Capitalism vs Communism

MichaelElpers

Capitalism: Bringing the most people out of poverty ever, and in the most fair and equal manner.  Allowing free markets to determine the value of goods and services produces the best goods, at the lowest cost, in the fairest way.

MayCaesar

Communism is basically rejection of all the societal progress since the tribal times and return back to the untamed tyranny of the mob. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but there are some people with weird values out there who just want to watch the world burn, I guess.
Communism is also easy to sell under the guise of taking property from the rich and giving it to the masses. Some people with a very negative outlook on humanity and pessimistic outlook on its future might like that idea.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system based on voluntary exchanges of goods and services. Person A wants to give something to person B in exchange of something else, and person B agrees, and the transaction occurs. What is there not to like here?
Capitalism, unfortunately, is a harder sell, as it does not promise people free stuff and, in fact, expects them to work hard for their success. As always, freedom fights an uphill battle against security.

For the books, I could recommend a ton, but anything from Milton Friedman is a great start. You could also read The Wealth of Nations by Smith, although some of the views expressed there are quite outdated.

Happy_Killbot

My pet theory about communism is that the reason it doesn't work is because the processing power required to manage it is far beyond what we can currently achieve.

Consider that every time someone makes a purchase there are several kilobytes of information which must be processed, including price, quantity, item, and transaction location. For an individual much of this information is automatically handled, for example going to a given distributor is going to cut a significant portion of that information out, but for a system which centralizes the production and distribution, the processing requirement goes up exponentially. This would explain why small communes can be so efficient and work just fine, but states which embrace communism fail.

While this is not a strong argument for capitalism, and I definitely don't have one, but I think it is clear that capitalism beats communism economically.

Ampersand

Communism is a system where you have just as much access to money, goods, services, etc as anyone else regardless of your job because commodities are owned communally. It's a very radical position and should functionally have end results near identical to anarchism (the political philosophy, not the laymans definition) and most left-wingers prefer to stick to socialism. In practice communism has very rarely been tried and often in very trying circumstances like the Paris Commune (a radical revolution in Paris in the 19th century that was quickly laid under siege by the french army) so it's hard to get an idea of how it works in practice.

The Soviet Union and the like were not communist, and that's not a "no true Scotsman" argument. Not only do they not meet the definitions of communism, but they specifically did not think that they were communist themselves. The various communist parties (e.g. the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) specifically called themselves communists not because they thought they were practicing communists, but because communism was the goal they one day wanted to reach. The soviets were Marxists, a specific fairly common type of socialism with a bajillion different sub-varieties. One of the key concepts of this is that countries should progress from Capitalism to Socialism to Communism (there's a rationale for this but not worth getting into here). Due to Russia being a feudal backwater, the communist party's first steps were actually to try and make the country Capitalist with Lenin's New Economic Plan because in their ideology capitalism was a prerequisite of socialism which was in turn a prerequisite of communism. 

Socialism is a system where the means of producing commodities are communally owned but people can still earn different amounts. Essentially imagine if wherever you go to work, you and all the other employees are also the shareholders of the business so you get to vote on things like how people's wages are set, who manages the company, etc like a worker co-operative type set-up.

I'm a communist although I don't expect to see it in my lifetime and would settle for socialism. The basis for my interest on socialism and communism is that I don't like inequality, I don't like people starving, i don't like people dying of diseases we could treat if we cared enough to give them the resources and a general disgust at the idea of allowing people to accumulate billions of pounds of wealth while other people starve and sleep homeless on the street. I'm also unhappy with Capitalism because by its nature capitalism is inherently coercive, the power is in the hands of the capitalist who owns the business and therefore the entire set-up is morally suspect. In addition the idea of people benefiting from the hard work of others simply because they are rich and can just invest money always strikes me an inequitable and relying to a large degree on people's luck about which station in life they are born into.

I would also say my salary's good and I earn more than most on average so I wouldn't benefit from socialism or communism directly if wealth/income was more evenly spread out.

To me Capitalism is a constant failure. It hasn't for a single moment anywhere on earth managed to achieve an equitable standard of living which doesn't impoverishing large chunks of society. Where and who those chunks are always vary, but in this day and age I think we can do better.

RoroSandiego

@Ampersand wouldn't Swedens socialist experiment in the 1970s-1990s count as a real socialist country? 

It was a failed experiment, they started to own business after 1990 because they realized things weren't going well.

Ampersand

@RoroSandiego

Maybe there's history with Sweden that I'm not aware of, but what makes you consider them socialist? I know there were some policies that made it look like they could head in that direction like the movement of trade unions sitting on company boars, but in the end that really amounted to nothing and certainly not workers control and an end to Capitalism. I view them as social democrats, not democratic socialists.

hamidseid36

Communism will never work due to human nature. The computers we are typing this on is due to capitalism. Like most things we have.

AlofRI

Communism and Fascism are political systems, Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. NEITHER economic system would work under communism OR fascism. BOTH economic systems work under democracy …. with LIMITS! Regulations are required to protect the people from abuses of either. Capitalism must be controlled enough to prevent the richest capitalists from taking control of the government (money is power)! Socialism must be democratic, allowing individual ownership of businesses while supporting the masses with social programs supported by BOTH the workers and capitalists …. sort of like the U.S. has been operating for the last 60 years! Problem is, deregulation has shifted the power from the people …. to the few! The power to those who hold the capitalist money which no longer is used to support "the masses", except to the extent that they have work, but are allowed to make only enough to get by on. Of course, if you happen to be clever enough to join the capitalist club, you get to slip by the "regulations" that have been de-toothed, and keep the money conservatives used to say …. "created good paying jobs". Now, it's more likely to buy another mansion or yacht. You become more like a communist oligarch!

Unregulated (communist style) capitalism is JUST AS DANGEROUS as (communist style) socialism. Neither are good without democratic regulation to protect WE, the people!