Why Isn't Communism Viewed As Negatively as Nazism?

[Scot Dutchy]

The communist model was never very clear.

[Hermit]

The communist model was never very clear.

Well, there are hundreds, if not thousands of communist and socialist models and parties about. (Obligatory Monty Python clip right here) But when it comes to fundamental concepts, such as Marx's and Engels's concept of private property, there is no confusion despite the right wing nuts who try to tell us that under communism a woman will have her tampon ripped out by its string if a female party member has greater need of it.

[JimC]

Nazism is the worst of two evils. You could ask a high school kid about Hitler and he would explain something about it. You could as the same kid about Stalin and if they took history they would go "yeah, wasn't he a bad dude too? And he was in World War II." And that would be it. Marx is obscure to most people.

Stalinism is State Monopoly Capitalism, the exact opposite of Communism.

Feel free to provide examples of workers control of the means of production in Stalin's Soviet Union, if you disagree.

One could argue, and I think with a fair degree of rationality, that the attempt to impose communism on any given society, no matter how lofty the ideals, breaks down on the rocks of human nature to lead inevitably to authoritarian strong-man rule...

[Forty Two]

The communist model was never very clear.

That sounds like a good reason to attempt emulate that model. If there is any economic model that deserves following, it's one that was never very clear.

[Forty Two]

Nazism is the worst of two evils. You could ask a high school kid about Hitler and he would explain something about it. You could as the same kid about Stalin and if they took history they would go "yeah, wasn't he a bad dude too? And he was in World War II." And that would be it. Marx is obscure to most people.

Stalinism is State Monopoly Capitalism, the exact opposite of Communism.

Feel free to provide examples of workers control of the means of production in Stalin's Soviet Union, if you disagree.

One could argue, and I think with a fair degree of rationality, that the attempt to impose communism on any given society, no matter how lofty the ideals, breaks down on the rocks of human nature to lead inevitably to authoritarian strong-man rule...

Even if there is not a "strong man" rule, the communist model does envision the individual subjugating himself or herself to the collective. The collective decides what people will do economically, for example, and it brooks no dissent. So, there is a system for deciding what the collective wants, and it's either democratic, or some other form of decisionmaking. Even if it is democratic, the individual may not deviate from whatever is ultimately decided, and the system contemplates that the collective will decide how many loaves of bread to bake and of what kind by the baker, and how many bakers will bake, etc. It will also decide how much yeast to produce and how it will be distributed, and how much wheat to produce and of what sorts, and how many ovens will be made by the oven factories, and how much stone/metal/other materials will be ordered by the factories to make the ovens, and the like. Since there is no private ownership of bakeries and oven factories (i.e. the means of production of baked goods), then somehow the collective will decide how these places are run.

Does anyone really think that the community as a whole can vote on all the issues necessary to run bakeries and oven manufacturing plants nationwide, or worldwide? Does anyone really think that the community can assign to it as subset of the community and task it with doing these things?

The reason a market econonomy, as Yeltsin saw in 1989 when he visited American supermarkets and marveled at the state of plenty, does better (not perfect, but a much better) at making ovens and bread is because it allows individuals who have a motivation to produce to see a need which they can fill, and then do what needs to be done to go fill it. Expertise is developed in given fields over time, so that a baker becomes expert at running bakeries, and he can determine based on his own bakery's self-interest how many ovens to order, and how many loaves of various breads to bake. There is a fail-safe in the market system - if the baker starts losing money, he will immediately or quickly change what he bakes and when or he will go out of business. If he cannot operate a rational system where he can make a little bit more money than he expends to bake the bread, then his bakery will go under. As long as he is baking bread of the kind the public wants at a price willing buyers are willing to pay, he will stay in business.

In the communist system, if the community or subset thereof that is running the bakery fucks up and orders too few ovens, or bakes the wrong bread, they don't have the authority to make immediate changes based on market forces (customers). They have to wait for the "community" to decide. It's not for the bakers to determine how much bread to bake. It's not their bakery to begin with.

It's not just a matter of the system breaking down because people are bad. People are not bad. People are good. People are moral. Morality comes from people. It's the communist system that is bad.

Look what else communism explicity suggests --

Confiscation of the property of "emigrants" and "rebels." So, communism, a revolutionary ideal, says that once communism is in place, if you "rebel" against it, the you lose whatever property you have. Obviously, Marx must have been talking about all property, and not just property in land or economic production, because if communism is in place then that's already been done - private property in land and productive activity is already illegal under communism.

How do the communist countries follow the economic principles and confiscation principles on the two points I just discussed? Very closely. In every communist country that has been tried, they have set up committees to make plans as to what would be produced, by whom, and in what quantities, and they have taken away the right of individuals to accomplish this task. The result has invariably been bad.

Further, communism has always had massive efforts to arrest, kill and otherwise squelch "counterrevolutionaries" and "dissidents." Political prisoners in communist countries are sent away to camps in droves. Is that "against the principles of communism?" No, of course not. It's right in the fucking principle writings. They don't allow individuals to fuck up what the "community" wants by raising dissent -- it hurts the ability of the community to successfully implement economic and political goals. So, when North Korea sends hundreds of thousands of political dissidents and resistors to camps, they are following the rules of communism - get rid of the dissenters and rebels.

Ideological communism seeks to eliminate the family, and religion. Why? Because they are allegiances to something other than the "community" or the state. Your own kids are no more valuable to the community than anyone else's kids. But, traditional families cause people value their own kids above others. And in religion, communism wants it eliminated, not because it's false, but because it's an allegiance to something other than the community. So, not only is religion not propped up by the state, or left to individuals to decide based on conscience - it's made illegal. You don't get freedom of religion there. And, as much of an atheist as I am - 100% -- I still want people to have freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of belief.

And, what of individual freedoms, like freedom of speech? In a communist society, the individual's best interests are indistinguishable from the society's best interest. Thus, the idea of an individual freedom is incompatible with a communist ideology. The only reason to hold individual speech and information rights would be to better the society, a condition which would likely be met only in certain instances rather than across time, making the default a lack of freedom. I.e., you can't go out en masse in a communist society and protest the community's decisions and actions, because by doing so, you are a dissident and a rebel - and fomenting opposition to the community is seen as making it more difficult for the community to meet its goals and plans. You can't have a communist society and let the naysayers and contrarians foment opposition to the community.

Did the real world attempts at communism deviate from ideological communism on free speech and press? Was ideological communism an ideology that supported every individual's right to speak his political mind, and write papers and books, criticizing the State, or the Community, or the various plans and attempt to argue against those entities down or move them in a different direction? Or, when the communist societies in the real world clamped down on free speech and the press, were they actually implementing the ideology of communism, or trying to?

[PsychoSerenity]

Does anyone really think that the community as a whole can vote on all the issues necessary to run bakeries and oven manufacturing plants nationwide, or worldwide?

Does anyone other than you think that would be necessary?

It seems like you've never been part of a democratically run organisation and have no idea what you're talking about, or you're deliberately setting up a ludicrous strawman just to be argumentative.

[Scot Dutchy]

Well he has not because he is an American. Like Russians they have never known democracy.

[Forty Two]

Does anyone really think that the community as a whole can vote on all the issues necessary to run bakeries and oven manufacturing plants nationwide, or worldwide?

Does anyone other than you think that would be necessary?

Look, someone somewhere has to make the decision, and I did not say that community has to vote on all the issues. I did note that it's either that, or some delegated committee or subpart of society has to make the decisions. The "community" in communism though is the authority which owns all the real property and the means of production, right? So, it's the community that must either make the decisions as to what to produce, how much and when, or delegate that authority to thers in some way. People are not free in a communist society to run a business and do it the waythey see fit. If they are able to do that, then it is not communism, because if you allow the means of production to be held in private hands then it is contrary to the most fundamental principle of the ideology of communism.

Communist countries that have tried to implement communism have tried real hard to plan and predict the needs of the people, and to cause them to produce what's necessary at every step of supply chains. They've tried to do this with some semblence of democracy, and others through a soviet style politburo structure and bureaucracy, etc. But in all cases it fails, not because people are bad or immoral or selfish. It fails because noboby knows how to do it.

Milton Friedman explains how the spontaneous order of the free market is always going to be superior than order imposed by a committee or government:

Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.

That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8

It seems like you've never been part of a democratically run organisation and have no idea what you're talking about, or you're deliberately setting up a ludicrous strawman just to be argumentative.

No - you failed to read the rest of my post, because I did not suggest that it had to be a vote of the entirety of the community. That's one logical possibility, but obviously, the government/community could make its will known through other means. But, in a communist society, what his being talked about is the "community" owning the means of production. It thus must be the community or a delegated arm or agent thereof that sets economic policy.

So, how will it happen, in your estimation, in a country where communism works? How will it be determined how many pencils are needed, and how to get them manufactured and to market?

[Forty Two]

Well he has not because he is an American. Like Russians they have never known democracy.

Hmm... federated government of several states, all with bicameral elected legislatures, a federal bicameral elected congress, and elected governors and an elected president -- all elected democratically. The only one not elected by a direct vote of the people is the US President, but that is essentially a democratic election through the electoral college.

All these democratic elections of representative officials have been going on for almost 240 years, but Americans have never known democracy.

[Rum]

I think America is highly democratic too. The system has arguably been battered by vested interests and the tortuous application of a constitution that struggles to keep up with the modern world but the people vote for their officials.

Perhaps America can learn a thing or two about democracy from the monarchy of the Netherlands.

[Forty Two]

Ah, yes, that emblem of Democracy -- we pay our greatest respects to that most humble monarch, the King of the Netherlands, and we honor him with his complete modern title:

By the Grace of God, King of the Netherlands, Prince of Orange-Nassau, Jonkheer van Amsberg, Marquis of Veere and Flushing, Count of Katzenelnbogen, Vianden, Diez, Spiegelberg, Buren, Leerdam and Culemborg, Burgrave of Antwerp, Baron of Breda, Diest, Beilstein, the town of Grave and the lands of Cuyk, IJsselstein, Cranendonk, Eindhoven, Liesveld, Herstal, Warneton, Arlay and Nozeroy, Hereditary and Free Lord of Ameland, Lord of Borculo, Bredevoort, Lichtenvoorde, Het Loo, Geertruidenberg, Clundert, Zevenbergen, Hooge and Lage Zwaluwe, Naaldwijk, Polanen, St Maartensdijk, Soest, Baarn, Ter Eem, Willemstad, Steenbergen, Montfort, St Vith, Bütgenbach, Dasburg, Niervaart, Turnhout and Besançon!

Any good democracy has a monarch of such vaunted titles....

By the Grace of God, the monarch of the Netherlands is endowed by the Dutch Constitution with his powers and authority. Like any good democracy, a third of Dutch Constitution describes the succession, mechanisms of accession and abdication to the throne, the roles and responsibilities of the monarch and the formalities of communication between the States-General of the Netherlands and the role of the monarch in the creation of laws.

We have much to learn...

[Seabass]

You jest, but I don't doubt that the Netherlands is more democratic than the US. Republicans are more interested in pleasing moneyed interests than the hoi polloi.

Studies: Democratic politicians represent middle-class voters. GOP politicians don’t.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ic-opinion

[Forty Two]

You jest, but I don't doubt that the Netherlands is more democratic than the US. Republicans are more interested in pleasing moneyed interests than the hoi polloi.

Well, you may have no doubt, but it would be interesting to hear your argument. How is the Netherlands "more democratic?"

Studies: Democratic politicians represent middle-class voters. GOP politicians don’t.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... ic-opinion

How does that article suggest that the Netherlands is more democratic than the US?

[Rum]

There is such a thing as a democracy index. On Wiki ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index ). If one prefers another source - a tad more 'serious' perhaps ( https://infographics.economist.com/2018/DemocracyIndex/ )- The USA does not score as highly as one might imagine as it happens on either. Both the UK and the Netherlands score significantly better than the USA, which is classified as a 'flawed democracy' interestingly.

I'm not one to argue in the face of evidence and I find myself slightly surprised. Interesting though considering how much the USA tends to strut around being the champion of the system.

[Sean Hayden]

flawed democracy