first of all, you're cherry-picking and repeating usual rhetoric 'cog in the wheel'. it's obvious you dislike the whole concept of communism. there is nothing unfair about the pure concept of communism because it's about a working unit. you have the mentality of a capitalist or 'everyone out for themself'. pay attention: when a society is a community where everyone contributes each according to their ability and by receiving what is needed, they can continue to grow and contribute. notice "need", not "want." it's a general concept and can be defined or twisted any way a government wants to do. the "concept" is just one that is fair considering the input of a collective society, not that it would actually work as it stands now. secondly, there is no difference in real life between the concept of "each according to his ability, to each according to his need" that occurs in today's society. it's just not called communism and it's just not perfect. there is retirement, bonuses, medical care, grants, research for disease etc. as for bringing up fair as a point of contention, as if capitalism is fair.. and i did mention several times the difference between an ideal concept and real life which you ignored. i also repeatedly said that a blend of systems are what would work best and "joe" was not the only one. you are playing cognitive dissonance. the only reason i was playing the devil's advocate was because you assumed communist countries exist and outright dismiss communist concept as a whole. that's what most capitalists do with the usual "evil" communism or socialism.
Bottom line here is that you cannot prove your claim that socialism can only be implemented with a dictatorship. Because it is blatently untrue.
i don't buy for a second that you are a moderate, otherwise you would not have made the 'strong' anti-communist stance. you are projecting. i think your argument is silly. i think it would 'fail' because people fail to think beyond immediate results or gratification. it's not really "thinking." excuse me for using the word 'evolved'. i guess long-term thinking and wisdom is just not necessarily a constituent of evolution. lol unlike with "evil" communism, right? the big, bad proverbial invisible devil. considering there is really no "communist" country.
No need.There have been plenty of examples. If you have time, energy, mood theoretically prove the opposite, so what I experienced is not true, it is your job.
One of the differences is that the dumbass cars and the bending your neighbors over for scams like the last generation of Republican politics is easily available under socialism. Socialism is not programmatically tyrannical; Cuba worked very well for fifty years under extraordinarily difficult circumstances - compare Haiti, which had none of Cuba's powerful enemies or imposed hardships all that time, but instead enjoyed the fruits of capitalist enterprise. Communism requires, as a minimum,. communal ownership and management of all property. Communes. (Socialism refers to State ownership of corporate enterprise, without reference to private houses, land, etc) It is not, in theory, necessarily totalitarian beyond that. The stuff about from each/to each can be taken as a criterion of evaluation rather than authoritarian imposition or fiat- and as such is hard to argue against: a system that failed to perform in that way would be defective in almost everyone's view, I think. The fact that proponents of laissez faire capitalism flinch from it, try to dismiss it, reveals. Lenin said that about communism, not Socialists. And it wasn't an "acknowledgment", but a theoretical point: to be taken in the same light that someone might say without monarchy capitalism could never have purchased a foothold. Capitalism, according to Lenin after Marx, was going to ruin itself, as it concentrated wealth in ever larger and less useful piles and undermined the lives and capabilities of most people in the society - squandering the benefits of its early stages of trade and market exchange, which it would cannibalize in the interests of the ownership class. So far, that seems prophetic.
But not under communism? I'm not saying it doesn't work...apparently it's never been tried? I dunno---I said it seems to work best when mixed with democracy and capitalism, just judging by the number of governments that operate more towards the socialist end of the spectrum versus the numer of social democracies, as in Europe.
I think you are getting Communalism and Communitarianism and such concepts like Libertarian municipalism confused and interposed with communism. A state is definitely necessary to impose communist principles, they are not voluntary. Communalism and Communitarianism are usually entered into by voluntary contract in the absence of coercion. Only in societies where a State exists does violent coercion exist. (Namely, every society currently on the planet. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! )
Not easily. You'd probably have to get your neighbors to support your personal foibles, at their large expense. Only a distant cabal of successful authoritarians could manage that, under even a rigidly authoritarian communism - and it's not easy to be one of them. Look at what Stalin had to do to the original communist setup, and the relatively poor rewards obtained by even the more successful collaborators in his tyranny. Alternatively, look at what more socialist Canada provides easily by way of cigars and car manufacture, half price medical care and talented entertainers, along with political factions ignorant and reactionary enough to please the most steadfast US Republican voter. Tell that to your local food coop. There are thousands of voluntary communist organizations in the US, not even counting the traditional nuclear families.
No doubt the example was chosen carefully (you may know---I have recently moved to Canada). But I'm confused---can you explain the point of the comparison? I mean, I would point out that Canada is one of the places where socialism seems to work well---that is, when mixed with a fair bit of Democracy and Capitalism. As a whole, from my three months in the country, people have the same concerns as people do in the US, and they have the same complaints. I don't think the average person is any happier here than in the states. But anyway, could you expand this a bit? I'm also interested in what you said before: capitalism required some bit of monarchy to get started? In what sense? (Sorry, I should've asked you this earlier.) But those are sort of "selective communisms", in the sense that they don't apply communist principles across the board. And this is far from "true communism", whatever that means. The point is that such small scale experiments don't extrapolate. Certainly communism is possible when everybody knows everybody else, and few people dissent---i.e., there is a common goal, and everyone more or less agrees with how to achieve that goal. Everyone is free to participate or not, but the option of not participating is much worse for both the non-participant and the rest of the community. Emulating this environment across a city, or a state, or a country seems pretty impossible without some authoritarian direction, do you agree?
Jesus...don't get him started. He is correct, in a sense: see ice's example about the local food bank. There's not really a government, per se, (excepting the person who has to report to the outside) but a bunch of people working for the betterment of all---i.e., the common good. The problem, of course, is for those poor wretched souls for whom this system doesn't make sense---if there are enough of them, the community falls apart, which is why, on a large scale, some government is needed. Anyway, discussions of "true anarchy" are probably better left to another thread Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The "principles of communism" are applied pretty universally - across the board, in a sense - in quite a few communes and communal organizations across the US, although many of even the long lived others have not survived the heyday of their creation. The inability of any of these small communes to expand and take over - "extrapolate" - to nation states is interesting, and clues are found in such established practices as the splitting of Mennonite colonies after a certain size, but it may be misleadingly posed as an issue: one might well ask, say, whether democracy itself in the US is an example of the 1776 extrapolation of communist principles (very common among the colonists in America - such as the founders of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - as well as the then-powerful Red nations frequently encountered and well known) to larger scale political organization. One man one vote is certainly not a capitalist principle. Not my opinion - I was invoking a frequently encountered bit of analysis to put Lenin's comments into context, as theoretical analysis of economic progress rather than 'acknowledgment" of some kind of failure of communism, socialism, or whatever.
If it wasn't already clear, I want to re-emphasize that I'm not really intending anything that I say to be an indictment of communism or communists in general. It's pretty clear to me that Heaven is probably a communism, but it's also pretty clear that that's about the only place that such a system can work on a large scale. Well, I wouldn't class "capitalism" as a form of government, but "one man one vote" is certainly in line with the idea that every person in a capitalist society should act in his own best interest. (I want to be clear, this is a necessary condition for capitalism, not a sufficient one.) "Voting" (when there's a choice) is just a way to express your own interests. Put this way, it's clear that "voting" does not equal "democracy", as some would have us believe. Moreover, I cannot reject the idea that there are some communist principles at work in America. The social net, to the extent that it exists, is clearly a communist principle, even if it isn't acknowledged as such. Sure, ok. I had never heard this analysis. I can't see how it's correct, but ok.
Voting is a way to express your own interests - even enforce them - without being able to foot the bill or cover the costs yourself. The idea that a moneyless, landless, capital lacking person would have any say at all, let alone coercive control, over economic policy and other people's economic decisions runs contrary to capitalist principle. There is nothing in capitalism that suggests that everyone in a society, regardless of their control of capital, should be able to act in their own best interests (regardless of ability to pay in the short term?). There is nothing in capitalism itself discouraging even such things as indentured servitude, slavery, debt peonage, prison labor, child labor, concentration camp labor, piracy, or a host of other atrocities and coercions and abrogations of ability to act in one's own best interests. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with tyranny, and in particular lends itself to tyranny by corporate power and the control of all of society by the managers or possessors of much capital. Surely that is obvious? Endowing the poor with political power comparable to that of the rich counters - curbs and limits the undesirable tendencies of capitalism left to itself. The identification of authoritarian overlordship with "left" or "communist" ideology not only reflects a profound ignorance of ideology, history, and the varieties of community based governance, some quite libertarian (Red tribal society in the American west circa 1700, say); it also tends to create a misidentification of personal liberty with capitalist economic structure - as if libertarian ideologies were some kind of right wing genre of thought. That is dangerously naive, if there are large corporations in the vicinity.
I think the issue with Communism that it is the most radical kind of political collectivism, and depends on an equally radical collectivism or altruism in ethics. In practice, communism has always been a form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism. Socialism, which is also a form of collectivism, emphasises state ownership of the means of production and subordination of the individual to the community, but through democratic means. The revolutionary doctrines of Marxism and Lenin's revolution in Russia, (and Mao's revolution in China) still resonate strongly even 114 years after the Russian revolution, especially in America, which also had a revolutionary beginning. But with a very different ideology. The fact is that communism is just an ideological façade, where personality cults can thrive. A better question for this thread would be: “What is true collectivism?” Moreover, another good one would be “why are free market capitalists so scared of anything with the slightest taint of it?”
