I’ll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don’t think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don’t see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don’t see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That’s not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That’s a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can’t individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn’t much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I’ve seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
If you’ve read Marx, why do you think people are advocating paying sewage workers the same as office workers? There are even methods that suggest working fewer hours for the same pay with regards to how strenuous it is.
Who manages that? Who decides what resources goes to who and how much time people work? There are a lot of answers to those questions, often solved with central planning that can’t possibly keep up with ever shifting needs. This gets directly into your 4th question, whether you’ve realized it or not.
How can you consider yourself left wing if you reject Socialism in favor of Capitalism? That’s just a centrist or right-winger.
Its one of the silliest things on the left, that a lot of people like you think that everyone to the left of them is an extremist and everyone to the right of them is a right-winger or Nazi. It’s exhausting to say the least. Most of my political understanding drives me towards socialist mechanisms within a capitalist system. To call that right wing is to be intentionally obtuse and ideologically ridged to say the least. Certainly the USA, where I am, is further right than most places, but even in the most left wing countries I would still be on the left. To call that “centrism” or “a right-winger” is just trying to be willfully ridged to move the goalpost to exactly where you stand. It’s an entirely semantic argument of your making, but it’s not in line with how people generally view the political spectrum.
How does Communism “come with all of the same power problems as Capitalism” if Communism is fundamentally democratic, and Capitalism fundamentally anti-democratic?
Powerful people have exploited every system the world has ever created, including the half assed attempts at communism. You are living in a dream world if you truly think that powerful people won’t exploit their decision making authority to drive the conversation to their benefit under communism. It’s one of the primary reasons communism could never get off the ground. Because people opted the quick way of trying to arrive at it by force and centralizing power in the hands of the few. But even if we try to get their slowly, the same thing will happen. Powerful people will exploit their power to prevent progress to their benefit. Power, and the ability to obtain it, objective negates the ability to create true communism.
How is Capitalism more agile than Communism?
Capitalisms core mechanism is supply and demand, that applies to workers as well. If a job needs to be filled, the system adjusts to fill that demand. If no one wants to pick up trash, wages have to go up to meet demand. That’s effectively what unions do, they put pressure on the supply and demand curve by striking and removing the supply of workers. The same thing happens with products themselves, if the market is missing something, then it gets expensive, causing a strong incentive for people to make that thing, which after the market adjusts and creates more products, causes the price to go down and availability to the masses to go up. Some of the things we produce are imperative to survival, like food. Capitalistic markets handle that naturally by adjusting quickly to those demands. People want to make money, so they put their effort towards the highest demands and the largest profitability. Communism is entirely supply based, and demand is centrally planned by some person making well educated guesses on how much of x the market needs. This is functionally not agile, it requires bureaucracy to manage demand and have a flawless picture of exactly what the demands are day to day, it’s impossible to be as agile as a system that adjusts as fluidly as capitalism, imo, and it is the biggest downside of communism. Central planners can literally make one mistake and the whole country starves to death.
How can you say Capitalism can nearly get to a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society when it depends on all 3 to exist?
At no point did I state that this was my goal, and you know that.
Stateless societies are functionally impossible in the modern world. If we press reset on the world today and removed nationhood, within a decade those with power will have grabbed up most of the land in the world, through massive bloodshed. This is why any stateless society can’t work, it creates a power vacuum that will necessarily be filled, and it will be filled by people that don’t care if you are alive or dead. Whether we like it or not, power exists, and some of those that wield more of it will always use that power to grab what they can. Nationhood is the assurance of less war. Despite all of the things wrong in the world today, we have the lowest portion of our society dying from wars in world history since we drew clear borders everywhere, a fairly modern thing. Borders used to be very fluid, and sometimes some areas were basically a collection of city states with undefined borders shifting every day. As much as the news seeks to tell you otherwise, this is the safest point in human history. stateless, classless, and moneyless societies would be the most vulnerable societies to power. Welcome to mad max express edition.
How can you “adapt Socialist ideas into Capitalism” when Capitalism and Socialism are mutually exclusive Modes of Production?
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, whoever told you that is a next level moron. Both exist on a continuum. Additionally, capitalism is an economic system, while socialism is both an economic and political system. Social democracies are a blend of systems.
Worker cooperatives are an inherently socialist ideal and function perfectly well under capitalism. Social programs that seek to redistribute a portion of the wealth to those most in need are also socialist in nature. The fact is there are some things central planning does a better job at and there are other things that markets do a better job at. I certainly think that more central planning is good for specific things. Like the fact that we pay for internet is moronic, it should be entirely socialized. But centralizing food production would likely result in mass starvation eventually. And even if by some miracle it didn’t, it would greatly reduce choices. But I don’t need choices for electricity, water, sewer, etc. I just need them to exist and function properly. For internet, I want it to be fast, but a nationalized system could probably build that out generation to generation if collective society deems that necessary.
I’ve read Marx. Every smug comment you continue to make just show how incredibly insecure you are about your beliefs. Stay on topic and stop wrapping your ego up into the conversation. Just because I don’t buy every single argument made, doesn’t mean I’m not well read, two people can read something and come to different conclusions. Maybe you should try reading things OTHER than Marx and see a multitude of perspective before you die on your hill. There is an immense portion of communisms ideals that is in line with what I believe in, but I am not someone that just rides an ideological train without addressing each things on it’s own merits. Applying ideology to everything instead of addressing each thing on it’s own merits is the antithesis of progress. You sound more like Communism is your religion than it’s a structural concept.
Worker councils.
Same problem, lack of agility. Worker councils in a system that has no money, or incentives to produce goods at the rate of demand, won’t meet demand. Worker councils would inherently be more concerned with the impact to them (the workers) than the impact to demand, and therefor the broad society at large. Again, people would starve.
There are no Socialist mechanisms within a Capitalist system, and confusing left and right for how progressive something is, rather than as structural Modes of Production, is wrong.
You don’t just get to change how words work because you want to parrot what Marx said word for word like everything he wrote was the word of god. In a modern context calling someone who believes in worker cooperatives, a broad social safety net, workers unions, and heavily regulated capitalism “right-wing” is objectively dishonest.
Capitalism is centralization of power into the hands of the few, Communism is by definition a spreading of said power. You don’t need a central leader, lol, you can have worker councils.
Sure, you will have those worker councils until someone with power convivences a bunch of scared people that they need control and then they slowly take over everything. Congrats, you had worker councils for 1-10 years. Welcome to the shortest “utopia” in the world. The lack of centralization is exactly what creates vulnerability. Why do you think Genghis Kahn existed? He saw the power vacuum that decentralized power created in Mongolia, and hated all of the war that it caused, and he incorrectly believed he could have the war to end all wars. One of the larges extermination events, by population percentage, in human history was caused by decentralized power, and that’s not exactly the first time. Are you expecting worker councils to stop some dude rolling up in a tank to take over?
That’s a lot of talk to essentially ignore what central planning is, lmao. It’s not some guy with a spreadsheet making one wrong move and everyone starves, it’s very decentralized and similar to regular infrastructure. Do you truly think central planning has a single planner, or do you think worker councils deciding at the local level cannot function?
It is functionally impossible to recreate the agility of capitalism within worker councils. Especially in todays globalized systems. It doesn’t matter how you do the planning, its the same issue, the incentives are not placed on demand. The incentives only meet what the workers want to supply.
That’s Communism, and you claimed Capitalism can nearly get to Communism.
All I said was “You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get”, I admit that was too broad in hindsight. What I meant is workers controlling the means of production and better outcomes for labor. A worker cooperative can exist within capitalism. The overarching system is capitalism, the micro system is socialist in nature. If I work for a factory that I and everyone else that works for it owns, then I work for a factory that operates on socialist principles. That factory can exist in a capitalist economy.
Sorry, you’re the next-level moron here, I’m afraid. Capitalism and Socialism are both Modes of Production, and are mutually exclusive. Either the Workers own the Means of Production, or Capitalists do. Social Democracies are Capitalism with social safety nets, they aren’t a blend of Capitalism with Socialism.
So worker cooperatives don’t exist in capitalist economy’s? That’s news to me, I must be delusional then! Only in their absolute forms could one argue they are opposed, and even then I think that gets into semantics that favor a strictly communist perspective. To anyone who isn’t breathing communist propaganda, socialism is both economic and political, and tends to be used in a lot of contexts. People don’t get to claim words for themselves, words have the meanings that society generally agrees it has. You might not like it, but playing these semantic games to redefine things to your worldview isn’t doing you any favors. You can search nearly any academic publication and you will get that answer, that Capitalism and Socialism are not diametrically opposed because they are not in the same category, they seek to define different things. But we don’t have absolute capitalism anyway, and you are well aware that I wasn’t stanning for absolute capitalism. But this is a tired semantics argument if your only point in this conversation is to rigidly define words only the way propagandists define them, and not how academia, and the general public defines them. If that’s your purpose, then this conversation is entirely pointless. I mean, it’s pointless anyway, but it’s even more pointless considering your goals of word definitions rather than substance of outcomes.
One was implemented and works to this day on a global scale. The other was implemented in barely a few countries and they all failed or they still work but under the dictator regime.
You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
Even if he was targeting different ethnicities just because of the risk they could’ve been spies, what he effectively did was put a different “value” on his citizens, which is the opposite of social equality, a center aspect of leftism.
Maybe in his and his followers’ minds the end justified the means and he was actually aiming to build a better society for everyone, but ultimately what he did was enact racism and social hierarchies. If that still counts as left-wing to you we have different definitions.
Of the two, one is still far more realistic than the other.
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I’ll bite. Until we have machines doing most things, communism is unlikely to work, especially in post agrarian societies. We need to first fully realize not just post scarcity, but post work. In theory it seems like things like anarcho syndicalism and basic communism should work, but I don’t think they really function at a large scale. Socialized democracy and worker owned cooperatives within a capitalism system gets the closest to solving the problems imo. I like the idea of anarcho syndicalism the most, but I just don’t see how it can survive in todays world.
With all systems the same problems crop up. Powerful people seek to exploit ANY system to their benefit, and unmotivated people seek to do the least to get by. Who cleans toilets in a equitable communist country, who picks up the trash? Do we force people into job roles to fill the need? Without economic incentives I don’t see how the system stays healthy. Removing class barriers to some jobs does not always make them desirable enough to fill the need. Capitalisms structure inherently results in people that are strongly incentivized into those roles, because the wage will usually rise to meet the demand for employees. (Low educated citizens seeing opportunity in jobs that make a living wage.)
Currently the biggest problem we have, imo, is really that people with power expend tremendous resources on controlling the flow of information, and that has left a lot of people very misinformed. No matter the system, those same people will be fooled into voting for things that benefit the powerful to the detriment of the rest of us. That’s not so much a capitalism problem, but an information problem. That’s a problem we have no solution for. It has been an issue with humans since civilization has existed. We can’t individually know everything, so we rely on others to fill in the gaps in our thinking and assumptions, and many of those people have a motive to only give you the information that benefits them, or worse off just lie. A lot of peoples anger towards capitalism, is a result of unbridled capitalism in a world where most people have incomplete information to make good decisions at the voting booth. We only have unbridled capitalism because of misinformation, not because capitalism is inherently bad.
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I AM left wing, have read about many social theories in my life all over the spectrum. There isn’t much one can do to distill that down to one post. Not one of the solutions to communisms problems I’ve seen in my lifetime are ever very fair or realistic. It comes with all of the same problems as capitalism as it pertains to power and it is infinitely less agile than capitalism. You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get, by adapting socialist ideals into capitalism while keeping capitalisms agility in the marketplace of needs.
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Who manages that? Who decides what resources goes to who and how much time people work? There are a lot of answers to those questions, often solved with central planning that can’t possibly keep up with ever shifting needs. This gets directly into your 4th question, whether you’ve realized it or not.
Its one of the silliest things on the left, that a lot of people like you think that everyone to the left of them is an extremist and everyone to the right of them is a right-winger or Nazi. It’s exhausting to say the least. Most of my political understanding drives me towards socialist mechanisms within a capitalist system. To call that right wing is to be intentionally obtuse and ideologically ridged to say the least. Certainly the USA, where I am, is further right than most places, but even in the most left wing countries I would still be on the left. To call that “centrism” or “a right-winger” is just trying to be willfully ridged to move the goalpost to exactly where you stand. It’s an entirely semantic argument of your making, but it’s not in line with how people generally view the political spectrum.
Powerful people have exploited every system the world has ever created, including the half assed attempts at communism. You are living in a dream world if you truly think that powerful people won’t exploit their decision making authority to drive the conversation to their benefit under communism. It’s one of the primary reasons communism could never get off the ground. Because people opted the quick way of trying to arrive at it by force and centralizing power in the hands of the few. But even if we try to get their slowly, the same thing will happen. Powerful people will exploit their power to prevent progress to their benefit. Power, and the ability to obtain it, objective negates the ability to create true communism.
Capitalisms core mechanism is supply and demand, that applies to workers as well. If a job needs to be filled, the system adjusts to fill that demand. If no one wants to pick up trash, wages have to go up to meet demand. That’s effectively what unions do, they put pressure on the supply and demand curve by striking and removing the supply of workers. The same thing happens with products themselves, if the market is missing something, then it gets expensive, causing a strong incentive for people to make that thing, which after the market adjusts and creates more products, causes the price to go down and availability to the masses to go up. Some of the things we produce are imperative to survival, like food. Capitalistic markets handle that naturally by adjusting quickly to those demands. People want to make money, so they put their effort towards the highest demands and the largest profitability. Communism is entirely supply based, and demand is centrally planned by some person making well educated guesses on how much of x the market needs. This is functionally not agile, it requires bureaucracy to manage demand and have a flawless picture of exactly what the demands are day to day, it’s impossible to be as agile as a system that adjusts as fluidly as capitalism, imo, and it is the biggest downside of communism. Central planners can literally make one mistake and the whole country starves to death.
At no point did I state that this was my goal, and you know that.
Stateless societies are functionally impossible in the modern world. If we press reset on the world today and removed nationhood, within a decade those with power will have grabbed up most of the land in the world, through massive bloodshed. This is why any stateless society can’t work, it creates a power vacuum that will necessarily be filled, and it will be filled by people that don’t care if you are alive or dead. Whether we like it or not, power exists, and some of those that wield more of it will always use that power to grab what they can. Nationhood is the assurance of less war. Despite all of the things wrong in the world today, we have the lowest portion of our society dying from wars in world history since we drew clear borders everywhere, a fairly modern thing. Borders used to be very fluid, and sometimes some areas were basically a collection of city states with undefined borders shifting every day. As much as the news seeks to tell you otherwise, this is the safest point in human history. stateless, classless, and moneyless societies would be the most vulnerable societies to power. Welcome to mad max express edition.
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive, whoever told you that is a next level moron. Both exist on a continuum. Additionally, capitalism is an economic system, while socialism is both an economic and political system. Social democracies are a blend of systems.
Worker cooperatives are an inherently socialist ideal and function perfectly well under capitalism. Social programs that seek to redistribute a portion of the wealth to those most in need are also socialist in nature. The fact is there are some things central planning does a better job at and there are other things that markets do a better job at. I certainly think that more central planning is good for specific things. Like the fact that we pay for internet is moronic, it should be entirely socialized. But centralizing food production would likely result in mass starvation eventually. And even if by some miracle it didn’t, it would greatly reduce choices. But I don’t need choices for electricity, water, sewer, etc. I just need them to exist and function properly. For internet, I want it to be fast, but a nationalized system could probably build that out generation to generation if collective society deems that necessary.
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I’ve read Marx. Every smug comment you continue to make just show how incredibly insecure you are about your beliefs. Stay on topic and stop wrapping your ego up into the conversation. Just because I don’t buy every single argument made, doesn’t mean I’m not well read, two people can read something and come to different conclusions. Maybe you should try reading things OTHER than Marx and see a multitude of perspective before you die on your hill. There is an immense portion of communisms ideals that is in line with what I believe in, but I am not someone that just rides an ideological train without addressing each things on it’s own merits. Applying ideology to everything instead of addressing each thing on it’s own merits is the antithesis of progress. You sound more like Communism is your religion than it’s a structural concept.
Same problem, lack of agility. Worker councils in a system that has no money, or incentives to produce goods at the rate of demand, won’t meet demand. Worker councils would inherently be more concerned with the impact to them (the workers) than the impact to demand, and therefor the broad society at large. Again, people would starve.
You don’t just get to change how words work because you want to parrot what Marx said word for word like everything he wrote was the word of god. In a modern context calling someone who believes in worker cooperatives, a broad social safety net, workers unions, and heavily regulated capitalism “right-wing” is objectively dishonest.
Sure, you will have those worker councils until someone with power convivences a bunch of scared people that they need control and then they slowly take over everything. Congrats, you had worker councils for 1-10 years. Welcome to the shortest “utopia” in the world. The lack of centralization is exactly what creates vulnerability. Why do you think Genghis Kahn existed? He saw the power vacuum that decentralized power created in Mongolia, and hated all of the war that it caused, and he incorrectly believed he could have the war to end all wars. One of the larges extermination events, by population percentage, in human history was caused by decentralized power, and that’s not exactly the first time. Are you expecting worker councils to stop some dude rolling up in a tank to take over?
It is functionally impossible to recreate the agility of capitalism within worker councils. Especially in todays globalized systems. It doesn’t matter how you do the planning, its the same issue, the incentives are not placed on demand. The incentives only meet what the workers want to supply.
All I said was “You can get to nearly the same place that communism wants to get”, I admit that was too broad in hindsight. What I meant is workers controlling the means of production and better outcomes for labor. A worker cooperative can exist within capitalism. The overarching system is capitalism, the micro system is socialist in nature. If I work for a factory that I and everyone else that works for it owns, then I work for a factory that operates on socialist principles. That factory can exist in a capitalist economy.
So worker cooperatives don’t exist in capitalist economy’s? That’s news to me, I must be delusional then! Only in their absolute forms could one argue they are opposed, and even then I think that gets into semantics that favor a strictly communist perspective. To anyone who isn’t breathing communist propaganda, socialism is both economic and political, and tends to be used in a lot of contexts. People don’t get to claim words for themselves, words have the meanings that society generally agrees it has. You might not like it, but playing these semantic games to redefine things to your worldview isn’t doing you any favors. You can search nearly any academic publication and you will get that answer, that Capitalism and Socialism are not diametrically opposed because they are not in the same category, they seek to define different things. But we don’t have absolute capitalism anyway, and you are well aware that I wasn’t stanning for absolute capitalism. But this is a tired semantics argument if your only point in this conversation is to rigidly define words only the way propagandists define them, and not how academia, and the general public defines them. If that’s your purpose, then this conversation is entirely pointless. I mean, it’s pointless anyway, but it’s even more pointless considering your goals of word definitions rather than substance of outcomes.
One was implemented and works to this day on a global scale. The other was implemented in barely a few countries and they all failed or they still work but under the dictator regime.
One was implemented and is actively ruining the planet.
The other was only used as a façade by dictators that didn’t feel like labeling themselves as right-wing.
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You can’t tell me the Great Purge is something a left-wing person would do. He thought Hitler was “a great man”.
I’m far from an expert in political history, but if we were to look at controversial figures on the left, Guevara and Castro are probably the “worst” I can think of that still clearly had left-wing ideals in mind.
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I mean, it’s not an absolute, but Wikipedia defines Left-wing politics as “the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies”.
Stalin actively repressed and killed ethnic minorities during the Great Purge. That’s absolutely not egalitarianism. I don’t know much of his politics but if he was trying to be a communist, his government was not really a “Dictatorship of the proletariat”. He could’ve written anything, actions speak clearer than words.
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Even if he was targeting different ethnicities just because of the risk they could’ve been spies, what he effectively did was put a different “value” on his citizens, which is the opposite of social equality, a center aspect of leftism.
Maybe in his and his followers’ minds the end justified the means and he was actually aiming to build a better society for everyone, but ultimately what he did was enact racism and social hierarchies. If that still counts as left-wing to you we have different definitions.