this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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This is what I always find amusing about the Communist argument.
Like, the elected politicians and bureaucracy can't be trusted enough to regulate industry under capitalism so we'll centralize things and then trust them to regulate industry under Communism?
Edit: whoof, should've thought about human nature when I dared to criticize communism. Almost lime there is another lesson somehwere there.
so, it's the goddamn weekend. How does everyone have so much free time this late on a Saturday? I'll do my best to get back to y'all on a dirty capitalist's time slot.
Literally read State and Revolution by Lenin which talks about how people assume the state has a neutral character, but actually it has a class character reflecting who it is designed to serve.
To be fair, I don't have to trust elected politicians to distrust unelected CEOs and other upper management more
But it's not like companies or business entities won't have folks in charge of them under communism... Someone has to run the whatevers...
But it's also not like the person who runs the whatevers has to be beholden to shareholders and profits. They could instead be incentivized to prioritize the collective well being of the workers.
And for that matter, politicians and the bureaucracy also live in a system that incentivizes (to the tune of millions in bribes) them to prioritize the interests of businesses owners, and thusly shareholders and profits, at the cost of the common good. Which is a major reason they can't be trusted.
Or, as has happened in capitalism, people will find ways to bend the system to benefit themselves. Except this time without boards so much as bribable officials and whatnot.
And now we find ourselves at the beginning of the meme.
Also, I find "people are greedy" to be an uncompelling reason to support a system that incentivizes greed and exploitation. If people bending a system to benefit themselves is a problem, then the system should be designed to be resistant to this, in a way that incentivizes promoting the common good. Or at the very least shouldn't encourage these problems.
Capitalism encourages these problems.
Capitalism is explicitly designed for people to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Capital begets more capital in a positive feedback loop that results in massively powerful billionaires.
If you elect representatives, those representatives are checked somewhat by the threat of being voted out. Capitalism has no such check. Sure, ostensibly people can choose not to buy a product, but unregulated capitalism selects for monopolies.
Capitalism was never designed, it emerged from Feudalism. Capitalism was never an idea, but a result of technological advancement, just as Socialism will be from Capitalism.
Just a minor correction, the rest of your comment is broadly correct.
If we're being technical, it resulted more directly from mercantilism than feudalism.
Ideally, supervision over most non critical sectors would fall to randomly drafted, single term committees of the people, think jury duty except better compensated and obviously with bureaucratic resources available to enable these committees to fulfil their role adequately.
Now this isn't suited for everything, but in either system any true oversight is done by the people, not the state.
Half of America wants to vote for trump and you want to trust in random people? That seems like a wild leap of faith.
You already trust these people today. They run/own many large corporations today which dramatically affect our lives in multitude of ways. Except today we can't get remove them from these positions of power under the current system.
It's thanks to this in part that your aunt keeps indulging her imaginary pain when she thinks about your lifestyle.
It's more like 30% and that's with Americans being some of the most wildly mis-educated people out there. I'm sick of seeing sortition shit, but sicker still of misanthropy.
Okay, would you rather the Germans who voted AFD? Or the rise of the French National Party? Or Fidesz in Hungary? Or PPV in Denmark?
AfD polls lower than Trump, did any of those others poll higher?
Afd just won a third of the vote.
You would like control of some industry ti maybe just go the far right?
Around 30% tops but more importantly what do those trump supporters want? The exact same things you do, they just believe different causes for the problems we all see and thus have wildly different solutions.
Shit, you'd better tell that to my aunt who told me how my lifestyle hurts her.
Cool have you done the work to find out why she thinks that way or what she actually wants? No? Great talk little buddy.
Youngling, she's a hard Catholic. If you can't imagine why a lifestyle would offend a hard Catholic, well, that's on you.
Maybe it's on me, since the Catholic belief is that gay marriage is okay, and you shouldn't treat them differently or try to change them. We're at least three popes deep on that stance now.
Long and hard and bitter laugh in Polish
Yeah, you might want to look into current Catholic doctrine:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality#:~:text=The%20Church%20teaches%20that%20same,%2C%20compassion%2C%20and%20sensitivity%22.
I feel like you're ignoring a lot of background, but let's run with your argument. Let's assume that we have to have some elected politicians and some appointed or elected bureaucrats, and either we should try to have a capitalist system or a communist system of some kind.
Let's try to keep things as equal as possible, knowing that we really can't, but just for the sake of argument. Which system is more likely to be corrupted? Remember, the express goal of capitalism is to throw wealth at the capitalists. If the regular person gets screwed, that's not corruption, that's a feature of the system... Oh, wait a second, I guess we already have an answer to our hypothetical, don't we.
But you did raise a good point. Any government, if it's to function somewhat reasonably, needs to be one that has a lot of transparency, oversight, and accountability. If you don't have those, it doesn't matter how you start off because it's going to end badly. So I agree with you, we shouldn't be trusting politicians.
If that's your understanding of Communism, then you need to read The State and Revolution. Quite a lot of Communist theory is concerned with eliminating the concept of beauracracy.
When have attempts to reduce bureaucracy not yielded even more bureaucracy ? This isn't a state V corporation issue either, bureaucracy thrives in both these places.
AES states.
Sahel states ?
Actually Existing Socialist States.
Such as ?
Throughout history? The USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, etc.
I don't know about Vietnam and Laos, but the three firsts ones are referred to as "regimes that controls all aspects of life". I mean, how is that even possible without extensive bureaucracy ? Are you interpreting "bureaucracy" in some unusual or private meaning of the word ? Like, are the "bureaucrats" just considered state officials themselves to pretend they aren't really a bureaucracy ?
"Bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned."
I mean, either they stay out of the lives of the people or they make all those decisions themselves or they hire a large class of bureaucrats to take these decisions for them. AI hasn't been around long enough to make it the bureaucracy.
By who? You just left this hanging, unsupported.
First of all, I reject the original premise that they control all aspects of life. Second of all, beauracracy is not the same as management, it's a group of career politicians enjoying the spoils of their own positions above everyone else. Lenin warns against it in The State and Revolution.
You should look into the Democratic structures of AES states. Here's a cool infographic about how the USSR worked:
In theory, democracy produces satisfactory outcomes...
Of course bourgeois democracy doesn’t produce satisfactory outcomes for the working class. It doesn’t represent the will of the working class, but rather that of the capitalist class.
Democracy does produce satisfactory outcomes, what changes reality is the structure of said democracy. Very few systems are direct democracies, and direct democracies themselves are flawed even in theory.
You should read the text.