Communism vs Capitalism does anyone actually think we'd be better off in a Communist society?

[All Cats Are Bad]

1 minute ago, OldGimletEye said:

Maybe. Or maybe people just say, "these people are effing crazy and I wouldn't let them run a lemonade stand, let alone a state or country."

Like Republicans did with Trump? Don't be ridiculous, Obamacare was the definition of incrementalism and the media called it socialism. The fact is banks and wealthy interests in this country will treat any kind of change, be it sweeping or incremental, with the utmost hostility, and the people who trust corporate-owned media to give them their news will go along with it.

The fact is, the more extreme the change proposed (like Ilhan Omar saying wipe student debt) the better it actually is for your average American. So if your opponents are going to put you 1001% on blast no matter what you do, you might as push policies which reflect this. That way, when it comes down to the inevitable compromise, that compromise will actually represent progress, and not the illusion of progressed measured from the ever rightward-shifting Overton window.

[OldGimletEye]

10 minutes ago, SaltyGnosis said:

Like Republicans did with Trump? Don't be ridiculous, Obamacare was the definition of incrementalism and the media called it socialism. The fact is banks and wealthy interests in this country will treat any kind of change, be it sweeping or incremental, with the utmost hostility, and the people who trust corporate-owned media to give them their news will go along with it.

The fact is, the more extreme the change proposed (like Ilhan Omar saying wipe student debt) the better it actually is for your average American. So if your opponents are going to put you 1001% on blast no matter what you do, you might as push policies which reflect this. That way, when it comes down to the inevitable compromise, that compromise will actually represent progress, and not the illusion of progressed measured from the ever rightward-shifting Overton window.

Well the whole media didn't call it socialism. Only conservative media did that. Also it would have been hard for Obama to get something more radical than the ACA. And certainly, axing everyone's private healthcare overnight to replace it with public healthcare probably wouldn't go over very well and it up being a disaster politically.. And I say this as somebody that hates employer sponsored healthcare.

Wiping student debt might be a good idea (depending on the details of how you plan to finance future education). But, how you use that example to get to the proposition that the more extreme the change, the better, seems to me a bit of an ass pull.  More extreme doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it might mean "really fucking stupid" as a matter of policy and politics.

Certainly, hard core conservatives will criticize anything the left does. But, those aren't the people that need convincing.

[Inkdaub]

33 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

want a new system

I don't think we want a new system but I believe a new system is absolutely necessary to our future survival.   

33 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

based on god knows what

Based on the elimination of the idea that a very few should control the overwhelmingly vast majority of wealth and resources.

40 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I'm not really interested in designing a whole new system

The systems aren't the only problem.  They aren't even the most important.  The systems work as they do because we say they do.  Because we insist upon it.  The systems are a problem but a bigger problem...THE bigger problem...is us.  We are the problem.  

[OldGimletEye]

5 minutes ago, Inkdaub said:

Based on the elimination of the idea that a very few should control the overwhelmingly vast majority of wealth and resources.

Well that really illuminates matters.

I mean could you be more specific? Would a Scandinavian style welfare state work for you? I'm down with that. But, that might still be too "reactionary" in some quarters.

[All Cats Are Bad]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well the whole media didn't call it socialism. Only conservative media did that.

Corporate media did it. Fox did it by screeching and squealing for eight years, yes, but CNN and MSNBC did it too by acting like the Obama administration was this meaningful step to the left, and not the center-right Republican government that it actually was.

Quote

More extreme doesn't always mean better. 

In this regard I think that it does. I'm a person who thinks that when a person has their house repossessed by a bank or liquified by a nursing home, their house was stolen. I think that if a homeless person breaks into an empty house to sleep in the middle of winter, the bank who owns that house should have to pay for private security to get rid of them, not call the police, who are payed for by our tax dollars and are supposed to be protecting people not property, and have them do their dirty work. I think the overwhelming majority of people being held in prisons right now are there illegitimately, and I think that the people who flew the planes into the building on 9/11 were ultimately less hostile to the wellbeing of this country than the average broker who died in the towers that day.

I'm not advocating for violence, but I really don't understand the mentality of anyone who can look at this country the way it is and think it's a system worth saving. I would honestly rather sit down with a neo nazi and try to talk him out of his anti-Semitism than sit down with a person who works in finance and try to explain why their job preys upon the poorest people in the country.

[felice]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Would a Scandinavian style welfare state work for you? I'm down with that. But, that might still be too "reactionary" in some quarters.

Scandinavia still has billionaires. For regular people, a million dollars is a staggering, life-changing amount of money. A billionaire could lose a million dollars a hundred times over and not notice. That is seriously fucked up.

[OldGimletEye]

8 hours ago, felice said:

Scandinavia still has billionaires. For regular people, a million dollars is a staggering, life-changing amount of money. A billionaire could lose a million dollars a hundred times over and not notice. That is seriously fucked up.

So what? If the choice is between Scandinavia and some communist hell hole, I'll take Scandinavia with the few billionaires. People try to get into Scandinavian countries. They tried to flee East Germany. Says a lot.

If I can provide people with decent jobs, decent health insurance, the financial ability to start a family, if they wish, and the ability to retire at a reasonable age, I just really don't give a damn too much if there are a few billionaires running around.

[OldGimletEye]

2 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

be protecting people not property, and have them do their dirty work.

Surely you mean only rich people's property. I'm pretty sure the "average joe" isn't going to be too happy to go out one morning and find out the car he uses to get to work just got trashed. Or he isn't going to be happy to find out his house got burned down.

If the police stop protecting property, guess what happens? The rich hire private security and regular people are left to fend for themselves.

Surely, you don't want to leave property protection to the free market?

2 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

I'm not advocating for violence, but I really don't understand the mentality of anyone who can look at this country the way it is and think it's a system worth saving. I would honestly rather sit down with a neo nazi and try to talk him out of his anti-Semitism than sit down with a person who works in finance and try to explain why their job preys upon the poorest people in the country.

Yes there are number of problems in finance and in banking, and I've written about them quite lot. However, one of the most basic decisions people and societies have to make is how much to consume today and how much to consume tomorrow or in alternative states of the world. This is much what finance is about. What do you propose on how we should go about figuring out how much to consume today, versus what we should save for the future?

And there a variety of jobs in finance. Some people in finance are crooks. But, others do useful stuff, like analyzing whether an investment made by company is likely to be profitable, or hedging certain transactions, or helping people how to figure out how to save for retirement.

[All Cats Are Bad]

59 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

What do you propose on how we should go about figuring out how much to consume today, versus what we should save for the future?

This is a false dichotomy. With the technology and resources we have available right now we could literally end scarcity of necessary resources for everybody in the world. The problem right now is the way resources are allocated, and those problems are going to persist as long as private industry controls the government.

[A wilding]

7 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

"Real AI" is a vague phrase that could mean a lot of things. AI has been developing over the past 30 years, as has automation, and it will be doing basic coding work in 10. We produce more now than we did 20 years ago, but have fewer jobs in production. Where do you think they went?

While I do agree with your basic point, I was told AI would be doing basic coding work in 10 years time when I first started in IT 30+ years ago (4G languages were in then), and in my opinion it is no nearer now than it was then.

Obviously computer languages and frameworks have become far more powerful than they were and, helped by Moore's law, we have got very good at AI than can "learn" to solve complex but well defined problems better than any human. However human understanding is required to convert specifications into software, and all attempts to write general purpose specification level languages have failed miserably. There are certain types of problem that the powerful but limited AI we have managed to develop cannot solve, and I personally am convinced that programming is one of them.

[All Cats Are Bad]

16 minutes ago, A wilding said:

While I do agree with your basic point, I was told AI would be doing basic coding work in 10 years time when I first started in IT 30+ years ago (4G languages were in then), and in my opinion it is no nearer now than it was then.

JOBS HAVE BEEN GOING AWAY BECAUSE OF MACHINES FOR THE PAST 30 YEARS AND THIS TREND WILL ONLY INCREASE PLEASE STOP LETTING THE AI THING DISTRACT FROM MY POINT.

[A wilding]

Sorry, that was mostly written for the benefit of @Ser Scot A Ellison who is interested in that sort of thing.

I will cease my thread hijack.

[All Cats Are Bad]

Lol sorry I was trying to be funny, you're good.

[Alarich II]

51 minutes ago, SaltyGnosis said:

JOBS HAVE BEEN GOING AWAY BECAUSE OF MACHINES FOR THE PAST 300 YEARS AND THIS TREND WILL ONLY INCREASE PLEASE STOP LETTING THE AI THING DISTRACT FROM MY POINT.

Fixed that for you.

[Altherion]

7 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

I'm a person who thinks that when a person has their house repossessed by a bank or liquified by a nursing home, their house was stolen. I think that if a homeless person breaks into an empty house to sleep in the middle of winter, the bank who owns that house should have to pay for private security to get rid of them, not call the police, who are payed for by our tax dollars and are supposed to be protecting people not property, and have them do their dirty work.

Your examples here have nothing to do with the difference between capitalism and communism. The governments in communist countries (e.g. the Soviet Union in the past or China or Cuba today) can and do repossess houses and other property under a variety of circumstances. Similarly, if a homeless person broke into an empty building in a communist country, whoever is responsible for that building would call the police and the police would, as you put it, get rid of them (not necessarily in as nice a way as the capitalist police...).

Your quarrel here is not with capitalism, it's with the rule of law. There's no society in the world where the task of the police is exclusively to protect people in the narrow sense that you describe. Police are supposed to enforce the law which often means protecting people, but often also means protecting property and sometimes means various other tasks (e.g. community outreach).

4 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

This is a false dichotomy. With the technology and resources we have available right now we could literally end scarcity of necessary resources for everybody in the world. The problem right now is the way resources are allocated, and those problems are going to persist as long as private industry controls the government.

The allocation problem persists even when private industry does not control government (see China for an example). This one is something that can in theory be solved by making a capitalist society more communist, but in practice, it's very hard to do it -- some places are better at it than others, but there is no known solution that works for countries of all sizes or all cultures.

[OldGimletEye]

8 hours ago, SaltyGnosis said:

This is a false dichotomy. With the technology and resources we have available right now we could literally end scarcity of necessary resources for everybody in the world. The problem right now is the way resources are allocated, and those problems are going to persist as long as private industry controls the government.

Supposing we can end scarcity of necessary resources. People and societies still have to decide how much to consume today versus how much to consume tomorrow.  They still have to decide how much to insure against bad states of the world, like when a flood, fire, or disaster occurs. New capital needs to be invested and old capital needs to be replaced. New generations come into the world and need to be educated. We will still have to decide how much we want to invest in new knowledge production.

[Liffguard]

9 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

 

If I can provide people with decent jobs, decent health insurance, the financial ability to start a family, if they wish, and the ability to retire at a reasonable age, I just really don't give a damn too much if there are a few billionaires running around.

I do, because I don't think that a truly democratic society can function when some people are a few tens of millions of times more powerful than others. That's my primary objection to billionaires, not the concentration of resources (okay, not only the concentration of resources), but the concentration of power.

In any case, a socialist system need not be centrally planned or authoritarian (not that central planning is necessarily inherently ineffective. Amazon is centrally planned after all). Decisions can still, in theory, be decentralised and reactive to market conditions. The primary question is, decisions made by who? Workers themselves, or the people who own their labour?

[OldGimletEye]

11 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

I do, because I don't think that a truly democratic society can function when some people are a few tens of millions of times more powerful than others. That's my primary objection to billionaires, not the concentration of resources (okay, not only the concentration of resources), but the concentration of power.

In any case, a socialist system need not be centrally planned or authoritarian (not that central planning is necessarily inherently ineffective. Amazon is centrally planned after all). Decisions can still, in theory, be decentralised and reactive to market conditions. The primary question is, decisions made by who? Workers themselves, or the people who own their labour?

Well, a few things.

I have yet to see a fully socialist system that has been truly democratic. What we have gotten instead, is just swapping out capitalist elites with party technocratic elites, plus with low economic growth and authoritarianism. That has hardly been a workers paradise.

If you think a a fully socialist system can be designed that avoids the past problems of communist regimes, then I'm all ears about how this would actually work. But you need to fill in a lot of details about how it would work, and avoid mindless leftist platitudes.

Finally, I'm generally for passing laws and bolstering institutions to limit the political influence of billionaires, like campaign finance laws and bolstering union power. But, if the choice is between an authoritarian communist regime, one in which the state actually has to force people to live there, and one that is not, I'll take the state with the billionaires.

 

 

[Liffguard]

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

If you think a a fully socialist system can be designed that avoids the past problems of communist regimes, then I'm all ears about how this would actually work.

I don't, because no one can design a society. What I want to see is a collaborative effort towards socialist principles being implemented in society. But it will have to be collaborative, and at least somewhat experimental, because there will be setbacks and misfires and unintended consequences. I agree there can't be a revolution as a singular event followed by a flawless unchanging utopia. But revolution as a never-ending process of collaborative change, I can potentially get on board with, because again, no one can design a society.

That said, I can give a few examples of the kinds of thing I would like to see implemented.

- Worker ownership, workplace democracy. I think people who do the work at an organisation should have a say in how that organisation operates. I don't forsee any one template by which this would be implemented, and different organisations could implement it differently.

- Decouple the basic necessities of life from labour. I think food, shelter and medicine should be considered fundamental rights rather than commodities. Whilst I concede that a certain amount of labour is required to provide for all human needs, I think we're long past the point where everyone must labour full-time in order to meet that provision. And more importantly, I don't think anyone should be compelled to sell their labour. Again, the exact practicalities of this are open to debate. UBI? Direct universal provision of goods? I'm open to different suggestions.

- An end to policing and prisons, as currently constituted. Whilst there are some aspects of both that will probably have to exist in any society, pretty much everything about the way they're currently implemented in most first-world nations should be changed. Take prisons for example, whilst there might be some need to isolate the tiny proportion of genuinely sick and dangerous people whose violence doesn't stem from material conditions, I see no reason for these places to be places of punishment. Similarly, police; why is emergency mental health response, community de-escalation, traffic regulation, armed response teams, and crime investigation all carried out by the same body?

- An end to growth as an economic goal for its own sake. The pursuit of growth above all else drives a wide variety of injustices. Climate change and ecological devastation, privatisation and enclosure, depressed wages and increased working hours. I would like to see an economy premised on asking what we actually need for our well-being, and organising resources towards that end. How exactly? To an extent, I think this ties in with worker control and workplace democracy. I think most people are content with the good life when they have it, and the endless push from more and more and more primarily comes from those who must increase profits or fail. But again, I’m open to other suggestions.

- Open borders. Not too much to add here, and this is already getting long.

- Universal lifelong education access, that isn’t premised on education being nothing but a job-training program (but with vocational job training very much also available).

And a whole bunch of other stuff. Massive wealth taxes. Maybe even a wealth cap. Progressive inheritance tax with a very steep curve. Restrictions on discrepancy of resources in legal representation (maybe all lawyers are public servants, assigned randomly to argue either side of a legal dispute or criminal case). Etc etc.

None of this can or will happen overnight. I’m not even 100% committed to the idea that all of it should happen. Again, this is just the kind of thing I’d like to see. But I'm open to other options. And there will have to be contributions from, well, basically everybody. Because no one can design a society.

 

[OldGimletEye]

9 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

 

- An end to growth as an economic goal for its own sake. The pursuit of growth above all else drives a wide variety of injustices. Climate change and ecological devastation, privatisation and enclosure, depressed wages and increased working hours. I would like to see an economy premised on asking what we actually need for our well-being, and organising resources towards that end. How exactly? To an extent, I think this ties in with worker control and workplace democracy. I think most people are content with the good life when they have it, and the endless push from more and more and more primarily comes from those who must increase profits or fail. But again, I’m open to other suggestions

I'll address some of your stuff later, but I want to address this one now. First, economic growth is important. Economic growth gives us the ability to fund programs for the poor and to continue to raise their standard of living (along with everyone else). Sustained economic growth is something relatively recent, as sustained per Capita GDP growth really didn't happen until the late 18th Century. If that had not occurred, we would all be living shorter and more harsh lives.

Secondly, to end economic growth is tantamount to ending knowledge production. Neither labor or capital explain economic growth. It's knowledge production that ultimately drives it.