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Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. C

• doomlaser 9y ago
  The future AI systems at the head of the major multinationals will surely be creative in coming up with a new method of global resource allocation..
• dogma1138 9y ago
  There is no way for a communist government to be non-authoritarian communism can’t work in any other way. Planned economy and lack of personal liberties cannot coexist in what we would call a democracy unless your definition of democracy is a slightly less violent conflict resolution method. Overall democracy works because it respects the wishes of the individual essentially it gives everyone the right to express their wants communism has no room for any form of individualism.
  • KozmoNau7 9y ago
    That's not communism, though. Communism requires the withering of the state, so a communistic government is a contradiction of terms.
    • noobermin 9y ago
      S/he probably meant socialist. Most of the people commenting don't know the difference.
      • iguy 9y ago
        This seems to come down to prescriptivist / descriptivist. The word communism is used to label the empire of Lenin & Stalin, and their friends and admirers. That's what it means. They didn't all call themselves communists. The germans also don't call themselves german. We do. It was invented long before, as a label for some imaginary perfect system which did not need to run gulags to keep the lights on. This perfect place played an important theological and rhetorical role in these kingdoms. If discussing such issues we use the word for this too. Words can have several meanings.
        • noobermin 9y ago
          I'm sort of agreeing with you? My point is leftists say communism and mean something different (some leftists don't even consider Stalin a proper communist, Trotskyists for example) but people outside use it as a blanket term for the left. Even some in the US call conservative democrats "communists". Regardless, it's just a word. My point is people commenting don't know the difference anyway, it's best to just read their comment as referring to "those authoritarian states that called themselves communist."
          • iguy 9y ago
            Sorry I guess I was replying also to GP "That's not communism, though", who seems to be insisting that "communism" means only the mythical utopia.
            • KozmoNau7 9y ago
              Communism in its real original meaning, yes. Not the perversions of later tyrannical dictatorships.
              • iguy 9y ago
                Well, the real meaning of words in English is defined by usage. And the English-speaking world spent half a century locked in cold war with an evil empire. That's what the word means. This imaginary utopia which some 19th writer dreamed up, to which said evil empire payed lip service, is a topic for those with special interests in 19th century utopian dreaming.
    • dogma1138 9y ago
      Now we're back to the "no true scotsman" argument, a communist government is not a contradiction unless you go by the most extreme anarchist interpretations of communist doctrine. But sure show me how you transition from the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase to this stateless paradise and I'll concede my argument.
      • KozmoNau7 9y ago
        Read Marx, then come back.
        • dogma1138 9y ago
          I had, so again please tell me how we switch to communism without the dictatorship of the proletariat or any mechanism through which we can evolve through it and I’ll concede my argument. By Marks himself the dictatorship is a critical phase in the process.
          • KozmoNau7 9y ago
            That's a twisting of terms, in the correct context, it's a temporary switch from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, to the opposite. The term dicatorship is only used because it retains the state, as it will not yet have withered away. Thus it does not meet the definition of communism. But it is not the same as the common defition of a dicatorship, with oppression and selfish tyranny, which seems to be the association you want to make. I loathe linking to Wikipedia, but the page in question does sum it up quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...
            • dogma1138 9y ago
              Again in practice how do we switch from A) to B), the truth is that you can’t and you won’t since any dictatorship will naturally always elect to preserve it’s power. The stateless version of your so called communism is essentially pure libertarianism the problem is that both are just as impossible and unlike the latter the former cannot coexist with the free market of ideas which is the natural state of a nationless/stateless society.
  • monort 9y ago
    Kibbutzism was less authoritarian, than you can expect from communism. I think it was because people always had a choice to leave.
    • dogma1138 9y ago
      The Kibbutz wasn't really communism not in what we would define as political / national communism, it was a cooperative and there is a good reason why virtually all of them were "privatized" by the mid 90's. And yes you hit the point I was trying to make, no one forces you to live under capitalism even in a capitalist country it's perfectly legal for you to go and live in a commune it is not however true the other way around. I had a grandparent die to Stalin's purges in the Gulag and I grew up in a Kibbutz I can say that my family experienced at least 4 different flavors of authoritarianism in the past 80 years and I've learned to be very weary of the very early signs of any authoritarianism. Polish/German (mainly due to the fact that they lived in a region that went back and forth between Poland and Germany since the unification of the Prussian states) Jewish family my parents were born in 1942 after their parents have already escaped eastwards because of some guy that couldn't get into art school.
  • btcindivist 9y ago
    It is a common mistake to characterize communism as collectivist. Marxist notion of communism is brutally individualistic.
    • iguy 9y ago
      "Collective" is practically a trademark term of the communist movement. It's one of their signature policies, the #1 guaranteed way to produce mass famine on fertile land! (When tired of mass starvation, the strategy is to export oil & buy wheat from the prairies, if you have enough oil.) What labels marxist theology applied to its imaginary systems is besides the point. This was all just words which the guys with guns made a certain class of intellectuals spout for their bread, to make sure everyone knew who was the boss.
• nostrademons 9y ago
  I think it's more that authoritarianism is the natural state of human nature, and capitalist systems tend to be less authoritarian because they setup multiple competing authorities and provide a mechanism for the entry of new ones, and in the chaos that results ordinary people have space for liberty by switching allegiances between titans of industry. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51. Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.) Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.
  • Animats 9y ago
    Communism has a problem with coordination. That's a classic observation. It may no longer still be true. Scaling works better now that we have enough computer power. Amazon doesn't have a problem with coordination. Nor does WalMart. Alibaba and Tencent don't seem to. All those companies are above the quarter-trillion dollar level. They approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy. There's no longer a limit on the size of a monopoly. It used to be that big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. The successful giant companies now seem to be past that problem. In a capitalist world, this leads to one big monopoly in each category.
    • nostrademons 9y ago
      Computers have proven fairly effective at augmenting or replacing middle management, but they haven't been that effective at replacing executives. These are two different skillsets: managers work to achieve a given goal more effectively and efficiently, while executives decide what the goals should be. The former is amenable to rational analysis, the latter is fundamentally emotional. An economy with a gigantic computer-controlled execution apparatus controlled by a single individual or small group of individuals starts looking a lot like the totalitarian strongman model of Mao or Stalin. Would you want to live in a world where Jeff Bezos controls the whole economy? Mark Zuckerburg? Regardless of how efficiently they run their companies, it's a problem when they're the only arbiter of what should be available to society. Put more succinctly, the genius of capitalism is that we can have Amazon and Walmart and Alibaba and Tencent and Google and Apple and dozens of other companies that approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy. In Soviet Russia they just had Soviet Russia.
• wonthegame 9y ago
  Maybe you mean they tend to be dictatorships that rob the people of their countries wealth.
• monort 9y ago
  Voluntary communism was tried too, read about kibbutzim. As you can expect it had practically the same problems as USSR (weirdly including authoritarianism) and they mostly had to return back to private property rights for members.
• iguy 9y ago
  In history there are exactly three ways in which different people end up doing the different jobs needed for civilisation. * You can have a caste system, where everyone does what his father did. Which is more fun if your dad was a priest than if he had to shovel shit. * You can have someone with a gun tell you what to do. This was Stalin's preferred system. It doesn't mix well with democracy, because threatening to shoot yourself doesn't get coal dug out of the mine. * You can use money, and let people trade their time for the fruits of their labour. This can exist with or without democracy. It can exist with varying levels of redistribution, too, but people still call it capitalism. What is this alternative system?
  • RealityVoid 9y ago
    I really don't see the caste system fitting in your example. I am not very knowledgeable of it, and might miss something, but surely, even in a caste system you get remunerated and paid. A caste is more of a who does what system rather than an incentive system.
    • iguy 9y ago
      Yes, that's exactly my point. These are the systems for deciding who does what. The incentives are purely monetary only under the 3rd system. Under the 1st & 2nd systems, not doing what you're supposed to do results in violence.
• eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Most people believe that the political spectrum has one axis only. Unsurprisingly there's so much disagreement and ignorance around the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum