drinkinglakewater

What if, instead of treating historically significant communists as greater, or throwing them away in pursuit of mythical pure ideal communists, we treat them as whole people with strengths and flaws that can be appreciated and critiqued?

Seems like a lot of effort for a guy that's gonna die soon

Blocked Party, Guys with Bryan Quinby, and Your Kickstarter Sucks are a great left adjacent trio of comedy podcasts, they're not explicitly political but still dunk on chuds and stuff.

Some niche improv ones are Hello From the Magic Tavern, Rude Tales of Magic, and Oh These Those Stars of Space. Magic Tavern is pure improv with a rotating guest, Rude Tales and Stars of Space are a consistent cast loosely using roleplaying games with the former being DND fantasy and the latter Star Trek inspired scifi. You can jump in anywhere with Magic Tavern and Stars of Spaces because they're both episodic, Rude Tales has an ongoing story but just started a new campaign in November so not much to catch up on.

God the way he draws mechanical stuff is so perfect

RIP to a legend

I wholly acknowledge a political class can develop, as it has in the USSR and China, but historically we can see these develop by removing agency from co-operative social structures like the de-collectivization of farming cooperatives and disempowering soviets. This can be mitigated, at least in part, through the use of cybernetics and creating robust systems of organizing and planning, essentially abstracting the planning out of the hands of petty decision makers.

HorribleSubs was right

The people are the recipients, the producers, and the planners. Under capitalism the planners are the capitalists, the producers are the workers, and the recipients are stratified by money, but under communism because common ownership abolishes class distinction the planners and producers are both workers and recipients are based on the needs because there's no capital accumulation.

The people are part of the planning structure so there's not necessarily a conflict, although I understand what you're getting at.

Communism as full political-economic system requires the abolition of private property through common ownership and the abolition of the commodity form in favour of need based distribution (use value instead of exchange value). Under capitalism, even if there is common ownership of production, the commodity form compels capital accumulation because distribution of commodities is based on their capital-value not their use-value, so a planned economy in this state is still stuck with planning around capital efficiency. Likewise, by abolishing the commodity form but not socializing ownership of production, a planned economy is still controlled by the small owner class (this was essentially what feudalism was). However, when we combine these two changes together and try a planned economy we now have a socialized ownership class that must use something other than capital as its central planning mechanism, which to communists is based on need.

TL;DR / e.g. "we have X number of people that need insulin, so we must produce that much insulin" vs "we have X number of people that need insulin, how can we price it to produce more insulin" vs "we do not need to produce insulin because the minority ownership does not need it" And you can substitute insulin in for whatever else.

Right, we agree on that. My disagreement is that because communism has completely different property relations and no capital accumulation, a planned economy cannot functionally work the same as under capitalism.