of it.
> It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned.
Yes. It took some of the materials from communism and bolted it on to capitalism so that the roof doesn't fall down every 20 years.
> Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago?
Really? From the UK all I can see is the literacy rates getting worse and worse in either country, people being driven into unspeakable amounts of debt by private universities and bank bailouts, and Americans dying of silly things like Type 1 Diabetes just because they couldn't afford enough medicine.
Just because things are "getting better", doesn't mean that things aren't bad -- in fact, it's an open admission to that fact. Nor does it mean that under an alternate system things would be worse.
> Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.
On the contrary, "free markets" of the current ideation have only existed for about a hundred years or so. Just because something is a market doesn't mean that you can jam it into the capitalist Free Market slot. I'd advise you to read Ellen Meiksins Wood "The Origins of Capitalism" for an academically correct view on this.
- BjoernKW 9y ago> It is trivial to prove that in most self-professed communist countries, the workers have not held the reigns of power. While this is true the question is: What does 'the workers holding the reins of power' even truly mean? Why didn't that state last longer in communist systems where it initially was the case (I suppose both the Paris Commune and the short-lived Soviet Republic in Germany after WWI are additional examples)? These affairs or definitions tend to be more gradual than we commonly think. For example, we usually take for granted that both the US and France have been democracies since the late 1700s. However, by today's standards they weren't (France in particular) because they hadn't universal suffrage and excluded large parts of the population from political participation. > Really? From the UK all I can see is the literacy rates getting worse and worse in either country, people being driven into unspeakable amounts of debt by private universities and bank bailouts, and Americans dying of silly things like Type 1 Diabetes just because they couldn't afford enough medicine. Those are certainly urgent problems but not necessarily ones that are entirely driven by poverty: Literacy rates drop because education systems are insufficiently funded and don't keep up with societal changes. Rampant university debt and bank bailouts are symptoms of a crony capitalist system that has politicians and corporations collude in order to extract value from society (i.e. rent-seeking). People dying from type 1 diabetes is a symptom of a dysfunctional healthcare system, which in rich countries is less a question of poverty but one of ideology. The true epidemic is type 2 diabetes, though, which is caused by malnutrition and obesity (which in turn in rich countries indeed are linked to relative poverty).