Why communism doesn't work?

[integral]

This is my current level of understanding.

Capitalism pits all the actors against each other, a division of power, its only when it consolidates to one authority that we get catastrophe and what trump is trying to do. Communism always leads to dictatorship because the state owns everything so all someone has to do is reach out there hand to sieze it all for themselves. the genius solution is to make all the whores compete with each other and get into each others way.

Edited yesterday at 01:31 PM by integral

[Ulax]

Thing is though, capitalism is also really a catastrophe.

You have people dying on the streets, many dying in opioid crises, many homeless etc.

Capitalist nations like the US wage illegitimate wars like Iraq which cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

[enchanted]

12 hours ago, Ulax said:

Thing is though, capitalism is also really a catastrophe.

You have people dying on the streets, many dying in opioid crises, many homeless etc.

Capitalist nations like the US wage illegitimate wars like Iraq which cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

So true. We have been told capitalism is the best thing there since childhood; no wonder many don't see it's negatives. 

Edited 14 hours ago by enchanted

[Topspin715]

Centrally planning everything in an economy is also very difficult because the market mechanism provides very useful information about what to produce and how much.  It doesn't allocate resources fairly and it tends towards wealth concentration, especially when wealth can be used to overpower competitors, but the market tends to be much more resilient and efficient than a purely centrally planned economy.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but part of the reason that the Soviet Union collapsed was that its economy became very bureaucratic and unresponsive to things like a collapse in the global oil price which had been bringing in a lot of revenue for the USSR.

Central planning can be preferable in situations where you know exactly what you need to build and need to mobilize a lot of resources quickly like if you have an outdated economy and need to quickly modernize.

The Soviet Union and China both used that power to modernize quickly. 

[Ulax]

1 hour ago, enchanted said:

So true. We have been told capitalism is the best thing there since childhood. No wonder many don't see it's negatives. 

Yes, and also capitalism is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with capitalism. Reality is blamed instead.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

29 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Yes, and also capitalism is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with capitalism. Reality is blamed instead.

Incidentally, this is the exact same line of reasoning 4th wave feminists use for "patriarchy" 

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Yes, and also patriarchy is so naturalised for us. Its 'just the way things are', and so when bad things happen we don't even associate them with patriarchy. Reality is blamed instead.

 

[Topspin715]

Capitalism isn't even a very meaningful term. It basically just refers to an economic system where the people own private property.

Within a "capitalist" system, you can still redistribute significant wealth, have a very strong safety net and entitlement programs, and invest heavily in education and public infrastructure.

The two biggest problems with capitalism is that it tends to lead to wealth concentration over time and then wealthy people and corporations start to buy off politicians to rig institutions and laws in their favor. When those problems get really bad, the people call for socialism although often they don't know what socialism means.

[Ulax]

23 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Incidentally, this is the exact same line of reasoning 4th wave feminists use for "patriarchy" 

 

Fair point. I mean it all derives a lot from the same core of critical theory

[PsychedelicEagle]

One of the strenghts of market economies is how efficiently and undistortedly information travels.

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“We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function.” — F. A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)

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One of the core strengths of market economies is how they coordinate dispersed knowledge. The information an economy needs is scattered across millions of people, much of it local and tacit, and no central authority can gather it. Prices compress it into a single signal: if a material becomes scarce, its price rises and people economize on it without needing to know why. Profit and loss then reward those who act on that knowledge well and push resources away from bad decisions.  ~ Claude

 

Edited 13 hours ago by PsychedelicEagle

[Ajay0]

14 hours ago, integral said:

Communism always leads to dictatorship because the state owns everything so all someone has to do is reach out there hand to sieze it all for themselves.

Communist ideology does not need to always have a dictatorship framework.

It can work well in a democratic setup as well.

Communist parties were elected by voters to power in Nepal,Moldova, San Marino, Chile Cyprus and in some states of India like Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura.

In India itself, regions where the communist came to power by elections resulted in much needed empowerment of the masses through mass education, healthcare and property rights, and reduction in feudalist/casteist and capitalist privileges of an exploitative nature.

It empowered the lower classes through class consciousness and by virtue of organization so as to protect themselves from predatory feudalists and capitalists.

However when the communists themselves descended to complacency, corruption and incompetence levels, they were voted out of power by the voters themselves for superior political parties and better quality political leaders.

Imho, Marx made a huge theoretical mistake in organizing a communist government under a dictatorship,  as a dictatorship with huge unaccountable power in its hands can get poor results as Stalin showed.

Communism can work well in a democratic setup as well with the necessary checks and balances, and Marx possibly did not study the possibilities as such.

Since the proletariat is the largest majority in any country, democracy can also lead to empowerment of the proletariat without any need for dictatorships, provided the proletariat or masses does their homework is assessing which political party and leader have their best interests at hand.

Edited 12 hours ago by Ajay0

[Ajay0]

15 hours ago, Ulax said:

Thing is though, capitalism is also really a catastrophe.

You have people dying on the streets, many dying in opioid crises, many homeless etc.

Capitalist nations like the US wage illegitimate wars like Iraq which cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

 Issue is that journalism in the west has ceased to be independent and are now blurting out media narratives favorable to their capitalist owners and policies set by the deep state, and not performing their original job of providing the reader with facts and dispassionate analysis of the same covering all sides and angles, and reaching informed conclusions.

Rather than educating the masses, they have mainly become indoctrination mechanisms instead with lowered standards of objectivity and fairness which they had ironically criticized in the media of dictatorships and theocracies.

These sayings by renowned western leaders corroborates what I am saying here...

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The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations. ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become. ~ Amy Goodman

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent. If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." ~ Malcolm X

 

 

So unless media agencies in democratic countries are independent of external controls that can dilute its objectivity and standards, truth is bound to be a casualty, and improper policy making and administrative measures unaccounted for, as well as creating an ill-informed and misdirected public.

Edited 11 hours ago by Ajay0

[Basman]

Many hands carry more. Centralized planning cannot replicate the vast and disperse knowledge and experience of locals and aren't accountable to the results they create or dynamic market demands to nearly the same degree. 

The persisting ugliness of capitalism means it does works in essence. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. Communism is bad once and then we go back to capitalism. We've gradually honed capitalism to be less brutal though, something we are likely to continue to do. We no longer base our economy off institutional slavery for one.