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nominalist
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31 Jul 2012, 3:45 pm

ruveyn wrote:
If Karl Marx were suddenly placed in China by a time machine, would he even recognize "Chinese Communism" as it is now practiced.?


Karl Marx believed in political and economic democracy. To him, collective ownership was democratic. China is none of the above.


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31 Jul 2012, 9:16 pm

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Unrestricted, laissez-faire capitalism is proving itself to be highly destructive to national economies(despite being lucrative for transnational corporations). This doesn't mean free markets will disappear, but the need for restrictions of capitalism is clearly necessary given that the removal of this restrictions in the form of deregulation of the financial sector of the US economy is what triggered the current global economic crisis.


That being said, the chinese most certainly DID originate scientifically based technology! I won't go into a list of chinese inventions but one of them that had a global impact was the GUN. What matters is the future, and not the past. The height of European and Western power is clearly over whether you like it or not.


1. The model that has show that it works and last is regulated capitalism. Totally free unrestricted capitalism has never worked. We had best get used to the Mixed Economy.

2. Chinese thinking completely missed out on the reductionist hypothetical approach to finding causes. Chinese thinking was holistic to the bone. Thus they never developed physics that happy combination of experiment and mathematics. Even the Greeks missed on this (they did not like the empirical method much). This successful recipe was finally formulated well enough in the time of Gallileo and Newton and it was done in Europe, not China or any other Eastern domain.

The Chinese nearly got it, but they missed. The would not isolate cause by reductionist thinking.

ruveyn



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31 Jul 2012, 11:35 pm

thomas81 wrote:
I'd like to know what people here think.



Communism can be successful when practiced on small scales with willing participants. On large scales it quickly degenerates in such a way that it violates it's own principals and defeats it's own purpose.

For large scale communism to work, humans would have to be a little more altruistic.



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31 Jul 2012, 11:39 pm

Chronos wrote:
thomas81 wrote:
I'd like to know what people here think.



Communism can be successful when practiced on small scales with willing participants. On large scales it quickly degenerates in such a way that it violates it's own principals and defeats it's own purpose.

For large scale communism to work, humans would have to be a little more altruistic.


or not to be engaged in a cold war.


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31 Jul 2012, 11:39 pm

Any system, when taken to an extreme, will degenerate into an oppressive hierarchy, with most of the people on the bottom.

Anarchism, communism, capitalism. All of them.



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31 Jul 2012, 11:47 pm

Chronos wrote:
Any system, when taken to an extreme, will degenerate into an oppressive hierarchy, with most of the people on the bottom.

Anarchism, communism, capitalism. All of them.


Are you holding that to be axiomatic or based on something else?
Historical data, first principles?

I think I can buy it as a heuristic, I think most social problems have interior solutions and that we live in the general area of most of them.


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Last edited by JakobVirgil on 01 Aug 2012, 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

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31 Jul 2012, 11:52 pm

JakobVirgil wrote:
Chronos wrote:
Any system, when taken to an extreme, will degenerate into an oppressive hierarchy, with most of the people on the bottom.

Anarchism, communism, capitalism. All of them.[/quote

Are you holding that to be axiomatic or based on something else?
Historical data, first principles?

I think I can buy it as a heuristic, I think most social problems have interior solutions and that we live in the general area of most of them.


History combined with my observations of human nature....if you are interested I can elaborate.



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01 Aug 2012, 12:11 am

Chronos wrote:
JakobVirgil wrote:
Chronos wrote:
Any system, when taken to an extreme, will degenerate into an oppressive hierarchy, with most of the people on the bottom.

Anarchism, communism, capitalism. All of them.[/quote

Are you holding that to be axiomatic or based on something else?
Historical data, first principles?

I think I can buy it as a heuristic, I think most social problems have interior solutions and that we live in the general area of most of them.


History combined with my observations of human nature....if you are interested I can elaborate.


I would be very interested.


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ooo
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01 Aug 2012, 12:16 am

TallyMan wrote:
I think the bottom line of why it fails is that self interest always rises above altruistic ideology for a common good.


Yeah, communism doesn't work. Obviously.

Communism breeds laziness.

If everyone could have everything for doing nothing, there would be no desire to work.

If everyone had the same thing, we would be punishing the hard-working, intelligent, and successful -- and rewarding the lazy.

Communism stalls research, breeds ignorance.

Communism would give no one reason to achieve or make technological or scientific breakthroughs... other than "for the good of us all."
Why would someone spend all their time trying to research a cure for disease with no potential personal reward in sight?

Communism breeds laziness.

Communism would also give no one any reason to try. If you would automatically be provided for, you wouldn't show up at work on time, if at all. If all students got passing grades, they would have no reason to study at all.

Sharing doesn't work.

In Communism, everyone shares everything. How would you like people assuming they can use your car, clothes, eat your food, live in your home, and use all your stuff? It's the same principal. No one wants to share what they worked for, and no country can provide everything for a person who doesn't work. The money and labor to produce and buy goods has to come from somewhere.

There's always a trade off of resources.

Say a new transit system has to be built. Who builds it, where, with what money? What resources must we give up to build this transit system? What other needs of ours will we have to put on hold in order to build it? We have to know the relative value of this by looking at the market prices. But, wait... market prices don't exist in Communism. Without market prices, we don't know the value of the transit system or the cost of building it. It would be like building a house, but not knowing the type of materials to be used, the cost of materials, or the cost of labor.

Communism depends on the success of the whole. But, communism encourages a lack of effort due to a lack of personal reward. People defer the work to other people, making "the whole" of society be less efficient, hard-working, and successful.

Communism is against human nature.

Communism leads to corruption. Countries that have tried Communism (Soviet Union, Cuba, etc.), the leaders ultimately became dictators who wanted more and more power. Look at Venezuela's history. Did Communism work? Of course not.



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01 Aug 2012, 12:22 am

AspieRogue wrote:
Libertarians keep pushing the fallacy of the magical free market solution to the worlds problems because they stand to benefit financially from it at the expense of everyone who's not an entrepreneur!

...Are you saying all libertarians are entrepreneurs? :scratch:



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01 Aug 2012, 12:32 am

Burzum wrote:
AspieRogue wrote:
Libertarians keep pushing the fallacy of the magical free market solution to the worlds problems because they stand to benefit financially from it at the expense of everyone who's not an entrepreneur!

...Are you saying all libertarians are entrepreneurs? :scratch:


Judging from their grammar I would say not necessarily.


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Their hungry thirsty roots??

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01 Aug 2012, 12:44 am

ruveyn wrote:
AspieRogue wrote:


Unrestricted, laissez-faire capitalism is proving itself to be highly destructive to national economies(despite being lucrative for transnational corporations). This doesn't mean free markets will disappear, but the need for restrictions of capitalism is clearly necessary given that the removal of this restrictions in the form of deregulation of the financial sector of the US economy is what triggered the current global economic crisis.


That being said, the chinese most certainly DID originate scientifically based technology! I won't go into a list of chinese inventions but one of them that had a global impact was the GUN. What matters is the future, and not the past. The height of European and Western power is clearly over whether you like it or not.


1. The model that has show that it works and last is regulated capitalism. Totally free unrestricted capitalism has never worked. We had best get used to the Mixed Economy.

2. Chinese thinking completely missed out on the reductionist hypothetical approach to finding causes. Chinese thinking was holistic to the bone. Thus they never developed physics that happy combination of experiment and mathematics. Even the Greeks missed on this (they did not like the empirical method much). This successful recipe was finally formulated well enough in the time of Gallileo and Newton and it was done in Europe, not China or any other Eastern domain.

The Chinese nearly got it, but they missed. The would not isolate cause by reductionist thinking.

ruveyn



The scientific method is not a European invention. In fact, IDK if you consider Persia to be an 'Eastern Domain' but that is where the scientific method originated. The true originators of empirical reductionism where Bin Sina and Al-Haytham(a persian living in what is now Iraq).



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01 Aug 2012, 12:55 am

ooo wrote:
TallyMan wrote:
I think the bottom line of why it fails is that self interest always rises above altruistic ideology for a common good.


Yeah, communism doesn't work. Obviously.

Communism breeds laziness.

If everyone could have everything for doing nothing, there would be no desire to work.

If everyone had the same thing, we would be punishing the hard-working, intelligent, and successful -- and rewarding the lazy.

Communism stalls research, breeds ignorance.

Communism would give no one reason to achieve or make technological or scientific breakthroughs... other than "for the good of us all."
Why would someone spend all their time trying to research a cure for disease with no potential personal reward in sight?

Communism breeds laziness.

Communism would also give no one any reason to try. If you would automatically be provided for, you wouldn't show up at work on time, if at all. If all students got passing grades, they would have no reason to study at all.

Sharing doesn't work.

In Communism, everyone shares everything. How would you like people assuming they can use your car, clothes, eat your food, live in your home, and use all your stuff? It's the same principal. No one wants to share what they worked for, and no country can provide everything for a person who doesn't work. The money and labor to produce and buy goods has to come from somewhere.

There's always a trade off of resources.

Say a new transit system has to be built. Who builds it, where, with what money? What resources must we give up to build this transit system? What other needs of ours will we have to put on hold in order to build it? We have to know the relative value of this by looking at the market prices. But, wait... market prices don't exist in Communism. Without market prices, we don't know the value of the transit system or the cost of building it. It would be like building a house, but not knowing the type of materials to be used, the cost of materials, or the cost of labor.

Communism depends on the success of the whole. But, communism encourages a lack of effort due to a lack of personal reward. People defer the work to other people, making "the whole" of society be less efficient, hard-working, and successful.

Communism is against human nature.

Communism leads to corruption. Countries that have tried Communism (Soviet Union, Cuba, etc.), the leaders ultimately became dictators who wanted more and more power. Look at Venezuela's history. Did Communism work? Of course not.


Alot of this is just nonsense though, like you learned about communism from some 50s cartoon. People wearing your clothes? What? That was never a feature of communism anywhere, not even in theory. People had their own things. The property that was collectivized consisted of capital, not consumer goods. Factories. Land. Housing. Not your t-shirt and breakfast bowl.

Neither in theory nor in practice was there no reason to try. In classical Marxism, your share of production depended entirely on what you were able to produce yourself. In state communism as it developed, you were paid a wage, the same as a wage job in the West. The primary difference was that you couldn't "make your money work for you", there was no way to get money from money without working. This is what allows people to become fantastically wealthy in the capitalist system - the ability to earn money without working for it, sometimes vast amounts of it, by investing money and gaining a share of profit from someone else's labour through ownership of capital (eg I buy a gas station, I pay the workers some wages and pocket the profit they create for me, without lifting a finger). This is precisely what communism set itself against.

Price mechanisms existed - goods in the Soviet Union were priced by supply and demand. Marx had them priced by the inputs it took to make them.

It's not a lack of personal reward that discouraged effort, it was a lack of competition, because what the Soviet Union effectively was, was a single corporation with a monopoly on the entire market. In classical Marxist theory it is difficult to tell if there would have been competition between the individual soviets (workplace committees that were supposed to run the society) or not. He does mention technological differences which would create differences in earnings between regions, but there isn't any mechanism for variable pricings or price competition, because the pricing equation isn't based on supply and demand but simply on averaging the cost of production (calculated in terms of labour inputs, with labour serving as a sort of currency in the form of certificates).



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01 Aug 2012, 7:02 am

Communism is against rules of nature - human nature

That's true: we are not bees or ants, we are mammals - our behavior is similar to chimpanzees, wolfs, dogs - with all the consequences.

We are naturally prone to monarchy, capitalism, "social Darwinism", tribe systems (even some social groups are kind of tribes), some of us to mild socialism (like Bonobo chimpanzees)


So "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is one of the most stupid ideas - an it will never work
(Ok, maybe if someone can change human genetics to develop swarm instinct - it could work, but ONLY then)


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01 Aug 2012, 8:25 am

GreenShadow wrote:
Communism is against rules of nature - human nature

That's true: we are not bees or ants, we are mammals - our behavior is similar to chimpanzees, wolfs, dogs - with all the consequences.

We are naturally prone to monarchy, capitalism, "social Darwinism", tribe systems (even some social groups are kind of tribes), some of us to mild socialism (like Bonobo chimpanzees)


So "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is one of the most stupid ideas - an it will never work
(Ok, maybe if someone can change human genetics to develop swarm instinct - it could work, but ONLY then)


We have a lot in common with ants and other colonial insects, actually. These creatures have a form of civilization and humans are the only mammal that is capable of this. Ants are remarkable because of their division of labor which is what civilization is all about.



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01 Aug 2012, 9:31 am

AspieRogue wrote:

We have a lot in common with ants and other colonial insects, actually. These creatures have a form of civilization and humans are the only mammal that is capable of this. Ants are remarkable because of their division of labor which is what civilization is all about.


Ants have no ego. Humans have a lot of ego. Very different beings indeed.

Humans are neither hive nor herd animals. We are social primates and have something in common with the chimps.

ruveyn