What do you think of Communism

[Nilokeras]

This is an overly-simplistic narrative of good and evil, relying on dated narratives about Maya civilization. The story of the Terminal Classic is much more complex than “those shortsighted idiots slash-and-burned too much of their rainforest,” and the popularization and centering of that narrative to the exclusion of all others frankly says more about our own modern ecological anxieties than it does about the actual archaeological record.

I'm not relying on the old slash and burn canard. The Maya had a very complex system of agriculture that used a variety of different techniques, but the common thread tying them all together was a reliance on predictable patterns of rainfall. They again did not have the benefit of huge river systems like in the other cradles of agriculture that brought consistent and repeatable water supplies. When rainfall patterns shifted the agricultural systems took on an enormous strain and collapsed. Slash-and-burn deforestation probably contributed to that through things like changes to the residency time of that rainfall on the landscape, but it wasn't some 'the dumb Maya burned all their forests and then starved' narrative.

This is true of our agricultural society, but it is not true about agricultural societies in general throughout history. This is not a fair generalization at all.

Can you give some examples? I'm genuinely curious.

[Khardsland]

If this is not proof of why capitalism is bad, I don't know what is

[Senkaku]

This is an overly-simplistic narrative of good and evil, relying on dated narratives about Maya civilization. The story of the Terminal Classic is much more complex than “those shortsighted idiots slash-and-burned too much of their rainforest,” and the popularization and centering of that narrative to the exclusion of all others frankly says more about our own modern ecological anxieties than it does about the actual archaeological record.

I'm not relying on the old slash and burn canard. The Maya had a very complex system of agriculture that used a variety of different techniques, but the common thread tying them all together was a reliance on predictable patterns of rainfall. They again did not have the benefit of huge river systems like in the other cradles of agriculture that brought consistent and repeatable water supplies. When rainfall patterns shifted the agricultural systems took on an enormous strain and collapsed. Slash-and-burn deforestation probably contributed to that through things like changes to the residency time of that rainfall on the landscape, but it wasn't some 'the dumb Maya burned all their forests and then starved' narrative.

“Deforestation may have contributed somewhat by changing the residency times of rainfall” is certainly true; I just felt your initial post in this chain was offering much too clear of a dichotomy between the “virtuous” forest management of North American Indians vs. the unsustainable/highly vulnerable forest management of the Classic Maya. The reality here is simply that regional preindustrial societies of any stripe were extremely sensitive to shifts in the climate— but if surviving hunter-gatherers die or move away from their drought-stricken homeland, they leave less in the archaeological record than agriculturalists who were really into monumental stoneworking.

This is true of our agricultural society, but it is not true about agricultural societies in general throughout history. This is not a fair generalization at all.

Can you give some examples? I'm genuinely curious.

…I mean, can you give examples of societies where anyone but maybe a slice of the noble class really thought of themselves this way, before maybe arguably Europe in the Renaissance? Russian and Chinese peasantry, Polynesian farmers and voyagers, the Maori, the Haudenosaunee, the peoples of the Valley of Mexico, Mesopotamian marsh dwellers; hell we’ve just been talking about the Maya— peasant life through all of history has been lived deeply in tune with natural cycles, and traditional mythologies usually connect peoples’ origins and inner lives very deeply to their local environment. Rituals and ceremonies and festivals are timed to occur at important natural turning points like solstices and equinoxes associated with planting and harvesting; local plants and animals are given symbolic connotations and have traditions or lore created around them, etc. The idea that humans are separate from and above nature may have been bandied about by a few wealthy philosophers, but its entry into actual mass consciousness seems to me to be a very recent phenomenon. In the case of the US, Mexico, and Canada, where we had plenty of indigenous societies practicing agriculture who are nonetheless still viewed as highly attuned to their natural environments, I think the popularization of the idea we’re separate from nature very clearly stems from settlers on the frontier viewing themselves as conquerors— literal conquerors of indigenous people, and spiritual conquerors of the “virgin” land and nature of an “empty” continent. North American settler societies bulldozed the natural and human world they found in front of them to build imitations of European landscapes rather than integrating themselves into existing lifeways, and so now we’re so disconnected from them that we imagine that everyone in the world always had the same clinical distance from and disinterest in/disdain for their environments.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Does communism inherently require statelessness?

Yes, otherwise, power still accumulates in private hands, albeit in the hands of the state instead of capital.

[Umeria]

Does communism inherently require statelessness?

Yes, otherwise, power still accumulates in private hands, albeit in the hands of the state instead of capital.

So vote out any state actors abusing their power

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Yes, otherwise, power still accumulates in private hands, albeit in the hands of the state instead of capital.

So vote out any state actors abusing their power

Power still accumulates in the hands of the state, no matter who is elected to certain positions. It's a principle of all organisations that they seek to secure their own continued existence and influence at the cost of all their other duties. The same goes for the state.

[Umeria]

So vote out any state actors abusing their power

Power still accumulates in the hands of the state, no matter who is elected to certain positions. It's a principle of all organisations that they seek to secure their own continued existence and influence at the cost of all their other duties. The same goes for the state.

They can seek all they want. A fair democratic system ensures that they won't succeed.

[Kubra]

I'm not relying on the old slash and burn canard. The Maya had a very complex system of agriculture that used a variety of different techniques, but the common thread tying them all together was a reliance on predictable patterns of rainfall. They again did not have the benefit of huge river systems like in the other cradles of agriculture that brought consistent and repeatable water supplies. When rainfall patterns shifted the agricultural systems took on an enormous strain and collapsed. Slash-and-burn deforestation probably contributed to that through things like changes to the residency time of that rainfall on the landscape, but it wasn't some 'the dumb Maya burned all their forests and then starved' narrative.

“Deforestation may have contributed somewhat by changing the residency times of rainfall” is certainly true; I just felt your initial post in this chain was offering much too clear of a dichotomy between the “virtuous” forest management of North American Indians vs. the unsustainable/highly vulnerable forest management of the Classic Maya. The reality here is simply that regional preindustrial societies of any stripe were extremely sensitive to shifts in the climate— but if surviving hunter-gatherers die or move away from their drought-stricken homeland, they leave less in the archaeological record than agriculturalists who were really into monumental stoneworking.

Can you give some examples? I'm genuinely curious.

…I mean, can you give examples of societies where anyone but maybe a slice of the noble class really thought of themselves this way, before maybe arguably Europe in the Renaissance? Russian and Chinese peasantry, Polynesian farmers and voyagers, the Maori, the Haudenosaunee, the peoples of the Valley of Mexico, Mesopotamian marsh dwellers; hell we’ve just been talking about the Maya— peasant life through all of history has been lived deeply in tune with natural cycles, and traditional mythologies usually connect peoples’ origins and inner lives very deeply to their local environment. Rituals and ceremonies and festivals are timed to occur at important natural turning points like solstices and equinoxes associated with planting and harvesting; local plants and animals are given symbolic connotations and have traditions or lore created around them, etc. The idea that humans are separate from and above nature may have been bandied about by a few wealthy philosophers, but its entry into actual mass consciousness seems to me to be a very recent phenomenon. In the case of the US, Mexico, and Canada, where we had plenty of indigenous societies practicing agriculture who are nonetheless still viewed as highly attuned to their natural environments, I think the popularization of the idea we’re separate from nature very clearly stems from settlers on the frontier viewing themselves as conquerors— literal conquerors of indigenous people, and spiritual conquerors of the “virgin” land and nature of an “empty” continent. North American settler societies bulldozed the natural and human world they found in front of them to build imitations of European landscapes rather than integrating themselves into existing lifeways, and so now we’re so disconnected from them that we imagine that everyone in the world always had the same clinical distance from and disinterest in/disdain for their environments.

Got any further readings regarding the non-north american indigenous agricultural examples? I don't need to know about that one, I remembered when you mentioned lol.

As said before, ain't nobody here an anprim wanting to return to monke. I quite like getting my groceries at the store.
And I'll also admit an occidental bias on my part here when speaking of "agriculture" without an adjective. You know how it is, we're all anglophones here, right?

[Equai]

What I think about communism? I love it

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Power still accumulates in the hands of the state, no matter who is elected to certain positions. It's a principle of all organisations that they seek to secure their own continued existence and influence at the cost of all their other duties. The same goes for the state.

They can seek all they want. A fair democratic system ensures that they won't succeed.

It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Democracies have a tendency to become less democratic over time, and they accumulate power all the same.

That is probably why there exists, in practice, no fair democracy bigger than a local sports club.

[Australian rePublic]

What I've learnt from this thread is that communists support mob justice and don't think that people should be paid to maintain sewers, want everyone to work harder for no reason because they don't believe in janitors and keep yelling "but you wrong, bro" without providing a reason as to why I am wrong. All this by people who think that helping their freinds move every couple of years is equivalent to daily warehouse work

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

What I've learnt from this thread is that communists support mob justice and don't think that people should be paid to maintain sewers, want everyone to work harder for no reason because they don't believe in janitors and keep yelling "but you wrong, bro" without providing a reason as to why I am wrong. All this by people who think that helping their freinds move every couple of years is equivalent to daily warehouse work

Those are all things you made up yourself.

[Portzania]

Communism is a straight up W. Fr fr. On ohio.

[Australian rePublic]

What I've learnt from this thread is that communists support mob justice and don't think that people should be paid to maintain sewers, want everyone to work harder for no reason because they don't believe in janitors and keep yelling "but you wrong, bro" without providing a reason as to why I am wrong. All this by people who think that helping their freinds move every couple of years is equivalent to daily warehouse work

Those are all things you made up yourself.

Some of them yes, others no, but in either case, all 100% confirmed by this thread. And if I were misrepresenting anyone's stance on the matter, I would have been corrected by now

[Indecent Anime Empire]

Communism is a straight up W. Fr fr. On ohio.

ayo don't be lyin on the motherland, for it is told by thy prophecy that Corruption and Anarchy is the true communism.

[El Lazaro]

What I've learnt from this thread is that communists support mob justice and don't think that people should be paid to maintain sewers, want everyone to work harder for no reason because they don't believe in janitors and keep yelling "but you wrong, bro" without providing a reason as to why I am wrong. All this by people who think that helping their freinds move every couple of years is equivalent to daily warehouse work

This “mob justice” sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe commies aren’t all bad. How do I get involved?

[Portzania]

I would love to be swept up in mob violence and converted into the swarm of flesh.

[El Lazaro]

I would love to be swept up in mob violence and converted into the swarm of flesh.

Ok, this is starting to sound like a weird fetish thing.

[Ripoff USA]

Communism is a decent/good system. Since everyone is the same and controlled by the government, crime is not really there. Control is the main focus of communism. However, the communist economy is really hit or miss, since everyone is equal and can't do anything to make more or less money. See, when Marx created the system, it was going to be the perfect society. However, he just couldn't come to terms with the fact that it was never going to happen. People aren't perfect, the world's not perfect, nothing is. Capitalism is better for the people, and communism is better for the government. There is no in between that's perfect.

[Umeria]

They can seek all they want. A fair democratic system ensures that they won't succeed.

It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Democracies have a tendency to become less democratic over time, and they accumulate power all the same.

That is probably why there exists, in practice, no fair democracy bigger than a local sports club.

Indeed. The United States, for example, is much less democratic than it was at its founding.

Are you, an advocate of anarchist utopia, seriously going to tell anyone else that if something doesn't exist now it can never work.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Those are all things you made up yourself.

Some of them yes, others no, but in either case, all 100% confirmed by this thread. And if I were misrepresenting anyone's stance on the matter, I would have been corrected by now

You would have been. As you were.

It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Democracies have a tendency to become less democratic over time, and they accumulate power all the same.

That is probably why there exists, in practice, no fair democracy bigger than a local sports club.

Indeed. The United States, for example, is much less democratic than it was at its founding.

Are you, an advocate of anarchist utopia, seriously going to tell anyone else that if something doesn't exist now it can never work.

The question is: why doesn't it work?

In this thread, as in others, you have defended a system working because something could 'theoretically' happen i a democracy, even if it doesn't. Good, stable democracies may be theoretically possible, but that they practically do not occur might say something about what forces push a democracy in a certain direction.

A liberal democracy is a menagerie of the possible, but that's no defence if those things don't actually happen.

[Umeria]

Indeed. The United States, for example, is much less democratic than it was at its founding.

Are you, an advocate of anarchist utopia, seriously going to tell anyone else that if something doesn't exist now it can never work.

The question is: why doesn't it work?

In this thread, as in others, you have defended a system working because something could 'theoretically' happen i a democracy, even if it doesn't. Good, stable democracies may be theoretically possible, but that they practically do not occur might say something about what forces push a democracy in a certain direction.

A liberal democracy is a menagerie of the possible, but that's no defence if those things don't actually happen.

What is the "it" in "why doesn't it work". Are you referring to something that has already been shown to not work?

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

The question is: why doesn't it work?

In this thread, as in others, you have defended a system working because something could 'theoretically' happen i a democracy, even if it doesn't. Good, stable democracies may be theoretically possible, but that they practically do not occur might say something about what forces push a democracy in a certain direction.

A liberal democracy is a menagerie of the possible, but that's no defence if those things don't actually happen.

What is the "it" in "why doesn't it work". Are you referring to something that has already been shown to not work?

Why don't democracies work like you say they do?

[Umeria]

What is the "it" in "why doesn't it work". Are you referring to something that has already been shown to not work?

Why don't democracies work like you say they do?

They do.

[Ifreann]

What I've learnt from this thread is that communists support mob justice and don't think that people should be paid to maintain sewers, want everyone to work harder for no reason because they don't believe in janitors and keep yelling "but you wrong, bro" without providing a reason as to why I am wrong. All this by people who think that helping their freinds move every couple of years is equivalent to daily warehouse work

Why would anyone maintain a sewer when we've implemented UBI, which you support, and they can just be unemployed until a better job comes along?