California's Assembly Votes To Allow Communists To Hold State Jobs - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Geikkamir;52216605]The vast, vast majority of humanity's existence? On a very large scale there aren't any examples but to say that communism was [i]never[/i] successful is blatantly untrue.[/QUOTE] Are you seriously trying to imply communism and tribalism are the same thing?

[QUOTE=Komodoh;52216634]Are you seriously trying to imply communism and tribalism are the same thing?[/QUOTE] It's primitive communism /s

[QUOTE=Komodoh;52216634]Are you seriously trying to imply communism and tribalism are the same thing?[/QUOTE] [URL="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism"]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism[/URL]

"Saying, 'it's not real communism,' is just an idiot's argument!" cried the person wishing to god repeating this over and over is a convincing argument.

[QUOTE=nulls;52216648][URL="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism"]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism[/URL][/QUOTE] So Marx is saying that tribes had no social hierarchy, and didn't fight for capital. Yes, because all tribes pre-civilization didn't have tribal leaders, there were no gender roles, and they didn't fight other tribes for access to resources. They were all a beautiful, equal society in living perfect harmony. Makes perfect sense. :rolleyes:

[QUOTE=Komodoh;52216667]So Marx is saying that tribes had no social hierarchy, and didn't fight for capital. Yes, because all tribes pre-civilization didn't have tribal leaders, there were no gender roles, and they didn't fight other tribes for access to resources. They were all a beautiful, equal society in living perfect harmony. Makes perfect sense. :rolleyes:[/QUOTE] Why have literally all your posts been strawman arguments so far? Marx/Engels in no way said anything along the lines of what you're trying to imply. All they said was that small hunter-gatherer tribes were communist-esque in nature in the sense that every person had to contribute and share resources for the benefit of the whole tribe, and they didn't have socioeconomic class structure or incentive/need for capital.

[QUOTE=nulls;52216680]Why have literally all your posts been strawman arguments so far? Marx/Engels in no way said anything along the lines of what you're trying to imply. All they said was that small hunter-getherer tribes were communist-esque in nature in the sense that every person had to contribute and share resources for the benefit of the whole tribe, and they didn't have socioeconomic class structure or incentive/need for capital.[/QUOTE] Yea, and now none of those exist and were replaced or conquered by superior capitalist systems. Really makes you think. :thinking:

[QUOTE=Komodoh;52217224]Yea, and now none of those exist and were replaced or conquered by superior capitalist systems. Really makes you think. :thinking:[/QUOTE] havent read all your posts here but did you really just answer a strawman callout with a strawman

[QUOTE=DOG-GY;52217291]havent read all your posts here but did you really just answer a strawman callout with a strawman[/QUOTE] Welcome to komodohposting

[QUOTE=Geikkamir;52216605]The vast, vast majority of humanity's existence? On a very large scale there aren't any examples but to say that communism was [i]never[/i] successful is blatantly untrue.[/QUOTE] i think that early humans didn't practice communism, but something different that modern day people could try equating to it

[QUOTE=nulls;52211129]Because most countries people paint as communist/socialist are little more than an authoritarian single-party government with a state-controlled economy & Marxist paint job. This is not what socialism nor communism is meant to be. C[B][I]ommunism is more or less a post-scarcity society where that can only come after decades of successful socialism[/I][/B]. It's not meant to be authoritarian or anti-democratic at all. I'd even say it's meant to be more democratic than basically any Western country.[/QUOTE] Post scarcity is impossible. If your ideas require a fundamental shift in the nature of reality, maybe your ideas fucking suck. How many hundreds of millions of people more have to die before you people admit that maybe marx's thinking fails to represent reality in any real capacity whatsoever.

[QUOTE=Trilby Harlow;52217879]Post scarcity is impossible. If your ideas require a fundamental shift in the nature of reality, maybe your ideas fucking suck. How many hundreds of millions of people more have to die before you people admit that maybe marx's thinking fails to represent reality in any real capacity whatsoever.[/QUOTE] Such a wise, and well thought, argu- wait...There's no arguments to be found here..

[QUOTE=ImUnstoppable;52218015]Such a wise, and well thought, argu- wait...There's no arguments to be found here..[/QUOTE] I'm tired of "experts" in communism

[QUOTE=ImUnstoppable;52218015]Such a wise, and well thought, argu- wait...There's no arguments to be found here..[/QUOTE] I'll be honest, i had a long and meticulously written post that took so long the ticket expired and facepunch's anti-ddos thing ate the post. So fuck it, i'll just get to the point where you people are advocating for something with a 100% success rate of manifesting murderous totalitarianism with at least 160 million corpses laid directly at it's feet.

[QUOTE=Trilby Harlow;52218036]I'll be honest, i had a long and meticulously written post that took so long the ticket expired and facepunch's anti-ddos thing ate the post. So fuck it, i'll just get to the point where you people are advocating for something with a 100% success rate of manifesting murderous totalitarianism with at least 160 million corpses laid directly at it's feet.[/QUOTE] "listen to achieve communism kill 100000 billion trillion ppl and then we win ok, kill all white ppl too" -Karl Marx, Kapital Volume II Page 666 I want to know why Communism is open to tolitarianism

[QUOTE=ImUnstoppable;52218039]I want to know why Communism is open to tolitarianism[/QUOTE] because marx subscribes to historicist thinking that doesn't merely state that communism is something to strive for, but as an actual consequence of the laws of historical/economic development marx said that communism was literally the consequence of laws that (he considered) to be on par with scientific laws. these laws determined the course of history and therefore could be used to predict the future. falsifying marx is impossible because there are no methods or ways within Marxism itself that can be used to say "communism won't work" ultimately marx derives a lot of his thought due to hegel (either from or in opposition to) or otherwise (or in turn) plato. plato is the grand forefather of totalitarianism and we need protection from his legacy

[QUOTE=ImUnstoppable;52218039]"listen to achieve communism kill 100000 billion trillion ppl and then we win ok, kill all white ppl too" -Karl Marx, Kapital Volume II Page 666 I want to know why Communism is open to tolitarianism[/QUOTE] Look, if your philosiphy has a 100% manifestation rate of universal abject horrors, something's wrong with it. And the fact that you haven't/can't say "Yeah but X state didn't have horrible horrible things happen in it!" means you know that's true. Just because it feels like how it [I]should[/I] be, or that it's nature appears benign doesn't mean that's what will happen should you enact it. The nazis thought the master race had the burden of taking care of the mongrol hordes. Nazism at it's core is actually a perverse edipol mother complex nesting inside a fascist/socialist political framework. There's a reason people found it appealing beyond the general resentment of the allied powers and bringing absolute order to a chaotic time. There is that echoing glimmer of perverted compassion in there. The thing with communism is that none of marx's thinking even began to accurately represent human behavior in any way. The worst offender being his assertion that all power structures or social hierarchies of any kind are by nature oppressive. But the problem with that is that higherarchies are one of the core parts of the human mind. You have all sorts of little systems in your brain that constantly scan for your place in any number of social hierarchies. Your place in local hierarchies are what you base the majority of your identity on. Climbing up them is what gives your life meaning, because that's how you identify what you need to do or where to go. You want to move up in the world to live more comfortably, gauge your success at what you want to do, appear/be more attractive, increase your agency and status. Looking up is also how you set goals. You want to reach X position or use X position to compare to your current situation to identify where things could be better. It's a reward system, it's a system of gratification, it's a mechanism to identify problems in your own life or identify where things need to be improved, it's a mechanism to better identify your place in the world, it's a system of collectively outsourcing value judgments on products, services talents or individuals. It's many, many extraordinarily important things that have no other obvious substitute. We split with lobsters 350 million years ago, and fucking [I]lobsters[/I] have social dominance hierarchies and inbuilt biological systems that regulate serotonin based on that lobster's performance in that local hierarchy. A lobster will get in a fight and lose, and go off sulking. But if you inject that sucker with serotonin, he'll perk right back up and get into another fight to try and move on up that ladder. And we have all kinds of systems like that but on a much more complicated scale. This system is something that's older than [I]trees[/I], and communism is founded on the concept that this is an unnatural social construct that inherently oppresses those at the bottom and must therefore be removed from society to create a flat social structure to maximize equality between individuals and therefore achieve a just society. So in rejecting social dominance hierarchies of all stripes, and asserting that all must be of equal stature, and produce and act according to that individual's nature for the great commune, Marx's model has already stripped each and every person of their identiy and the mechanism in which human beings derive meaning from life. And that's before we even introduce his extraordinarily low resolution conceptualization of classes. So an individual with an already tenuous identity is now sucked into whatever arbitrary class he fits into. And because of the lack of any of the multiplicity of hierarchies we have in the west, military to knitting circles to engineers to Wii Tennis rankings, because society should be flat, there is nothing that individual can do to escape the defining features of his class. Communism destroys the individual. In any marxist society, there is no individual. There are only individual manifestations of group identities. So all individuals are stripped of identity, meaning, status and purpose. What do you think this does to a person? It isn't sunshine and rainbows. Secondly, what's so great about [I]absolute[/I] equality? People are different, so why should everything end up the same? Why should extraordinary people be on the same level as vagrant psycopaths, devoid of redeeming features? To drag down the fantastic, and unduly elevate the useless. That doesn't seem very just to me. That's just the tip of marx's horrible model of human beings, but hey let's keep going. The question is "why Communism is open to tolitarianism" A better question is, why is it literally always result in totolitarianism, and the tacit question is, what does totolitarianism have to do with marxism? And sure, marx says he wanted a flat, stateless/govermentless society devoid of class conflict. So how the hell does it result in genocidal empires that slaughters it's own people? Well, the easy answer is go read solzhenitsyn. If you read all the volumes of the Gulag Archipelago, you'd drop that hammer and sickle three chapters in. He goes into great detail about how literally every single facet of marx's works and any thinking derrived from it is directly and logically linked to any given horror perpetrated by any communist goverment you can find. But i'll focus on one of the core ideas. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. it sounds so obvious. Everyone does what they can and want to, and everyone gets what they need. No corrupting government required. And that sounds really cool, until you think about it. "To each according to his need" , sure. But who decides what needs are important, and what's not? Me getting a shiny gold paperweight sure as shit ain't more important than you getting food. But what if there's two people in the hospital, and only enough resources to keep one alive? Which is more important? What if there isn't enough food? What if there isn't enough farming equipment available for the [DEL]kulaks[/DEL] farmers? Who gets the new tractor? You've stripped both of any social status to determine who's more important, and you can't go by who's the best farmer or who's the most socially important person/group, because that requires the admission of a hierarchy within those domains, which is antethetical to communism. And to even get that far, you need a centralized authority to control the distribution of goods, unless there's private individuals producing tractors, in which case wham, there's a figure with power, as he controls the tractor supply, and therefore the keys to the production of food. Instant status. But ok, to maintain the flat social structure, all goods should be centralized so as to be distributed as evenly as possible. So you need a central authority to manage it. Oh shit, we have a government now. And because the only possible admissible differentiating quality between various people within that authority is how good a communist you are, it's immediately going to become a purity spiral. And away we fucking go. So ok, your flat society model will invariably create a centralized authority due to the nature of reality. Ok, that's fine. What about the genocide? Well here's the thing. Communism only "works" if everyone agrees to communism. So what do you do about the people who say "no.". Well now it becomes a morale good to get rid of them. Because if they rebel against communism the whole structure comes down, and because everything is centralized/collectivized, that means everyone starves to death [DEL]again[/DEL]. So now it's a matter of self interest to eject the rogue elements for the sake of the stability of literally everything. And because of the fact that any dissent is disruptive to the entirety of the system, you now can't really criticize anything. And more importantly, if you're a true believer, any suffering due to the nature of the system is now a tacit admission that you and the entire shebang is [I]wrong[/I]. It's evidence that the enterprise has failed and is imperfect. The glorious socialist state has taken over, and you're sitting there starving to death in state built housing. And someone asks how you're doing, and to say "i'm starving to death and i hate it" is both incredibly hard to admit, and is also an act of subversion to the state. So now everyone lies, all the time. And that dishonesty spreads out to every facet of your behaviour. You ever meet someone who just is a pathological liar? They just can't help themselves, and just always lie. And they are always a fucking mess, right down to the core. Now imagine literally [I]everyone[/I] is like that. Now imagine everyone is like that, and nobody is an individual, and nobody has meaning. And the glorious utopia you were promised is a failing oppressive state. You're gonna look around and just [I]resent[/I] things. All things. Existence itself even. You were lied to, you're suffering horribly, and to admit that is horribly difficult and would make you a traitor to the state. So you keep all that inside. And only once you're in that state do people do truly horrible things. School shooters resent existence, and they want to express the cruel futility of reality. Resentful sociopaths like Carl Panzaram do horrible things because they think it's all a sick joke. That's the state that all this puts you in. At worst you're a hateful little monster, at best you're an apathetic wreck without purpose or direction. Then one day the state decides in an act of self preservation that all these annoying dissidents should be unpersoned. You see the Stasi knocking on doors, and those people just kinda go away. But hey, fuck 'em, you've got your own problems. What does it have to do with you? Also a fun little note. The soviets thought that criminals were socially friendly elements, and transported them on the same Stolpyn cars that they transported gulag prisoners on. But because the dissidents were socially unfriendly elements due to being traitors to the state, they saw fit to give the career criminals actual authority over the political prisoners. So you can imagine how that went.

[QUOTE=Trilby Harlow;52218205]We split with lobsters 350 million years ago, and fucking [I]lobsters[/I] have social dominance hierarchies and inbuilt biological systems that regulate serotonin based on that lobster's performance in that local hierarchy. A lobster will get in a fight and lose, and go off sulking. But if you inject that sucker with serotonin, he'll perk right back up and get into another fight to try and move on up that ladder. And we have all kinds of systems like that but on a much more complicated scale. This system is something that's older than [I]trees[/I], and communism is founded on the concept that this is an unnatural social construct that inherently oppresses those at the bottom and must therefore be removed from society to create a flat social structure to maximize equality between individuals and therefore achieve a just society.[/QUOTE] actually capitalism and the kind of society thus created isn't natural at all and it's a stupid to assume so. we have an entirely new economic system and political structures with populations several magnitudes larger than natural/traditional systems. in many ways its extremely unnatural (following timetables, waking up to alarm clocks, working for a hourly rate for 40 hours a week every week, the loss of artisan labour and work) and has caused a whole host of problems. collectively we call many of these changes "modernity", but back in the 19th century they didn't conceive of it at that point the point about lobsters (we didn't split from lobsters 350 million years ago btw, we probably split at least 600 or more million years ago) ignores the fact that lobsters have had their hierarchies and group sizes remain stable for millions of years humans have gone from societies of a couple of hundred into tens or hundreds of millions in a nation. these are not natural changes, and the kind of society we now live in is not natural to us. it's constantly changing and things once considered "solid" are changing more and more rapidly and people are becoming atomized and divorced from how lives ought to be. capitalism isn't natural, but its a kind of "solution" to our modern economic problems - and it's not perfect by any shot. humans are getting obese, we die from cancers and stress and gain a myriad of mental illnesses that did not afflict people in the past. we live in a new world and Marxism isn't the answer, but this world isn't the one we should be living in. marx was writing primarily at the time when old social and political structures were collapsing to be replaced with capitalism, and he saw that this was leading to many new problems that (from his perspective) seemed to be unfixable and would in many ways lead to the collapse of capitalism through its own failures

[QUOTE=Trilby Harlow;52218205]an entire book[/QUOTE] tl;dr: communism can't work because human nature, unironically using gulag archiplego and the black book of communism as sources, communism will personally come and take your individuality pack it up folks, I'm a capitalist now. homeless people just need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and the soviet union was clearly a communist state.

[QUOTE=nulls;52218449]tl;dr: communism can't work because human nature, unironically using gulag archiplego and the black book of communism as sources, communism will personally come and take your individuality pack it up folks, I'm a capitalist now. homeless people just need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and the soviet union was clearly a communist state.[/QUOTE] So instead of actually taking the time to reply properly or debate his points you're going to throw a tantrum. I'm not even sure if I entirely agree with Harlow but at-least he can fucking argue properly.

Do yall differentiate between communism and egalitarianism and socialism etc?

[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;52218463]So instead of actually taking the time to reply properly or debate his points you're going to throw a tantrum. I'm not even sure if I entirely agree with Harlow but at-least he can fucking argue properly.[/QUOTE] calm down, I'm just poking fun at his generic anti-communist arguments.

[QUOTE=nulls;52218494]calm down, I'm just poking fun at his generic anti-communist arguments.[/QUOTE] No, you just don't have an argument.

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;52218500]No, you just don't have an argument.[/QUOTE] I'll personally come back in a couple hours or so and refute every block of his post with evidence and quotes. I don't have the time to write out an entire argument at the moment given the length of his. Is that unreasonable to you?

Real communism has never existed because it doesn't work

[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;52218463]So instead of actually taking the time to reply properly or debate his points you're going to throw a tantrum. I'm not even sure if I entirely agree with Harlow but at-least he can fucking argue properly.[/QUOTE] Most of those things are generic statements that are used (and debunked) in every thread where communism is involved, it's understandable nulls is tired of it, as everyone else is.

[QUOTE=AutismoPiggo;52218521]Real communism has never existed because it doesn't work[/QUOTE] It's more that the world itself isn't really in a state where it could work as it would require us having all the resources needed to ensure everybody gets what they need, no more, no less. And that the communities of the world actually got along enough to put differences aside in the name of keeping shit running smoothly. It's quite idealistic. But you never know what the (far, far) future holds. We make weird breakthroughs with things all the time, there's nothing actively stopping it being a possibility. Just not something we can do any time soon.

marx was wrong but he wasn't useless and he made a lot of decent criticisms and points in his day and he did do a lot of research and work. half of the anti-communist people in here very much give off the impression that they haven't read marx, although they also share this in common with half of the pro-communists here

[QUOTE=mdeceiver79;52218464]Do yall differentiate between communism and egalitarianism and socialism etc?[/QUOTE] This is what I'm wondering aswell. There's been good discussion in this thread but there's plenty of posts still that don't go into what they mean.

Okay, lets discuss Harlow's post. [QUOTE=Trilby Harlow;52218205]Look, if your philosiphy has a 100% manifestation rate of universal abject horrors, something's wrong with it. And the fact that you haven't/can't say "Yeah but X state didn't have horrible horrible things happen in it!" means you know that's true. Just because it feels like how it [I]should[/I] be, or that it's nature appears benign doesn't mean that's what will happen should you enact it. The nazis thought the master race had the burden of taking care of the mongrol hordes. Nazism at it's core is actually a perverse edipol mother complex nesting inside a fascist/socialist political framework. There's a reason people found it appealing beyond the general resentment of the allied powers and bringing absolute order to a chaotic time. There is that echoing glimmer of perverted compassion in there.[/quote] The point we've been discussing for the last 20 posts or so is that none of the societies that people claim to be communist ever actually followed any communist theory or subscribed to any form of communist ideology, nor did they really claim to be communist. Literally every single """communist""" country on Earth has had a (typically) authoritarian government, currency, and economic class. [quote] The thing with communism is that none of marx's thinking even began to accurately represent human behavior in any way. The worst offender being his assertion that all power structures or social hierarchies of any kind are by nature oppressive. But the problem with that is that higherarchies are one of the core parts of the human mind. You have all sorts of little systems in your brain that constantly scan for your place in any number of social hierarchies. Your place in local hierarchies are what you base the majority of your identity on. Climbing up them is what gives your life meaning, because that's how you identify what you need to do or where to go. You want to move up in the world to live more comfortably, gauge your success at what you want to do, appear/be more attractive, increase your agency and status. Looking up is also how you set goals. You want to reach X position or use X position to compare to your current situation to identify where things could be better. It's a reward system, it's a system of gratification, it's a mechanism to identify problems in your own life or identify where things need to be improved, it's a mechanism to better identify your place in the world, it's a system of collectively outsourcing value judgments on products, services talents or individuals. It's many, many extraordinarily important things that have no other obvious substitute. [/quote] Is this the 'human nature' part of the argument? Awesome, we totally haven't heard and [URL="https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1561928&p=52161528#post52161528"]debunked this every time a thread regarding leftism pops up[/URL]. Also, please see below. Social hierarchy is [U]not[/U] the same thing as social class in the context you're using it in nor socioeconomic standing. "Human nature" is changeable mindset that is directly influenced by your socioeconomic standing under a capitalist society. Also, before you try using the "MArx didnT account for HUMAN NATURE!!" argument in a serious setting ever again, [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_human_nature"]here[/URL] [URL="http://sfr-21.org/human-nature.html"]you[/URL] go. [quote] So in rejecting social dominance hierarchies of all stripes, and asserting that all must be of equal stature, and produce and act according to that individual's nature for the great commune, Marx's model has already stripped each and every person of their identiy and the mechanism in which human beings derive meaning from life. And that's before we even introduce his extraordinarily low resolution conceptualization of classes. So an individual with an already tenuous identity is now sucked into whatever arbitrary class he fits into. And because of the lack of any of the multiplicity of hierarchies we have in the west, military to knitting circles to engineers to Wii Tennis rankings, because society should be flat, there is nothing that individual can do to escape the defining features of his class. Communism destroys the individual. In any marxist society, there is no individual. There are only individual manifestations of group identities. So all individuals are stripped of identity, meaning, status and purpose. What do you think this does to a person? It isn't sunshine and rainbows. Secondly, what's so great about [I]absolute[/I] equality? People are different, so why should everything end up the same? Why should extraordinary people be on the same level as vagrant psycopaths, devoid of redeeming features? To drag down the fantastic, and unduly elevate the useless. That doesn't seem very just to me.[/quote] I've lumped these two sections together because they can more or less be debunked with a simple "you have literally no idea what you're arguing against". Marx/Engles did not ever preach that individualism was a bad thing, nor did they say communism wants to do away with it. Communism does not seek to steal your individuality for the collective. Quit being intellectually dishonest and misleading everyone here. What Marx did say regarding individualism in that under capitalism, individualism was brought by commodity fetishism (associating with a thing rather than the labor associated with creating said thing) or through social alienation. Communism does not seek to create robots from people, made equal in every single way. The goal of communism is to bring about a [B]socioeconomically[/B] equal society, where people are free to pursue their passions without having the burden of worrying about capital, while assisting the rest of society to allow this to happen. We don't want a society where people are literally equal in every way, essentially only economically. [quote] We split with lobsters 350 million years ago, and fucking [I]lobsters[/I] have social dominance hierarchies and inbuilt biological systems that regulate serotonin based on that lobster's performance in that local hierarchy. A lobster will get in a fight and lose, and go off sulking. But if you inject that sucker with serotonin, he'll perk right back up and get into another fight to try and move on up that ladder. And we have all kinds of systems like that but on a much more complicated scale. This system is something that's older than [I]trees[/I], and communism is founded on the concept that this is an unnatural social construct that inherently oppresses those at the bottom and must therefore be removed from society to create a flat social structure to maximize equality between individuals and therefore achieve a just society.[/quote] Yes, it's a pretty well known fact that most animals have some sort of social structure. Economically equal != socially equal, see above points. [quote] The question is "why Communism is open to tolitarianism" A better question is, why is it literally always result in totolitarianism, and the tacit question is, what does totolitarianism have to do with marxism? [/quote] It doesn't, and it hasn't. As said above, countries that people think are communist do//did not claim to be communist nor do they follow any communist ideology. The USSR and Cuba claimed to be attempting to progress towards socialism. Venezuela does not claim to be socialist, nor are they. North Korea does not claim to be communist, though they still have leftist imagery and symbolism. [quote] And sure, marx says he wanted a flat, stateless/govermentless society devoid of class conflict. So how the hell does it result in genocidal empires that slaughters it's own people? [/quote] Post-revolution paranoia + handing power to the state. AKA not communism. [quote] Well, the easy answer is go read solzhenitsyn. If you read all the volumes of the Gulag Archipelago, you'd drop that hammer and sickle three chapters in. He goes into great detail about how literally every single facet of marx's works and any thinking derrived from it is directly and logically linked to any given horror perpetrated by any communist goverment you can find. [/quote] You still think the USSR was communist despite throwing Marxist theory out the door in favor of authoritarianism and collectivism? Despite never claiming to be communist, despite not meeting literally [I]any[/I] criteria of a communist society, despite several dozen posts of us explaining how and why the soviet union was not communist? At this point you're just turning a blind eye to fact and reason. Also, for the last fucking time, [B]there is no such thing as a communist state[/B]. Communism is by definition a stateless society. Not an authoritarian government. Not a state-controlled economy. Not fucking gulags. [quote] But i'll focus on one of the core ideas. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. it sounds so obvious. Everyone does what they can and want to, and everyone gets what they need. No corrupting government required. And that sounds really cool, until you think about it. "To each according to his need" , sure. But who decides what needs are important, and what's not? Me getting a shiny gold paperweight sure as shit ain't more important than you getting food. But what if there's two people in the hospital, and only enough resources to keep one alive? Which is more important? What if there isn't enough food? What if there isn't enough farming equipment available for the [DEL]kulaks[/DEL] farmers? Who gets the new tractor? You've stripped both of any social status to determine who's more important, and you can't go by who's the best farmer or who's the most socially important person/group, because that requires the admission of a hierarchy within those domains, which is antethetical to communism. And to even get that far, you need a centralized authority to control the distribution of goods, unless there's private individuals producing tractors, in which case wham, there's a figure with power, as he controls the tractor supply, and therefore the keys to the production of food. Instant status. But ok, to maintain the flat social structure, all goods should be centralized so as to be distributed as evenly as possible. So you need a central authority to manage it. Oh shit, we have a government now. And because the only possible admissible differentiating quality between various people within that authority is how good a communist you are, it's immediately going to become a purity spiral. And away we fucking go. So ok, your flat society model will invariably create a centralized authority due to the nature of reality. Ok, that's fine. What about the genocide? [/quote] Again with the intellectual dishonesty and not knowing anything on the subject you're arguing. Communists do [B]not[/B] want a centralized government nor dekulakization 2: stalin boogaloo. Decision on how resources are allocated and used should be democratically controlled by the people who actually labor to create and utilize said resources. For some reason you think that any scenario you just presented couldn't be reasonably resolved in a democratic method. No, clearly we need to jump immediately to the reincarnation of Stalin/Mao. [quote] Well here's the thing. Communism only "works" if everyone agrees to communism. So what do you do about the people who say "no.". Well now it becomes a morale good to get rid of them. Because if they rebel against communism the whole structure comes down, and because everything is centralized/collectivized, that means everyone starves to death [DEL]again[/DEL]. So now it's a matter of self interest to eject the rogue elements for the sake of the stability of literally everything. And because of the fact that any dissent is disruptive to the entirety of the system, you now can't really criticize anything. And more importantly, if you're a true believer, any suffering due to the nature of the system is now a tacit admission that you and the entire shebang is [I]wrong[/I]. It's evidence that the enterprise has failed and is imperfect. The glorious socialist state has taken over, and you're sitting there starving to death in state built housing. And someone asks how you're doing, and to say "i'm starving to death and i hate it" is both incredibly hard to admit, and is also an act of subversion to the state. So now everyone lies, all the time. And that dishonesty spreads out to every facet of your behaviour. You ever meet someone who just is a pathological liar? They just can't help themselves, and just always lie. And they are always a fucking mess, right down to the core. Now imagine literally [I]everyone[/I] is like that. Now imagine everyone is like that, and nobody is an individual, and nobody has meaning. And the glorious utopia you were promised is a failing oppressive state. You're gonna look around and just [I]resent[/I] things. All things. Existence itself even. You were lied to, you're suffering horribly, and to admit that is horribly difficult and would make you a traitor to the state. So you keep all that inside. And only once you're in that state do people do truly horrible things. School shooters resent existence, and they want to express the cruel futility of reality. Resentful sociopaths like Carl Panzaram do horrible things because they think it's all a sick joke. That's the state that all this puts you in. At worst you're a hateful little monster, at best you're an apathetic wreck without purpose or direction. Then one day the state decides in an act of self preservation that all these annoying dissidents should be unpersoned. You see the Stasi knocking on doors, and those people just kinda go away. But hey, fuck 'em, you've got your own problems. What does it have to do with you? [/quote] See my above points to realize why your argument and hypothetical scenario is fucking retarded and completely irrelevant to communism. [quote] Also a fun little note. The soviets thought that criminals were socially friendly elements, and transported them on the same Stolpyn cars that they transported gulag prisoners on. But because the dissidents were socially unfriendly elements due to being traitors to the state, they saw fit to give the career criminals actual authority over the political prisoners. So you can imagine how that went.[/QUOTE] [citation needed] Disregarding all nonsense and pettieness aside, it's pretty clear you've never read a page of Marx/Engles/Lenin/fucking literally any communist philosopher, because somehow despite all resources available to you, you still think communism is a centralized authoritarian government that wants to genocide and starve everyone. I apologize for the "YOU JUST DONT UNDERSTAND REAL COMMUNISM" autistic screeching, but I can't argue against something that really doesn't represent what the basis of my argument actually is.