Discussing Communism

[Navarro]

The better question is how will the billionaires deal with the inevitable uprising?

"When we rise up to kill all the people who are non-specifically oppressing us, they'll be the violent ones for defending themselves against us!"

I imagine the way they have always dealt with the working class.

You mean, like so?

But nobody denies capitalism is murderous.

"Waaah waaah people aren't immortal under capitalism this is 100% the same as communists deliberately murdering people!"

 

[Battlegrinder]

Charles Murray is a hack, who sold bad science to people desperate to justify their privilege, but that's neither here nor there.

Well yes, that is the issue, that's he's not actually in any way relevent to the causes and problems of domestic violence, and yet had a section of the book set aside so the author could rant about him.

An associate's degree in anything is going to be incredibly superficial. In particular, the idealized microeconomics that is taught in low level economics courses doesn't especially work when applying it to macroeconomic systems.

Even in my associates degree, we discussed the difference between mirco and marcoencomics and how little the two systems have to do with one another, and had courses dedicated to both fields. Maybe you should lay off the critique of fields you don't actually have any experience with, because it doesn't your arguments any good to go around demonstarting just how little you understand the things you're talking about.

The right wing Austrian school of economics survives by explicitly rejecting the idea of real world modeling and attempts to form economics as a system of "pure logic". It fails, and has always failed, but it provides a justification for laissez-faire economics so it gets plenty of funding anyway.

Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, the austrian school is not "right wing", though given the fact that several of the concepts they invented disprove Marx's theories, I can see why you would think otherwise. Nor did they "fail", the school has actually originated and popularized a number of fundemental concepts that were incoporated into mainstream economics. In it's orginal forumulation, they largely rejected mathematical modeling, however contemporary economists that subscribe to that school of thought do not. Nor does the Austrian school explictly endorse laissez-faire policies.

Criminal justice has rigorous elements. Specifically those corresponding to the laws, which are spelled out with a high level of specificity because they actually have to be used by judges and lawyers. It also has theories of "criminal causation" which are mostly based on nothing and forensicsa, which turns out to be a bunch of pseudoscience used to sell convictions to credulous juries. Blood spatter analysis, bite mark analysis, arson detection techniques and so on have repeatedly proven to be hokum when studied by people not invested in the field.

Once again, that's wrong. Blood spatter and the like are not "hokum." They are not very reliably and people in the field are prone to making conclusions beyond what the evidence does support, and all three fields are relatively young and immature. That is not the same as them being pseudoscience.

The reason "criminologists" oppose communism is that the field is largely made up of people who want to be cops, and unsurprisingly, that is an authoritarian population.

Yes, because if there's one group of people that have never done well in communist systems, it's authoritarians.

That's not what you think it is. Abbot wasn't arrested for feeding the homeless as the outrage headline suggests. He was arrested for violating health and safety ordinances; specifically that if you have an outdoor feeding area, there also has to be a bathroom nearby (which only makes sense), and you must have the property owner's permission before you set up a feeding area on their property.

Eh, it's probably true that the laws in question were being used as a tool to deter the sort of thing he was doing. However, there are a number of points that meso skips over in his effort to lambast the capitalist system.

1. The city wasn't banning anyone from feeding the homeless. They just don't want this guy or people like him from turning the cities parks into gathering areas for homeless people. The city already has and supports other systems to help the homeless, but they don't think that handing out meals on public property every little while is all that effective.

2. Communist states are generally no better, and sometimes worse. At least in the one story he's waving around and claiming (without evidence) that it's some sort of systemic issue, the police only arrested the guy giving out food. In the USSR, they would have also grabbed the homeless people too, because being homeless was illegal.

3. No one likes the homeless, they're a net negative to any country or municipality and there has always been a strong motive to just drive them away rather than fixing the underlying issue. This applies in every political and economic system on earth.

The better question is how will the billionaires deal with the inevitable uprising? I imagine the way they have always dealt with the working class.

The idea that some grand populist uprising is inevitable is and always has been a retarded leftist fantasy.

But nobody denies capitalism is murderous.

Uh...yes, most people probably would do that.

 

[GoldRanger]

Philosophy doesn't make claims of being empirical. Economics typically does.

The question of who claims to be what has exactly zero relevance to the argument. In the end economics are the more empirical between the two, period, and we know that students of economy are much less likely to be communists than students of philosophy or similarly non-empiric fields of navel gazing "study".

Philosophy is very concerned with the lines between what can and can't be known, and what properly grounds belief. Philosophy of science is a huge field for precisely that reason.

Which is of absolutely zero aid in understanding and analyzing an ideology with very empirical effects on society.

Economics claims to be providing theories to explain a particular real world phenomenon, but mostly they fail to do so.

No, they don't "fail", not by a long shot. Many economic models actually explain the movement of capital quite well. Of course, their predictions are not always 100% on target. Neither are the predictions of meteorological models. That's what usually happens with extremely complex fields of study. It doesn't make them completely worthless.

Don't be silly. You don't have to kill people to expropriate private property.

Sure. People will just go ahead and willingly and peacefully give away their human rights, their life's work, and their freedom and ability to control their own fate and the product of their hard work to a faceless fascist bureaucracy out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's also a total coincidence that every single government in history that has attempted to expropriate private property en masse had been, in the end, forced to kill millions to make this happen.

You're exactly like a Nazi saying "you don't have to kill people to reach racial purity". In the end a Communist is just a peculiar strand of fascist who exchanged the Nazi's racial/genetic pseudoscientific nonsense for economic pseudoscientific nonsense, that while it sounds superficially better and more tempting, it's in the end exactly as deadly and morally repulsive.

 

[Free-Stater 101]

The better question is how will the billionaires deal with the inevitable uprising? I imagine the way they have always dealt with the working class. But nobody denies capitalism is murderous.

I do, so i know that to be a lie, capitalism is flawed not intentionally malicious, as it isn't a hivemind but a collective of individuals making decisions and sadly some of those decisions arent for anything 'other' than a 'greater good' is communism in practice any differnet in that regard other than paying lip service the good of the worker?

Moving on however your response is naive considering that mass confiscation of not just the property of the ultra rich but the rest of the upper and middle class would be needed to to make the system you support a reality.

Sorry, I didn't realize this was becoming a ad on to this unintentional dogpile my apologies.

 

[mesonoxian]

"When we rise up to kill all the people who are non-specifically oppressing us, they'll be the violent ones for defending themselves against us!"


You mean, like so?

"Waaah waaah people aren't immortal under capitalism this is 100% the same as communists deliberately murdering people!"

Try using your big boy words.

Well yes, that is the issue, that's he's not actually in any way relevent to the causes and problems of domestic violence, and yet had a section of the book set aside so the author could rant about him.



Even in my associates degree, we discussed the difference between mirco and marcoencomics and how little the two systems have to do with one another, and had courses dedicated to both fields. Maybe you should lay off the critique of fields you don't actually have any experience with, because it doesn't your arguments any good to go around demonstarting just how little you understand the things you're talking about.



Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, the austrian school is not "right wing", though given the fact that several of the concepts they invented disprove Marx's theories, I can see why you would think otherwise. Nor did they "fail", the school has actually originated and popularized a number of fundemental concepts that were incoporated into mainstream economics. In it's orginal forumulation, they largely rejected mathematical modeling, however contemporary economists that subscribe to that school of thought do not. Nor does the Austrian school explictly endorse laissez-faire policies.



Once again, that's wrong. Blood spatter and the like are not "hokum." They are not very reliably and people in the field are prone to making conclusions beyond what the evidence does support, and all three fields are relatively young and immature. That is not the same as them being pseudoscience.



Yes, because if there's one group of people that have never done well in communist systems, it's authoritarians.



Eh, it's probably true that the laws in question were being used as a tool to deter the sort of thing he was doing. However, there are a number of points that meso skips over in his effort to lambast the capitalist system.

1. The city wasn't banning anyone from feeding the homeless. They just don't want this guy or people like him from turning the cities parks into gathering areas for homeless people. The city already has and supports other systems to help the homeless, but they don't think that handing out meals on public property every little while is all that effective.

2. Communist states are generally no better, and sometimes worse. At least in the one story he's waving around and claiming (without evidence) that it's some sort of systemic issue, the police only arrested the guy giving out food. In the USSR, they would have also grabbed the homeless people too, because being homeless was illegal.

3. No one likes the homeless, they're a net negative to any country or municipality and there has always been a strong motive to just drive them away rather than fixing the underlying issue. This applies in every political and economic system on earth.



The idea that some grand populist uprising is inevitable is and always has been a retarded leftist fantasy.



Uh...yes, most people probably would do that.

I'm impressed your associates degree level courses actually covered the concept of macroeconomics at all. That said, I disagree entirely with your description of them. The entire point of Austrian economics was to attempt to create an alternative to Marxist analysis, and to justify the claim that any central planning of the economy was necessarily a step towards brutal totalitarianism. A claim which is about as busted as any you want to name.

If being largely subjective and easily used to justify whatever result you desire doesn't make something pseudoscience, we owe Rupert Sheldrake and apology.

Capitalism is a profoundly murderous system. Strikebreakers murdered labor organizers all over the country. Companies like Coke and Nestle back brutal governments to protect their control over cheap overseas labor. And until forced by labor protesters, factory conditions routinely killed and maimed people, and still do in many places where the multinationals have outsourced production.

Like Chesterton said about doctrines that denied sin:
"But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. "
By all means doubt Marxist solutions (I do, after all), but let's not pretend capitalism isn't knee deep in blood.

The question of who claims to be what has exactly zero relevance to the argument. In the end economics are the more empirical between the two, period, and we know that students of economy are much less likely to be communists than students of philosophy or similarly non-empiric fields of navel gazing "study".



Which is of absolutely zero aid in understanding and analyzing an ideology with very empirical effects on society.



No, they don't "fail", not by a long shot. Many economic models actually explain the movement of capital quite well. Of course, their predictions are not always 100% on target. Neither are the predictions of meteorological models. That's what usually happens with extremely complex fields of study. It doesn't make them completely worthless.



Sure. People will just go ahead and willingly and peacefully give away their human rights, their life's work, and their freedom and ability to control their own fate and the product of their hard work to a faceless fascist bureaucracy out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's also a total coincidence that every single government in history that has attempted to expropriate private property en masse had been, in the end, forced to kill millions to make this happen.

You're exactly like a Nazi saying "you don't have to kill people to reach racial purity". In the end a Communism is just a peculiar strand of fascist who exchanged the Nazi's racial/genetic pseudoscientific nonsense for economic pseudoscientific nonsense, that while it sounds superficially better and more tempting, it's in the end exactly as deadly and morally repulsive.

Right, people who uncritically accept claims of objectivity about legal and economic structures as valid are more likely to support liberal capitalism as opposed to those who by profession question such assumptions and ask on what basis claims can be supported.

The failures of economic models to predict or even accurately explain most economic phenomena without special pleading is a pretty notorious issue.

Nazis want to murder for being the wrong race, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong religion, disabled, the wrong political persuasion, or insufficiently subservient to the state. Marxists want to end private ownership of capital and see to the basic material needs of all people. So gonna say I disagree with you there, chief.

 

[Navarro]

Nazis want to murder for being the wrong race

Marx and Wells were in favor of this, not to mention the USSR's numerous ethnic cleansings.

the wrong sexual orientation

The USSR along with other communist regimes criminalised and persecuted LGBTs.

the wrong religion

Communists have persecuted and tried to destroy all religions and view religion itself as a tool of oppression.

the wrong political persuasion, or insufficiently subservient to the state.

So communists never mass-murdered political dissidents and those deemed insufficiently subservient to the State?

Marxists want to end private ownership of capital

I.e. they want to carry out a massive program of looting and robbery and murder all who resist.

and see to the basic material needs of all people.

So did the Nazis, only they defined 'people' as 'Germans'.

 

[GoldRanger]

Right, people who uncritically accept claims of objectivity about legal and economic structures as valid are more likely to support liberal capitalism as opposed to those who by profession question such assumptions and ask on what basis claims can be supported.

No. People who actually study economy are more capable of understanding the ups and down of a system that purports to make economic predictions.

If students of philosophy truly questioned assumptions they wouldn't have been so uniform in their political leanings. In the real world the faculties that teach philosophy merely exchange one set of assumptions for another one, more aesthetically pleasing but less grounded in reality. Regardless of what philosophy is supposed to be all about, that's what it is in practice.

The failures of economic models to predict or even accurately explain most economic phenomena without special pleading is a pretty notorious issue.

Such as? Be specific.

Nazis want to murder for being the wrong race, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong religion, disabled, the wrong political persuasion, or insufficiently subservient to the state. Marxists want to end private ownership of capital and see to the basic material needs of all people. So gonna say I disagree with you there, chief.

A well intentioned extremist is arguably worse than an openly malevolent one. They are both exactly the same as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Navarro]

Such as? Be specific.

Let's also look at Marx's predictions:

1. Wages rose rather than fell; the middle class grew instead of shrinking.
2. There was no world revolution.
3. Communist revolutions took place in less-industrialised, more feudal areas of the world such as Russia and China over well-industrialised, more capitalist areas such as Britain and America.
4. Instead of increasing prosperity beyond the level of capitalism (a critical part of the theory, as each link in the dialectic was supposed to bring more and more prosperity) socialism never brought prosperity even approaching that of which capitalist countries enjoyed.
5. The totalitarian workers' state produced by the revolution never withered away into "true communism", but either rotted until it collapsed in on itself and then became a more capitalist system, reformed itself into a more capitalist system, or persisted in totalitarian communism and was kept on life support for geopolitical reasons.

These are all very specific predictions of what Marx said would happen, critical to his thesis. And yet not one of them ever came true.

 

[Battlegrinder]

I'm impressed your associates degree level courses actually covered the concept of macroeconomics at all. That said, I disagree entirely with your description of them. The entire point of Austrian economics was to attempt to create an alternative to Marxist analysis, and to justify the claim that any central planning of the economy was necessarily a step towards brutal totalitarianism. A claim which is about as busted as any you want to name.

Well, again that's wrong. There was already a functional alternative to marx, it was called "the rest of the economic field", and while that field had some help from the austrian school in debunking marx, if not for them it seems plausible that someone else would have come up with a description of opportunity cost or marginal utility. As for your claims regarding the "entire point" of the school, no credible source I can find backs that claim.....nor any of the non-credible ones, for that matter.

If being largely subjective and easily used to justify whatever result you desire doesn't make something pseudoscience, we owe Rupert Sheldrake and apology.

There is no clear dividing line between peusdoscience and science. For example, the way you define it here, the entire field of psychology and sociology is pseudoscience.

Capitalism is a profoundly murderous system. Strikebreakers murdered labor organizers all over the country. Companies like Coke and Nestle back brutal governments to protect their control over cheap overseas labor. And until forced by labor protesters, factory conditions routinely killed and maimed people, and still do in many places where the multinationals have outsourced production.
....
By all means doubt Marxist solutions (I do, after all), but let's not pretend capitalism isn't knee deep in blood.

This is like saying that racism is an inherently exploratory, outward looking ideology, because of how many famous and influencial explorers were also extremely racist. The root cause of those problems isn't capitalism, the root cause it that humans are inherently flawed and will inevitably abuse the power they are given, no matter what system they're part of.

 

[mesonoxian]

Marx and Wells were in favor of this, not to mention the USSR's numerous ethnic cleansings.



The USSR along with other communist regimes criminalised and persecuted LGBTs.



Communists have persecuted and tried to destroy all religions and view religion itself as a tool of oppression.



So communists never mass-murdered political dissidents and those deemed insufficiently subservient to the State?



I.e. they want to carry out a massive program of looting and robbery.



So did the Nazis, only they defined 'people' as 'Germans'.

Thank you, much better.

I'd say deciding only Germans count as people is in fact a significant moral difference. Neither I, nor most actual Marxists are advocating for the moral goodness of the USSR, nor a return to its policies, and "robbery" (theft would be a better word, even under capitalist conceptions of property) is only meaningful if you believe currently existing property relations are valid.

No. People who actually study economy are more capable of understanding the ups and down of a system that purports to make economic predictions.

If students of philosophy truly questioned assumptions they wouldn't have been so uniform in their political leanings. In the real world the faculties that teach philosophy merely exchange one set of assumptions for another one, more aesthetically pleasing but less grounded in reality. Regardless of what philosophy is supposed to be all about, that's what it is in practice.



Such as? Be specific.



A well intentioned extremist is arguably worse than an openly malevolent one. They are both exactly the same as far as I'm concerned.

I personally think the extremists that kill people are worse than the ones who run food banks.

I'm not an economist, so my ability to meaningfully discuss specifics is negligible. I am familiar with the problem from reading about it in relation to the replication crisis in the broader sciences. I read a bit about Stiglitz discussing the intractibility of the problem, but then my eyes started to glaze over, because I just cannot get interested in economic theory.

The initial claim was that Marxists must not value facts, because philosophers favored Marxism, while criminologists and economists don't. If everyone is just accepting whatever assumption they are taught, that dissolves the initial claim just as well.

Though philosophers aren't terribly politically unified in fact. Communism is an absolutely huge range of political positions that agree only in accepting the basic desirability and achievability of a society with much reduced exploitation of labor. An equivalently all inclusive capitalist umbrella would put Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and John Paul II all under the same heading. A Maoist and a Christian anarcho-pacifist are both communists, but that is where the similarities end.

Well, again that's wrong. There was already a functional alternative to marx, it was called "the rest of the economic field", and while that field had some help from the austrian school in debunking marx, if not for them it seems plausible that someone else would have come up with a description of opportunity cost or marginal utility. As for your claims regarding the "entire point" of the school, no credible source I can find backs that claim.....nor any of the non-credible ones, for that matter.



There is no clear dividing line between peusdoscience and science. For example, the way you define it here, the entire field of psychology and sociology is pseudoscience.



This is like saying that racism is an inherently exploratory, outward looking ideology, because of how many famous and influencial explorers were also extremely racist. The root cause of those problems isn't capitalism, the root cause it that humans are inherently flawed and will inevitably abuse the power they are given, no matter what system they're part of.

I don't doubt other people would have come up with attempts to debunk Marx. There is, after all, money to be made by it. I just don't think they would be any more correct.

I think most theories of psychology and sociology are pseudoscience. They are, like a lot of economics, largely an attempt to write a plausible narrative that humans can understand around much more complex phenomena and in doing so reduce those phenomena in ways that are inimical to actual understanding. That is the key insight of post-modernism, after all.

I don't think racism per se is an ideology, but I would entirely agree that the ideological complex of colonial Europe was outward looking and exploratory, almost by definition. The entire world was seen as a set of datapoints and resources to explore, with only Europeans as truly civilized, detached observers and exploiters. Capitalism has killed people, still kills people, and will kill people for as long as it exists. You can deny any better solution exists, but let's at least admit the problem is real.

 

[Navarro]

Well, again that's wrong. There was already a functional alternative to marx, it was called "the rest of the economic field", and while that field had some help from the austrian school in debunking marx, if not for them it seems plausible that someone else would have come up with a description of opportunity cost or marginal utility.

Hell, Wikipedia even says that Marxist economics is considered a dead end and a marginal subject in academia.

As for your claims regarding the "entire point" of the school, no credible source I can find backs that claim.....nor any of the non-credible ones, for that matter.

It's all a big conspiracy man. Like when the police enforce reasonable regulations on handing food out in public, it's 'cause they're trying to starve homeless people to death!

There is no clear dividing line between peusdoscience and science. For example, the way you define it here, the entire field of psychology and sociology is pseudoscience.

Guess which subject was one of the pro-socialist ones in that picture I posted.

The root cause of those problems isn't capitalism, the root cause it that humans are inherently flawed and will inevitably abuse the power they are given, no matter what system they're part of.

There ... there might be a book that talks a lot about this, that socialists really don't like?

Thank you, much better.

Showing your childish conception of the world for the farce it is was the point.

Neither I, nor most actual Marxists are advocating for the moral goodness of the USSR, nor a return to its policies

Which is why the online places where Marxists meet up are filled with apologia for it.

and "robbery" (theft would be a better word, even under capitalist conceptions of property) is only meaningful if you believe currently existing property relations are valid.

"It's unfair that some people have more than others, gotta get it down to the lowest common denominator."

I'm not an economist, so my ability to meaningfully discuss specifics is negligible. I am familiar with the problem from reading about it in relation to the replication crisis in the broader sciences. I read a bit about Stiglitz discussing the intractibility of the problem, but then my eyes started to glaze over, because I just cannot get interested in economic theory.

So you admit you know nothing about economics and have no interest in it, yet somehow you just know it's all bunk.

Though philosophers aren't terribly politically unified in fact. Communism is an absolutely huge range of political positions that agree only in accepting the basic desirability and achievability of a society with much reduced exploitation of labor. An equivalently all inclusive capitalist umbrella would put Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and John Paul II all under the same heading. A Maoist and a Christian anarcho-pacifist are both communists, but that is where the similarities end.

And yet they all agree on destroying society as it exists and replacing it with a totalitarian dictatorship.

I don't doubt other people would have come up with attempts to debunk Marx. There is, after all, money to be made by it. I just don't think they would be any more correct.

The historical record debunks Marx well enough.

 

[mesonoxian]

There ... there might be a book that talks a lot about this, that socialists really don't like?

Can I not get through one discussion without liberals bringing up Harry Potter?!

 

[Battlegrinder]

I don't doubt other people would have come up with attempts to debunk Marx. There is, after all, money to be made by it. I just don't think they would be any more correct.

You didn't say that people would have finanical intrests in disproving marx (which also is not true. There's no such phrase as "as rich as an economist", and there is a reason why that turn of phrase doesn't exist), you said the austrian school's entire purpose was to come up with one.

I think most theories of psychology and sociology are pseudoscience. They are, like a lot of economics, largely an attempt to write a plausible narrative that humans can understand around much more complex phenomena and in doing so reduce those phenomena in ways that are inimical to actual understanding. That is the key insight of post-modernism, after all.

I didn't say "psychology theories" I said the entire field would be pseudoscience by the reasoning you supplied. As for the postmodern "insight", I doubt that's the case, I think most people can actually understand all three fields fairly easily.

I don't think racism per se is an ideology, but I would entirely agree that the ideological complex of colonial Europe was outward looking and exploratory, almost by definition. The entire world was seen as a set of datapoints and resources to explore, with only Europeans as truly civilized, detached observers and exploiters.

That characterization is overly simplifed to the point of absurdity, and also misses the point of what I was saying so much I'm convinced you're being willfully obtuse.

Capitalism has killed people, still kills people, and will kill people for as long as it exists. You can deny any better solution exists, but let's at least admit the problem is real.

Well yes, there is a problem, and it is real, but you are 100% wrong as to what that problem actually is.

Can I not get through one discussion without liberals bringing up Harry Potter?!

I think he meant something more like "the Bible", not harry potter.

 

[mesonoxian]

You didn't say that people would have finanical intrests in disproving marx (which also is not true. There's no such phrase as "as rich as an economist", and there is a reason why that turn of phrase doesn't exist), you said the austrian school's entire purpose was to come up with one.



I didn't say "psychology theories" I said the entire field would be pseudoscience by the reasoning you supplied. As for the postmodern "insight", I doubt that's the case, I think most people can actually understand all three fields fairly easily.



That characterization is overly simplifed to the point of absurdity.



Well yes, there is a problem, and it is real, but you are 100% wrong as to what that problem actually is.



I think he meant something more like "the Bible", not harry potter.

Yeah, but most liberals seem to take more inspiration about how the world works from Rowling than Christ.

I don't agree with your claims about psychology and sociology being pseudoscience by that standard, then. There are observational sciences. Things that catalogue information and attempt to categorize it, after all, and there are kinds of sociology and psychology that do just that. For that matter, there is economics that does just that. When you attempt to create a theory to explain that data, and the theory predicts nothing but permits you to impose whatever conclusion you want on specific data, it is pseudoscience.

I agree that most people can understand psychology and sociology. I disagree that they can understand the workings of human minds and cultures on any deep level. Insofar as psychology and sociology make claims to permit such understanding, they are false. That isn't to say they can't be useful. You don't need to know the nature of consciousness and human will to make cognitive behavioral therapy work or to correlate the changes in various economic and social factors. That's why I specified the theories are mostly pseudoscientific, not the fields themselves. Jungianism, behaviorism, gestalt psychology and so on aren't much better than the theory of the humors.

 

[Abhorsen]

For that matter, there is economics that does just that. When you attempt to create a theory to explain that data, and the theory predicts nothing but permits you to impose whatever conclusion you want on specific data, it is pseudoscience.

See, this isn't actually true that this applies to economics. First, most of microeconomics is well supported by experimental evidence. Second, macroeconomic theories are somewhat tested. Basically, when it comes to an entire economy, it quickly becomes impossible to isolate variables, but we have definitely determined some things. And both of these just utterly ignore anything about marxist economics except to laugh at parts of it, like the labor theory of value or price fixing.

But socialism doesn't just fail because it doesn't work, it fails because it is morally wrong as well. Fundamentally, socialism requires putting a gun to someone's head to force them to give up their stuff, while free markets do not.

 

[mesonoxian]

But socialism doesn't just fail because it doesn't work, it fails because it is morally wrong as well. Fundamentally, socialism requires putting a gun to someone's head to force them to give up their stuff, while free markets do not.

Whereas capitalism involves putting a gun to someone's head to force them to give up the products of their labor. Using private property rights to argue for private property rights is circular.

 

[Cherico]

Whereas capitalism involves putting a gun to someone's head to force them to give up the products of their labor. Using private property rights to argue for private property rights is circular.

Lets see I go out and I work at a job, in exchange I get paid X amount of money, I can go out and use this money and exchange it for goods and services. If I do not like my job I can go out and get another one. Last time I checked my boss hasnt put a gut to my head to get me to do any of this.

I was offered money for my labor, I decided to give them my labor in exchange for money, then I used the money for various things I needed and wanted.

Its a pretty sqaure deal.

 

[Abhorsen]

Whereas capitalism involves putting a gun to someone's head to force them to give up the products of their labor. Using private property rights to argue for private property rights is circular.

Nope. What you've described isn't capitalism. There's no gun, or it by definition isn't capitalism. Capitalism depends on a free market, and a market isn't free if someone works because a gun to their head. This could be any number of other systems, depending on who holds the gun. If it's the government, it's socialism. If it's someone who claims to own you, it's slavery. If it's a company, that's still not capitalism. Capitalism depends on voluntary exchange.

Instead, in a capitalist system, I trade the my labor to someone for money. They value my labor more than the money, and I value the money more than my labor, so we both win.

Using private property rights to argue for private property rights is circular.

I'm not, I'm saying unprovoked violence is inherent to socialism, and it isn't to capitalism, that's why capitalism is better.

 

[GoldRanger]

I personally think the extremists that kill people are worse than the ones who run food banks.

Oh. I am glad that you agree with me that both Nazism and Communism are equally as horrible then.

I'm not an economist, so my ability to meaningfully discuss specifics is negligible. I am familiar with the problem from reading about it in relation to the replication crisis in the broader sciences. I read a bit about Stiglitz discussing the intractibility of the problem, but then my eyes started to glaze over, because I just cannot get interested in economic theory.

I see. I minored in economy in university, so I guess I have an advantage over you in this regard.

The initial claim was that Marxists must not value facts, because philosophers favored Marxism, while criminologists and economists don't. If everyone is just accepting whatever assumption they are taught, that dissolves the initial claim just as well.

Economy is a field that relies heavily on statistics in the research itself. It's fairly "soft" as far as real sciences go, but it's not nearly as full of assumptions as you think it is. Various economic models do rely on assumptions for the most part, but those get reexamined when they run afoul of the real world (the Keynsian models normally taught to undergraduate students are understood to be too simplistic for precisely this reason, they rely on the assumption of perfect "Homo Economicus" humans that react in very specific and rigid ways to changes in the economy).

All this is still miles and miles ahead of any of philosophy, which is not even a field of science of any kind, soft or otherwise.

Though philosophers aren't terribly politically unified in fact. Communism is an absolutely huge range of political positions that agree only in accepting the basic desirability and achievability of a society with much reduced exploitation of labor. An equivalently all inclusive capitalist umbrella would put Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ayn Rand, and John Paul II all under the same heading. A Maoist and a Christian anarcho-pacifist are both communists, but that is where the similarities end.

Different shades of the dame color are still the same color. That is not how true diversity of thought works.

 

[Deleted member 88]

The only way I see a communist society functioning is true post scarcity. If anything could be created, from I dunno zero point energy or something from human cybernetic technology that could access zero point energy, and transform it into matter at will.

In such a world, nothing would be scarce as anything could be created from just pre existing energy in the universe. Capitalist supply and demand economics would break down.

And you'd more or less have "from each according to his ability to each according to his need".