Topic: [It's not real communism] or why socialism can still be an answer - page 4. (Read 1016 times)

Exactly, which leads to the question "is it possible to get one without the other?". Which is the whole point of this OP. I'm glad someone got it cause I had a feeling of hitting a wall with TECSHARE xD
I disagree here

To take something we all know (even if I'm convinced possibilites are more or less infitine and the best solution is yet to be created) let's take the constitution/laws system that is currently used. The rules aren't the laws but the constitution, because laws can be changed easily while constitution is supposed to structure society. If you change constitution you change society in a redical way.

So you're saying not everyone can participate to writing the rules? Why not? Of course not everyone can agree on something, that's impossible, but why couldn't a vast majority agree on something?

Ahah!
Well you reach another problem here which is the idea of choice. You can't have this choice. And i mean, it's just a fact, you can't have this choice that's all. You don't whose where you're born, well it means you don't chose which kind of society you live in, and if you're born in a group leaning towards the "nearly everything" while you're more on the "not much" side... Well I don't have a solution.

And I don't think those groups can coexist, it seems to me that those groups can only fight each other until one remains ^^

It's incredible but I actually globally agree with what you wrote. First time ever I believe.
That would be ideal but... Very complex to put in practice. I mean the problem is not to put the person away of this society but to find another society accepting this person. And more, it's a bit unfair because all "new persons" by that I mean all persons born in this society won't be given the choice.

What the hell it means that I more or less agree with a full BADecker post? Omg what's happening? 

Oh yeah, because an elite group of unaccountable academics would always have the people's best interests at heart right? Oh PLEASE DO tell me about how great technocracy is. I have been round and round with this sham of an ideology as well.

Start with government? I thought that you didn't like big state controlled centralized entities! That could never go wrong could it? Your vision is a totalitarian nightmare. In fact the Nazis were obsessed with order and record keeping. Some of the earliest IBM systems were even used to catalog people in camps. It would be EVEN better with everything automated right? I can't wait to have my virtual lawyer protect my virtual rights!






Considering you are the one floating the premise that "it is not real Communism", you are the one that needs to demonstrate that your ideology has any SUCCESSES to EVEN JUSTIFY trying it again. I think after hundreds of millions of lives lost over the past hundred years or so "trying Communism" it is safe to say you better have some good fucking evidence before we try this dumpster fire of an ideology again at all.

Your premise in the op is literally just a "no true Scotsman fallacy" combined with some circular logic as a pathetic misdirection tactic. You aren't arguing facts you are attempting to condition me to your ideology via brute force and repetition. My point is I am saying THE IDEOLOGICAL CONCEPT IS THE PROBLEM.

Hey I got a question for you Mr. workers rights. Did you know the USSR was bankrupted right around the Bolshevik revolution, and Wallstreet bankers not only helped plan it, they funded it, and helped Marxism and Communism take power from the Tsar? That's right. Your precious ideology was the invention of Wallstreet and European bankers!

It is a system of controlled opposition. Red vs Blue. Us vs Them. Republican vs Democrat. Only on a global scale. It is right in your face. The symbol of Communism, the hammer and sickle, are ancient. The hammer represents building and creating, and the sickle represents destruction and the harvest. Capitalism comes in and builds society up. The people get too much power and influence or society becomes otherwise imbalanced, such as via the financial debasing, then Communism is brought in to strip the nation of resources systematically until there is nothing left. Then the process is started all over again. We don't have to submit to harvesting.

Some thoughts.

Socialism is a difficult thing for fairness. The reason is that all people are different, and they all have different needs to operate efficiently. The best people who can tell what the needs of a person are, is the person himself or the people near him. This means that socialism can only be applied to the general basics of people... food, water, clothing, basic housing, etc.

People thrive on some kind of desire to better themselves and their possessions/conditions. In other words, if the particular form of socialism takes away opportunities to be better - make more "money" - it will only produce a mediocre society.

Generally speaking, when people work together in a socialistic way, and when they are positive about the socialism they are working in, nature provides an abundance of property and advancements for the people. To be fair, the benefits of this advancement, whether it be in property or science or "money" or living conditions, needs to be applied for all people... not simply stored up, nor used the ways a "dictator" might use it, except by the formal agreement of all the people of the society.

There are many writings about how to apply socialism correctly. Most people have their own form of socialism in their own family. Good socialism must allow freedom in such a way that unfair advantage can never be taken against any of societies members. This has to include a form of socialism where people can remove themselves and their property from the society if they want... but at least themselves if they had formerly agreed to pool their property, making it theirs no longer.

Blockchain technology is something that can help with all this. But the whole idea of socialism is extremely complex. Many of the writings by popular socialism thinkers are not realistic, but have elements in them that allow socialism to become a dictatorship... or the next most dangerous thing, a democracy.

Answer is in your sentence, problem is linked to the government not the economic idea
Where would you rather live? USA or Norway?
Cause if you look at the hapiness rankings of countries, top ones are definitely socialist countries.
What?? No not at all. Africa is the poorest continent and is more or less a capitalist paradise...
No you don't have a socialist economy, you're just in an elective dictatorship :/

Everytime, everywhere in the world, someone tried to implement a socialist economy the results wereonly poverty, massacre, millions of deads, hungers... But no, that was not the true socialism. Let's try again and killmore people and make more governments rich.

Liberalism, on the other hand, always made the people have better lives, with more freedom and real development in all areas (culture, technology...)

All poor countries in the world are not really capitalists, but socialists.
I live in one of them: Brazil. We have a socialist economy now. We are fucked.

Take a look at https://www.heritage.org/index/

It's an index of economic freedom. All good countries in the world are living liberalism economies, while bad countries are living socialist economies.

I bet you live in a rich country.

I'm doing this step by step because you're so biased that you don't seem to actually read me. My point is not saying that communism works but that previous communist countries failed because of the representative government system. So that it's worth thinking about a communist direct democracy. Thinking about it, not saying it's the solution. There is a "can" in the title you know?

Why so? I never said communism works that's absolutely not my point... Please re-read me because I never wrote that and will never because I don't believe so. That's not the point of this OP.
Agreed. That's more the point of this OP which is to say that those deaths are linked to the dictatorship, which is a consequence of how communism was implemented.
I'm taking your link as a reference:

1"During argument, someone re-defines the group in order to exclude counter-examples. Instead of backing down from "all groupmembers are X" to "most groupmembers are X", the debater simply redefines the group."
Didn't do this

2"Before argument, someone preemptively defines some group such that the group definitionally must be entirely "good" or entirely "bad". However, this definition was created arbitrarily for this defensive purpose, rather than based on the actual qualities of the group."
Didn't do this

It's not a No True Scotsman because I'm not saying at all that communism works or is good or whatever.
Then as you love to say, if you bring a new argument please provide evidences to back it up.
Don't see the link with the argument... And until you bring any proof of that you just sounds like a conspiracy theorist to me ^^


I disagree strongly with the last part, first I don't see how what you describe is historically accurate because it just never happened anywhere. Second because the "opposition cycle" you talk about is much more linked to inequalities cycles for me. But that's a whole different argument you're discussing here ^^

It is always the same thing with Communists... its not that they are wrong, its just that I don't understand it and simply need to hear it repeated enough times to be suitably indoctrinated via operant conditioning. YOU ARE LITERALLY STATING THE SAME ARGUMENT  only in a SLIGHTLY different way. I think after a few hundred million lives lost we should just give up on the ol' Communism, what do you say?

So for you "Implementing A" and "Trying to implement A but fail and implement B" is the same?
My point is saying that failure is linked to representative government, not the ideological concept.

It's exactly the same as saying that flying is impossible because you weren't able to fly just by moving your arms. It's not that flying is impossible, it's that you need a different kind of technology and a different approach.


Exactly, excellent comparison ^^

From what I see, most problems from the different economical or ideological systems come from representative government which is just elective dictatorship with extra step. If you can acti directly in the code as you say, then you create something completely different where you can apply your ideology/economic ideas.

Technocracy with heavy favor towards automation ~= socialism.

Start with government to prove a mostly automated front-end and then expand from there. Automation may be more expensive in the short term, but overall, it's a valuable investment.

The only hitch is the government "automation" probably should be open source so the people can vote on the "changes" in the code of law.

Once we automate government in this way, we can automate industry similar. This way, as an individual, if you want change in a product, you just fork the automation framework to create your own version.

Your entire op was just saying past Communism was not true Communism... I say it is a fallacy, you deny you said it, then turn right around and say but no it will work this time. Your logic is circular.

Oh ok so you actually didn't understand my OP at all ^^

I'll try to make it shorter and easier:
-Past "communist countries" were not communist but dictatorship
-They failed to implemant communism and were transformed into dictatorship in the process

No true scotman would be saying "those states aren't proof of communism failure because that was not the right kind of communism"
I'm saying "they tried to implement communism but failed and were transformed into dictatorship on the way"

It's not that they implemented something which is not real communism, it's that when trying to implement it they failed completely and utterly because communism isn't compatible with representative governments. That's my point. Hope it was a bit clearer.

No I... Did you read me? ^^

That's not a coincidence at all and I explain that communism leads to dictatorship not because of what communism is but because of how it's implemented. The problem isn't communism/socialism but how we handle it. And my point is that new technologies might allow us to implement it in a different way.

Didn't you....literally...just get done doing that? I guess it is just a convenient coincidence those are the same instances eh?

Please do come back

But I believe it would be a no true scotman if I'd say that communism works because the failure weren't true communism. Which is not my point, just saying that the given examples aren't counterexamples but rather indication that communism leads to dictatorship.

Actually it is a well known logical fallacy called "no true Scotsman". So no, it is not really a valid argument. I will be back for more don't worry

Hello world.

Have been away for lon and following HellFish advice I'm starting a selfmod thread. Feel free to say whatever you want as long as it's not trolling.

So why starting this thread? Because there is this sentence I hear and read a lot that always triggers me a bit. Right wing people mockingly saying that you have to be a complete retard to be a socialist and that the argument "it's not real communism" is stupid. This argument is just saying that USSR or whatever "communist" country failure isn't a proof of communism failure because... Well it wasn't real communism.

And this argument is... Perfectly valid though a bit short-sighted.

I dare anyone to give an example of a real communism state in our world, present or past. There are none.

There is this HUGE MISTAKE made by tons of people who believe that communism = no private property = everything belongs to the state. Which is a very brutal and stupid interpretation of communism manifest. Communism doesn't mean everything belongs to the state but everything is owned by the people. In particular for Marxists (which are the most common kind of communists) it's not that there should be no private property but that anything being used in the economy (the means of production) should belong to the workers using them. (Which means very VERY limited private property because depending on interpretation pretty much anything can be considered being part of the economy)

But let's simplify all this by saying that, in communism, the means of production are supposed to belong to the people.

The people.

Not the state, the people. That's where lies the "it's not real communism".

Because what are exactly countries like Venezuela or USSR or Cuba or North Korea? They're countries where state is all powerfull, meaning the leaders are all powerfull. What do you call such countries? Dictatorships. And it doesn't matter if the dictatorship calls itself communist or islamic or democratic or whatever. A dictatorship is just a dictatorship, a country where the people are oppressed by a very small group having the power. It's not communism at all! It's the opposite of communism.


So no it wasn't real communism. But why is it a short-sighted answer? Well because it seems that every time a country adopts communism it falls immediately into a dictatorship. So even if those countries aren't communist, if every country trying to adopt communism falls into dictatorship 2 days later... Well it means that even if there is a slight difference, communism leads to dictatorship.

And that's right. At least that WAS right. Communism means that the people own and control everything equally, but that wasn't possible, what was used was that people were represented by a government THEN this government controls everything (hence the dictatorship).

But maybe we have an alternative solution now. Maybe we can do things differently... What if we didn't use the government to control things? What if we did it ourselves directly? With our technologies we no longer have a use for representative politics. Direct democracy is completely possible.


So I can't say anything for sure of course, but it seems to me that we have new possibility. Applying the new technologies (including blockchains) to create a country where everything is directly controlled by the people, which would be real communism this time.

EDIT: Since TECSHARE and I have don't have the same definition of trolling I removed his posts from the thread but he ahd the good idea to post them on another one. You can find our arguments there https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/reee-its-not-real-communism-or-why-socialism-can-still-be-an-answer-5076948 if you're interested