That was actually really helpful. Fascism and communism seem linked in some people's heads sometimes.

Well, you have to admit, it's one of the better ways of enforcing it when people are waiting in line for hours to get into a store with no food inside. Get a democracy in there and I'll bet communism gets thrown out right quick.


On the other hand, yeah, my bad.

Why? You have to assume that the voters have been removed from the hundreds of years of subtle brainwashing of capital democracy.

Also Krylo's post was totally everything I should have said but didn't because I'm an idiot.
Though the problem is that you can't entirely seperate the economic models and the political models. For example, democracy as we know it, is so entirely based around the ideals and methods of capitalism that it is difficult to imagine how that could function outside of a capitalist system without bewing more accurately classified as an anarchy.
I'm referring to the whole substructure/superstructure idea where the substructure is the economic base of a society and the production hierachies and the superstructure is pretty much everything else including political organisation. The substructure is one of the largest determinants of how the superstructure organises itself because economic means are so important as to condition how we act and think in other areas of life. It can be seen in the modern day "democracy" where because our economies are all capitalist, democracy has taken on aspects of capitalism such that the two are now often indistinguishable. I don't think I'm argunig or explaining this very well though :(.
But in general it can be useful to seperate out economic and political terms.

There was a better way to word that but I couldn't think of it.
 

You're stating conclusions that come from your own bias. Personally, I'm not in support of the whole Communist/Socialist economic model, but it isn't hard to see that you've already decided what you believe and that every statement of yours is merely an extension of that, rather than being from an understanding of how these systems function.

Yeah, especially because capitalism is designed to be an inefficient mode of production so a communist model will have far far more food available than a capitalist system.

Inefficient how? Isn't the whole idea that people will find the best way to do something so that their incentives are maximized? That is, doesn't rational self interest dictate that since whoever has the most efficient means of production/service/whatever will get the most out of their payment/whateverincentiveyoulike that people will always be striving for the most efficient means?

Because, as I said, human nature tends towards thinking of oneself first and others later. People are simply not so philanthropic as to do their best for no incentive, which means communism, on a large scale, needs to be enforced. Communism works in things like small farming communities because the people have an individual reliance on each other and all know each other, which is in itself incentive to do their best. When you factor in many faceless individuals, that breaks down. Humans only have a limited capacity to recognize numbers, and anything past that becomes a statistic, which is hard to sympathize with. When people are living in suboptimal conditions like communism tends to produce, they tend to want to change things.

You know, I think you're wrong about that. I'm just factoring in past examples and basic human nature. Tell me, would you just absolutely love to give all your money to people in Africa who you don't know and will never meet? Same principle. Humans will generally only work to benefit themselves and those immediately around them under normal circumstances. Communism is about everyone working to benefit everyone, which is much too large in scale for a human brain to wrap itself around and therefore must be artificially enforced. Communism would be great if people could just do it, but things don't work that way.

We're not thinking in practical terms. Again, you're assuming everyone is willing to give their all for no incentive, which history shows they aren't.

This is also very true. Competition ensures better products to catch the consumers, while in theory, production falls into an optimal balance based on ability to produce. Of course, theory is bunk, but it works better than the theory behind communism. Capitalism assumes people are self-servicing pricks and caters itself to that.

So basically, you're taking in the human factor along with your definitions?

I wasn't defining in the first place. I was providing examples. Notice that I mentioned Europe and China. There's a difference.


Edit: My bad. I guess I did try to define a bit, and yeah, I guess I did mix in the human factor. On the other hand, my examples weren't entirely wrong given that. There's a difference between theory and reality, and as a practical person, I tend to focus on reality.

Maybe in theory, it's disputed. Certainly not in practice.
There are multiple ways capitalism is inefficient.
A) There is reproduction of goods far beyond neccessity and this tends to lead to most production focusing on luxury, non-necessity goods.
B) The vast majority of wealth and resources in capitalism goes not into production but into planning the production and not actually into the production. See: the finance and business sectors which are so ridiculously massive that it is hard to imagine while producing nothing
and the most important
C) Capitalism leads to a vast under-investment in technology because it is not profitable for the investors, thus crippling production from the beginning.
Being profitable does not equal being productive. Especially not in the long-term. Capitalism is about extracting short terms values of wealth which have no relation to productivity int he short term and especially not in the long term.

Communism does not produce suboptimal conditions. It leads to better conditions that capitalism except for say the top 1% of society. The other 99% will outvote them.
As a guide USSR and China and Vietnam are excellent examples of capitalist societies. Do not use the poor conditions in these countries as failures of communism, they are failures of capitalism.


That's because people have been influenced by hundreds of years of capitalism. Human nature can change.
And the problem is that people see it as a loss. Once they become educated that everybody in communism will have more, and more than they possibly need, they won't be bothered. People have been misinformed by their masters and that brainwashing needs to be overcome.


Again, superabundance.


This is how capitalism was concieved in the 1700s. Nobody takes this seriously anymore. Capitalism isn't about production, it's about wealth. There is an important difference. It is possible that this could occur in a "free market" but no such things exist.
Capitalism actually maximises inefficiency because production is expensive. It is far cheaper to stifle your market. Without perfect and instant flow of goods and people there is no "free market" to correct anything. In addition, all the capital is tied up in finance so nobody can outcompete the inefficient procedures and the world remains inefficient, unproductive and unmechanised. Estimates of productivity I've seen put the current world at about 5-10% of optimised efficiency.

TL:DR version- "Free market" is a nonsensicle idea unless you have perfect teleporters which also allow you control of time. There is also a waste of resources and modern capitalism ties this waste into finance such that actual production is minimised rather maximised.
Because investment capital is restricted to the upper tier it is far more profitable for them to run a semi-monopoly and to waste it. Beaurcracy is far far cheaper than production and the investors have no real challenge to this position except in the sphere of finance which does not concern productivity.