Why didnt communism ever work?

[perspective]

*Originally posted by Bryan Ekers *During the process, individuals can come and go (still voluntarily) but the process lives on. A corporation allows this sort of flexibility. A co-op does not.

Why do you say that? Do you mean co-op or commune?

[Arjun]

mssmith:

On the second quote, you misquoted me; I never mentioned co-ops previous to this post (although I do try to support them)

About the people I have talked to about communism. No, actually none of them were potheads. Their age ranges from teenagers (like myself) to businessmen (who, not surprisingly would support capitalism).

As hard as it may be to believe, there do exist intelligent people who do support communism.

And on that, when you say that communism will work “in theory”, that means you are disregarding reality, you are thinking logically. Of course reality continually defies logic and so often what works “in theory”, as i think communism should, doesn’t work in reality, as communism doesn’t.

[perspective]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *1. Looking out for one’s own interests is not ‘greedy’. It’s the natural state of mankind. People care about themselves, their children, their extended family and friends, and then society. And that’s the way it should be. Man is not intended to be a slave. Society is not an end unto itself. Man exists and lives and dies and has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while doing it. Society is nothing more than a means to achieve those goals.

I agree with most of that except for that last bit about society. Rather a bit of a brush off.
I see plenty of people as servants in capitalism though. So I’m not sure what your point is.

Communism, on the other hand, removes that incentive and replaces it with either ‘good will’ or an over-reaching bureacracy.

You seemed pretty straight forward on the bureacracy part. What happened to the good will idea?
The overeaching bureacracy of Russia had a lot more to do with maintaining control than distribution of goods. Even if for some reason (feel free to tell me what that is) a central bureacracy 2000 miles away is necessary for communism, why would it care about a shoemaker or even 1 shoe factory?
Look it’s no problem to hit the bureacracy of Russia. Everybody knows about it.
Communism means the sharing of property for the good of the community in a classless society. Note the lack of “over-reaching bureacracy” in the definition. This is a very strong definition one that is hard to achieve completely(Just as a completely free market seems elusive). Still we could share a lot of things and make the differences between incomes small enough that democracy could actually function better.
In one setup, people still get to trade with other people without a bureacracy, and they can make more money according to how much or how well they worked. The big difference is that there aren’t capitalists somewhere reaping the benefit of someone elses labor. The workers are also the “stockholders” and people that don’t work cannot collect. If there needs to be a leader or leaders they can be elected so that they are actually responsible to the constituents of the collective.
There’s no reason you can’t start your own collective with whomever you like or even work by yourself if you prefer.
There are many different ways of envisioning cooperation and sharing for everyone’s good. “Over-reaching bureacracy” especially the kind attached to a totalitarian government is probably the last option a democratic society would choose for that purpose.
Oh BTW, if you’d like to debate the merits of capitalism. Come on over to communism vs capitalism.

[msmith537]

*Originally posted by Colinito67 *
Why couldn’t that happen on a larger scale, assuming that “subdepartments” are small enough so that individuals are held responsible, and that the job that needs to be done doesn’t require specialization.

colin **

Not everyone is qualified to be surgeon or engineer or computer programmer or pilot for a day. Once you pull these people off their “regular job” to clean toilets and wait tables as part of your sense of fairness to society, you have decreased societies efficiency and productivity.

Also, a surgeon or engineer can do a toilet cleaners job. A toilet cleaner can’t do the engineers job.

Originally posted by Arjun
And on that, when you say that communism will work “in theory”, that means you are disregarding reality, you are thinking logically. Of course reality continually defies logic and so often what works “in theory”, as i think communism should, doesn’t work in reality, as communism doesn’t.

Sorry if I misquoted you, but I think you are misquoting me. I don’t believe communism works in theory or in reality. Reality never defies logic unless the logic was faulty.
perspective - As I mentioned, your commune is a self-selected group who all share the same ideals and goals. In the real world, that will not be the case. That is why communism fails. Those people who don’t fall in line with the rules of the commune find themselves shot or in the gulag.
Just a nitpick but its M Smith, not Ms Smith and I am a guy, not a girl.

[perspective]

*Originally posted by msmith537 *
Not everyone is qualified to be surgeon or engineer or computer programmer or pilot for a day. Once you pull these people off their “regular job” to clean toilets and wait tables as part of your sense of fairness to society, you have decreased societies efficiency and productivity.

I’m imagining these things getting done on a per organization basis. So the pilot wouldn’t wind up waiting tables in some random restaurant, but if they took a turn cleaning up the bathroom in the pilot’s lounge, I don’t think society would come crashing down.

perspective - As I mentioned, your commune is a self-selected group who all share the same ideals and goals. In the real world, that will not be the case. That is why communism fails. Those people who don’t fall in line with the rules of the commune find themselves shot or in the gulag.

Why would anyone get shot unless they were being violent? What kind of disagreement are you picturing?
A communist government can be just like any other government. If it arose from a democracy why would it be any more repressive than any other democracy?

[Sam_Stone]

You seemed pretty straight forward on the bureacracy part. What happened to the good will idea?

You need some way of organizing a complex society no matter how much good will there is. Bureaucracy is not the result of evil people with evil desires. Bureaucracies grow as people attempt to cope with complexity.

The average mid-level bureaucrat in the Soviet Union was no doubt a normal person with a family trying to do his job, just as they are here.

[quote]

The overeaching bureacracy of Russia had a lot more to do with maintaining control than distribution of goods. Even if for some reason (feel free to tell me what that is) a central bureacracy 2000 miles away is necessary for communism, why would it care about a shoemaker or even 1 shoe factory?
[/quyote]

You’re wrong. By and large, the Soviet bureaucracy was an honest attempt to allocate the assets of a nation in a way that the planners thought would be best for that nation. It was just a bad way to do it.

A central bureaucracy may not be necessary, but some means of coordinating the activity of millions of people is. The two major competing methods we have today is the free market and the price system, and central planning by a large state organization. Most countries have a mix of both. Even the Soviets had a mix, because there was a large black market that was tolerated precisely because it operated at levels that the Bureaucracy wasn’t capable of managing anyway. The Black market acted as ‘grease’ for the economy, filling in the gaps where central planning failed.

Communism means the sharing of property for the good of the community in a classless society. Note the lack of “over-reaching bureacracy” in the definition.

You can define it any way you want, but you can’t avoid the dictates of reality.

Okay, your ideal classless society doesn’t have a bureaucracy. Great. Now let’s say I want to make my fellow communists, who I love dearly and want to help, a new plow for the tractor. Where do I get the steel? Who makes it for me? Given that there’s not enough steel for everyone to have everything they want, who makes the decision that the plow I want to build is more important to society than Bob’s new steel tire rims, which are competing for the same resources? Which one of us gets what we want?

Let’s get specific here. The devil is always in the details, and in my experience Communists are really good at talking about brotherly love and classless societies, but really weak when it comes to the details. So let’s hear them. How are you going to efficiently allocate all of the steel that is available in a society if you don’t have some form of central planning or other mechanism for determining who gets what?

This is a very strong definition one that is hard to achieve completely(Just as a completely free market seems elusive). Still we could share a lot of things and make the differences between incomes small enough that democracy could actually function better.

In one setup, people still get to trade with other people without a bureacracy, and they can make more money according to how much or how well they worked.

Really. How do they tell how much they should trade for one good? How many loaves of bread is a pound of steel worth? Who decides?

Who decides how much or how well someone is working? What if I work my ass off to achieve my life’s dream of making the world’s largest pink flamingo? How much wheat does a farmer who busted his ass all year have to give me? Again, who decides?

What if my deepest love is to be a wheat farmer, but there’s already a glut of wheat? Who has to trade me for my wheat? Or do I just starve? If someone comes to me with a bushel of wheat, and I’ve already got more than I need, do I have to give him the chairs I made, even I need them?

Remember, we’re not talking about a barter society. We’re talking about a ‘classless’ society. So value judgements on the worth of various goods have to be made, and some mechanism has to be in place to take things away from people who have collected more than ‘their share’. After all, even in a barter society you’ll soon find that some people are better at it than others, and will start to accumulate more goods. As a good communist, you can’t allow that. So who decides what’s ‘enough’, and what if the person you want to take it from doesn’t agree?

Again, let’s get some specifics going. This is great debates, not a religious revival. Give me a workable plan we can discuss.

The big difference is that there aren’t capitalists somewhere reaping the benefit of someone elses labor. The workers are also the “stockholders” and people that don’t work cannot collect.

And here you just hit on the biggest fallacy about capitalism that Communists have. You think capitalists are just a bunch of lucky, rich people using positions of power to fleece the masses. In fact, capitalists are the organizing force of our society. They take the risks, come up with innovations, raise capital, get people to enter into contractual obligations to work together, etc.

Anyone can be a capitalist. My daughter set up a lemonade stand a couple of weeks ago - she’s a capitalist. Whether she decides to continue in that role, or get other skills that pay her in the labor market is her decision.

The best capitalists are the ones that are the most efficient at organizing the assets of society in producing wealth. There are thousands of small restaraunt owners, but Dave Thomas rose above the herd and became a huge success, because he was better at it than they were.

In a capitalist country, the people who have proven most effective at organizing and controlling the means of production largely wind up being the ones in the biggest positions of power. It’s a very efficient system.

The profit corporations make can be considered the country’s ‘management fee’. And guess what? The average profit margin in the United States among all corporations is only about 3%. That’s an extraordinarily low price to pay for the management of a nation’s assets in the most efficient manner.

As for ‘reaping the benefits of someone else’s labor’, it’s equally valid to say that workers are ‘reaping the benefits of the capitalist’s money’. After all, the reason an auto maker makes $35/hr is not because of a union or the good will of the company. He makes $35/hr because his labor has been magnified a hundred times over by giving him access to millions of dollars worth of machinery, which the capitalist provided to him.

In reality, capitalists enter into contracts with workers. Both bring value to the table, and both benefit. It’s a good system. After all, if GM had nothing of value to offer the worker, why wouldn’t the worker just go into business for himself? And if GM is offering the worker value, aren’t they entitled to profit from that? If not, why on Earth would they ever take the risk?

There’s no reason you can’t start your own collective with whomever you like or even work by yourself if you prefer.
There are many different ways of envisioning cooperation and sharing for everyone’s good. “Over-reaching bureacracy” especially the kind attached to a totalitarian government is probably the last option a democratic society would choose for that purpose.

Collectives work because the people are in close proximity, and everyone has the same basic understanding as to what the needs of the community are, where resources have to be allocated, etc. And everyone knows who’s being a lazy bastard, and pressure can be put on that person to stay in line.

But this organizational structure simply doesn’t scale. Once activities are taking place in areas you can’t observe, you need to transmit essential information around. As the scope of the organization grows, information requirements grow at an exponential rate. That’s why even small organizations get ensnared in bureaucracies. You simply have to have SOME way of organizing everything to avoid waste, duplication, etc.

So tell us how you’d do it.

Oh BTW, if you’d like to debate the merits of capitalism. Come on over to communism vs capitalism.

How many threads like this do we need?

[Bryan_Ekers]

*Originally posted by perspective *
** Why do you say that? Do you mean co-op or commune? **

I admit I didn’t get into sufficient detail, but consider the formation of a commune with all property held collectively. If members of the commune or co-op (I’ll have to do some research into the exact legal definitions) decide to leave, do they abandon all claim to ownership? How are new members recruited? Do a new member get an equal share of ownership. If a commune is successful and gets a large influx of new membership, can the original members limit the voting power of the newcomers if they fear the newcomers will change the commune’s direction?

A corporation doesn’t have these problems (though they have others). A group of people pool their money to form a corporation and their voting rights regarding the corporation’s actions are proportional to their original investment. If the corporation needs cash over and above profits, it can sell more stock and increase the ownership pool, with new members having power proportional to their invesetments. If a stockholder decides to leave, he or she can sell their holdings, possibly for far more than the original investment. The day-to-day management consists of people hired by the corporation to accomplish specific tasks. These people are paid salaries and occasionally they are given stock options which means they can one day become stockholders, themselves. At each stage and in each way, association with the corporation is purely voluntary. You do not have to buy shares, but if you do, you have certain rights. You do not have to work there, but if you do, you can expect compensation, and even negotiate for more. You can terminate your association at any time and not lose everything you’ve accumulated.

If you want to construct a jumbo jet, or a 30-story building, or a factory, you need thousands of people and a sizeable investment in money, resources, skills and time. A corporation is a better structure for pursuing such a goal since a communist structure inevitably introduces more complexity and beaurocracy than strictly necessary. A commune is fine for a relatively simple task (plant the food, grow the food, eat the food, sell the rest of the food) but at a certain level of complexity when skilled workers have to be brought in, the corporation offers them a simple deal; come in, do your work, get paid, then go away.

On a related note, I have to take issue with the idea that most (or even many) people working in a capitalist system are exploited and unhappy. Sez who? And if they’re so damn unhappy, what’s stopping them from emigrating in large numbers to more socialist nations, or voting in more socialist officials?

[perspective]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *You need some way of organizing a complex society no matter how much good will there is. Bureaucracy is not the result of evil people with evil desires. Bureaucracies grow as people attempt to cope with complexity.

Sure. Look around you. We have plenty of bureacracies here in the US. If you’re a farmer and you want to drain a swamp on your land, you probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement even though it’s your land. Then you have to wait for approval while all of the bureacratic cogs turn.
Does mean that food production is behind and folks can’t buy what they want? No. Bureaucracy that responds to a democratic society instead being an arm of an unquestionable authority is much more efficient.
Want to build a house? You’ve got paperwork for that too. So what.

Okay, your ideal classless society doesn’t have a bureaucracy.

I didn’t really mean no bureacracy period. Just without an overeaching central bureacracy 2000 miles away.
Of course, in everybody’s ideal society there’d be no bureacracy and no need for one. Could we ever live without one? Maybe, maybe not.

You did raise an important point about the allocation of raw materials. Steel isn’t quite what I considered a raw material. The steel would be managed primarily by those who processed it from the iron ore. They would decide who to trade with by themselves.

The actual iron ore is the key though. There is value in the labor of the folks who mine it. But is there an intrinsic value to the ore? Where does this value come from and who will it benefit? And how much should be mined?
This is where I think bureacracy would begin to really come into play. My take is that the iron ore itself is as much yours as mine. It was made by forces that we had nothing to do with. The incentive for mining it is simply that you’ll get paid to do it. This includes payment for trying to locate the resources, making the extraction equipment etc…

I think there should be an intrinsic value to the ore based on it’s relative rarity and usefulness. If gold costs the same to mine and process as lead we couldn’t have folks using it on their fishing lines when we need it for electronics, tooth fillings and whatnot. So there would have to be a regulatory body for this.

I don’t think this would be all that shocking as folks that extract resources often file EIS’s and deal with government bureacracy anyway. The prices of diamonds and oil already face strong internal controls from their industries which choose when to put resources on the market anyway. So price controls are nothing new either.

So the iron miners will have to charge a price significantly over their labor for the ore. A certain amount will be taken from the sale and redistributed. Much in the same way that native americans in Alaska get oil checks. This wouldn’t be as big a deal as it seems as the iron ore prices would escalate the price of products that people need to buy anyway.

In my system money would essentially be a labor exchange. People get money for working, which they can use to trade with other people as they see fit. I don’t have a problem with anyone owning a car, just owning the car factory. If you were really paid for your labor, it would take all of your life to buy a large factory (think about how much time it would take you to build one by yourself).

What if my deepest love is to be a wheat farmer, but there’s already a glut of wheat? Who has to trade me for my wheat? Or do I just starve?

As if farmers weren’t already subsidized by a bureacracy. There will be co-ops that fail just like businesses fail everyday. There would probably be a welfare system not that different from what we have in the US. Although hopefully it would function much better.

So value judgements on the worth of various goods have to be made, and some mechanism has to be in place to take things away from people who have collected more than ‘their share’.

I think some people would make more money than others but hopefully not so much that they could weild more political influence or control enough resources to dictate labor prices. If someone had the option of working in a co-op with a good wage and benefits based on the performance of the co-op, I don’t think someone would enter into an agreement where they would and give an unequal amount of the profits to someone else. Therefore I think it would be hard for someone to come up with more money than they can actually earn. Salesmanship takes work too you know. If you couldn’t sell from an inventory larger than what you had earned, it would take a lot of time and work to make your money.

Though there could be someone like a Jimmy Swaggart who simply got people to give them their wages through sheer personality. These individuals would be rare though. So I don’t think it would be a huge bureacratic nightmare. I would be in favor of a spending limit based on the highest wage that the most skilled person would earn. There could be exceptions for emergencies or buying a house, but too many exceptions would quickly attract attention.

Again, let’s get some specifics going. This is great debates, not a religious revival. Give me a workable plan we can discuss.

I’m all for it as long as the debate is “why this plan will/won’t work” instead of a conclusion that “this plan won’t work therefore communism doesn’t work”. There are a lot of people that theorized about communism. I’m not even the most well read out of them. I just agree with ideals of communism and haven’t seen any solid proofs for why it can’t work.
The scope of your questions are on the scale of Alan Greenspans’ job. It isn’t easy to make Capitalism work either.

In fact, capitalists are the organizing force of our society. They take the risks, come up with innovations, raise capital, get people to enter into contractual obligations to work together, etc.

Think about this: how much does the President of the US make? Not a lot compared to the people that supported his campaigns. Organizers and leaders don’t have to be billionaires.

In a capitalist country, the people who have proven most effective at organizing and controlling the means of production largely wind up being the ones in the biggest positions of power. It’s a very efficient system.

CEO’s don’t necessarily own the company. If I inherited a few million and hired a CEO with a proven track record. I could stand to make millions maybe billions more without knowing a damn thing about what the CEO is doing.

As for ‘reaping the benefits of someone else’s labor’, it’s equally valid to say that workers are ‘reaping the benefits of the capitalist’s money’. After all, the reason an auto maker makes $35/hr is not because of a union or the good will of the company. He makes $35/hr because his labor has been magnified a hundred times over by giving him access to millions of dollars worth of machinery, which the capitalist provided to him.

Boy these capitalist sure are magical. I’m sure that capitalist worked hard mining all of that iron ore then molding into machinery. Not mention all of the engineering degrees he had to get to design all that machinery. When he constructed the building by himself that was quite a sight to see too. :rolleyes:
What’s with this magical power we assign to these people? You say they’re great organizers, well that’s peachy they can get paid accordingly for their skills just like everyone else. They don’t have to continually make a profit off of our labor just for their organizational skills though.

In reality, capitalists enter into contracts with workers. Both bring value to the table, and both benefit. It’s a good system. After all, if GM had nothing of value to offer the worker, why wouldn’t the worker just go into business for himself?

Because the vast majority of wealth is already owned by a very few capitalists. The choices are limited. You can sell your labor as a business owner or as an employee but almost no one can afford to buy a factory.

How many threads like this do we need?

I don’t know. I didn’t start either of them, but they have their differences.

[ianzin]

The OP contains an assumption that communism has never worked. I know people from the former Yugoslavia who would argue quite passionately that it did. They maintain that they enjoyed a much better standard of living in Belgrade before the war than they ever will here in the UK, and that life in general was much better.

Personally, I agree with many of the posts here. Communism has some attractive tenets, pertaining to fairness and equality and lack of exploitation, but it fails to acknowledge some fundamentals of the way most people think and feel most of the time. Ultimately, people prize the freedom of self-determination over artificially-imposed equality.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Originally posted by perspective *
** Boy these capitalist sure are magical. I’m sure that capitalist worked hard mining all of that iron ore then molding into machinery. Not mention all of the engineering degrees he had to get to design all that machinery. When he constructed the building by himself that was quite a sight to see too. :rolleyes:
What’s with this magical power we assign to these people? You say they’re great organizers, well that’s peachy they can get paid accordingly for their skills just like everyone else. They don’t have to continually make a profit off of our labor just for their organizational skills though.*

I guess things look magical when you don’t bother to try to understand them. If a man wants to build a factory, of course he doesn’t need to design the equipment or building himself; he hires people who can. And he pays them with money he gets from investors, who risk a portion of their own wealth on the chance that the man with the plan will gather together the necessary equipment and staff to construct the factory and eventually return dividends. The investors don’t need to know anything about factory-building, nor do they have to take an active physical role, but they supply the capital to get the project started, and in exchange for taking that risk, they expect a return. And they also expect that the returns will not be given to people who took no risks but only demand a share in the name of “fairness”.

Because the vast majority of wealth is already owned by a very few capitalists. The choices are limited. You can sell your labor as a business owner or as an employee but almost no one can afford to buy a factory.

Go back to Macroeconomics 101. People rarely buy factories, but corporations often do. Forming a corporation is a minor bit of paperwork and once you have one, you can attract investors and accomplish more with their investments than you could possibly do alone.

I suggest you don’t show them your Mao shrine, though.

[perspective]

I really think were heading into territory better off in communism vs capitalism. But oh well…

*Originally posted by Bryan Ekers * And he pays them with money he gets from investors, who risk a portion of their own wealth on the chance that the man with the plan will gather together the necessary equipment and staff to construct the factory and eventually return dividends. … And they also expect that the returns will not be given to people who took no risks but only demand a share in the name of “fairness”.

Whether it’s one investor or twenty there’s still a lot of venture capital being thrown around. A lot of wealth in the hands of a few.
Gamblers take risks too. But they don’t earn their money. Venture capitalism is high stakes game that only a few can play. Sure one company might be better than the next but no matter who wins it’s the same small group of people who benefit.

A million bucks might seem like a lot to us, but to most of these people it’s not going to make the difference between whether or not they put food on the table. When your average person starts a business their livelihood and credit are at stake. Therefore it’s generally a smarter decision for them to take the job at the factory even if they earn less than their labor is worth.

Sure if I was a good enough salesperson and could somehow get around my lack of experience with handling large sums of money, I could choose to attract investors and successfully expoit people too. Oh joy.

On a related note, I have to take issue with the idea that most (or even many) people working in a capitalist system are exploited and unhappy. Sez who? And if they’re so damn unhappy, what’s stopping them from emigrating in large numbers to more socialist nations, or voting in more socialist officials?

Almost every country has emigration laws. Changing your country isn’t just a matter of moving. The only time it’s relatively straightforward is when someone in that country wants to hire you or marry you. Also the difficulty of learning a new language and cultural differences play a role.
There are number of people who feel used and underpaid every time they go to work. I can’t say if that’s most or not, but I’m sure it’s sizable. And even amongst folks who are “successful” they can experience depression and anxiety due to trying so hard to get ahead.
Co-ops are easier to start then communes. They are focused on a single goal like running a farm or a store. They are much more integrated into the current community. They are usually started with a loan or an “angel” who simply likes the idea. One of the food co-op’s in my town is currently undergoing expansion. They took out about a million in loans. Due to their track record they had good credit and they didn’t have to sell off shares of the company to investors.
How cooperative factories that take millions to start will happen is an open question. The idea of a co-op in a capitalist society is still undergoing change. Much is being learned. If I didn’t see one for fifty years I wouldn’t be surpised. Then again if I saw one in the next ten years, I wouldn’t be that surprised either.

[Arjun]

I started this thread to find out peoples thoughts on Communism. When we speak of communism capitalism will inevitably follow. But the point of this thread is not to establish which is better; I’m simply asking if communism will work and why it hasn’t in the past.

The main problem the most people have with communism is little incentive to move up. When I initially posted this question I asked if the communist system could be “tweaked” to solve this problem. :>

For example, as has been presented by some of the people who favor communism, why can we not have a society in which we give people flexibility to move up (or down) within the economic system while insuring that we don’t have a select few that are grossly rich while the rest are extremely poor?

Or bring socialism into the argument. What do the capitalists in this thread think about a socialist government? Is it and acceptable compromise or still flawed and if so how?

[rjung]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
The implicit assumption here is that Communism is a superior system for enlightened, selfless, good human beings, and that we only need capitalism because we aren’t ‘fit’ for something better.

You inferred all that from one sentence? Wow, Sam, maybe you should try decaf.

If it helps any, I think human beings are greedy, selfish bastards because those are survival traits we inherited from millions of years of evolution. But that’s a separate thread. Suffice it to say that IMO communism won’t work for human beings for the same reason you can’t stage an equine version of Oklahoma!

[msmith537]

*Originally posted by perspective *
I’m imagining these things getting done on a per organization basis. So the pilot wouldn’t wind up waiting tables in some random restaurant, but if they took a turn cleaning up the bathroom in the pilot’s lounge, I don’t think society would come crashing down.

There’s no benefit to society either. Why have a highly trained, highly educated professional take time out his productive day to do a job someone else can do with a minimum of cost and training.

*Originally posted by perspective *
Why would anyone get shot unless they were being violent? What kind of disagreement are you picturing?
A communist government can be just like any other government. If it arose from a democracy why would it be any more repressive than any other democracy? **

I am picturing a disagreement where I tell the Ministry of Labor to go fuck themselves when they ask me to take time out of my day to clean the toilets.

A communist government is diferent becaue the people decide what is good for ALL of society and EVERYONE has to follow along. Capitalism at least takes into acount that what benefits you may not benefit me yet we can still exist under the same system.

*Originally posted by perspective *
Sure. Look around you. We have plenty of bureacracies here in the US. If you’re a farmer and you want to drain a swamp on your land, you probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement even though it’s your land. Then you have to wait for approval while all of the bureacratic cogs turn.
Does mean that food production is behind and folks can’t buy what they want? No. Bureaucracy that responds to a democratic society instead being an arm of an unquestionable authority is much more efficient.
Want to build a house? You’ve got paperwork for that too. So what.

So compare the customer service levels of a typical company that must compete with other firms vs the service levels at your local DMV. You don’t have to wait in line for 2 hours to address a problem with your phone bill, do you? Without competition, your commuist beurocracy is under no pressure to sacrifice cost to improve customer service. Hope you like waiting in lines.

*Originally posted by perspective *
You did raise an important point about the allocation of raw materials. Steel isn’t quite what I considered a raw material. The steel would be managed primarily by those who processed it from the iron ore. They would decide who to trade with by themselves.

How would they decide? And why would you think that finished goods would also not need to be allocated?

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by perspective *
Co-ops are easier to start then communes. They are focused on a single goal like running a farm or a store. They are much more integrated into the current community. They are usually started with a loan or an “angel” who simply likes the idea.

[QUOTE]

We call those angels venture capitalists.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by perspective *
One of the food co-op’s in my town is currently undergoing expansion. They took out about a million in loans. Due to their track record they had good credit and they didn’t have to sell off shares of the company to investors.

[QUOTE]

Why is it better to raise $1 million in capital in the form of interest bearing debt than to raise the same amount in the form of a stock offering?

[Bryan_Ekers]

*Originally posted by perspective *
I really think were heading into territory better off in communism vs capitalism. But oh well…
Whether it’s one investor or twenty there’s still a lot of venture capital being thrown around. A lot of wealth in the hands of a few.

Yeah, one, or twenty, or a thousand, or twenty thousand, not an unusual number of individual stockholders for a large corporation. Why, I could buy a share of Microsoft right now, if I wanted, and that gives me the right to vote at shareholder meetings.

Gamblers take risks too. But they don’t earn their money. Venture capitalism is high stakes game that only a few can play. Sure one company might be better than the next but no matter who wins it’s the same small group of people who benefit.

Well, you, too, can join that group of people if you’re willing to buy a share of stock. Who told you you couldn’t play? Call a broker and open an account; there’s nothing stopping you. As for “earning” the money, you’re misusing the word. Investors have never “earned” money in the sense that they went out and physically worked for it and no-one expects them to. Rather, they supply the financial fuel that allows other people to “earn” money, and in exchange for that fuel, they expect to be paid. I’m not sure why this seems so odious.

When your average person starts a business their livelihood and credit are at stake. Therefore it’s generally a smarter decision for them to take the job at the factory even if they earn less than their labor is worth.

You throw around the phrase “average person” a lot, which makes me suspicious in and of itself, but in this case, you may be right. Taking a job working for someone else certainly involves a lot less hassle than establishing your own business, but whether or not that’s a “smarter” decision is up to the individual. The point is; in a capitalist system, that choice is up to the individual. In a communist system, it isn’t.

Sure if I was a good enough salesperson and could somehow get around my lack of experience with handling large sums of money, I could choose to attract investors and successfully expoit people too. Oh joy.

You also throw around the word “exploit” a lot. Unless you’re getting in the slave trade, your employees will work for you voluntarily and if you don’t pay them enough, they’ll leave, voluntarily. And your lack of experience isn’t the fault of the capitalist system; it sounds like a personal problem to me.

Almost every country has emigration laws. Changing your country isn’t just a matter of moving. The only time it’s relatively straightforward is when someone in that country wants to hire you or marry you. Also the difficulty of learning a new language and cultural differences play a role.

Well, if so many Americans are so disconted, they can come here to Canada where we have a relatively socialist system with free medical care, etc, the same language (mostly) and similar laws and customs. And how does capitalism prevent people from learning new languages and cultural differences?

I like the way the skipped past my “voting in more socialist officials” suggestion. In the idealized communism you’re promoting, I gather all decisions are reached by consensus. Once your population passes a certain level, this is no longer feasible and you’ll the need to elect (or appoint) officials who hold their offices for a certain time and whose judgement we trust in day-to-day matters. In the meantime, you’re free to vote for whatever left-wing candidates are running in your area, or even run for office yourself. Can’t get elected? Well, I guess the consensus just isn’t running in your favour. By communist standards, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

There are number of people who feel used and underpaid every time they go to work. I can’t say if that’s most or not, but I’m sure it’s sizable. And even amongst folks who are “successful” they can experience depression and anxiety due to trying so hard to get ahead.

Well, we need communism to save these people, stat! I’m not sure why a change in economics is going to cure depression and anxiety, unless you mean the Soviet Method, which involved drinking lots and lots of vodka.

[Sam_Stone]

quote:

Originally posted by Sam Stone
You need some way of organizing a complex society no matter how much good will there is.

Sure. Look around you. We have plenty of bureacracies here in the US. If you’re a farmer and you want to drain a swamp on your land, you probably have to file an Environmental Impact Statement even though it’s your land. Then you have to wait for approval while all of the bureacratic cogs turn.
Does mean that food production is behind and folks can’t buy what they want? No. Bureaucracy that responds to a democratic society instead being an arm of an unquestionable authority is much more efficient.
Want to build a house? You’ve got paperwork for that too. So what.

Oh, joy. Now imagine having to go through that hassle when you need pencils, or want to get a new hammer, or need fuel for that shipment, or…

This is an improvement? The things you mentioned are real, but they are the unfortunate NEGATIVE effects of trying to control aspects of society from a central authority. It’s not a model I’d like to apply to my shoe purchases, thanks.

quote:

Okay, your ideal classless society doesn’t have a bureaucracy.

I didn’t really mean no bureacracy period. Just without an overeaching central bureacracy 2000 miles away.
Of course, in everybody’s ideal society there’d be no bureacracy and no need for one. Could we ever live without one? Maybe, maybe not.

Quit weaseling. ‘Maybe, maybe not’ is not an answer to anything. Do we need one or not? If not, how are you going to organize the productive assets of society? Specifics, please.

You did raise an important point about the allocation of raw materials. Steel isn’t quite what I considered a raw material. The steel would be managed primarily by those who processed it from the iron ore. They would decide who to trade with by themselves.

So who decides who gets to mine the iron ore? The people who live on it? The state? I assume the state would control raw resources. If so, why should the people who mine the ore get to set the price? How does the fact that they are working with ore make them fundamentally different or more privileged than another worker who is working with intermediate products like ball bearings?

And it sounds like you want to give the miners a monopoly on deciding who they will give the processed ore to. If that’s the case, what’s to stop them from gouging the public? So I assume you’ll need some way to decide what a ‘fair’ price of the ore is. Who decides, and how? Specifics, please.

The actual iron ore is the key though. There is value in the labor of the folks who mine it. But is there an intrinsic value to the ore? Where does this value come from and who will it benefit? And how much should be mined?

The reason you are starting to confuse yourself and back into a rhetorical corner is because you have accepted Marx’s “Labor Theory of Value”. You’re trying to establish artificial distinctions between ‘value’ produced by labor and ‘value’ of products that have no labor component. That’s going to get you into trouble, because there IS no difference. The value of something rests solely in the extra utility it provides to other people. Whether it was created by nature or the work of 10,000 humans is irrelevant.

This is where I think bureacracy would begin to really come into play. My take is that the iron ore itself is as much yours as mine. It was made by forces that we had nothing to do with. The incentive for mining it is simply that you’ll get paid to do it. This includes payment for trying to locate the resources, making the extraction equipment etc…

How about payment to the people who are living on top of the ore? Do they get a say? How about extra payment to people who have to live downrange from the smoke plumes? Much has been said about how Capitalism doesn’t handle external costs particularly well, but Communism is FAR worse. Which is why the Communist countries tended to be ecological nightmares.

I think there should be an intrinsic value to the ore based on it’s relative rarity and usefulness. If gold costs the same to mine and process as lead we couldn’t have folks using it on their fishing lines when we need it for electronics, tooth fillings and whatnot. So there would have to be a regulatory body for this.

Well, you’re trying to come up with a definition of value that is based on the demand for that product. Which is an improvement, because that’s what Capitalism does. The problem is that in your system, some human or group of them has to make the decision for everyone else. Gold is a really good example here, because it’s scarce. And economics is all about allocating scarce resources. So your central planners are going to be inundated with requests for gold, and they won’t be able to come close to meeting the demand. Who gets it? The electronics company? The research company that claims to be near a breakthrough on cold fusion but needs large amounts of gold? Jewelry manufacturers? Architects who are asking for gold leaf for a government building?

Who decides, and on what basis? Specifics, please. This gold example might be a really good one to expound upon. I’m going to start a new thread on this.

I don’t think this would be all that shocking as folks that extract resources often file EIS’s and deal with government bureacracy anyway. The prices of diamonds and oil already face strong internal controls from their industries which choose when to put resources on the market anyway. So price controls are nothing new either.

Nothing new, but always a failure. The reason that diamonds and oil are controlled like that is because they are the result of monopolistic practices. DeBeers owns the vast majority of the world’s diamond production, and OPEC exerts a lot of control on world oil prices. In both cases, this would not be allowed under U.S. law. Unfortunately, these organizations are outside that law.

But are you suggesting that because there are *some price controls today, that it would be a good thing to expand price controls into everything, or even a majority of things? That’s like saying the state should just shoot everyone, because after all some people are shot in capitalist countries, right?

Price controls are a bad thing. They break the functioning of the market. If you want to see the ultimate effect of price controls, I suggest you look at the housing market in NYC, or what happened to gasoline in the 1970’s when Ford tried to ‘plan’ the supply and demand of gas through price controls. You also might want to have a look at what happened to the market for Sheep in New Zealand in the 1970’s when well-meaning bureaucrats thought they could improve upon the free market by setting up price controls and subsidies to control the market.

So the iron miners will have to charge a price significantly over their labor for the ore.

How much more? Based on what criterion?

A certain amount will be taken from the sale and redistributed. Much in the same way that native americans in Alaska get oil checks. This wouldn’t be as big a deal as it seems as the iron ore prices would escalate the price of products that people need to buy anyway.

How much? And why? And what’s the point of doing that? Let me see - you’re going to raise the price of all products that use steel by charging a premium for ore, but then you’re going to re-distribute the profits back to the society? That’s going to have the effect of disconnecting the value of steel from its true cost, and will distort the economy. In other words, people will use less steel than they would if its price were allowed to float naturally, and their rebate checks will result in them buying more of other types of goods.

How is this a good thing, and what is the societal rationale for it? Couldn’t I just as easily make a case that the ore should be free, thus maintaining the price of steel goods artificially low? How do you justify any of this?

What are you going to do in your system if there is a steel shortage?

In my system money would essentially be a labor exchange. People get money for working, which they can use to trade with other people as they see fit. I don’t have a problem with anyone owning a car, just owning the car factory. If you were really paid for your labor, it would take all of your life to buy a large factory (think about how much time it would take you to build one by yourself).

Oh. Okay… So at what point is it determined that I own the ‘wrong’ kinds of things? So I can own a car, but it would be illegal for me to charge for rides in it? What if I work harder, and so I can afford a 1-ton truck, and because I own a 1-ton truck I can ship more goods than my neighbor, who only has a half-ton truck? Now I’m earning twice as much money as he is. Is that allowed in your system?

Because ultimately, if you let people have money, and let them ‘freely trade’ with others, guess what’s going to happen? Some people will work harder than others. Some people will save more money. Some people will organize with others to buy goods they can’t afford by themselves. In a very short period of time, you’ll have wide disparities in wealth.

See, Capitalist societies don’t have rich and poor people because Capitalist is exploitative or because it codifies disparity in wealth. Capitalist societies have disparities in wealth because human beings have disparities in ability, in work ethic, in impulse control, etc.

So if you want to have a ‘classless’ society, you have to have a way to take the ‘excess’ resources away from the smartest, hardest working people, and give them to the people who don’t work as hard or as smart. In the end, the net effect of that is to punish the people you should be rewarding, and to reward the people who don’t deserve it.

If you do that, your economy will go in the dumper real quickly. So what’s the next step? It’s the same as every other communist country discovered - if you can’t reward people, you have to threaten them. That’s why these countries rapidly devolve into totalitarianism - not because they are full of some sub-species of human that is evil, but because the laws of nature lead them down that path.

quote:

What if my deepest love is to be a wheat farmer, but there’s already a glut of wheat?

As if farmers weren’t already subsidized by a bureacracy. There will be co-ops that fail just like businesses fail everyday. There would probably be a welfare system not that different from what we have in the US. Although hopefully it would function much better.

There you go again. Wheat farmers are somewhat subsidized by the federal government, so you use that as justification for more of the same. Most economists recognize that farm subsidies are a bad thing. And they aren’t the result of capitalism - subsidized industries are little islands of socialism in a capitalist country. They are a flaw of democracy, not a benefit.

But I’ve got to say, your point of view seems to be shifting away from Communism, and more towards socialism. Now you’re going to allow farmers to fail, but have some sort of welfare system for them? Presumably, welfare won’t pay them as much as the farm did, or no one would have an incentive to farm when they could sit at home and watch ‘Rosie’ instead. How is this communism? Farmers owning their own farms and being allowed to fail is not a feature of communism, in which the means of production are owned by the state.

[Sam_Stone]

quote:

So value judgements on the worth of various goods have to be made, and some mechanism has to be in place to take things away from people who have collected more than ‘their share’.

I think some people would make more money than others but hopefully not so much that they could weild more political influence or control enough resources to dictate labor prices.

‘Hopefully’? We’re not basing an entire government on your ‘hope’ that things will work out okay, are we? Let’s have some specifics - WHY wouldn’t people earn as much as they do in capitalist countries? What mechanism are you going to put into place to prevent extraordinarily successful people from becoming extremely wealthy?

If someone had the option of working in a co-op with a good wage and benefits based on the performance of the co-op, I don’t think someone would enter into an agreement where they would and give an unequal amount of the profits to someone else. Therefore I think it would be hard for someone to come up with more money than they can actually earn. Salesmanship takes work too you know. If you couldn’t sell from an inventory larger than what you had earned, it would take a lot of time and work to make your money.

They wouldn’t? What if the Co-Op with the really rich guy at the top offers you a better wage than the one with the crappy manager that doesn’t pay well?

You’ll have to explain the bit about not being able to sell from an inventory ‘larger than what you had earned’. What about savings? If a co-op makes 10% per year more wheat than another Co-op, and they both sell the same amount to the market, isn’t the first co-op going to have 10% of their wheat left at the end? Or more to the point, if they both sell all of their wheat, the first co-op will have 10% more money. If the managers of the co-op keep 5% of that for themselves and distribute the extra 5% to the workers, aren’t those workers better off, even though to the managers are getting rich?

As a worker, which co-op would you rather work for?

Though there could be someone like a Jimmy Swaggart who simply got people to give them their wages through sheer personality. These individuals would be rare though. So I don’t think it would be a huge bureacratic nightmare. I would be in favor of a spending limit based on the highest wage that the most skilled person would earn. There could be exceptions for emergencies or buying a house, but too many exceptions would quickly attract attention.

Huh? Now there’s a spending limit? I thought people could ‘freely trade’ with whatever money they earned? And you have a list of exemptions? Wow, that bureaucracy is sure growing fast. Have you thought about the practicality of maintaining this? Who decides whether someone has exceeded their ‘spending limit’? How do you even KNOW what people have spent? Do all sales have to be recorded and filed with a bureaucracy somewhere?

quote:

Again, let’s get some specifics going. This is great debates, not a religious revival. Give me a workable plan we can discuss.

I’m all for it as long as the debate is “why this plan will/won’t work” instead of a conclusion that “this plan won’t work therefore communism doesn’t work”. There are a lot of people that theorized about communism. I’m not even the most well read out of them. I just agree with ideals of communism and haven’t seen any solid proofs for why it can’t work.
The scope of your questions are on the scale of Alan Greenspans’ job. It isn’t easy to make Capitalism work either.

Right. So go look for my thread on managing gold. Let’s narrow this down and see if we can come up with our communist national plan for Gold.

quote:

In fact, capitalists are the organizing force of our society. They take the risks, come up with innovations, raise capital, get people to enter into contractual obligations to work together, etc.

Think about this: how much does the President of the US make? Not a lot compared to the people that supported his campaigns. Organizers and leaders don’t have to be billionaires.

No, they don’t HAVE to be. But when people have a demonstrated ability to be able to efficiently manage large collections of resources, then people are generally willing pay them a lot of money for their services. CEO’s are rich because they get paid well. They don’t become CEO’s because they are rich.

quote:

In a capitalist country, the people who have proven most effective at organizing and controlling the means of production largely wind up being the ones in the biggest positions of power. It’s a very efficient system.

CEO’s don’t necessarily own the company. If I inherited a few million and hired a CEO with a proven track record. I could stand to make millions maybe billions more without knowing a damn thing about what the CEO is doing.

CEOs rarely own the company. The shareholders generally own the company. They appoint a board of directors, which in turn picks a CEO. If the CEO fails, the board will fire him. If the board is a failure, the shareholders can vote them out. It’s very democratic.

But your point is wrong anyway. If you hire a great CEO, and as a result make more money, you did something - you made a very big decision, with very large consequences. Get it right, you get rewarded. Get it wrong, you get punished.

But I highly recommend that you pay attention to what your CEO is doing. “Not knowing a damned thing” gets punished in capitalistic societies. Just ask the shareholders of Enron.

quote:

After all, the reason an auto maker makes $35/hr is not because of a union or the good will of the company. He makes $35/hr because his labor has been magnified a hundred times over by giving him access to millions of dollars worth of machinery, which the capitalist provided to him.

Boy these capitalist sure are magical. I’m sure that capitalist worked hard mining all of that iron ore then molding into machinery. Not mention all of the engineering degrees he had to get to design all that machinery. When he constructed the building by himself that was quite a sight to see too.

It’s not magical. These capitalists evaluated proposals from people, and decided to invest their own money in one. A company was born. The capitalists then had to find managers with the right level of education and experience and put them in charge of their money. At each step along the way to building a company, there is risk. The vast majority of start-ups fail. Many companies survive but never return a profit to the investors, or return a smaller profit than they could have gotten in the money markets.

But now that the company has been started, these same people then hire the right engineers, laborers, etc. They have to build the structure of the company. They have to work out distribution rights, agreements with partners, set prices, build marketing plans, etc. Or they have to know who to hire to achieve that.

Then there are a million ways that company can go into the weeds. The corporate culture can become stale, or poisonous. Crooked managers can fleece the company. Laborers can go on strike. The list goes on. Building a large company is not easy, and keeping it running smoothly is harder.

So now a worker comes along. He is hired into this corporation, and reaps the benefits of efficient manufacture, wide distribution, good marketing, etc. Because his wage increases proportional to the level of productivity the company achieves. Why? Because in a capitalist country, when a company shows ‘excess’ profits (i.e. by trying to keep all the money and not pass on efficiency savings to the workers), some competitor will see an opportunity and hire all the people away.

That’s why in the U.S. the profit margin averages only about 3%. Competition.

quote:

In reality, capitalists enter into contracts with workers. Both bring value to the table, and both benefit.

Because the vast majority of wealth is already owned by a very few capitalists. The choices are limited. You can sell your labor as a business owner or as an employee but almost no one can afford to buy a factory.

The choice is not limited. I’m a ‘worker’, and I could find a job with any number of companies. They are in competition for my services.

And the vast amount of wealth in a capitalist country is NOT owned by a very few. The most INCOME is earned by the top 10 percent or so, but most of the wealth in a capitalist country is contained in the infrastructure. And that infrastructure is largely owned by the people. 401k’s now make up a significant percentage of investment capital. Private investment by the middle class is another significant percentage. And even the poorest benefit from it because capitalism ensures that they have access to that infrastructure to leverage their own labor capability. Even a janitor benefits from trash companies hauling trash and cleaning products companies making better cleaning products.

[sailor]

>> Why didnt communism ever work?
>> When we speak of communism capitalism will inevitably follow. But the point of this thread is not to establish which is better; I’m simply asking if communism will work and why it hasn’t in the past.

When someone asked Albert Einstein “How’s your wife?” he replied “Compared to what?”

You see, everything is relative.

“Can communism work?” you ask and I say “compared to what?” and it so happens capitalism is the inevitable comparison because that is the most widespread system and what communism would replace.

Can communism work better than capitalism? The 20th century taught us in practical terms that it cannot. If you have any doubts just take a trip to Cuba where they practice all those things like the State owns all means of production etc. The practical result is people is there is not enough food to go around and people are forced to eat shit. . . and there isn’t even enough shit to go around.

Then we could discuss North Korea.

Yeah, I know. We do not have to be constrained by reality here. We are discussing what could be. yeah. right. Let’s not let reality spoil the fun.

Kudos to Sam Stone who is doing a great job in this thread. I do not have the patience or the energy to participate in the nth edition of this thread.

[perspective]

Wow, quite a lot of feedback. I’m going to have to try pick out some trends in the arguments and address them as best I can. If you feel that certain points were overlooked please be patient, persistent and concise. I wish I had more time address everybody but life outside the SDMB goes on.

The first trend I see is the lack of recognition for the amount of choice that I have proposed to give individuals. Yes, this is closer to socialism and I have acknowledged this by way of saying that extremes are hard to realize in the real world(the US’s “capitalism” has it’s own overtures to socialism as well) Things that I’ve never proposed such as a “Ministry of Labor”, a bureacracy for pencil distribution, or an immediate need for a communist government/economy get thrown around as if I had. It gives me the feeling that the particulars that I’ve provided have only served to give people an excuse to ignore my overall ideas.

I’m not going to try to come up with an entire economy/government in vitro that could be instantaneously implemented. Of course there will be oversights and problems with an idea proposed by a single person. I’m willing to offer specifics in the spirit of improving them. But if I’m just going to be debated by people who have already made up their minds that communism is ipso facto inferior to capitalism, I would rather debate whether or not communism is a worthy goal to plan for in the first place.

As a converse example, with the faith that you have in capitalism, would any of you feel qualified to plan by yourself the transition of China into a free market economy? Surely this a job for a whole team of people with many qualifications. And even after much discussion and debate the plan that they would hammer out would still face unforeseen problems, frustrations, adjustments, and probably minor disasters. Look at the transition Russia is currently undergoing and you’ll find that they’ve faced many, many problems without easy solutions.

People seem to be forgetting that the “free market” had it’s own self destructive tendencies towards monopolies. It also had no qualms with child labor, hazardous working conditions,unchecked environmental destruction, indentured servitude, sharecropping, or slavery. In the US capitalism has faced at least one major depression and several recessions. It is constantly being tinkered with by a multitude of bureacracies.Much of economic news centers around the actions of the Federal Reserve and impending economic stimulus packages. Capitalism, in practice, is not a static theory but a system that is maintained with great effort, skill, and government control. Capitalism did not arrive as a fully formed homonculus from somebody’s head perfectly implemented and with no need of adjusting to historical precedence or ongoing needs. I also might add that many of these adjustments can be viewed as a long term trend towards socialism.

That is why I opened my opinions on this thread with idea of a slow evolution of ideas from the actions of free individuals. Slowly through practical experimentation and the brainstorming of many capable individuals the science of living in harmony with others can be developed. There’s much work to be done and many problems to be addressed. Those who don’t want to work on it don’t have to. But it has already been successful enough to attract my interest.

Something that haven’t addressed but have been meaning to is the subject of communes that were started here in the US. I think this a great direction for the debate to head. Unfortunately, I don’t have the first hand experience with communes that I’ve had with co-ops, so I can’t comment on them as well. My impression has been that many (though not all) of them failed. I don’t think this is too surprising for any radical social experiment. If someone has lived in a commune or read a few good books on their history and wants to comment on why some failed and others did not I’d love to hear their input.

[Henry_B]

HUH!

It is impossible to write about everything said, but some comments:

• there are toilets to be cleaned in capitalism too. Someone has to do it.
• More or less I see why the “planning” in former Sovjet Union did not work as Sam Stone describes (the shoe-describtion).

Even if this should be another thread:
Should not capitalism or a capitalistic system anyhow give work, food and shelter, free health-care and education as a minimum?

Unfortunately these are often opposed by “the not so lazy people”. Or those that believe that the other ones (without ________) are just lazy.

I think this is the discussion that should be had.
But I do not want to steal this tread, so if anyone is intrested in this, please open a new one.

Communism is stone dead with its bureaucrats.
And those that were “communists” in this country, were never that. They should all be sent to the northern part of Siberia and try to learn something about real life = the life they stuffed to the people for decades.

And what was right/wrong:

• the health care was not what the propaganda told it to be. It costed nothing, that is true.
• the housing is/was under any norms.
• the shortage of everything, beginning from toilet-paper.
• the education system was good.
• the knowledge of the outern world was poor. (To know Your neighbours is very impotant in order to work against conflicts.)
• the roads. Well, the Russians jokes about this: "There are no roads, just directions (to walk).
  Some 100 years ago a writer, maybe Pushkin, I do not remember, said: “There are only two faults in Russia; bad roads and many fools”.
  I can assure You that here are many very bright guys also, but the roads remains…
• the bureacracy is just something unbelieveble.
• this is the richest country in the world, just people is and always has been, poor.
  And here the people is, like everywhere: nice and very nice.
  But that has nothing to do with communism.

I try to stop my rant here.