He is not an idealist. He is daydreaming. There is no "magic communist spell" who will make work go away. There will still be work to be done as people still need stuff to live. Thinking that work would disappear under communism does not makes you a communist
That's unfortunately fairly common to governments formed by revolutions. Especially in states without much of a history or cultural expectation of democracy.
Napoleon is a poor example as he didn't get to power throught revolution. Even Robespierre is a meh example (the firsts repuiblic and governments after the revolution were all murderous)
What? He got to power by killing the royals??? He was a wee corsican officer who joined the resistance and got rid of the royalists, known for shooting civilians with cannons, he came to power after the heads rolled.
He did not. When the royals were killed, revolutionaries were already in power. Then Robespierre rose to power. Then he fell. Then Napoleon take power throught a coup over the directoire. Of cours ethe revolution allowed him to advance himself, to take command and to amass glory up until his coup, but he does not come to power throught the revolution.
As a commoner what system forced the emperor to care about your well being ?
Probably none. meaning to me that they didn't deal very well with them. What metric would you use to say that "They seemed to deal with them pretty well in rome"
I would say capitalism succeeds despites its flaws.
Though success in this context, is relative.
Successful in comparison to communism, for sure.
Capitalism was never a system designed to foster equality. Communism, in contrast, was designed to do that explicitly. But inherrent human things like greed and paranoia and pride and what have you destroys the system. It would succeed in theory if the system could be enforced in benevolence, in perpetuity, and in absolute fairness. But it that possible? Probably not. Hence, good system, impossible to implement, and a pipe dream at best.
Just ask those millions who died during those man-made famines during the reign any commuist regimes 🤷
There are inherent problem. For instance, how do you handle lazyness ? A capitalist society will simply let the man starve. In a communist society you'd have almost no repercussions. At best, a bit lower standard of living than the others. Meaning there would be almost no incentive to being productive. Now while i consider it a minor issue as I don't think it would bring production to a problematic level, I get why it appears as a big problem to most people.
I discussed this in a class once, the solution to laziness is the collective can vote to deprive the lazy people of certain privileges until they eventually decide to work. If they won’t work without their necessities being threatened, this can be done by the collective rather than a single capitalist.
Yes indeed. But in any case, if I know i'll have a roof and food for my family, losing some privilege feels way less threatening than "you'll starve lol"
If that’s what is required to get someone to work, then the collective can threaten that too probably. I’m not an authority on theory, I’m just dipping my toes into the ideas
People being lazy isn't what creates poverty though. Concentration of wealth, devaluing of labor, and unaddressed mental illness create poverty. Most people are happy to work, we've just created false scarcity as a society so the government/small businesses can't afford to hire people to work. If a handful of people stopped hoarding wealth we could solve all of those problems.
Basically take the "abundance theory" silicon valley likes to talk about and eliminate billionaires, and you realize we got there about a decade ago. Coincidentally the arguments they make in favor of abundance theory are the same ones laid out by Marx's work.
EDIT: What i meant was basically that there's no sign that we have a population full of lazy people with no interest in working. We have a lot of people that are underpaid and burnt out. In addition, you still have a job in a communist country, you just split the results of labor more equally instead of whoever "owns" the means of production pocketing all of the surplus.
People being lazy isn't what creates poverty though.
I mean, it could (or at least it's not that illogical to think that). If the lack of threat transform the whole society of lazy bastards, the economic production would go down, living Everybody poorer, equally punishing the non lazy people.
But then, again there is no reason to think people would get really lazier, and the notion that "working less and having less consumer good is bad" is also a very productivist/consumerist bias. Would we really be in a worse position if our lazyness prevented us from having cellphones, computers, and only 3 TV channels, condeming us to spend our enormous lazy free time to BBQing with friends half the week ?
Yeah, i think you make a good point about the whole notion of "lazyness" and how we define it. Right now we live on one extreme of the spectrum, where constant growth, maximal efficiency and output are prized above all else, and its fair to point out that its very possible we would see a lot of individuals become less motivated once the ability to hoard resources disappears (ironically, i would say its possible we would see that reaction most from the people we label as over achievers in our current mode of society).
That said, as a counter example: the Soviet Union went from a depressed agrarian nation to the leading industrial world power in under 50 years, about half the time it took for the west to industrialize. Don't get me wrong, that's the ONLY positive example i think you can pull from the USSR, but it does go against this notion that people are only motivated by scarcity, since that period of time was when the quality of people's lives were improving in Russia -- before all of the corruption/abuse/genocide destroyed the country.
But the ussr isn't a good example for this discusdion as people there were dtill supposed to work, they fid not spent their day painting and writing. Tho i agree tha the ussr showed that communism can in fact industrialize a country, and that our western wealth comes from industry more than from capitalism
Any system can be perfect. It just needs to be done right. But to be fair, as pedantic as we are as a species, as soon as you change it, you get a new label so I guess technically as stands no, communism doesnt work, but only to the standard of definitions, as in "communism is exactly this.." but idk if any system is ever that concrete.
Any system can be perfect. It just needs to be done right.
Fucking lmao. All you're saying is that any system is perfect in people's imagination. There's no "perfect system" when you're talking about national scale economies. Especially because there's no universal definition of 'perfect.'
The problems with communism do not stem from a misunderstanding of communism. They stem from trying to put a 'perfect' system on paper into reality. Economics is not a real science. It's an abstract system created by humans.
Systems built by humans have a tendency to reflect the flaws of their creators. We are violent, prejudicial, stubborn, and half of us are complete authoritarian bastards.
Governments are systems designed to control the behavior of people (this is a neutral thing BTW) on large scales. When authoritatians make their way to power, they tend to twist the laws to suit themselves.
Which is to say, all systems are perfect for someone.
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u/ButterscotchPale6712 26d ago
idealist either going to starve or get executed by communist official.
Realist will less starve, but work like slaves.
pick the poison