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ToughDiamond
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11 Dec 2022, 12:37 pm

magz wrote:
Minder wrote:
Even if you somehow got rid of money, you'd still probably have a ruling class. They might be defined by political influence or social capital.

In communist Poland, money was largely worthless.
So people struggled for things (every item separately) not money and accumulated power mainly through social connections.

Think this way - Neolithic societes did not have money but many had social stratification and some forms of ruling class.

I take it the idea of making money practically worthless was an attempt to stop individuals accumulating wealth. But didn't it make life difficult? Money makes the exchange of labour and products wonderfully easy compared with exchanging products.

It's hard to know what to do about the fact that many people wouldn't play the equality game. It must make it even more difficult when equality is imposed on a society that never voted for it in the first place. It would be better to start with an empty chunk of the world and let those who wanted to live in a socialist way come in and sign up to a "ceiling and floor" economic system that abolished getting rich and getting poor. That way the only problem would be the ones who were only pretending to be egalitarians, though that's still far from an easy problem.

Incidentally, the UK once had a Co-operative Wholesale Society that grew and thrived for many decades. It still exists but has been in decline since the end of WW2. Why it rose and why it fell is still something of a mystery to me. Best guess, it can't cope with the consumerist mindset and behavioural patterns that pervade the modern public.



magz
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12 Dec 2022, 3:26 am

Money practically worthless is a common result of really bad fiscal politics. Take Zimbabwe, for a more recent example. AFAIK, during its heighs of inflation, the society switched to practically a barter economy, supplied by some use of foreign currencies. But the president of Zimbabwe was building private palaces for himself. It had nothing to do with egalitarianism.

Some kinds of "ceiling and floor" approach are being employed in social democracies, by progressive "chimney-cutting" taxes and extensive social support. In some places (Scandinavia), it even seems to be working.


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12 Dec 2022, 4:59 am

magz wrote:
I found it an interesting question, indirectly asked in this thread: viewtopic.php?t=409591

What is communism?
And does it have any chance of working in the real world?

I think we should start from the utopian slogan:
From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
Great.
Now: who decides abilities and needs of each commune member? And how?


The pigs, of course. :mrgreen:

magz wrote:
Please, no "commies good", "commies bad", etc. in this thread.


Awwww.
No: "Four legs good...two legs bad"?
What a party pooper. :(

Quote:
The pigs draw up seven commandments which all animals should abide by:

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.

Appended to these commandments is the mantra or slogan ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, because animals (who walk on four legs) are their friends while their two-legged human overlords are evil. ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’, then, is a political slogan in Animal Farm. Indeed, more than this, it’s a revolutionary slogan. The animals of the renamed Manor Farm – now known as Animal Farm, of course – found their own political ideology, Animalism, which is designed to echo the name (and values) of Communism.

https://interestingliterature.com/2021/ ... -analysis/

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19 Feb 2023, 12:54 pm

magz wrote:
MaxE wrote:
As for Communism, in particular Marxism-Leninism, you could say it was a failure but at the same time people who lived in that system did benefit in some ways and some of those people would go back if they could, especially in Germany (where a consensus based cultural tradition may have resulted in greater success i.e. there were people there committed to making it work unlike Romania for example).
I once sat in a plane next to a Polish guy who described life in DDR he remembered.
If someone had anything but a car in their garage - the neighbours let the police know and you got raided. If a car was parked that did not park in this street earlier - a denuntiation and an investigation.
Sure it was wealthier and better-organized than Romania or Poland but it was a really stiff police state, at least according to his account.
Similarily, Czechoslovakia was better-off than Poland - but when my parents' friends learned that my father rejected recruitment to the party and still could work as an engineer, they were shocked. It was impossible there. Poland was relatively free at a cost of enormous poverty.


EDIT: removed some of the quoted text.

I saw this and couldn't help thinking about this earlier conversation. This is evidence of some nostalgia for DDR days. My other comment is that German society is unusually consensus based for a European country. Some of what seems shockingly conformist to most Westerners seems less so to a German, in my experience. Germans are far readier to rat out their neighbors or draw public attention to somebody violating some sort of societal rule, irrespective of government. Of course in the DDR this was taken to extremes, I don't dispute that for a minute. Still there's this poster.

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blackomen
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13 Mar 2023, 11:36 am

IMO, Anarcho-Communism is the best system on paper, at least for me but I have no idea how to set up and sustain such a society especially without the use of violence and suppression to get there. If there's a practical way of achieving it, I'm all ears but until then, no thanks, I'll stick with good old Democracy and Capitalism though I'm open to more safety nets (like UBI or maybe some Democratic-Socialist policies.)

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
I don't think I'm an expert on communism because ive never read marx's works and all I have to go by are the "Better Dead than Red!" Narratives here in the US but personally I think communism sounds good on paper but always fails simply because of the nature of humans.


It's hard to force all humans to be 'equal' when we're not much different from our relatives the apes who are always looking up to an alpha who gets more of their share than the other lesser apes.

Notice that in every communist society the one in charge of the country still gets nicer things than the average citizen in that country?



Dengashinobi
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13 Mar 2023, 11:43 am

MaxE wrote:
magz wrote:
MaxE wrote:
As for Communism, in particular Marxism-Leninism, you could say it was a failure but at the same time people who lived in that system did benefit in some ways and some of those people would go back if they could, especially in Germany (where a consensus based cultural tradition may have resulted in greater success i.e. there were people there committed to making it work unlike Romania for example).
I once sat in a plane next to a Polish guy who described life in DDR he remembered.
If someone had anything but a car in their garage - the neighbours let the police know and you got raided. If a car was parked that did not park in this street earlier - a denuntiation and an investigation.
Sure it was wealthier and better-organized than Romania or Poland but it was a really stiff police state, at least according to his account.
Similarily, Czechoslovakia was better-off than Poland - but when my parents' friends learned that my father rejected recruitment to the party and still could work as an engineer, they were shocked. It was impossible there. Poland was relatively free at a cost of enormous poverty.


EDIT: removed some of the quoted text.

I saw this and couldn't help thinking about this earlier conversation. This is evidence of some nostalgia for DDR days. My other comment is that German society is unusually consensus based for a European country. Some of what seems shockingly conformist to most Westerners seems less so to a German, in my experience. Germans are far readier to rat out their neighbors or draw public attention to somebody violating some sort of societal rule, irrespective of government. Of course in the DDR this was taken to extremes, I don't dispute that for a minute. Still there's this poster.

Image


In my opinion germans are culturally inclined towards a totalitarian conception of society. No offence intended, it's just my humble idea.