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Because it's never, ever worked. There are a lot of ideas that seem smart from an academic perspective but which, when implemented, fail. In the case of Commu

Because it's never, ever worked. There are a lot of ideas that seem smart from an academic perspective but which, when implemented, fail. In the case of Communism it only works if a whole society can manage to bury their natural human desire to achieve more than their neighbor and history has proven time and time again that burying that instinct is not possible and when you try you simply get lethargy.

unalone 17y ago
Okay. I was thinking Communism more in the idea of "let's not let the market be entirely free," not Communism in the sense of "everybody is forced to be equal." I'd argue that a completely free market would be just as terrible.
- TomOfTTB 17y ago
  Clearly there's a spectrum. I mean, the market we have now isn't completely free and I'm not one that has a problem with regulations. My only issue is the piece basically saying "I became 20 in a bad economy but others became 20 in a good economy so the Government should step in and fund me to the point that my experience is equal" Some people are luckier than others and that stinks but I don't think the Government can fix that. But I have no problem with Government safety nets that stop people from falling completely down the rabbit hole either.
  - unalone 17y ago
    I didn't really think Squashed was suggesting he ought to get funding, I think he was stating that the system as it stands now, where hard work leads to nothing, is flawed. You can see the implied solution as "I need money," but from his older writings, I'd be more inclined to think it's "There's a problem with a system wherein happiness is so based on the economy, and where we're told we need a good job to be happy, so that our happiness is based on a fluctuating system." The problem isn't the lack of a job, in other words, so much as it's the emphasis on having certain jobs. ALSO: Can we please stop downvoting based on who we agree and disagree with? I'm enjoying this conversation quite a lot and I hate seeing Tom and myself dipping into 0 and -1 while productive debate's going on.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      I agree downvote-as-disagreement is bad. However, at the moment, your only comment downvoted below 1 in this thread makes the claim "I was thinking Communism more in the idea of 'let's not let the market be entirely free'". That's such an aggressive redefinition of Communism it borders on falsehood, so I understand the downvotes. There are many, many critiques of the free market and proposals for moderating market activity for the greater good. Very few of these deserve to be lumped under the heading 'Communism'. The Communist critique of markets and capital/ownership is larger, and their program, in both theory and practice, different. 'Communism' means something, and that something is much more than the innocuous "let's not let the market be entirely free". (For example, you could wholeheartededly agree "let's not let the market be entirely free" and still be shot as a counterrevolutionary by a dedicated Communist.)
      - unalone 17y ago
        I was referring much more to Tom's being downvoted. He was at a universal -1 for a bit, which frustrated me. I kind of misuse terms a lot. I say Communism when I mean socialism, and vice versa. In reality, I'm just anti-extremism. (I once discussed with some friends forming a political party on the concept of "extremist moderatism", or the idea that the only thing bad is extremist worldviews.) So in my view, neither capitalism nor communism is a be-all end-all, and the real solution is murkier and in the middle.
turkishrevenge 17y ago
Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each set of social relations imposed on the populace by the ruling class of each social epoch. In the Feudal period, it was the divinity of the monarch and the "natural" state of the peasantry being tied to the land, surrendering a tithe to the king and the clergy. Before that, it was "natural" to conquer and subjugate the enemy within a slave society like Rome. Also, everything that was tried before was either smashed by state intervention backed by capitalist interest, e.g. the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, or Franco during the Spanish civil, or was a Stalinist dictatorship.
- gloob 17y ago
  All the evidence we have suggests that human history and prehistory is primarily concerned with two things: firstly, people making stuff, and secondly, people taking other people's stuff and optionally killing them. This is widely true for societies ranging from stone-age tribal groups, all the way up to the present day. Of course many beliefs are created and imparted by society at large, but not all are. The belief that our planet is roughly a sphere is more accurate than the belief that it is flat, and the belief that the Earth orbits the sun is more accurate than the reverse. I'm fairly sure we've hit on something with the whole "People would rather be rich than poor," idea.
  - unalone 17y ago
    They'd rather be "rich than poor" because we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible. I'd agree with you if you'd said "comfortable rather than stressed", but there's a difference between the two. Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.
    - gloob 17y ago
      Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich. That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question. I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.
MaysonL 17y ago
Communism works fairly well - in small doses: i.e. for groups small enough for everybody to know everybody else. This allows for discipline of goldbrickers and avoidance of takeover by charismatics. See, for example, the Hutterites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite
- unalone 17y ago
  Reminds me of Gladwell's little bit on Dunbar's Constant in The Tipping Point. He brought up GoreTex as a company that, by splitting its company into miniature groups of under 150, thrived despite nobody having job titles. I'd like to see a nation try to work itself using Dunbar's Constant. A government based on the idea that people can all relate to one another in small groups would be radical.
  - MaysonL 17y ago
    I've often thought that a government based on proxies, given only to personal acquaintances, with a hierarchical structure where 12 proxies at one level would elect you to the next level, might work better than our present representation. (Then again, maybe the old Athenian idea of choosing legislatures as well as juries by lot might work better too).

unalone 17y ago

Okay. I was thinking Communism more in the idea of "let's not let the market be entirely free," not Communism in the sense of "everybody is forced to be equal." I'd argue that a completely free market would be just as terrible.

TomOfTTB 17y ago
Clearly there's a spectrum. I mean, the market we have now isn't completely free and I'm not one that has a problem with regulations. My only issue is the piece basically saying "I became 20 in a bad economy but others became 20 in a good economy so the Government should step in and fund me to the point that my experience is equal" Some people are luckier than others and that stinks but I don't think the Government can fix that. But I have no problem with Government safety nets that stop people from falling completely down the rabbit hole either.
- unalone 17y ago
  I didn't really think Squashed was suggesting he ought to get funding, I think he was stating that the system as it stands now, where hard work leads to nothing, is flawed. You can see the implied solution as "I need money," but from his older writings, I'd be more inclined to think it's "There's a problem with a system wherein happiness is so based on the economy, and where we're told we need a good job to be happy, so that our happiness is based on a fluctuating system." The problem isn't the lack of a job, in other words, so much as it's the emphasis on having certain jobs. ALSO: Can we please stop downvoting based on who we agree and disagree with? I'm enjoying this conversation quite a lot and I hate seeing Tom and myself dipping into 0 and -1 while productive debate's going on.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    I agree downvote-as-disagreement is bad. However, at the moment, your only comment downvoted below 1 in this thread makes the claim "I was thinking Communism more in the idea of 'let's not let the market be entirely free'". That's such an aggressive redefinition of Communism it borders on falsehood, so I understand the downvotes. There are many, many critiques of the free market and proposals for moderating market activity for the greater good. Very few of these deserve to be lumped under the heading 'Communism'. The Communist critique of markets and capital/ownership is larger, and their program, in both theory and practice, different. 'Communism' means something, and that something is much more than the innocuous "let's not let the market be entirely free". (For example, you could wholeheartededly agree "let's not let the market be entirely free" and still be shot as a counterrevolutionary by a dedicated Communist.)
    - unalone 17y ago
      I was referring much more to Tom's being downvoted. He was at a universal -1 for a bit, which frustrated me. I kind of misuse terms a lot. I say Communism when I mean socialism, and vice versa. In reality, I'm just anti-extremism. (I once discussed with some friends forming a political party on the concept of "extremist moderatism", or the idea that the only thing bad is extremist worldviews.) So in my view, neither capitalism nor communism is a be-all end-all, and the real solution is murkier and in the middle.

turkishrevenge 17y ago

Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each set of social relations imposed on the populace by the ruling class of each social epoch. In the Feudal period, it was the divinity of the monarch and the "natural" state of the peasantry being tied to the land, surrendering a tithe to the king and the clergy. Before that, it was "natural" to conquer and subjugate the enemy within a slave society like Rome. Also, everything that was tried before was either smashed by state intervention backed by capitalist interest, e.g. the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, or Franco during the Spanish civil, or was a Stalinist dictatorship.

gloob 17y ago
All the evidence we have suggests that human history and prehistory is primarily concerned with two things: firstly, people making stuff, and secondly, people taking other people's stuff and optionally killing them. This is widely true for societies ranging from stone-age tribal groups, all the way up to the present day. Of course many beliefs are created and imparted by society at large, but not all are. The belief that our planet is roughly a sphere is more accurate than the belief that it is flat, and the belief that the Earth orbits the sun is more accurate than the reverse. I'm fairly sure we've hit on something with the whole "People would rather be rich than poor," idea.
- unalone 17y ago
  They'd rather be "rich than poor" because we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible. I'd agree with you if you'd said "comfortable rather than stressed", but there's a difference between the two. Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.
  - gloob 17y ago
    Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich. That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question. I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.

MaysonL 17y ago

Communism works fairly well - in small doses: i.e. for groups small enough for everybody to know everybody else. This allows for discipline of goldbrickers and avoidance of takeover by charismatics. See, for example, the Hutterites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

unalone 17y ago
Reminds me of Gladwell's little bit on Dunbar's Constant in The Tipping Point. He brought up GoreTex as a company that, by splitting its company into miniature groups of under 150, thrived despite nobody having job titles. I'd like to see a nation try to work itself using Dunbar's Constant. A government based on the idea that people can all relate to one another in small groups would be radical.
- MaysonL 17y ago
  I've often thought that a government based on proxies, given only to personal acquaintances, with a hierarchical structure where 12 proxies at one level would elect you to the next level, might work better than our present representation. (Then again, maybe the old Athenian idea of choosing legislatures as well as juries by lot might work better too).