(Dec 22, 2020 at 6:53 PM)Vertette Wrote: That's not what I'm implying at all
This mythical version of communism I've heard about from every single communist I've talked to that has never been tried could only ever exist in a place where everyone is altruistic. In other words, it could never work in reality. Race doesn't come into it.
Meanwhile, capitalism is something that isn't working in reality right now
Obviously laissez-faire corporatism hasn't really turned out to work in the general public's favor, so we should think outside the box to explore other options, including but not limited to communism
The reason many people are attracted to communism is that it has succeeded at removing oppressive power structures in the past - these are events we can learn from, for all their successes as well as their failures, instead of shunning them like they're just unquestionably bad for some reason
Like I said before, Native Americans had absolutely no contact with the outside world and yet many of their tribes had no concept of private ownership, so obviously capitalism isn't the only economic system compatible with human nature. Seems to me human nature has both good and bad aspects, and we should trend toward an economic system that rewards + relies upon the good ones instead of basically encouraging everyone to be selfish and step on as many other people as possible
But instead the discussion always comes back to communism's failure, how may people it killed, etc. How much as capitalism failed? How many people has it killed? These points are curiously left unaddressed in most of these discussions, because according to centrist geniuses we're meant to assume the economy we currently slave under during this arbitrary point in history is the best one that could possibly exist. If your definition of success in an economic system is its ability to enable success for a majority of people, then it seems like capitalism tends to fail often, and drastically. Its failure is so widespread, in fact, that the US tends to spend our tax dollars on military coups to replace up-and-coming socialist governments with fascist dictators who will be more likely to provide desirable resources to us at an affordable cost, thereby increasing the profit margin and concentrating more private capital in an even smaller area (i.e. the entire point of capitalism)
However, under that same definition, it seems communist revolutions have been very successful in the past at lifting an enslaved majority out of poverty that previously seemed inescapable. It seems that when an exploited class is given the option to seize power over the means of production and distribution, they normally choose to do so. It's almost like the alternative solution of allowing limitless amounts of wealth to be accrued by individuals, who can then purchase the rights to other people's labor to quite literally earn money for nothing, is nonsensical and shitty
I don't purport to be an economist or a political scientist or anything like that, but my belief is that if humanity can't survive without a system that rewards them for exploiting other humans, we don't deserve to survive, our evolution was a huge waste of time, and we should fuck off so all the other cool animals on this planet (who obviously have fairness and equity figured out a lot better than we do) can enjoy it in peace