Topic: Capitalism vs Communism (Read 1051 times)

I can't form any good ideas with my feeble mind so I'll just type random unintelligible psychobabble in an effort appear smart.  When no one wants to respond to my stupidity ill have had the last word and itll appear as if ive won the argument by default.  Oops I've entered the metadata.

"So let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: where do we live today, in our global postindustrial society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of "globalization": the brutal imposition of a unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of Nation-State. And, in this situation, is not the description in The Manifesto of the social impact of the bourgeoisie more actual than ever?"

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-spectre-is-still-roaming-around/

We all use a mix of these today, right?

In a system modeled on Capitalism money seems to always flow to whoever is greediest and most deviant often at great cost to human decency.  The u.s. has managed to take vast amounts of what can only be described as priceless stolen land along with they resources it contains, cashed it in, and turned it into an ever increasingly shitty environment.  They then held this to be proof of the succes of a system modeled towards Capitalistism. Obsurd.

Capitalism vs Communism hasn't been relevant since the '80s.

In 2015 it's more like capitalism vs. capitalism. Spoiler alert, capitalism loses, humanity wins.

Actually, what was tried in Hungary or USSR was not a Communism, and not even a Socialism. It was in fact Capitalism covered by a fig-leaf of Socialism, where there was only one monopolist corporation on the market - the State. You can see the same symptoms of lack of motivation, token acknowledgement and stagnation in other big monopolies.


Capitalism or communism are just mirrors of the mindset of the humans that comprise a society. You can't build one or the other as long as the majority of the people don't subscribe to it. As long as someone is prepared to grab more and more at the expense of the others, you'll have Capitalism. Once people naturally start feeling compelled to help others, to contribute to the society, giving to it - you'll have Communism.


I disagree with this quote. A communist would say: "All men should come together and build such fine houses for each other in cooperation."

EDIT: And a capitalist would say: "If I hire those 20 vagrants for the minimal wage and outsource construction material factory to the dirt-cheap Elbonia, I'll build an even grander house at half the price".

You can quote me on this.

And, Phelps Adams has actually swapped labels.

The best way would be capitalism with a bit of socialism.

in a direct comparison capitalism wins over communism. Just look on the world map and see how many countries are using capitalism and how many communism and compare how many of those countries are rich and how many poor. Communism has good foundations but when you implement in real life then all sh.t starts to fall, because some people will always tray to take advantage over others.

I am not a specialist in this area. I think pure communism is against human nature. Selfishness and laziness will always ruin a communistic society. There is not pure communistic and pure capitalistic society in real life, all current societies lies somewhere in between.

I mean, back like 30-40 years ago communism was seen as the antidote for capitalistic greed and the communists believed that their system would produce more wealth and distribute it more equally, and cure social problems including environmental degradation, which is a major problem even in today's world.

Journalistic writings state that East Germany (the communist side) was polluted with the Buna Chemical Works company dumping ten times more mercury into its neighbouring river than a comparable West German plant did in a year. Also, the East German smoky two-stroke Trabant cars emitted one hundred times as much carbon monoxide as a western car with a catalytic converter.

Back then, the message was that capitalism was cleaning-up the industry, however they were not such non-polluters themselves. In some ways the paternalistic communist state had protected the interests of primary producers like farmers and fishermen and so the environment. There was a law that made smelters shut down and so not pollute in spring when crops were growing. I guess that means that you're right, they both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Reminds me of this quote...
"Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.' "
–Phelps Adams

The comparison would be interesting, apart from the fact that we don't have any single case where Communist was actually implemented and tried out at a level of a country. Even Socialism, in the few countries that tried it, was far from the spec.

The best example of Communism that I can come up with is Open Source, and it works. For Communism to work, people first need to change to behave selflessly, altruistically, wish to share the results of their work and implicitly know that those around them work with the same motivation. Until that happens, the best model that maps human behaviour of greed is Capitalism.

I believe that Capitalism has the superiority and has far more advantages over Communism due to the generated economic growth it has on its nations. Such as by means of production,communist nation such as North Korea, the society(government)as a whole has the ownership to its resources,meaning the nation does not have the capacity for individual growth that does not generate economic growth.Where else in capitalist nation such as United States, an individual has the rights to a private ownership to its resources,therefore has the capacity for individual growth that generates the nation to its economic growth.

But when the super majority of the population is running on all cylinders and having the freedom to innovate then the most amount of people are succeeding and more well off rather than the flipside under the mediocrity and misery of egalitarian communism which reduces people to the lowest common denominator because one can't reap rewards for their efforts. Then, under capitalism where the most are thriving, charities and churches are well funded to help out those that can't help themselves. The lazy parasites deserve nothing and need to be ostracized until they grow a pair and man up.

Capitalism has beat socialism almost every time so far. Can't expect communism will have different outcome this time.

We have tried something like this but it didn't work. Humans by nature want more, and better stuff. (Stuff can be literally anything from knowledge to money.) You can call it greed if you want. If you suppress this kind of greed then you will get only stagnation. I've seen it in the last decade of socialism, ppl wasn't motivated at all, everybody thought why do anything above the acceptable minimum if they can't get anything more or better just stupid titles and worthless badges. Finally this lack of motivation paralysed the whole society what collapsed pretty soon.

No political system works the way it should because in every system there are always going to be those who have the power and change the system to make themselves more powerful. That is the way of Humanity.

Communism is the exploitation of many by a few and capitalism is sacrificing the weak for the overal best of the society.

Cons of the Communism society:

Contrary to popular belief , the " survival Of the fittest" is not on Capitalism, its on Communism.

Money is often used to hide lack of intelligence, creativity or just pshysical or mental qualities..

In the Communism society from above, the talent will be rewarded not with money but with visible "titles" or "rewards" to continúe the human progression, those rewards will worth more than actual money because today money can be gotten from many sources not only "success", it can be given even for free.

So with this rewards, the people that is just "stupid" or below average will be more visible, stupid people could expect some kind of social bullyng or exclusión from various activities.

Thoughts?

The only way Communism can be good is if for example, in an utopian town, all the work force is given a job, and they are paid the same amount of money regardless of their position, and all of them work the same amount of hours.. around 30 every week.
"bad" jobs will be done also by them like recollecting the trash from the streets , but every one will only work no more than 1 day every 2 weeks on this kind of jobs and as everyone will contribute to this tasks the result will be a very clean society, friendly with the nature and with rest of the people.

Technology wont make so much contamination because they will release the mobile phones, computers and any gadget with the best materials, and it should have the life before going obsolete, mobile phones at least 3 years instead of the actual 1 year.

Companies will work on 0 profit, just the needed to operate the facilities and the production.

What would people do once the ghost of money, materialism and shallow life is gone?

Capitalism is only a temporary experiment that obviously can't work in the long run.

Cons of capitalism:

We can take as example the online strategy games where every player advance level / skill or whatever to fight each other and advance even more fast, but after some time the first and best players are on the top of the ranking and they start to form a pyramid , each of the top 5 players have several times the wealth/points than the next 30 players, or even worse, the first player have even 2x or 3x the points of the second one, this means for example the number 7 would have more than 100x or even 1000x than any player outside the top 1000.
Did that look similar to Forbes list? hehe.
Well the bad thing is that many of those games reset the ranking after some time, because new players don't like to join a game where it will be hard just to not be at the bottom. But money system doesn't have resets.

Every current poor man/women in the world will have a very high difficulty just to not be poor anymore, i don't even say rich and as the time pass, the difficulty will increase  even more because like in those games:
The top 50 players even when they are in the top of all, they keep playing, the number 1 to keep being the number 1, and the other to raise a position, the battle between them makes the bottom and mid people even poorer, in the game because they have the advantage of having almost no one above them and they only attack and in the real money life is the same, the big companies need to be even bigger to battle among the top 50, so they just destroy smaller companies from outside the top 1000 people, they use better advertisement, prices, etc, and the small company or business just cant afford a battle like that, the employees just receive less salary every year, because the battle among those top players became so hard that they need to pay less to stay in the game.

The GOAL for capitalist companies is NOT to protect the planet, people, or deliver the best item/service, their goal is getting the more amount of MONEY they can, so they don't care about people health, planet health or even their own employes life quality.
They will release "new" versions of every item in small periods of time (even when the "new thing" is just a display 0.5 inch larger, speaking about a mobile phone)  to make more profit from them, but WASTING resources.

Capitalism everything is a pyramid, companies, money, governments, in the companies the highest your position is, the less employes are on it and the more money they receive.

Many "New" players (poor people) don't accept the unfair game they are required to play, so they just try to cheat and start doing criminal things making insecure the life's of the people above them, they know how unfair are their position on the game, or they just only learnt that you must trample the people around you to move in the social and money ladder.
With globalization, the game was extended to the entire world, those top 50 players can use some countries just like a big factory taking advantage of the low salaries they can pay there.
As the time passes, small businesses will keep dissapearing and big ones will get bigger, and bigger, a capitalist system like this one can only end in a scenario where only 5 or 10 companies control every aspect and need of the people, they will be controlled by some kind of global power ring, and most people will be employes.

Methods to make a reset the capitalism system:
Most effective and most used: War,
Second: Economic crisis
...

Stephen F.