I agree, communism is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work because it didn’t factor in the greediness of people, so the system isn’t protected against people abusing it. That’s why most communist states were/are dictatorships with corruption and oligarchy. It only works if everyone wants it and no one abuses it. So it doesn’t work on a large scale.
Imo the best we can get is capitalism but capped (so no billionaires, no monopoly companies etc.), combined with a shit ton of socialism. Everyone will benifit if we pull up the lowest part of society. A group is as fast as the slowest member. Let’s just make sure everyone runs a bit faster, instead of just a few at the cost of the rest.
The best I want is anarchy. Fuck borders, states and world leaders, fuck hate and greed.
As Marx points out in Das Kapital, the capitalists will always capture government, defang the regulatory bodies, and then use financial shenanigans (fraud) for rent-seeking to make themselves insanely rich, but bringing their own economy crashing down.
This has happened across history multiple times.
The problem is barbed-wire. Barbed-wire is an early technology that allows large numbers of people to be controlled and contained by small numbers of people. We’re developing all sorts of other tech intent towards the same goal. You’ve seen some already, with the mass surveillance state, ALPR and the recent move to take down Flock cameras.
China and EU are also buying big into mass surveillance technology, as a means for the capitalists to keep the working class from organizing.
That is to say, so long as we allow for a plutocratic class, and don’t actively prevent it, it will pose a threat to democratic, rules based society. And eventually they’ll win permanently, right before civilization collapses, they retire to their apocalypse shelters and humanity dies off.
Capitalism is non-viable. We may struggle to find something else that cannot be corrupted, but the consolidation of wealth and political power is baked into capitalism.
The workers didn’t really own the means of production so far but they often had strongly improved lives during socialism. Look at the healthcare system of cuba or the rapid improvement of living conditions in the ussr after lenin took over.
A lot of the concepts capitalism is based on are deeply flawed which is why a weakened version of it will still lead to some of the same problems.
Yeah but at the same time LGBTQ were prosecuted, so it’s healthcare is not for everyone.
or the rapid improvement of living conditions in the ussr after lenin took over.
Yet the system wasn’t protected against someone like Stalin. And also under Lenin things were grim for many.
Again, the idea of communism is great, it just doesn’t work in the form we’ve seen. So far the best form is (and I hate to say this) China I think, with a partially open market and the average lives improved significantly. But also China has a one party system with one leader with too much power who can stay in office as long as he wants, also known as a dictator. Next to that they have workers with 7 day work weeks and no holidays, concentration camps and an insane amount of corruption.
Coming back to Cuba, they are also not doing great.
Maybe Cambodia is an example of a functioning communist state, although the wealth gap there is also insane and they had a dictator not too long ago (Pol Pot) with a pretty severe genocide. And with the recent whistle blowers on Chinese scam centers in Cambodia and Myanmar (which got it’s slave workers through Cambodia), also a vast network of corruption came to light reaching as far up as ministers. And also Cambodia isn’t a proper communist state, even though they do identify as communist.
I wish there was a new version of communism in which there are protective measures against tyrant leaders and corruption.
After the fall of the USSR most states who became Independant kept the system of the USSR. They continued with corruption and a non-functioning system (as the vast network of the USSR wasn’t there anymore). Estonia did not. They completely rewrote their entire system, switched to digital and became the world leader in cyber security and low running costs while having a properly functioning system. Maybe we could make a state built on that, but then out of communism?
The marxist form of communism abolishes states as well, but the workers have to take over the means of production first before they actually have power over the owning class.
Cuba had a very hard time due to the US sanctions and the CIA. But they showed that it was possible to be communist without losing quality of life.
East Germany for example had great LGBTQ rights much earlier than most surrounding countries. Probably because they had a much easier situation than cuba.
China is just capitalistic in their doing. You can see that from the way housing is managed there and how they sacrifice quality of life for the good of the owning class.
No states is also the final goal of marxism, it just describes a way to get there. We have seen that striking is very effective if done properly, so it makes sense to connect the power of the ruling class to their ability to control the workers.
What we need to learn from existing socialist/communist nations is how they achieved the revolution and what went well. We should also learn what causes undesirable outcomes and how we can prevent them from happening.
There really isn’t a need for a new form of communism if marxism already exists and matches a lot of the things you are asking for.
I hate to be that guy, but without workers owning the means of production there is no socialism period. There may be socialist policies, but that is something completely different.
Capitalism is only somewhat efficient at distributing wages during the small market phase. The problem is of course no one has been able to reel in selfishness or corruption under any current system whether it is communism or capitalism (socialism on a large scale has never existed). And just to be clear, governments identifying as socialist do not fucking count without workers owning the means of production.
Dismissing past socialist projects is not very helpful to actually achieving socialism/commumism. Even though they weren’t always ideologically clean they still had a lot of aspects of a socialist economy.
Socialism can also be laid out it different strategies making the definition not always be completely accurate. Cuba and the USSR were big steps in the development of socialism and its theory.
When has any country obtained the simple ideals of socialism.
Socialism and its wanna-be special ed cousin communism are DOA at this point to me and I would wager most other people as well. I fully believe they can be reborne into a new system and philosophy for our more modern era learning from the mistakes of the past and I look forward to this.
I agree, communism is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work because it didn’t factor in the greediness of people, so the system isn’t protected against people abusing it.
Greediness of people isn’t something inate to the human condition but one created and fostered by capitalism and systems of private property. Most of human history before agriculture was lived under a system of primitive communism where resources were shared by the tribe with little to no hierarchy.
Individualistic selfishness was a behavior created by the sectioning of private property for agriculture and the accumulation of surplus. It is a learned behavior, which means it can be unlearned. Unlearning it will require a drastic change in culture and ideals, but it is not impossible.
There are times in history where the people have freed themselves from domination like Barcelona in the Spanish civil war or the paris commune, only to have it snuffed out by authoritarians. The system can work, there’s just a group of people with a lot of resources who will do anything to stop it from doing so.
Most of human history before agriculture was lived under a system of primitive communism where resources were shared by the tribe with little to no hierarchy.
Yeah, but those were small and primitive settlements. We don’t live in those times anymore, we don’t have small settlements but large states with millions of people. We’re not the dame as humans back then, so it’s comparing apples and pears.
Communism so far only really worked in small communities where people lived by choice.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
/- Karl Marx
Marxists distinguish private property and personal property. Personal property is stuff you own to use, eg. Your home, your car, your phone etc. Private property is stuff you own to make money from the labor of others, eg. Rental homes, factories, stocks, bonds etc.
Seizing the means of production doesn’t fully capture the goals of communism as it would leave other forms of exploitative property, ie. Rental properties, in the hands of the rich.
Private property is personal property except in definitions from Marxists. I am not one, but I recognize the concept of the workers controlling the means of production.
Simply put, using this terminology conflates two different concepts in 90%+ of people heads and is counterproductive.
I agree in most contexts I wouldn’t use it, but this is a meme about communism on lemmy which is 90% socialist / fellow travelers. The level of discussion on this forum is high enough that we can use or introduce people to ideas like Marx’s definition of private property. We don’t need to dumb down shit for the normies here.
Trying to indoctrinate other human beings into an philosophy from hundreds of years ago that has been used by brutal dictators to abuse countless people is an interesting goal. Good luck!
The ideas of Marx, such as class conflict, private property etc. , have advanced socialists understanding of society and political economy significantly. To reject all of those ideas because they were co-opted by dictators is myopic.
Are you going to reject Darwin’s theories of evolution because he had some questionable views on eugenics and since his ideas were used to justify Nazi eugenics policies and the Holocaust?
Are you indoctrinating people into a philosophy from a hundred years ago that has been used by brutal regimes espousing social darwinist ideals to send people to their death when you explain the concept of natural selection?
Those are not solely his ideas, he was building off a lot that came before him. He was not even close to the first person to write about class struggle. I am not sure why you feel the need to elevate him onto a pedestal. Probably related to why you feel the need to indoctrinate people.
If Darwinism was used to brutaly oppress and murder countless people I would seriously question it. Comparing scientific study to philosophy seems pretty suspect though. I wish you good luck on your journey.
I think that, the larger/less tightly-coupled the societal unit, the easier it is for people to take advantage of others. Utopian ideologies only work if almost everyone sees the benefits and no one can subvert them, and even then only if there is cultural continuity over time.
i’ll never understand this take. Socialism doesn’t work because of corruption and greediness so the best thing we can do is capitalism, which literally is based on corruption and greediness.
What about laws against corruption and greediness on top of a democratic system designed around production for human needs instead of the profit motive?
I mean on the one hand you have a system that breaks and ruins lives for most people if people work against it and corrupt it and on the other hand you have a system that benefits only a few and fucks over everyone else when it works as intended.
Saying socialism doesn’t work because of a few failed attempts is like the coyote dismissing every single of his ideas immediately after the first try and directly going to the next one except in this case the “solution” is to keep the system that has been shown for hundreds of years to work so badly that it is literally driving humanity towards extinction.
I meam you are not wrong in principle. What you mean with “capitalism with a shit ton of socialism” IS socialism. there is no capitalism with socialism because those two contradict each other. It is all about who controls the means of production. It is either a few rich assholes control production or the production is democratically controlled by society as a whole. The latter is socialism.
If you want markets and commodities etc on top of that, thats cool, can still be pure socialism though.
edit: outed myself as german “usw” == “and so on” 🤦
and of course 100% agree regarding fuck borders fuck states fuck fascism … that is communism btw 😁
i’ll never understand this take. Socialism doesn’t work because of corruption and greediness so the best thing we can do is capitalism, which literally is based on corruption and greediness.
Ah, but I didn’t say that. I said communism didn’t work. I do think socialism works. Communism is just one form of socialism.
Indeed capitalism is a form of greed, that’s also bad (way worse) and I’m against it. I’m all for socialism, just not communism the way we know it. Maybe communism 2.0 which would have to be made with protection against corruption and bad leaders. So far both capitalism and communism have (had) corruption and bad leaders.
Ah i see then we were talking about different things. When i think of communism, i think of Karl Marx’s definition. A stateless, moneyless, classless society. According to him, socialism is the transition phase between capitalism and socialism and if socialism is implemented correctly, the concepts of class, state and money just vanish over time. As far as i understand it, anarchists and communists completely agree about the end goal there.
That’s why i purposely talked about socialism, not communism. Those former projects were socialist projects as well (or at least tried to be that, however you wanna see that).
I think this newer definition of communism vs. socialism largely stems from red scare anti communist propaganda and politicians with progressive agendas that try to distance themselves from those failed socialist experiments due to said propaganda. After all proudly proclaiming yourself to be a communist completely disqualifies you from any kind of political career. I would assume the label “anarchist” would have a similar affect 😅 . Even saying you are a “socialist” is still difficult. That’s why the term “democratic socialist” emerged. I think that term is completely redundant. Socialism cannot be socialism if it is not democratic.
About communism 2.0 and protections against bad leaders. Supposedly that is what china is doing with their concept of promotions in the party purely based on how well they do on different objective metrics. If that is actually what is happening there, i don’t know. At least in theory that seems better than being able to get into a position you are wildly unqualified for purely based on populism.
Country without borders - Only sometime who can’t be invaded would say that buddy.
No no, I’m against countries in general. No countries means no borders anywhere. I think smaller communities with their own rules and laws are better than a giant landmass with rules and laws for everyone, based on what’s best for the people living in the big city while the country is so much larger. If there are no countries, there are no wars between countries. No nations means no nationalism.
Only sometime who can’t be invaded would say that buddy.
Everyone can be invaded these days. There’s a war 2000km from here. It’s in our backyard and soon we might be part of it.
Strong enforcement of Anti-trust laws. Higher tax for the rich. Start-up friendly environment.
And leaders, politicians and other figures with positions of power should be held responsible and reprehensible for lying and causing harm with their words, actions and policies.
People for positions of power should not want that position at all, and people who do want these positions should never hold any form of power.
Positions of power should have extensive medical, psychological and intellectual tests. Never one person should have total control, no single leaders.
I agree, communism is a nice idea, but it doesn’t work because it didn’t factor in the greediness of people, so the system isn’t protected against people abusing it. That’s why most communist states were/are dictatorships with corruption and oligarchy. It only works if everyone wants it and no one abuses it. So it doesn’t work on a large scale.
Imo the best we can get is capitalism but capped (so no billionaires, no monopoly companies etc.), combined with a shit ton of socialism. Everyone will benifit if we pull up the lowest part of society. A group is as fast as the slowest member. Let’s just make sure everyone runs a bit faster, instead of just a few at the cost of the rest.
The best I want is anarchy. Fuck borders, states and world leaders, fuck hate and greed.
But most of all: Fuck fascism, that is the worst.
a communist state doesnt exist. Marxism-leninism ≠ communism
I never said it was.
In fact, Marxism and anarchism have more in common than Marxism and communism.
But it’s called the Communist Manifesto?
As Marx points out in Das Kapital, the capitalists will always capture government, defang the regulatory bodies, and then use financial shenanigans (fraud) for rent-seeking to make themselves insanely rich, but bringing their own economy crashing down.
This has happened across history multiple times.
The problem is barbed-wire. Barbed-wire is an early technology that allows large numbers of people to be controlled and contained by small numbers of people. We’re developing all sorts of other tech intent towards the same goal. You’ve seen some already, with the mass surveillance state, ALPR and the recent move to take down Flock cameras.
China and EU are also buying big into mass surveillance technology, as a means for the capitalists to keep the working class from organizing.
That is to say, so long as we allow for a plutocratic class, and don’t actively prevent it, it will pose a threat to democratic, rules based society. And eventually they’ll win permanently, right before civilization collapses, they retire to their apocalypse shelters and humanity dies off.
Capitalism is non-viable. We may struggle to find something else that cannot be corrupted, but the consolidation of wealth and political power is baked into capitalism.
We need something else.
The workers didn’t really own the means of production so far but they often had strongly improved lives during socialism. Look at the healthcare system of cuba or the rapid improvement of living conditions in the ussr after lenin took over.
A lot of the concepts capitalism is based on are deeply flawed which is why a weakened version of it will still lead to some of the same problems.
Yeah but at the same time LGBTQ were prosecuted, so it’s healthcare is not for everyone.
Yet the system wasn’t protected against someone like Stalin. And also under Lenin things were grim for many.
Again, the idea of communism is great, it just doesn’t work in the form we’ve seen. So far the best form is (and I hate to say this) China I think, with a partially open market and the average lives improved significantly. But also China has a one party system with one leader with too much power who can stay in office as long as he wants, also known as a dictator. Next to that they have workers with 7 day work weeks and no holidays, concentration camps and an insane amount of corruption.
Coming back to Cuba, they are also not doing great.
Maybe Cambodia is an example of a functioning communist state, although the wealth gap there is also insane and they had a dictator not too long ago (Pol Pot) with a pretty severe genocide. And with the recent whistle blowers on Chinese scam centers in Cambodia and Myanmar (which got it’s slave workers through Cambodia), also a vast network of corruption came to light reaching as far up as ministers. And also Cambodia isn’t a proper communist state, even though they do identify as communist.
I wish there was a new version of communism in which there are protective measures against tyrant leaders and corruption.
After the fall of the USSR most states who became Independant kept the system of the USSR. They continued with corruption and a non-functioning system (as the vast network of the USSR wasn’t there anymore). Estonia did not. They completely rewrote their entire system, switched to digital and became the world leader in cyber security and low running costs while having a properly functioning system. Maybe we could make a state built on that, but then out of communism?
But I prefer no states at all and anarchism.
The marxist form of communism abolishes states as well, but the workers have to take over the means of production first before they actually have power over the owning class.
Cuba had a very hard time due to the US sanctions and the CIA. But they showed that it was possible to be communist without losing quality of life.
East Germany for example had great LGBTQ rights much earlier than most surrounding countries. Probably because they had a much easier situation than cuba.
China is just capitalistic in their doing. You can see that from the way housing is managed there and how they sacrifice quality of life for the good of the owning class.
No states is also the final goal of marxism, it just describes a way to get there. We have seen that striking is very effective if done properly, so it makes sense to connect the power of the ruling class to their ability to control the workers.
What we need to learn from existing socialist/communist nations is how they achieved the revolution and what went well. We should also learn what causes undesirable outcomes and how we can prevent them from happening.
There really isn’t a need for a new form of communism if marxism already exists and matches a lot of the things you are asking for.
I hate to be that guy, but without workers owning the means of production there is no socialism period. There may be socialist policies, but that is something completely different.
Capitalism is only somewhat efficient at distributing wages during the small market phase. The problem is of course no one has been able to reel in selfishness or corruption under any current system whether it is communism or capitalism (socialism on a large scale has never existed). And just to be clear, governments identifying as socialist do not fucking count without workers owning the means of production.
Dismissing past socialist projects is not very helpful to actually achieving socialism/commumism. Even though they weren’t always ideologically clean they still had a lot of aspects of a socialist economy.
Socialism can also be laid out it different strategies making the definition not always be completely accurate. Cuba and the USSR were big steps in the development of socialism and its theory.
When has any country obtained the simple ideals of socialism.
Socialism and its wanna-be special ed cousin communism are DOA at this point to me and I would wager most other people as well. I fully believe they can be reborne into a new system and philosophy for our more modern era learning from the mistakes of the past and I look forward to this.
Greediness of people isn’t something inate to the human condition but one created and fostered by capitalism and systems of private property. Most of human history before agriculture was lived under a system of primitive communism where resources were shared by the tribe with little to no hierarchy.
Individualistic selfishness was a behavior created by the sectioning of private property for agriculture and the accumulation of surplus. It is a learned behavior, which means it can be unlearned. Unlearning it will require a drastic change in culture and ideals, but it is not impossible.
There are times in history where the people have freed themselves from domination like Barcelona in the Spanish civil war or the paris commune, only to have it snuffed out by authoritarians. The system can work, there’s just a group of people with a lot of resources who will do anything to stop it from doing so.
Yeah, but those were small and primitive settlements. We don’t live in those times anymore, we don’t have small settlements but large states with millions of people. We’re not the dame as humans back then, so it’s comparing apples and pears.
Communism so far only really worked in small communities where people lived by choice.
Private property exists under communism and socialism. I think you mean workers owning the means of production which is something different.
/- Karl Marx
Marxists distinguish private property and personal property. Personal property is stuff you own to use, eg. Your home, your car, your phone etc. Private property is stuff you own to make money from the labor of others, eg. Rental homes, factories, stocks, bonds etc.
Seizing the means of production doesn’t fully capture the goals of communism as it would leave other forms of exploitative property, ie. Rental properties, in the hands of the rich.
Private property is personal property except in definitions from Marxists. I am not one, but I recognize the concept of the workers controlling the means of production.
Simply put, using this terminology conflates two different concepts in 90%+ of people heads and is counterproductive.
I agree in most contexts I wouldn’t use it, but this is a meme about communism on lemmy which is 90% socialist / fellow travelers. The level of discussion on this forum is high enough that we can use or introduce people to ideas like Marx’s definition of private property. We don’t need to dumb down shit for the normies here.
Trying to indoctrinate other human beings into an philosophy from hundreds of years ago that has been used by brutal dictators to abuse countless people is an interesting goal. Good luck!
The ideas of Marx, such as class conflict, private property etc. , have advanced socialists understanding of society and political economy significantly. To reject all of those ideas because they were co-opted by dictators is myopic.
Are you going to reject Darwin’s theories of evolution because he had some questionable views on eugenics and since his ideas were used to justify Nazi eugenics policies and the Holocaust?
Are you indoctrinating people into a philosophy from a hundred years ago that has been used by brutal regimes espousing social darwinist ideals to send people to their death when you explain the concept of natural selection?
Those are not solely his ideas, he was building off a lot that came before him. He was not even close to the first person to write about class struggle. I am not sure why you feel the need to elevate him onto a pedestal. Probably related to why you feel the need to indoctrinate people.
If Darwinism was used to brutaly oppress and murder countless people I would seriously question it. Comparing scientific study to philosophy seems pretty suspect though. I wish you good luck on your journey.
I think that, the larger/less tightly-coupled the societal unit, the easier it is for people to take advantage of others. Utopian ideologies only work if almost everyone sees the benefits and no one can subvert them, and even then only if there is cultural continuity over time.
i’ll never understand this take. Socialism doesn’t work because of corruption and greediness so the best thing we can do is capitalism, which literally is based on corruption and greediness.
What about laws against corruption and greediness on top of a democratic system designed around production for human needs instead of the profit motive?
I mean on the one hand you have a system that breaks and ruins lives for most people if people work against it and corrupt it and on the other hand you have a system that benefits only a few and fucks over everyone else when it works as intended.
Saying socialism doesn’t work because of a few failed attempts is like the coyote dismissing every single of his ideas immediately after the first try and directly going to the next one except in this case the “solution” is to keep the system that has been shown for hundreds of years to work so badly that it is literally driving humanity towards extinction.
I meam you are not wrong in principle. What you mean with “capitalism with a shit ton of socialism” IS socialism. there is no capitalism with socialism because those two contradict each other. It is all about who controls the means of production. It is either a few rich assholes control production or the production is democratically controlled by society as a whole. The latter is socialism.
If you want markets and commodities etc on top of that, thats cool, can still be pure socialism though.
edit: outed myself as german “usw” == “and so on” 🤦
and of course 100% agree regarding fuck borders fuck states fuck fascism … that is communism btw 😁
Ah, but I didn’t say that. I said communism didn’t work. I do think socialism works. Communism is just one form of socialism.
Indeed capitalism is a form of greed, that’s also bad (way worse) and I’m against it. I’m all for socialism, just not communism the way we know it. Maybe communism 2.0 which would have to be made with protection against corruption and bad leaders. So far both capitalism and communism have (had) corruption and bad leaders.
I myself am an anarchist.
Ah i see then we were talking about different things. When i think of communism, i think of Karl Marx’s definition. A stateless, moneyless, classless society. According to him, socialism is the transition phase between capitalism and socialism and if socialism is implemented correctly, the concepts of class, state and money just vanish over time. As far as i understand it, anarchists and communists completely agree about the end goal there.
That’s why i purposely talked about socialism, not communism. Those former projects were socialist projects as well (or at least tried to be that, however you wanna see that).
I think this newer definition of communism vs. socialism largely stems from red scare anti communist propaganda and politicians with progressive agendas that try to distance themselves from those failed socialist experiments due to said propaganda. After all proudly proclaiming yourself to be a communist completely disqualifies you from any kind of political career. I would assume the label “anarchist” would have a similar affect 😅 . Even saying you are a “socialist” is still difficult. That’s why the term “democratic socialist” emerged. I think that term is completely redundant. Socialism cannot be socialism if it is not democratic.
About communism 2.0 and protections against bad leaders. Supposedly that is what china is doing with their concept of promotions in the party purely based on how well they do on different objective metrics. If that is actually what is happening there, i don’t know. At least in theory that seems better than being able to get into a position you are wildly unqualified for purely based on populism.
Strong enforcement of Anti-trust laws. Higher tax for the rich. Start-up friendly environment.
Country without borders - Only someone who can’t be invaded would say that buddy.
No no, I’m against countries in general. No countries means no borders anywhere. I think smaller communities with their own rules and laws are better than a giant landmass with rules and laws for everyone, based on what’s best for the people living in the big city while the country is so much larger. If there are no countries, there are no wars between countries. No nations means no nationalism.
Everyone can be invaded these days. There’s a war 2000km from here. It’s in our backyard and soon we might be part of it.
And leaders, politicians and other figures with positions of power should be held responsible and reprehensible for lying and causing harm with their words, actions and policies.
People for positions of power should not want that position at all, and people who do want these positions should never hold any form of power.
Positions of power should have extensive medical, psychological and intellectual tests. Never one person should have total control, no single leaders.