call me a ball of silly string but

explain communism to me. please

 

Simply put, Communism is a system of social organization. Individual ownership of real property is relinquished, and the means of production becomes the responsibility of all.

I could go into it MUCH deeper than that, but it would take all night. And frankly, I have neither the time nor energy. But that is the basic principle.

There is so much info online which explains it better than I could.

 

Communism is a quick, easy, and reliable way to ruin a country, kill people by the thousands and start a war.

 

Wow real educated thought WP. An idea of equallity kills people. The trouble with communism is that the idea is no matter how much work you do you get as much food. So some people are lazy in their efforts and dont work as much, putting the country behind on its quota of needed goods, ex Shoes. Now even further into this is not everyone wears the same sized shoe but they are being mass produced in one size, one style. But the real problem is the establishment of a leader in communism. He will have more power then his fellow citizens and be better off. Communism is one of the most beautiful concepts on paper but humanity fuddles up the formula.

 

I'd like to know where Marx established these rules. There is no necessity in communism for equal pay for absolutely everyone (part time vs. full time etc). This comes from misconceptions about Marx's labour theory of value stating that for simplicity's sake, all work is worth the same. What Marx noted however, and what his critics usually fail to grasp, is that he allowed for differences between somebody like a doctor and somebody like a street sweeper - the doctor's extra ten years of schooling are factored into the labour's worth. If, for an average of 40 years of work the doctor had to do 10 years of school, then his labour would be worth 1.25 times that of someone who had no school to go through. In any case, this isn't so much a prescription for a communist society as a part of his economic theories and critiques of capitalism.

The allegation about everyone getting the same size of shoes...I really don't have a clue where that came from. If anyone could enlighten me about that, I'd be more than pleased

As for the establishment of a leader, that's another very subjective part of communist theory, various communists support everything from a totilitarian dictatorship to some extremely democratic forms of governmence (Soveits for instance). In any case, that's part of the early phases where capitalism is supposed to be eliminated, the goal is a stateless society of perfect democracy.

What you need to understand about Communism is that Marx's work was 99% criticism of capitalism, with only some very vague (and often contradictory) predictions about what a communist society would look like. In the time since there have been all manner of theories about how this classless society would work, some far better than others. Unfortunately, it's usually the worse ones that have been tried on a national scale, leading to some of the worst tyrannies of the 20th century. That doesn't mean, however, that there's nothing to be learned from communist theory, or that there's nothing wrong with capitalism.

 

Im not refering to Marxist Communism, but how communism tends to work in the real world. The shoe thing is a refrence to how the mass production of materials can go wrong. I don't know to much on communism and what I do I learned through economics. As such I was glad to learn more.

 

Also, Marx was prediciting that communism would be a natural progression from capitalism. Capitalism was a stage of development, like feudalism, which would inevitably reach its limits due to "internal contradictions". As a result, capitalism would ultimately be replaced by communism, the system for the next stage.

So in some ways, Marx was neither trying to promote immediate communist revolution, or criticising capitalism for being "unjust". He was saying that from a purely academic economic theory type perspective, capitalism can only develop to a certain point.

Of course he proved to be completely wrong about all that too.

 

Communism is a 19th century economic theory that intended to explain the effects of the first literate workforce on an economic system that had relied on social position more than ability.


Today communism is totally outdated but some diehards cling to it because of the word equality.

 

150 odd years is a drop in the bucket in world history PB, simply because Capitalism hasnt yet cracked under those very internal contradictions doesn't mean it isnt already showing stress lines or that Marx wont inevitably proven correct.

Never say never lest you live to eat your words.

 

Keep hope alive LH.

 

Capitalism is working at the moment. There's no telling how long it will last. The oil's gonna run out sometime, we're in the middle of an ecological catastrophe on a level with what happened to the dinosaurs, we've STILL got a world-ending arsenal of nuclear weapons on "launch on warning" status...

Marx said it would give way at the end-stage of capitalism, and as far as I can see, it's still growing, most of the world's population is still miles from "industrialized".

Communism's failures in practice are attributable to a number of things. First, and most obvious is the fact that most of it wasn't REALLY communism, leaders like to trumpet words like "equality" and "freedom", and use convoluted ideologies to back up their regiemes. Let me remind everyone that communism isn't the only ideology that's been used that way, everything from Buddhism to anti-semitism have been exploited by tyrants, and we shouldn't let that degrade the theories themselves (although some of the, like anti-semitism, degrade themselves fairly nicely). The more complicated answer is that communism was supposed to arise from a country at the apex of capitalism and industry, probably England or Germany, and China, Russia and Cuba were all far from industrial at the times of their revolutions, definitely far from ideal candidates.

The way I see it, capitalism will probably fall, eventually, to something better. And Marx's critiques of why will have been fairly on-the-ball, at least for part of it. What replaces it, however, will be far from what Marx imagined...something far more democratic, decentralized and participatory.

 

Capitalism is "working" my ass... who is it "working" for... the upper 1%? thats what its working for...

communist ideals have been distorted... we dont want to kill people, we just want to stop being exploited by large corporations and our country run by them.

 

So, I take it that i am the only one really happy with capitalism? Communism will not work, it can't. It sounds grand on paper, but the human factor destroys it fast.

 

I'm not much of a capitalist but I can't buy into communism all that much either. I suppose I would like to see a sort of balance between capitalism and socialism. I wouldn't have capitalism completely done away with but I'd have it highly regulated. My problem with communism is that it generally doesn't respect individuality and personal freedoms much, and government is too centralized. I'm sure there are varieties of communism/Marxism that are different from this, but it's hard to find any that have actually come to pass in reality.

 

I don;t like any form of socialism, i've come to realize 70% of the world doesn't give to 2 fucks about equality and i hate any form of big government. People do best when left alone.

 

Equality destroys. Equal opportunity saves.

 

People with common sense : 1
Commies: 0

 

What brought you to realize that?

Hey, I completely agree with that, with social issues, that is - I'm a social Libertarian. But I don't believe people necessarily do best economically when left alone. Economically I lean someways towards socialism.

Thinking about a couple arguments I've heard lobbied at both socialism, some fear big fiscal governments because the government has control over money, and thus have some control over you. But with laissez-faire capitalism, that doesn't change. It's just the very wealthy that control money and the power that goes with it. And the very wealthy don't have to care about voters. Politicians do, at least during election years. That's kinda why I figure I'd rather go for big fiscal government, with a tightly regulated private sector.

 

I dont understand how anyone can believe that communism can work. It doesnt work because Humans have personality. Seriously, It's so obvious, its kicking you in the face. And dont bring up this "it looks good on paper" BS. It doesn't. How many of you have read the communist manifesto? anyone with a decent political mind that has read and fully understand the communist manifesto knows that communism was BS from the begining.

 

As an addition to what Lunacy was saying (which I totally agree with) In Real Life, the opposite of the above happened, and probably will continue to, at least for a while.