We need to reform globally to allow all countries to have the same opportunities. At the moment, only a handful of nations control the money, the power... and they hoarde it. It is high time for a uniform global government that can redistribute wealth amongst nations and allow the people of every nation an equal opportunity.

A global communist system that has a global budget will solve all of the issues that the world today faces. We need to focus on the issues of the people... each person is created equally, so we need to treat them as such.

11/4/2012 12:13:11 AM

Time to stop posting when you've been drinking.

The only things that will make this happen ever is a giant fucking meteor or an alien invasion. Or a pandemic that kills just about everyone.

11/4/2012 1:02:03 AM

^

and even then it'd take a shitload of force by those in power to make it happen

[Edited on November 4, 2012 at 1:04 AM. Reason : ]

11/4/2012 1:04:11 AM

OP obvs. hasn't had just oneshot

11/4/2012 1:00:43 AM

Quote :

"The only things that will make this happen ever is a giant fucking meteor or an alien invasion."

Paul Krugman's plan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/paul-krugman-alien-invasion_n_1609805.html

11/4/2012 1:59:10 AM

^ Krugman is a very smart man. He is a comrade that realizes that the only way to reduce the deficit and end the economic slowdown is to spend as much as possible.

11/4/2012 8:39:16 AM

krugman is one of the least intelligent men on the planet.

unless you just believe he doesn't believe anything he says and he's being paid handsomely to write his hack pieces.

So either he's one of the least intelligent or the least reputable men on the planet. either way...

11/4/2012 9:09:05 AM

Hopefully you sensed my sarcasm about Krugman.

Anyway, got into a discussion with someone who is a registered member of the communist party... I didn't realize the shit they believe. Essentially that there needs to be a global government to control the wealth amongst nations and each nation has a budget. Really scary shit... My first post was almost verbatim of what a registered member of the US Communist party said to me on Friday.

Its almost comical... shit is fucked up enough on the federal level. How the hell do they expect it to work on the global level?

Their end goal is that everyone is paid equal and everyone is equal. The whole notion of a global communist system to redistribute wealth amongst nations is quite frankly idiotic and will never happen.

[Edited on November 4, 2012 at 9:55 AM. Reason : .]

11/4/2012 9:53:31 AM

They are all secretly Masons. Communists, socialists, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and Rotarians.

11/4/2012 10:00:52 AM

No, no, no. The communists ARE the aliens, man.

11/4/2012 12:23:30 PM

^ Oh yes, the reptilian alien space dwellers from the Planet Nibiru. It all makes sense now!

11/4/2012 1:11:50 PM

Idiotic is the wrong word to describe it. It is more utopian because it would only work if there were more selfless people than selfish people which is not realistic to ever happen based on human nature. If we look at other species, of insects in particular, there is much more efficiency when everyone does their job, cares for the well being of the entire colony and the well being of each other. Humans are territorial hoarders by nature but at the same time we are smart enough by nature to change our very nature.

Global gdp per capita is about 1000 per month which is quite a bit in the grand sense of things. If you think about the communal sharing of resourxces, everyone would be able to pool and easily get what they need with 1000 per month. That is basically a grad student;s life.

11/4/2012 1:53:17 PM

Quote :

"Idiotic is the wrong word to describe it. It is more utopian because it would only work if there were more selfless people than selfish people which is not realistic to ever happen based on human nature."

please define human nature.

are you one of the selfless or the selfish people?

11/4/2012 6:47:42 PM

Human nature is used to describe basic instinctive human behaviors that have been inherited from our ancestors on a basis of individual fitness. Being selfish and hoarding resources increased your chances of surviving and reproducing.

Quote :

"are you one of the selfless or the selfish people?"

An easy litmus test would be to ask someone who makes more than 12k per year if they would be in favor of a global communist system with knowledge that it was guaranteed to work.

I would answer yes to that question and therefore I am one of the selfless people.

11/4/2012 7:19:53 PM

What's idiotic is the pursuit of an impossible fantasy. Global communism will never happen because the amount of cooperation and altruism needed to reach that is beyond our capacity as a species.

The concept itself isn't "idiotic". If, somehow, humanity were organized into a single, cooperative workforce, we could achieve incredible things. There's enough space, resources and energy readily available on this planet to give everyone, the entire human population, a standard of living that is both rich (by US standards) and sustainable. All that's required is efficient resource and workforce management.

11/5/2012 1:14:59 PM

What smart people believe: Homo sapiens, having evolved fully about 200,000 years ago as hunter-gatherers in the plains of Africa, have desires and instincts that also just happen to be perfectly attuned to a 6-billion person global industrial economy such that their individual whims, limited rationality, and desires exercised in a market happen will emergently produce sustainable, prosperous, just outcomes and efficient allocations of scarce natural resources from now until the end of time.

[Edited on November 5, 2012 at 1:38 PM. Reason : .]

11/5/2012 1:37:59 PM

So the last time someone took up the Communist banner and established a world order around it, there was still tremendous inequality with the bulk of the resources concentrated around the Soviet Union while the satellite states got scraps. Of course, modern communists will simply wave their hands and say that the Soviet world order wasn't true communism, but short of hyperlocal communes, I have yet to hear any communist offer up a better means to implement a Marxist system that didn't require the execution of intellectuals and a bureaucratic boot on the throat of the masses.

11/5/2012 5:59:14 PM

and let's not forget that within the Soviet Union, resources were concentrated in Russia

and within Russia (like really all other commie states), they were concentrated in the Kremlin and its Kronies

[Edited on November 5, 2012 at 6:12 PM. Reason : like the KGB

11/5/2012 6:11:30 PM

Soviet Union was a hoax. You can't have a ruling party or emperor in a true communism. Its just a form of fraud alternative to the "everyone can make themselves rich in capitalism" ponzi scheme. The party takes too much and does things to help themselves while everyone else suffers. Show me a democratic communism.

11/5/2012 8:23:14 PM

Quote :

"If you think about the communal sharing of resourxces, everyone would be able to pool and easily get what they need with 1000 per month. "

So that would be $12,000 a year. I pay $25,800 in rent a year here in Boston ($2,150/mo). There is no way that I would get by. The cheapest studios here are $1,500... you could room with people but that still ends up being $700/mo. Living by on $1,000/mo in certain areas of the county and world is just not possible, especially when considering the cost of living.

11/5/2012 9:02:43 PM

The soviet union was a state socialist, or state capitalist endeavor (depending on how you look at it). When you consider that it had a wage system, lacked direct democracy of the work place (having eradicated the actual soviets), and that the *state was the sole employer*, it becomes clear that it's a form of bureaucratic capitalism (where capital is the collective property of a bureaucratic class).

Think about the fact that East German workers led a revolt calling for a "government of steel workers". You can't acknowledge those sorts of events and still claim the USSR was some sort of accurate incarnation of Communism. Plenty of forms of "socialism" or "communism" try to develop an image of the working class in the national mind as they organize their industry through the state. This externalized image of the worker is a symbol of oppression to actual workers, though, which should tell you something about whether or not it's actually Communism.

Take a look at the Paris Commune or some of the actual soviets for organic examples of socialism. Just pointing at the USSR and going "DUHHH COMMUNISM" is essentially buying into the lowest brow American propaganda there is. Don't buy the okey doke.

11/5/2012 9:11:32 PM

Quote :

"So that would be $12,000 a year. I pay $25,800 in rent a year here in Boston ($2,150/mo). There is no way that I would get by. The cheapest studios here are $1,500... you could room with people but that still ends up being $700/mo. Living by on $1,000/mo in certain areas of the county and world is just not possible, especially when considering the cost of living."

No cost of living is often inflated due to people stealing outrageous profit, Most of that 1500 for rent is going towards helping someone make a lot more than 12,000 dollars. I'm pretty confident most of those boston landlords make more than that in a month. Theres enough houses and resources for everyone to live in. rent could only be maintenance and even maintenance would be lower if nobody could make more than 12k.

11/5/2012 9:52:51 PM

Who will enforce that nobody makes over $1,000/mo? Will all money be distributed to the individual by the government?

[Edited on November 5, 2012 at 10:35 PM. Reason : mo]

11/5/2012 10:35:08 PM

Ideally, there wouldn't be money or government "leaders". You're not going to actually hand out 12k checks because our whole idea of what 12k is would be moot in this system. Like I said in the other post, the cost of many things involves heavy profit for the rich. 12kper year figure is just to give you an idea of the worst case scenario quality of life but 12k would go a lot further in this world as you would get 12k worth of ultra-wholesale pre-profit goods.

Everyone lives near where they work and everyone works but gets equal time off in which they can spend how they want. Some people work in entertainment and vacation. Everything is still the same but you could think of it as one giant all-inclusive resort (in terms of the absence of money not in terms of the unlimited open bar aspect) except everyone works also.

[Edited on November 5, 2012 at 10:52 PM. Reason : k]

11/5/2012 10:47:36 PM

Thinking there will never be government leaders is extremely naive. There will always be people in every society who will have others gravitate toward them. That gravitational pull will go to someone's head, and you end up back where you started, with leaders calling the shots.

That's just how we do.

Give me a group of more than a couple hundred people without some leader telling others what to do. Yea, I'm sure you could find some tribe out in Australia living like that, but with millions of people in a society, it just won't work.

11/6/2012 7:56:55 AM

Quote :

"Give me a group of more than a couple hundred people without some leader telling others what to do. Yea, I'm sure you could find some tribe out in Australia living like that, but with millions of people in a society, it just won't work."

Check out "Workers Councils".

11/6/2012 10:40:08 AM

time for oneshot to return to China.

11/6/2012 1:06:55 PM

Quote :

"Take a look at the Paris Commune or some of the actual soviets for organic examples of socialism. Just pointing at the USSR and going "DUHHH COMMUNISM" is essentially buying into the lowest brow American propaganda there is. Don't buy the okey doke."

That's what the caveat was of "hyperlocal communism." I've seen successful communes at the local level, but things begin to fall apart when you start to scale it. I'm not saying the Soviets got it right, but you can't simply dismiss it either given that it was the only real attempt on a national or global level to establish a Marxist state. The Soviet example shows just how hard it is to do something like this at a national or international level because of all the pitfalls and detours it can take as you try to figure out how to run an entire nation on the system.

It's like all the so-called democratic and capitalist nations out there where almost no one has figured out how to do either purely at a national level and made systematic compromises to get some sort of system up and running... all examples are perversions of both, but in their critiques of those ideologies, they still point to them as examples of why those systems are flawed.

11/6/2012 2:49:44 PM

I like riding my unicorn to Sunday brunch.

11/6/2012 3:05:32 PM

Quote :

"That's what the caveat was of "hyperlocal communism." I've seen successful communes at the local level, but things begin to fall apart when you start to scale it. I'm not saying the Soviets got it right, but you can't simply dismiss it either given that it was the only real attempt on a national or global level to establish a Marxist state. The Soviet example shows just how hard it is to do something like this at a national or international level because of all the pitfalls and detours it can take as you try to figure out how to run an entire nation on the system."

You won't find many anarchist-left or other libertarian socialist strains that would argue with the first statement--governance should be devolved to the lowest possible level (closest to the individual) as possible. You should see Marxist critiques of the Soviet Union for more (Pannekoek has a pretty good one, as does Guy Debord).

The point is never to run within the "nation state" model. When you say "Marxist state", what do you mean? Marx envisioned a take-over of the state only long enough to enact "proletarian reform", after which the state would be *dissolved*. One of the lessons of 20th century revolution is that organizations effective for taking over bourgeois structures and governments are *not* effective at dissolving and restoring direct power to the workers. Russia has all of the lessons you need to know on this front.

Could you run a *state* this way? Maybe not, but the point is to have local communes (workers councils) working with each other via other processes (sending of recallable delegates). It's hard to imagine how industry would start to lace itself together at the higher levels, in this way, as it tends to happen based on the needs of the moment.

The greatest theoretical triumph of 19th and 20th century socialism came in the form of the practical, organic realizations that theory didn't predict--the workers council system.

Quote :

"It's like all the so-called democratic and capitalist nations out there where almost no one has figured out how to do either purely at a national level and made systematic compromises to get some sort of system up and running... all examples are perversions of both, but in their critiques of those ideologies, they still point to them as examples of why those systems are flawed."

This is why a bottom-up approach that empowers individuals can be quite powerful. The only desirable feature of a "federation" that includes many communes, say, is that it can provide an organization that protects individuals from excesses in their own communities.

11/6/2012 3:35:25 PM

Quote :

"Human nature is used to describe basic instinctive human behaviors that have been inherited from our ancestors on a basis of individual fitness. Being selfish and hoarding resources increased your chances of surviving and reproducing."

what about non-agrian communities? is it possible that the actions of humans have more to do with their environment than some fundamental nature?

Quote :

"I would answer yes to that question and therefore I am one of the selfless people."

if you're selfless, then presumably there are others who are also selfless. is it possible for the selfless to outnumber the selfish, potentially even overwhelmingly so?

Quote :

"Global communism will never happen because the amount of cooperation and altruism needed to reach that is beyond our capacity as a species."

i'm not a proponent of any specific form of social organization, but your claim is unsubstantiated. you're essentially saying, "we can't ever do that because we don't do that now." if we were in the Dark Ages, and you suggested to some fellow serf that maybe we could have system of self-governance rather than ruled by some dude who's authority was derived from divine right, they'd likely say you're crazy, talking about the impossible.

the world is the way it is largely because we've made it this way. that means we can make it some other way, if we so choose.

11/6/2012 4:52:32 PM

My question is this: If everyone makes the same amount, $1,000/mo, then what would motivate me to work my current developer job where I have to work extra hours fixing bugs, going to events during the week nights promoting a product, etc?

I can't be the only one that would consider a less strenuous job if pay is set for every job position.

11/6/2012 5:06:09 PM

we eliminate the monetary system so you don't get paid anything

what would motivate you to do any work would be the same thing that would motivate anyone else to do any work, the inherent satisfaction of utilizing your mind and body and the subsequent contribution it provides to all those around you

[Edited on November 6, 2012 at 5:14 PM. Reason : ...]

11/6/2012 5:14:22 PM

Quote :

"what about non-agrian communities? is it possible that the actions of humans have more to do with their environment than some fundamental nature?"

Quote :

"if you're selfless, then presumably there are others who are also selfless. is it possible for the selfless to outnumber the selfish, potentially even overwhelmingly so?"

There used to be a lot more but they were slowly killed off or died off while those who were selfish and looked out for themselves and their family were more likely to produce offspring. Natural selection at its worst.

11/6/2012 10:27:07 PM

^^ riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I want some of what you are smoking, dude.

11/6/2012 10:53:12 PM

^just a suggestion, something to aim for, something i have faith that humanity is capable of

Quote :

"Natural selection at its worst."

i don't think that's a manifestation of "natural selection" that we're slaves to

humans are capable of all sorts of social organizations

if we wanted to structure things differently we could

11/7/2012 2:08:50 AM

but by definition, true communism is something you could never force. Force and communism just don't work together unless you force someone out of the system completely. But in this world, the globe is the system so there must be global communism to be true communism unless you could reestablish complete isolationism within the boundaries of all necessary resources.

Since you cannot force it, selfish people will always ruin it. Since we have evolved to be selfish, we are not quite cut out to be communal/colonial species.

11/7/2012 2:22:41 AM

the way that we evolved to behave, at a time when humans scarcely occupied the earth, is not a good model for behavior going forward.

it was good to be selfish back in the day, b/c food was hard to find and there weren't many other people around who needed it. i don't think i have to explain that neither of these are true anymore. we evolved when we created (discovered?) agriculture. we must evolve again into a cooperative species, or we will die. just like a cancer that kills its host. be smarter than cancer, y'all.

Quote :

"^^ riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I want some of what you are smoking, dude."

you would work b/c if you didn't you'd be an outcast in society, and women would not want to reproduce with you. based on posts of yours, i gather it'd pretty much be business as usual for you.

11/7/2012 3:53:11 AM

So what would prevent someone from starting a "black market" business and profiting on it (over $1,000/mo)? Also, how would the global government punish people for starting a business that creates profit over the threshold?

11/7/2012 8:36:34 AM