The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.
This is what people don’t seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it’s a far better starting point.
Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.
Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.
I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn’t work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.
So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:
You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.
1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.
Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.
So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?
You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.
But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.
That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can’t have nice things. If you don’t try, you don’t get.
The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.
This is what people don’t seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it’s a far better starting point.
Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.
Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.
I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn’t work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.
So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:
You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.
1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.
Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.
So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?
You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.
The answer is you want to build a train route through a mountain. You don’t need it, thus we don’t have to build it.
But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.
I was under the impression that the nation state should be dissolved and everyone forms communes that reflect their values.
Direct democracy can work way better with smaller communities.
The problem is, you would need a large federation of these communes to band together to defeat a hostile nation state level threat.
The federation! Oh shit
We tried many times, millions were killed each time.
I meant try for utopia. What you refer to isn’t that.
It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn’t praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.