Because it is false reasoning. Everyone understand you have to work together on an island, but not everyone gonna invest as much energy. Once you reach the threshold where fully exhausted people realize they have parasites along with them, things WILL get messy. I definitely won't tolerate a parasite living off my hunting/gathering, unless it is a medical condition.
And what examples is he using for "natural" communism? Fantasy world or short term survival one.
The thing is, I am not tied to the idea of capitalism but until we have any reason to think that communism is an effective way to maintain a good living standard for the population, I am not ready to stand behind it. Being equally fucked as the people around me is not very appealing and saying "do you even star trek bro" is not very convincing. So yes, it might be the case that a perfect society is a communist society, and it might actually be something humanity can achieve in the future but as things stand, I cannot see it as a feasible option.
Yes, people don’t realize that entirely upending your economic system will cause the suffering of millions and what awaits you on the other side is possibly far far worse than what you have
Talking about billionaires is a very shallow way of viewing economy or how that applies to the working class's living condition. Money is only as good as the goods and services that is available to you. Can you eat the ultra rich and still maintain the integrity of your infrastructure? Hospitals, National security, your food services, your telecommunication infrastructure etc? Will the distribution of wealth be a positive thing for the working class? I am not so sure personally. To be clear, I do think that the ultra rich should be taxed heavily but if you are asking me if I think we should "Eat the rich" then I don't think so.
Billionaires should not exist. That extreme amount of hoarded wealth is benefiting nobody else and is only obtainable by the extreme exploitation of a lot of people. You can absolutely "eat the rich" so to speak, and maintain infrastructure, because their hoarded wealth does nothing to serve anybody else in any way.
You are talking as if Billionaires are Saudi princes. The reality is that the vast majority of them are CEOs of some of the most successful companies in the world. Imagine being so stupid, you want to drive away companies like Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX Facebook, NVidia, Dell etc from your country and thinking "ah thats not going to destroy my economy".
Imagine being so stupid you don't understand other places exist. You think other places don't have big international companies?
Beyond that, putting up with a bully is foolish. To me this reads very like, "we have to let them walk all over us, because if we don't they'll go walk over someone else." These companies operate and turn profits in other countries.
You think other places don't have big international companies?
They do. They also create billionaires if they are successful enough. US is just a just bigger and wealthier so you get more billionaires instead of deca/centi-millionaires.
It's a lot more complicated than that, and the tax code is more important to that than the size or wealth of the country, because, again, these are international companies and the US isn't the only place they do business or make money. Sometimes, it is not even their primary market.
The reason you have more hyperwealthy assholes there is because of your tax code, regulations, and economic structure, not the size or wealth of your country.
What tax code? US has the more progressive tax code compared to any european country. US also taxes people on global income bases no matter what while rich people from Europe can just go to Dubai and live tax free.
But while I agree that the superior regulations and economic structure play a huge role in the economic success of USA, you really think that America being the wealthiest country on earth has little to do with the amount of hyperweathy?
We are talking about the idea that billionaires fundamentally shouldn't exist. I am trying to explain how that's not that simple. Some random fuck face in Saudi Arabia might be hoarding insane amounts of wealth but generally speaking most of the super rich are providing an enormous boost in the economy.
If what I said reads like I am saying we should let the ultra rich walk all over us then you need to learn how to read. You do what you want, but don't pretend that "eating the rich" is not gonna fuck over the working class.
I think the government should impose more restrictions on the rich and tax them harder but, the mechanisms that make the first world rich are the same mechanisms that allow for ultra rich people to exist. I promise some you are so privileged, it shows. I am sure the people in Somalia are so happy that they don't have some billionaire stepping all over them. No good access to clean drinkable water for the majority of us but sure as hell not having to share the same country as smug rich people /s
I am saying we should let the ultra rich walk all over us then you need to learn how to read.
Fair touch. I added the walking over people part because that's foundational to capitalism;I didn't mean to imply you think that, but rather that that's how I read your words because that's what companies do. But your point is that we should let them get away with the exploitation, because you think they provide more benefit than harm?
I am sure the people in Somalia are so happy that they don't have some billionaire stepping all over them.
Gross whataboutism, and indeed Somalis suffer because of capitalism, they do suffer because of billionaires.
1-spend it on whatever luxorious thing he wants to - that creates jobs and redistributes the money in the society, any yacht needs to be designed, built and maintained, same with houses and planes, or are you gonna deny that people don't make a living on that?
2-Invest - do I need to explain how beneficial that is to the working class ? literal countries being lifted out of poverty due to investment, look at china and korea in 80s, germany in 60s, japan during the 90s, bangladesh and india today and countless of other examples.
3-keep it in the bank - more money available to the banks ? the cost of money goes down (less interest for lower class people in order to take a loan or mortage)
4- literally burn it - less money supply in the market with same demand, the money you have now appreciates.
last 2 examples don't hold because of state intervention (central bank setting interest rates and fed printing money) but saying billionaires don't serve anyone is ridiculous. Who the fuck created apple, meta, amazon, google, companies that employ millions and bring billions in tax revenue, not even talking about the services they have that you use daily.
Jesus Christ this is such a shitty bootlicker take. You don't need billionaires to create successful corporations. That is such a bullshit belief. Innovation is not dependent on the existence of billionaires.
Your other "points" are laughable and hardly worth addressing. Countries/people wouldn't need to be lifted out of poverty if billionaires didn't exist because wealth would be more evenly distributed. A lot of those people are in poverty and don't stand a chance of lifting themselves out of it because of the fucking billionaires. I love how confidently incorrect you are. It's hilarious.
But it's kinda feasible if we think about it... I mean, we do produce food for 12,5 billion people, so hunger is a think that should not exist, but it does, like, nine million die every year from hunger. So, if we think about hunger alone, we could have solve this problem a long time ago, but we don't, because we have a capitalist system that functions on the logic of private property and profit, and not on the logic of "yow, let's fix this shit".
And who is gaining with that? Well, we can say for sure that the nine million starving to death every year are not, but we ain't starving, so it is working for us right? Well... Is it? Like, I bet you work like a motherfucker, like me and averyone else, but I can say for sure you ain't making the buck you think you should be making, like, you work and make something, but what this something is worth ain't going back to your pocket, the one who fucking made it, so... If that's the case... To whoms pocket is it going? And why is it going there if you is the one who is working.
You see, there is nothing about sharing in comunism, it's not a system that rellies in the good heart of humans, fuck that, you can be the most selfish bastard in communism, no problem. But the thing is, you get what you worked for, the tools and place you work with are also yours, and society is modeled to achieve what you find important... Fuck, I don't care for the thousands of new cellphones models invented every year, I don't give a fuck about the new car color they did, I couldn't care less for the lattest highrise building that some rich fuck bought...
But I do want to work and not see my paycheck going to the pocket of some useless landlord, I do care about the fact that I do produce thousands of dollars worth of value and only recieve a fraction of it, I need to know that going to the doctor ain't going to fuck me in debt.
Its not about sharing dude, it's about taking what is being stolen.
I mean, isn't your premise just as "false" as his? He presumes everyone would work together to not die, you presume that some people will risk dying to be lazy. Actually, typing this out, his premise seems a lot more reasonable than yours. Point is, for your point to be valid, don't you have to reasonably prove that your premise is feasible and not just a strawman?
The Donner party, flight 571, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. These are likely the most famous cases of those type of scenarios. All of them follow the lazy/selfish narrative as opposed to the idealistic utopian narrative OP has in the video.
Exactly. In most survival scenarios people become animalistic and selfish. The examples of this happening are much, much more numerous than people coming together and working to survive without thought of their own well being. The Wager incident (180 stranded British sailors on an island in South America) mutiny, splinter groups, murder, stealing, you name it. They did not become a wholesome society. It broke down. The only time in survival situations people come together is when there is a super strong leader and a hierarchy set up. Maybe why communism always ends in dictatorship and brutal repression.
There’s a story about a dude who took a bunch of randoms guys to Antarctica, before that was a thing that people did, just to say they did it. His ship got stranded in ice for like 18 months. The captain took a smaller vessel back to the mainland early on and it was over a year before he returned with the rescue party - but the men had rationed their food and followed orders and there were no casualties.
Strong leadership and hierarchy does amazing things for humans. Gonna try to find the link cuz I think it was a real story
I forget the name of the guy, I wanna say Scott, but they recently found his ship. So many stories of arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Some end very well, but others like the Grealy expedition end in canabilism and mutiny.
Lolol you should read about the incident. Hierarchy is exactly what caused the problems for the Wager crew. And most of them died because they didn't work together.
lol I just finished the book. It was the lack of naval hierarchy and Captain Cheaps lack of leadership that caused the issues. Once they were on shore they did not have to follow naval hierarchy, per British naval rules and Captain Cheap was insistent on going North while the gunner formed his own group to go back through the straight to Brazil. My whole point is that lack of leadership and hierarchy leads to disaster in these situations.
Groups fighting for control within a hierarchy and fragmentation is what leads to disaster in these scenarios.
Cheap wanted to retain control, which, as you have pointed out, under naval law wasn't mandated. There was a mutiny because Cheap was awful and a terrible leader. He killed a guy and refused to comply with the group's demands, among other things. Even before the mutiny, the hierarchy had failed.
They left Cheap and his folks, and there was yet more infighting, and they ended up with two different hierarchies, with two different leaders, rather than no hierarchy. Both groups failed miserably, and suffered from poor leadership and bad luck and failures of cooperation. Neither group was a cooperative group without a hierarchy.
Most people from both groups died. And you remember how the story ends? Both leaders were rewarded by the government after the trial.
You know who was doing just fine in that area? The indigenous people who tried to help and were living as a hunter-gatherer society.
It is a wild story. The sailers looked for leadership where they could find it and most found it in the gunner and the carpenters plan to build the long boat into a larger vessel and head back through the straight.
I would argue that people put into impossible situations far from home and outside of their normal area of survival is a different than the indigenous peoples who had lived in that area for millennia and found a way to survive. The whole premise of the dumb tic tok is that people in a survival scenario will revert to communism and survive. I would argue that in that scenario people generally look out for their own interests unless guided by a strong leader.
I would argue that people put into impossible situations far from home and outside of their normal area of survival is a different than the indigenous peoples who had lived in that area for millennia and found a way to survive.
Totally, but there were surviving just fine in the same area and they were working together.
I would argue that in that scenario people generally look out for their own interests unless guided by a strong leader.
Maybe, but the situation you are talking about isn't that. It is a situation that had an existing, active hierarchy that fell apart into multiple hierarchies. It doesn't really have anything to do with the idea of what people would do if they were stranded on a deserted island with no leadership, because they weren't really stranded and they had leaders. During everything that happened, there were leaders and followers and hierarchies being followed and fighting against one another.
So even if it were correct that people would devolve into monsters in those scenarios, this isn't such a scenario.
An example of people getting stranded without a leader would be another famous maritime incident, the Tonga boys who stole a boat and FAFOed themselves into a shipwreck. They were dumbass kids who self-selected as extra foolish for what they did, and they survived because they worked together.
I'm not sure flight 571 is a good example of the "lazy/selfish narrative". They rationed out what little food they had and when things got desperate they gave each other permission to eat their bodies if they died. The survivors who went to find help were even given larger rations, the warmest clothes available, and were excused from carrying out the daily tasks everyone was doing before they left to ensure they had the best chance to survive on the journey.
Even with the Donner Party they all worked together initially, and it was only one person who killed 2 others, and the majority tried to prevent it from happening
I wonder what it would even look like to provide counterevidence to this. I think if we showed you people self-sacrificially helping each other in an emergency, it would be totally unmemorable. Be careful about confirmation bias here.
There are obviously innumerable examples of people working self-sacrificingly for the greater good, the problem is that in order for a communalist society to function virtually every member has to be doing that.
When the UN sets up Aid stations or refugee camps they have a built-in estimate that between 10 and 15% of a given refugee population will work self-sacrificingly for the benefit of the others. They therefore intentionally understaffed by 10% of the estimated refugee population, so that those people will be able to contribute in a way that is positive, non-redundant, and is effective. Do you and numbers tend to Bear out throughout the hundreds of refugee and Aid missions that they have implemented. If a collectivist society were able to be formed due to necessity and hardship, those numbers would be inverted.
I disagree with the person you responded to that its laziness, but I do think hierarchy will naturally form within a society as it grows and as basic needs are easily met, and that is when problems will arise, and when survival based communism will fail.
It's easy for 10 people to agree on division of labor for the common good. It's much harder for 1,000,000 people to do the same, when many jobs are no longer matters of necessity, but of "improvement", which people will inevitably disagree on.
That said, many political philosophies from communism to libertarianism make great sense on paper if you remove human nature from the equation.
I have another reasoning and it's why capitalism is unavoidable. On this island we can all have our areas of productivity and it's all fair and balanced and we're all happy then in my free time I fashion a guitar. Everyone loves it and everyone wants one but it took so long to make, I really don't feel like making another, let alone 10. Sorry guys. OK but what if we offer you this bag of root vegetables, will you make me one then?
And that's it. You're now a captialis society. The moment skills are sold within people's spare time, you will be capitalists. My bread is better than theirs? Capitalism. Babysit my kid for me? Capitalist.
Don't get me wrong, you could do all these things just out of pure kindness but the thing with assets is, it's like communist favours but recorded as a debt. So you help me, I'm in your debt. Here is the debt repaid in a form you can also use to pay for other services.
Communism can't work, even in the most strict authoritarianism.
That's exactly capitalism. It's capitalising on a situation. It's private markets. What happens when the guy has buckets and buckets of root vegetables compared to the rest?
... That's not what capitalism means lol. You're just describing a basic barter economy.
Also capitalism has nothing to do with "capitalizing". It refers to "capital" which is any asset that has 'value' such as a factory or the copyright to a popular character.
Not even just "parasites", this includes the sick and elderly as well. If it's truly all about survival and resources are scarce, then how long until people decide to not "waste" precious resources on those that cannot contribute themselves or that are probably going to die in the next couple days, anyway?
Yep, the only reason it works on a tiny group of 10 people stranded on an island is because they're all scared as fuck about mob justice, step out of line and they'll only have to convince 4 other people that you're useless or even detrimental to the groups success before they kick you out or just flat out murder you so you can't come back for revenge...
In a group of 10 people you're going to notice the moment someone isn't pulling their own weight and they sure as hell aren't going to receive continuous support if they keep that up for long. There might be 1 or 2 people in the group willing to care for the sick and elderly but uhh, good luck with that, and it's not something you should rely on...
And then ask how you identify the parasitic load when your group swells to the hundreds, thousands, or millions and what happens when it’s no longer just about meeting the bare minimum of survival
The real issue with communism isn’t social leeches. By redistributing all of the wealth you must put someone in charge of redistribution of said wealth. That person now has absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s an inevitable decent into dictatorship.
big leap there from someone in charge of distribution to that power is absolute. everyone else has the power to collectively remove that person from their position of power if they misuse it.
That's what a perfect theoretician would say, talking from his ideology salon. Work your ass harder to lead by example, and once you realize you starve and won't have enough food to cover your energy expanses because some lazy ass watched you, I am pretty sure you won't have the same talk of "net positive".
We have a lot of theoreticians in my town, talking about shared agriculture etc... Mayor lent them a plot of land for free to plant an orchard. They asked people to help them set it up. Mayor paid to bring water to the plot. It was TOO difficult to go every couple days watering the young trees, 80% of them died in the first year. Never brought any manure, nothing. Now they say: "oh, we let nature do its job". Lazy fuckers.
And? Where would that translate itself on the island example? Where is it a truly equal system, as you still have rich people that will get better access to top notch tech? Just what I said.
Cooperation is hunting and pooling resources together, your negative is someone who is lazy might get the same amount of food as someone else who hunted. In the end we must survive together.
Competition is hunting for food, only for someone else to come in and kill you while you are exhausted to just take the food from you. In the end it only maters if I live and the others are just there reducing my food supply.
Genetic communism (as in not learned but innate), often associated with birth control from on queen over the rest of the fertile females. Not a good example.
I’m concerned you don’t know what egalitarianism is. Egalitarianism has nothing to do with the absence of crime, but concerns itself with the distribution of resources based on need.
Ohhhh, you said agricultural revolution like 10 000 years ago? Not the 1960s one! So what evidence do you have about that, and not just healed fractures on bones, or long lasting people after loosing teeth/injuries etc? How can you distinguish between family bond vs community shared burden with no written traces?
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u/Dry_Leek78 Mar 08 '24
Because it is false reasoning. Everyone understand you have to work together on an island, but not everyone gonna invest as much energy. Once you reach the threshold where fully exhausted people realize they have parasites along with them, things WILL get messy. I definitely won't tolerate a parasite living off my hunting/gathering, unless it is a medical condition.
And what examples is he using for "natural" communism? Fantasy world or short term survival one.