Reading an actual book on economics makes it impossible for a benevolent individual to be a communist, at least without a physically painful amount of cognitive dissonance.
Oh, you sound really informed on this. What books of marxist economics have you read to come to this conclusion? What theory of subjective value based economics books?
I mean, I've just spent over a decade studying various schools of economics, maybe you have much more insight than me on this topic.
Yeah, to be a communist you have to be stupid enough to read books on economics.
I think it works pretty well in real life too.
Privileged, child, or petite bourgeois aspirations?
Remember that growth is relative. GDP per capita in the mid 30s was still three times higher in countries like the states, UK, and Switzerland compared to the Soviet Union. This trend continued into the next decades. Pretty much all of Europe had a stronger economy.
And how did that pan out for high GDP France? GDP per capita is a bad statistic to use. Two economists trading a random object and 20 dollars back and forth raises the GDP of a place by forty dollars per cycle
And there weren’t mass famines and rampant scarcity issues to the same extent in the west.
Thats because they exported their economic problems to the colonies. Look up how many people starved to death In British colonial India. Also the soviet union ended the previously periodic famines when their collectivization policy was fully implemented
Yes the Soviet economy did grow, but the libertarian argument is about efficiency.
What sort of efficiency? Because Marxists argue that capitalism is really good at making profit and really bad comparatively at efficiently improving human outcomes.
But many factors influence price (competition from profit seeking, availability of resources, etc).
That is literally why it has low information value.
you remove profit motive in any sense, how can a group allocate resources effectively or incentivize work?
Empirical response: How did the soviet economy grow 50 percent during the Great depression?
Theory based response: when you remove profit seeking workers are no longer alienated from their labor, as the harder they work the more it benefits them and their community and not some rich fuck.
If I'm working a job now, what incentive do I have to be as productive as possible? The potential for promotion? If I wanted to optimize my chances for that, I'd be more interested in learning to be a kissass than to improve my work.
Price/profit margin signal more than just greed. The market self corrects based on prices.
Price is a very low information density signal. It isnt actually rational to do economic planning (as all firms do in market economies) off of price, why do you think non-hostile corporate espionage is a thing?
Then a group of representatives are needed to do it for them, but wait, isn’t that the same thing as a government owning and operating the economy? Like in fascism? Oh no!
Sure, if you ignore all the differences that makes it entirely different, such as:
Democratic control
Local level decision making toward central goals being done by workers and not capitalist overseers
The lack of a profit motive
Claes consciousness, aka we understand how things actually work and we don't have to blame misfortunes on a scapegoat like under capitalism
Tbf Vietnam has a hard time building lines given all the unexploded ordinance that the US left
How would it be physically possible to see a whole subway from that one photo
Ngl this is lazy orientalism. You can easily look up whether Pyongyang has a subway system and find photos taken by Westerners of their subway system
Yoy might want to make it clear that you're making fun of nazi apologists
Oh, now do Heart Mountain next!
anti-authoritarian leftists, including anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, democratic socialists, and reformists(who commonly use “tankie”
Ah yes, the anti authoritarian anarchists like the Ukrainian Free State, a military dictatorship that enabled pogroms against Jewish people in their territories.
The marxist leninists were in practice a lot more anti-authoritian" than the anarchists and other "anti-authoritians" of the time.
USSR was justified in using tanks to crush a revolution
noted anti-stalinist Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary
I would also send tanks into Hungary -even if we were close to a peaceful settlement- if I suddenly got reports of soviet government officials and jews being lynched. Revolutions don't start lynching jews. Counter-revolutions do.
This happened a decade after the holocaust in a country that the Soviets failed at denazifying as successfully as other Warsaw pact countries. Hungary was an enthusiastic collaborator in the holocaust. You do the math. The vanguard of the true revolution they were not.
Idealist. It would be easier and more viable to just have the means of production be owned and democratically managed by the proletariat than to share power in the long term with our exploiter without one side or the other losing.
Why? The US does genocide all the time without consequence.