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Communism went away. It's not that communism was better. It's that it was competition. There was, for half a century, a competitive threat - do better than the USSR, or face a revolution. That threat was taken quite seriously in the US for decades. Industrialists (the US economy was mostly manufacturing back then) were careful not to get too greedy or power-hungry.

They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many industries. Most telcos were run by governments. Monopolies were routinely targeted by democratic governments.

Capitalism now has a monopoly position and acts like it.

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Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. Communist governments tended to be authoritarian, but it's not clear to me if it's a natural consequence of communism. It's more likely that authoritarianism is a consequence of violent revolutions. Is it possible to combine communism with democracy?

The future AI systems at the head of the major multinationals will surely be creative in coming up with a new method of global resource allocation..

There is no way for a communist government to be non-authoritarian communism can’t work in any other way.

Planned economy and lack of personal liberties cannot coexist in what we would call a democracy unless your definition of democracy is a slightly less violent conflict resolution method.

Overall democracy works because it respects the wishes of the individual essentially it gives everyone the right to express their wants communism has no room for any form of individualism.

That's not communism, though. Communism requires the withering of the state, so a communistic government is a contradiction of terms.

S/he probably meant socialist. Most of the people commenting don't know the difference.

This seems to come down to prescriptivist / descriptivist. The word communism is used to label the empire of Lenin & Stalin, and their friends and admirers. That's what it means.

They didn't all call themselves communists. The germans also don't call themselves german. We do.

It was invented long before, as a label for some imaginary perfect system which did not need to run gulags to keep the lights on. This perfect place played an important theological and rhetorical role in these kingdoms. If discussing such issues we use the word for this too. Words can have several meanings.

I'm sort of agreeing with you? My point is leftists say communism and mean something different (some leftists don't even consider Stalin a proper communist, Trotskyists for example) but people outside use it as a blanket term for the left. Even some in the US call conservative democrats "communists".

Regardless, it's just a word. My point is people commenting don't know the difference anyway, it's best to just read their comment as referring to "those authoritarian states that called themselves communist."

Sorry I guess I was replying also to GP "That's not communism, though", who seems to be insisting that "communism" means only the mythical utopia.

Communism in its real original meaning, yes. Not the perversions of later tyrannical dictatorships.

Well, the real meaning of words in English is defined by usage. And the English-speaking world spent half a century locked in cold war with an evil empire. That's what the word means.

This imaginary utopia which some 19th writer dreamed up, to which said evil empire payed lip service, is a topic for those with special interests in 19th century utopian dreaming.

The English-speaking world spent most of a century deeply immersed in anti-socialism/communism propaganda, you mean.

This historical revision of "The US and capitalism did nothing wrong" needs to die.

I make no claim that the winning side of this long war were a bunch of saints. I'm just arguing that against confusing the name of the losing side with the name of a famous utopian vision.

On propaganda, you may notice that one side's propaganda needed to be backed up at home with a gulag system, while vocal dissent on the other side was not a bar to ivy league tenure.

Then they don't understand what they mean, "benign" AKA elective communism can only exist in a free and pluralistic open market society where people have the personal freedom to choose how to live.

Trotsky would've been just as bad as Stalin in the end not because he was evil but because an authoritative regime has no other means of asserting power other than force and violence.

Which is why under any autocracy even the most "benevolent" ones any challenge to the authority, ideology and core philosophy of the rule must be squashed.

Even if we take the most theoretic and idealistic interpretations of Marxism you always have what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is essentially the phase that all communist governments get stuck on because there is no way for it to evolve into anything but another dictatorship, free market democracy or pure anarchy.

The idealistic state which is supposed to come after the dictatorship in which 7 billion people somehow live in harmony and prosperity with no laws to enforce how to live or to protect them isn't possible.

And a dictatorship by definition does not have the mechanism to yield power or to evolve in a non-violent manner and a natural instinct to preserve it at all cost even if that state was achievable it could never get there.

I just don't know why we give these imagined phases any more credence than the coming of the Twelfth Imam.

They simply aren't relevant for talking about the brutal 20th century system of organising human affairs called communism. (Or rather, perhaps, no more relevant than the details of the Imam are to understanding the Iranian regime. If you want to go deep and read between the lines in speeches etc, then of course you have to know the relevant theology.)

Which phases? The dictatorship of the proletariat is essentially 20th century communism.

Now we're back to the "no true scotsman" argument, a communist government is not a contradiction unless you go by the most extreme anarchist interpretations of communist doctrine.

But sure show me how you transition from the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase to this stateless paradise and I'll concede my argument.

Read Marx, then come back.

I had, so again please tell me how we switch to communism without the dictatorship of the proletariat or any mechanism through which we can evolve through it and I’ll concede my argument.

By Marks himself the dictatorship is a critical phase in the process.

That's a twisting of terms, in the correct context, it's a temporary switch from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, to the opposite. The term dicatorship is only used because it retains the state, as it will not yet have withered away. Thus it does not meet the definition of communism.

But it is not the same as the common defition of a dicatorship, with oppression and selfish tyranny, which seems to be the association you want to make.

I loathe linking to Wikipedia, but the page in question does sum it up quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...

Again in practice how do we switch from A) to B), the truth is that you can’t and you won’t since any dictatorship will naturally always elect to preserve it’s power.

The stateless version of your so called communism is essentially pure libertarianism the problem is that both are just as impossible and unlike the latter the former cannot coexist with the free market of ideas which is the natural state of a nationless/stateless society.

>"the truth is that you can’t"

Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes.

Again, it is not a dictatorship in the commonly understood terminology, but rather a term that is used for a political system where one part has political power over the other under the existence of a state, because we don't really have a proper and precise term for it.

How do you call a system of government that by definition does not operate in a free market of ideas, respects individual freedom and property rights and consists of a monolithic political ideology?

>"Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes."

Can you have a system that does not conserve energy? No, there such things as absolutes.

Communism besides being the mother of all bad ideas and the most vile ideology humanity has created is also deeply internally flawed and essentially ensures that it's final outcome can never be reached.

And even if we take that final outcome as our starting point it has no mechanism to sustain itself once there is no government and now laws that dictate social behaviour anyone can do whatever they want and no one can stop them.

So if at T+0 we have the withering of the state and perfect communism at T+1 nothing would stop me from taking control over whatever resource I want and saying well fuck you now you gotta pay.

Ah ok, you've obviously bought in 100% to US-style anti-socialism propaganda. I refuse to argue with fanatic True Believers.

I have no problems with social democracies I live in one, we’re talking about communism.

Kibbutzism was less authoritarian, than you can expect from communism. I think it was because people always had a choice to leave.

The Kibbutz wasn't really communism not in what we would define as political / national communism, it was a cooperative and there is a good reason why virtually all of them were "privatized" by the mid 90's.

And yes you hit the point I was trying to make, no one forces you to live under capitalism even in a capitalist country it's perfectly legal for you to go and live in a commune it is not however true the other way around.

I had a grandparent die to Stalin's purges in the Gulag and I grew up in a Kibbutz I can say that my family experienced at least 4 different flavors of authoritarianism in the past 80 years and I've learned to be very weary of the very early signs of any authoritarianism.

Polish/German (mainly due to the fact that they lived in a region that went back and forth between Poland and Germany since the unification of the Prussian states) Jewish family my parents were born in 1942 after their parents have already escaped eastwards because of some guy that couldn't get into art school.

It is a common mistake to characterize communism as collectivist. Marxist notion of communism is brutally individualistic.

"Collective" is practically a trademark term of the communist movement. It's one of their signature policies, the #1 guaranteed way to produce mass famine on fertile land!

(When tired of mass starvation, the strategy is to export oil & buy wheat from the prairies, if you have enough oil.)

What labels marxist theology applied to its imaginary systems is besides the point. This was all just words which the guys with guns made a certain class of intellectuals spout for their bread, to make sure everyone knew who was the boss.

I think it's more that authoritarianism is the natural state of human nature, and capitalist systems tend to be less authoritarian because they setup multiple competing authorities and provide a mechanism for the entry of new ones, and in the chaos that results ordinary people have space for liberty by switching allegiances between titans of industry.

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51.

Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.)

Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.

Communism has a problem with coordination.

That's a classic observation. It may no longer still be true. Scaling works better now that we have enough computer power. Amazon doesn't have a problem with coordination. Nor does WalMart. Alibaba and Tencent don't seem to. All those companies are above the quarter-trillion dollar level. They approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy.

There's no longer a limit on the size of a monopoly. It used to be that big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. The successful giant companies now seem to be past that problem. In a capitalist world, this leads to one big monopoly in each category.

Computers have proven fairly effective at augmenting or replacing middle management, but they haven't been that effective at replacing executives. These are two different skillsets: managers work to achieve a given goal more effectively and efficiently, while executives decide what the goals should be. The former is amenable to rational analysis, the latter is fundamentally emotional.

An economy with a gigantic computer-controlled execution apparatus controlled by a single individual or small group of individuals starts looking a lot like the totalitarian strongman model of Mao or Stalin. Would you want to live in a world where Jeff Bezos controls the whole economy? Mark Zuckerburg? Regardless of how efficiently they run their companies, it's a problem when they're the only arbiter of what should be available to society.

Put more succinctly, the genius of capitalism is that we can have Amazon and Walmart and Alibaba and Tencent and Google and Apple and dozens of other companies that approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy. In Soviet Russia they just had Soviet Russia.

Maybe you mean they tend to be dictatorships that rob the people of their countries wealth.

Voluntary communism was tried too, read about kibbutzim. As you can expect it had practically the same problems as USSR (weirdly including authoritarianism) and they mostly had to return back to private property rights for members.

In history there are exactly three ways in which different people end up doing the different jobs needed for civilisation.

* You can have a caste system, where everyone does what his father did. Which is more fun if your dad was a priest than if he had to shovel shit.

* You can have someone with a gun tell you what to do. This was Stalin's preferred system. It doesn't mix well with democracy, because threatening to shoot yourself doesn't get coal dug out of the mine.

* You can use money, and let people trade their time for the fruits of their labour. This can exist with or without democracy. It can exist with varying levels of redistribution, too, but people still call it capitalism.

What is this alternative system?

I really don't see the caste system fitting in your example. I am not very knowledgeable of it, and might miss something, but surely, even in a caste system you get remunerated and paid. A caste is more of a who does what system rather than an incentive system.

Yes, that's exactly my point. These are the systems for deciding who does what. The incentives are purely monetary only under the 3rd system. Under the 1st & 2nd systems, not doing what you're supposed to do results in violence.

Most people believe that the political spectrum has one axis only.

Unsurprisingly there's so much disagreement and ignorance around the topic.

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

I think the next iteration of the being known now as capitalism, which is actually just trying to be a collection of principles for resource allocation, must take into account the impact that currently isn't tracked or quantified by money.

It's imperative that the government or some superior structure (preferably decentralised) that doesn't exist yet enforces this improvement of economical performance tracking.

Max Roser (https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser) collects a lot of data about trends in living conditions and economics. He was the source for a lot of the graphs in Steven Pinker's latest book.

Except measures (and measurements) and all of this stuff just don't seem to work. In the abstract they sound good, but in implementation they always look incredibly lacking and seem to just further perversify incentives.

It's not that we shouldn't try to improve these things, but in my opinion your position is a forlorn hope that is destined to be disappointed.

The times when nations have worked better and more efficiently are times when there have been other sources of unity and a combined sense of national value which the modern world, and perhaps historical distance from the reckonings of the past (in particular world war 2) have been inexorably weakening.

It turns out that some problems are solvable by a massively parallelized optimization process based on independent decision making, advertising, pricing, and money.

Success stories include food production, household goods, and many kinds of media.

Failures include addictive drugs, gambling, global warming, and healthcare.

As a civilization we’re crushing it on problems solvable by capitalism. The solution to other problems is not new ways of measuring things to make them fungible (sounds like Wuffie). The solution is other forms of collective action and decision making, like functional governments and NGOs.

The USSR more resembled state capitalism than socialism. Especially if one holds that socialism is a form of government which aims at the improvement of material conditions of workers, and more worker management etc.

See Chomsky: Soviet Union vs Socialism

https://chomsky.info/1986____/

Communism was a historic aberration. Trying to make an economy without market is stupid, as you throw away a valuable tool known since prehistoric times. Markets are not the problem, but they are not enough.

Exactly, this whole conversation gets sidetracked by assuming that communism is the primary alternative to the current system.

We’re at the point now where labels such as “capitalist” and “communist” is meaningless. China is a purported communist country but is minting more billionaires per year than any other country.

I disagree that labels are meaningless. Capitalism is well understood to mean private ownership of the means of production. China is doing a lot of different things and most people understand that.

If it's so well understood why is everyone including those in power acting is helpless? Even the rich warn about the problems. I don't think things like "money", "capitalism" etc are well understood at all. It may not even be possible because those are very fuzzy terms that describe vastly different things depending on what aspects you are looking at and they consist of >90% context. IMO any discussion waving around any of those words can be safely ignored or engaged in only because one is extremely bored and wants entertainment.

That's kind of a confusing line of questioning. People are pointing out problems yes (I often agree with them, I'm a socialist), but that doesn't change the definitions of words. If we muddy the words, we won't even know what we're talking about and that favors the status quo. The remedy for ambiguity is clarity.

> the definitions of words.

...is extremely ambiguous, context dependent, variable. Especially for words ending in '-ism'.

> The remedy for ambiguity is clarity.

Then don't use words from the extreme end of the range of vapor words. Instead, talk about something concrete.

And a capitalist society wouldn’t privatize profits but socialize risk.

Why? What kind of law, or institution, or self-regulation prevents it?

This is a very good point. It's like trying to trouble shoot a system failure in a bullet train based on a 19th century document detailing train locomotion.

Yeah, I'm not sure "communist" was ever a particularly valuable label, in that anything large and nominally communist was more statist or totalitarian oligarchy, just painted red. My understanding is that as envisioned, the state would "wither away", devolving power to the people, but in practice people who like power were quite happy to seize the levers of the government and never let them go. Oopsie!

As an aside, I strongly recommend Iannucci's The Death of Stalin [1], which is in US theaters right now. The material would be horrific in a serious film, but treating it as a black comedy makes it endurable. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, and the cast is first rate.

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_death_of_stalin/

FWIW, 88 metascore on Metacritic [1] is solid, high. Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev! Can't wait.

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-death-of-stalin

The Death of Stalin is great.

The fact that some people once wished the word "communist" to mean something else doesn't matter much. Post-1945 it has had a clear meaning: the empire of Stalin, and its vassals, imitators, and admirers.

"as envisioned" just means some people once told a fairy tale about how nice things would be. The Heaven's Gate cult also "envisioned" riding to paradise on Comet Hale-Bopp.

This seems like a strange sentiment when the trajectory of wealth accumulation and power in Capitalists societies track pretty closely with the analysis of Marxism. Unless your saying that all ostensibly communist societies are actually examples of State Capitalism.

>Communism went away.

Not really. Plenty of people now pushing for the equality of outcome. Which is a cornerstone of communism.

Marx and Engels most certainly did not think equality of outcome was a cornerstone of communism, on the contrary. Just think about "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" from Marx Critique of the Gotha Program. Clearly administering goods according to need is antithetical to equality of outcome.

Marx/Engels thought that equality in general, was a concept used by the "bourgeoisie" to manage scarcity. They thought that equality of outcome was impossible, and that communism would be so much more efficient than capitalism at providing goods (because communism would be based on pure cooperation rather than 'energy intensive' class antagonisms of capitalism) that nobody cared any more about equality, because everybody had more than enough. In other words, with communism, the desire for equality would whither away.

See e.g.

- F. Engels, Brief an Bebel (1875), MEW 34, 129

- F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, MEW 20, 9599

This is theoretical communism. The actual communism (that was supposed to be gone) was far from it.

Communism and socialism were disliked primarily because they reduce freedom. Every additional unit of socialism, is one less unit of freedom. Full communism dictates almost every part of your life.

I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force.

It's just propagnda.

Capitalism is also freedom limiting. Just ask low wage earners struggling to pay rent and afford healthcare.

And on the other hand, the nordiis seem to do quite well.

Capitalism is like "Enter to win a chance at freedom! Remember, you can't win if you don't play."

* Terms and conditions may apply.

There's a difference between having less choices by being less wealthy than being forced by others to do things. Can you point out an example in pure capitalism where people are forced by others and not the laws of nature?

Is there really, though? If I can't do X, then I can't do X: whether that's from an oppressive government or my own lack of wealth as the result of a rigged economic system is a distinction without a difference.

From what I see labour has become less valuable now than previously, and capital (land, resources, robots, AI, etc.) has become more valuable and therefore more highly rewarded. Whereas previously you needed thousands of workers to produce something, now you can create enormous wealth with much fewer. Craigslist at one point was making hundreds of millions of dollars with just 19 employees (they had the record for revenue per employee at one point). What's a specific example of the rigged'ness?

There's a difference between someone physically constraining you so that you can't eat and from not having enough money to eat, but that doesn't mean the one is free in the latter case. Indeed, presumably one does not want to be physically stopped from eating because one wants to eat - i.e. substantively we want to be free to do things, and can only do things if society grants us the means to.

What are 'the laws of nature'?!!?

The laws of nature are simply that life is inherently a struggle. Imagine being born on a planet with no-one else, if you don't gather food and build shelter you will die. You are constantly on a path of poverty and death unless you fight against it. Since humans are social creatures that love each other we don't like letting that happen to others even if they can't create enough value to sustain themselves. But once society gets big and anonymous enough, that requires force (taking something from someone else that provides greater net happiness for them both).

For the record I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force and reduces freedom.

One could just as well make the opposite argument (and many have, mostly famously Rousseau): humans originally lived in a condition of equanimity and plenty and it was the development of complex social organisation and property which led to all of the maladies which you ascribe to 'the laws of nature'. IMO there is no 'neutral' description of the abstract nature of the social condition as such.

All forms of social organisation require force. Capitalism is based on a particular configuration of property and contract relations established and upheld through coercion. It is not 'neutral' or 'natural'.

> the development of complex social organisation and property which led to all of the maladies

Wait are you arguing for or against social cooperation? I would definitely disagree that social organization cause more harm than good. I would say that it is humanity single most important strength. Imagine a place with complete anarchy and disorganization.

> property

Do you think that there was never any property? I am not sure which era you are referring to but when things are infinitely abundant relative to the population there is no need or concern for making them property. No one cares who owns which land when there is endless land. If you decided to take your fellow caveman's spear tho, you would probably get a knock on the head. Have you seen children's natural reactions and jealousy when another child takes their toys? Material is fundamental to survival, and gets more pronounced when things is scarce.

> Do you think that there was never any property?

The concept of owning land/estate other than your dwelling is very modern.

Can you point to a socialists country where workers are living in palaces and live forever?

> It's just propagnda.

No, it isn't.

You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts.

You didn't see people getting shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall into East Germany.

You don't see vast numbers of South Koreans trying to sneak into North Korea (or preferring life as an illegal alien in China to living in their own country).

Freedom is also a problematic word. I guess you could say that Europe has "more units of communism" than the US. But if you ask where a poor person is more free, you'd get quite different answers from different people.

The poor person has more choices because money was forced from a rich person to them (please keep in mind that I am not against this, it is likely the better system). But these are extremely different kinds of freedom. If you have an example of how the poor person was forced to be poor it would be important here.

You are working with a politically loaded conception of what 'force' is. The fact that we live under a mode of production in which one class of people have a monopoly over the means of production, and everyone else is destitute and must sell themselves to access the conditions of life, is not a natural state of things which does not require force, and from which any deviation is some kind of violation of nature.

Ok, let's say we start over and distribute all material equally - don't you think that over time some people will be more skilled and focused at gathering material and would end up with more than others? How do we counter that?

That's what I mean by different definitions of freedom

> If you have an example of how the poor person was forced to be poor it would be important here.

You are really stretching the world "forced" here.

Still, a poor person that wants to survive has to choose between paying for food and rent or being arrested and imprisoned for theft. Which then implies being forced to work and therefore not having time and money to get better education and so on...

I would say it’s really a dislike based on percieved freedom. Are you really anymore free in a capitalist system if the majority of the population can only afford the cheapest {insert item} at Wal-Mart? The pending existential crisis of capitalism in the US is what good is choice if only a select few hold the ability to exercise it?

Edit: spelling

Nope, people dislike communism because every time it has been tried, a significant portion of the population ends up dead or in slave labor camps.

Sorry, but I'll take the freedom to buy endless crap, have an virtually unlimited food supply, and have the freedom to criticize the government without ending up in the Gulag.

I’m defintely not making an argument for communism. I’m simply trying to make the point that there is a stark opposition to anything but pure capitalism in the US and a lot of the position seems to be based on a percieved freedom level. Buying endless crap and having unlimited food supply is a logical reason to favor capitalism. Opposing all other market forms (either holistically or partially applied) without consideration because it violates a perceived real or unreal freedom level doesn’t make sense to me.

You can't make that statement independent of a pre-existing conception of what freedom is, and as such, independent of whether you have the value-set of a socialist/communist or not. So it's effectively circular as a philosophical claim. If one conceives of liberty as something positive for which one needs the conditions of its realisation - i.e. where it is not just the absence of someone physically impeding you such that you cannot live a meaningful life, but requires the substantive means by which to achieve such a life - then there is no freedom without socialism. Similarly, if you believe in economic democracy, there is no freedom with socialism. And so on.

'Full communism dictates almost every part of your life'.

No it doesn't.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're all the same, which means they're off topic here.

Repetition doesn't fit with intellectual curiosity, and the purpose of the site is the latter.

This comment was about historical events and in direct response to parent, it does not reflect my own views or ideologies. Things that shaped the past seem relevant even if those things were ideological. This looks like censorship by users who just don't like the ideas (which are not necessarily my own). Anyway no problem.

It's not a question of the particular ideas, but of the class of ideas. The opposite ideas would be just as problematic because they belong to the same class—in this case, generic ideological discussion. The problem is that those only lead to the same recycled tangents over and over, usually with a downward spiral into incivility. They're closed systems that admit no new information. That makes them off topic here.

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