754
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
754 points (100.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
31187 readers
289 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Let's use another analogy:
Before the Wright Brothers, heavier-than-air flight was considered impossible. There were many failed attempts, going back centuries, at implementing various designs with the aim of heavier-than-air flight. Despite the many, many failed attempts, it was not the goal itself that was impossible; the attempts were poorly constructed. Once the Wrights got it right, the principle took off.
It is correct to say that each of those attempts at a pre-communist system, while the initial developers of those systems did aim to eventually secure the conditions necessary for communism to succeed, did not in fact materialize into actual communism. The reasons for that vary from implementation to implementation. Frequently they relied on a powerful central state, to attempt to expedite the process faster than the more gradual grassroots development Marx foresaw.
Personally, I think they were all bound to fail by virtue of the fact that we were, and are, not yet at a technological state (that is, when industrial automation has supplanted virtually all workers in providing all the conditions necessary for survival) necessary for communism to succeed.
They were the equivalent of grabbing two big fans and flapping your arms. The fact that flapping big fans does not allow for sustainable heavier-than-air flight does not make 747s impossible. It's just an insufficient attempt. Personally, I think Market Socialism is a much more robust foundation which does in fact incrementally improve on the benefits of market economies (which are frequently confused with benefits of capitalism itself).
I think centrally planned economies, which comprise most of the failed pre-communist approaches, are not only poor implementations, they're not even really communism, and are barely even socialism except by the most degenerate definitions. However, confusing failed attempts at a concept for the impossibility of the concept itself is intellectually disingenuous.
“We’ll never survive!” “Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
I really want to believe that a communist world is possible. Maybe I'm like the pessimists that doubted humans could ever fly. I just don't see it ever working.
If it's possible, it's a long way down the road. It certainly has its difficulties, which deserve to be discussed. Like I said, it's probably a century or two away. Right now the closest we can get is market socialism.
The thing I get miffed at is when people misrepresent the concept, then argue against that unrelated concept (that and arguing for an inversely misrepresented capitalism). It's possible that no topic has been more frequently and fervently straw-manned in the last century than communism. That kind of behavior doesn't help anyone but billionaires.
I don't think using terms that you disagree with is necessarily a straw man. If we had been arguing about the possibility of flight and my position was that all previous attempts had failed, you'd come back and say, "those weren't attempts at flight, those were bad bird impersonations."
On a separate note, I've got a question for you. If capitalism inevitably leads to people being poorer, why does this graph show that over the last 200 years the number of people in poverty has steadily declined?