Hacker News Reader

Comment by HoopleHead | Hacker News Reader

I'm presuming you're an American, seeing as you seem to equate being a Communist with being a terrorist. Communism, as a political ideal, is a perfectly acceptable proposition. The fact that many oppressive regimes have declared themselves to be Communist states should not detract from that —any more than the equally evil actions of states which claim to be Democratic, should tarnish the ideals underpinning Democracy.

View on HN

> I'm presuming you're an American, seeing as you seem to equate being a Communist with being a terrorist.

He said: Mandela was a communist and a terrorist. He's not saying what you're claiming.

Mandela was a terrorist because he was part of a terrorist organization that intentionally set off bombs in shopping malls and restaurants.

In what twisted mind is communism an acceptable proposition???

There isn't anything intrinsically wrong with communism as an ideal. All of its implementations, however, have been seriously lacking, and perhaps it is unviable in practice; this does not mean the concept is unacceptable in theory.

You are clearly incompetent about the subject. The "ideal" of communism and the practice of communism are not two different things. Communism is practiced precisely the way it is theoretically intended to work.

Communism is a cleptocratic system of ruling and exploiting the manual labour and natural resources of any given territory inhabited by unambitious masses that largely lack individualism. The core of the system relies on individualism and personal achievement being punished and forcefully suppressed, while the masses are continuously promised vague ideals of equality and justice (much like with any other system of government - nothing innovative here. ) There is nothing acceptable about communism - not in theory, not in practice, not in ideals - nothig.

You sound like an Ayn Rand soliloquy.

I've been told this a number of times. I've never read any Ayn Rand - probably should. I was, however, born and raised in communism, as were my parents, so I talk from experience.

And i suppose the people of "The Democratic Republic of North Korea" know a thing or two about democracy and republics.

There are plenty of communists who categorically reject state communism. They're called anarchists.

Leftist anarchists are against private property though and against turning a profit and individualism. We all know how this ends. Also, how do you enforce the no private property rule without a state and without a private security agency?

You realize that private property is defined and enforced by a state, right? It doesn't exist until a social structure says "This is yours and we will guarantee it with force of violence if we need to".

Also i'm sure our definitions of individualism are irreconcilably different. Your individualism involves people subordinating others with violence explicit and implicit if you really think capitalism is a pro-individualism system. For me, individualism cannot be separated from collectivism.

Why would you want to build anything if anyone can come and grab it because private property is bad? My body belongs to me and so does what I build with it unless I voluntarily give it away. I don't need a state to enforce the protection of my property, I could do it myself or pay someone (a person, a private security agency or yes, a state).

> Your individualism involves people subordinating others with violence explicit and implicit if you really think capitalism is a pro-individualism system

What is capital(ism) if not the accumulation of things to build more things. In order to build anything, you need a certain capital even in a anarchy world, it could be pieces of wood, bricks, money etc. Now who is better suited to manage this capital? Everyone? Turns out, some people suck at managing capital and some people know best how to manage it because they're the ones who managed to accumulate enough in order to build this capital in the first place. Societies where capital was managed by collectives have historically not done well.

Also, I'm not for subordinating people with violence so not sure where you got this idea. I'm ok though with using force to defend your body and the property you acquired peacefully with it (because you built it or because someone agreed to give it to you).

Lack of private property doesn't need enforcing, it's the existence of private property that needs enforcing

It is a natural thing to want to own the property you live on at least, even lions urinate on their turf to mark it as theirs. How would you start preventing humans from doing what every mammals has ever done ever?

They don't... private property isn't the same thing as personal property. Anarchists aren't against personal property.

How about a second car? How about a second residence?

This all counts as personal property (though of course people disagree about what exactly should count as personal property). An example of private property is owning a factory that you don't personally work in, or even owning an apartment which you have never lived in and don't intend on living in. The Sauk leader Black Hawk articulated something like this idea when he said

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.

Locke[1] also believed that people shouldn't be able to own things that they don't personally use or hoard resources if they are scarce.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso

What if you're the best at managing said factory without working in it, should I own it instead because I work there even though I have terrible management skills that will lead it to bankruptcy? Seems awfully inefficient. Should the people working at Apple factory own Apple? Not making much sense. How long would it last?

I think managing a factory counts as working in it (working in the office rather than on the floor). With respect to the idea that there should be no private property, it seems to me that there's no reason that this implies that a factory should be managed by factory workers. By all means hire managers to manage the factory, it's what they're best at. But managing a factory (i.e. being the person that coordinates the business side of the company) isn't the same thing as owning it or controlling it. You can imagine, for example, a factory that is managed by a manager but ultimately owned and controlled by a worker collective (which includes the manager). The most important decisions of the factory could be made democratically (supported by data gathered by managers) whereas the day to day business decisions would be made by people who manage the factory.

That wouldn't work though. Factory workers from a competing factory would attract the best managers by offering them more money or complete control and ownership because they know the factory would have way more profit and therefor more money for the workers this way. And then you're back to private property because it turns out its the most efficient way to get things done.

Who would enforce their private control in a society where there is no legal concept of private property?

Themselves and people who voluntary agree with them because it would be in their own self-interest to be rich with a more successful factory instead of poor with a bankrupt factory?

As usually used, "private property" is a superset of "personal property", as all non-government-held (non-"public") property is " private property", including both real and personal property.

But I think you are probably using an unusual and ideologically-specific definition of "private property" that you should probably detail explicitly.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I grew up in socialist Syria and that was pretty much it, my wife in Peru had a similar experience and so did my Russian friends. I think most Westerners are totally clueless when it comes to what communism really means and are quick to label you an Ayn Rand fanboy. I guess they will eventually find out if they keep voting for more socialism though.

You weren't raised "in communism". You lived in a socialist country ruled by an organization which, depending on the country, might or even might have not called itself communist party. Communism might have been the proclaimed goal of that government, but in reality that was little more than an ideological slogan.

I think authoritarian left wing communist "transition states", are what most people mean by communism now. The word has evolved and changed meaning. Also, I believe that because the two are synonymous, and there never was any "true communism" implemented according to many, expressing communism as the above isn't too factually inaccurate. If someone calls their self something, and is labeled that thing, they'll eventually be that thing. In this case, "communist" governments.

Are you sure that is how Marx described communism, as a cleptocratic system of ruling and exploiting... I mean, I don't remember reading that at all, just like I don't remember Ayn Rand describing libertarianism as a return feudalism where property rights rule out over the collective of the people.

Are you sure Marx wrote that, or are you letting your own bias into your definition?

For the record, I live in a communist country and don't like how that aspect turned out at all. But I don't blame it on the communism, after all, Russia still has many problems even after they threw off communism. Selfish bad leaders will beat you up with any ideology they find convenient.

Marx did not describe communism that way, obviously, but it should be equally obvious that his terrible ideas led directly to what happened. Communism isn't some great idea that flawed humans have repeatedly screwed up - it is a flawed idea whose outcome was easily predicted even by Marx's contemporaries.

Seen with the benefit of hindsight, Mikael Bakunin's criticism is most appropriate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Critique_of_Ma...

They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

For Bakunin, the fundamental contradiction is that for the Marxists, "anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved."

Marx directly argued that communism should be implemented by violent revolution that would put in place a temporary "dictatorship of the proles", which is an absurd concept containing the seeds of its destruction.

(This is meant as a reply to sievebrain: there appears to be some sort of thread-nesting limit.)

Bakunin did on occasion describe himself as a communist; but like Kropotkin, his communism was of the libertarian rather than authoritarian variety.

There isn't anything intrinsically wrong with communism as an ideal.

There clearly is. Everywhere it has been tried, it led to at least poverty and usually genocide. Communism has been far, far worse than nazism or fascism and holding national socialism as some sort of valuable ideal untainted by the reality is unacceptable almost everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

In practice yes, but not in theory, which is an important distinction. To use an analogy, genocide of Jews is an unacceptable ideal, you don't have to try it out to know its bad. In retrospect, no one thought the nazi's plan could have ended up working in a "good" way. Compare that to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, given communism as an ideal alone, it wasn't inherently flawed or "evil", it just turns out people are selfish enough for this not to work, leading to a lot of collateral damage in the form of bad ideals (like genocide).

Fascism is quite similar, though I'm not sure one could say communism is worse than fascism, given that the latter was only tried a couple of times and was put out relatively quickly, while the impact of the former happened over a much longer period of time and under much larger populations.

It turns out that public ownership of the means of production actually leads to an even worse world than planned, industrial genocide. Part of the reason why is people clinging to this idea long after it has been shown not viable and leading to absolutely horrific events like Holodomor (a Holocaust level genocide before Holocaust) or The Great Leap Forward.

I can see how one might find communism interesting from the perspective of 19th century. I cannot believe anyone still does in the 21st.

I think you are really misinterpreting the meaning of "an acceptable proposition". It doesn't have to evaluate to T, only that, as an abstraction, it does not evaluate to F based on its structure alone.

No we don't want communism (at least I don't), but for someone to say it is illogical is completely incorrect.

> In practice yes, but not in theory, which is an important distinction.

Communism is an economic system that falls apart in practice because of greed. An economic system that fails to account for greed is not good, even in theory.

If someone said "let's go communist", you would have to argue with them why it was a bad idea. A reasonable proposition that turns out not to be a good idea.

If someone said "let's kill the Jews", you would probably slowly and carefully walk away from that person because they were nuts. An unreasonable proposition that you probably don't want to bother arguing against (because what kind of person would even say that?).

When I hear that something "works in theory," I understand that to mean "if you oversimplify a little, this would work well." "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is."

But it's only valid if you oversimplify a little. Starting with "first, forget everything you know about human nature" goes too far.

I don't think of "works in theory" as shorthand for "doesn't have internal contradictions" or "sounds reasonable if you forget everything you know about human nature."

I happen to have the exact same reaction to both (and it's not the kinder one).

I am not seeing how communism can become a viable idea on a large scale, but on a smaller scale it is nothing new or unusual. In a family people normally share property, food, money, and products of labor. That's communism. Israeli kibbutz is another example.

Some aspects are present in large companies too. For instance at many companies teams don't directly pay for infrastructure that they use, it's all provided by the company. Or computer equipment, air conditioning, etc. Of course this has issues of its own, like people under-appreciating the all the VMs they're provisioning, and it gets especially bad if the budget gets tight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com