Why are anticommunists so godawful at """""arguing"""""...

Why are anticommunists so godawful at """""arguing"""""? The few """arguments""" they do make consist entirely of edgy oneliners and memes such as "le best system we have", "all technology is the result of capitalism", or just flat out getting angry and spewing insults/pictures of le baysed pinoshit.
Exhibit A: boards.4chan.org/int/thread/84893362

Other urls found in this thread:

boards.4chan.org/int/thread/84936440
marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1890/xx/marx.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

It’s deeply ingrated American culture. They think communism is about making everyone have the same and capitalism will give everyone freedom.

this. they don't know what capitalism and communism actually are, so there's no way to respond. it's just gibberish

Most of it boils down to not acknowleding all of capitalism's problems. If something shitty happens under capitalism, it's either considered an externality or even considered communism.
You see, capitalism is 100% perfect and everything bad that happens is communism. Bank bailouts are communism, neoliberalism is communism, failing welfare states are communism.

What should annoy you is that, as shit as those arguments are, most Socialists and Communists would not be able to go on a podium with someone spouting them and make a good case for Socialism.

I mean, sure, you can 'debunk' those cliché arguments. You can debunk them in a wordy, lenghty fashion, that in the context of a rapid-fire debate would be boring and would give room for plenty of things to be picked apart and distorted, making it easy to dismiss or villanize you in front of audience that was mostly confused by what you've just said. Meanwhile, the old anti-communist soundbites and catchphrases will be as effective as they have always been.

it doesn't help that there are retards floating around arguing for socialism that don't even understand the ethics and logic behind it.
e.g.
Socialism or Barbarism!'s debate against AltHistory was completely embarrassing

Can you summarize that? First I'm hearing of such a debate.

Isn't communism about abolishing property altogether? Effectively that's the same as making "everyone having the same" (or everyone having nothing).


You are arguing with a strawman mate

That's because Socialist and Communist intellectuals are armchair revolutionaries, building self-masturbatory political and economical theories with no real world experimentation.

You think capitalists thinkers do not have "lengthy and wordy" arguments to make? Maybe they just choose not to when they are in the podium, as they would immediately lose if they were arguing with a good left debater (who knows lengthy and wordy arguments have no place in the podium)

...

Go ahead and explain what I got wrong

Communism distinguishes between personal and private property.

A simple example:

You buy a house and parcel of land 100 miles from where you live. You don't live there. You don't actively use it. You put a fence around it that says trespassers will be shot, and intend to sell it one day when the value of that land has gone up substantially. This is private property.

You also own a car. You use your car to get to and from work. You rely on your car to get around and take your possessions from one point to another. You do not simply "own" the car for the sake of personal profit, you are actively using it. This is personal property.

If someone chooses to live in the house, because they don't have a house, the only damage done to you may be prospective value of the house. By living there illegally, they gain shelter. And you, most likely, do not lose shelter as a result. It will not be the same if they take your car.

Given your example, I think I understand the distinction. However I don't see how this distinction applies to my previous statement.

The way I see it, you redefined "property" as "private property" and created a new term "personal property" that effectively means something else. So my initial statement would just be rewritten as "Isn't communism about abolishing private property altogether?", and I don't see how you disagreed with that.

I mean, and using your example, how did the people in your proposed communist society get to have a car as their personal property?

I, a person who understands nothing about communism, find your argument to be nonsensical sophistry as I cannot explain it with my basic intuitions and understanding of the world. You have been baited and outsmarted.
See OP

I forgot my meme arrow, but you get the point

This distinction has been around since forever, it's capitalist ideologues who insist that the clothes on your back are the same thing as a landlord's 500 houses
That being said, I think speaking of "property" and "posessions" is more convenient than this stupid private vs personal stuff

But in current society, both are considered private property, in the sense you can use them or not, store them for later use, save it to sell later, right? So ultimately, since communism is about abolishing private property, it is about abolishing property as we currently understand it. So what exactly is wrong with saying "communism is about abolishing property"?


dude what are you even trying to say

In a sentence: you are trying to understand communism without thinking like a communist.
You have a vague idea of what communism is, and you're filling in the blanks with your intuitions, background assumptions and understanding of the world. This is a typical capitalist strategy. They create a caricature of communism then pat themselves on the back when that caricature seems nonsensical while viewed through their naive, liberal worldview.
Communism is counter intuitive because your intuitions have been shaped by capitalism. For this reason, while capitalists are certainly capable of lengthy, detailed arguments, communists need to make such arguments. If they don't, they get bad faith responses like yours that appear to point out damning flaws in communism.
If a communist wants to speak about freedom and equality to a capitalist audience, he must define those terms carefully because "freedom" means "liberal freedom" and "equality" means "liberal equality." A communist knows that communist societies are capable of innovation, but he must prove this to capitalist sympathizers.
This also goes towards answering OP's question. Anti-communists can't argue because they don't have to.The truth of capitalism is baked into how we describe the world.

they don't want to actually argue with you is the problem

Because they don't read

You just defined property in a way that Marxists do not. Don't be so dishonest.

You can define property in whichever way you would like. I know what definition I used when I made my sentence "isn't communism about abolishing property altogether", which is the definition I believe the majority of people use. If someone would like to define property some other way, that is fine, but then we will just talk past each other.

The bottom line is, is communism or is it not about abolishing the concept of property as we normally understand it?

...

When communists talk about abolishing private property, we use the communist/Marxist definition of private property. Not the one you have defined, nor whatever one you think is normal.

So, if we are using the communist definition of private property, then yes, communists are for the abolition of private property.

To answer your question, if we are to use the definition that you have given, or that you think is the normal definition, then no. We don't want your damn toothbrush.

At least you recognize that I'm trying to understand communism. Now, do I need to think like a communist to try to understand communism or do I need to try to understand communism to be able to think like a communist? I would say the latter.


Absolutely, although I would say that vague is a rather vague qualifier though, and a bit presumptuous of you to use it. To the rest, isn't this what everyone does? They know a bit about the world and they "fill the void" with their understanding of it?


I don't think it is a strategy, I just think it is how anyone approach any concept. I'm legitimately wanting to know what is there that I misunderstand, it is not a strategy towards anything. The "naive, liberal worldview", a rather arrogant description of it, is just my worldview, which can change, and which I can use to talk to other people.


Any argument is enriched by length and detail. But a podium is not the place for that. I also don't think I have made any "bad faith response".


You seem to define everything in terms of a captalistic/communist dichotomy which I don't think makes sense. Forget about "a captalist audience", just think an "audience". Which terms would you use for "freedom", "liberty", etc? There is no capitalist world in opposition to a communist one. There is just the world, which you need to engage with.

Because there just aren't any facts. It is IMPOSSIBLE to face the fact that workers are exploited for their wages and make an argument to the counter. There is NO reasonable counter except for "Its not exploitation cuz they don't care for money" which goes against the entirety of liberal economics with max utilization and such. This is just one example of things that can only be faced with "Lalalalala not listening commie".
Same exact reason flatearthers sound so stupid.

putting aside the discussion of what is the normal definition of property.


What if I have more than one toothbrush?

Is this going to be a discussion on the private/personal property distinction or are you just being pedantic? I don't care how many toothbrushes you have, so long as you performed the labor to earn them. I have multiple toothbrushes, some for cleaning teeth, some for cleaning guns. All are used.

Once a week a commissary will be dispatched to your house, there in he will count your commodities and see if they are equal to your neighbors. Any extra will be redistributed. Now leave.

how are we measuring how much labor entitles me to have two or more toothbrushes?

this>>2372175

I don't have a lot of time to respond to this post, but I need to apologize based off of this line. The way you're approaching communism is similar to a strategy that anticommunists use to attack communism. It's not how I tend to approach concepts, so I got defensive and assumed you were being an asshole. Sorry, I was an asshole.
I use liberal as an insult, but here it just means what it says.
Shorter arguments are in certain ways much better than longer arguments. My point is that capitalists can make short arguments because they don't need to "show their work" in the same way that communists do. A podium is a fine place for a long, detailed argument if the speaker is good enough.
It's a rough approximation, and it works. Your usage of "audience" illustrates the point I'm trying to make. If I speak to a general audience where I am right now, I can make certain assumptions about the audience. One of those assumptions is that most of the audience will be capitalists or self-identified socialists who assume liberal definitions of freedom and equality. Given that assumption, I would intentionally not use the word "liberty" and would probably at least lay out the difference between positive and negative freedom so I don't sound like I'm speaking about freedom as a singular thing. Freedom is a loaded term because we live in a liberal society. Audience is a loaded term because an audience is made up of people who live in our society. "The world" is mostly capitalist. That's what I am engaging with.
By vague I mean anticommunists generally haven't interacted with communist literature seriously. I mean a definition of communism that isn't at all rigorous and is rather a collection of policies and ideas, like an out of focus picture where you can just make out equality, universal healthcare and maybe some gulags. Maybe people usually fill in the fuzzy bits with their pre-existing worldviews, but I've gotten out of that habit. In the case of communism, you get bizarre results. The trouble that many people have understanding how communists think of equality is the perfect example. All people need to do is let go of their assumptions. If you don't, you'll never understand communism.
I think this question is pure sophistry or at least I don't have time to answer it in a particularly useful way. In order to understand communism, you need to be willing to let go of your assumptions. Not forever, but just for the sake of learning.

We'll seize the Internet of Things and use it to ensure you only have one toothbrush.

This depends on how much time it takes for one to labor and produce a toothbrush. If I have a toothbrush making machine that can produce 1,000 toothbrushes in an hour, than I would have to labor 1/1,000th of an hour (3.6 seconds) in order to earn a toothbrush or labor credits to buy a toothbrush (doesn't have to be labor on toothbrushes, could be producing something else).

In a planned economy, this gets factored by how many toothbrushes are scheduled for production. If it is planned that each person needs at most 10 toothbrushes per year, then there are only 10 x # of people scheduled for production, which means you can't go buy 100 toothbrushes.

The idea is to plan to produce things that will be directly consumed/used. It would be a waste of labor if we produced so many toothbrushes that they need to be stockpiled.

Exhibit B:
boards.4chan.org/int/thread/84936440

That's interesting. I just have some concerns about that, maybe you can answer them and then I could learn something new. I'm sure there are answers for them in a communist literature somewhere.

If the worth of labor measured by how long it takes to produce something, won't people just gravitate towards easy jobs, but that take a long time to complete?

How can you prevent the planners of this economy from extending the labor cost of an easy to make good (say, by artificially increasing the time it takes to complete something), so that there is more work to be done?

Thanks for the response.

I think that someone can certainly let go of assumptions when entertaining a concept or a different idea. But assumptions do not simply exist in a vacuum, they are the result of experimentation with the real world. So I'm not sure how much can you "let go" and then learn something useful that you can bring back and turn into action in the real world.

Don't you think that if to make sense of communism you need a different intuition about so many things, that maybe it is simply that communism is wrong rather than your own intuition?

How can we believe that philosophers managed to figure out the way the world actually works and how it could be improved, by using just their heads and essentially no experimentation, and this idea is so good as to warrant a worldwide revolution to put it into place?

I feel like if indeed it works, then yes, it is the job of communists to show it. They have the burden of proof so to speak. And this is why the capitalist / communist dichotomy is a bit misleading. It is not that we live in a new world, and people are set out to make an argument about how this world is to be organized. We live in a world that already exists with certain traditions, customs, etc, and then there is this other world called "communism".

Also, I feel that showing how communism works cannot be for every single question, to answer that you "need to read a book". Unless that book has numbers, and has some actual science work, how can it be any more truthful, wrt its description of reality, than the reality that a person experience every day?

I will definitely have a look at some communist literature, so thanks for pointing that out. I still fear I'll find too many assumptions that contradict my own, and then will not be able to accept anything as truthful.

If communism is truthful and right, then why not think of way that convinces people at large of that? How about thinking of a way that communism can appear organically in the world we have today, and that will be a show that it works. If enough communists are serious about it and motivated enough, can't they come together and build a communist society together?

The thing is, we already have church that sold "wet dreams". You guys are trying to sell what churchfuckers have been selling since time immemorial. it worked while your product was "fresh" and "hip", then it became "mainstream" and now it's too cliche.

I'll back up internet friends when they're arguing with these people, and it's always the same porky propaganda. The best part is when they're ancaps or minarchists or whatever other meme ideology, ranting about the evil government blah blah blah, only to turn right around and parrot verbatim the government's ancient anti-communist talking points.

There's a study that demonstrates that quality of life outcomes were higher in socialist countries than equitable capitalist counterparts, but there's a line in it where they explain that they excluded the US because there "isn't a socialist country of that development level" if I had to guess they excluded the US because if they released a study that said life in socialist countries was better than, it'd never get published

The study uses World Bank data that covers 93% of the global population, but these fucking dimwits ignore all that to go "ha! they had to exclude the US, the BEST capitalist country! Better luck next time, commies!"

These fucking idiots here "communism" and their minuscule brains just shut down. It's the most disgusting willful ignorance.

This. You try and explain your terms and reasoning and they just cover their ears and scream about "leftist word games."

That's how people worked out the mathematics running your computer.

marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1890/xx/marx.htm

I think comparing computational theory to communism is not right. Computational theory facts are indeed facts if you accept the axioms enumerated before them, and follow logically from theorem to theorem. If communism is at the same level of truth, then it would be a subject of mathematics which it is not. If what you say is true, then enumerate the axioms of communism and the theorems.

More importantly, mathematics never built a computer, engineering did, and we can all look at it and see that it works. Where are this same type of experimentation with respect to communism?

Nevertheless the text you quoted is interesting.

To be fair most people don't know how to argue or debate. I'd argue Americans know it less because of their school system not teaching anything of value besides memorisation.

If you're just going to be a cock sucking pedant then fuck off.

Go read Kapital you fucking piece of shit, all the mathematical and philosophical work is there and done for you, you goalpost moving faggot.

Tell that to the kulaks they stripped of their land, food, dignity.

Case in point.

And in case you were wondering, yes cape town is in a communist nation state.

Referring to the drought/water managemenrlt crisis. Before you go telling me cape town isnt in zimbabwe, I know its in SA.

No one moved the goalpost. I've addressed what you said and introduced a new issue. Address this

If das kapital is a mathematical work prove to me any theorem at all that it introduces. You can copypaste.

That's the definition of moving goalposts you retarded nigger faggot.
Fuck you.

The value of a commodity is split into three terms:

c, v, s

v = wage per unit commodity
s = surplus value (profit) per unit commodity
c = capital and raw materials per unit commodity

The production of commodities necessitates in the first instance exploitation due to its structure. Furthermore due to the division of labor and the commodity form of production inequality of wealth is a natural result of capitalism.

Also you're an enormous pedant, if you want the proper elucidation go to the source

You just think that because you are failing to see what I'm trying to tell you. Your statement was saying that communism theory is at the same level of computational theory - which is plainly wrong. It is not pedantic to make the distinction, because if you do not, you end up with fallacious arguments such that communism is just like a computer - the implication being, if the computer worked, when you built it, communism will work as well when you introduce it in the real world.

An economy, ultimately, is the result of the interactions of millions of independent agents each with its own priorities and intentions. Any economical theory starts by simplifying reality by building a model of it, and in that simplification you certainly lose something. So the conclusions you get are "mathematically correct", but they will only be correct in the real world if the underlying model is a correct model of reality, which is never the case, because it is always too simplifying. So at best, communism is at the same level as other economical theories.


Thanks for posting that. I sort of answered to this point in the reply to the other guy. So communism is at the same level as other economical theories, and it has some mathematics to describe how it works, but at the start of it there is a model of reality from which the economical theory is built.

This is not a theory of communism!! This is classical understanding (marxist) of Capitalism.

Communists understand the deep structures of capitalism far far better than orthodox economists. We have bullet proof theories of all the economic phenomena existing in capitalism and we built it based on reality not on an idealised version. For example if you were to ask an orthodox (neoclassical) professor the following question:

"What determines the specific equilibrium price of commodities''

They would not be able to answer, this may seem like an innocuous question that isn't even complex. But to even begin to answer the question you must penetrate the structures which exist at the heart of capitalism and see reality as it really is.

You're absolutely a pedantic brainlet making up excuses to not be wrong.

You should do the world a favor and fucking kill yourself.

This part of what is meant by the phrase "the end of history". Capitalism has even bought the language. People can only describe the world on capitalism's terms. The state of language is already much worse than people like Orwell predicted.

so if your license gets suspended and you don't use your car for a while does it slip into the 'private property' category and get redistributed? are you allowed to sell/trade it if after a couple months of using public transport to commute you decide you prefer it to driving?

This is a stupid question, you know its stupid before asking so why did you ask it? Unless you're actually retarded why would you ask something this stupid?

If you argue in bad faith don't expect anything other than derision and mockery

I'm sure there are a lot of ways that Marxism as an economic theory makes a lot of sense. But in the end, it is an economic theory - its description of reality is simplified. Thus it is not at the same level of truth that the theory of computation makes of computation, which is what I was trying to say to the other guy.

I think that if anyone is a real economic theorist, and a serious one, a good question to ask yourself is, what are the flaws of my economical theory? Anyone should be able to criticize his own work, and see where his models fails to contemplate the full of reality.

Everything you just said basically amounts to a banal truism dressed up in far more words than are needed

If pointing out the difference between the level of truth between a theory of economics and a theory of mathematics is a banal truism, then why can't the other dude get it.

Can you argue that Communism does not lead to a censorship within the society of the individual? Or do you guys all just really not care if a government takes away rights for, "the greater good". You do realize that the chans you even communicate on are banned in China yes? Can you argue that the distribution of information to the citizens in China would be MORE restricted with communism? I'm seriously curious about your guys delusions please don't ban.

oops *without* communism, typo. Even drunk I can destroy your logic dick suckers.

Kapital is scientific, and the theories laid out in the book have been empirically tested and confirmed repeatedly. It even has predictive powers on the development of Capitalism today, considering it was written in 1860s.

It is not as scientific as computer science obviously mainly due to the nature of economics being comprised of ever changing social phenomena and not some concrete ever existing property of the universe like gravity or increasing entropy.

But all of that is irrelevant because any rational person can see that the planet is dying and inequality is increasing and the future increasingly uncertain and chaotic. These developments have a simple yet extremely difficult to implement solution. Which is the abolition of private property.

Communism or barbarism

So far I've yet to see any evidence of that. Kapital is as scientific as other economical theories, I think.

I'm genuinely curious about this.


Yes, so it is not as scientific as say physics, biology, or any other science (which is to say, it is not science!).


So the answer to societies problems is to embrace some alternatively theory because It purports to being some holy grail that solves all other problems? What if the ways it solve problems end up creating even more problems than you had before?


Are you even sure private property is the result of some oppressive reality we live in, and not the natural expression of human beings wants and needs?

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Start reading and stop being a sophist.

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