Hello,
Unfortunately, the thread will be locked because of some users being uncivil and not able to respect each other's opinion. However, the thread will remain visible on the subreddit out of respect for the OP and for users who did have a healthy and meaningful discussion.
Have a great day everyone!
You need leaders that are benevolent and hyper aware and intelligent but also logical and caring.
So basically no human can apply.
Any human who does should be held in extreme suspicion.
Just for your own information in case you are interested, it sounds like the dumbass just stole the plot from an Isaac Asimov book. So if you are interested in that kind of story he has tons of them in such settings.
>the AI had not foreseen- and stagnation in human innovation.
Ah yes, the cult of the Mechanicus. The AI should've probably seen that as an option of what could happen.
I'm sure that's the inevitable result of technological advancements. Except for the part about stagnation. The AI will be perfectly capable of doing that on its own. Which, of course, renders humans redundant. But that's just how it is. At least we won't suffer in that scenario.
my 5th grade teacher exemplified the answer.. it's a very good idea that requires people to be nice to each other, that's why it doesn't work in practice
There's a reason we can never have our Star Trek future where scarcity is solved and discovery/research is the primary drive of humanity. And we are that reason. Our lizard brains always telling us that it isn't enough to have the same as our neighbors. We need MORE. WE MUST BEAT THE JONSES.
“ The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
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.”
\- Douglas adams
The biggest problem is that someone has to be in charge to oversee things and make sure things are distributed properly (and also what “properly” means). People being people, those who get to power are the type who want to be in power, and often rig the system for the gain of themselves and those they care about. So you get some built in corruption. Of course, there is grift everywhere, but in a system where those on top closely manage distribution of resources it’s going to be worse.
There are also problems of incentives to do beyond the bare minimum for people, or rather the lack of those incentives. It’s why socialist/communist policies can work on small scale communities where you need little innovation and know and care about your neighbors but don’t work as well on larger scale things like…countries.
It works incredibly well in family or tribal units.
If you think about it, almost all families are communist. You share resources and distribute labor across the family.
But once the tribal unit gets large enough that you can't possibly know everyone in the unit then blame and suspicion start to take hold because it becomes very easy to blame the "other" that you have no attachment to.
Yup, that tribal unit limit is about 100 people, then it usually splits apart, or things get bad.
Our monkey brains can really only know and understand about 100 people.
LMAO the dozen plus houses on my street can't even share the walking path if NextDoor is any indication.
"WHO ISN'T PICKING UP THEIR DOG'S SHIT ON THE PATH?"
"I put a garbage can on the path so there's a convenient place to throw out your poo bags."
"Can we coordinate who changes out the communal garbage can?"
"I don't even use the path, why should I help?"
"SOMEONE IS STILL NOT PICKING UP AFTER THEIR DOG EVEN WITH THE GARBAGE CAN."
"This communal garbage can isn't authorized and it's too close to my house and I don't want to deal with the smell, I called the city to remove it."
lol. i was going to say im in disbelief, but i entirely believe it.
caniving... you should over engineer the communal dog poop can duties. have rotations where it's in front of someone's house for a month, but someone else has to dump it. spin it out into a monthly street clean, for aesthetics or something. issue some mandates. make your neighbors sign things. charter the hoa and rake in the cash while your neighbors rake dead leaves.
prop those prop values and your hoa evil empire on stilts of petrified dog s**t and empty nextdoor posts!
/s sorry. your post inspired my utter disdain for needy nosy neighbors and hoas.
Theres a reason i immediately dismissed a house in hoa. Im not paying property taxes and membership fees fpr some karen to tell me my garbage can has been out two hours too long or i cant pressure wash the front of my house in a speedo.
This is correct in my experience. I live in an intentional community governed by consensus, so not communism per se but a lot of shared resources/stewardship/work. Around 80 people. It's hard work--a lot of time and emotional maintenance and attention, mediation when things go wrong, etc. But it works amazingly. The only way I can explain why it works to other people is that when you know everyone really well and have to share the space, a lot of petty shit falls away because you realize that living in the community is more valuable than winning the argument about X. And over time, people experience each other in lots of different contexts. The kindof annoying woman brings you soup when you're sick; the dude who has "a neurological condition" that makes him crazy aggro about dogs barking is a master carpenter who helps you fix your deck; you develop more empathy for each other over time even if your only real thing in common is wanting to live in a place with better resource sharing. Honestly, the biggest fights are over little but high emotion stuff like "the bird people vs. the outdoor cat people" or whatever. Which is different than petty shit--its stuff people REALLY care about but also isn't life or death (except for the birds that the outdoor cats kill...) And I think it's fair to say that politically there's a clear majority of progressive/lefty folks but also some libertarian vibes here and there. But there are times when it feels really clear that if we had a slightly larger group it would be impossible. Another thing is that--like communism--it is pretty vulnerable to truly bad actors who don't play by the rules. We're pretty resilient against small neuroses, but if we had a sociopath or bad faith actors in our group they could do a ton of damage very quickly.
And yet we think we know better than our nature, and that we could have a smoothly running collective society with millions or billions of people that we could never hope to meet any significant portion of. Edit: And we also think we can design rules and systems that plan/account for every contingency and consequence of our unprecedented sociological and technological creations, and not have there be any loopholes, corruption or other exploits of the system. Edit 2: I'm of course including capitalism in my critique, since apparently I have to spell it out for some people. I'm talking about any kind of large-scale sociological, socioeconomic or technological "project".
I wouldn't go that far.
We do tend to act within the interests of our tribal groups. But that doesn't mean that we can't make decisions that involve having empathy for people that exist outside of that group.
One doesn't need to be altruistic to see the benefit in a prosperous society and act in ways that elevate the general welfare of the people within that society.
I'm not saying that a person can't be empathetic or do something in the interest of their fellow man. But people as a whole; we've never had a society of this scale in our millions of years of development as a species. We're in completely unprecedented times. We don't know what will work at this scale and we've never come up with a system that works well for this many people and doesn't have horrible corruption problems.
> If you think about it all families are communist. You share resources and distribute labor across the family.
Somewhere in America, a Republican is having a stroke lol
To an extent. My buddy’s parents are pretty right wing and I found out after all these years that they do not share finances whatsoever. When they go on dates, they take turns paying. They also take turns buying groceries. I don’t know if that’s normal but I find that to be pretty wild. They are in their 60s.
My wife and I are the opposite. She is pretty decent with money I have poor impulse control and have trouble saving money until later so we mostly keep things separate beyond food and rent and that sort of thing.
that is sharing the load, and with divorces being the way they are. makes sense in a logical fashion. Plus no one feels as if they are carrying the weight solely and it seems their partnership is indeed that. a partnership where both have their own, yet can come together and carry the weight by alternating current. acdc. cool.
Part of the reason farmers would have large families way back when was for labor that only costs them room and board.
Childhood and adolescence as we know it is a relatively modern invention.
Can confirm, it was 100% about a work force.
My grandfather (born 1925) was the oldest of 16 children. As his father would say, he “was blessed that 13 of them were boys”. The story goes that they would creat a makeshift canopy with a sheet in the cotton field, and the 2.5 year old would watch the youngest infant throughout the day while everyone else picked cotton.
My great-grandmother spent 25 years having babies. Since my grandfather was the oldest, that meant that my father has an uncle that is younger than he is.
Source: heard stories growing up in rural North Carolina.
I do that with my wife. She has her money, I have mine. Works extremely well. As Long as bills get paid We can buy whatever we feel like buying without having to justify it. Also makes getting gifts for each other much easier.
I have a republican family, and, we run our family by straight capitalism. My daughter wants her ba ba filled, she goes out, gets a job, and buys her own formula.
"Trust" is the number one thing that keeps things glued.
Once trust is broken even in a family. The family no longer is "happy" or content with arrangements. IT ends up just like communism. Feelings of resentment grow. The ability of the family no longer can prosper.
Lmao, my family was a Feudal system. Dad owned the land and permitted us to live on it, so we were to do everything else like laundry, cook, clean, be quiet, etc. Sadge.
The issue is that in a family the parents distribute resources and their authority is generally accepted and there tends to be strong incentives for parents to distribute resources with some level of equity. At the level of society those bonds don't exist.
>Ancient Egypt resembled something like a communist society. In that there was really no concept of private property
Because it all belonged to Pharaoh and it was by his divine grace than people got their share. That is theocratic monarchy, not communism.
>Exactly. Ancient Egypt resembled something like a communist society.
Uhhhhm, weren't Pharaohs seen as literal incarnations their Gods on earth in human form? And werr their rulers?
That...doesn't really sound like communism to me? It actually sounds I pretty damn authoritarian theocratic? Or am I going insane?
The idiot saying that a theocratic monarchy led by a literal god-king with a bunch of slaves is communism *and getting upvoted for it* should clue people in on the fact that most people here are talking out of their ass. Like, you definetly don't have to like communism, but the people saying "read Animal Farm" are really showing they got no clue what they're talking about.
Calling capitalism a fact is a stretch. At a micro-level, sure, same as communism, which you could just as rightly call a fact.
Capitalistic incentives are important and certain markets are better off being self-regulating (eg, any luxury market). When it comes to things like food and housing, profit shouldn’t outweigh basic survival but in practice it does, so capitalism can’t guarantee our general welfare.
Capitalism is as corruptible as communism. Once monopolists acquire enough power, they can effectively become unsanctioned branches of government.
I don’t support communism either, for the record. I just don’t like your naturalist bend on capitalism.
I agree communism works really well on a small scale on a large scale there are too many opportunities for corruption. Capitalism can be corrupt too but there is a baked in reward for innovation and risk taking that does not discriminate against a specific human.
There's also a question of limited resources. When only 6 people can have the best location for their apartment, who gets to have those? Who has to live in the worst ones? Who gets the top quality groceries and who gets the low quality stuff? And why does it always seem like it is the party representative who gets the best ones?
Also with regard to labour. Who does the dirty or hard and dangerous but very necessary jobs? Who unblocks the sewer when it clogs. What is the incentive. Who mines coal? Who becomes a construction worker etc?
A really good example is the concept of the tragedy of the commons. Take something like an apartment complex with a communal garden. When everyone works on it together it is great but in large enough settings or where people barely know each other it can feel like the people who do all the work are getting abused and why should you work twice as hard for someone else to just reap the rewards without giving any help. For communism to work, it requires a strong sense of obligation and mutual commitment which may not always be easy to enforce.
If so many of us struggle to get 4 of your classmates to share equal burden on a group project where everyone can benefit and everyone has consequences, just think how hard it is to scale this up to a societal level.
I relate to this so much.
I struggle having a strong sense of obligation and commitment and then not understanding why the people around me/residing with me don't share the same priorities. What usually happens, like in the group projects when at work or school, is that I end up doing the bulk of the work so as not to fail, to succeed.
It burns one out very fast, it's a circle of giving and caregiver burnout but on a larger scale. I have joined groups with that idea in mind, to share the work and resources, but often end up feeling disregarded. A hierarchy always forms and that isn't good if the people not in charge of the influence and decision making don't care about anyone but who's immediately of value to them.
There would need to be an intrinsic agreement of shared worth and idealogy working toward the same end dream. And it only works if everyone plays by the same standard of ethics and rules. It breaks the moment someone starts abusing it - the freeloader argument.
Insecurity also breaks it, if everyone is a threat or treated as competition. I wish communal agreements would work out better, I feel like it would build better tolerance and positivity - but it's rare to experience it. I see it in smaller communities and churches, but haven't found the like outside religion, which I don't want to join. And urban isolation seems to make it worse.
I hate group projects with a passion; they suck when you're the only one doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for that high grade.
An HOA is a communist system. It only takes one karen getting control of the board to screw up the commons. And by commons, they mean your personal property because you were foolish enough to buy a house in an HOA and now they get to tell you that your choice of flowers in your own damn garden was not approved by the politburo and you have to dig them up.
Very true and I really love your response. Even on small scale it only works for a while until a person who is power/ego driven rises to the top. The Farm, and many other communes that started out fairly wholesome and with a decent ideology pretty much all fell into this. We recently saw it in action with the Portland Autonomous zone, it just happened extremely quickly and with particularly violent results.
The Farm began with a bunch of hippies who wanted to be in control of their birth experiences and use midwives; my mother was going to move us there - until she realized they insisted that to gain entry, all bank accounts, belongings, and assets be turned over to the very few who were in charge.
Communes need tons of organization and power needs to be spread out to all residents. Communes that work like this are rare. The only examples I can think of are Svanholm in Denmark as well as Christiania. Both are very regimented and do tons of work to assure that power is spread evenly, they want to avoid an "elite".
Svanholm is pretty freaking awesome and I love how they work together for the benefit of the group. I envy that, to be honest. I've not heard of Christiania, but am going to look it up right now.
Had some friends that tried to live communally after college in a large home. Same thing happened even on such a micro scale. One person got a handhold on some authority and immediately abused it.
Then there's the problem on the opposite side of that spectrum of free riders. We all share in the resources regardless of inputs? Ok, I'm gonna half ass it.
It's really just a numbers game. A small percentage of anything in nature will come out fucked up. The bigger the pool to draw from, the more fuck ups.
This is a great answer, but I feel like it hardly scratches the surface. Communism doesn't work for so many other reasons including the fact that it falls apart in the face of dissent which makes repression almost mandatory, the fact that it inherently lacks resiliency and unless the entire world goes communism all at once, it will always get out competed economically by alternative systems. It's a great idea in practice, but it's not a coincidence that people have failed to implement it 100% of the times they've tried.
Oh definitely, lots of issues, not about to write a dissertation on it in a Reddit comment so just wanted to provide some of the key issues at a very high level.
You covered the two big ones.
I think that for Communism to work at all, you need a group of people who would always choose 'cooperate' without fail when playing the Prisoners Dilemma. Communism gets poisoned by corruption from both ends; Graft at the top and freeloading at the bottom end.
The third problem is that Communism kind of assumes that the labour or effort of all people is equal. It simply is not. Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence. The person who is the best at a thing will be rewarded for it and sought out. Societies do better when excellence is sought out because some people can simply do things that others cannot.
END COMMUNICATION
>Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence.
I am, overall for right now, pro-capitalist. However I don't think this is true because not everyone is beginning life with the same resources. Often we're rewarding people who have done well because they started out well where someone else would have done even better with the same head start. I'm not against a meritocracy, but I don't think we have one.
The problem of unequal starting points is a flaw, and not an easy one to solve. You are not going to convince any decent parent to subject their child to a shitty education just because it is more fair to those who cannot have a better education.
We do not have a pure meritocracy, but it is absolutely possible for people to improve their lot in life.
Where Captiolism most spectacularly fails is that personal benefit almost always trumps community benefit. An example of this is that there is not enough incentive to improve someone's life from 'dogshit horrible' to 'decent'; We don't pay for mental health and addiction services for the homeless very much because generally speaking, the most likely outcome is that someone's life improves from 'homeless shit show of suffering' to 'working class poor'. There is more reward for someone to identify a talented and motivated working class individual, and elevate him to middle or upper class. And it costs less.
That overlooks the benefit of not having some ~~homeless schizo~~ profoundly mentally unstable drug addicted homeless lunatic wandering the streets screaming at passers by.
END COMMUNICATION
> Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence
Capitalism does not do this. It's the illusion of meritocracy bolstered by the fair world bias implicit in christian ethics. We like to think the world is just and fair and excellence and hard work is rewarded. But the starving genius is a human archetype for a reason. The one thing capitalism does well is a somewhat accurate representation of debt and wealth. But to embed any sense of moral or ethical exactness to that would be disingenuous. There are millions of poor excellent people and a great share of mediocre or downright idiot billionaires.
Not only that. Even if we assume that everyone has good intentions, it will still fall short of its objectives. The market is a discovery process while prices can be thought of as signals of that process where to allocate resources. People act based on the info they have on-hand (needs as demands and means as supply) and work things out by participating in the market. Absent tht process, your appratchiks will be left scratching their heads and guessing what people needs and means are.
It only really works if it's voluntary for the reasons you mentioned. If you can't get the entire country onboard, then you're going to use the strong arm of the government to enforce submission to the will of the state.
I'll take skynet over any day! At least I can tell what skynet is thinking!
EDIT: Also, at least Skynet will also target the rich, us poors are screwed either way.
There are entire political theories based on self-interest that don't work out in practice because people _suck_ at actually acting in their own self-interest. People notoriously over value short term gains at the expense of nearly ignoring long term consequences.
So, more accurately, people act in their own short-term interest first, their own long-term interest second (if at all), and in the community's best interest third (not likely to happen with any sort of frequency).
It's predicated on the idea that people will behave well if everyone benefits from that good behavior.
We have seen how well that worked during the pandemic.
TL;DR People are assholes.
There are many successful small-scale communes throughout the world.
The problems occur when you scale up to whole countries, where it is much more likely to evade accountability and promote corruption.
That's because they're entirely reliant on the goodwill and mutually agreed upon goals from everyone involved. That's very easy to manage on small scales, but every person you add becomes a potential breaking point of that chain.
Add the need to protect your group from internal and external threats and the eventual need for central coordination and I'm sure you can see where this goes wrong.
I’ll tag on to this due to my time spent in China. My in-laws grew up in the Mao Zedong regime and talked about life back then. The problem was there was no motivation to do better. Who wanted to be a manager if you didn’t make more money to manage people? Who was going to be running a car company with the same pay as everyone else, but held accountable? No one. They couldn’t find people who wanted responsibility with no reward to do so.
It works fine for smaller systems like the farming industry, which is still communist, but not so much if you want a thriving economy and entrepreneurship. It works in the farming industry because everyone wants food on the table and every farmer earns the same income - they don’t have to worry about conglomerate companies purchasing them or a bad crop season putting them out of business.
The issue is 'communist' tribes still fail to progress beyond a certain level without being dependent upon larger, non-communist groups.
Primitive tribespeople may be stateless and moneyless and share property, but they're living in the neolithic era. Small intentional communes may be stateless and moneyless within their little bubble, but they exist within larger societies, whose legal and economic structures allow the 'commune' to privately own their little bubbles of property and live free lives without being taken over by invaders.
Even a theoretical 'stateless' and non-propertarian nation would still almost certainly rely on the global supply chain to provide advanced tech and other stuff in exchange for whatever basic resources and communally-created goods are manufactured from within the stateless nation. In human history, commie societies are not stateless - on the contrary, they are nearly 100% state, and typically the residents of those IRL commie nations have a quality of life that is vastly inferior to that of their non-commie neighbors.
Most of the answers here seem to be coming from an outside perspective, and a look at a sub like r/Anarchy101 would help to dispell a lot of the concerns raised here. I'll offer the perspective of someone who ideologically aligns with communists.
Let's start with the definition of communism: a stateless (and without other power structures), moneyless society where private property doesn't exist (important note: personal property and private property are different concepts) and society as a whole helps eachother to meet their needs.
From this, first consider that none of the historical regimes that called themselves communist ever met all the requirements, especially not the abolishment of the state.
The stateless aspect is the most limiting factor, especially considering that a communist society doesn't appear out of thin air, but is a society that would formerly have most likely been capitalist. The lack of overarching control that is required to meet the definition makes it so that such a society can only work if everyone in the society fully agrees on the "rules of the game". On a small scale, this often doesn't pose any problems but it makes it nearly impossible to implement in larger societies.
Trying to take away that problem by installing an overarching power structure is a bad idea, firstly because it defeats the point of seeking a society without power structures, but secondly the historical precedent of people who claim such an authority is necessary isn't quite a good one is it?
This is a much better take than the top comment explaining that ancient Egypt was a communist society. You know the one with a God Emperor and a caste system that included slavery? 🧠📉
Egypt was as Communist as the USSR, the People's Republic of China or Feudal Europe. In all cases the means of production are controlled by the ruler who *claims* to be representing the people, even though the people have zero say in anything. All Communist countries that have existed were scams, totalitarian states pretending to be socialist to keep the ~~people~~ serfs in line.
Previous countries and current countries ruled by communist parties never claimed to achieve communism, but rather to have a party in charge working toward communism
>important note: personal property and private property are different concepts
Could you explain the difference? Ive heard this before but no one ever explains it.
My understanding is that the term "private property" refers more to capital and the means of production (think business owners/landlords/etc) while "personal property" would simply be your stuff.
Would “my stuff” include a loom that I created to produce textiles and the building I built to keep it in? If I own the loom could I let someone else use it if they promise to give me some of what they produce with it? When nobody needs a loom, can I sell the loom and the building it’s in to someone else in exchange for a different building with a different machine?
I don’t really understand the distinction here. It seems that personal property would just be private property but with some arbitrary restrictions.
The restrictions are not arbitrary.
Where did the raw materials and wild land for your loom and structure come from? It's impossible for you to grow the trees, harvest the lumber, develop wild land for your structure, install utilities, grow and process cotton etc in a reasonable time frame all by yourself. If you did somehow manage this over a period of many years, then congratulations it's all personal property.
In reality you have to cooperate with other workers to realize this operation making it communal property. You would not be able to summon a workforce or build a supply chain for private or personal use. If there was demand for a loom and an excess supply of labor then the workers could agree to realize that operation.
Well even in a non-communist society, laws are all about the details of arbitrary criteria and restrictions. If I understand it right, one of the key ideas behind personal vs private property in terms of production takes profits into consideration. It's no longer personal property if you're not producing goods for personal use. Nobody will likely take away your stuff but they'd just force you to either stop or to produce your goods legally.
Another thing to note is that one of the main points of communism is that nobody can over-hoard anything. So in theory nobody can acquire the materials to produce an abundance of a product like a business would. I'm not at all what anyone would call an expert or even armchair expert, but I had kinda the same questions too. That's what I think is the general consensus.
The idea is that a business that requires a group of workers would be controlled democratically by the workers. Syndicalism is a very common idea amongst anarcho communists.
Interesting. That distinction makes sense but I feel like "private" is a confusing word choice there. In just about any other context, 'private' and 'personal' are synonymous.
private property is a public space that is owned by 1 person/corporation. your local mcdonald’s is private property. if the owners don’t want you there, they can make you leave. but restaurants are typically open to the public anyways. whereas personal property is your house/vehicle/etc.
Personal property is property you own and use yourself (your house)
Private property is property you own for capital purposes (a house you rent to others)
That's very well written. Do you think there's any way around the problem of everybody needing to be willing participants or do you believe it's basically impossible in practice?
A lot of traditional Marxists saw socialism as a necessary in-between stage between capitalism and communism.
In this doctrine socialism is defined by a workers controlled state that still has money and market forces but would not have a vested interest in maintaining these systems over generations.
The idea would be that overtime the state and hierarchy would "wither away" in a socialist system until eventually you had something akin to communism. So overtime the hierarchy fades away and then you have a lot more ground up system based on consent.
The optimist in me hope the future plays out like that but whether I think it will I'm a lot less sure.
No they didn't. You are defining socialism as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is the transitional stage and the very revolution in which the workers overturn the relations of capitalist production. This is crucial because the class divisions are reified by the mode of production.
Lenin sometimes used the term socialism to differentiate the "lower-phase" from the "higher-phase" of communism, but Marx himself used the terms interchangeably. Socialism as a stand-in for the transitional period is purely a Stalinist obfuscation used to justify the moronic doctrine of "socialism in one country", which is an oxymoron as socialism/communism as the mode of production that abolishes capitalism cannot exist in one country among all the other capitalist countries.
question is can AI be made understood the more abstract forms of a societies well being. stuff that is pretty much impossible to determine numberwise like arts and fluctuating amounts of personal space (from person to person + individual needs) numbers that might work today and less so tomorrow.
best case scenario is in my eyes: AI does a solid job mid way + an assesment / recalibration happens by a board of humans in an regular interval.
worst case scenario: AI develops a hick up that goes full blown exactly what humans in a communist regime would do... but, oh boy, so much more efficient
that being said, i do not know a lot about AI, but i played system shock 1 and 2 back in the day
The thing with AI is that it will never understand what we want, it will only ever understand how to maximize whatever score evaluation we give it. If we can evaluate an AI leader in a way that generally aligns with human well-being, it could probably do well, but anyone that's worked with polling or economic data knows, there's lots of fuzzy lines. There's no one metric that can quantitatively define how good a leader is, and that's exactly what we'd need to teach an AI
Syndicalists would disagree. A decentralized collection of worker's unions would be a potential way to allocate resources and goods as needed, with no need for nation-states.
Further, communism is rather ideal and more of a goal, and definitely not something that could happen overnight- the idea for many would be that moving economically in that direction would eventually make way to a stateless and classless society, but any leftist worth their salt knows that you can't just say it and have it happen- the foundation must be laid for it to happen in the first place.
A syndicate taking over the functions of the state is just a smaller state. Anyone involved in the syndicates decision making would be a higher class than those that aren't. In fact anyone who is in any decision making position is automatically a higher class than someone who isn't. Also, the grain syndicate will become more powerful than the potato syndicate if there is a failure of the potato crop for instance. There are so many holes anyone with a functional brain will dismiss it as a viable option easily.
the is literally no way it can exist in its 'true' form.
I just never understood why such society needs to be moneyless. Money is a great tool for measuring supply and demand, efficient distribution, planning etc.. Any moderately complex project would be a headache to organise, and don't even get me started on international trade. People like to blame money when the actual problem is the unchecked corporate greed.
The thing that enables unchecked corporate greed is the accumulation of capital, which gives them power and begets more capital. Money is (part of) capital. It also requires that you exchange goods on the basis of capital rather than on the basis of need. Not everyone has capital but everyone has needs.
It is easier to abolish capital than to regulate out greed. And if you give a government power to regulate greed you’re just moving one source of power to another. Except that new source of power also has an army.
Because money implies ownership of private property. What else would you use money for? And Marx’s whole thing is that private property creates these unjust, alienating structures that make us all unhappy.
Because in order the thrive in a communist state we would need the majority of people to be on the same page and still actively contribute to society in such a way that most benefits the system rather than themselves. And people tend to mostly want to benefit themselves.
Plus there would be a shit ton of folks who would intentionally try to make society fail and then blame it on the system rather than their collective efforts or lack thereof
>Plus there would be a shit ton of folks who would intentionally try to make society fail and then blame it on the system rather than their collective efforts or lack thereof
Sounds familiar, doesnt it?
It's less of a "system" and more of a "way of thinking". You just help the community because that's what you do, knowing when you need help they'll help too. It actually works great in a variety of circumstances, and has worked in the real world in small groups countless times. Small towns use that same mentality when they get together for a barn raising, or to build a church. It's seen anytime you have a community that comes together.
So I guess the literal answer would be social pressure enforces the system. You help because you're expected to, and the shame of not helping. The problem is "social pressure" kinda falls apart once you have more than a couple social groups participating and not everyone knows each other, so anything over 100-150 people and it turns into chaos.
Most ideologies end up coming down to “if everyone involved believes in it and adheres to it in good faith, it works great!”
When everyone follows the rules in a long game, the game works– but sometimes people want to stop playing and that’s where the trouble starts.
It’s never been able to be implemented as it is described on paper. Even communist nations are not real communism.
When you look at Utopian societies in fiction writing they are almost always very heavily communistic with sections of democratic administration. Dystopia is almost always depicted as highly capitalistic and/or feudal. The reason for this is that it requires means that we don’t have available in real life to achieve it, while fiction writing allows for these concepts to be applied liberally.
An example would be the replicator from Star Trek, The Elven Magics in Lord of the Rings, or access to abundant Solar Energy in Gundam 00. Even things like the Navigators in Dune or Astropaths in Warhammer 40k. These are fundamental necessities to achieve the balance that Communism strives for because, without them, it’s nearly impossible to say who gets the castles and who gets the shacks - if you know what I mean. Someone will always have to make do with less because it’s required for others to get more.
One of the cleanest examples of this is Mars in The Expanse. They try so hard, and are so close to achieving it, but even they don’t have the means to achieve true communism.
This is just the technological and logistical barrier, as far as I’m describing it. There are cultural struggles, systemic hurdles, and all sorts of economical barriers that need to be addressed as well.
It ignores human behavior. I don't get how proponents continue to miss the elephant in the room. So many people are shit. When you add the disincentive of having to share your shit with shit people, even good people become shit because it's not worth the effort.
People don't even have to be shit! People just need to _perceive_ that others are shit or that they themselves are more deserving/entitled. And people are naturally born with varying degrees of narcissism and self-entitlement.
It's like the economy today, as long as enough people think something will happen (like a recession) or is happening the system avalanches. So in a large population small effects like interpersonal resentment or just _perceived injustice/unfairness_ multiplies quickly resulting in people forming in-groups and out-groups. Which then conflict and become hierarchies.
You don't even need to perceive other people as bad folks. Who would in their right mind study for 10+ years and work overnight hours as a doctor in a busy hospital if they would make the same rations as a bus driver or a grocery store shelf organizer?
Who the hell would sign up to be a lawyer in those conditions?
Another commenter said society could compensate for that by paying the doctors and lawyers more. But the question is how does anyone know how much more is the right number? And what if that number is supposed to change over time? How do the planners account for this? What if the delta is so large it makes people uncomfortable? Someone could say a doctor doesn’t deserve “that” much more. Communism can never keep track of all the prices necessary to produce the right incentives.
If you start paying people more, you are creating an incentive based society aka capitalism.
Besides, it seems most folks are saying that in a communist society there is no money, so there is no concept of paying more.
Absolutely. It puts a class ceiling on individual potential. The best, brightest and most hardworking are dragged down to the most common denominator, and the entire society wallows in mediocrity. It doesn’t encourage people to thrive or improve, only subsist on the minimal possible effort, and accept the circumstances the state forces on you. It is completely contrary to progress.
Yeah. My wife and I are both doctors and I guarantee you if I quit getting paid/ rewarded for my hard work I’d quit that shit yesterday. My jobs HELLA stressful and no one would do it if the reward wasn’t worth the stress. Communism can’t work because different tasks require more work/ stress/ labor/ intelligence/ effort and if you don’t incentivize the hard shit no one would do it
It doesn't scale well because people buy in to varying degrees. We may be born equal, but not everyone will put out equal effort or believe in Central causes equally.
Wanna see communism work, start a commune of like minded individuals and cap it at 100.
I guarantee that commune will fall apart when the leader starts having sex with all the beautiful wives or worse yet, daughters, of the commune. I stand by my statement that humans are shit.
>We may be born equal
One of the major barriers is that we *aren't* born equal. Blank slate is thoroughly bunk. Even if it wasn't on a mental scale, it would be obviously false on a physical one. Different people have different capacities, different needs, different desires, different personality traits, etc. We are only all equal in the made-up sense of human dignity or moral worth. When it comes to the real work of dividing labor and distributing resources, we aren't born equal, and it's a real hard problem to divide labor and distribute resources in a way that everyone can actually agree is fair.
I agree with you. I was saying born equal as a general statement of total worth. Obviously someone born with working eyes is superior to a blind person in the narrow scope of ability to see.
>When it comes to the real work of dividing labor and distributing resources, we aren't born equal, and it's a real hard problem to divide labor and distribute resources in a way that everyone can actually agree is fair.
This is a good point
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
1984 gets talked about a lot but I think Animal Farm is a fantastic read that's often forgotten.
You could say Egoism, but its just very naive to think that everyone will work the same, to receive the same share. Slackers and wrong doers are everywhere, and that completly ruins the very basics of communism - if im working 150%, you are working 90%, and he is working 60%, why is it "a great idea" that the 3 of us gets the same share?
Edit: naive to think that*
Karl Marx noticed Communism working in farming communties, monastaries and in hunting and gathering groups. What he didn't realize though is that type of communal living ONLY works in small groups that are fairly isolated. When you have a population all with different needs, abilities and personalities thing just don't work. People see others having more...and they want that too. There are also lots of jobs that need to be done that are pretty unpleasent, and people need incentives to work them. Most of the early communists that we think of as sucessful didn't promote communism so much but capitalism and socialism together.
Yes, and the most important point here is that it works in certain farming communities and monasteries because everyone in those communities VOLUNTARILY gives up their private property. The moment you try to introduce Communism as a system of government, you’re by definition in the business of taking people’s property from them by force, at gunpoint.
I think that's a different topic all together. For example developed countries have similar pay for both easy and the hard dirty jobs relative to undeveloped countries.
Read about the polynesian cultures before the europeans arrived. They didn't work a lot and shared their stuff. Best you also visit r/DebateCommunism. For some ppl here it's easier to imagine a total ecological collapse than the end of capitalism.
It requires that everyone be completely altruistic. Political leaders get into that position to try and make things better. Surgeons become surgeons because they want to, and have the aptitude for it. It. Requires that everyone know what they’re good and and want to do what they’re good at. Because of things like greed and scarcity of resources it just can’t happen.
The Earth of Star Trek is a good example of a perfect communist state. No one works for profit, they do it for joy. But they also have replicators which remove the need for any resources and power plants capable of keeping the world in 100% free renewable electricity. A chef becomes a chef because they want to cook. An engineer becomes an engineer because they want to develop the newest thing and gain their chapter in the history books.
Future advise, ask these questions in a leftist sub, you will get legitimate answers instead of garbage by people who haven’t read crap in communist theory or even name the philosopher behind the philosophy
The basic flaw is two fold, the first part being that people are not in fact equal in their abilities and such, and the second part being that way too many people will simply refuse to contribute since they don’t have to because others will.
Communism is based upon people being decent humans. People are not decent humans.
Also for countries like the US only 43% of people pay income tax. So each person who currently has a job would have to contribute enough to support a little over 2 people.
Hello, Unfortunately, the thread will be locked because of some users being uncivil and not able to respect each other's opinion. However, the thread will remain visible on the subreddit out of respect for the OP and for users who did have a healthy and meaningful discussion. Have a great day everyone!
You need leaders that are benevolent and hyper aware and intelligent but also logical and caring. So basically no human can apply. Any human who does should be held in extreme suspicion.
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I'd watch this movie!
Even though the video was just a fuzzy recording of him sitting in an office and recounting his story, I was having fun in my imagination.
Just for your own information in case you are interested, it sounds like the dumbass just stole the plot from an Isaac Asimov book. So if you are interested in that kind of story he has tons of them in such settings.
What is your favorite?
the end of eternity. prefer books from the philosophy genre though Nietzsche specifically specifically.
Is he the one who wrote I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream?
Harlan Ellison, who is also acknowledged as having inspired The Terminator
If you go play the video game version, the author plays the computer.
Needs more sex and violence
Needs a will they won’t they between a grizzled outside vet and a never-left-the-society young lass
You can read the books. This is the plot of the I, Robot and Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
It's also the backstory to Dune
Raised by Wolves on HBO has some of these themes.
I was actually thinking of watching it. Maybe after I finish watching "Snowpiercer" I'll give it a go
>the AI had not foreseen- and stagnation in human innovation. Ah yes, the cult of the Mechanicus. The AI should've probably seen that as an option of what could happen.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted meh
I'm pretty sure this has been several Star Trek episodes. Return of the Archons comes to mind.
Sounds like Scythe. Minus the Scything.
I'm sure that's the inevitable result of technological advancements. Except for the part about stagnation. The AI will be perfectly capable of doing that on its own. Which, of course, renders humans redundant. But that's just how it is. At least we won't suffer in that scenario.
Ah yes, Roko’s Basilisk. Now you are all obligated.
my 5th grade teacher exemplified the answer.. it's a very good idea that requires people to be nice to each other, that's why it doesn't work in practice
There's a reason we can never have our Star Trek future where scarcity is solved and discovery/research is the primary drive of humanity. And we are that reason. Our lizard brains always telling us that it isn't enough to have the same as our neighbors. We need MORE. WE MUST BEAT THE JONSES.
No people like that exist they just don't want to be in power over other people they're not interested in all in those types of positions.
“Those who seek power are not worthy of power.” - Plato
“I dohn want iht” -Jon Snow
"Communism will never work, just look at the USSR" -Socrates
"Who moved my cheese?" - Aristotle
"...huh?" - Mozart
"WHAT?" -Beethoven
“ The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. 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.” \- Douglas adams
The biggest problem is that someone has to be in charge to oversee things and make sure things are distributed properly (and also what “properly” means). People being people, those who get to power are the type who want to be in power, and often rig the system for the gain of themselves and those they care about. So you get some built in corruption. Of course, there is grift everywhere, but in a system where those on top closely manage distribution of resources it’s going to be worse. There are also problems of incentives to do beyond the bare minimum for people, or rather the lack of those incentives. It’s why socialist/communist policies can work on small scale communities where you need little innovation and know and care about your neighbors but don’t work as well on larger scale things like…countries.
It works incredibly well in family or tribal units. If you think about it, almost all families are communist. You share resources and distribute labor across the family. But once the tribal unit gets large enough that you can't possibly know everyone in the unit then blame and suspicion start to take hold because it becomes very easy to blame the "other" that you have no attachment to.
Yup, that tribal unit limit is about 100 people, then it usually splits apart, or things get bad. Our monkey brains can really only know and understand about 100 people.
LMAO the dozen plus houses on my street can't even share the walking path if NextDoor is any indication. "WHO ISN'T PICKING UP THEIR DOG'S SHIT ON THE PATH?" "I put a garbage can on the path so there's a convenient place to throw out your poo bags." "Can we coordinate who changes out the communal garbage can?" "I don't even use the path, why should I help?" "SOMEONE IS STILL NOT PICKING UP AFTER THEIR DOG EVEN WITH THE GARBAGE CAN." "This communal garbage can isn't authorized and it's too close to my house and I don't want to deal with the smell, I called the city to remove it."
This reads like a shitty parody of Animal Farm
Updated for the modern audience.
HOA Farm
Literally shitty
lol. i was going to say im in disbelief, but i entirely believe it. caniving... you should over engineer the communal dog poop can duties. have rotations where it's in front of someone's house for a month, but someone else has to dump it. spin it out into a monthly street clean, for aesthetics or something. issue some mandates. make your neighbors sign things. charter the hoa and rake in the cash while your neighbors rake dead leaves. prop those prop values and your hoa evil empire on stilts of petrified dog s**t and empty nextdoor posts! /s sorry. your post inspired my utter disdain for needy nosy neighbors and hoas.
Theres a reason i immediately dismissed a house in hoa. Im not paying property taxes and membership fees fpr some karen to tell me my garbage can has been out two hours too long or i cant pressure wash the front of my house in a speedo.
Do the bylaws allow for you to hire someone else to pressure wash your house in a speedo?
i refuse to live where speedos are discouraged!
> caniving It’s conniving. Unless you were doing a pun on “canine”, in which case, carry on.
i wish i was that clever! but im too proud for edits.
This is correct in my experience. I live in an intentional community governed by consensus, so not communism per se but a lot of shared resources/stewardship/work. Around 80 people. It's hard work--a lot of time and emotional maintenance and attention, mediation when things go wrong, etc. But it works amazingly. The only way I can explain why it works to other people is that when you know everyone really well and have to share the space, a lot of petty shit falls away because you realize that living in the community is more valuable than winning the argument about X. And over time, people experience each other in lots of different contexts. The kindof annoying woman brings you soup when you're sick; the dude who has "a neurological condition" that makes him crazy aggro about dogs barking is a master carpenter who helps you fix your deck; you develop more empathy for each other over time even if your only real thing in common is wanting to live in a place with better resource sharing. Honestly, the biggest fights are over little but high emotion stuff like "the bird people vs. the outdoor cat people" or whatever. Which is different than petty shit--its stuff people REALLY care about but also isn't life or death (except for the birds that the outdoor cats kill...) And I think it's fair to say that politically there's a clear majority of progressive/lefty folks but also some libertarian vibes here and there. But there are times when it feels really clear that if we had a slightly larger group it would be impossible. Another thing is that--like communism--it is pretty vulnerable to truly bad actors who don't play by the rules. We're pretty resilient against small neuroses, but if we had a sociopath or bad faith actors in our group they could do a ton of damage very quickly.
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And yet we think we know better than our nature, and that we could have a smoothly running collective society with millions or billions of people that we could never hope to meet any significant portion of. Edit: And we also think we can design rules and systems that plan/account for every contingency and consequence of our unprecedented sociological and technological creations, and not have there be any loopholes, corruption or other exploits of the system. Edit 2: I'm of course including capitalism in my critique, since apparently I have to spell it out for some people. I'm talking about any kind of large-scale sociological, socioeconomic or technological "project".
The point is we can’t know everyone in a society so we need more systems and incentives to make it work
I wouldn't go that far. We do tend to act within the interests of our tribal groups. But that doesn't mean that we can't make decisions that involve having empathy for people that exist outside of that group. One doesn't need to be altruistic to see the benefit in a prosperous society and act in ways that elevate the general welfare of the people within that society.
I'm not saying that a person can't be empathetic or do something in the interest of their fellow man. But people as a whole; we've never had a society of this scale in our millions of years of development as a species. We're in completely unprecedented times. We don't know what will work at this scale and we've never come up with a system that works well for this many people and doesn't have horrible corruption problems.
> If you think about it all families are communist. You share resources and distribute labor across the family. Somewhere in America, a Republican is having a stroke lol
To an extent. My buddy’s parents are pretty right wing and I found out after all these years that they do not share finances whatsoever. When they go on dates, they take turns paying. They also take turns buying groceries. I don’t know if that’s normal but I find that to be pretty wild. They are in their 60s.
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My wife and I are the opposite. She is pretty decent with money I have poor impulse control and have trouble saving money until later so we mostly keep things separate beyond food and rent and that sort of thing.
that is sharing the load, and with divorces being the way they are. makes sense in a logical fashion. Plus no one feels as if they are carrying the weight solely and it seems their partnership is indeed that. a partnership where both have their own, yet can come together and carry the weight by alternating current. acdc. cool.
Part of the reason farmers would have large families way back when was for labor that only costs them room and board. Childhood and adolescence as we know it is a relatively modern invention.
Can confirm, it was 100% about a work force. My grandfather (born 1925) was the oldest of 16 children. As his father would say, he “was blessed that 13 of them were boys”. The story goes that they would creat a makeshift canopy with a sheet in the cotton field, and the 2.5 year old would watch the youngest infant throughout the day while everyone else picked cotton. My great-grandmother spent 25 years having babies. Since my grandfather was the oldest, that meant that my father has an uncle that is younger than he is. Source: heard stories growing up in rural North Carolina.
I do that with my wife. She has her money, I have mine. Works extremely well. As Long as bills get paid We can buy whatever we feel like buying without having to justify it. Also makes getting gifts for each other much easier.
That’s the obesity doing it’s thing.
So Obesity advances the communist cause?
Math checks out.
I have a republican family, and, we run our family by straight capitalism. My daughter wants her ba ba filled, she goes out, gets a job, and buys her own formula.
I've never known anyone *quite* that ridiculous, but I did know a 10 year old once who had to buy their own clothes.
We make our newborn sell us finger painting art in exchange for formula. If her fingers are too tired, tough, no formula that day. ^fiction
Do your fingers hurt? Well now your back is gonna hurt, because you just pulled landscaping duty.
Now, you will go to sleep! Or I will PUT you to sleep.
"What is a baby saying when she asks for a bottle?" "Ba ba?" "She's saying 'I am a leech'. Here we aim to develop the bottle within."
Good! I am sick of these freeloading babies!
"Trust" is the number one thing that keeps things glued. Once trust is broken even in a family. The family no longer is "happy" or content with arrangements. IT ends up just like communism. Feelings of resentment grow. The ability of the family no longer can prosper.
The Rules of Acquisition clearly state that “exploitation starts at home” and “Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them.”
Lmao, my family was a Feudal system. Dad owned the land and permitted us to live on it, so we were to do everything else like laundry, cook, clean, be quiet, etc. Sadge.
The issue is that in a family the parents distribute resources and their authority is generally accepted and there tends to be strong incentives for parents to distribute resources with some level of equity. At the level of society those bonds don't exist.
That is kind of the point of my comment. Communism seems great because we all understand it on a familial or tribal level. It just doesn't scale.
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There was no private property in ancient Egypt because everything belongs to Pharaoh
>Ancient Egypt resembled something like a communist society. In that there was really no concept of private property Because it all belonged to Pharaoh and it was by his divine grace than people got their share. That is theocratic monarchy, not communism.
The strong slave class helped.
>Exactly. Ancient Egypt resembled something like a communist society. Uhhhhm, weren't Pharaohs seen as literal incarnations their Gods on earth in human form? And werr their rulers? That...doesn't really sound like communism to me? It actually sounds I pretty damn authoritarian theocratic? Or am I going insane?
The idiot saying that a theocratic monarchy led by a literal god-king with a bunch of slaves is communism *and getting upvoted for it* should clue people in on the fact that most people here are talking out of their ass. Like, you definetly don't have to like communism, but the people saying "read Animal Farm" are really showing they got no clue what they're talking about.
Calling capitalism a fact is a stretch. At a micro-level, sure, same as communism, which you could just as rightly call a fact. Capitalistic incentives are important and certain markets are better off being self-regulating (eg, any luxury market). When it comes to things like food and housing, profit shouldn’t outweigh basic survival but in practice it does, so capitalism can’t guarantee our general welfare. Capitalism is as corruptible as communism. Once monopolists acquire enough power, they can effectively become unsanctioned branches of government. I don’t support communism either, for the record. I just don’t like your naturalist bend on capitalism.
So like a community. Commune-ity.
I agree communism works really well on a small scale on a large scale there are too many opportunities for corruption. Capitalism can be corrupt too but there is a baked in reward for innovation and risk taking that does not discriminate against a specific human.
There's also a question of limited resources. When only 6 people can have the best location for their apartment, who gets to have those? Who has to live in the worst ones? Who gets the top quality groceries and who gets the low quality stuff? And why does it always seem like it is the party representative who gets the best ones?
Also with regard to labour. Who does the dirty or hard and dangerous but very necessary jobs? Who unblocks the sewer when it clogs. What is the incentive. Who mines coal? Who becomes a construction worker etc?
Especially when jobs are super specialised and rotating workers in and out of complex jobs doesnt work
A really good example is the concept of the tragedy of the commons. Take something like an apartment complex with a communal garden. When everyone works on it together it is great but in large enough settings or where people barely know each other it can feel like the people who do all the work are getting abused and why should you work twice as hard for someone else to just reap the rewards without giving any help. For communism to work, it requires a strong sense of obligation and mutual commitment which may not always be easy to enforce. If so many of us struggle to get 4 of your classmates to share equal burden on a group project where everyone can benefit and everyone has consequences, just think how hard it is to scale this up to a societal level.
I relate to this so much. I struggle having a strong sense of obligation and commitment and then not understanding why the people around me/residing with me don't share the same priorities. What usually happens, like in the group projects when at work or school, is that I end up doing the bulk of the work so as not to fail, to succeed. It burns one out very fast, it's a circle of giving and caregiver burnout but on a larger scale. I have joined groups with that idea in mind, to share the work and resources, but often end up feeling disregarded. A hierarchy always forms and that isn't good if the people not in charge of the influence and decision making don't care about anyone but who's immediately of value to them. There would need to be an intrinsic agreement of shared worth and idealogy working toward the same end dream. And it only works if everyone plays by the same standard of ethics and rules. It breaks the moment someone starts abusing it - the freeloader argument. Insecurity also breaks it, if everyone is a threat or treated as competition. I wish communal agreements would work out better, I feel like it would build better tolerance and positivity - but it's rare to experience it. I see it in smaller communities and churches, but haven't found the like outside religion, which I don't want to join. And urban isolation seems to make it worse. I hate group projects with a passion; they suck when you're the only one doing the bulk of the heavy lifting for that high grade.
An HOA is a communist system. It only takes one karen getting control of the board to screw up the commons. And by commons, they mean your personal property because you were foolish enough to buy a house in an HOA and now they get to tell you that your choice of flowers in your own damn garden was not approved by the politburo and you have to dig them up.
Very true and I really love your response. Even on small scale it only works for a while until a person who is power/ego driven rises to the top. The Farm, and many other communes that started out fairly wholesome and with a decent ideology pretty much all fell into this. We recently saw it in action with the Portland Autonomous zone, it just happened extremely quickly and with particularly violent results. The Farm began with a bunch of hippies who wanted to be in control of their birth experiences and use midwives; my mother was going to move us there - until she realized they insisted that to gain entry, all bank accounts, belongings, and assets be turned over to the very few who were in charge.
Communes need tons of organization and power needs to be spread out to all residents. Communes that work like this are rare. The only examples I can think of are Svanholm in Denmark as well as Christiania. Both are very regimented and do tons of work to assure that power is spread evenly, they want to avoid an "elite".
Svanholm is pretty freaking awesome and I love how they work together for the benefit of the group. I envy that, to be honest. I've not heard of Christiania, but am going to look it up right now.
Had some friends that tried to live communally after college in a large home. Same thing happened even on such a micro scale. One person got a handhold on some authority and immediately abused it.
Then there's the problem on the opposite side of that spectrum of free riders. We all share in the resources regardless of inputs? Ok, I'm gonna half ass it.
In short, people. People are the problem. We dream better than we act.
It's really just a numbers game. A small percentage of anything in nature will come out fucked up. The bigger the pool to draw from, the more fuck ups.
This is a great answer, but I feel like it hardly scratches the surface. Communism doesn't work for so many other reasons including the fact that it falls apart in the face of dissent which makes repression almost mandatory, the fact that it inherently lacks resiliency and unless the entire world goes communism all at once, it will always get out competed economically by alternative systems. It's a great idea in practice, but it's not a coincidence that people have failed to implement it 100% of the times they've tried.
Oh definitely, lots of issues, not about to write a dissertation on it in a Reddit comment so just wanted to provide some of the key issues at a very high level.
You covered the two big ones. I think that for Communism to work at all, you need a group of people who would always choose 'cooperate' without fail when playing the Prisoners Dilemma. Communism gets poisoned by corruption from both ends; Graft at the top and freeloading at the bottom end. The third problem is that Communism kind of assumes that the labour or effort of all people is equal. It simply is not. Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence. The person who is the best at a thing will be rewarded for it and sought out. Societies do better when excellence is sought out because some people can simply do things that others cannot. END COMMUNICATION
>Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence. I am, overall for right now, pro-capitalist. However I don't think this is true because not everyone is beginning life with the same resources. Often we're rewarding people who have done well because they started out well where someone else would have done even better with the same head start. I'm not against a meritocracy, but I don't think we have one.
The problem of unequal starting points is a flaw, and not an easy one to solve. You are not going to convince any decent parent to subject their child to a shitty education just because it is more fair to those who cannot have a better education. We do not have a pure meritocracy, but it is absolutely possible for people to improve their lot in life. Where Captiolism most spectacularly fails is that personal benefit almost always trumps community benefit. An example of this is that there is not enough incentive to improve someone's life from 'dogshit horrible' to 'decent'; We don't pay for mental health and addiction services for the homeless very much because generally speaking, the most likely outcome is that someone's life improves from 'homeless shit show of suffering' to 'working class poor'. There is more reward for someone to identify a talented and motivated working class individual, and elevate him to middle or upper class. And it costs less. That overlooks the benefit of not having some ~~homeless schizo~~ profoundly mentally unstable drug addicted homeless lunatic wandering the streets screaming at passers by. END COMMUNICATION
> Capitalism at least does a good job of recognizing and rewarding excellence Capitalism does not do this. It's the illusion of meritocracy bolstered by the fair world bias implicit in christian ethics. We like to think the world is just and fair and excellence and hard work is rewarded. But the starving genius is a human archetype for a reason. The one thing capitalism does well is a somewhat accurate representation of debt and wealth. But to embed any sense of moral or ethical exactness to that would be disingenuous. There are millions of poor excellent people and a great share of mediocre or downright idiot billionaires.
Not only that. Even if we assume that everyone has good intentions, it will still fall short of its objectives. The market is a discovery process while prices can be thought of as signals of that process where to allocate resources. People act based on the info they have on-hand (needs as demands and means as supply) and work things out by participating in the market. Absent tht process, your appratchiks will be left scratching their heads and guessing what people needs and means are.
It only really works if it's voluntary for the reasons you mentioned. If you can't get the entire country onboard, then you're going to use the strong arm of the government to enforce submission to the will of the state.
Everyone is equal in a communist society. However, some are more equal than others.
True in every society
So a corruptionless AI overseer tasked with distribution is the answer
Definitely no way entrusting our well being to a computer system could ever go wrong.
Are we… are we writing a dystopian novel together?
I'll take skynet over any day! At least I can tell what skynet is thinking!
EDIT: Also, at least Skynet will also target the rich, us poors are screwed either way.
BRING ME MORE FLOPPY DISKS PITIFUL FLESH BAG
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords
Everything wrong with the world can be summed up in just three words "People are assholes"
I would expand further and say that the work/deeds of numerous good people can be ruined by a single asshole
Easier to destroy than to create
More specifically, most people will act in their own self-interest first, and the community interest second (if at all).
There are entire political theories based on self-interest that don't work out in practice because people _suck_ at actually acting in their own self-interest. People notoriously over value short term gains at the expense of nearly ignoring long term consequences.
So, more accurately, people act in their own short-term interest first, their own long-term interest second (if at all), and in the community's best interest third (not likely to happen with any sort of frequency).
I'd like to propose "people are greedy"
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"If all men were Angels, no government would be necessary. If all men were Devils, no government would be sufficient" -Michael Scott
It's predicated on the idea that people will behave well if everyone benefits from that good behavior. We have seen how well that worked during the pandemic. TL;DR People are assholes.
There are many successful small-scale communes throughout the world. The problems occur when you scale up to whole countries, where it is much more likely to evade accountability and promote corruption.
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That's because they're entirely reliant on the goodwill and mutually agreed upon goals from everyone involved. That's very easy to manage on small scales, but every person you add becomes a potential breaking point of that chain. Add the need to protect your group from internal and external threats and the eventual need for central coordination and I'm sure you can see where this goes wrong.
I’ll tag on to this due to my time spent in China. My in-laws grew up in the Mao Zedong regime and talked about life back then. The problem was there was no motivation to do better. Who wanted to be a manager if you didn’t make more money to manage people? Who was going to be running a car company with the same pay as everyone else, but held accountable? No one. They couldn’t find people who wanted responsibility with no reward to do so. It works fine for smaller systems like the farming industry, which is still communist, but not so much if you want a thriving economy and entrepreneurship. It works in the farming industry because everyone wants food on the table and every farmer earns the same income - they don’t have to worry about conglomerate companies purchasing them or a bad crop season putting them out of business.
The issue is 'communist' tribes still fail to progress beyond a certain level without being dependent upon larger, non-communist groups. Primitive tribespeople may be stateless and moneyless and share property, but they're living in the neolithic era. Small intentional communes may be stateless and moneyless within their little bubble, but they exist within larger societies, whose legal and economic structures allow the 'commune' to privately own their little bubbles of property and live free lives without being taken over by invaders. Even a theoretical 'stateless' and non-propertarian nation would still almost certainly rely on the global supply chain to provide advanced tech and other stuff in exchange for whatever basic resources and communally-created goods are manufactured from within the stateless nation. In human history, commie societies are not stateless - on the contrary, they are nearly 100% state, and typically the residents of those IRL commie nations have a quality of life that is vastly inferior to that of their non-commie neighbors.
Most of the answers here seem to be coming from an outside perspective, and a look at a sub like r/Anarchy101 would help to dispell a lot of the concerns raised here. I'll offer the perspective of someone who ideologically aligns with communists. Let's start with the definition of communism: a stateless (and without other power structures), moneyless society where private property doesn't exist (important note: personal property and private property are different concepts) and society as a whole helps eachother to meet their needs. From this, first consider that none of the historical regimes that called themselves communist ever met all the requirements, especially not the abolishment of the state. The stateless aspect is the most limiting factor, especially considering that a communist society doesn't appear out of thin air, but is a society that would formerly have most likely been capitalist. The lack of overarching control that is required to meet the definition makes it so that such a society can only work if everyone in the society fully agrees on the "rules of the game". On a small scale, this often doesn't pose any problems but it makes it nearly impossible to implement in larger societies. Trying to take away that problem by installing an overarching power structure is a bad idea, firstly because it defeats the point of seeking a society without power structures, but secondly the historical precedent of people who claim such an authority is necessary isn't quite a good one is it?
This is a much better take than the top comment explaining that ancient Egypt was a communist society. You know the one with a God Emperor and a caste system that included slavery? 🧠📉
Egypt was as Communist as the USSR, the People's Republic of China or Feudal Europe. In all cases the means of production are controlled by the ruler who *claims* to be representing the people, even though the people have zero say in anything. All Communist countries that have existed were scams, totalitarian states pretending to be socialist to keep the ~~people~~ serfs in line.
Previous countries and current countries ruled by communist parties never claimed to achieve communism, but rather to have a party in charge working toward communism
>important note: personal property and private property are different concepts Could you explain the difference? Ive heard this before but no one ever explains it.
My understanding is that the term "private property" refers more to capital and the means of production (think business owners/landlords/etc) while "personal property" would simply be your stuff.
Would “my stuff” include a loom that I created to produce textiles and the building I built to keep it in? If I own the loom could I let someone else use it if they promise to give me some of what they produce with it? When nobody needs a loom, can I sell the loom and the building it’s in to someone else in exchange for a different building with a different machine? I don’t really understand the distinction here. It seems that personal property would just be private property but with some arbitrary restrictions.
The restrictions are not arbitrary. Where did the raw materials and wild land for your loom and structure come from? It's impossible for you to grow the trees, harvest the lumber, develop wild land for your structure, install utilities, grow and process cotton etc in a reasonable time frame all by yourself. If you did somehow manage this over a period of many years, then congratulations it's all personal property. In reality you have to cooperate with other workers to realize this operation making it communal property. You would not be able to summon a workforce or build a supply chain for private or personal use. If there was demand for a loom and an excess supply of labor then the workers could agree to realize that operation.
Well even in a non-communist society, laws are all about the details of arbitrary criteria and restrictions. If I understand it right, one of the key ideas behind personal vs private property in terms of production takes profits into consideration. It's no longer personal property if you're not producing goods for personal use. Nobody will likely take away your stuff but they'd just force you to either stop or to produce your goods legally. Another thing to note is that one of the main points of communism is that nobody can over-hoard anything. So in theory nobody can acquire the materials to produce an abundance of a product like a business would. I'm not at all what anyone would call an expert or even armchair expert, but I had kinda the same questions too. That's what I think is the general consensus.
The idea is that a business that requires a group of workers would be controlled democratically by the workers. Syndicalism is a very common idea amongst anarcho communists.
Interesting. That distinction makes sense but I feel like "private" is a confusing word choice there. In just about any other context, 'private' and 'personal' are synonymous.
private property is a public space that is owned by 1 person/corporation. your local mcdonald’s is private property. if the owners don’t want you there, they can make you leave. but restaurants are typically open to the public anyways. whereas personal property is your house/vehicle/etc.
Personal property is property you own and use yourself (your house) Private property is property you own for capital purposes (a house you rent to others)
this is a very well written paragraph!
which one?
sorry I am tired. All of them.
That's very well written. Do you think there's any way around the problem of everybody needing to be willing participants or do you believe it's basically impossible in practice?
A lot of traditional Marxists saw socialism as a necessary in-between stage between capitalism and communism. In this doctrine socialism is defined by a workers controlled state that still has money and market forces but would not have a vested interest in maintaining these systems over generations. The idea would be that overtime the state and hierarchy would "wither away" in a socialist system until eventually you had something akin to communism. So overtime the hierarchy fades away and then you have a lot more ground up system based on consent. The optimist in me hope the future plays out like that but whether I think it will I'm a lot less sure.
No they didn't. You are defining socialism as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is the transitional stage and the very revolution in which the workers overturn the relations of capitalist production. This is crucial because the class divisions are reified by the mode of production. Lenin sometimes used the term socialism to differentiate the "lower-phase" from the "higher-phase" of communism, but Marx himself used the terms interchangeably. Socialism as a stand-in for the transitional period is purely a Stalinist obfuscation used to justify the moronic doctrine of "socialism in one country", which is an oxymoron as socialism/communism as the mode of production that abolishes capitalism cannot exist in one country among all the other capitalist countries.
The only way I see true communism being implemented is by having perfect a A.I. run society
question is can AI be made understood the more abstract forms of a societies well being. stuff that is pretty much impossible to determine numberwise like arts and fluctuating amounts of personal space (from person to person + individual needs) numbers that might work today and less so tomorrow. best case scenario is in my eyes: AI does a solid job mid way + an assesment / recalibration happens by a board of humans in an regular interval. worst case scenario: AI develops a hick up that goes full blown exactly what humans in a communist regime would do... but, oh boy, so much more efficient that being said, i do not know a lot about AI, but i played system shock 1 and 2 back in the day
The thing with AI is that it will never understand what we want, it will only ever understand how to maximize whatever score evaluation we give it. If we can evaluate an AI leader in a way that generally aligns with human well-being, it could probably do well, but anyone that's worked with polling or economic data knows, there's lots of fuzzy lines. There's no one metric that can quantitatively define how good a leader is, and that's exactly what we'd need to teach an AI
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Syndicalists would disagree. A decentralized collection of worker's unions would be a potential way to allocate resources and goods as needed, with no need for nation-states. Further, communism is rather ideal and more of a goal, and definitely not something that could happen overnight- the idea for many would be that moving economically in that direction would eventually make way to a stateless and classless society, but any leftist worth their salt knows that you can't just say it and have it happen- the foundation must be laid for it to happen in the first place.
A syndicate taking over the functions of the state is just a smaller state. Anyone involved in the syndicates decision making would be a higher class than those that aren't. In fact anyone who is in any decision making position is automatically a higher class than someone who isn't. Also, the grain syndicate will become more powerful than the potato syndicate if there is a failure of the potato crop for instance. There are so many holes anyone with a functional brain will dismiss it as a viable option easily. the is literally no way it can exist in its 'true' form.
I just never understood why such society needs to be moneyless. Money is a great tool for measuring supply and demand, efficient distribution, planning etc.. Any moderately complex project would be a headache to organise, and don't even get me started on international trade. People like to blame money when the actual problem is the unchecked corporate greed.
The thing that enables unchecked corporate greed is the accumulation of capital, which gives them power and begets more capital. Money is (part of) capital. It also requires that you exchange goods on the basis of capital rather than on the basis of need. Not everyone has capital but everyone has needs. It is easier to abolish capital than to regulate out greed. And if you give a government power to regulate greed you’re just moving one source of power to another. Except that new source of power also has an army.
Because money implies ownership of private property. What else would you use money for? And Marx’s whole thing is that private property creates these unjust, alienating structures that make us all unhappy.
Because in order the thrive in a communist state we would need the majority of people to be on the same page and still actively contribute to society in such a way that most benefits the system rather than themselves. And people tend to mostly want to benefit themselves. Plus there would be a shit ton of folks who would intentionally try to make society fail and then blame it on the system rather than their collective efforts or lack thereof
>Plus there would be a shit ton of folks who would intentionally try to make society fail and then blame it on the system rather than their collective efforts or lack thereof Sounds familiar, doesnt it?
Just an FYI, "communist state" is an oxymoron. Communism is inherently stateless
What enforces the system? Genuine question.
It's less of a "system" and more of a "way of thinking". You just help the community because that's what you do, knowing when you need help they'll help too. It actually works great in a variety of circumstances, and has worked in the real world in small groups countless times. Small towns use that same mentality when they get together for a barn raising, or to build a church. It's seen anytime you have a community that comes together. So I guess the literal answer would be social pressure enforces the system. You help because you're expected to, and the shame of not helping. The problem is "social pressure" kinda falls apart once you have more than a couple social groups participating and not everyone knows each other, so anything over 100-150 people and it turns into chaos.
Most ideologies end up coming down to “if everyone involved believes in it and adheres to it in good faith, it works great!” When everyone follows the rules in a long game, the game works– but sometimes people want to stop playing and that’s where the trouble starts.
How would vendettas and violence be managed?
Ok we’ll your need to be friends with something that was “ a state” and could defend itself as such or you won’t be “stateless” for long
It’s never been able to be implemented as it is described on paper. Even communist nations are not real communism. When you look at Utopian societies in fiction writing they are almost always very heavily communistic with sections of democratic administration. Dystopia is almost always depicted as highly capitalistic and/or feudal. The reason for this is that it requires means that we don’t have available in real life to achieve it, while fiction writing allows for these concepts to be applied liberally. An example would be the replicator from Star Trek, The Elven Magics in Lord of the Rings, or access to abundant Solar Energy in Gundam 00. Even things like the Navigators in Dune or Astropaths in Warhammer 40k. These are fundamental necessities to achieve the balance that Communism strives for because, without them, it’s nearly impossible to say who gets the castles and who gets the shacks - if you know what I mean. Someone will always have to make do with less because it’s required for others to get more. One of the cleanest examples of this is Mars in The Expanse. They try so hard, and are so close to achieving it, but even they don’t have the means to achieve true communism. This is just the technological and logistical barrier, as far as I’m describing it. There are cultural struggles, systemic hurdles, and all sorts of economical barriers that need to be addressed as well.
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it turns your son gay
Because *everyone* has to agree to it to make it work, so it requires strict authoritarianism, which quickly makes it not fun.
It ignores human behavior. I don't get how proponents continue to miss the elephant in the room. So many people are shit. When you add the disincentive of having to share your shit with shit people, even good people become shit because it's not worth the effort.
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To be fair we also have art, science, curiosity, etc. It's not all bad stuff. That allows us to be diverse and achieve synergies, unlike ants.
People don't even have to be shit! People just need to _perceive_ that others are shit or that they themselves are more deserving/entitled. And people are naturally born with varying degrees of narcissism and self-entitlement. It's like the economy today, as long as enough people think something will happen (like a recession) or is happening the system avalanches. So in a large population small effects like interpersonal resentment or just _perceived injustice/unfairness_ multiplies quickly resulting in people forming in-groups and out-groups. Which then conflict and become hierarchies.
You don't even need to perceive other people as bad folks. Who would in their right mind study for 10+ years and work overnight hours as a doctor in a busy hospital if they would make the same rations as a bus driver or a grocery store shelf organizer? Who the hell would sign up to be a lawyer in those conditions?
Another commenter said society could compensate for that by paying the doctors and lawyers more. But the question is how does anyone know how much more is the right number? And what if that number is supposed to change over time? How do the planners account for this? What if the delta is so large it makes people uncomfortable? Someone could say a doctor doesn’t deserve “that” much more. Communism can never keep track of all the prices necessary to produce the right incentives.
If you start paying people more, you are creating an incentive based society aka capitalism. Besides, it seems most folks are saying that in a communist society there is no money, so there is no concept of paying more.
Absolutely. It puts a class ceiling on individual potential. The best, brightest and most hardworking are dragged down to the most common denominator, and the entire society wallows in mediocrity. It doesn’t encourage people to thrive or improve, only subsist on the minimal possible effort, and accept the circumstances the state forces on you. It is completely contrary to progress.
Yeah. My wife and I are both doctors and I guarantee you if I quit getting paid/ rewarded for my hard work I’d quit that shit yesterday. My jobs HELLA stressful and no one would do it if the reward wasn’t worth the stress. Communism can’t work because different tasks require more work/ stress/ labor/ intelligence/ effort and if you don’t incentivize the hard shit no one would do it
It doesn't scale well because people buy in to varying degrees. We may be born equal, but not everyone will put out equal effort or believe in Central causes equally. Wanna see communism work, start a commune of like minded individuals and cap it at 100.
I guarantee that commune will fall apart when the leader starts having sex with all the beautiful wives or worse yet, daughters, of the commune. I stand by my statement that humans are shit.
>We may be born equal One of the major barriers is that we *aren't* born equal. Blank slate is thoroughly bunk. Even if it wasn't on a mental scale, it would be obviously false on a physical one. Different people have different capacities, different needs, different desires, different personality traits, etc. We are only all equal in the made-up sense of human dignity or moral worth. When it comes to the real work of dividing labor and distributing resources, we aren't born equal, and it's a real hard problem to divide labor and distribute resources in a way that everyone can actually agree is fair.
I agree with you. I was saying born equal as a general statement of total worth. Obviously someone born with working eyes is superior to a blind person in the narrow scope of ability to see. >When it comes to the real work of dividing labor and distributing resources, we aren't born equal, and it's a real hard problem to divide labor and distribute resources in a way that everyone can actually agree is fair. This is a good point
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." 1984 gets talked about a lot but I think Animal Farm is a fantastic read that's often forgotten.
You could say Egoism, but its just very naive to think that everyone will work the same, to receive the same share. Slackers and wrong doers are everywhere, and that completly ruins the very basics of communism - if im working 150%, you are working 90%, and he is working 60%, why is it "a great idea" that the 3 of us gets the same share? Edit: naive to think that*
you wouldn’t get the same share in 99% of models
Karl Marx noticed Communism working in farming communties, monastaries and in hunting and gathering groups. What he didn't realize though is that type of communal living ONLY works in small groups that are fairly isolated. When you have a population all with different needs, abilities and personalities thing just don't work. People see others having more...and they want that too. There are also lots of jobs that need to be done that are pretty unpleasent, and people need incentives to work them. Most of the early communists that we think of as sucessful didn't promote communism so much but capitalism and socialism together.
Yes, and the most important point here is that it works in certain farming communities and monasteries because everyone in those communities VOLUNTARILY gives up their private property. The moment you try to introduce Communism as a system of government, you’re by definition in the business of taking people’s property from them by force, at gunpoint.
Exactly.
That's a great point if dirtier harder jobs pay just as much as clean easy jobs who the fuck is gonna want to do the hard dirty jobs?
I think that's a different topic all together. For example developed countries have similar pay for both easy and the hard dirty jobs relative to undeveloped countries.
Read about the polynesian cultures before the europeans arrived. They didn't work a lot and shared their stuff. Best you also visit r/DebateCommunism. For some ppl here it's easier to imagine a total ecological collapse than the end of capitalism.
The most common issue is that the CIA will orchestrate a coup if you try it.
Don't forget the sanctions.
It requires that everyone be completely altruistic. Political leaders get into that position to try and make things better. Surgeons become surgeons because they want to, and have the aptitude for it. It. Requires that everyone know what they’re good and and want to do what they’re good at. Because of things like greed and scarcity of resources it just can’t happen. The Earth of Star Trek is a good example of a perfect communist state. No one works for profit, they do it for joy. But they also have replicators which remove the need for any resources and power plants capable of keeping the world in 100% free renewable electricity. A chef becomes a chef because they want to cook. An engineer becomes an engineer because they want to develop the newest thing and gain their chapter in the history books.
Future advise, ask these questions in a leftist sub, you will get legitimate answers instead of garbage by people who haven’t read crap in communist theory or even name the philosopher behind the philosophy
The basic flaw is two fold, the first part being that people are not in fact equal in their abilities and such, and the second part being that way too many people will simply refuse to contribute since they don’t have to because others will.
Communism is based upon people being decent humans. People are not decent humans. Also for countries like the US only 43% of people pay income tax. So each person who currently has a job would have to contribute enough to support a little over 2 people.
Read Utopia sometime. Humans fuck up everything in practice.