What's the object of being communist?

The world bank's definition of "poverty" is very self-serving in the sense that it assumes everyone to be wage laborers and the poverty rate is measured by that wage, rather than the ability to gather to one's self the means of survival.

So, under their model, a small farmer driven off their land and made to work in a factory for $2 a day was "rescued from poverty"

I find the idea of a systemic breakdown of capitalism based on its normal function fascinating. After all, how is it that human beings, despite their individual agency, seems to behave as stupidly as algae asphyxiating themselves in a pond?

i trust you, it just seemed way much utopic, even in the case that global economies indebt themselves more than their actual gpd, such scene couldn't take place.

Obviously not. Market socialism could not do it, let alone social democracy which is an even weaker and more pathetic political form bound to self-destroy just as it historically has.

Democracy itself is not desirable, it keeps the great down, it's a terrible and awful political system of mass idiocracy that undermines the well-being of the many as you can well see our entire history attest to, as well as its concept.

Communism isn't about democracy, it isn't about equitable share of society's burdens, it isn't about an equal base for all as meritocracy in which the hard working get more. Communism is the aim to free man from material politics so that all can do everything to fully develop themselves with no limit, for not all learn at the same pace or require the same resources to come to par. In such an arrangement all men are limited only by their will to become what they claim they could be. In such a time and place you really are responsible for how you end without blaming bureaucracy, the in-group, or your awful parents (no nuclear family).

So do you think it wouldn't work just because it would self-destruct and the basic income and state-funded education and health care would eventually be taken away or have their funding drastically cut? Or do you think even while those things were in place and were well-funded, it still wouldn't work in terms of being a system geared towards allowing anyone with talent to rise in their field, regardless of who their parents were?

My comment actually had nothing specifically to do with the "democracy" part of "social democracy", I was just talking about the idea of having a market economy but also having tax-funded basic income, education, and health care…apart from the basic income part that's what you generally see in social-democratic systems today. Though as far as democracy goes, I don't think non-democratic governments are very good at fostering excellence or creativity since they generally tend towards censorship and punishment of people who don't fit some template of a productive citizen or who fail to have the "correct" ideology.

So long as the economy of labor time is the economy of the world, which admittedly will be the case until science magic like replicators are a thing, the type of flourishing that communism represents is not a real possibility.

Communism as such, given our current capacities, is not possible even if we limited the population. There is a finiteness to our resources and their uses. Frankly, communism as the young Marx poses in philosophical form is itself a ridiculous concept that is as abstract and idealistic as one gets. Neither do we know if it can be achieved with finite science, nor does the problem of alienation as such end with communism.

Social democracy, and the idea of a minimum universal wage for just existing, do not provide a fix that is desirable. Is it better than what we have? Fuck yes, but it would not fix the problem of private individuals/groups commanding the direction of politics and economics. As much as the masses don't know good shit from bad shit, individuals driven and maintained in position by the logic of capital accumulation are just as bad if not worse as experience tells us with how our entertainment and sense of aesthetic has been shaped in the world at large under these conditions shows us. My bringing in of democracy in general was to just cut to the root of the issue, that no democracy can fix this kind of flourishing problem, furthermore, no political form at all can fix this problem, hence communism as a concept is in Marx originally an apolitical dream of a currently impossible economy. Communism is a purely negative concept of what >not< being alienated materially or socially would mean, but not what how or what it could actually be.

Communism won't have any need for self-proclaimed great men and their worshipers.

History only attests to the inefficiency of class rule and anything even remotely resembling democracy being ruthlessly stamped out as soon it appears.

Wrong. It's existence is unthinkable without worker control over society.

Considering how political terminology has been butchered I can't even be sure what your actual definition of democracy even is, but for all I know you're probably just referring to modern parliaments and elections. If that's the case then I can attest to the inefficiency of that 'democracy' as well.

keep it up comrade

Everything happening here under capitalism is all due to the power of labour. Capital requires enclosure, don't forget that.

The only reason it's true that the only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital is because capital instated necessarily removes any other forms of self sustenance for the worker - the process of capital is the process of proletarianization.

Finally, all of the improvements to these peoples lives is due to nothing else other than their own labour. Remember that, they have to sell their labour to get access to a living - imagine if they didn't have to?

The measure of capitalism against communism isn't the measure of capitalism against capitalism in the past but capitalism against communism.

But with a livable basic income people wouldn't be forced to spend their time on work they don't like in order to avoid destitution. Anyone who had some creative or intellectual project they wanted to work on could just get by on basic income while they were doing it, and if they needed help improving their skills they could go back into the free educational system.

This gets back to what I said about the problem of innovation under a communist system. When it comes to deciding what new products or technologies to invest resources in developing, not everyone is equally skilled at deciding what will actually end up being widely recognized as useful. If different people have proposals that require a lot of "funding" (whether we define that in terms of money or in terms of basic physical resources like iron ore) to get off the ground, who decides which proposals get which amounts of funding? One idea I've thought about is that in a market socialist system, you could have it set up so that all profits from companies were didn't go to capitalist shareholders but went back into a common investment pool controlled by the government, and then you could have government employees who could make investment decisions, with the amount that each employee could decide to invest being based on the track record of their previous investments, the ones with the best track records being allowed to make decisions for the largest fractions of the whole investment pool. But if this track record was based on how much profit their previous investments made, then the incentive would still just be for the professional investors to look for things that will sell well, even though unlike capitalist investors they wouldn't get any personal share of the profits. Maybe you could come up with other measures of "success" in investments besides profits (which tell you the extent to which the product fills a public need or desire), but it's hard for me to think of how to choose the measures other than just the whims of the leaders (or the masses, in a democratic system).

Well, who would make the decision about things like which movie scripts to fund (and again 'fund' can mean physical resources rather than money) or which book manuscripts to make large print runs of, and what criteria would they use to choose other than expected popularity/profit with the public? If you have some kind of planning committee for investing in artistic and intellectual products, how to make sure that anyone with talent can rise and be seen by large numbers of people, even if their ideas might be too new or strange to be recognized as worthy by those on the committee? For the promotion of excellence I think it's important to have a sort of Darwinian selection process for creative products, where a whole lot of people can independently throw their stuff out there and then the community decides what's most worthy of recommending and passing along (not just in a totally democratic way, since their can be sub-communities of people who have particular shared tastes not shared by the public at large, and within these sub-communities particular works can be recommended and promoted even if they wouldn't be of much interest to the rest of the public).

We are just after a global economic crisis. Are you living under a rock? Poverty in America, parts of Europe is pretty high.

Poverty hasn't decreased, it's just hidden better.

Let others do all the work while you reap all the benefits.

Also, kill all dissenters.

A walk through the nearest "poor area" should remind you.

Capitalism and communism are two wings of the same bird of prey and they're both controlled by jews

You don't need to put this boring brainwash-puke between spoilers brackets.

If you are a committed materialist there is no way around Marxist thought. Marxian critique of capitalism is really all you need. I don't know if it makes me a communist per se but if you are a person who is committed to understanding the world in an objective and scientific way without dogma and ideology you have to go through Marx, there is no other way. How you use Marxian dialectic from that point on is your own personal choice.