Your probably the only serious communist I’ve came across. So I’m curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world. I know we live in a corrupted capitalist society. But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better. We’ve had many people call amarica today late stage capitalism, but that implies that it’s inevitable that society will be corrupted by blind brand loyalty and companies will buy out compition. So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.
… while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better.
First, socialist countries haven’t been allowed to thrive. They’re a threat to the established capitalist status-quo. That’s what the entire red scare period was about; undermining leftist nations so they fail. See the Guatemala coup for example. The country removed their dictatorship and formed a democracy. It happened to elect a leftist president who implemented a minimum wage and began granting land to peasants. This pissed off the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) who were benefiting from cheap land and exploiting labor. They had the US overthrow the democracy and instate a dictatorship (which ended up committing a genocide).
This has happened many times. The only leftist nations that were able to survive this are ones with strong governments and cultural hegymony (basically dictatorships with strong restrictions on citizens). This doesn’t mean that’s the only possibility because that’s the only ones that survived, it just means those are more stable when undermined by a powerful external force. It’s like asking why everyone who has been shot in the head has died. It’s not their fault someone else shot them.
(Also, many capitalist nations have failed, and that equally is not a sign that capitalism is destined to fail.)
Now for this:
So I’m curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world.
Innovation happens all the time without capitalism. In fact, capitalism often hinders innovation. The requirement of capitalism is profit seeking. If you don’t think something will make a profit, you shouldn’t invest in it.
I think it’s penicillin that almost didn’t exist because of capitalism. (This is from memory, so some parts may be wrong) The company was trying to create a certain drug. During the experiments penicillin was found. The company told them to move on, but the people running the experiment saw an opportunity and continued developing it on their own. Under capitalism, you shouldn’t persue unlikely but potentially beneficial, though possibly not profitable, possibilities. Can you imagine the number of times this has happened and the people involved listened to what they were told?
People like to innovate. Just look at makers online. They make all kinds of stupid shit that won’t ever make money just to see what will happen. Profit is not the thing that creates innovation. Human ingenuity is. If you give humans enough resources to persue what they want, they will innovate.
Also, generally communism or other leftist ideals aren’t advocating for equality in outcomes. They’re advocating for equality in opportunity. If you’re born wealthy, you shouldn’t get special access to thing that an average person doesn’t have access to. You shouldn’t be allowed to persue your goals when an average person can’t. However, if you create something that makes your life easier or better, that’s not going to be removed from you. There’s equal opportunity to improve your life, but not everyone will persue things equally.
So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.
Personally, I’m more towards anarchism than communism, but I see value in both and they share so much in common.
How would you go about eradicating “eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others”? Those are fundamental aspects of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to increase profits by any means possible, which includes breaking laws when it’s more profitable to do so. Eradicating brand loyalty is only possible if you elemenate labels, but that also creates the opportunity for cheap alternatives to undercut on quality. Exploiting labor is also fundamental to capitalism. If the goal is profit then you should pay as little as possible for as much as possible. If you don’t then someone else will undercut you and you’ll fail while they exploit.
There’s no avoiding it under capitalism because the fundamental goals are misaligned with morality. The only choice is a system that favors morality, potentially by making moral options profitable or just not prioritizing profit. You can’t really “fix” capitalism. The fundamentals are rotten. You can improve it, but it’ll always be misaligned with what we want. There may be a place for capitalism under another system, but capitalism as the foundation is never going to prioritize humanity, good, and doing what’s right.
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of innovation comes from students, researchers, and people working in tech, who, alongside their generally higher education, also aren’t working 9-5, on-site jobs.
I agree. I’m adding on to the parent comment to provide an example of a real situation in which people who could generally make ends meet while doing very little work are instead producing the bulk of our new technologies, discoveries, and (as you mention) optimizations.
Kudos on the respectful questions instead of dissolving into rhetoric. I love these sort of conversations.
But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better
Hold the phone. We have thriving socialist societies today, unless the EU is doing a lot worse than I thought. In fact in France and Germany they’re nearly 100% nuclear and renewable and in France’s case have secured enough nuclear fuel to power their society for centuries. All of them have socialized medicine, and judging by the new heart surgery techniques out of France lately they’re not lacking for innovation just cause the government is footing the bill. Furthermore, have ALL capitalist countries stood the test of time economically? I can name quite a few that exist right now like Fiji, which is certainly capitalist, but does NOT help their people in being capitalist (selling their water has harmed their environment, and the profits really are not passed along to their people).
Why would you think innovation would disappear?
Let’s take the socialist (communist) medical systems in foreign countries. There is still IMMENSE value in winning the government contracts that use your medicine. And I’m a weird communist who still values personal property and intellectual property, I still see that as integral to the process. So like, if you invent the cure for cancer you can still demand $X per treatment, we’re just talking about who’s footing that bill in the end. I’m just cool with the government being able to design a competing product/treatment. That’s kinda really it.
NASA is purely government funded and non-profit. If NASA had been able to charge for half the stuff they gave the world for free they’d be the richest corporation on the planet, since the MRI, CAT scanner, and a whole ton of other technology was made by them. Yet NASA doesn’t profit on any of it, and is one of the most innovative entities in the world. Kinda puts a dent in your ‘well there’d be no innovation’ right? I dunno man, have you ever met scientists and engineers? I’m convinced if you just gave them all unlimited budgets and material all our problems would be solved overnight, and most of them would refuse anything beyond the satisfaction of having made something new and decent living wages and conditions.
And that seems to be working wonderfully for the EU countries who’ve already adopted this system, and for the Chinese, it’s not like innovation just dissipated from there, hell they’re beating us in a few areas right now.
Define “thriving,” even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.
“Capitalism” did not make everyone’s lives better. Development did. That’s why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.
Simple “blind brand loyalty” and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of “Late-Stage Capitalism.” Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.
Blind brand loyalty isn’t the issue here, and you cannot “fix” Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.
All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it’s safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.
I’d define thriving by peoples control over their lives. Like working class people being able to persue hobbies and afford luxury items. Yea it’s quite possible to make people live long lives but from what I’ve seen in my home state of Vermont living a long fulfilling life is much harder than having a long miserable life. From what I understand I didn’t know that people lived longer in the ussr but I’m aware the average jo didn’t have a color tv or a car much less a car with climate control, radios, automatic transmissions, convertible tops or a sense of fashion. I’m even told a toilet that flushed was quite the lugury just as it is in China. I can buy that people who didn’t get disapeared could live long lives but it couldn’t have been pleasant lives. Seriously American consumer products were so good that many of us are still using tractors from the 50s houses from that same time are just now starting to rot. Even today Japan is making cars that are far more reliable and efficient than any other countries. Tiwan is leading the way in high quality computer chips. Chips that are used in both weapons and lugury products. Henry Ford forsed all car companies to make cars for average folks. Then other companies were able to force Ford to make cars that aren’t the model t.
I think your biggest issue is that you’re comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people’s access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn’t even reached full Capitalism yet, then I’m afraid you aren’t being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was “good.” However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people’s lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn’t go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers’ freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.
Your probably the only serious communist I’ve came across. So I’m curious how do you expect innovation to happen in a communist world. I know we live in a corrupted capitalist society. But while we have had many counties try and fail to make a thriving socialist society. We have had capitalism thrive and make everyones lives better. We’ve had many people call amarica today late stage capitalism, but that implies that it’s inevitable that society will be corrupted by blind brand loyalty and companies will buy out compition. So why do you think we should change to communism, instead of eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others.
I want to comment on this first:
First, socialist countries haven’t been allowed to thrive. They’re a threat to the established capitalist status-quo. That’s what the entire red scare period was about; undermining leftist nations so they fail. See the Guatemala coup for example. The country removed their dictatorship and formed a democracy. It happened to elect a leftist president who implemented a minimum wage and began granting land to peasants. This pissed off the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) who were benefiting from cheap land and exploiting labor. They had the US overthrow the democracy and instate a dictatorship (which ended up committing a genocide).
This has happened many times. The only leftist nations that were able to survive this are ones with strong governments and cultural hegymony (basically dictatorships with strong restrictions on citizens). This doesn’t mean that’s the only possibility because that’s the only ones that survived, it just means those are more stable when undermined by a powerful external force. It’s like asking why everyone who has been shot in the head has died. It’s not their fault someone else shot them.
(Also, many capitalist nations have failed, and that equally is not a sign that capitalism is destined to fail.)
Now for this:
Innovation happens all the time without capitalism. In fact, capitalism often hinders innovation. The requirement of capitalism is profit seeking. If you don’t think something will make a profit, you shouldn’t invest in it.
I think it’s penicillin that almost didn’t exist because of capitalism. (This is from memory, so some parts may be wrong) The company was trying to create a certain drug. During the experiments penicillin was found. The company told them to move on, but the people running the experiment saw an opportunity and continued developing it on their own. Under capitalism, you shouldn’t persue unlikely but potentially beneficial, though possibly not profitable, possibilities. Can you imagine the number of times this has happened and the people involved listened to what they were told?
People like to innovate. Just look at makers online. They make all kinds of stupid shit that won’t ever make money just to see what will happen. Profit is not the thing that creates innovation. Human ingenuity is. If you give humans enough resources to persue what they want, they will innovate.
Also, generally communism or other leftist ideals aren’t advocating for equality in outcomes. They’re advocating for equality in opportunity. If you’re born wealthy, you shouldn’t get special access to thing that an average person doesn’t have access to. You shouldn’t be allowed to persue your goals when an average person can’t. However, if you create something that makes your life easier or better, that’s not going to be removed from you. There’s equal opportunity to improve your life, but not everyone will persue things equally.
Personally, I’m more towards anarchism than communism, but I see value in both and they share so much in common.
How would you go about eradicating “eradicating blind brand loyalty and cracking down on wealth gained through stifling others”? Those are fundamental aspects of capitalism. The goal of capitalism is to increase profits by any means possible, which includes breaking laws when it’s more profitable to do so. Eradicating brand loyalty is only possible if you elemenate labels, but that also creates the opportunity for cheap alternatives to undercut on quality. Exploiting labor is also fundamental to capitalism. If the goal is profit then you should pay as little as possible for as much as possible. If you don’t then someone else will undercut you and you’ll fail while they exploit.
There’s no avoiding it under capitalism because the fundamental goals are misaligned with morality. The only choice is a system that favors morality, potentially by making moral options profitable or just not prioritizing profit. You can’t really “fix” capitalism. The fundamentals are rotten. You can improve it, but it’ll always be misaligned with what we want. There may be a place for capitalism under another system, but capitalism as the foundation is never going to prioritize humanity, good, and doing what’s right.
It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of innovation comes from students, researchers, and people working in tech, who, alongside their generally higher education, also aren’t working 9-5, on-site jobs.
Innovation is not only new products, innovation is in optimization
I agree. I’m adding on to the parent comment to provide an example of a real situation in which people who could generally make ends meet while doing very little work are instead producing the bulk of our new technologies, discoveries, and (as you mention) optimizations.
Kudos on the respectful questions instead of dissolving into rhetoric. I love these sort of conversations.
Hold the phone. We have thriving socialist societies today, unless the EU is doing a lot worse than I thought. In fact in France and Germany they’re nearly 100% nuclear and renewable and in France’s case have secured enough nuclear fuel to power their society for centuries. All of them have socialized medicine, and judging by the new heart surgery techniques out of France lately they’re not lacking for innovation just cause the government is footing the bill. Furthermore, have ALL capitalist countries stood the test of time economically? I can name quite a few that exist right now like Fiji, which is certainly capitalist, but does NOT help their people in being capitalist (selling their water has harmed their environment, and the profits really are not passed along to their people).
Why would you think innovation would disappear?
Let’s take the socialist (communist) medical systems in foreign countries. There is still IMMENSE value in winning the government contracts that use your medicine. And I’m a weird communist who still values personal property and intellectual property, I still see that as integral to the process. So like, if you invent the cure for cancer you can still demand $X per treatment, we’re just talking about who’s footing that bill in the end. I’m just cool with the government being able to design a competing product/treatment. That’s kinda really it.
NASA is purely government funded and non-profit. If NASA had been able to charge for half the stuff they gave the world for free they’d be the richest corporation on the planet, since the MRI, CAT scanner, and a whole ton of other technology was made by them. Yet NASA doesn’t profit on any of it, and is one of the most innovative entities in the world. Kinda puts a dent in your ‘well there’d be no innovation’ right? I dunno man, have you ever met scientists and engineers? I’m convinced if you just gave them all unlimited budgets and material all our problems would be solved overnight, and most of them would refuse anything beyond the satisfaction of having made something new and decent living wages and conditions.
And that seems to be working wonderfully for the EU countries who’ve already adopted this system, and for the Chinese, it’s not like innovation just dissipated from there, hell they’re beating us in a few areas right now.
Couple things, here.
Define “thriving,” even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.
“Capitalism” did not make everyone’s lives better. Development did. That’s why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.
Simple “blind brand loyalty” and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of “Late-Stage Capitalism.” Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.
Blind brand loyalty isn’t the issue here, and you cannot “fix” Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.
All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it’s safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.
I’d define thriving by peoples control over their lives. Like working class people being able to persue hobbies and afford luxury items. Yea it’s quite possible to make people live long lives but from what I’ve seen in my home state of Vermont living a long fulfilling life is much harder than having a long miserable life. From what I understand I didn’t know that people lived longer in the ussr but I’m aware the average jo didn’t have a color tv or a car much less a car with climate control, radios, automatic transmissions, convertible tops or a sense of fashion. I’m even told a toilet that flushed was quite the lugury just as it is in China. I can buy that people who didn’t get disapeared could live long lives but it couldn’t have been pleasant lives. Seriously American consumer products were so good that many of us are still using tractors from the 50s houses from that same time are just now starting to rot. Even today Japan is making cars that are far more reliable and efficient than any other countries. Tiwan is leading the way in high quality computer chips. Chips that are used in both weapons and lugury products. Henry Ford forsed all car companies to make cars for average folks. Then other companies were able to force Ford to make cars that aren’t the model t.
I think your biggest issue is that you’re comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people’s access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn’t even reached full Capitalism yet, then I’m afraid you aren’t being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was “good.” However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people’s lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn’t go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers’ freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.