Who does communism appeal to? Why would we want to rid society of it's classes...

>Who does communism appeal to?

Fanatics who want to see the current social order destroyed.

You are literally straw manning right now

>You foolish, Ug. Growing plant in 'field' never work. It human nature to pick berry.

I like the idea of a planned economy - someday.

It is unrealistic to even attempt to implement it though.
>inb4 butthurt leftypol
Let's live in the real world, a lot of people will suffer and die if anything like that is attempted, and it will just fail in the end.

>tfw kind of see the appeal of communism but want the average self described degenerate communist nowhere near me
Just give go full automation senpai and everything will sort itself gradually senpai

Ironically despite always talking about indoctrination, they themselves are heavily indoctrinated. The armchair intellectual ones are generally well read/educated/versed in philosophy, to them communism is it's theoretical version, the end of all oppression, but it never turns out well. They have a poor grasp of economics.

>Jamal and Billy Bob may have the ability to become world class entrepreneurs but they never do because they weren't able to overcome their birth.

So? If they are never able to generate wealth then tough shit. This is the moralist shit I'm talking about.

>it's another "either you're a dipshit marxist or right-wing goon" episode

Mixed economies with strong organized labor and robust, efficient welfare states produce the best results, folks.

Well I agree for the most part. The issue is that decentralized economies have signiifcantly more power with which to process information since so many people make decisions.

Centralization can only work if computers can become significantly powerful enough to properly analyze, collect, and react to information. Beyond that I don't see it being an efficient system.

>the end of all oppression

Why is ending oppression seen as an intellectual pursuit?

>in b4 autistic screeching from navel gazing socialist redditors and worshippers of the cult of the free market™

Do what other folks do and be a social media manager for whatever peasant communist party you can think of in some bumfuck nowhere third world shithole.
Folks will be normal and well adjusted, or at least as far as shit-eating peasants can be.

>but it never turns out well
But it's impossible for it to have been tried as conceptually people are not ready for communism.

The Communists who think to actually implement communism are anarchists.

>"Social democratic policies have led to increases in standards of li-"

>"YOU KILLED ROSA LUXEMBURG REEEEEE"

My point is that Jamal may be able to run a company or government better than Joe Normal. I am against restricting peoples access to things by birth partially because of moral arguments, but also because it is less efficient.

I am less against stratification and more against being born into a class. Ideally, people would be born on an even plane and the cream would rise to the top. Now that being said implementing such system would both be abhorrent and basically impossible since it goes against one of humanities deepest drives.

Yeah, it would require quite a bit of organization, and honestly I don't see people being smart enough to do it right now, we'd need AI or genetic engineering or eugenics(disclaimer: real eugenics would be interracial, but unfortunately the only people interested in it are /pol/ idiots who don't even know what a gene is) - 3 things that are achievable with advances in technology. Chinese have used CRISPR on human embryos, strong AI is not very far away.

Planned economy and something like communism is the future, we just won't be alive when it happens.

The irony of the soviet system was that its economic policies, while on paper seeming centrally planned, practically resulted in a system more decentralized than our own. The Soviet Union never cultivated economic feedback mechanisms that would allow efficient communication of data between the shop floor and the politburo chambers. The result was basically economic anarchy.
We're better than the soviet union at central planning.

Well of course but that is no fun to argue. Playing Devils advocate is entertaining and helps you to think out your positions more.

The specific building process of communism has ended horribly. My point of view is that we can talk about communism when there's full automation and post scarcity.

I would not be so predictive. We don't know how close Smart AI is and even then we don't know what it will lead to. Also, I don't think eugenics could make nearly a big enough difference on any reasonable period of time.
Well ideally there is mix of both going on like we have now. I wasn't specifically arguing against the soviet system. I was more arguing against the idea having an economy rigidly controlled by a central state apparatus.

>Pretending to not know it's not about it being intellectual as it is practical.
ITT typical right shill baiting

>Who does communism appeal to?
Moralists, idealists and economic illiterates
>Why would we want to rid society of it's classes?
muh equality
>This all just sounds like moralist bullshit.
That's because it is, to an extent

Communism is a failed system and anyone with a decent understanding of economics knows this. It's an authoritarian system that would deteriorate the standard of living for all citizens and suppress our freedom but hey, at least everyone would be "equal".

Pic related

>Who does communism appeal to?
There many many reasons that communism appeals to certain countries. The most common reason that people throw around (and not entirely inaccurately) is that it appeals to poor peasant class people. Imagine if you were a relatively recently liberated Russian serf. You're free but certainly not well-off so wouldn't ideas of land redistribution and common wealth be very appealing? After all you've really got nothing to lose and everything to gain. AND the fact that the majority of your countries population feels the exact same way as you do definitely helps.

My own personal theory is that communism appeals to people because of the open wounds from imperialist, and particularly capitalist countries. While this definitely doesn't apply to all countries, it works for a lot of them. Vietnam and Korea were especially susceptible to communist ideals, with Vietnam being recently liberated from French control and Korea, from Japanese. Both of which were pretty brutal capitalist nations. Any sane person living in those countries would be COMPLETELY opposed to capitalism after something like what they went through. Becoming communist is a huge middle finger to western imperialists. And even for countries that weren't colonies (Russia), the growing distrust between them, and former western allies made Russia want to distance themselves as much as possible from the unreliable capitalist countries. tl;dr Russia didn't like US, Britain, and France, so they became communist in defiance of them.

That theory has a lot of holes and gaps in logic but I find it to work sometimes. You just always have to remember that there is no single reason for anything a country or peoples may do. It is a combination of many many feelings, political standpoints, and individual ambitions.

And never call something "moralist bullshit" because you don't understand it. If you want to shitpost, go to /pol/.

>Why would we want to rid society of it's classes?
Why wouldn't you? Whether it's feasible or not is another question.

Obviously it increases the standard of living, but implementing socialist policies gives the government more power over you. How much power over your own life are you willing to secede to the government?

Would you say that there is a danger in social classes becoming more rigid

>And never call something "moralist bullshit" because you don't understand it.

>Don't call something what it basically is

The advanced man adapts nature to his needs, the primitive man succumbs to it.

This isn't about limiting freedom of speech or expression, and usually the free-market nonsense about FREEDOM OF CHOICE leads to basic needs like health care becoming commodities.

The Gulag Archipelago was a good book but Solzhenitsyn went off the deep end later on in life. Also, classicalism is autistic as fuck.

Do you think that there are unreasonable barriers for advancement in todays society for those born in the bottom 10 percent.

I am not saying the solutions are any better, but I do think it is a serious problem that many people who otherwise could be productive members of society are restricted by birth. I feel like it is a loss for society as whole.

>The advanced man adapts nature to his needs, the primitive man succumbs to it.

Yep, you've basically described the difference between rich people and poor people. :^)

I'm sorry, what was your argument again?

>Arguments such as how impractical communism is or how it goes against human nature are just laughed off by proponents and never given a proper counter argument.
Probably because they've heard them so many times from ignorants like you they've realized there's no point bothering.

The children of the well-off, who are raised in luxury and indolence, and who hate their parents so fancy themselves as "revolutionaries" because they shill for an ideology that would unironically see them all lined up against a wall and shot.

Sure.
What I'm trying to argue is against the notion of liberalism and socialism being flawed because they go against some perceived concept of nature which may actually be quite unnatural.

>forced redistribution of wealth
>moral
Pick one

>Probably because they've heard them so many times from ignorants like you they've realized there's no point bothering.

Go ahead, the stage is all yours.

Is communism even feasible theoretically in a consumer economy?

I'm merely using the soviet system as an example of a "centrally planned" economy to illustrate how it can fail. It helps us understand not simply the economics of countries but of large business's with diverse economic output, and how they can fail or succeed. One of those ways, a damning one, is the divide between planning and execution, and the structural weaknesses of a system that create such.

Then how do you explain Kim-Il Sung then? He (reportedly) grew up poor and uneducated.

About as much as I'm willing to secede to any employer, relative to my economic circumstances.

It's all done under the guise of "freeing" poor weak people who can't compete.

Test question: Are you a member of a privileged class? If so press 2, if not hang up.

There's a million counterexample for each "every communist is X" stereotype. And each of those stereotypes contradicts the others. It honestly amazes me that people are retarded enough to keep spouting this kind of shit (about any ideology).

Could you elaborate?

Is unregulated capitalism feasible in a modern day democracy?

I see this reminds a lot of the second emperor of China.

He would kill all of his messengers if they ever gave him bad news. As you can predict this very quickly lead to the downfall of his empire and his dynasty.

Centralized apparatuses are much more fragile than decentralized ones, because the misjudgment of single individuals and the inability to properly transmit info from the bottom to the top can lead to very large charges based on faulty logic and faulty information.

Nope. If land and wealth is equal, then no one has the resources to make much else other than food and clothes. Plus, the whole idea behind consumer economies is "I can buy what I want with the money I have" but communism dictates that all goods and wealth are distributed evenly. i.e. you have no money to buy products that don't exist.

Realistically however, most communist countries are not that hardcore communist. In Russia for example, after seeing the failing of communism, Lenin decided to allow for SOME private business and property rights.

If that's true (it probably isn't) then he's an exception.

Theoretically yes. It would just require a degree of cooperation and management never before seen. It is not impossible just extremely difficult and not worth the effort.

Well there's no evidence to suggest that his poor roots aren't true. But I'd still like an explanation of how he came to power despite not being a parent-hating and educated shill

Marx talks about "seizing the means of production" because at the time manufacturing and industry was the driving force behind the world's biggest economies. The United States for example, isn't like that anymore. Huge amounts of our GDP are made up by the service sector. If you want to get rich in America you don't start a steel or an oil company, you make a product that appeals to the average person. How would a transition to communism even work?

>Advancements in social ideology should be rejected just because they come from people in positions of greater knowledgeability.

>If land and wealth is equal, then no one has the resources to make much else other than food and clothes
>communism dictates that all goods and wealth are distributed evenly
These are the kind of people that claim communists don't know economics.

Of course not, that's why all the largest economies are mixed. Only Ancap retards actually think that the market works best with no regulations.

Oh yes, it's quite like that. It's a bad trait in a middle manager and even worse in the guy running the whole operation. Heck, the aloofness of Chinese emperors to the day-to-day economics of the realm is a very notable contributor to its economic underdevelopment during the imperial times.

Not necessarily so. We live in an era where large multinational conglomerates are able to turn rather tidy profits, despite naysayers of earlier times doubting whether or not simple joint-stock companies could survive with their scope. They have similar management and power distribution challenges that the soviet union had, though we can think of many successful examples of these conglomerates and, well, we know that the Soviet Union was really unsuccessful. If anything, it's an interesting thought experiment to see the Soviet Union by its business practices, by its attempts to maximize output while minimizing input, as opposed to simply its politics.

>Only Ancap retards actually think that the market works best with no regulations.
Well most contemporary neocons and neoliberals would be receptive of any deregulative policy presented to them. This whole dichotomy against
socialism is the obstacle that has impeded the development of logical and balanced ideologies.

>who does communism appeal to?
Have you actually read the Manifesto, user? It should be self-evident

"Seizing the means of production" is a manifesto thing. like all manifesto's, simple political measures are overexaggerated, because the point is to get folks now to consider measures and practices that they can do right away, in this case for revolution.
It's why you should never trust pamphleteers, they ain't here to start an academic disputation with you, they want you to do something ASAP.

For Marx's extant writings, exactly how to go about organizing economic growth, meeting consumer demand, and so on isn't present, one gets a picture only from offhand snippets, newspaper clippings, and parenthetical notes.

I won't say whether or not it would work or not, because a model was never presented in the first place. It's generally up to folks living in a particular time to figure out how to work things out in their particular time.

I will, however, say that yeah, the economies of the eastern bloc and certain african and latin american states were very ill-suited at production for the consumer market. Idk if they could have reformed in order to do so, but they certainly did not, anyways.

On your second paragraph

I have been thinking of response and upon more thinking I guess a more accurate statement is that centralized apparatuses are vulnerable to misjudgment and poor communication. But, there are obviously advantages that can mitigate these inherent disadvantages.

I am wondering what is more vulnerable a single 50 billion dollar copperation or a hundred 50 million. Honestly, I am not sure and it interesting to apply this to countries as well. Like could the United States on average be run better if it was a looser collection of independent states.

In the time when folks were in the process of "westernizing", the whole dichotomy mattered little to them, and it seemed to work out well enough.

Japan, for instance, through huge state resources into infrastructural development and state enterprise it later developed into its large private/semi-private zaibatsu's.
It wasn't socialism or anything, they just figured that that was what would grow their economy and they'd stick with it until they found another way of growing their economy.

I think a good example a how dencetrailization can hurt on a national scale is Poland in the early modern period

Depends on the practices and polices of the one worth 50 billion and the one worth 50 million. It is true that they are conceptually vulnerable to such, as a matter of theory, and we can therefore expect one worth 50 billion with the same management structure to be more vulnerable than one worth 50 million.
However, in practice companies are dynamic, they expend a lot of effort into collecting internal data and formulating policy in order to remain stable and competitive in changing economic circumstances. Some policies work, some don't, sometimes bad ones are corrected, sometimes they are not.

The value of the soviet union as a model is that it was a big economy relative to the world economy, the business that was the soviet union was one of the biggest around, and yet it's a comedy of errors, it's one "what you should not do" one after the other, and that's really valuable in a model.

And hey, whatever model gets your noggin joggin, man. This US with a much weaker federal system, how would it organize economic relations between states? Would they use a single currency, but value it differently state by state?

By all means, please elaborate.

user that you replied to here

I think such a thing could only happen if the wealthy class had the power to undermine members of lower classes (which is definitely the case nowadays due to excessive government intervention in the market and the plutocracy that is the US, for example) and/or the lower classes were in a state of constant poverty, without the means of becoming educated to lift themselves out of poverty. Such a thing, I believe, wouldn't happen in a society whose economics reflected no collectivism (i.e. a free market), or would at least be very unlikely to happen

/thread

this

Quality post

But the building process for communism is capitalism.

>Who does communism appeal to?

Me.

>Why would we want to rid society of it's classes?

Because they are immoral, inefficiant and result in numerous contradictions and antagonisms that result in massive conflict, pain, suffering, subjugation and death.

>This all just sounds like moralist bullshit.

I'm fine with someone who wants something better for humanity than a planet where the rich get to shit on everyone else due to birth right and luck and driving us into a new extinction era due to climate change.

The discussion ended here folks.

Sargon pls

I just realized it's the profile pic of that stupid Youtuber. Fuck, I just thought it was a cool image of Sargon smoking a cigar

>human nature
you are just memeing now dawg

Human nature is demonstrably changeable.

>of course it won't be ME working the fields in the freezing spring

DUDE

ANALOGIES

LMAO!!!!!!!

it appeals to everyone

but the middle class is cancer so we will never have it and will keep chasing printed paper instead of colonizing planets

eradicate the fucking middle class reeeeee

>mfw i go ahead and read what the bolsjeviks did in Russia

Gotta be honest, it was absolutely satanic. Basically to give the quick rundown, the commies declared that "kulaks" were an enemy and should be exterminated. "Kulak" was very loosely defined as a peasant who wasn't starving to death. So the commies sent soldiers to millions of farmers and either deported them to work camps in siberia or just shot them on the spot. Calm farmers just living in tune with nature were mass genocided because of an unreachable ideal. Communism is demon worship.

t. middle class teenager

>chasing printed paper instead of colonizing planets
>starving to death instead of having cool things
FTFY.

which youd have anyway you gigantic american fucktard since we have the technology, resources AND knowledge

but MUH MONEY
MUH STATUS
MUH TINY AMERIFAT DICK

jesus crist i hate all of you so much

I am from a post communist country. Fuck you. You have no idea how an economy functions. You have no idea how authoritarian regimes put up facades for those on the outside looking in.

>not in the cult of the free market
But we get cool money oriented powers!

1.) The disenfranchised and those who are enslaved to corporations and capitalists.

2.) So that everyone could truly work for himself instead of working to fill others' pockets

>This isn't about limiting freedom of speech or expression
It's still limiting freedom. Locke styled government and Social Democracy are irreconcilable due to the government abuse of it's power to sieze one's property. When 90% of what you earn is taken away the government is denying your freedom to pursue happiness.

Scary people
There were about 70,000 commies in total at the beginning of the russian revolution however they manages to manuever themselves to the top of the socialist faction and the vast majority of the red army wasn't communist, they were just scared of what would happen if the tsarist regime was reinstated.
Commies managed to intimidate Russia into communism

Then why do the poorest people in capitalist countries live twice as well as the average person in communist ones?
Why would people rather work a minimum wage job in Austria, USA, Netherlands, UK, than work some typical middle class respected job in communist ones?

You're just making assumptions.
>why would the low class who swallow what they are told prefer their job over the better one in a country they have never been allowed to go to

I'm not making assumptions. I have an uncle in Switzerland and an uncle in the USA. It's true.
Look at the number of Poles, Slovaks, various Yugoslavs, Albanians, etc. in Germany, Austria, UK, Switzerland. Compare the average incomes. Look at the GDP per capita PPP (PURCHASING POWER PARITY) at the beginning of the 20th century and at the end for countries that had Communist governments.
In the 1900s Czechoslovakia was as developed as Austria, in the 1930s Yugoslavia was as developed as Spain, now look at the statistics from the 90s, heck even look at the current statistics. Countries that transitioned from communism later are doing much worse.