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Capitalism VS Communism - Which Is Better?

Debate Information

Do you belive that Capitalism is better than Communism?
Nathaniel_B
  1. Live Poll

    ?

    13 votes
    1. Yes
      84.62%
    2. No
      15.38%
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  • AlexOlandAlexOland 313 Pts   -  
    Depends on if you like starving or not.
    DrCerealGeorge_HorseMasterofPunNathaniel_BcheesycheeseZombieguy1987
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    I think communism is viable on a very small scale, such as a single family of 4 sharing resources between its members - but does not work as soon as the structure reaches a certain size (say, a few dozen people) and shared resources become very hard to manage and very easy to exploit.

    Communism on a societal scale is a suicide. Very quick and violent suicide, as the only communist system attempted in history (Pol Pot's Kampuchea) shows.
    DrCerealNathaniel_BcheesycheeseZombieguy1987
  • George_HorseGeorge_Horse 499 Pts   -  
    AlexOland said:
    Depends on if you like starving or not.
    You just had to say that didn't you?
    Nathaniel_BZombieguy1987
    "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? " ~Epicurus

    "A communist is like a crocodile" ~Winston Churchill

    We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.~Orson Welles
  • someone234someone234 647 Pts   -  
    Tamed Capitalism is pretty nice.
    Tamed Socialism is impossible.
    Untamed capitalism is horrific to the working class.
    Untamed Socialism may as well be Fascism considering how the regimes carry it out.
    Zombieguy1987cheesycheese
  • CheesusFarleyCheesusFarley 27 Pts   -  
    If a democratic libertarian communism could be deployed correctly, it would genuinely be a utopia. However, any type of communism is profoundly arduous, if not even possible to be successfully deployed. It doesn't work in authentic life. The only thing in my opinion that would work is a libertarian-moderate capitalist moderate economic system.
    Zombieguy1987
  • I strongly stand with Communism if you are talking about a state or a welfare state as in Communism, the community or society solely owns the resources or the means of production. On the other hand, in capitalism, the resources or the means of production lies with a private owner.


    cheesycheese
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    AlexOland said:
    Depends on if you like starving or not.
    I can't tell which side of the debate this is in favour of.
    WordsMatterZombieguy1987cheesycheese
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    Capitalism:








    Communism:







    I will let you decide which is better for you.

    DrCerealNathaniel_BGeorge_HorseZombieguy1987cheesycheese
  • DrCerealDrCereal 193 Pts   -  
    Excuse me? Poverty in India, a capitalist nation:

    Your post is cherry picking and commits an appeal to emotion.
    George_Horse
    Bis das, si cito das.
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    @DrCereal

    GDP per capita in India over the last 10 years:

    https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/india/gdp-per-capita
    Nathaniel_BGeorge_HorseZombieguy1987
  • WordsMatterWordsMatter 493 Pts   -  
    MayCaesar said:
    I think communism is viable on a very small scale, such as a single family of 4 sharing resources between its members - but does not work as soon as the structure reaches a certain size (say, a few dozen people) and shared resources become very hard to manage and very easy to exploit.

    Communism on a societal scale is a suicide. Very quick and violent suicide, as the only communist system attempted in history (Pol Pot's Kampuchea) shows.
    I'm going to have to disagree with you on the maximum size communism can facilitate. Many of our Hunter gatherer ancestors could be described as egalitarian communist societies. They could support up to around 100 people in a larger group, that while they worked together, would break off into 2 or 3 smaller groups for average day to day life. Once the numbers started to rise passed 100 they would break off and form 2 main independent groups, each with their own 2 or 3 subgroups. The 2 larger groups would fall out of contact and not be considered in the same society any longer. 

    These groups had the added benefit that they tended to be mostly or entirely related by blood so they had a biological interest in each other's fitness. They didn't view family structure in the same way that Western societies do today. Extended family is significantly more important in child rearing in Hunter gatherer societies than in Western societies. Even though it was a larger group it can still be considered a single family in the same way we view parents and their children as a single family. So it that sense you are right that communism works within a family but it depends on what that society defines a family to be.

     The societies tended to have no system of stratification or hierarchical structure. The closest to that would be that elders tended to settle disputes but the voice of everyone in the society carried a lot of weight in the elders decision making process. This applied in cases when members of the group felt that another member was not pulling their weight. Social punishment was delt out, depriving then of contact or certain goods, until the person either agreed to correct whatever complaint was made against them, or to be fully cast out of the group. Whether or not a person is pulling their weight was totally subjective, but in such a small society a consensus on that subjectivity is easier to reach and it was easier to monitor everyone else's effort.

    Of course these Hunter gatherers did not study political philosophy and so their societal structure was based on nothing more than what they found to work best for them through thousands of years of trial and error, and also influenced by the geography and ecology of the area. That is to say, an egalitarian communist like society was the natural organization.

    You could poke a hole in this when you consider that the means of production were simply gathering food and resources, hunting, building tools, and child rearing. Not exactly what Marx was talking about when he said the means of production.

    This type of society completely fell apart with the Advent of agriculture as that required people to focus more of their time on more specific things. The farmers could only farm. People began to specialize in more specific things and with that many different systems of society were born with varying stratification levels and hierarchies.

    Maybe these Hunter gatherer societies could be considered communist, maybe not. However, it has been shown to be possible for groups of people numbering under 100 to equally share the work put into a society, and the rewards reaped by the society.
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    @WordsMatter

    Those societies, however, quickly developed the concept that, in essence, was a progenitor of capitalism: reciprocity. Commonly and mistakenly imaged as simple sharing, there was much more for it, and it was actually much closer to free market trade than to sharing.

    Suppose someone caught a lot of fish. They would not be able to eat so much fish at once, not to mention that they need their small tribe to survive in order for themselves to survive. So they put this fish into the basked of the shared goods - but in return they acquire invisible currency, recognition, which they can then trade for favors from other members of the tribe. It was a common way to establish dominance in a tribe: those who had a lot to share (mostly acquired through hard work at the time) also gained a lot of essentially a political capital. The individual with the largest amount of that capital became de facto the head of the tribe: not exactly an absolute ruler, but a ruler nonetheless.

    In fact, many historians believe that the instability of this system is what first caused religions to appear, and later, official political structures. The problem was that not everyone in the society agreed that the ruler had as much political capital as he/she was claimed to have. This caused a lot of strife within tribes - which was extremely dangerous for the tribe at the time: the tribe in which people fight each other for the right to rule, instead of hunting and gathering, had a low chance of survival.

    The closest analogue to reciprocity in the modern days I can think of is tax breaks for philantropists. Similar "tax breaks" existed in those primal societies as well, they simply were done with a consensually agreed upon virtual currency, rather than real physical assets. A person who had much more of that currency than another member of the tribe had a strong degree of control over that individual and could often send them to collect resources in one's stead.

    What those gatherers had was not exactly a vertical structure of the society, but nor was it horizontal. I would characterize it as similar to crony versions of capitalism nowadays such as the one in China or Russia: people with a lot of economical assets gained a large degree of control over the politics in the society and could, to an extent, dictate their will to their subordinates.

    The problem with plain sharing is that, as the number of members grows, the number of economical disputes between them grows as that number squared. When there is only a few people in the group, they can easily find a centralized consensus. But where there are hundreds people, it becomes impossible to accommodate for everyone's needs as soon as a single member goes rogue and breaks off the consensus. In this case, it becomes essential to control the rogue individuals by force - and that sets a precedent that in practice has little chance to not be abused. This is what the Inca empire was like: the basic assets were essentially shared between people, but there was a certain enforced ideology that dictated just how much everyone's share was, and those who abused the trust of the society were punished harshly. In the end, it was a totalitarian system that gave its people some economical freedoms, but controlled almost everything else in their lives.

    ---

    Sharing can be very helpful in various conditions, even sharing in very large groups (sharing of knowledge with everyone through Wikipedia is a good positive example of sharing) - but I do not see a more-or-less sizable group as viable when sharing the resources essential for survival and satisfaction of people's basic needs. At some (pretty early) point, "verticalization" becomes necessary. And it even happens in large families; Chinese families are a good example, with the elders having a serious pull with the younger members, a pull that is not legally enforced, but nonetheless exists in practice.

    Even two best friends or spouses have a difficulty maintaining a strictly equal relationship; arguments over who gets to go to a grocery store, or to select a movie to watch on TV, are very common even in the most loving couples. While larger groups can successfully share almost everything for a time being, I do not think such structures are very stable and durable. Humans are survivors by nature, and as such, we only tend to care about the good of others as long as it results in the good for ourselves. When we share resources, we do it for practical reasons, and when those reasons stop being valid, then a sharing-based system falls apart.
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    Maybe these Hunter gatherer societies could be considered communist, maybe not. However, it has been shown to be possible for groups of people numbering under 100 to equally share the work put into a society, and the rewards reaped by the society.
    Generally they wouldn't be - they're at a stage in society where the means of production and ownership of them - as well as a commodity driven society - are so alien as to not really relate. You could maybe call them socialist if you are happy with a fair few "except for this..." exceptions but you couldn't call them Communist as that's revolves around essentially a post-scarcity society (at least in terms of all fundamental needs).
  • Nathaniel_BNathaniel_B 182 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar And India during the Cold War was a ally of the Soviets, I’m not sure when or if they were really socialist, but they declare themselves to be socialist. 
    George_HorseZombieguy1987
    “Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.” ~Peter Drucker 

    "It's not a gun control problem, it's a cultural control problem."
    Bob Barr
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    @Nathaniel_B

    They did employ certain socialist policies, and several Indian states even declared themselves communist for the time being - Indian political structure is strongly decentralized. Ultimately, however, I think the reason of the state of their economy is not the influence of socialism, but, rather, their general caste-based societal structure. In India, the government is notoriously powerless with regards to upholding the law, and until recently the Indian political system was as close to a "rule of the mob" as it could get.

    Nowadays, India is developing very rapidly, but I am somewhat skeptical with regards to its future: whatever economical policies they implement, they will not get too far until they change how their society works. That said, free market reforms can do miracles even in such places.

    Capitalism does not magically guarantee prosperity; it is simply one of the required ingredients. Communism, however, almost certainly guarantees a total and complete economical, political and societal failure.
    George_HorseNathaniel_BZombieguy1987cheesycheese
  • cheesycheesecheesycheese 79 Pts   -  
    Tamed Capitalism is pretty nice.
    Tamed Socialism is impossible.
    Untamed capitalism is horrific to the working class.
    Untamed Socialism may as well be Fascism considering how the regimes carry it out.
    Tamed socialism is entirely possible just look at denmark it’s the happiest nation on earth
    Nathaniel_BZombieguy1987
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    @cheesycheese

    Denmark has nothing to do with socialism. It has a thriving free market, and is an investment heaven in many regards.

    There are very few socialist or semi-socialist states on this planet right now, and all of them are at the bottom of quality of life, press freedom and political freedom indexes. And given that even many self-called socialist states have implemented or are implementing radical free market reforms (China and Vietnam are good examples), the list is incredibly short. Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Laos - and we just about ran out.
    Nathaniel_BZombieguy1987cheesycheese
  • cheesycheesecheesycheese 79 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar when i say socialism i mean the fact that Denmark doesn't care about people on welfare paying them back while America is under the false impression that you get what you deserve while still not paying for education then they blame people for not being able to afford university
  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -  
    @cheesycheese ;

    Well, you cannot just redefine terms at your leisure. In this thread we are talking about socialism/communism, not what you personally decide to define as socialism/communism.

    You are also wrong if you think that Denmark just hands money over to everyone without any expectations. The gap between the state's narrative claiming to be providing for everyone, and the poor segment of the society that struggles to get anything out of the system, is one of the main topics among economists in Denmark these days.
    cheesycheese
  • Polaris95Polaris95 147 Pts   -  
    @MayCaesar

    You're confusing socialism with communism. Spain has a socialist government right now, and it's working better than with the right-wing government they had before.
    cheesycheese
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