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> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail

• _mlbt 1y ago
  I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly. To Quote Ronald Reagan... “How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
  • ben_w 1y ago
    What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years. But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing. To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly. I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdash-one-of-the-major-problems-for-there-are https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas... (Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
    • nullpoint420 1y ago
      It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
      • Manuel_D 1y ago
        Democratic Socialism still entails collectivization of the economy. If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
  • immibis 1y ago
    Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
    • _mlbt 1y ago
      How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly? Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature. But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled. Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort. > How do you allocate resources and labor fairly? I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements". Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists". (Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
      • immibis 1y ago
        You're right, I cannot think of any possible way to raise the minimum wage without creating a brutal authoritarian regime that silences opposition.
• graemep 1y ago
  Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
• qcnguy 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    > Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation. Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      So imperialism was the cause.
    • qcnguy 1y ago
      What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food. The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is. Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs. If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War). The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did. You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.