You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don’t produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
Yes. But don’t worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries “never make the same mistakes as their predecessors,” so if we starve it’ll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
“Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn’t repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely.”
It’s a little different than “nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real.”
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
The funny thing: both memes are true… We live in a fkin disgusting world where every system oppresses. People who think capitalism works for the people are equally braindead as the ones claiming China and Russia are communist utopias.
Sure Marxist communism could be great, but it yet has to be archived
Nobody thinks that Russia is communist. However, whatever you want to call China, it’s objectively better than what we have in the west. One thing to note though is that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the Communist party has 95 million members.
China lifted 800 million out of poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. People in China also enjoy high social mobility.
Unsurprisingly, government satisfaction in China is extremely high and unmatched by any western democracy:
Numerous studies and surveys also show that people who actually live in China feel their country is democratic in a sense of having a government that works in the interest of the majority. In fact, far higher percentage of people living in China feel their system is democratic than those living in US
Finally, China is the only major country that’s actually doing anything meaningful to transition off fossil fuels. Once again, making absolutely stunning progress this year alone.
So, yeah, China might not be an utopia, and they have plenty of problems. However, it is a country where life continues to improve with each and every decade, that doesn’t suffer from constant economic crashes the way capitalist shitholes do, and where people are happy and optimistic about the future. Seems like looking at what China is doing and learning from that might be a good start for people in the west.
It’s also fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
i think your projecting something here or making a deliberate strawman, read my first sentence again and tell me where I am “able to recognize that [my] own system doesn’t live up to the ideal [i] have in [my] heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system [i] dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.”
Nobody is projecting anything here or making ant strawman. You made a false equivalence claiming that both US and China are bad. I gave you concrete examples of China continuously improving lives of its people, and being pretty much the only place in the world where major quality of life improvements are happening for the majority. If you can’t understand that, then what else is there to tell you.
Do you think China is a Marxist utopia? Because if not I don’t know why you are so butthurt by my comment, if yes my point stands.
Not sure what you are trying to proof here, to me it seems like you have two simple categories in your head: “pro me” and “anti me” and you assume everyone in the same category must be the same. I remotely mention that I don’t think China is heaven on earth and you start to talk about how I must be mentally derailed or something.
I think calling the us democratic is far fetched, butcallingg China democratic is not very close to the truth either.
Nah I don’t think China is an utopia. I just think it’s far better than what US offers. If you can’t understand that one thing can be better than the other without either being some sort of an utopia, what else is there to say.
“People who think China is a communist utopia are idiots”
And
“There is NO good aspekt of China AT ALL”
Are two different sentences and you don’t need to start calling me mentally derailed or make site long fanboy essays about China, what else there is to say?
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
As is said, it seems like you are working with only two categories in your head: “pro China” and “pro us”
That one can criticise one of them without liking the other doesn’t seem to fit in your head
Yeah that’s me, and being able to recognize that one system is a better option than the other has nothing to do with the straw man you keep making. It seems like you’re having a really hard time wrapping your head around the concept that one thing can be preferable to another without either being perfect.
Yeah, please give up on pretending you were trying to reason. What you were doing was making a transparent straw man and ignoring what I told you. That’s just lazy trolling.
How’s about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I’m not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
“Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia”
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today’s Russia “be said to be communist”, and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?
Communism isn’t the issue the same way Capitalism isn’t the issue, the issue is rich people abusing working class and poor people. Removing democracy from these systems just make them absolutely horrid in the long run. Also China isn’t communist it’s state capitalist dictatorship.
In all seriousness though Chuck Norris is a right wing weirdo who believes Climate policy is a con game designed to usher in a “one world order” and that evolution isn’t real.
The following are the twelve points that guide Mr. Norris' life:
I will develop myself to the maximum of my potential in all ways.
I will forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements.
I will always be in a positive frame of mind and convey this feeling to every person that I meet.
I will continually work at developing love, happiness and loyalty in my family and acknowledge that no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
I will look for the good in all people and make them feel worthwhile.
If I have nothing good to say about a person, I will say nothing.
I will give so much time to the improvement of myself that I will have no time to criticize others.
I will always be as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am about my own.
I will maintain an attitude of open-mindedness toward another person’s viewpoint while still holding fast to that which I know to be true and honest.
I will maintain respect for those in authority and demonstrate this respect at all times.
I will always remain loyal to God, my country, family and my friends.
I will remain highly goal-oriented throughout my life because that positive attitude helps my family, my country, and myself.
I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that’s an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that’s a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying “I believe in socialism” doesn’t dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.
memes
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.