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> According to Wikipedia, communism is all about common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, allocating products to everyone in the

> According to Wikipedia, communism is all about common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, allocating products to everyone in the society. That sounds very fair, admirable, equitable. It doesn't at all. I mean the infantile view of it maybe, in the same way that someone who promises you that their magic snake oil will cure cancer sounds great. Clearly it can't work though, right? Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it. Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive? It's both no and yes depending on the situation and depending on who you ask. So some people will be unhappy, and so there need to be deciders, enforcement, and now you have classes. So much for the classess utopia. A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving to prevent a spiral. Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions, so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition. So you have a paranoid police-state dictatorship. It seems almost inconceivable that a communist society can remain stable and productive without this oppression. At that point, the gulags and genocides follow quite naturally. This all follows from pretty basic obvious principles about human behavior, nobody should even need to look at history to see this. But when you do look at history, it has been proven out again and again from USSR to Cambodia to North Korea to China to Ethiopia. And yet the way it's presented, those failures and atrocities were some kind of aberration and not representative of real communism. Which is totally false, akin to arguing that WWII and the genocide of Jews and other undesirables wasn't true Nazism and that we really should give Naizsm another try (and another few dozen tries after that). These atrocities were directly caused by communism. They are the true communism.

tejohnso 4y ago
> Clearly it can't work though, right? Obviously it's not clear to a lot of people that it can't work. I haven't thought much about it, but here are some responses to your hypotheticals. > Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it I don't think so. You could have the group decide what is fair and there need not be taking things from people if everyone is contributing willingly based on the agreed upon rules. Ownership is common, so control must also be common. As soon as you have a "someone" as you describe you've gone out of the realm of the communist ideology as I've understood it. > Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive? Common ownership of the means of production and distribution doesn't imply that the distribution must be equal regardless of individual output. So it's back to the group deciding on how that works, since they are the common owners. > A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving Even if the group decides on the distribution, you will have a curve representing individual production and another representing satisfaction with the rules. I think this is going to be the case in many ideologies. But this might only be a problem if you're presupposing other problems, like an egotistical psychopath "someone" at the top who insists on maximizing output from their workforce. Which is again way outside the communist ideology. At least, I didn't see anything that required forced compliance as part of the ideology. What if people who were on the strong disagree end of the curve could simply leave? Unfortunately in our world of countries we can't easily go somewhere that operates under rules we are more aligned with, but that's an implementation problem and in this discussion we're talking about the ideology itself, not problems with poor implementation. But we might be getting too close to the infantile view you mentioned. I suppose it's not unreasonable to say that espousing an ideology that can't work "in the real world" is infantile. But when Lennon had people imagining there were no countries and no religion, I don't think he was widely thought of as infantile. I think there is a certain type of person who believes that things can change for the better, even if the changes required are drastically different from what we have now. You could call this type of person a dreamer. Maybe being a dreamer is infantile. Anyway, I don't see how this is related specifically to communism. > Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions To me this is also only a problem if other problems external to the ideology are presupposed. And is not communism specific. You've stated that the problems are basic, obvious principles about human behavior. I'm not capable of a decent attempt to refute that. We do have a pretty abysmal track record. > so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition You definitely don't have to do that.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Well yeah some people also think the guy selling snake oil out the back of his trunk will cure their diabetes too. I didn't mean literally everybody, I mean any serious person who has put any thought into it. A group can't decide as a group with everybody on equal terms and no consolidation of power or authority. This is the human condition. This is why communism doesn't work and you definitely do have to hold any stable communist society together with a brutal authoritarian police state and single-party dictatorship. History and reality agree with me.

tejohnso 4y ago

> Clearly it can't work though, right? Obviously it's not clear to a lot of people that it can't work. I haven't thought much about it, but here are some responses to your hypotheticals. > Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it I don't think so. You could have the group decide what is fair and there need not be taking things from people if everyone is contributing willingly based on the agreed upon rules. Ownership is common, so control must also be common. As soon as you have a "someone" as you describe you've gone out of the realm of the communist ideology as I've understood it. > Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive? Common ownership of the means of production and distribution doesn't imply that the distribution must be equal regardless of individual output. So it's back to the group deciding on how that works, since they are the common owners. > A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving Even if the group decides on the distribution, you will have a curve representing individual production and another representing satisfaction with the rules. I think this is going to be the case in many ideologies. But this might only be a problem if you're presupposing other problems, like an egotistical psychopath "someone" at the top who insists on maximizing output from their workforce. Which is again way outside the communist ideology. At least, I didn't see anything that required forced compliance as part of the ideology. What if people who were on the strong disagree end of the curve could simply leave? Unfortunately in our world of countries we can't easily go somewhere that operates under rules we are more aligned with, but that's an implementation problem and in this discussion we're talking about the ideology itself, not problems with poor implementation. But we might be getting too close to the infantile view you mentioned. I suppose it's not unreasonable to say that espousing an ideology that can't work "in the real world" is infantile. But when Lennon had people imagining there were no countries and no religion, I don't think he was widely thought of as infantile. I think there is a certain type of person who believes that things can change for the better, even if the changes required are drastically different from what we have now. You could call this type of person a dreamer. Maybe being a dreamer is infantile. Anyway, I don't see how this is related specifically to communism. > Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions To me this is also only a problem if other problems external to the ideology are presupposed. And is not communism specific. You've stated that the problems are basic, obvious principles about human behavior. I'm not capable of a decent attempt to refute that. We do have a pretty abysmal track record. > so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition You definitely don't have to do that.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
Well yeah some people also think the guy selling snake oil out the back of his trunk will cure their diabetes too. I didn't mean literally everybody, I mean any serious person who has put any thought into it. A group can't decide as a group with everybody on equal terms and no consolidation of power or authority. This is the human condition. This is why communism doesn't work and you definitely do have to hold any stable communist society together with a brutal authoritarian police state and single-party dictatorship. History and reality agree with me.