CreateDebate is a social debate community built around ideas, discussion and democracy.
If this is your first time checking out a debate, here are some quick tips to help get you started:
Arguments with the highest score are displayed first.
Argument replies (both in favor and in opposition) are displayed below the original argument.
To follow along, you may find it helpful to show and hide the replies displayed below each argument.
To vote for an argument, use these icons:
You have the power to cast exactly one vote (either up or down) for each argument.
Once you vote, the icon will become grayed out and the argument's score will change.
Yes, you can change your vote.
Debate scores, side scores and tag scores are automatically calculated by an algorithm that primarily takes argument scores into account.
All scores are updated in real-time.
To learn more about the CreateDebate scoring system, check out the FAQ.
When you are ready to voice your opinion, use the Add Argument button to create an argument.
If you would like to address an existing argument, use the Support and Dispute link within that argument to create a new reply.
You can share this debate in three different ways:
#1
#2
#3
Paste this URL into an email or IM:
Click here to send this debate via your default email application.
Click here to login and CreateDebate will send an email for you.
the simplest way communism makes no sense
As far as I understand communism is a societal state in which each member of society contributes the entirety of their labor to a common inventory which each member of society has equal access to. If that is the case can I take more than I contribute to the common inventory? If true that means someone else is left with less than he contributed in which case why would that person want to be part of a communist society? Can I only take as much as I contribute? if that is the case why be part of a communist society in the first place?
That's the only part of communism that makes sense. Most people get less than they contribute. If there is any profit being made by the company that you work for and you don't receive any of it then you are getting less than you contribute. Communism is supposed to equalize the money for workers. That's where the problem lies. Businesses don't exist without risk. There is no reason to risk anything if you can't benefit from the risk.
The only people who would be receiving less under a communist society are the risk takers. There are few risk takers. The overwhelming majority of people would gain on paper. The overwhelming majority of people would benefit if communism could work.
"If there is any profit being made by the company that you work for and you don't receive any of it then you are getting less than you contribute."
Let's say there is a guy who owns a company and he employs 10 engineers. He pays each person $100k and they sell $2 million worth of products. Let's say there is $500k in overhead. That leaves $500k left for the owner. If it were communism the $500k that went to the owner would be distributed to the workers since they are responsible for the work that went into selling that much. In that case communism benefited 10 people and hurt only 1. That's how it is supposed to work at least.
There's no selling in communism, everything is already owned by everyone and you can't sell people something that's already theirs. a valid analogy would be 3 people, 1 produces 50$ of value, 2 also produces 50$ of value and 3 produces 200$ of value. so 1 and 2 decide to forcefully confiscate 100$ of 3's produce and distribute it between themselves so everyone's equal. if 3 wanted to give 2 and 1 his produce there'd be no need to initiate communism through a violent revolution because he'd do so himself.
if 3 wanted to give 2 and 1 his produce there'd be no need to initiate communism through a violent revolution because he'd do so himself.
Right, but you aren't person number 3. You are almost guaranteed to be person 1 or 2. Twice as many people benefit in your analogy by switching to communism. When more people would benefit there is a chance it would happen. That's the only reason why it would happen.
why would number 3 want to be part of a communist society? and you understand that communism creates an environment that encourages people not to work? the less you work the more you receive from others. other than that, what is your definition of communism?
why would number 3 want to be part of a communist society?
He wouldn't in the same capacity. That was my point. He would just be like 1 and 2 and get by. That's not self evident with your debate description.
and you understand that communism creates an environment that encourages people not to work?
Yes, but that would only entice people to want communism. I could live in a society where I don't work, it one where I have to work. Why choose the work society if I get the same stuff?
the less you work the more you receive from others.
No. You receive the bare minimum.
other than that, what is your definition of communism?
You get less if you don't use your abilities. You receive based on your needs and abilities. If you don't use your abilities (work) you only get what you need.
are you alleging that you wouldn't have to work in a communist society? if nobody works, how would you obtain the bare minimum?
the less you work the more other people need to work in order to supplement what constitutes the bare minimum that you need. so yes, the less you work the more you receive from others.
not to mention that the "bare minimum" is food and water both we can easily obtain ourselves and we did so for most of humanity's existence.
other than that, what constitutes "using your abilities"? and I don't understand, in your version of communism people receive from what?
The overwhelming majority of people would benefit if communism could work
The problem is that Communism simply cannot work because its premise depends on people being what we are not.
Every communist country (USSR, Cuba, China, Cambodia, North Korea, etc.) devolves immediately into tyrannical dictatorships, usually complete with mass murder by the government, slave camps, and mass incarceration.
It is all an attempt to get people to change enough to go along with the program. Even with all that force and fear and oppression, it still does not work.
In reality, most of us are the opposite of what Communism requires. Many of us are ambitious, competitive, constantly seeking some elusive improvement so we can be satisfied, and generally unwilling to share with strangers. Most of those who are not these things are lazy and unwilling to work to help ourselves, much less help a stranger.
We cannot change these qualities in ourselves even when we want to.
The overwhelming majority of people would end up in prisons or mass graves.
This is wrong. Most people are NOT hugely successful, because we allow those who would lord over us to do so. Humans have bought into the idea that a leader is a better fit for a good life than true democratic directive. But if you want to talk about what most humans are, then they are co-operators, not competitors. Co-operation and social cohesion are what make civilizations thrive. Competition breeds animosity. The two are rarely compatible, and even when they are, it is only for a time.
Several scientific studies have shown us that human beings, in our elementary state -- as infants and children, before we are corrupted -- are extremely altruistic. Evidence also shows that those who are moral and altruistic tend to do relatively poorly in capitalistic societies and highly competitive scenarios. They seek to find solutions that work best for everybody: self-interest is secondary to communal interest.
This idea that capitalism represents the innate nature of man is a hideous fallacy. Predatory capitalism represents the realisation of the world desired by the psychopathic few. The rest of us are, to the capitalist predator, a unit whose value is directly proportional to the degree to which we are useful for them.
All of those societies you have mentioned: USSR (Stalinist, pyramidal Russia); Cuba (tyrannical despotic nation); North Korea (theocracy) etc, are not communist. Do any one of those societies direct their issues -- issues of economy, society, litigation, currency, values -- through entirely democratic, communal means? No. Not one of them: they are all despotic. Communism -- and I mean Marx's vision of it -- is not a despotic society, it is the exact opposite.
Sean, this is a brilliantly well-articulated argument. I thoroughly agree with it all, and in my opinion this part needs to be underlined for extra emphasis:-
But if you want to talk about what most humans are, then they are co-operators, not competitors. Co-operation and social cohesion are what make civilizations thrive. Competition breeds animosity.
It's a tragedy that great critical thinkers are so rare.
your entire argument is predicated on capitalism being forcefully implemented by a select few, can you prove it is so?
Why would the many wilfully consent to a system which rewards only the few? You might as well demand "proof" that monarchies were forcefully implemented by a select few. Certain truths are rendered self-evident by the law of reason.
how does capitalism reward only the few? and you should read your comment again, you basically made an argument against capitalism being forcefully implemented and only rewarding a select few.
Feudalism was forcefully implemented. Neocapitalism is necessarily a mode of suppression, and in this regard is not dissimilar to feudalism: for one person to rule, all others must bow, and for one person to "succeed" to immense financial wealth, many others must fail. This is why less than fifty individuals own over half the world's material wealth, and why almost half the population of the Earth live in what we in the Western world would call financial and material poverty.
Like title, money is most often inherited, and it is used just as effectively as title to oppress.
You and I, relatively speaking, have a far superior standard of life to may people across the world, but we are still born into a system we don't decide upon. And I can assure you, that once mankind siezes the power to determine how and for whom he creates wealth and propserity -- as a democratic unit -- there'll be no more billionaires and no more Kings and Queens, and with the right education, no more starving kids.
Capitalism is grotesque.
In the same few acres of space in the subcontinent you can find a merchant selling hundreds or thousands of tonnes of produce wrought from the labour of hundreds of impoverished, malnourished Indian women, and those same women cutting the bad pieces out of the cast-off onions to sell in order to buy minuscule helpings of staple foods, living barethread, shoeless, day-by-day.
Capitalism rewards immorality and heartlessness, and punishes anybody who dislikes that reality. It makes monsters out of people.
The only people who would be receiving less under a communist society are the risk takers.
I think you miscalculated.
True, many of the risk takers would do worse. However, about half of companies fail to last long enough to earn a profit, so some of the risk takers might actually do better.
More to the point, real wealth is measured in what people actually produce. Most of what we produce, we only make because some risk taker invented it, and another brought it to market where consumers could buy it.
Without invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, productivity goes down to the bare bones of what a society already has because everyone is busy doing the bare minimum of whatever job the government assigned.
People who do not take risks, but advance their incomes simply by working harder and smarter would also receive less. When everyone gets the same, there are no raises, promotions, no performance bonuses. Their increased contribution would be spread around to those who do the minimum or nothing. Without reward, most would decrease their efforts, which would decrease everybody else's income.
Communism is about giving people based on their needs and abilities. If you work hard that's an increase in ability relative to others. You do not have to be get the same amount for communism. And if we go by the debate description that implies you get as much as you contribute, working harder means more contributing which means you get more. The debate description fundamentally described an unequal system, so your argument needs to be tweaked.
Their increased contribution would be spread around to those who do the minimum or nothing.
A certain amount from your initial contribution will be distributed, but if you get to keep any additional contribution you put in your argument falls apart.
Actually the basis of my argument is what people basically are. "In reality, most of us are the opposite of what Communism requires. Many of us are ambitious, competitive, constantly seeking some elusive improvement so we can be satisfied, and generally unwilling to share with strangers."
These all amount to a drive to own bigger and bigger things, to have more and more control over the things that affect our lives. Communism by definition frustrates this drive.
That is why every communist country has to become hyper-oppressive in order to subvert what people are so that the communist system can continue.
If you work hard that's an increase in ability relative to others. You do not have to be get the same amount for communism. And if we go by the debate description that implies you get as much as you contribute, working harder means more contributing which means you get more.
A lot of the problem would end up being the cost of government management of the whole communist system.
It is hard to tell whether that would eat up more of each person's contribution than would the profit taken out by the business owner in a capitalist system.
Beyond just the work administration, and product distribution tasks, there are the government tasks of determining comparative value of each persons contribution. In free-market capitalism, the market does this automatically.
I think we can safely assume that the folks who decide contribution value would rate their own tasks/contributions as being among the most valuable. But beyond that it is tough to tell what the rating scale would be.
For example, if you have ever worked in a restaurant, you know that there is no most valuable task (i.e., which employee is contributing the most) nor are the positions subject to the same ways to measure who is working hardest.
Thomas Sowell, a conservative economist, was a communist in the 1960s while in college. One summer he went to work for a government agency (Dept. of Labor or Transportation, I think.) He said that seeing how badly that department functioned convinced him that communism could never work because government is just too ineffective and too inefficient.
When people are assured they will be treated fairly and their livelihood is not in doubt, they will do what they love, rather than what they "have to do".
Actually I agree communism makes no sense. But what also makes no sense is trying to smear any form of government as being "communist" just because it funds things needed for the common good of society, like roads, sewers, militaries, schools, safety net programs, etc. Public programs fall nowhere close to communism on the spectrum. Even when people are in a panic about high taxes it still remains on the opposite end of the spectrum from take it all away.
As far as I understand communism is a societal state in which each member of society contributes the entirety of their labor to a common inventory which each member of society has equal access to. If that is the case can I take more than I contribute to the common inventory?
No, you can't. You can withdraw only the total product of your own labour.
Your laughable bias and misunderstanding are evidenced fairly clearly by the fact that, under capitalism, the product of your labour is stolen from you by your employer, and in return you get a small percentage of it back. Hence, quite typically of morons like you, a problem with capitalism suddenly becomes a problem with communism.
What??? We weren't talking about communism??? We WERE.. It IS the topic.. I told you WHY communism doesn't work. You didn't like it, so you respond with a nasty comment.. What else is new?
It also resides in the minds of college leftists both professors and students.
Most of the cure for that is kids, a mortgage, and loss of tenure.
Believe it or not, I was once a communist.
Communism is a very attractive idea when you are minimally employed and completely without ambition.
However, the minute I wanted to make my life better, and started to think seriously about becoming a husband and father, I saw the limits of the whole thing.
I realized that in a capitalist system like we have here, I could change what I did, and earn more. In fact I sextupled my income between age (23 and 30.) I had the primary input into how much better I could do economically.
Communism relegates everyone to doing no better than the average. The reality of averages is that to make any significant improvement in my situation, EVERYBODY has to work harder and smarter.
Face it, other people are not going to row harder just because I want them to.
The simplest way communism makes no sense is that it frustrates self-determination and ambition, which are the primary mechanisms for getting us to climb down out of the trees and make life better.
The simplest way communism makes no sense is that it frustrates self-determination and ambition
Bullshit. Utter, raging bullshit.
Communism changes the social incentive from personal hedonism to collective progress. Just as there are people who respond better to the first incentive, there are also people who respond better to the second. The only difference is, the ones motivated by the second incentive are generally much nicer people.
so why is there a need for the implementation of communism through a violent revolution? can't you just form communism with a bunch of people that respond better to collective progress? why force your ideology on people? especially as if you do, it means they respond better to personal hedonism which makes them unsuited for communism.
Collective incentives decrease perceptibility of reward & thereby act as negative reinforcement, resulting in the poverty typical in communist nations.
Disagreement about what qualifies as collective progress frustrates many people motivated by the good of others. It also creates internal strife which necessitates the oppression universal in communist countries.
Ambition and Self-determination don't go away, but rather produce the dictatorial, oppressive, and hyper-privileged ruling class typical of communist nations.
-
You wrote: Communism changes the social incentive from personal hedonism to collective progress. Just as there are people who respond better to the first incentive, there are also people who respond better to the second. The only difference is, the ones motivated by the second incentive are generally much nicer people.
You seem to be ignoring what people actually are, and how that has worked itself out historically in communist countries.
-
-1- Hedonism and Operant Conditioning. The "personal hedonism," as you call it, is based in our pleasure centers. Rewards in operant conditioning tap into that quality (psychological function) in order for positively reinforce (encourage) behaviors. Stronger/bigger rewards are more effective than smaller rewards. Distributing the reward over many others for a behavior you did shrinks the reward you get. As a result, it will be a less effective reinforcement. This reduces the likelihood that desired behaviors are consistently encouraged.
Negative reinforcement is the withholding of a reward when the subject exhibits a behavior you want to discourage. If you perform a behavior (that the society needs you to continue performing) but the reward for that behavior is so diffused that you fail to perceive it, then ultimately you will cease performing the behavior.
By thus frustrating (not rewarding) ambition and the innate desire for personal achievement and reward, communism demotivates those the society needs to be productive.
Ultimately, people only work as hard as they have to in order to keep from being punished. Because communism ostensibly guarantees that everyone eats has a place to live, and gets medical care of the same quality of everyone else, no meaningful punishment is automatic to the system.
In most workplaces, the least productive worker ends up setting the standard. (Marx would have known this if he had ever bothered to get a job.) This explains why communist countries historically have been less effective at critical tasks like food production/distribution and infrastructure development than their free market counterparts (e.g., USSR vs. US or France, East vs. West Germany, PRC vs. Taiwan & Hong Kong, North vs. South Korea, Cuba vs. Mexico, any of the British West Indies or American Virgin Islands.
-
-2- Collective Progress and Self-Determination.
People clearly disagree on how a society should be shaped, or what constitutes progress. Even those who agree on these, disagree on priorities. As a result, even were you to have a society full of nothing but people who respond to the incentive of social progress, the same change that would gratify some as a benefit for all, others would decry as disastrous to the society.
Collective ownership of everything means that nobody gets to do what they want with their stuff to help make the society the way they think it ought to be. (Capitalist republics work this out through the free market.) What happens is that some totalitarian government (oligarchy or dictatorship) implement their personal concept of progress. This leaves large numbers of those motivated by collective progress in the situation of being punished (not merely unrewarded) for their work to accomplish the leaders vision of progress.
This alone would explain why communist countries end up being extremely oppressive, and why they imprison or kill so many citizens.
How many gulags would be required to house all the Americans who disagree with Bernie Sanders' vision of "progress?"
-
-3- Ambition and Self-Determination in Government.
Inevitably, there will those who never release their ambition and self-determination. These are the folks who are likely to end up running things, just as the most ambitious and self-deterministic end up running things in capitalist republics. These are your Stalins, Ceausescus, Pol Pots, and Maos.
Moreover, these qualities drive such despotic rulers to reward themselves more than by the equal share communism promises. That is why Stalin, Mao & the Kims were all fat in nations of starving people. It is why party leadership in all communist countries always get the best goodies, access to the best entertainments, etc..
If you look around, you'll see that communism is DEAD
Communism won't die until critical education dies. Perhaps Communism might be dead in America, but the rest of the world doesn't spend quite so much money pouring right wing propaganda into people's ears.
Certainly, I'm not a right winger. But, I AM a capitalist. I don't disagree with your synopses in another thread that capitalists take a workers labor just like communists do..
But, instead of talking about how different they are, let's talk about how much they're the same..
In this world, if you wanna play, you're going to pay.. Some call it paying the piper, whoever the piper is. Some call it bribery. The mob calls it the vig.. Governments call it taxes and fees, banks call it interest, and your boss takes some of your labor be he a capitalist or a communist.. Everybody pays.
What I LIKE about capitalism is that you have a CHANCE to improve your lot.