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207 points jimhi | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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germandiago ◴[] No.29829418[source]
This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part.

None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

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FredPret ◴[] No.29829520[source]
Communism is taxes and government regulation gone mad
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thechao ◴[] No.29829740[source]
Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers. You're talking about about an out-of-control regulatory state; maybe one with an authoritarian bent?
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x3iv130f ◴[] No.29830352[source]
Your definition is the correct one for what Communism strives to be. A communal ownership of things.

It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.

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fallingknife ◴[] No.29830688[source]
It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.
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beaconstudios ◴[] No.29831329[source]
Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".
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fallingknife ◴[] No.29832718[source]
Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.
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beaconstudios ◴[] No.29832758[source]
joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
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1. michaelscott ◴[] No.29837386[source]
A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc.

It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.

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2. beaconstudios ◴[] No.29838604[source]
I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.