Is Communism misunderstood?

Who's survival? When any unchosen duty is imposed, it is a threat, not an aid to human survival.

 

Seemed to work on the Nazis.

 

Communism is greatly misunderstood....mainly by the brainwashed drones who can't see it was invented by right-wing middle classes who wanted a kind of elite capitalism to replace religion in keeping the masses in order with a false promise that "one day you'll be rewarded". Communism also made a useful propaganda tool for the US and UK governments to keep whole populations living in fear.

 

Whatever this means. Communism resulted in millions of deaths in the former Soviet Union. The fact that the Russians helped in the defeat of the Nazis means very little to them.

 

The only problem with Communism is that we are not moral enough to be better Angels who have not the need for the Expense of Government on Earth.

 

Tell me how no one has ever gotten it to work? The Soviet Union became one of two superpowers under communism. Before this, it was a rather poor, agrarian country. The Soviet Union was devastated by 2 major wars, and still came back. The U.S. prevented European nations from trading with the Soviet Union important technologies that the Soviets could have used to catch up. It is not fair to compare the U.S. and Soviet Union directly, because the U.S. had so many advantages from the start. They did spend way too much on the military, but that has nothing to do with Communism, as a capitalist country can do the same thing. This was one of the biggest reasons for the "Era of Stagnation." Also, agriculture was pretty successful in the Soviet Union, contary to popular belief. Meat consumption was on par with the U.S.

Cuba was doing pretty well even with U.S. sanctions until the Soviet Union collapsed. The U.S. illegally invaded Cuba, then placed sanctions on them. Even then, Cuba managed to have very good health and education systems, and the economy was growing until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

East Germany is another example of the success of Communism. After world war 2, West Germany was given massive amounts of aid, while East Germany had to pay huge amounts in reparations. This allowed the West German economy to take off while East Germany fell behind. After the aid to West Germany decreased, and when East Germany stopped paying reparations, the East German economy grew at a faster pace than West Germany.

 

Since when does proof that something does not work rely on 1 or 2 data points?

 

I believe the objective and market based metrics of our political reality provide the best anecdotal evidence of all in support of central planning; South Africa fell in just a few years with sanctions, many communist countries are still around even with sanctions.

 

So what are you trying to argue, exactly? Russia is a massive country with a huge amount of natural resources. Nonetheless, under communism the country was exceedingly poor compared to the rest of the western world. Per capita GDP of Russia ten years after the end of the Soviet Union was about a tenth of what it was in the United States in the same year. Either you can argue that this awfulness was caused by its lack of trade (despite being the USSR being the largest country on earth and having potentially massive trade networks, to my knowledge it made no real attempt to trade beyond the Communist bloc) or not. Nonetheless, the fact is that production in the USSR was skewed throughout the countries entire history. Its entire history was a testament against central planning.

It's much easier to grow at a faster pace if you're already smaller and less industrialized because moderate increases in growth in absolute terms will mean a much higher increase in growth in percentage terms. Furthermore the fact is that East Germany still to this day hasn't caught up to West Germany. There was some consideration about keeping the two different countries after the fall of the wall because East Germany was still economically backwards in comparison to its western counterpart.

I'd like you to actually explain in a theoretical matter how the autocratic and centrally planned Soviet Union could ever supersede the capitalistic United States in growth and economic development, even if they had been given access to the same resources. Relatively free capitalism will always be superior to full central planning

 

Communism has never been truly tried as a government. There's a reason for that: it defies human nature. It requires everyone agree on everything, share everything, contribute to everything to benefit everyone. No selfishness. No attempts at greater power than anyone else. This is why it cannot exist.

Anyone who tell you a place like the USSR was communist doesn't know what communism is. The USSR was a totalitarian state - one guy and his circle of friends told everyone else what to do. That certainly isn't communism.

And why do people always say China is communist? China is more Fascist than anything else - government and business teamed up to rule everyone else.

 

In my opinion, it was because they engaged us in a Cold War instead of an Industrial Automation race.

 

Old Jar the former Soviet Union became a great military power largely by spending 25% of GDP at a minimum on their military. By way of comparison the Us during the same time period averaged less than 7% of GDP spent on military.

As a society the USSR sucked big time, the average farmer wasn't much better off in 1980 than he was in 1920, and waiting in line three hours for toilet paper, when you could get toilet paper at all, was defininitely a bummer. And it was stilla two tiered society in which party members now occupied the positions formerly occupied by the bourgeoisie. By the fall of the former soviet union the underground economy was larger than the open economy.

 

And why would they have outperformed the United States if they had not done that?

 

Because industrial automation could have solved many of their supply side problems.

 

How would this allow them to pass the United States in terms of industrial output?

 

We may not have beat them to the moon since central planning is what was required to get us to the moon.

 

How was production skewed? Per capita GDP before collapse was about half of the U.S. before the Soviet Union collapsed. Shows you how well capitalism is working now...

Actually, it's easier to increase faster economically if you are wealthier, because the level of technology you have is higher and should accelerate faster. The more advanced we have become technologically, the faster the economy has grown. Just look at the past 200 years as an example.

Central planning is better because if you have competent leaders, they can make far better economic decisions than the average person both in their personal and business lives. I believe that most people have no clue what they really want. This is why markets fail. The argument goes if someone is willing to place a certain value on a commodity and actually pay that value, then that will make that person happiest. However, people have no clue what they should be spending their money on to make them happy. That is why they need planning from competent leadership that tells them what they will get. It makes no sense that we buy a whole bunch of useless (*)(*)(*)(*), and this actually means the economy is growing. Maybe we need to start looking at economic efficiency and not just economic growth for the sake of economic growth. Governments can think long term, while most companies and individuals only think on the scale of a few years. If we got rid of holding elections every 2, 4, or 6 years, the government could be concerned about the long term future of the country, and this automatically makes it more efficient than thinking in short term periods like is currently done.

 

That is why I said they spent way too much on the military. If the U.S. spent that percentage of their GDP on the military, there is no way they would have experienced growth either.

It's probably no different for farmers in the U.S. Lines weren't a big problem in the USSR until the 80's when they tried to instill more capitalist policies. Yeah, Gorbachev was a terrible leader, that sold out the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could have easily worked out its problems if it weren't for his policies.

 

So far no societal structure has been literally permenant, whether sateteless or not. We don't know what the future will bring but we do know that primative communism lasted longer than feudalism and much longer than our capitalist system - which is clearly already unstable - has up until now.

Perhaps socialism won't last and we'll return to capitalism, who knows? What would be ignorant is making the historical mistake of assuming the current system will last forever.

 

I already told how and why it never gets there, but everyone ignored that... Go back read it and understand... It really doesn't go any further than that...

 

If you get told a lie often enough, and insidiously enough, it becomes lodged in the psyche. Just like the so-called Great Communist Conspiracy which never existed but was fed to a gullible American public who lapped it all up. Those gullible and ignorant idiots are still with us...

 

Unfortunately, Reefer Madness is still with us as a privilege and immunity under our republican form of Government. Maybe we should insist on a new law of "perjury against the People".

 

What does that have to do with surpassing the United States in productive capacity and standard of living?

How wouldn't production be skewed? Production in central planning is wholly arbitrary and is entirely dependent upon whatever those in charge deem fit.

The Soviet Union grossly inflated the numbers for their real GDP count. How are we certain of this? How does converting to capitalism instantly shrink your GDP by over half? GDP in the capitalist society is a rule of thumb at best, but in a centrally planned economy it's pretty much useless by its very nature.

This is wrong. It's underdeveloped countries like China and India that are able to grow at a very high pace of 8%+. It's developed Western countries like America and Germany that are lucky to get around 3%

1. How do you make sure you have competent leaders?

2. How do several competent leaders know what tens of thousands of different goods hundreds of millions of different people want in differing quantities? With all of the different interests in the United States, exactly how would one ever anticipate them in the first place, or know what the best set of goods to fulfill these interests are? Exacerbating things, these leaders would probably live far differently than the normal human being does, which would cause them to effectively empathize even less with the normal person and effectively anticipate their desires.

3. Even if leaders did know generally what people wanted, how would they know how much of this to produce or what the best way to produce this was? In an advanced society there are massive numbers of different inputs and different ways of producing things. With all of these different processes competing for the same resources, how would one ever decide which inputs should go where, or how many consumer goods to produce? It's entirely guesswork. In the capitalist society you have a numerical common denominator of value: money. In the centrally planned society you don't have this, meaning that one cannot come close to assessing the true cost of any project. Should iron be used for making factory, for a hospital, for a school, some lamp posts, a children's toy? There are thousands of different ways that it could be used, but one cannot assess which one is more valuable in the absence of money prices, let alone actually conceive of all the different uses and quantities in the first place

4. What stops these leaders from being wrong about what people want? And what if they are wrong and it makes people worse off than they would have been?

5. What incentive do these leaders have to conserve capital goods and natural resources?

 

"Communist read Lenin and Marx. Anti-Communist understand Lenin and Marx."-Ronald Reagan

 

Sorry Oldjar but no the only times lines weren't a problem in the USSR is when there was literally nothing to buy. And farming in theUS was very diiferent in 1980 in the US than it was in 1980. But not in the Soviet Union. This was compounded by the fact that you really can't plan farming in the Ukraine from an office in Moscow. Put it this way under the czars, Russia was a net exporter of wheat it was an importer under the Politburo.