Ask Lemmy

One thing I'll add that I haven't seen mentioned is communisms relative weakness in the propaganda department. If you look at democracy as a bunch of competing interest groups i.e. parties trying to win the masses over to there side to win, then there main tool / weapon is information that will make the opposition look bad and your side look good, i.e. propaganda. Good propaganda requires intimate knowledge of people's desires and a knowledge of how to shape those desires to the benefit of your program. Capitalism is very good at this due to competition forcing them to better understand there customer so they can sell them more. Capitalism creates great salesman which is fundamentally what you need to create good propaganda. You can see this expertise most plainly in advertising pushing the message that consumption is good, fulfilling and will make you happy.

This expertise combined with the large amount of resources capital can Marshall to push there message makes electoral politics extremely difficult for communism or any program that goes against consumption like environmentalism. Even if you completely eliminate capital and it's control over media in one nation foreign actors will still come in using the same expertise and resources to try and bring back capitalism. So since communists can't compete electorally with a free press they go towards autocracy to keep power.

Well it didn't happen in every case. In the UK socialists became a big faction within the post war labour party and created the NHS. Almost every other country in Europe has a similar story with the creation of their own healthcare systems. Russia and China have never been democracies at any point in their history so maybe that has more to do with it than socialist and communist ideas.

What hierarchical structure exists in any type of system that doesn't breed corruption?

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Even popular egalitarian movements face significant resistance to social and economic change. This will not only come from elites who stand to loose from social change, but also from common people who for one reason or another oppose that which benefits themselves. Beyond the social and economic connections to the elite, the social inertia to change is on the side of capital.

The solution, from Bolivar to Lenin to Castro has been to force the people to be free because you can't have socialist democracy if people would vote to return to capitalism or colonialism.

Leftists have long talked about "educating" the populace, but this is another tempting avenue for creeping totalitarianism. It's not like capital is innocent of coercion, but so long as it accommodates the ignorant, it has an overwhelming advantage over a system that requires an improved humanity.

I suppose we'll iron this out. Remember that the social anchors for capital are hundreds of years old and have their roots in feudalism and aristocracy. Socialism is young and her sins are close in our minds not because their failures are extraordinary but because they're recent.

The vanguard party is essentially an oligarchy. It chooses its own successors, and we’re supposed to trust that they are too smart and on the lookout for the populace to not abuse power selfishly. A core tenet of anarchism is that while people may hold authority, nobody should hold positions of power.

Though I would say that while quite corrupt, one-party, and authoritarian, Cuba is a lot more democratic than people think

Because it is a dictatorship.

A dictatorship of the proletariat.

For real though we've not seen communism yet.

Realistically anybody who can take control of a country is a bit of a ruthless cunt, and ones that take over in an armed uprising especially so.

It's not a massive shock that some of them don't want to give up the crown once they've got it.

Even in so called democracies, we basically get to choose our "king" from a heavily vetted list. It ain't going to be people like me and you rising to the top.

Greed. The Achilles heel of humans since the beginning of time. Greed breeds hate, hate breeds fear, and fear breeds violence.

Because some people are more equal than others

The main reason is the Monroe Doctrine. The United States literally made it its business to terrorize any "communist" state, even if it's democratically elected. That breeds the conditions for paranoia, the desire for increased protection, etc.

But, in the context of endgame scenarios against dictators, the main factor usually is how the military responds, especially when asked to brutalize the population. If the military parts ways, they may start a coup of their own or they may (rarely) defer to the population.

So, by extrapolation, I imagine it's also true here: other powerful factions allow it because it opens opportunities for them to garner more power too. Business execs, politicians, and military officials alike are duking it out for influence amongst themselves as well.

Simple. Power corrupts. Even with a socialist government there is always gonna be power hungry people seeking authority over their constituents. Think of the majority as sheep, comfortable with being herded and the power hungerers as the wolves slavering to enslave them.

OP how much of today's markets and politics are definited by Oligarchs and the rich? Can you really say that a plutocracy isn't it's own kind of dictatorship?

Even more so, many westerners have been fooled by culture to think this is natural, inevitable, and good.

In terms of per capita rates, the Irish Catholic Church was incarcerating more of Irelands population than Stalin did to Russia during his reign.

Just two companies; The British East India company and the Belgian Rubber plantations of the Congo killed more people than Stalin or Mao (especially if you factor out the deaths from Lysenkoism, which wasn't a part of communism).

So early Capitalism and Colonialism killed far more than Communist dictatorships have....

And finally there is this to say - Communism is an economic system designed to interrupt plutocratic rule. It's not a governmental system of elections and checls and balances....

...and if we are to be the most up to date with this: China and Vietnam have Socialist Oriented Market Economies. The one in Vietnam, has almost eliminated homelessness entirely. Is that a dictatorship compared to the woes of the west's housing crisises?

Early systems from both economic models - Capitalism/Colonialism and Communism - both had events of mass killings. Both have seen dictatorships... You only focus on these things in the Communist model, because of your background. Likewise, someone from China or North Korea might hear more about the famines, deaths and genocides of the Capitalist and Colonial corporations I've mentioned above.

P.S. Are Cancer deaths from chemicals Capitalists kept on the "safe" list indicative of a dictatorship by the wealthy? What about the deaths and famines from weather disturbances in the climate? If we're counting the famines under Communism, then why not these things to? It's because of a hidden Western ideology/indoctrination culture.

Because people suck ass, and to successfully go from capitalism to socialism and then to communism, you need a whole population that puts the needs of the many above their own selfish desires. It's not impossible, but it's gonna be hard to truly accomplish.

Bureaucratic systems world based on control of information and decision making. If there are insufficient mechanisms for maintaining checks on power accumulation, those systems can be abused by psychopaths and used to accumulate power. The same applies to capitalist structures.

I think because true communism never existed. All the previous attempts were flawed, people got corrupted, misused their power and it's difficult to overcome human nature. It might work in theory (or not). But so far the attempts ~~weren't that many and they~~ were all flawed for different reasons.

Let's look at it this way - they were already going to be dictatorships, the dictator picked what he told the people they'd get. Most of the big ones all say Power To The People as they're pushing their way to the top, but as soon as they get there they make themselves permanent. Some of them took a pretty good stab at it like Mao or Stalin, but they killed their people in droves to make it happen. Once that happens you gotta stay in power or they're going to kill you. And of course, with themselves at the top of the heap, they took everything for themselves and The Party, and The Party became the end all and be all instead of actually advancing the country.

Regimes tend to change with violent revolution, as it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power. Revolutions have leaders, and those leaders are the ones responsible for distributing the power to the masses. But it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power.

Even in the rare instance where a person does give up their power, all you need is for one person to take advantage of the system. Communism rewards people for their labours, but someone will need to judge how much people should be rewarded. One corrupt judge slips in, and the system corrupts with them.

Many informed responses already so I'll add my uninformed opinion.

Political change has never occurred in a vacuum. Communism is a direct threat to capitalism. So ~~the US~~ capitalists will do everything in their power to undermine and disrupt communism.

Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that's a large part of the reason that I'm an anarchist.

Because nobody’s claiming all this stuff that’s now just freely lying around. Someone better claim it before it gets gone.