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Cowbee enters the chat (crazypeople.online)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[+] -35 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (23 children)

Communism by itself isn't bad, nor is capitalism, but both assume that their proponents are immune to greed, and that their opponent are full of it.

There are good things in both, bad things in both. The problem is to find people that are truly altruistic, and that have the moral fortitude to stay altruistic.

Edit: y'all can downvote all you want, I'll stand by my opinion unless someone has the honesty to argue on that.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    nor is capitalism

    hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago

    Capitalism doesn't assume anything, it wasn't thought of and created, it arose from the commodification of production and distribution towards the end of feudalism. It arose naturally, without a plan. Communism isn't a "plan" either, Marx analyzed where capitalism was necessarily trending towards and saw that as production was socializing, profits were remaining private, creating sharper contradictions and crisis. Communism socializes the profits of production and distribution, and finishes capitalism's socialization process.

    Neither of them are built on any assumptions surrounding greed whatsoever.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago*

    Heavily disagree, friend. Capitalism by itself is bad. It may have good things, but that hardly justifies the inhuman and cruel roots it stands on. Capitalism does not assume that its proponents should be free of greed, it wants them to be greedy. Why the hell would you want to keep expanding your money if not for greed? Capitalism runs on this principle of self expanding value and inequal exchanges. It strives for profit, nothing else. I haven't studied communism well enough, but communism doesn't assume it's proponents to be immune to greed, it dismantles the institutions by which greed operates(money, class, and state).

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Read Marx

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  • [+] -14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Already done, lot a good ideas, some ideas I don't agree with, but an enlightening read nonetheless.

    The part I disagree the most about are free competition.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I promise you that we all know you haven't read Marxist works. No need to lie.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago

    Neither capitalism nor communism assume that their proponents are immune to greed. Capitalism was developed as an improvement over (European) feudalism and mercantilism. The idea is that division of labour expands the quantity and diversity of goods that can be produced. Communism is similarly supposed to be an improvement on capitalism. Here, the idea is that centralised planning can improve the distribution of the produced goods (and further improve the quantity and diversity of goods).

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    Can you list the good parts of capitalism? If you say the free market, capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on that concept. Socialism and communism have free market aspects too, but they centralize control of resources so that 5 people can’t drain everything and ascend to the top.

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  • [–] -5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

    Both having a form of free market doesn't make it suddenly good for one side and bad for the other.

    Some sort of free market is good, so new idea can brew, some of them being one day attempted, other won't because it ends up either not getting traction, or would very obviously fail after some research.

    Problem is with too much planning is that it doesn't give as much place for innovation, as well as put too much weight on a single point of failure. That played a good part in the USSR famines, like the holodomor, which was then further aggravated by their unwillingness to admit they fucked up, blaming it on other factors. But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not).

    And I'll pass on the other similar failures (Chernobyl, among other), that follow the very same pattern.

    Of course, the USSR had some very clear wins, like the first part of the race to space, and others.

    The USSR could have been a success if their leader weren't selfish idiots, which os a shame since I'd rather live in a good cummunism regime than a good capitalism regime.

    I always worked toward such ideals, I contributed to some open-source project (Gnome, KDE, mostly translation, bug report, but also some packaging for OpenSUSE and Fedora.

    I'm a bit tired of those who blindly follow ideologies without having the intellectual honesty to recognize where said ideology fucked up and where it was great. Do I have to be called a social-traitor for every reflection on communism or socialism? I doubt Marx would be happy to see those he tried to enlighten sheepishly follow whoever yell the loudest... Even if they yell parta of what he tried to teach them.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    But if they had learned from their mistakes, it would have improved, but unfortunately those very same error were repeated multiple time (see the multiple famines the USSR faced while strangely their western counterparts did not.

    What other famine after holodomor? I can only think of one but was during siege from the nazis.

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  • [–] -4 points 5 months ago* (4 children)
    • 1921-1922 (Povolzhye, or Volga famine), 5-10 millions dreath
    • 1932-1933 (Holodomor), 3.5 to 7 millions death in Ukraine alone
    • 1930-1933 (Asharshylyk), 1.5 million deaths (seem small, but that was 40% of then Kazakhstan population)
    • 1932-1933 (at the same time than the Holodomor, but in Russia) : 1 to 2 millions deaths
    • 1946-1947: 1 to 1.5 millions deaths

    And that's only those who were big enough to be impossible to hide completely.

    All of them have something in common: the central government minimised them, and tried to hide them. Some weren't even acknowledged until after the USSR fall. All of them are a combination of bad luck (war, drought) combined with hasty decisions which made what could have been a hard year a generational disaster.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Question: "what famines occurred because the Soviets didn't learn from the 1933 famine?"

    Answer: A famine from -before- that famine, the famine you're being asked to name one after, TWO OTHER FAMINES THAT HAPPENED THE SAME YEAR, and the one that happened because the fucking nazis invaded

    What a mixture of bad faith and just plain stupid

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago*

    TWO OTHER FAMINES THAT HAPPENED THE SAME YEAR

    It's also exceptionally bad faith to treat it as three famines while it was a single one occuring on huge areas. But once we learn it, the entire "holodomor" narration shatter immediately.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    You're referring to a famine at the outset of the USSR coming from civil war, referring to the 1930s famine as 3 separate famines, and blaming the famine caused by Nazi invasion on the Soviets. There's good reason that's all you have to bring up.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    You're contradicting yourself a bit. You reference capitalism as being good for innovation, but then reference the technological advances the soviets made, beating the US into space. You say the Soviets didn't learn from the 1930s famine, but it was the last famine outside of wartime in the Soviet Union.

    It's also a blunder to blame all problems on leadership. The USSR was run collectively, and the leadership was not uniquely "stupid," they were in general very competent. They were also not especially selfish. Some leaders were better or worse than others, but the Soviet Union was run by the mass proletariat, with the CPSU as the organized element.

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  • [+] 10 points 5 months ago (4 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    The state ownership of production is deliberate, and aimed at improving efficiency and allowing forward planning. One (or a few, if you want competition) large factory is more efficient than a bunch of smaller workshops. State ownership can lead to corruption, as you pointed out, but it is a conscious choice and not happenstance.

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  • [+] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    State ownership has both advantages and disadvantages; I just wanted to point out that it was a deliberate choice.

    The state at national level should be limited to providing facilitation, infrastructure, defence and foreign policy. Independent Local governments should provide the bulk of public services.

    What do you do when some regions are poorer than others, or one gets hit by a natural disaster? Again, it isn't black and white. There are advantages to both centralisation and devolution.

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  • [+] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    since that has the longest track record in failure

    Failure in achieving what?

    A natural disaster would be handled by regional or national disaster response agencies.

    How would there be a national disaster response agency without central planning? Who would fund it? Who would run it?

    Since after the industrial revolution, the high productivity of cities has been subsidizing the wealth of the suburbs and rural areas to the significant detriment of overall productivity.

    Are cities actually more productive, or is their higher productivity subsidised by rural areas?

    you will find that the wealth and productive density per person will balance according to the inherit environmental factors to a much larger degree.

    Perhaps, but is that what you want? The resource-poor societies of Central Asia lie between theresource-rich China and Europe. Would a theoretical Eurasian government not want to subsidise people living in these regions, so that they can service the trade routes between China and Europe?

    a lack of central control and planning does not prevent collaboration and coordination from occuring between entities.

    Who mediates disputes, and who enforces their decisions?

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Ownership by the socialist state is the only way to actually collectivize production and distribution, and thereby end class society and the basis of the state. Ownership at a societal level is the solution, not at the level of individual producers. What you are creating is a form of cooperative-based economy that replicates the larger problems with capitalism, and prevents the transition to classless society run to fulfill the needs of everyone.

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