Originally posted by Enter
yeah, and nothing has ever had a more profound effect on my life than oxygen, but i'm not constantly debating with people on the internet about the makeup of that element
you know what i fucking mean nigga
I mean if you want a real answer then the reason I study and care about things like political theory (and I use "study" and "care" very loosely here) is mostly that it's fun to bullshit about. I know I'm never going to live in a communist state, and that no amount of critique here or in any other venue is going to change anything but at least it can be stimulating conversation.
But I do at least believe the things I say (except when sarcastically communist-posting), even if I don't think it will change anything, and on some level it's easier to accept and deal with issues in our society when you look at them as product of a coherent system instead of random acts of god or physical laws or something.
Originally posted by Sophie
The shit you attribute to capitalism is actually what you get when you have capitalism + government.
It's not capitalism's fault governments exist and corrupt everything they touch.
Well that's exactly my point. It's not communism's fault that dictatorships of the proletariat often operate on immense and violent political repression and fail to transform into real communisms either. You're making the exact same argument as the "not real communism crap" you mentioned earlier.
I'm down on capitalism as a modern institution a lot but I do appreciate that there's a beautiful model of decentralized resource allocation in free markets, and I think in contexts that aren't nation state economies it's optimal. A very non-serious but I think interesting example artificial economies like those in video games where there are no real externalities and systematic restraint of extra-economic activities (e.g. you can't establish a monopoly, or there are mechanics to mitigate monopolies) it produces really interesting and efficient economic configurations.
The problem is this isn't how real capitalisms work. Externalities do exist, monopolies can be formed, market participants act irrationally all the time and aren't purely self interested.
And even if all you were saying were correct, i would still rather live in a real world capitalist country than a real world communist country because we all know how the USSR and Mao's China turned out to be. Oh and Venezuela don't forget glorious communism in Venezuela. If you want about to talk about empirical evidence.
I mean I agree that I would much rather live in a western "democratic" capitalism than the USSR. I see the point you're making here, and it's true, it's better to live places that happen to call themselves capitalisms than those that call themselves communisms. But the USSR was never a communism, not even a deformed or poorly functioning one, it satisfied none of the criteria that define communist states. I think it's reasonable to argue that the USSR is further from a true communism than, say, the USA is from a true* capitalist economy. But even if it's not, you'll notice I never criticized some failing of an actual system that's casually called capitalism as a fundamental issue with capitalism. You were the one that made a claim about how communist societies are organized that was simply untrue, even with respect to "real world communism" as there was no real world system being talked about in which "the party" exists.
* taking true to mean the ancap formation of capitalism I assume you're defending here.
