Capital successfully fought to put lead into American's blood and lungs for a century after it was known to be poison. To this day they're still fighting to keep it there.

https://www.theatlantic.com/...

https://www.jsonline.com/...

Tinfoil is absolutely enough protection against radiation, now go out there and stabilize the reactor!

The Glorious Leader has declared that we have too much lead. You’re now reassigned to be in front of the firing squad.

Tbh I'd rather work in a uranium mine, it's less toxic than lead in the quantities you'd be exposed to

Remind me, what did they do to indigenous people when they were trying to get uranium for the Manhattan project?

This nonsense is just western projection.

Yeah I don't think pure communism is the answer, but neither is pure capitalism.

They I have good or bad news for you, depending on your stance. We don't. You may, depending on the company which you work for, but generally speaking most people don't.

Yes, yes, YES. Capitalism is evil, pitchfork and torches! Reality check: Capitalism is also the very big reason why you have a computer on your desk or in your hands in the shape of a phone to write about the evils of capitalism. Capitalism is at its core about the freedoms to share and acquire resources in the most efficient way possible. Does it have big BIG problems with runaway effects where a single person can suddenly pheewwww shoot into the sky and start resource hogging? Absolutely. Should that be legally limited and curbed? Absolutely! Is that currently done well? Absofuckinglutely not!

But none of that means that "communism will save us". Dear god, please please don't be THAT naive, don't believe in santa claus.

If you want to spend your free time in a commune to help hippies or whatever it is that you want to do, I applaud you. Seriously, well done. But you WILL have to work for a home. You WILL have to work for food, and that computer you have in your hand to curse the evils of capitalism. And you have to work so that when we all do that, that resources get moved over the world so that the farmer gets his equipment that he needs to farm the grains that he sends to a supermarket that gets bought by a baker which you then buy in the shape of a bread loaf... We all work together.

Again, is there a shit tonne of abuse going on? Of course. Nobody denies that. Is that abuse being curbed? Nope. Should we hang the ultra rich that have been abusing this system? Nah, lets not hang people. I'm not for violence. But should we tax them 100% of their income until their posessions are within a reasonable range? Absolutely.

But communism is not the answer, please learn some history about the "successes" (meaning ALL failures, no exceptions) of comnunism. Read about the famines, the suppression, the torture, the corruption and the crap that comes with that to make it work. I like my freedom. I don't need piles of cash and people generally should not be allowed to have piles. You do that with laws and taxing and enforcing. Lets focus on that instead.

And then surely people will start doing logistics for your fantasy farm in their free time right?

No, you would be working 12 hours per day every day in uranium mines.

Wall Street:

Then tax the crap out of them. Communism is NOT the answer, its the cause for an order of magnitude more suffering than capitalism will ever be able to cause. These sesame street types that really believe that communism will give them a vegetable garden to work in just should stop using the internet. You are using a frikkin mobile phone, a device that is the frikking epitome of capitalism and science to bitch about the evils of capitalism (and loads of people do the same with science too).

Turn in your mobile phone and go live on a hippie farm (or in a cave) and die of horrible preventable diseases, if that is what you wish, but you don't get to have it both ways.

Yes, capitalism has a shit tonne of problems that MUST be solved, totally agree. The wealthy should be taxed up to a 100% of income once their income and net worth surpasses a certain level. Just cap it. We should have free education, free healthcare, basic rights on homes and food... A socialist system BUILT ON A CAPITALIST SYSTEM. That is because capitalism, at its core, is allowing people the freedom to trade in the most efficient way possible by themselves. THAT IS STRENGTH and that is the very reason why the west currently rules just about everything. Yes, having it run loose with no restrictions (as we currently try to do for some fucked up reason) is bad, VERY bad. Still not communism bad, though. I 100x rather have our current fucked up capitalist system over living in the fun communistic countries of the USSR (hello famines!), China (heeelllooooo famines with millions of victims!) or Korea (helloo!!!) or... Well, you get the gist. I'm not even talking about the government policing that comes with it.

Captialism has problems, absolute. FIX THEM. Don't go jackoff over systems that are known for misery, famines, death camps, and just general failure.

Yeah, and distributing resources efficiently is one of the core strengths of capitalism, its the reason why capitalism is so successful.

No, I'm not saying capitalism is perfect nor that it doesn't cause suffering, nor that it does not need a shitload more limits than it has right now, but communism is NOT known for its efficiency, nor for letting people just do whatever the hell they want to do. Communism forces people to do what the boss says, if you don't like it you can go to a gulag. If you're talking about "Communism gives people the freedom to find the most efficient ways of distributing resources" then you're kind of confusing that with Capitalism.

I love how you just assume that capitalists/socialists are all Christians lol

The fuck do I care what a 2000 year old prophet claimed about an even older warrior god from the middle east?

Im sure that 6000 year old ancient Jewish patriarchs definitely knew the god of the entire universe and it just happened to be the god they selected from their pantheon to be the best god. It's almost like everyone thinks their god is the biggest god, and none of them have ever proven to exist.

The Christ also is fictional, as is whatever god you're talking about Were you talking about Apollo, perhaps? Mars? Shiva? Khaless?

In any case, you're talking about people living in the stone age, dying every day of horrible preventable diseases. Things that were resolved mainly through capitalism, but I guess nobody likes to think about that, can't admit that "bad thing" can do something positive too, now can we?

In all likelihood they would be neither. With modern technology, we don't need a large percent of the population farming. I realize communists typically eliminate the intellectuals and kulaks—those who would actually have useful knowledge—first, but the smart things would be to have the current farmers keep farming. You'd likely be assigned to a factory to manufacture widgets for the rest of your days.

And the part where they believe to have any freedoms whatsoever IS realistic? Or the part where they believe to actually be alive and not die in the next famine is realistic?

I see very little realism here...

Fuck that! Your little children and old grand parents can mine coal! You need to build our rail line!

If production stays low, we WILL be forced to lower the age of workers from 9 years to 7 years. Work harder, your kids lives depend on it (if you've been given a permit to have kids, of course!)

Animal farm wasn't specifically about communism, though. The lesson was that any well meaning revolution/societal restructuring will inevitably get hijacked by a smaller group that wants to use it as an opportunity to grab power and seize control. No matter what said group calls themselves, they're most likely going to end up as the same aristocracy/oligarchy that the revolution fought against.

It's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union but it's also potentially what could happen in any other revolution.

I'm sorry do you think that the point of animal farm is that the animals shouldn't have revolted in the first place?

That book was written by a socialist.

Your username is "KillAllPoorPeople" and you're talking about peoples heads not being screwed on properly. Lol, ok

Meaning? You think that the world should be communist and then we'd all be happy working in our vegetable garden? I'm responding like that because I get so many facepalmingly stupid responses from people who actually really believe that with communism they would get freedom. I don't even know how to respond to that, because its so mind bendingly stupid. They complain about all the starvations in capitalist countries.

WHERE!?

I can point to countless famines in communist countries with millions upon millions of deaths. But capitalism? Its currently riddled with problems, yes, we need to do better, tax the shit out of the rich until they are at normal levels.. But famines? In a democratic capitalist country? Where?

Its just mind blowing that people can be THIS dumb. Read some frigging history for your own sake.

That's correct, but I'm not sure what you understand those terms to mean, because neither really supports taking all ownership away from people. I'm just gonna leave this blorb here, because I feel like this is where it fits best.

Communism in the style of Marx and Engels means that the workers own the means of production. They would have been completely in favor of a person owning their own farm (or jointly owning it if multiple people worked it). They didn't really envision much of a state to interfere, much less own property.

That the Soviet Union (and later the PRC, fuck them btw) claimed to be building the worker's paradise under communism was mostly propaganda after Lenin died. There hasn't been any state that has implemented actual communism as established by theory.

Socialism (as I understand it, but I'm not well-read on it) means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules, with bans of exploitative practices. There are some countries trying to implement a light version of this across Europe, to varying success (mostly failing where capitalism is left unchecked).

The issue is that the US started propagandizing like mad during the cold war, and "communism" was just catchier to say than "supportive of a country that is really just a state-owned monopoly". Soon everything that was critical of capitalism also became "communism", which eventually turned into a label for everything McCarthy labelled "un-american". This is also the time they started equating the terms communism and socialism. A significant portion of the US population hasn't moved past that yet, because it fits well into the propaganda of the US being the best country in the world, the American Dream, all that bs. The boogeyman of "the state will take away the stuff you own" turned out pretty effective in a very materialistic society. Although I'm very glad to see more and more USAians get properly educated on the matter and standing up for their rights rather than letting themselves be exploited.

Dude walked right into that one, didn't they?

Communism is when no toothbrush

You individually are allowed to own the means of your production if you don't exploit other people. Everyone who works at the farm owns the farm.

It doesn't sound like you understand these terms.

That's false. There's no state in communism. See Karl Marx or any Communist writer on this.

You're mistaken, the state is a collection of proletariat meaning you are a part of the state. You may not be the whole state but it is your land as it is everyone elses

Atleast as far as I understand it

Under communism, the state owns the resources. People are not the state.

Communism is stateless

You're getting a lot of flak (rightly), but I figured I'd actually give you a right definition so this can be a growing opportunity: If you own a resource and you use that resource to produce profit, that resource is private property. If you're not making profit, it's only personal property. Farm for your family? Personal property. Farm where you give the output to your community? Personal property. Farm where you sell the yields? Private property.

That's not really how it works

Nah

Wrong. Personal property is owned by an individual person. Private property is owned by corporations/ capital. It's impossible for one to magically change into the other.

Only if you keep all the stuff you produce

Under a capitalist legal framework yes, but hear me out, it's possible to redefine laws and is really what this debate is about.

Any socialist society needs to be democratic first, socialist second. Many more democracies have gotten closer to socialism than socialist societies have gotten close to democracy.

Communism focusses too much power in too few positions

Literally the opposite of communism

Communism focusses too much power in too few positions,

marxism would be a better term instead of communism as true communism requires no one having economic or political power over someone else

The only thing I know for certain is that the people who want to be in power are very people you don't want to be in power. We should do that veil of ignorance thing once we havr learnt how to wipe someone's memory.

We should select leaders by lottery from a pool of those who have passed a civics exam instead of elections. Maybe that would help with the problem of corrupt people seeking positions of power.

Thats why i personaly believe that we should strive to build an A.I. to replace leadership, be it political and/or economical. Leadership has shown that they are 100% corruptible and that they are willing to sell the lives of the people they are suposed to protect to pretty much the fucking devil, in exchange of the privilege of showing that they have the biggest dick in the room or to get another swimmig pool in their 8th mansion (im mostly refering to global warming and oligarchy but other scenarios still apply). In my book that shows that we as a species can not lead ourselves without genocide and opresion, and even with those they dont really lead people, just protect their own interests and those of their friends. The A.I. wouldnt be corruptible, would exploit resources with sustainable technology in a renewable manner, eventually leading to having the equivalent of infinite resources, and would provide all the needs of the people in a human way, from phisical to psicolgical, and eventually more edonistic needs where possible. Imho the fact that we are not working on something like this is kinda worring since i think is the only way to realistically save ourselves from ourselves.

The ship is not sinking, the sea level is simply rising to its rightful place

But it's different when a monopoly/oligopoly does it! Surely... The difference here really is that there is no incentive to decide more coal miners are required, whereas our shitty version of capitalism absolutely pushes for companies to fuck over competitors any way possible. It makes it near impossible for small businesses to stand up to established ones with all the resources.

Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that's a misunderstanding of communism.

Oversimplified for brevity, but basically: You may not be able to OWN a farm in the sense that the land itself is collectivized (not even always true under socialism, depends on specific policies and also whether you consider the "farm" to be a different entity from the land it's sitting on, in that case you often own the farm itself, just look at home ownership rates in socialist countries), but you can USE and WORK ON the farm to generate products for yourself and society at large. I don't see it as that different practically from the perspective of the farmer, since they're still living on the land and taking advantage of its productivity.

I think that's certainly better than renting or mortgaging the land and having to deal with landlords and banks. Collectivization usually freed farmers from their obligation to their landlord or private bank and they just continued farming as normal. It's the landlords who had their "livelihood" taken away (i.e. land that they owned but someone else was living and working on), not the farmers doing the actual work.

You can generate money with a car or a farm. The whole problem with capitalism is getting money without working because you let people work with your stuff. So owning a car and use ist as a taxi is fine with communism. Having a taxi company is not. But you can form a taxi company with others. The difference is no one has financial power over others. No one just profits because he/she is the owner. There are people in charge but they are in charge because they have the knowledge and ability not just because they own everything and can do what they want.

That was a really fascinating read, thanks. Checked out a few of the other links from the wiki. Do you happen to have or know where I can see interior pictures and floorplans?

I'll try looking it up myself in the meantime; I love stuff of that nature

It's an oversimplification, but.... Sort of, yeah. Property you "own" to keep from others, and make money from owning it.

Rule of thumb and there are always exceptions, land that you live and work on is usually personal property, land that you own but someone else pays you for the privilege of living and working on is private property.

One of the thousands of nuanced use cases that generalist communist revolutionaries haven't even thought about let alone have the skills to provide solutions for.

I think definition b on private covers what he was talking about

Also merriam Webster is not the end all be all of how language is used

"Did people in the USSR hate their governments?" - https://dessalines.github.io/...

"Did the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries have functioning democracies?" - https://dessalines.github.io/...

It's also interesting how people who's 50, who would have been around 18 when the USSR collapsed or their country seceeded and would have spent their entire adulthood and potentially a part of their teenhood bearing the shockwaves rocking every part of their country under the newly established capitalism (their supposed liberation and salvation and who their new governments claimed would fix literally everything and make them not miserable anymore) that nearly destroyed plenty of Eastern European countries, are overwhelmingly against the USSR, but the trend goes to far more favorable of the USSR the older you get. I'm sure it's just nostalgia though, the oldest people are just behind on the times and their opinions don't count.

Edit: I fixed a miscalculation I made regarding how old people were when the USSR collapsed. My bad.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/...

https://www.statista.com/...

Jesus that was a tough read. Absolutely no real work going to be done in these communes lmao

Oh, that's brilliant.

Oh my god that is pure gold. Diaper boy holy shi, brilliant.

Person who hasn't read a single book on communist theory explaining to the communists how they misunderstood what communism is.

Maybe not die in a labor camp, but they won't be doing what they expected to do, or even wanted to do.

If they don't have any particular skill, they'll probably end up being crop pickers or some shit because we really need those.

Modern life in wealthy capitalist countries is subsidized by massive wealth extraction from the global south.

I call the team I root for mine. I act as if I was a part of the team even though at best I'm in the stands. Even if I was to be forced into a mine, which yeah of course I don't want nor hope for communism to lead down that path, I bet I still would feel like a part of that mine is mine (no pun intended). The same would be said for if I worked on a farm full time.

Saying 'my farm' for the farm you work on that the people (you) own under this theoretical communism isn't wrong.