Why don't we have a communist society yet? I mean we could.

0wing said:
Thread, please. :lol: Forget about it, communism/socialism/oppposition-of-western-individualism/whateveryouwannacallitism is strictly eastern thing.

Specifically a russian thing, mainly the idea of collective ownership of production means; Convocation existed in ancient rus' as veche and reintroduced and reformed as actual convocation (soviet) during the 1905 revolution.

Chinks in general value collectivism over individualism.

Without this base you have no solid ground to stand on in argument.
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By that logic than our current exploitative hierarchies and "shallow" culture are the result of us descending from civilizations like Rome which had holidays based around sodomy.
 
TheHouseAlwaysWins said:
By that logic than our current exploitative hierarchies and "shallow" culture are the result of us descending from civilizations like Rome which had holidays based around sodomy.
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I always wonder if every time where a certain transition was on the horizon, you had someone, somewhere saying something like "This is just a pipe-dream/impossible utopy that will never become true!". Abbolishing slavery? Mad man! Equality for everyone? Ludicrous! No King you say! Peasants with voting their leaders?! What the hell!

If things couldn't improve for the better, we would probably be still flinging rocks together like 30 000 years ago.

YOU DAMN YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPERS AND YOUR FUCKED UP FIRE! In my day, we used to eat meat RAW! And we loved it! It made us STRONGER! This idea of yours, that everyone will one day cook all their meat? WHAT'S NEXT! EATING VEGETABLES?! That's just an impossibla utopia! From where are we all going to get our Fire even?! No one knows how to make it yet correctly! No one will be wanting to eat raw meat anymore and actualyl work for it! And those that know how to keep the fire, will have to work 40-50 hours per week just to keep it runing just so the others can enjoy their free meat!
 
I bet ITT no one ever read one wise old fella 'Adam Smith'. Compared to this sad reality, his postulats also seem utopian. At least he's far smarter than local basement 'muh taxes' libertarians with signed Ayn Rand posters on the wall.
 
Well, now that you mention Adam Smith, I think but that's just opinion of course, if he would see todays neoliberals, he would despise them. I think he would be against globalisation and the current economic model we have. Not beacuse of the government or the fact that he rejected to much influence, but the fact that we're not seeing free market economies today, but oligarchy and corporatism. Adam Smith, was not a radical. He was in favour of free trade and not unlimited markets. Free trade is the source of wealth and not unlimited markets. Unlimited markets, lead to monopolism and not to wealth for everyone, this is not what Adam Smith meant with the invisible hand. Adam Smith, and you can quote him on that, didn't trust traders and merchants! A good trade, is one that benefits both traders, lets say you have cloth, I have wine, we both trade, now we both have cloth and wine, it's a win-win and there should be no power or administration stoping us from making such trades. But there still have to be some sort of rules for it to happen. Like a just and independed jurisdiction, a market where compeition can actually happen and where monopolism isn't forming. A merchant, isn't working for the greater good or for society, he's working for his own profit and only his interests, which is alright, that's his task! But if everyone would be always and solely working for his own profit, that would be the end of a civiliced society, definetly as we know it. And Adam Smith knew this. So what we need, is a government strong enough to set the rules, which have at the very least to be true for everyone.
 
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The problem with capitalism at least from what I've seen of it is that it tends to grow too big to the point of starting to surpass governments and it negatively effects everyone in the end. Capitalism, if you look at it in the big picture over generations, is as destructive as stuff like fascism and stanlinism are. All neoliberalism is less restricted capitalism innit?


Crni Vuk said:
this is not what Adam Smith meant with the invisible hand. A.
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I haven't read him cause I don't have much access to reading sources currently. Is his works online actually? If he's the source of the invisible hand concept, he was really wrong completely. There is no invisible hand that sorts out good ideas from bad ideas.
 
We need clean zero-cost energy and asteroid resource harvesting before Star Trek happens, duh. First thing first. Also gib teleporter beam.
 
TheHouseAlwaysWins said:
I haven't read him cause I don't have much access to reading sources currently. Is his works online actually? If he's the source of the invisible hand concept, he was really wrong completely. There is no invisible hand that sorts out good ideas from bad ideas.
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No clue, just look for Wealth of Nations, there he mentions the "invisible Hand" but only very briefily and not in detail. However, looking at his work, one has to remember that he was a man of his time.
 
Because we're too poor for that, not everyone has the same quantity of material yet, or the same level of intelligence, way of thinking. We will be almost every time individualistic, only the herd is not isolated.
 
We don't have communism (even the Utopian kind....) because the whole system was invented by a drunk mooch with rich friends. Also the fact remains that violence will have to be used to set it up and maintain it.

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." From the Communist Manifesto.

You want more violence, because Communism is how you get more violence. There is no "Utopian Communism", and the Utopia of it is only in the minds of the deranged.
 
GonZo_626 said:
We don't have communism (even the Utopian kind....) because the whole system was invented by a drunk mooch with rich friends. Also the fact remains that violence will have to be used to set it up and maintain it.

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." From the Communist Manifesto.

You want more violence, because Communism is how you get more violence. There is no "Utopian Communism", and the Utopia of it is only in the minds of the deranged.
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"But that wasn't real communism. we haven't tried real communism yet"
 
Communism has the problem of people having drive. Emotional drive or financial/power drive.

If you believe that we essentially are slaves to our emotions that's a problem and conflicts with systems in general if you ask me. I don't know if we truly are slaves to them, but I've seen it argued before. I'd say if we were logical, emotionless, and completely honest beings I could see communism working. But until we have endless supplies of anything we'd need and easily available, I don't see it working. People will lie, they will cheat the system, they'll try less to better themselves. It's behavior.

If we aren't motivated to become doctors then why would you spend 8 years studying it? For the better of society? Sure, it sounds nice but we don't think about it like that after 8 years of schooling and we start asking about our own desires and wants. Why would the guy who flips burgers get everything he needs while the guy who does construction get nothing more? People are going to compare themselves to their peers and see if they're doing more work, they want more benefits.

Not to mention that there's the idea (I'm still on the fence about this one for sure) that if other people weren't worse off than you, you couldn't really feel happy. Sure you'd feel happy for a bit, knowing everyone is okay. There'd eventually come a time where you have no reason to feel like you could be worse off until your neighbor breaks his leg and you go back to. "At least that wasn't me." It's why some people can be so happy without clean water because in their minds, at least they have water. Others rarely consider that one day they could lose clean water. I'm guilty of that as are most people in first world nations.
 
From my perspective communist and socialist societies never work. The problem with them is the complete lack of accountability be both the government and it's people.

To be honest the only system of government I think would be by far the most beneficial is the one proposed by Robert A Heinlein.

I know that's the politics of Starship Troopers movie, but its an applicable introduction. Please feel to research how a system based upon personal accountability would be like.
 
GonZo_626 said:
We don't have communism (even the Utopian kind....) because the whole system was invented by a drunk mooch with rich friends. Also the fact remains that violence will have to be used to set it up and maintain it.

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." From the Communist Manifesto.

You want more violence, because Communism is how you get more violence. There is no "Utopian Communism", and the Utopia of it is only in the minds of the deranged.
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But maybe at some point technology will allow us to achieve at least a few utopian ideas.

Societies are constantly changing and historically speaking there was a constant progress, not just in technology and the tools we use but also our understanding of moral, ethics, liberty and equality. I would argue, at no point in human history have the people today enjoyed more safety and liberty then ever before, to freely speak their mind without repercussions. When I am saying this, then I mean this ONLY(!) in a historical context! When you compare America/Europe of 2019 with 1819 or 1719 or even earlier. I mean we saw a constant evolution, from the Magna Carta, to the Constitution, the Human Rights and so on. And I see at the very least for now, no reason to believe that this progress will stop. Of course we will never see a communist society emerge from all of this, that would be a terrible idea anyway because a pure communist society, basically a form of anarchism, would collapse the moment it came to happen. This is, if we follow a 'strict' definition of communism. But I could see a society in 2050 or 2100 that's achieving some ideas of it, the same way as how Germany achieved to succesfully implement some social concepts trough the so called 'Soziale Marktwirtschaft' (social market economy) after WW2, by combining a free market capitalist economic system alongside social policies that establish both fair competition within the market and a welfare state. I mean, even the United States saw some social reforms over the last 100 years and they are definetly a much better society than 100 or 200 year ago.

Anyway, what ever kind of society, system or governance we will see in the distant future, I have no doubts in my mind that it can be a better society than we have now. Just as how we, experience a better society than our ancestors did.
 
Communists thought the invention of the steam engine was enough for their effortless utopia to come to life. Didn't work. And now they're again overestimating the effect of technology and underestimating human nature.
 
Says the guy who's using lasers he's working with in his job to mark his Zippo or something. Hass, I love you like a Brother, but sometimes you're a cynical fuck! I mean if you started a metal band 300 years ago, you'd probably experienced a death that metal bands would sing about today, because the priests would have burned you on a stake.
 
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