GarbageShoot [he/him]

This particular string of replies was you doing a stupendously poor job of explaining anything or accomplishing anything but looking like a snob. It would be better to say nothing than to be an asshole to someone who has done nothing worse than be a slightly frustrating liberal in their own thread on a non-communist instance.

I’m not claiming anything I said is facts, just the way I understand it to be/how it had been explained to me quite a while ago. I could absolutely be wrong, if that’s the case I’ll gladly retract my comment based on new (to me) information. I’m far from qualified to give an authoritative answer on this topic.

I apologize for being coarse, it’s a bad habit of mine.

The way I understand it is “the government decides to build a factory because the country needs a factory” vs “the people of a region get together and build a factory because they want one”. Well, in either case nobody really owns the factory (compared to capitalism), but rather who’s in charge of it, who decides who works on what and how it comes to be.

If the government is democratic, there’s very little substantive difference here as-described, because “the government decides X” is an entity with the popular mandate doing it, and if that decision loses it the popular mandate, the people can oppose it. Likewise, if “the people” of a locality decided to build a factory in this hypothetical and a minority opposed it, if the minority cannot sway the majority, they are simply ignored.

The problem comes in when you realize that the goods produced by factories mostly aren’t for the use of the local community, they are for a much more expansive group of people. There need to be systems to coordinate production at the full scale of society so that people have some idea of who needs what. It’s compounded by the fact that the machines in the factory will themselves probably need to be imported from elsewhere.

Unfortunately the only examples of communism we’ve seen are authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, and currently North Korea and China (sort of). I don’t think we have a true socialist community that’s not some form of capitalist hybrid, let alone post-scarcity communism or socialism without massive corruption tainting it.

Depending on your definitions, you left out Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. In any case, I don’t think most people are able to maintain the “real communism has never been tried” stance. Eventually, you either come down on the side that “No, they were real communism and communism is therefore evil” or “I was lied to about at least some of these countries and should give them credit”. For an anglophone, societal gravity is very much on the side of the first option, but it’s possible to reach the second conclusion if you have a strong enough motivation to dig through information. Cuba is probably the route of least resistance.

I’m pretty sure all those ancient societies didn’t have universal human rights and civil liberties. The concept of rights doesn’t really begin until the 1600s afaik

What in the world are you talking about? Most societies throughout history had rights for their citizens.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/video/significance-of-citizenship-in-ancient-greece.html

and universal rights until the 1800s at the earliest

See my screed about America. Universal how?

There are non liberal societies right now, they’re all dictatorships with no freedoms, hence my statement

But this flatly isn’t true. Let’s pick a country that both of us probably hate: Saudi Arabia. There are lots of backwards laws and abuses, but cops still typically need a warrant to search your house and aren’t allowed to just go in and beat you to death. There are cases where they do anyway, but so it goes in most states. This black-and-white view where people are free in liberal states and there are “no freedoms” in other states is unserious.

It’s also worth pointing out, and this might go a little way to explaining your argument with someone else in this thread, that the magical way neoliberals talk about “dictatorship” doesn’t make any sense. A government might nominally operate in an autocratic way, where one dude’s word is law, but it cannot subsist on one dude’s authority. That autocrat’s authority is dependent on some class of people who interests he serves creating the material basis for him to keep ruling (Saudi Arabia is a good example, since it is an absolute monarchy that serves the capitalist class). Thus, any so-called dictatorship is really the rule of that class and not of that individual, even if it nominally goes through the decrees of the individual. Likewise, if one class is fundamentally in power, it is no less of a dictatorship if the nominal system is more open, because the real power hasn’t changed.

Firstly, I thought it was a moneyless society. What do the so-called businesses operate with? Secondly, owning land is not the same as using land ownership to extract a rent from people who don’t own land, which is what a landlord is. You’re asking an economic question, so economic relations are important!

I can’t think of any societies that emphasize individual rights that aren’t liberal

Genuinely, how hard are you thinking? Everywhere from Ancient Greece to Medieval Ireland to every iteration of China (except Japanese occupation) had personal rights.

“Emphasize” here is a weasel word, but can you really say it about the darling of neoliberalism, America? America abuses more rights abroad than any other country, so I guess you mean American denizens. Oh, but non-citizens get treated horribly, especially illegal immigrants but also immigrants in general, so you must just mean citizens. Then again, prisoners in America are kept in conditions consistent with its own definition of slavery, which is why there’s a cutout in the Thirteenth Amendment to permit just that, so I guess non-criminal citizens? Of course, being homeless in quite a lot of America is de-facto criminal and the homeless suffer heinous abuse by the cops with little recourse, so I guess it’s actually the housed, non-criminal citizens. Speaking of the cops, they kill over a thousand people every year, something that would be called “summary execution” if it was done by America’s enemies. Do I need to keep going? And mind you, this is all at the relative zenith of human rights in America, ignoring chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the various forms of patriarchal domination, disenfranchisement of non-land-owners, and so on.

What I’m saying is that your definition needs work.

Does the Federation really have private property? Are there landlords and business tyrants? Or does it just have personal property, things a person owns for their own personal use?

Personal rights also aren’t monopolized by liberalism, as much as neoliberal media tells you it is so. Personal rights also existed in classical slave societies, under feudalism, and yes, under every Marxist state (I don’t know about the weirdo ““communist”” ones like Peru or Cambodia)

It’s amazing how people just make things up. I genuinely have no idea where you got these definitions unless it was some hole on Reddit or similar.

What manages the means of production if not a government? Saying “the people” is as hollow as the US talking about “Freedom” and “Democracy”. “The people” cannot merely project their will into the aether and have it realized, they need some method of organization. They need to be able to administrate complex systems rather than just hang out in “primitive communism but with high technology somehow”. Whatever that system is and whatever you call it, that’s a government. In a system of democratic government that administers things, the difference between “the people” owning things and the government – here an organ that exists only so the people can manage the means of production – owning them is immaterial.

If you don’t want to start a political argument, that’s not the way to do it.

One needs to be careful with the word “liberal”, because it means very different things in different contexts (in large part due to political parties identifying themselves as “liberal”). In the stricter political-philosophical sense, liberalism is very closely tied with capitalism and the “freedom” to own things as private property (market allowing) and do what you want with it.

The most textbook definition of communism as a political-economic organization (rather than an ideology) is that of a “stateless, classless, moneyless society.”

Then it goes from “waste of money” to “actively bad”. God knows the last thing the US needs are new technologies with “military applications”

We aren’t functioning on the same timescale or known factors as the Wright Brothers were.