Communism, a perspective of the political ideology

So it is interesting to see that some of the vg chat members I talk to claim to be communists.

I only know the basics of Communism, and from what I've gathered, it seems like an ideology that is a viable option for uprising governments and societies. But again, this is also coming from a person who doesn't necessarily agree with the Communist ideology.

Seeing as the free-flow of ideas is the best way to get to the truth, this forum is now a marketplace of ideas! Express your opinions on Communism, and let us grow in knowledge of other people's beliefs and perspectives.

I have to agree with Klarth. It's more of a fad these days for nerdy kids than a solid belief. It's certainly not an economic system worth pursuing.

As for it being better than capitalism, that's only under ideal circumstances, and anything other than that would eventually ruin it completely. Since it's virtually impossible to meet the conditions at any point, I don't see the reason behind even considering it at our current state.

Many say that Communism is great in ideology, but bad in practicality. The way I see it, it's bad both ways. The ideology of trying to establish a world where the masses wield the power, or Utopia, is foolish, since the masses are not capable of wielding power effectively. Further more, equality discourages creativity, which can only come from being outside the norm of society.

Although many of the philosophers of Communism like Marx were intelligent and good-willed men, Communism has resulted in nothing but pain for the world. Always, the Parties that overthrow the elite end up being elites themselves, often worse than the original ruling class. The highest of Party officials often have expensive villas that would make a capitalist weep. Further more, policies like the Five-Year-Plans caused mass starvation and unnecessary suffering. In addition, every Communist state has its secret police that eliminate anyone who chooses to disagree with the Party. Further more, almost every Communist state in existence tends to degenerate into foul dictatorships.

If you want to have a look into the world that Communism (and Nazism too) strive into unknowingly, read 1984 by George Orwell. It's a warning of the worst kind of totalitarian state possible, as well as a criticism of Stalinist barbarianism.

[quote=Lunairetic]Neither has capitalism. See dependency theory. Modernization and Westernization != Positive development on the whole of the world's populous.
You seem to have a bit of a tendency to jump the gun.

I don't agree with capitalism in the least. As far as I'm concerned there is no perfect form of government - Every single one employed in the past has been skewed in some way, and despite anarchy seeming like the only viable alternative, everyone knows why that's a shoddy idea.

You name a flawless form of government which makes everyone happy and equal and is fantastically easy to execute, and I'll be cool.

Which is?

My personal philosophy is the government that governs least governs best. I can see why a lot of people would disagree. It is a personal matter of opinion, and has everything to do with current technological advancements and the exact era of time.

Wait, wait, wait. People still claim to be communists? Kids claim to be communists? Jesus...

Welcome to America.

Communism has created poor economies ever since it started in the Soviet Union. If a poor economy isn't painful, then what is?

[quote=Vampiro V. Empire;606393]Wait, wait, wait. People still claim to be communists? Kids claim to be communists? Jesus...

Definitely. Take a walk in the alley behind my house and someone's done a ****ing huge hammer and sickle mural. It's wicked sick, comrade!

[SIZE=-1]Anyway capitalism is the worst ideology ever, except all the others that have been tried.[spoiler]yeah, i know the churchill quote is democracy, but **** it[/spoiler]
[/SIZE]

[quote=Vampiro V. Empire;606418]I know people like symbols and imagery, but that's quite a bit different than considering yourself a communist.

Oh right, were you talking about kids who actually see themselves as Commies? Ones who follow the ideology?

I was just talking about kids who say 'OH YEAH I'M COMMUNIST, MARK AND LENNON WERE REALLY AWESOME'.

[quote=Mixman]Communism in itself has never created a strong economy. You may say China, but China is not purely communist. As I mentioned earlier, China has special economic zones set up in the major cities which strengthen the economy as a whole. Capitalism has existed since the beginning of time. Of course it has failed. Capitalism also exists in socialism and communism.

Just so everyone knows, Capitalism itself is NOT a form of government. It is an economic system. It is imperative that everyone understands the difference. Capitalism itself hasn't failed, but merely governments that have a history or installments where capitalism is featured.

It may not be a "strong" economy, but let me ask you this: What defines a strong economy? And in regards to that, are we talking a specific instance or are we talking an interdependent perception on economy? Capitalism may bring forth a powerful economy in a specific instance, but these nations are not autonomous. It comes at a price, and that's the livelihood of others. In order for Capitalism to fully exist without bounds, it will become dependent on the resources of its peers. Its wealth comes from siphoning it away from the weaker. So if we're talking global economy, Capitalism is in fact worse on a distribution basis. The richer people become, the more people that are sucked into Absolute Poverty. We have limited resources on this earth, Capitalism merely hordes placement of these resources into an elitist group, "Westernized" is the common term as to which it can be applied in our current time frame.

Marx was a much better sociologist and historian than he was an economist, and he was a much better economist than he was a prophet or political planner.

For me it's kind of dumb and pointless to defend alternatives to capitalism on the basis of what the Soviet model did in power. THe intellectual legacy of marxism goes much wider than that, which is often difficult to understand for people in the post-Cold War, triumphalist, OMG COMMUNISM SUXORS time period. How many people are even aware of how substantially worse things are in Russia now, for example? All they see is Gorbachev, the wall falling, and assume everything must be peachy.

However, I do think it's funny that in every country where a successful communist/socialist revolution took place was actually a semi-industrialised or entirely agrarian country, not one of the advanced capitalist states where the revolutions were supposed to happen. AND, in many cases, those states industrialised under socialism, then started to move to a more capitalist state after a period of industrialisation. Vietnam is doing it, China is doing it, Eastern Europe did it too (of course, some parts of it were essentially de-industrialised in the early 90s, but that was more bad ultra-free market economics than a problem with capitalism per se). It's entirely likely that Venezuela will become more prosperous off the back of its socialist social programs aimed at raising the poor up, and Cuba will be much more industrialised and well educated after a period of socialist rule, than it ever was before.

So, if socialism is, in practise, an alternative path to industrial capitalism, does that mean the theory is backwards and wouldn't that mean Marx is spinning in his grave?

I can't stand the phrase, "Communism works in theory, but not in practice." What, do people not take corruption into account into their theories? Maybe we need better theorists out there. The phrase should be more along the lines of, "Communism is an ideal impossible to achieve in reality." Even then, I'd argue with it.

The original idea with communism is that it would be born, inevitably, out of superabundance of material goods meaning it was no longer worth fighting over them or trying to exclusively own them. This is because in a Marxist view, all of history and society is driven by material factors, people's basic needs for survival and their conflicts in trying to achieve security and power in an inherently limited material setting. The society in Star Trek, with its post-scarcity economy born from being able to literally make unlimited supplies of anything, is a good example of a successful communist society. From the point of view of Marx, once resources were common enough that there was no longer class conflict or predatory elites, the need for a state would wither away... since the state exists basically to protect and enforce property laws and the interests of the people with the money and power (which is expressed through property laws anyway).

This is why capitalism was needed. Marx had a lot of positive things to say about bourgeois capitalism. It's more progressive and productive than what it replaced, it introduced (however incompletely) notions of freedom and equality into politics, and it's really really good at making lots of stuff. But, from the point of view of someone in 1848, capitalist economics and industrialisation was not good at resolving material hardship in the masses of people at the bottom and actually made things much worse for them. This contradiction of increasing material affluence coupled with increasingly alienated and exploited workers, would inevitably lead to uprisings and the lower orders (the real producers of affluence) seizing control and instituting a socialist order. Marx was something like a Machiavelli for the proleteriat in this regard.

The point I'm making is that talking about "instituting communism" is wrong, because it was never meant to be instituted, but rather to pretty much develop on its own, in a super-abundant future (that super-abundance to be instituted by socialism, because capitalism was deemed incapable of creating AND distributing it).

----

In my own view, Marx failed to anticipate a couple of key things: the environment, globalisation, and the ability of capitalism to more or less overcome its internal contradictions.

The first is environmental limitations. At the core of Marxian thought is the idea that man has, throughout history, driven for freedom from nature. This is the liberation Marx speaks of--collective liberation as a species, from the tyranny of poverty and starvation and exploitation of some by others trying to increase their own security. In the beginning, we were subsistance-level hunter gatherers (primitive communism) and very vulnerable to nature. This continued until we started to produce more than we needed to survive, in an effort to make ourselves more free and secure in our basic needs... agriculture was the result, then complex empires, armies, and so forth. According to Marx, history has been a process of man striving for ever-increasing material control of his surroundings. The problem with this, though, is that the later stages of history, for Marx, are characterised by COMPLETE freedom from the environment and from limits imposed by having to gain our living from nature, because this was the only possible solution to problems of oppression and exploitation. But ultimately, man can never master nature, and Marx was wrong there. I think that's been shown to be folly. Superabudance isn't possible. We're inherently limited by our environment, and the goal shouldn't be to escape from that (as both capitalism and communism essentially try to do) but to manage a decently sustainable and prosperous living within it.

The second is globalisation. Basically, we've exported our exploitation and production to parts of the world that cannot reach us. We're all bourgeois now, in the first world. How can the proletarians revolt and rise up when they live on the other side of the world?

The third thing, capitalist resilience, can be summed up in a word--reform. Things like Keynesian economics, labor regulation like the 8-hour day and the minimum wage, the welfare state, and so forth, have helped create enough people content with the system that even the workers are not willing to overthrow it because they have a stake in the system like everyone else. Marxists call this "false consciousness" -- the idea that the workers have been bought off and tricked into accepting their subservience. It's true in a sense, but that's just a different feeling toward the same reality, which is that capitalism has proved itself more resilient than it looked in the bloody and conflict-ridden 19th century.

You must spread more reputation... blah blah.

Nice post Arwon.

Communism can work. If you had a small town or village you could, but not with a country. The main factor is the inability for the head of the Government to give up power after its been given to them.

Heh.. speaking of people who see communism as a fad...

[QUOTE=Ch

Communism won't work because human beings love to own things and own more things than other people, same for most mammels on the planet. It's fundamentally unfit for humans.

The only way it can work is if you take all those things away, like chernobyle, after everyone evacuated some stayed. those who stayed didnt have anything and worked together to get essential things like food, water, etc without any form of currency. No government was involved and they were all perfectly fine.

No, they were poor and had only the bare essentials. I'd rather have capitalism and all my stuff, thanks.

[quote=Marxist;609935]I saw that coming....
Well im not calling myself a marxist because its a fad, ive read Communist Manifesto by Marx and agree with it, even though its more an ideal.

HEY GUYS, IT'S COOL, OKAY? I READ COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. I AGREE WITH IT. IT'S TOTALLY COOL. I READ IT.

Anybody who actually has to make the account Marxist and immediately preach about Communism is probably a faker.

[quote=Speedfreak;609987]Communism won't work because human beings love to own things and own more things than other people, same for most mammels on the planet. It's fundamentally unfit for humans.

[COLOR=red][COLOR=White]that is a factor, but mostly corruption plays a bigger part than greed, because there are people who can "resist" human nature and be the model communists (im sure there are people like this). the main thing about communism is that because of its authoritative structure, it is more prone to corruption, mostly due to lack of power checks.

on another note, i find it ironic that Marx, an atheist, build an ideology which represents the Christian utopia.[/COLOR]
[/COLOR]

[quote=Lunairetic;611290][COLOR=black]Greed as a driving factor of Capitalism? No way. It's too bad that exact same sentiment is something that ****s over thousands, if not millions, of people - and a lot of the time its not even necessary.[/COLOR]

Sorry, but it's in human nature to prefer luxury over bare essentials. Greed is an entirely different concept.

communisim is a great apple.when you eat it it tastes so good
which means it's good you (technacly)racist

I find it ironic that people remember all the wars/poverty caused by capitalist governments, and choose to ignore the wars/massacres/bloody rebellions/etc caused by communist governments. Selective memory?

[QUOTE=S

lol2-year-necro-bump