this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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You're technically describing the downsides of authoritarianism, bordering on dictatorship, not communism. That being said, I don't believe communism would work either. Communism isn't the only system at play in those scenarios. Again, not defending communism as a good thing, just that the given reasons aren't actually due to communism but other parallel systems that were implemented at those times.
The only way communism can work is if it's not run by people.
You'd need something like a benevolent AI overlord.
The problem with all forms of government and economy is that it involves human beings.
This is a truly unpopular opinion but i will stick my neck out to say i fully agree.
Power corrupts, humans are flawed with greed and bias. The bigger a society becomes the more impossible it becomes for humans to properly remain in charge.
AI today is far from perfect and more then flawed but it keeps evolving faster, infinitely faster compared to how biological life can. The potential for AI to grow into something much more capable, unbiased and fair then any of is can be is obvious, so is its potential for the exact opposite.
Summarized: i don’t trust humans in positions on power at all and i wont start to just because i don’t know if i can trust something not human instead.
It absolutely is not obvious. AI, especially today, is usually either generative based on past examples or evolutionary based on given goals. Both of those come with obvious and extreme bias. Bias is actually an integral part of machine learning. It's literally built into the system and is defined and controlled to achieve the results desired.
AI is and always will be biased, moreso by its creators, but absolutely by the information and frameworks provided to it. We have absolutely no idea how to approach the concept of an unbiased AI, or even defining what unbiased would look like. It's philosophically extremely difficult to define what an unbiased person would think or do.
Edit: somehow I missed that last sentence fragment. I don't think we're in disagreement of the conclusion, but possibly just the details of how one arrives at it.
Calling it “obvious” was an error on my part, its more a subjective feeling that i chose to believe in.
I fully agree on what you said about bias with ai today, i think its not possible to do it without guided bias because ai doesn’t have a full perspective of the world it exists in. It only knows what we tell it.
In a way its a young child, and we often have to lie to guide behavior. Information often needs to be abstracted and simplified to get human desired results, we have yet to obtain a true artificial intelligence result, because for me to be considered intelligent you need to be entity and not just a tool.
Seeing ai evolve though, how fast we archieved near gpt3 performance on consumer hardware is mind blowing. Open ai talks about smarter then human ai in a few years and I believe it. When the systems are truly intelligent and can learn themselves and adapt to changes in the world, new information then we “start” getting into an era where machine lead humanity can happen.
Some of my simplified rational is that once ai becomes smarter then human it will fully understand that biological entities are biased to their own needs and that itself can also be biased from its own perspective but because an ai does not have biological needs or feelings it can properly dedicate itself to overcome its own flaws and shortcomings.
If you burn a pastry, you don't just give up baking pastries. You declare that the burnt one isn't a real pastry and start over.
Likewise with communism. Oh a few million people died? No biggie just try again 😚
This is a ridiculous analogy. It's also to the point of technically arguing one side while sarcastically supporting the other.
And it also ignores my actual point and sets up a straw man anyway. All you're doing is trying to claim I'm making a no true Scotsman fallacy. I am not. I never said every case of communism wasn't communism. I even implicitly stated otherwise by saying communism hasn't been attempted that many times for a statistical significant trend. I stated the failures mentioned were do to other problems. I'm not even claiming communism can or can't work. Just that the arguments provided don't support the conclusion. Being quippy doesn't give a free pass to avoid using logic and reason. I've even made comments against people making bad arguments in support of communism. I just want to see real discussions about it and not folks repeating sound bites from their favorite talking heads.
If communism devolves into authoritarianism every time it is attempted, I don’t see the practical distinction.
How many times has capitalism become dictatorships or fascists? Yet we continue to do it.
Not to mention all those attempts have died in the socialism phase, because surprise surprise consolidation of power doesn’t lead to it being distributed.
“WhAtAbOuT!”
A handful of times. Most capitalist nations are not authoritarian. Purely by the numbers, it has a much better track record. Of course, “it’s not real capitalism/communism” always derails this discussion.
I think you outline why communism inevitably fails. Marx advocated for violent revolution to overthrow the “bourgeois” democracy. The moment democracy is gone, the strong take and retain power. This is why, no matter the system, democracy must be the bottom line. It ensures that power is distributed. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than the alternatives.
It turns out it's every time as we're seeing with late-stage capitalism. Purely by the numbers it's like 17 times vs 300 and of those 17 they were in a cold war with half the world. And that's not even the same argument? It's not up for debate that these were socialist countries, fuck the second S in USSR is for socialist.
And once again that's a miss. You're conflating capitalism with democracy, that's not the same thing at all. You can have democratic or authoritarian capitalist or socialist countries.
I’m sorry I don’t understand what you’re arguing. Are you claiming that all Western nations are authoritarian? I emphatically disagree.
Why do overwhelming popular policies, like drug reform and universal healthcare, fail time and time again, while overwhelmingly unpopular policies, like tax cuts for the rich, easily succeed time and time again? Capitalism inevitably becomes thinly-veiled bourgeoisie authoritarianism. "Vote with your dollars" means those with the most dollars have the most votes.
You act as if it's been tried any amount of time that would be statistically significant. Sometimes it's not even communism other than in name and folks still count it.
And it doesn't devolve into it. It's simply always been done at the same time. When you have essentially a dictatorship, absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
A practical distinction historically speaking, but not philosophically speaking. If you're unable to differentiate between concepts in history, I don't know how you can ever effectively discuss them objectively. Though, this should have been evident with your comment initially. Communism doesn't devolve into authoritarianism. They're not even the same types of philosophies. One is about governing and one is about commerce. It's like claiming capitalism devolves into a plutocracy. It does help to produce a plutocracy, but it didn't devolve into one. They're not the same thing.
There is a difference between theory and execution.
Communism doesn't even have to mean that there has to be a state for example.
Communism is a group of ideologies and not automatically Stalinism or State Capitalism like in China.
These are some societys which are at least socialist and some of them on the way to communism If you want to simplify it heavily: the means have to mark the ends ergo you can't use the state to destroy the state (communism describes a stateless moneyless and classless society)