• TWeaK@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn’t the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        How has what I said got anything to do with liberal ideology? If anything, the implication of what I said is that we need more authoritarianism, in order to stop people fucking around.

        • Redderthanmisty@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          So… you’re a fascist?

          Communism provides a solution to capitalism by being a more democratic system, both politically, and economically. Not by being more authoritarian.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            No I’m asking how what I said had anything to do with liberal ideology. Can you stay on topic?

            Most communist nations have not been very good when it comes to democracy. Not that they couldn’t be, but it obviously isn’t an inherent property.

              • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Again, that isn’t an answer to my question. And no I do not think liberal means Democrat, I’m not in the US.

                  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    My question was how me saying people are the problem has anything to do with liberal ideology? My statement about authoritarianism was to point out that what I said before was definitely not liberal.

                    What would be liberal would be to say it’s a good thing that people can fuck around and twist things to their benefit, as if that was the system working as intended. I’m not saying that. I’m saying systems aren’t working, and the problem is people.

                    If you keep framing the problem as caused by the system, then you’ll be blind to the people problem in whatever system you implement to replace it.

    • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The same is true of many implementations of communism. The problem isn’t the system, the problem is people, and people try to corrupt the system to their benefit.

      People everywhere have always been exactly the same since the dawn of time. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve were literally McDonald’s franchise owners. I am extremely intelligent.

      • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I mean, not to be glib. It does look like we are functionally then same as our recent ancestors. Like, hundred thousand years ago on the plains of Africa the homo-sapians there would be indistinguishable from any person off the street today after a wash and shave.

        • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s not a question of of similarity in terms of how we look, or our intelligence. It’s a question of whether “human nature” is an immutable thing that exists. Marxists say that it doesn’t, it’s merely a consequence of material conditions, and that changing material conditions would change what people call human nature

          • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I mean, we do have some nature. It just isn’t as pronounced as people like to talk about. And it specifically isn’t what capitalism calls it.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        People everywhere have always been exactly the same since the dawn of time. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve were literally McDonald’s franchise owners.

        Nothing to do with what I’ve said, but ok.

        I am extremely intelligent.

        Yes, you are!

        • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          You said that communism can’t work because of human nature, thereby implying that everyone everywhere has always been exactly the same, ignorant of the fact that the concept of private property was invented about five thousand years ago in a few isolated places. For hundreds of thousands of years and for the vast majority of people who have ever lived, they never knew anything about private property and probably would have considered the idea absurd (which it is). No private property = communism. If we can say that anything is human nature (nothing actually is, since human nature changes depending on context), it would actually be communism. Capitalism is not only collapsing right now because it’s a terrible idea, it’s collapsing because of its fundamental contempt for human beings and even nature itself.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I didn’t say that communism can’t work. I’m just saying people try to fuck it up for their benefit, whatever it is.

            Maybe people will get better over time and be less likely to do that. Really though I think it’s just something we have to account for, by developing robust social systems that can’t easily be abused, not without being caught.

            • relay@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              People are self interested yes. Eliminating rent seeking behavior that is enabled by private property makes the social system harder to game for helping themselves at the cost societal good. Communists want to eliminate private property for this reason. Does this mean that all anti social behavior will be eliminated? No, but most crime is committed due to lack of economic opportunity. Politicians not doing what is in the interest of the people that elected them is often due to capitalist funded lobbying firms. Not having private property addresses those problems and other problems that are caused by those problems.

            • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Marxism has an answer to the idea of people getting better. “Human nature” as you see it is a result of material conditions. If we change the material conditions we change “human nature”

            • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I didn’t say that communism can’t work. I’m just saying people try to fuck it up for their benefit, whatever it is.

              The same was true of capitalism when it was getting started in rural late medieval England, but here we are.

              Maybe people will get better over time and be less likely to do that. Really though I think it’s just something we have to account for, by developing robust social systems that can’t easily be abused, not without being caught.

              Democracy in every home and workplace (also known as communism) should take care of this.

              “Maybe people will get better over time”—it’s certainly a choice people have. We can kill ourselves with capitalism or build a better world for everyone with communism.

            • very_poggers_gay [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              People, particularly the wealthy, try to fuck things up for their benefit because capitalism has so deeply engrained in them a sense of rabid and egocentric individualism, and has taught them that having more than others makes them good, and if they have more than others it’s because they’re good.

              The poor are “abusing” social systems because many of those systems lock them into poverty, where they’re forced into a game of economic limbo, which withholds any/all benefits if they earn too much (which is still not enough to live on), or they do things to receive more support than what the state says they are owed with the goal of having an acceptable standard of living, if they can even achieve that.

              Neither of these problems will be solved by people “getting better over time”, and in fact, we are all observing these things getting worse and worse. Reforming social safety nets can maybe provide a solution to the latter problem, if they’re drastic enough. But, imo, communism provides the solution to both.

    • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Lmao, I literally read this exact same “argument” from a different user in a different thread five minutes ago.

      You guys really need to come up with some new material.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The same is not true of implementations of communism. Socialist states at their best implement systems that encourage the natural human drives for cooperation and compassion, and in the two largest cases, China and the Soviet Union, it led to the fastest gains in quality of life in history

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Socialist states at their best

        And capitalism at its best does not distort the value of everything. Yet the people problem is so endemic that the value of everything is distorted.

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            1 year ago

            To look at its best you’d have to look at individual moments. Just like looking at the successes of communism you’d have to look at individual moments, rather than the overall state of the country now. The people problem is endemic everywhere, so instances where things haven’t been twisted are rare.

            • Trudge [Comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yes, that’s why I mentioned historic as well. Which country in which period of time would you say best exemplified capitalism at its best?

              1980s social democratic Sweden? 1990 miracle of Han South Korea? Current Singapore?

              • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                I don’t really have an opinion of any country being the best example. You’d probably be better off looking at individual transactions to find good examples - Capitalism is all about transactions at the end of the day.

                An example of things working as they should could be found in microprocessors. ARM design almost all of the processors in our phones, but they don’t actually manufacture them. They license their IP to Qualcomm, Samsung and others who use and modify the designs to create the devices we buy. The end consumer price of the phone is definitely over-inflated, but the supply line transactions for those components work in a novel yet reasonably fair way.

                Granted, there are many more examples of things not working as they should. That’s because people fuck around and do things they shouldn’t, because it benefits them somehow. Capitalism doesn’t prevent that, but it isn’t the cause of that, people are.

                • Trudge [Comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Okay, let’s talk about transactions then. You mentioned a good B2B example of a good transaction that benefits business entities that engage in it.

                  Can you give me a good B2C example of a good transaction in capitalist societies that benefits consumers?

                  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    Can you give me a good B2C example of a good transaction in capitalist societies that benefits consumers?

                    Selling food discounted at or around its cost price just before its about to expire. Or any situation where a reasonable price has been haggled, however this has gone out of fashion.

                • ShiningWing@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  An example of things working as they should could be found in microprocessors. ARM design almost all of the processors in our phones

                  This is especially hilarious because the whole reason RISC-V has been developing rapidly is because the ARM monopoly isn’t an example of things working as they should, and companies want an alternative

                  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    ARM expanded upon the RISC-IV instruction set because it hadn’t been updated since 1988. RISC-V was introduced in 2015, however if ARM hadn’t been successful in the years preceeding that there’s every chance RISC would still be lying dormant.

                    You’re right that open source ISA’s are generally better, and hopefully ARM will switch to RISC-V, but that really is a separate matter to ARM’s viability under different societal systems.

        • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Just jumping in here to say, look up the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’. The value of everything is distorted because capitalism is commodity producing society. This is explained in the first three or four chapters of Capital Volume I.

    • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I mean, in the the liberal west used violence to replace comunism with a right wing dictatorship. Yes.

      However that isn’t really a flaw in comunist theory

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yes. Basically, any time someone tries to do something nice for everyone and introduce communism, some people or other come along and fuck it all up. Then they call their fucked up monstrosity “communism” to further damage the credibility of any meaningful progress.

        Those people are the same people who fuck up capitalism and distort it for their benefit. Maybe it’s easier for them to do under capitalism, maybe that’s just what they’re used to and they don’t want to change, but if all you do is deal with capitalism as the problem then you’re still going to have a people problem with whatever comes next.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            You call them capitalists because they were successful at fucking up capitalism.

            • DoiDoi [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I think you are missing some necessary historical context to follow along with what they’re saying here. Capitalists (through military, CIA, NATO etc) have routinely engaged in mass killings of communists around the world. One specific instance being the murder of 1 million+ people (communists) in Indonesia between 1965-1966 all organized and funded by the US. There’s a great book about this called The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World that I think everyone who isn’t familiar with the incident should read.

            • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Cna you show me an example of where capitlaism has worked? The system has failed every time it has been tried. It is so bad that being around it is bad for other systems. If the systems they touch always fair it is time to consider why they are so toxic.