Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi all! We have been experiencing an issue on site where threads have been missing the latest postings. The platform host Vanilla are working on this issue. A workaround that has been used by some is to navigate back from 1 to 10+ pages to re-sync the thread and this will then show the latest posts. Thanks, Mike.
Hi there,
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest

Is communism as bad as people say

1356

Comments

  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 18,190 ✭✭✭✭Dohnjoe


    In practice Communism was a failure and it's not like we dabbled in it for a few years, it was a consolidated failure over decades. Attempts to rebalance wealth were actually successful, but not quite in the way it was originally envisioned, essentially everyone became poor.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,503 ✭✭✭✭Mad_maxx


    This country will be one of the first to go red should we ever see a return of communism spreading internationally in a big way.



  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]


    Rich and middle-class folk championing it are some craic.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    communism isnt coming back, we need to move on from this



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,427 ✭✭✭dublin49


    Success for capitalism is a society that accepts ridiculous greed as something to be aspired to by everybody.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 41,102 ✭✭✭✭Annasopra


    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

    Terry Pratchet



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 41,102 ✭✭✭✭Annasopra


    You're the one making the statement they are. Wheres your proof.

    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

    Terry Pratchet



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,378 ✭✭✭mikethecop


    this is exactly the problem with communism ,


    its a great idea on paper but incompatible with humanity



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,419 ✭✭✭✭nullzero
    °°°°°


    The world around us. All of human history.

    Human beings can be incredibly benevolent and charitable but in the whole humanity is driven by the hubris of a small minority, it has led us to war, genocide, and as far as holocaust.

    Communism has killed an estimated 94 million people. Capitalism is an extremely flawed system but when it goes wrong it doesn't result in the catastrophic situations that communism has led to.

    Capitalism is crap, Communism is a disaster.

    Glazers Out!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 16,512 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Count the number of Communist countries left, that'll give you your answer OP.



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 16,512 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Wearing Che t shirts and 'sticking it to the man'. Most grow out of it eventually.



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,614 ✭✭✭WrenBoy


    I'm aware.

    Communism is a fashion statement a the minute, it isn't actually going to happen, people need to accept that.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    so we all need to embrace greed, then what?

    im aware i live under a rock, but where is this fashionable at the moment?



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,614 ✭✭✭WrenBoy


    America. Communism/ Socialism / Anarchism are the "in" cool views to ascribe to at the minute with younger people who I would wager don't have much knowledge of the ideologies they claim to support for the most part. It's counter culture stuff thats been going on forever its just communisms/ socialisms turn now.

    Online spaces most eveidently



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 14,477 ✭✭✭✭Thelonious Monk


    Communism may not work but how many millions have capitalist countries like USA killed since after WW2, and continue to do so?

    Problem with capitalism is we're destroying everything around us and it just isn't sustainable, we should be looking at adopting other ways but I don't think we're capable of it and we'll plough on ahead until wars start kicking off, and then there's the whole climate change thing which capitalism just makes worse and worse.



  • Posts: 0 ✭✭✭ Allyson Repulsive Buckle



    "I've yet to meet anyone from Eastern Europe who thinks Communism was anything but a disaster for them."

    Not that clear cut :

    https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/15/european-public-opinion-three-decades-after-the-fall-of-communism/

    "Most Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians, and more than four-in-ten Hungarians and Slovaks, believe the economic situation for most people in their country today is better than it was under communism .... However, in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, more than half currently say things are worse for most people now than during the communist era."



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    ah id somewhat disagree there, we ve been engaging in a form of anarchist capatalism for a long time now, so nothing truly new there, my suspicions also being, very few are actually truly advocating for these ideologies, theyre actually just expressing their anger and frustrations towards this form of capatalism, and are searching for alternatives, and the most commonly known alternatives, are the ones you mentioned. my suspicions again, most may not even truly understand what these alternatives even mean, including myself, again, its just a reaction to our current failures



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    “each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.”

    so If you say are single, busting your hole, upskilling, ‘flexible’...but living at home..

    youll get paid less then a cûnt who has no interest, no motivation, no get up and go, no aptitude or want to learn, a non performing son of a gun...but because his need is to feed a family of five and what not....

    been in a job where dicks like that were ‘looked after’... procreation was a passport to happyville for them..



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78




  • Advertisement
  • Posts: 0 ✭✭✭ Allyson Repulsive Buckle


    I'd like to see a system where there are sensible min / max salaries for 99%* of all jobs, say (and this is a non scientific quick example) min 30,000 max 80,000 ..... everyone has a wage that will sustain them, there is less inequality, yet room to aspire to a "better" (by which we normally mean well-paid) job. Never happen I know, but still.

    * Why 99% ? There are always going to be a few roles usually associated with fame like sports / movies / etc that will fetch more. What I'm talking about is your bus driver, doctor, IT worker, waiter, etc.



  • Registered Users Posts: 247 ✭✭Perseverance The Second


    Like a lot of political theories it's nice on paper but does not stand up to scrutiny when you look at how many strong men have managed to exploit these systems.

    Stalin being the classic example. The Kim family in North Korea being the most prominent example of how these systems can easily be reshaped into regimes that embody the notion that "some people are more equal than others".



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 19,542 ✭✭✭✭Tony EH


    Again, one must look at who is using Communism.

    If we take Stalinist Russia and the U.S.S.R of the 20th Century, you can see that it easily fails the test of what Communism is supposed to be. It's a dictatorship for a start, and has no power derived from the people, which is one of the central points to its theoretical origins. The so called "Communism" of Russia under Stalin looks nothing like what Communism, or Communists, espouse. At nearly every turn, Stalinism rejects Communism as it's primary goal was to keep Stalin in a position of power and to subject nations outside of Russia to rule.

    Absolutely none of that is Communism and both Marx and Lenin would have balked at what Russia would become after 1924, as it resembled nothing remotely coincident to their beliefs.

    Stalin merely used the idea of Communism to hold onto power and constantly trumpeted its verbal touchstones while practising something else entirely. His rule bared little resemblance to Communism and probably mirrored that of Tsarist Russia more closely. But, as understand it, Lenin's idea for the future of Russia was for control "by the people", with the party members voted for to implement that control, which is nowhere to be seen under Stalin who appointed his own yes men to positions favourable to his ultimate goals, which entirely centred around his lust for power.

    In the end, though, Stalinism was the power of one individual through fear, not power by the people. Few folk, if any, who would consider themselves well disposed to the ideas of Communism would ever consider Stalinist Russia to be any kind of example of those ideas.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,419 ✭✭✭✭nullzero
    °°°°°


    Communism was never based in conservationist ideology. Communism isn't some green utopian ideology.

    If we're concerned about saving the planet neither capitalism or communism are the way to go.

    Glazers Out!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,419 ✭✭✭✭nullzero
    °°°°°


    All of that can be directed back to communism always falling foul of human nature.

    It's a nice idea, but it has to be implemented by humans, and humans are b*stards so it's doomed to failure by definition.

    Glazers Out!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,427 ✭✭✭dublin49


    I am not a fan of greed or capitalism so cant help you with that one.



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 19,542 ✭✭✭✭Tony EH


    Well, maybe you're selfish and the people you know are selfish. But that doesn't mean that "people" are selfish.

    If we were just purely selfish beings we wouldn't have made it out of our caves.



  • Posts: 13,688 ✭✭✭✭ Luis Long Sax


    Mankind hasn't seen communism in practice since pre-Ice Age days.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 19,542 ✭✭✭✭Tony EH


    Well, there's an argument to be made that Capitalism has never truly existed, just like the argument that's made for Communism.

    Like Communism, the basic tenets of Capitalism sound fine, too, when they are uncorrupted by individuals. A system where successful entities do well and the poorer entities have to leave the marketplace is ok...in theory. The problem with it though is that, in practice, it is destroyed by the likes of the biggest fish in the pond devouring all the competition to become monopolies and some entities being deemed "to big to fail" and being kept artificially afloat. Cronyism is absolutely rife in such a system, even when the checks and balances are put in place to try and combat it.

    One could say that we are where we are with Capitalism because, like Communism, it has been regularly been warped by people to suit their own end games. So much so, that were are now in the realm of Boom and Bust Capitalism that only benefits the very few in society. That's not what Capitalist theory was supposed to be about. The "Capitalism" of today is largely about getting as much in as possible by rampant inflation, before the whole deck of cards comes crashing down.



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,128 ✭✭✭Fattybojangles


    Communism is simply the greatest most progressive and highest achieving ideology on earth.

    Simply look at the advancements made in the Soviet Union under Communism and Comrade Stalin in 30 years they went from a back water of illiterate peasants to the second super power on the planet within 40 years they were in space.



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,614 ✭✭✭WrenBoy


    Was the juice worth the squeeze in your opinion ?



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 1,128 ✭✭✭Fattybojangles


    You don't get juice without squeezing. The advancements in education healthcare life expectancy etc were astronomical under communism.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 19,542 ✭✭✭✭Tony EH


    It falls back to the individuals who choose to use a political theory that appeals to a broad array of people for their own ends. That's not necessarily "human nature". That's the nature of that particular individual.

    One could hardly call the likes of Joseph Stalin a general example of "human nature", and I would be genuinely worried about anyone who would consider him as such.

    However, it's not just Communism that can be subject to the corruption of the individual. Political theories of all shades can be warped into the personal ideologies of those who find themselves at the top of the tree.

    This is why all power must be reckoned with, no matter where that power comes from, which I believe was one of Marx's foundations for his belief in the first place. Unfettered power, whether in the form of Communism or Capitalism (and everything in-between), will always be a bad thing.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    They were in space while their economy and wellbeing of their citizens collapsed..



  • Posts: 533 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    I find all of these debates tend to reduce things to binary arguments. We don't live in a purely capitalist or socialist society, it's a mixture of elements of both, within the framework of a pretty sophisticated representative democracy that sits inside a structure of a constitution and legal system that places emphasis on individual rights. That's true of most modern democracies.

    Pure communism largely failed. You can't really go against human nature and there's a desire to own things, be able to accumulate wealth and have a lot of control and autonomy over many aspects of life. Pure, unregulated capitalism is also a failure as it just leads to nasty oligarchies and societies that are so divided that you get extreme inequality, lack of social mobility, lack of opportunity and grinding poverty.

    I mean, look at what's being proposed by elements in the US and the UK on the libertarian fringes that have gone mainstream in the Tories and GOP - it looks like a retreat to Victorian values. All very nice and cozy, until you read Dickens or the fact that several million Irish (and Scots) who were citizens of what was then the most wealthy country on the planet, fled as economic migrants to the US and elsewhere to escape famine and girding poverty. Something was severely wrong with that...

    There's a sweet spot, and most of the post WWII democracies achieved that to some degree. Even the US which is an outlier in many ways, has a lot of social safety nets and social spending, they just have become paranoid and lost in some weird culture war where it has to be red or blue and there's no grey, which has led to things like an inability to provide anything resembling functional public health care and so on.

    Ireland's system actually quite effectively redistributes wealth, but we (along with others) would want to watch that we don't just drift into 'socialism = bad' simplistic American style debates. They achieve nothing and they misrepresent reality.

    If you listen to debates in Ireland, they're often about perceived lack of public services, not about dismantling the state or abolishing tax for example,. There's a general desire for a fair and equitable society, that does not imply that there's a desire for communism or extremes.

    Portraying socialism as Eastern Bloc, Soviet or Chinese socialist totalitarian dictatorships is a complete misrepresentation of what it is in the context of a functioning liberal democracy.



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,614 ✭✭✭WrenBoy


    Ya the wilful killing of 20million+ people and grinding down of citizens is worth it to you. To me its monstrous and objectively worse than what the Nazi's ever did but you go ahead and cheerlead. The hammer and sickle is no better than the swastika.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,427 ✭✭✭dublin49


    an alien reading about Democracy ,might suspect its operating system would be closer to Communism than Capitalism.Same goes for Christianity even more so.



  • Registered Users Posts: 240 ✭✭monkeyactive


    I wonder what Alexander Solzhenitsyn might have to say here.

    I will say one thing though , I don't think communism has ever been done right yet. There has always been psychopathic dictators or personality cults in the background and other stuff going on. Id be curious to see how it might have played out if it was worked by non lunatics especially in a modern technological society.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    Look at the socialist positives in country.

    Free Healthcare...

    about one third of people living here are medical card holders I think about 32% of the population last I read.

    Free Travel...

    over 25% of the population have a travel pass to enable them travel free on public transport.

    Free Education...

    Primary, secondary and most third level... FREE... or close.

    in terms of pensions Ireland is rated I think 14th or 16th in the world for most generous old age pensions.

    the only danger to the above is our population increasing...



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    ....theres clearly another country called ireland, cause virtually none of that is actually true for our country!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    All documented my friend... all true...you can research too.



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 29,901 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    ...so these citizens pay no taxes?

    by any chance are you a parent? free school????

    do you need to check your facts?



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 41,102 ✭✭✭✭Annasopra


    Thats not evidence that people are innately selfish 😅

    It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

    Terry Pratchet



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 25,796 ✭✭✭✭Strumms


    It’s free at the point of delivery, nobody is deprived an education because they cannot afford one...

    what are you charged for aside from uniform, books... the delivery of the education is free..

    taxes obviously fund the running of the country and paid into a pot... you won’t be billed or invoiced for your education so therefore it’s free, you are not charged. They are just the facts...



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,419 ✭✭✭✭nullzero
    °°°°°


    Whatever you say. No point arguing with someone who's got their head in the sand.

    Glazers Out!



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 20,211 ✭✭✭✭Donald Trump



    I'm not arguing for communism. Just pointing out that your scenario does not contradict communism in theory.

    Even if you remove the wealth component, you will have other factors there. If you meet a girl, do you take interest in what she does based on her earning capacity or on her intellect/looks/other factors?

    Who would you be more likely to be attracted to as a partner currently - a hooker who makes 1000 a night or a relatively poorly paid academic who is an expert on say, etymology of European languages (i.e. some random topic)? Some otherwise untrained and unqualified young wan who makes 5k a week getting her kit off on onlyfans or her twin sister who is training to be a doctor?

    Under communism, your own skills and ability would be your only distinguishing characteristic. Which might not make it worthwhile for those in the middle, but the top will still be the top.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 303 ✭✭.42.


    Communism is good for some and bad for others.

    Many people in the ex Soviet Union countries admit life was a lot better under Communism then how they have it today living in complete poverty and living in run down flats.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 23,901 ✭✭✭✭Kermit.de.frog


    Don't forget human nature too. Leaders of such regimes wouldn't feel they deserve to be equal for long!

    Which is why it invariably results in dictatorship.

    The masses keep equality though - equality in abject poverty.



  • Registered Users Posts: 98 ✭✭bmwfan


    communism always leads to greed

    east germany was a perfect example the people in control had everything and the working people had an idea of a socialist model that didn't work that's why they needed the wall



  • Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,335 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Communism and capitalism are complex topics both in theories and practical applications. To muddy the definitions frequently used to separate them, how about these? There were 20th century Catholic Communists in Brazil (read Paulo Freire).

    Combined with the early historic origins of the Catholic Church, where communalism was practiced before the Church gained power (almost like Marx in reverse, with the Catholic state growing in power rather than withering away).

    Jacques Derrida cautioned us about the limitations and potential distortions of dichotomies, like making nominal, mutually exclusive categories between communism vs capitalism. Such phenomena are more complex and sometimes need fuzzy logic to review them. Like a friend of mine once observed, praxis, or the application of theories to practice can be a bit messy in reality, and where either/or distinctions may suffer in terms of utility.



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,427 ✭✭✭dublin49


    a pampered elite is communism gone wrong,its capitalism working perfectly,



Advertisement