What's so terrible about Communism ?

Good post.

Could you elaborate on why this is true? Because last week, your solutions pertaining to the environment, involved murdering the weak and forbidding travel - two ideas that has been beloved under certain economic systems.

This is a vicious LIE.

The moderators should ban such awful and baseless accusations.

This is what opposition does to deflect from substantive discussion. Pivots for the topic at hand and tries to throw make it a discussion about character instead of the issues posed in the OP which is the failure of unregulated capitalism to protect the shared environment that we are all dependent upon.

I apologize, i forgot about the olds.

You posited this,

In which Luckbox interpreted similar to how i did and respondid with this...

And then it appeared that you mentioned age and skill sets as being suggested starting points...

But maybe you were talking about something else but I don't think anyone should have the power to dictate who lives and who dies to satisfy your personal opinions about the planet.

I am trying to bring attention to the fact that we are already making decisions every day which determine who lives and dies without acknowledging the consequences of those decisions.

Edit .... at no point did I point advocating for killing weak people. Or any people for that matter.

Left untreated, climate change will kill billions. We may have already passed that threshold and it's simply a matter of time before the chain reaction we have initiated reaches its equilibrium.

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Apart from the millions murdered and enslaved in gulags, purges and suppression of freedom, Communism was awesome.

Capitalism is simply the way things are and has always been. We've been trading with each other for thousands of years. People like to have stuff.
Overall, despite the awesomeness of Communism, I reckon I prefer Capitalism due to it giving you more freedom.

Like most of your other original posts, this one screams "I want to be a radical but I haven't thought my ideas through yet."

If our primary concern is the environment, why do we have to choose between capitalism in its current form and communism? In other words, why is communism necessary in order to have the level of environmental regulation that you desire? What makes you think that the government of a communist society would be particularly sensitive to the environment?

I don't know if communism is "necessary in order to have the level of environmental regulation that you desire", but one thing I can tell you for sure is that capitalist economies have no answer to this question BY DEFINITION. Private firms have an outsized amount of power in capitalist economies and many of them have an explicit interest AGAINST taking many of the measures which would improve our environmental health.

It would be a lot harder for factories to dump their environmentally hazardous by-products into poor people's lakes than it is now.

One thing that would likely happen is the flourishing of alternative energy sources, now that there are no longer giant corporate conglomerates doing everything in their power to lower the effectiveness and efficiency of solar, water, nuclear, whatever else is out there, I dunno. I'm not remotely qualified to say to what degree these alternative sources would fulfill everyone's needs, if we could become energy independent, etc., but it sure seems like a nice thing to try!

and btw, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that politically-minded non-radical posters have thought things through than radical posters of the same kind

you weren't necessarily saying that, but I hate the common-ish idea that standard/centrist politics are just this collection of bits of common-sense wisdom and one would have to be some kinda weirdo to advocate for alternative politics

this is an idiotic assessment...

You're getting ahead of yourself. Communism is step two.

Step one is a fundamental altering of human nature, which is to protect one's own.

For Nutter and Karl, what does the reality of Communism look like in your dreams? How does one ensure their daily needs are met, while also providing for the possibility of wants?

Do wages and currency exist, or does everyone simply choose a role in society, show up, and give it their best shot?

How much lower does the ceiling of luxury and leisure become compared to today's society? Obviously mega-yachts are out. But what about golf? Does golf still exist in true communism? It seems quite frivolous, and I'd imagine the competition for jobs at the golf course would be quite stiff given the flat compensation structure in society and most job alternatives.

I find internet communists fascinating, because I honestly can't wrap my head around what that world looks like. No rewards means no reason to take risks. No rewards also means no reason to trade comfort for compensation. Most jobs in society are objectively kinda shitty when you compare them to what people would "want" to do with their time, but obviously someone needs to clear the septic tanks. Did septic tank guy just draw the short straw, or does he just get preferential treatment at the food trough? If the latter, where does the favoritism stop?

Can you get fired at your dream job under communism? If so, do you just get sent home forever, or are you forced to do a job you don't want? The last part sounds a little too close to slavery.

What if the people who work at the big polluting factory don't particularly care about the pollution? What if reducing it made their job more difficult so they simply choose to ignore it? Who is in charge of regulation? Can they force the factory workers to comply? How does one get chosen for this enforcer role?

I have about a million other questions regarding the internet version of Communism.

We know how it has worked out in real life, but you guys just keep telling us we're doing it wrong. What does doing it, "right" look like?

Actual communism, which would be institutionally protected worker ownership of the means of production - not what we saw in the Soviet Union which never achieved this aspiration - would, in theory, provide more democracy because democracy would be an inherent part of the institutions, our places of work, which affect our politics. In theory, we would wouldn't have the current corruption of the state-corporate complex which has killed democracy. We probably wouldn't have billionaires either because the guy on the assembly floor is going to think "sure the CEO is more important than I am but not THAT much more important". So maybe a the guy on the assembly line makes 60k and the CEO makes 300k, and maybe we have a federal law controlling the ratio of management compensation relative to the median wage in a company.

How would this affect the ability to deal with the environmental crisis? I think it would help a lot. For one thing a company where workers are in control aren't going to choose to spend millions of dollars in lobbying and propaganda designed to influence thinking and confuse the issue. They are going to better people than the scum that rises to the top currently and, without highly concentrated capital getting in the way, the population could maintain anti-corruption laws forbidding such campaigns. In summary we would have less lobbying against the public interest and more cooperation within workplaces towards popular aims like having a clean environment, both of these because we would have more democracy running through all of our institutions and the prevention of this continual end-around done by those (effectively) despots who own corporations.

Just a reminder...the current situation is we are heading right into environmental collapse and everyone feels completely powerless to stop it. Even people in powerful positions, say the CEO of some company profiting from harmful externalities, knows what is happening, probably doesn't want it to happen, but cannot effectively do anything about it. The current situation, where concentrated capital runs our society, is a more suicide cult than sustainable society.

The "daily needs" part is easy (I address the "possibility of wants" part below), practically a part of the definition of the term "communism". Shave off some of the extreme excess wealth from the owner class, nationalize Amazon, and boom, we should have the means and infrastructure in place needed to deliver goods to anywhere in the country, including the non-profitable areas which are at risk of getting shafted under a for-profit model.

Wages and currency would still exist, certainly, which should provide the answer to, "While also providing for the possibility of wants". There's no Rule Of Communism which states you can't buy a nice car or nice clothes -- you just can't do it on the backs of the working class any longer. Remove the corporate profit motive and we would stop buying most of our goods from slave-shop owners in Mexico, Bangladesh, China, etc.

There are a lot of basic misconceptions of nations with Communist/socialist/democratically planned economies; that everybody must have the exact same wage, everybody gets assigned a certain job regardless of their desires or ability to work it, or, as you wrote, "No rewards means no reason to take risks" -- risks and rewards aren't a thing that need disappear in a Communist state, it's just, the risks don't entail extreme poverty and homelessness for the risk-taker when they fail, and the rewards don't mean you get to be an Elon Musk-style gazillionaire and effectively run the planet when you succeed.

I'll respond to the rest of your post later today. I got stuff to do in a few minutes, but you made a good-faith post (one which contains a number of basic fallacies on Communism as I see it, but that's normal and fine) and I want to respond in kind.

This is important. It's easy to dismiss what we're saying as a kind of "No True Scotsman" logic fail, but I think that's false. If it mollifies the capitalists a bit, I will argue we (all of Earth, not the US) have never tried truly laissez-faire capitalism either.

This is such textbook climate crisis mentality I wonder if these threads are a troll

We are complex but at the same time have some very basic primal instincts and values. Just like you don't act like prey near a predator (run away) because they have a basic categorization method to view the world

The earth is innocent and pure. Our existence is a toxin, parasitic, etc. This is kind of how a hard core anti vaxxer views injecting a baby. This is why you get these hysterical climate activist movements making everything worse around them and completely ignoring reality. These same people often think about how to "ethically" "depopulate" humans. If they're being honest with themselves they are never really the ones needed to be "depopulated", it;s always someone else. Just like the climate movement is run by people flying around to conferences in private jets. Or the people imposing covid lockdowns are having dinner parties at the fanciest restaurants or having orgies. Everyone else needs to sacrifice to a level I'm comfortable with. How convenient. This mentality also applies to "team science" when they actually implement their policies and "solutions" in a place like Germany. It is a complete failure on every level, including the environment. So do they learn? No, of course not. They'll ignore and deflect questions about it and talk about the buses running on time

So here we are. Oh would communism help the environment. Yes, it could. The complete destruction of humanity could help the environment. Another way to look at it is that the private sector will always need to be regulated for a number of things, including the environment. The regulators can and will be corrupted. We need to stay vigilant

If in 2025 you have to ask the question "what's so terrible about communism?" you are amazingly uninformed. You are significantly more dangerous than an actual nazi. The problem we have with communism is it keeps creeping back up and back in. The death toll with this experiment is astronomical. The suffering incalculable. If we actually learned those lessons, it wouldn't be all that much of a problem . Unfortunately we see places like North Korea. We see the failure of Cuba and then see Venezuela be like hold my beer. WTF are they doing? Until what we saw in Charlottesville even be on the table to take over a whole country, I'm pretty confident in my statement

Going back to primal instincts and values, oppressor and oppressed narratives keep coming back for a reason. It's a basic worldview. In its latest "woke" form, its identity based oppressor vs oppressed narratives. On the left there is extremists and there are many people participating at a less extreme level and unaware. That's what DEI is. Of course they'll give you and themselves a long winded round about but when you remove all the fluff and nonsense and distill it down to what it actually is, it's just identity categories, and oppression rankings

Communism requires no private property of productive capital.

That requires massive constant state violence to sequester everything from the most successful people, otherwise they can accumulate capital and put it into productive use.

That, and the exceptional devastation to incentives for the most capable people of course: if you know everything above what allows you to live comfortably will be sequestered, you won't work more than the minimum necessary to achieve that.

Enlarge that to the whole of society and the damage is infinitely worse than the worst negatives you can think of about capitalism

Totalitarianism in the hands of people who agree with him about environmentalism is necessary to achieve the regulatory framework and the enforcement he needs to achieve his targets.

Communism is just inherently much more totalitarian so he goes to that, forgetting how disastrously polluting communism was and is to this very day

Be very specific here because it's a world of difference between co-ops only being allowed, and every worker in every sector owns every OTHER company as well.

If it's co-op ONLY you can have companies where the median salary is 1m and companies where it is 20k.

Co-ops only would look VERY similar to capitalism, only huge difference would be the old/retired are ****ed entirely

We did in some areas of the world in the 19th century (and it was the most successful experiment in world history).

Anyway I am ok to discuss the co-op only model which was never tried, if that's your proposal.

You realise you actually just went and did the 'That wasn't real Communism!' thing beloved of bourgeois Westerners?

Only for the masses. Communist leaders invariably end up with a good deal of property and a good deal of capital.

Communism isn't bad in theory, and I'd argue that it's a good thing by definition.

...eliminating wasteful consumerism
...collective well-being over profits
...redistributing of resources
...access to basic needs and community cooperation

Those are all great ideas on the surface, but to shorten the conversation, i think you'd make a stronger case for arguing something closer to the Nordics, which implement a capitalist approach with a much stronger social welfare elements. It's something that works in both theory and in practice and could happen here.

Because the same people running the show here in USA #1 are likely going to be the ones that are running your communist utopia who now have greater avenues of corruption and the lack of motivation and resources to distribute - which can repeat some of the same disasters as in the past and cause it to fall short of its goals.

Tbh, I don't think the modern day communists have either really thought out or understand the basic checks and balances and bureaucratic inefficiencies when powerful decisions are casted by a centralized group like this. You'd also have to fight against and suppress growing dissent as well dealing with economic stagflation since competition is going to be discouraged to some degree - how much, who knows, but that is going to affect and slow down the opportunity to create a sustainable environment

There would be a lot of issues to face for sure and I think it would be important to have some solutions to those issues before re arranging the world.

...I obv don't expect anyone to have all the answers to these questions because this is a very complex problem. But you're also going to have to find a way to work alongside a global commerce, while keeping prices low, while being able to successfully distribute those resources all while no longer having the same businesses and employers as before.

We need to think beyond the labels of systems like capitalism and communism. It's pretty apparent that any system is going to have a hard time completely considering all factors of human values and the public good as inputs and outputs. I do believe that people generally need to be incentivized which capitalism is obviously good at. I also think it has a near infinite number of externalities that don't get properly captured in the equation. Ideally we live in a world that appropriately rewards behavior that is good for humanity and has a built in floor for those struggling.

So capitalist in the sense that people should be incentivized and rewarded and communist in the sense that the achievements of man should largely flow to the public good. But both of these are just incomplete systems that are built in simpler times. We need to think beyond them and continue to find ways to "value" things that are currently being missed.

in before someone calls me carbon tax carney