Communism

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Sy Borg
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Re: Communism

Post by Sy Borg »

Communism is an ideal. It has never been put into practice, aside from some corrupted versions in China, Russia, NK, N Vietnam etc.

In each case there was no equality. The main difference between those quasi-communist dictatorships and other societies was the absence of the middle class. The leadership simply exploited/exploits the masses, with their families and cronies enjoying the perks of the ultra rich, resulting in significantly more people living in poverty than under capitalism.
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Re: Communism

Post by Alias »

Frewah wrote: November 1st, 2018, 6:51 pm Yes, the profit aspect has been ignored. And the cost of money which is interesting in itself. There’s a modelling problem, economists are still struggling to explain and understand things like inflation.
Economists are struggling with quite a lot of issues. I wouldn't put too much faith in their speciality - it changes, along with morals and beliefs.
It seems as if inflation was abolished by decree in the socialist countries.
Governments make various attempts to cope with the circumstances they encounter, by controlling those aspects over which they have some power. Whether it's freezing rents or shooting strikers or cutting taxes or enacting a pension plan or contracting out the justice system or downloading social services onto the churches. The single most vital function of every government is to avoid being overthrown. They do what they want, then they do what they can; then they do what they need to; then they do what they're told.
These countries had a different set of serious issues which they couldn’t resolve. Very different but very real.
All countries do. All the time.
I think these problems were worse than the fact that everyone wants a piece of the action in our economy, the profit aspect.
If that's what you're comparing. But is that what you should be comparing? What is the effect on the population on each of these policies? Can you say how many are starving? How many are wealthy? How many have educational opportunity? How many are homeless? Can you compare the long-term cost of unemployment and a high crime rate?
At least, there’s competition which makes the system more flexible.
Who is competing with whom? What is flexed as a result?
In Sweden, a cooperation was created so that food coul be sold to a lower price than what you had to pay for otherwise. Today, they are expensive. Lidl, a private company, is considerably cheaper.
At what point in its progression from ground to table is it cheaper and by what standard is cheapness measured? $$ tag in the supermarket is a very small part of the story of a food item - yet it's the only visible part. If you take the only visible part of every thing for the thing itself... well, just stay out of the North Atlantic.
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Re: Communism

Post by Alias »

Greta wrote: November 1st, 2018, 7:42 pm Communism is an ideal. It has never been put into practice, aside from some corrupted versions in China, Russia, NK, N Vietnam etc.

In each case there was no equality. The main difference between those quasi-communist dictatorships and other societies was the absence of the middle class. The leadership simply exploited/exploits the masses, with their families and cronies enjoying the perks of the ultra rich, resulting in significantly more people living in poverty than under capitalism.
Yes, but it's not quite a fair comparison. You need to take into consideration where those countries were in their history, particularly in terms of class structure, wealth distribution and individual opportunity, before the revolutionary faction took power. A new elite simply replaced the old one - and incidentally opened a number of possibilities that had not existed there. That these possibilities were not used to their full potential is obvious, but there was some change that may yet turn out to be an improvement. As history goes, the work of a century is not a finished product.

Capitalist countries didn't suddenly impose capitalism on ancient, insular feudal systems and make it work, nor create a new system in a new land according to new principles. Even letting it loose on a post-communist Russia has created more problems than it's solved. In Africa, it has not done very much good. It didn't have to be built from scratch on a ruined civilization; it evolved under the auspices of prosperous, powerful, well-armed monarchies. Capitalism wasn't invented: it arose out of European expansionism, ambition, greed and land-hunger. And it had as many victims as the birth of communist regimes - except a lot of them were/are non-white, and never counted.

It's possible that what's being compared are not ideas, or ideals, or systems of political/economic organization, but many histories unfolding in various ways, at various speeds, in their own stages.
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