Definition of Socialism and Communism

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When it comes to small companies like that, I think it's because there is both a sense of community spirit, by their nature everyone is working and nobody is sponging and that the people pushing down from above are the people you'll have to face daily. In a capitalist country they also have the advantage of being streamline and relatively unencumbered by over reaching commercial laws.

On a large scale community spirit is eroded, there are loads of sick lame and lazy to look after and the people high up are usually out of sight and out of mind. The very high up can also make whatever legislation they like and it usually involves "redistribution" of company profits that strangle companies further.

This is really interesting, thank you. Ironically, I recently read the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels February 1848 and it's hard to dispute the vision. (Well.. when I say "read" I mean read for a bit then skipped to the principles, but I do plan to read it along with the silmarillion and dune.. one day)

Out of interest, I have some questions to pose;

1. What is your opinion of Maoism?
2. Given capitalism is based on competition and exploitation, which left unchecked deepens class divides and asset strips the earth, do you think sustainable capitalism is possible?
3. Is a society without oppression possible?

I don't know enough about it to have a firm opinion. But an intelligent Marxist once told me he thought the problem was that you can't go direct from feudalism to communism.

2. Given capitalism is based on competition and exploitation, which left unchecked deepens class divides and asset strips the earth, do you think sustainable capitalism is possible?
Again I don't know, but I think it's a plausible theory that it can't survive in a closed system forever. My simplistic grasp of the theory is that the owners of the means of production never pay their workers the full value of their labour, and as the workers are ultimately the purchasers of the produce, eventually the market has to collapse. Having said that, it's taking a suspiciously long time to destroy itself. Maybe the boom-and-bust cycle will just go on forever, along with all the misery and broken dreams it generates?

3. Is a society without oppression possible?
Interesting article, and I guess if they're right about the Australian aborigines etc. then clearly it's possible for humans to live together without oppression. Whether we can go back to that now we've drifted into something so antagonistic to it, I don't know. I suppose everybody thought that universal suffrage would sort it all out, the have-not majority would elect representatives to organise the levelling of society, and they'd get the job done and everybody would have their equal share of wealth and power. And yet here we still are, with half the working class strongly opposed to the left wing. I suppose it's down to a combination of brainwashing by the elite and betrayal / ineptitude from the so-called left-wing representatives.

There are some socialists called "impossibilists" who think it's counter-productive to try to bring about socialism through the ballot box, and that the system just has to hang itself with its own rope. It's a scary thought, that maybe it can't be done peacefully, and I hope there's a better way. But wealthy people seem like heroin addicts - the more they accumulate, the more they want. They'll fight tooth and claw to enhance and maintain their stash, and they've got a heck of a lot of money and power to fight with. The way some of them deny the existence of environmental problems, you'd think they'd rather see the planet burn than stop polluting. And I've lost count of the number of business representatives who have railed against public health measures during the Covid pandemic. I think the only oppression they see is the "oppression" that damps their profit.

that's only social sustainability - and here, capitalism has been meandering between more or fewer socialized indtitutions to prop itself up.
But ecologically, I personally think that geological and evolutionary timescales which the ecosydtem works on are incompatible with the short timespans of financial markets.

I'd be inclined to think that's correct.

I came to that conclusion, I think aspies have a degree of immunity to brainwashing. I do get brainwashed and am sometimes happier that way, but I figure it out faster than NTs, then I can't go back to being brainwashed. There's some good points made on revisesociology that;

- education: we are taught through teacher-student structures that hierarchy is natural and to accept our place in the workforce. Also the private school system deepens divides
- news and media - news owners are typically ruling class, CEOs are interviewed with reverence and language used taints "protesters" with anarchistic motives.
- religion - suffering is billed to be righteous and the promise of a reward after death normalized oppression and exploitation



It is certainly possible to have a society without oppression; many people in our history have lived in such societies. What isn’t possible is to eradicate oppression without also overthrowing the class system that it was developed to serve.

We moved from feudalism to capitalism in hundreds of years and Frank Li's loop theory / Marx's model of societal development says that this is natural, albeit takes a long time and the inevitable end is communism, but nearly all cultures have disproved this, like you said, when the proletariat simple don't rise up!




I just watched "don't look up" on netflix and eventually decided that it was excellent. Yet terrifyingly close to real life. So when people say "we can't continue to clear the rainforests, we have to live sustainably", I worry that we can and we will...

So there's a "long wave" marxist theory of economics (market cycles), but even that is pretty short in ecological terms!

In the meantime, the industrial revolution has been chipping away at the planet for hundreds of years. So are you saying that economics and ecology are orthogonal (not really connected), or that an even more macro theory of politics needs to be considered to determine if a political construct is "sustainable" (in the ecological sense of the word) ?

And are you saying that there are different meanings of sustainable? Like financial sustainability, social sustainability and ecological sustainability?

I do find politics and sociology fascinating but I do struggle to comprehend it sometimes...

I guess the elite have become quite clever at throwing the Great Unwashed just enough scraps to keep them from overthrowing them. That and tricks such as misdirecting their wrath onto each other. I couldn't understand the astonishing ineptitude of government when they imported lots of cheap labour without even trying to calm the predictable tensions by preparing the indigenous population for the culture shock and obvious competition, until somebody suggested that maybe that omission was deliberate.