[quote]Otep wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
Well… technically, he suggested his revolution occur only after enough capital had been developed for the proletariat to live comfortably on and after a fundamental change in human nature had occurred. Hope springing eternal, this hasn’t happened yet, and so a 100% refutation of Marx’s ideas have yet to come to light. Arguably, this is because he placed his utopia after a new jerusalem that may or may never happen.
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In short, he rested the crux of his conclusions on the existence of an event that’s impossible to prove or disprove, you just have to take it on faith. Which makes for bad science, but it should remind you of some religions.
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Human nature will not change. To base conclusions on that premise is ridiculous… You have a better chance winning two lotteries, getting struck by lightning, and ate by a bear simultaneously.
[quote]You are right in that very small communities can and do have communal living. A family is a good example. I don’t make money for me, I make it for my family. It doesn’t and cannot work in large numbers and is certainly a failure as a centralized government. If you don’t know whose cutting into your pie, it’s not ok…
Communism / socialism trump the basic models for all human behavior. Opperant conditioning and classical conditioning are the two basic environmental models for human behavior. It is as hard wired in the human being as breathing. It is because of that, communism and socialism doesn’t work and will never work. In Freud speak, our ego sees it as detrimental to our survival as a species. We our survival mechanisms see ourselves first, family second, freinds and loved ones third, and acquaintances forth. Taking care of who knows who, doing who knows what, with who knows who, does not fit this model. Our natural instinct is to rebel. Because if you are taking shit from me that’s beneficial to me, my family, friends or acquaintances to throw in to a communal pool for just anyone, my natural instinct is to fight you for it.
You have to know everybody in the communal pool, if you don’t you cannot share your resources with them. You cannot know millions of people. I would say a really well organized community can tolerate no more than 60 -80. Any larger and factions grow with in the group. [/quote]
I think the actual number is around 150, not 60-80. I can’t cite the studies at the moment, but I’m pretty sure 150 is the number of individual relationships an person can have within a given group/identity.
So it works in small groups. And has since the dawn of time. That would negate your blanket statement that ‘it never works’. As to your criticism that it’s lack of property rights makes life difficult in large society, I agree. I’ll even go one further and acknowledge it doesn’t always work in small groups: Jamestown is a good example. But to say that it doesn’t work at all because it betrays the hard-wiring of human beings is patently false.
That’s really all I’ll take umbrage with.[/quote]
It never works as a form of government. The fact that opperant conditioning is the basis for 95% of human behavior, it is precisely why it will never work. It is simply our biology that makes it impossible for something like communism to work. It can only work in small numbers, very small numbers. You have to know the people you share with, or your survival instincts will take over and make you pissed off.
I presented an argument that says that our human nature, the biology which drives us makes communism / socialism an impossible life model to be functional. You need something better than your word that it’s “patently false”. Prove me wrong.
