broke_wagon
broke_wagon on Hacker News
You seem to have a very particular idea of one kind of communism, and you seem happy to interpose it into my opinions.
Having said nothing about how or even if communism should be brought about, I certainly acknowledge that it seeks to bar certain apparently voluntary economic interactions on the grounds that they are not as voluntary as they first seem.
Take the rest of your strawman with you, I have no use for it.
I am painfully aware that this argument seems prone to a "no true Scotsman" defense, but really, the basic principles of communism are very much at odds with many of its famous "proponents" (usurpers).
Well said, thank you for your explanation.
It sounds like you are confusing communism with central ownership or state ownership. Communism is only concerned with the ability of workers to have meaningful control of work activity and output.
Of course it's just a process. Capitalism is a process which centralizes surplus and power, i.e., increases inequality, and communism is a process which decentralizes surplus and power, i.e. decreases inequality. Calling communism unrealistic and disastrous is again just being diminutive.
Communists want for people who do productive work to have an equal say in how work is done and what happens to the product. Not complicated, not unrealistic, and certainly not an inevitable disaster.
In empirical terms, there's a lot more evidence for the disaster-causing tendency of capitalism than communism. At the very worst, the end result of communism is empirically unknown, since, to date, communism has not been allowed to flourish on a noteworthy scale.
Carrying a communist (or capitalist, or ...) banner around as you pillage doesn't make you a communist (or a capitalist, or ...). Attack the system, not those who usurp its name. Only then we can have a discussion.
Communism isn't some "radical" boogeyman, it's just a process to eliminate inequality. (Why should there be any inequality at all?) We don't need to be diminutive about relatively different ideas; that's unhelpful at best.