communism vs capitalism

[Big Brother]

Because Europe is essensitaly a democratically socialist society/

America doesn't have a welfare state and is completely unorganised compared to the much more developed Europe

 

Europe is not one society, it consists of many societies with many different traits. Some are social democratic like you said, others are more conservative, libertarian and so on. To put every one of these societies in the same box is terribly inaccurate. They have similarities but they aren't the same.

 

I'm not a rabid capitalist, but communism in a pure form goes against human nature, robs people of their self development, stops them leaving a legacy to their children.

 

Seriously, please elaborate your universally accepted definition of human nature and why exactly it's so fundamentally opposed to Communism, because I'd really like to know the rationale behind that. Also, I'm confused, because from the way I understand it, one of the very fundamental reasons Communists seek to establish Communist societies is to put an end to exploitation and thus provide opportunity for everyone to grow and develop themselves as human beings to the best of their ability. Marx himself wrote:

 

“It is the fact that bread labor ties man to nature which makes it impossible for it to be expressive of what is truly and fully human; thus, it is only when man has overcome the necessity to spend time on bread labor that he or she can be thought of as mastering nature and becoming fully humanâ€.

 

So, how is it that true Communism robs people of their self-development?

Edited January 16, 2016 by Big Brother

[Spite]

where do you think that wealth comes from? oh wait, like you said, you think it materializes out of thin air like magic.

 

let me ask you something: once china stops having sweatshops, where is our sweatshop labor going to be located? like are you completely oblivious to the fact that we live in a global economy? do you really think it's as easy as changing a few laws and bam insta-wealthy western capitalist nation?

 

not everybody can be a millionaire. the wealth of the west is built on exploitation and is unsustainable.

 

I don't think you understand how economics actually works. Wealth does materialise out of thin air like magic. Technology advances, methods of communication, industrial production, service provision and so on improve. The West is rich because we're so much further along the tech tree than everywhere else. The technological explosion that gave us that huge competitive advantage war born out of liberalism, free thought, capitalism and the anglo-saxon work ethic.

 

That technological advantage meant that one man in a factory could do the work of a hundred men in India or China. The West became fantastically more productive and produced a huge amount of wealth. That process has continued to the present day, with the most successful countries being the ones who adopted a system with free markets, free thought, an emphasis on education, a strong legal framework that resists corruption and so on.

 

China is, as you put it, becoming a much wealthier nation. Technology is advancing and ideally this would mean a switch to a more service based economy. Right now a lot of people have menial jobs in industry, true. There are machines that could do those jobs, but at present the cost of labour is lower than the cost of machines to replace that labour. As labour becomes more valuable, the population becomes more educated etc (on a global scale) then they will use machines instead of people. Kind of how people use tractors in fields, make noodles using machines, and so on ad infinitum. 

 

The main reason that so many startups and new innovations pop up in Western countries is that the infrastructure, educational standards, legal system and market economy encourages innovative behaviour. Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc which have all of the above grow quickly. Countries with limited the above like China and India grow in a more imbalanced and overall less stable fashion. Countries without a robust legal system, education provision etc grow more slowly and less effectively. 

 

A culture where there is no personal reward for hard work, where the law exists to enforce equality, where achievement has no link to anything isn't a society where there will be innovation or growth. In addition, a society where everyone on paper gets equal provisions encourages corruption by its very nature. Corruption leads to inefficiency and lack of competition, which leads to monopoly and ultimately state capitalism. 

 

Western liberal democracy, with all the associated benefits (free markets, free people, good education, strong legal system, reliable infrastructure etc etc) is exactly the reason the West is so successful, and no it isn't a zero sum game- it just isn't. This can be proven simply by looking at the per capita income of the world. 

 

 

All that extra wealth just "came out of thin air".

[Spite]

Europe is not one society, it consists of many societies with many different traits. Some are social democratic like you said, others are more conservative, libertarian and so on. To put every one of these societies in the same box is terribly inaccurate. They have similarities but they aren't the same.

 

 

Seriously, please elaborate your universally accepted definition of human nature and why exactly it's so fundamentally opposed to Communism, because I'd really like to know the rationale behind that. Also, I'm confused, because from the way I understand it, one of the very fundamental reasons Communists seek to establish Communist societies is to put an end to exploitation and thus provide opportunity for everyone to grow and develop themselves as human beings to the best of their ability. Marx himself wrote:

 

“It is the fact that bread labor ties man to nature which makes it impossible for it to be expressive of what is truly and fully human; thus, it is only when man has overcome the necessity to spend time on bread labor that he or she can be thought of as mastering nature and becoming fully humanâ€.

 

So, how is it that true Communism robs people of their self-development?

 

This is typical pseudo-intellectual bullshit. You think the average Joe cares about "mastering nature and becoming fully human". Sure it probably annoyed Marx that he had to live off handouts from his capitalist buddies whist he philosophised. The average person working though doesn't want to retire from labouring and sit thinking about human nature. What they want is to progress, to make money, to buy a bigger house and a car and have all the nice things and to pass a portion of that on to their children. Some people manage to achieve their goals, and some don't. Capitalism can be cruel and someone in a Bangladeshi village with no education isn't going to become the next Bill Gates- or at least it's fairly unlikely and I accept that. 

 

I myself would describe myself as a democratic socialist (in UK terms a fabian, in european terms, maybe ordoliberal). I believe the state has a strong role in providing the framework for success and to grant equality of opportunity by providing education, healthcare and equal access to employment. By encouraging trade unions and work-life balance and all that jazz. I don't believe that the chain between personal achievement and reward should be removed though. If you got the same money for being a doctor or a receptionist, why would you want the hideous hours and stress of being a doctor? If you start a company and work hard for 30 years, should you finish your career earning exactly the same as when you started? What is the motivation to work hard? You'd end up corrupt, doing extra jobs on the side. If you don't get fired or promoted based on performance, what's the point in working hard?

 

Basically workers in a communist society are slaves to that society. They have no more encouragement to work hard than slaves in the cotton fields did, because they see no personal reward for their hard work. Asking someone to work hard to benefit their family is going to work. Even their company if it's small enough. But when someone says "your hard work makes our society of three hundred million marginally more productive! If everyone works harder we can all be wealthier together!" people don't care. They just don't. I know I wouldn't care. I know if I work hard, in one or two years I'll get a promotion. Since I worked hard the last ten years since I hit adulthood, I'll earn more than the national median wage. No doubt I will be promoted again if I keep working at improving my education and skillset as I am now. If I was going to get paid exactly the same regardless, would I work hard, study, apply for promotions? Of course not, who cares. I'd do the easiest job I could. I'd pull sickies, I'd slack off. Everyone would.

 

Human nature demands personal development and growth and success. And no, I don't mean dreaming about moonbeams or whatever Marx imagined. Nobody cares about Marx anyway, he was proved wrong. There was no revolution, just a bunch of aborted social experiments that caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of proles.

[Big Brother]

This is typical pseudo-intellectual bullshit. You think the average Joe cares about "mastering nature and becoming fully human". Sure it probably annoyed Marx that he had to live off handouts from his capitalist buddies whist he philosophised. The average person working though doesn't want to retire from labouring and sit thinking about human nature. What they want is to progress, to make money, to buy a bigger house and a car and have all the nice things and to pass a portion of that on to their children. Some people manage to achieve their goals, and some don't. Capitalism can be cruel and someone in a Bangladeshi village with no education isn't going to become the next Bill Gates- or at least it's fairly unlikely and I accept that. 

 

I myself would describe myself as a democratic socialist (in UK terms a fabian, in european terms, maybe ordoliberal). I believe the state has a strong role in providing the framework for success and to grant equality of opportunity by providing education, healthcare and equal access to employment. By encouraging trade unions and work-life balance and all that jazz. I don't believe that the chain between personal achievement and reward should be removed though. If you got the same money for being a doctor or a receptionist, why would you want the hideous hours and stress of being a doctor? If you start a company and work hard for 30 years, should you finish your career earning exactly the same as when you started? What is the motivation to work hard? You'd end up corrupt, doing extra jobs on the side. If you don't get fired or promoted based on performance, what's the point in working hard?

 

Basically workers in a communist society are slaves to that society. They have no more encouragement to work hard than slaves in the cotton fields did, because they see no personal reward for their hard work. Asking someone to work hard to benefit their family is going to work. Even their company if it's small enough. But when someone says "your hard work makes our society of three hundred million marginally more productive! If everyone works harder we can all be wealthier together!" people don't care. They just don't. I know I wouldn't care. I know if I work hard, in one or two years I'll get a promotion. Since I worked hard the last ten years since I hit adulthood, I'll earn more than the national median wage. No doubt I will be promoted again if I keep working at improving my education and skillset as I am now. If I was going to get paid exactly the same regardless, would I work hard, study, apply for promotions? Of course not, who cares. I'd do the easiest job I could. I'd pull sickies, I'd slack off. Everyone would.

 

Human nature demands personal development and growth and success. And no, I don't mean dreaming about moonbeams or whatever Marx imagined. Nobody cares about Marx anyway, he was proved wrong. There was no revolution, just a bunch of aborted social experiments that caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of proles.

 

"Mastering nature and becoming fully human", is just another term for personal growth. It's not pseudo-intellectual, it's human development of human abilities, just phrased differently. You might be fine with the injustices of capitalism, but a lot of us aren't.

 

You talk about doctors and receptionists earning the same amount of money and business owners earning the same their entire careers, but this really fails to take into account that in a communist society, there would be no money. No one would get paid anything by anyone.

 

Basically, workers in a capitalist society are slaves to that society. This is what we call wage slavery, where workers rent themselves and their time to employers, who reap the vast majority of the rewards the workers seek for themselves. Communism seeks to remove this parasitic relationship between employer and worker, to get rid of the unfair distribution of wealth, or rewards, if that's what you want to call it. In Communism, people would most certainly be working to benefit their own family. Their work would benefit everyone in their local society, including themselves. Capitalism is a competitive system where you're forced to compete and you're pressured into reaching higher and higher, for more and more rewards. As you know, this condition wouldn't exist in Communism, there wouldn't be a need to compete and there wouldn't be any desire for more rewards, because you'd already have them. In a society like that, where you are truly free to do whatever you want, whether it's being a lumberjack, doing paperwork, songwriting, you name it, human beings could develop themselves exponentially.

 

You can trivialize Marx in your little corner of the world all you want, but various people all over the planet are still studying, discussing, evaluating and building on his works and will probably continue to do so for a while longer. And honestly, I trust him to know what he's talking about more than I trust you.

[Hereno]

I don't think you understand how economics actually works. Wealth does materialise out of thin air like magic. Technology advances, methods of communication, industrial production, service provision and so on improve. The West is rich because we're so much further along the tech tree than everywhere else. The technological explosion that gave us that huge competitive advantage war born out of liberalism, free thought, capitalism and the anglo-saxon work ethic.

i'm going to stop you here, because you actually just said "you don't understand how economics works" followed by using the term "tech tree" to describe real life

 

need to stop playing so many video games and writing so much but saying so little. you live in a magical world that doesn't exist.

Edited January 16, 2016 by Hierophant

[Abu Haddad]

#walloftext2016

[Redael]

No, this statement is the result of lacking knowledge regarding how Communism would actually function. You wouldn't get any money, because there wouldn't be any money. There wouldn't be any need for currency, there wouldn't be any boss or employer that pays you. This wage relationship exists in a Capitalist economy, but not a Communist economy, and the notion that "everyone gets paid the same in Communism" is just a silly misunderstanding.

 

 

 

"Human nature". What an arbitrary, watered down concept. Some people say that humans are violent by nature, and the only things keeping us from hurting each other are laws and the like. Others say that humans are peaceful by nature, and that we only turn violent because of hierarchical power structures. Some say we seek social connections out of love for others, some say it's because of the fear of being alone. Some say we're greedy, others say we're giving.

 

I'm rambling but the point is, there is no agreement on what human nature actually is. There's no universal consensus, no actual strict definition of which exact traits belong to human nature. Many, many people define human nature in many different ways.

 

So taking all this into account, how can you say that Communism fails application because of human nature? How can you make such a statement, when no one even knows or actually agrees on what human nature really is? The easy answer is: You can't. Or you can, but you'd be wrong.

 

Unless you can empirically prove and define exactly what human nature is, by which I mean define which characteristics inherently belong to human nature, you'll always be wrong by blaming something on it. You might as well say Communism cannot be applied because magical pixies from the moon don't like the color red.

If there is no money how do I buy stuff

[Big Brother]

If there is no money how do I buy stuff

 

Well that's the thing, you wouldn't have to buy anything. Ideally, you would already have access to everything you need and so you'd have no need to buy anything. You would have to work for stuff at times though.

[Spite]

"Mastering nature and becoming fully human", is just another term for personal growth. It's not pseudo-intellectual, it's human development of human abilities, just phrased differently. You might be fine with the injustices of capitalism, but a lot of us aren't.

 

You talk about doctors and receptionists earning the same amount of money and business owners earning the same their entire careers, but this really fails to take into account that in a communist society, there would be no money. No one would get paid anything by anyone.

 

Basically, workers in a capitalist society are slaves to that society. This is what we call wage slavery, where workers rent themselves and their time to employers, who reap the vast majority of the rewards the workers seek for themselves. Communism seeks to remove this parasitic relationship between employer and worker, to get rid of the unfair distribution of wealth, or rewards, if that's what you want to call it. In Communism, people would most certainly be working to benefit their own family. Their work would benefit everyone in their local society, including themselves. Capitalism is a competitive system where you're forced to compete and you're pressured into reaching higher and higher, for more and more rewards. As you know, this condition wouldn't exist in Communism, there wouldn't be a need to compete and there wouldn't be any desire for more rewards, because you'd already have them. In a society like that, where you are truly free to do whatever you want, whether it's being a lumberjack, doing paperwork, songwriting, you name it, human beings could develop themselves exponentially.

 

You can trivialize Marx in your little corner of the world all you want, but various people all over the planet are still studying, discussing, evaluating and building on his works and will probably continue to do so for a while longer. And honestly, I trust him to know what he's talking about more than I trust you.

 

The only society where there could be no money is one where there are infinite resources. All money is, is a rationing system for goods and services. However you want to call it, unless everyone has unlimited access to resources, then their portion of the total will be rationed. If it is unequally rationed, that is not communism. If it is equally rationed, then everyone is "paid the same", and the problems I mentioned will exist.

 

i'm going to stop you here, because you actually just said "you don't understand how economics works" followed by using the term "tech tree" to describe real life

 

need to stop playing so many video games and writing so much but saying so little. you live in a magical world that doesn't exist.

 

So basically my argument absolutely destroyed your hypothesis and you have to resort to accusing me of not understanding technological development due to my use of popular nomenclature used within the gaming community of which we are all part? Sure mate.

[Big Brother]

The only society where there could be no money is one where there are infinite resources. All money is, is a rationing system for goods and services. However you want to call it, unless everyone has unlimited access to resources, then their portion of the total will be rationed. If it is unequally rationed, that is not communism. If it is equally rationed, then everyone is "paid the same", and the problems I mentioned will exist.

 

Well, I disagree. With the collective means of production of the entirety of human civilization and sustainable development, I believe it would be possible to practically have infinite resources. As far as access is concerned, that's just a matter of developing high standards of transportation and transportation infrastructure, localizing production and maybe encouraging population growth in cities where more people will have more access to commodities, goods and services.

[Redael]

Well that's the thing, you wouldn't have to buy anything. Ideally, you would already have access to everything you need and so you'd have no need to buy anything. You would have to work for stuff at times though.

You don't understand. A successful economy needs the one percent. Beacuse the one percent ownes the corporations and the corporations manufacture stuff. Without companies in your country you need to get everything form Foriegn nations, which costs more. The alternative would be government monopolization. With either of theese approaches, mostly Government monoplization but also all forigen imports, the lack of compilation will eliminate incentives for techongolical advanements, which puts your nation behind other nations(Presuming the whole world isn't communist, if they were we would enter a dark age). We can see this in the collapse of the USSR and modern communist and socialist nations

[Fox Fire]

The only society where there could be no money is one where there are infinite resources. All money is, is a rationing system for goods and services. However you want to call it, unless everyone has unlimited access to resources, then their portion of the total will be rationed. If it is unequally rationed, that is not communism. If it is equally rationed, then everyone is "paid the same", and the problems I mentioned will exist.

 

 

So basically my argument absolutely destroyed your hypothesis and you have to resort to accusing me of not understanding technological development due to my use of popular nomenclature used within the gaming community of which we are all part? Sure mate.

If it's unequally rationed problems also exist. The fact is, neither capitalism or communism works. We just just pretend they do.  Wealth does not come out of thin air. It is as you said a rationing system for resources and services. However, do you realize that it's essentially slavery that keeps this train moving all across the world? Do you realize that slavery is driven by capitalism? Who do you think grows the food on your dinner plate or makes your shoes? If workers had to be treated fairly, it cuts into the profits of business owners. We can replace jobs with machines, but then we just have even less jobs, specifically for low requirement positions, further harming the lower class and further helping the upper class. The problem with capitalism is that it's debt based system that consistently generates debt. That debt has to be someones burden, so it falls on the people at the bottom. It's literally a ponzi scheme. It inherently concentrates wealth into fewer hands until eventually it becomes unsustainable. 

And that is why capitalism doesn't work either. 

[Hereno]

You don't understand. A successful economy needs the one percent. Beacuse the one percent ownes the corporations and the corporations manufacture stuff. Without companies in your country you need to get everything form Foriegn nations, which costs more. The alternative would be government monopolization. With either of theese approaches, mostly Government monoplization but also all forigen imports, the lack of compilation will eliminate incentives for techongolical advanements, which puts your nation behind other nations(Presuming the whole world isn't communist, if they were we would enter a dark age). We can see this in the collapse of the USSR and modern communist and socialist nations

no actually we really don't need people whose sole role in the system is owning things and raking in profits. working people are perfectly capable of doing that. welcome to communism.

[Redael]

no actually we really don't need people whose sole role in the system is owning things and raking in profits. working people are perfectly capable of doing that. welcome to communism.

So you would take billions of dollars from a person who worked his entire life and spent years in college to get, hardly seems fair

[WISD0MTREE]

If that's the case, why do American students perform so poorly to their European counterparts?

I was joking. He misspelled a word. 

[Fox Fire]

So you would take billions of dollars from a person who worked his entire life and spent years in college to get, hardly seems fair

You mean billions of dollars from people who inherited a built up fortune from previous people and continue adding to their hoard by simply owning things and making no contribution to society? A lot, and I mean a lot of people will work much harder for their entire life and never receive even a fraction of what a corporate CEO makes to sit in a cozy office and own things. Hardly seems fair.  

[Hereno]

So you would take billions of dollars from a person who worked his entire life and spent years in college to get, hardly seems fair

since when did spending a lot of time doing something mean that it was automatically good?

 

besides, wealth generated in a capitalist economy necessarily comes from the exploitation of labor. even if you organize into a cooperative, which are few and far between, you're still going to deal with others in a private free market economy dependent on human wage labor.

Edited January 17, 2016 by Hierophant

[Redael]

You mean billions of dollars from people who inherited a built up fortune from previous people and continue adding to their hoard by simply owning things and making no contribution to society? A lot, and I mean a lot of people will work much harder for their entire life and never receive even a fraction of what a corporate CEO makes to sit in a cozy office and own things. Hardly seems fair.

 

Some inherited money, but someone else worked for the right for his/her children to have money . For example, my father grew up poor, and is now the owner of a small business, so he worked hard and now I have finical security, and a guartenteed college fund. He is a nice person now and was a nice person before. So yes, I may be speaking from the 1%, but my opinion is still valid

since when did spending a lot of time doing something mean that it was automatically good?besides, wealth generated in a capitalist economy necessarily comes from the exploitation of labor. even if you organize into a cooperative, which are few and far between, you're still going to deal with others in a private free market economy dependent on human wage labor.

so when the working class works average on something to earn money "good" but the people giving them money are "evil" I believe there are good people with money good people without money evil people with money and evil people without money. Let's not villain the 1% beacuse a lot of them give millions to charity and are actually good people, yes there are rotten apples, but that doesn't reflect all of them Edited January 17, 2016 by Redael

[Redael]

Accidentally quoted myself and can't delete for some reason

Edited January 17, 2016 by Redael

[Franz Von Dietrich]

Communism in its true form, is impossible to attain.

[Fox Fire]

Some inherited money, but someone else worked for the right for his/her children to have money . For example, my father grew up poor, and is now the owner of a small business, so he worked hard and now I have finical security, and a guartenteed college fund. He is a nice person now and was a nice person before. So yes, I may be speaking from the 1%, but my opinion is still valid so when the working class works average on something to earn money "good" but the people giving them money are "evil" I believe there are good people with money good people without money evil people with money and evil people without money. Let's not villain the 1% beacuse a lot of them give millions to charity and are actually good people, yes there are rotten apples, but that doesn't reflect all of them

That's cool. I work for my money. Like everyone else should. My father grew up in a rich setting but had to earn his living. He has money but that doesn't mean any of it is mine. I don't get free college or even a free car. There is a difference between helping your child and handing them everything they need and more. If the 1% were actually charitable they wouldn't hoard the amounts of money needed to be at the top percentile. There is no need for an individual to have that kind of money.

[Redael]

Communism in its true form, is impossible to attain.

Correct, the USSR used it as an excuse to raise government power and do far worse things to its citizens then capitalist companies do to their workers

[Redael]

That's cool. I work for my money. Like everyone else should. My father grew up in a rich setting but had to earn his living. He has money but that doesn't mean any of it is mine. I don't get free college or even a free car. There is a difference between helping your child and handing them everything they need and more. If the 1% were actually charitable they wouldn't hoard the amounts of money needed to be at the top percentile. There is no need for an individual to have that kind of money.

Stop Generslzing the 1%, my family is very charitable, and the only reason I don't work is beacuse I'm under 18

[Hereno]

Some inherited money, but someone else worked for the right for his/her children to have money . For example, my father grew up poor, and is now the owner of a small business, so he worked hard and now I have finical security, and a guartenteed college fund. He is a nice person now and was a nice person before. So yes, I may be speaking from the 1%, but my opinion is still valid so when the working class works average on something to earn money "good" but the people giving them money are "evil" I believe there are good people with money good people without money evil people with money and evil people without money. Let's not villain the 1% beacuse a lot of them give millions to charity and are actually good people, yes there are rotten apples, but that doesn't reflect all of them

 

Okay but you're using yourself as an example. Not every family is like yours, and I'm not familiar with your personal situation. But we can talk about any number of corporations who have done incredibly shady things to get to the top. Bill Gates, founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, was nearly as bad as Steve Jobs. He also went to an Ivy League school and had access to a computer back when they took up an entire room. Rags to riches, right? IBM helped build equipment for the third reich to better keep track of Jews. Nestle buys chocolate from African farms which use children as slave labor. Coca Cola hired paramilitary groups to kill their unionizing workers in the third world. Nike, Apple, and so many more companies pay pennies on the dollar to sweatshop workers who can't even afford to buy the things they produce. But capitalism works, right? Yeah, if you bury your head in the sand and don't think about it too much. But even that's becoming impossible for more and more people these days - and I say, good.

 

That's cool. I work for my money. Like everyone else should. My father grew up in a rich setting but had to earn his living. He has money but that doesn't mean any of it is mine. I don't get free college or even a free car. There is a difference between helping your child and handing them everything they need and more. If the 1% were actually charitable they wouldn't hoard the amounts of money needed to be at the top percentile. There is no need for an individual to have that kind of money.

Bingo. Children are starving to death while certain people have billions of dollars to their name. I don't care what you did, that's absolutely absurd and completely unjustifiable.

[Fox Fire]

Stop Generslzing the 1%, my family is very charitable, and the only reason I don't work is beacuse I'm under 18

LMAO! That's exactly what I'm talking about. I was working when I was like 11, buddy. Being under 18 is possibly the shittiest excuse for not having a job. If your family is in the 1%, they don't sound very charitable. That kind of money is not obtained by being charitable and if they're the kind of "charitable" people who simply throw money at charity groups, then there is a high chance that most of that money is going into rich peoples pockets again, not people who need it. If the rich were actually charitable then why are there so many people living in poverty? To inflate the wallets of the rich.