Skeptic Project

Also, I'd like to say this: There is absolutely nothing wrong with Communism. It's actually pretty damn close to what an RBE is, but it's considered a dirty word because most Americans were raised on government propaganda. The traditional problem with Communism is simply that it must be administrated by humans, who will inevitably be corrupted by their power.

But you take Communist Russia circa 1917, exact same politics but remove the leaders and replace them with computers and robotics, and today we'd all be flying the Hammer and Sickle. If someone in the leadership of this Movement suddenly said, "Okay, we're all fucking Communists here!" that wouldn't bother me in the slightest. I'm immune to brainwashing now.

People do crave leadership. People are lazy. But leadership doesn't have to be corruptible. In fact, leadership can't be corrupted once money is taken out of the equation.

To address the thread title, yes, there is a huge problem with this Movement, IMO. The problem is that people don't realize that GETTING THERE IS THE ENTIRE BATTLE. The RBE concept is sound. It stands up to intense scrutiny as the only viable alternative for mankind. But if we don't make people understand that society itself is in a state of emergency, that we must go to war of some sort against our so-called leaders before it's too late, we can kiss all these ideas goodbye.

Money-free Economy? Round Cities? Vertical Farms? Driverless Cars? Great ideas. Never gonna happen. Not until we overcome the evil beast controlling our planet - GREED!

I mean, hey, if you're a scientist, and you want to develop something for an RBE, go right ahead, I sure as hell can't do it. But do so with the understanding that whatever you create is just going to be abused for profit until we force the majority of people to wake up and smell the failure of the Monetary/Market System.

It's not that hard. Seriously. The Man is making it quite easy now, he's not able to cover all his tracks in the Information Age. Go ahead and talk to someone about an RBE, pick yourself a nice staunch Republican if you enjoy a bit of anger with your conversation. You'll realize a few minutes in that everyone is grasping at straws now, no one can present any cohesive logic in favor of retaining the current system. You'll win every argument, everyone knows deep down inside that our society is corrupt beyond redemption in its current form.

The problem is, everyone in this Movement is talking about round cities, egos, and trolls. No one is having THAT conversation - the one that leads to revolution.

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=231&id=338544&limit=10&limitstart=50&Itemid=100114&lang=en#339245

Where's The Hot Commie when you need her?

But you take Communist Russia circa 1917, exact same politics but remove the leaders and replace them with computers and robotics, and today we'd all be flying the Hammer and Sickle.

The "politics" were basically doing what the party thought was be the right thing to do. The problem wasn't computational, it was strategical, financial and intellectual. Computational problems did play a big role later, but not until the 50's/early 60's, and solving them would not have soviet tyranny much more enjoyable, only more productive.

On KhanAcademy, Sal said that Marx didn't realize that companies could compete for labor, thereby raising laborer's wages. Is it true that the communist ideology has such an obvious flaw?

No, that's not true. Marx uses Ricardo's works about positions of power in trade to argue that the "capitalist" is essentially in a position of power against the masses of workers competing for employment. A method to combat this tendency would have been unions, as they turn masses of (competing) workers into one acting party, which Marx however considered to be little more than the fight of a slave to reduce the weight of his chains.

That said, I'm not a Marxist, so you'd probably get a better result asking an expert on this topic.

This is kind of off topic, but if some people argue that unions drive companies away (overseas), wouldn't the solution be some kind of international union?

Twitter?

"Going dumpster diving for dinner, thanks to low wages"

This is kind of off topic, but if some people argue that unions drive companies away (overseas), wouldn't the solution be some kind of international union?

There has been some thought in this direction by the OECD, but it's being resented for obvious reasons by both governments of low-wage countries and international corporations, so it's about as likely to happen as FEMA death camps.

Both China and Vietnam abandoned Marxist economic planning in the 1980s or even prior.

The western view is that the USSR failed, it actually didn't. The USSR was dissolved by choice, even when by popular vote (71%) the people stated they did not want to dissolve the USSR. If the people had no hope in the USSR and it was truly failing, why did they mostly vote to keep it? Why did Albanians vote in majority to join the USSR?

The USSR's economic stagnation, though, happened for two primary reasons:

1) The inability for central planners to create the industrial jump they did in the 1930s-50s. It's easy to increase industrial output when most of the people are unemployed and uneducated peasants. The question then is how do you keep that going? China's solution was to abandon central planning, and Gorbachev was on the way to do the exact same thing.

2) Considering #1 above, by the 1960s under Brezhnev the economy began to decay rapidly due to corruption from within the state itself and also central planners simply ignoring the problem, and trying to refocus the industry that was left in competing military with the United States, which had the power to spend itself into debt, and the USSR didn't.

China and Vietnam can do what any third world hell hole can do: pay people almost nothing for labor. It has nothing at all to do with "communism," you find the same thing in other South East Asian countries and other places around the world. The benefit for the US is that in some places, non-CP labor movements are extremely illegal, and that has more to do with totalitarianism, and less to do with socialism; it has a history in itself as to why that is.

Or we can just tow the America-fuck-yeah ideological line as to what happened in the USSR: Reagan destroyed it with his mighty low-tax (but really high-tax) fists of capitalist fury.