For a great and concise introduction to Libertarian Socialism here is a classic Noam Chomsky lecture from 1979 called The Government of the Future, in which he gives a justification for Libertarian Socialism, or Anarchism, as the natural and correct form of government for advanced industrial society from the classical liberal ideals of the enlightenment. He also compares the competing economic and social ideologies, laissez-faires capitalism, state capitalism and state socialism.
> "Those of us with nothing to sell but our labour power"
This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match.
So, if the value (benefit? effectiveness?) of our work is measured by our ability to be creative, how does one reconcile that with pure labour valuation, which is evocative of the standard-dollars-for-hours exchange?
I'd be interested to hear from any self-professed communists about this.
Now you've basically made people wary to respond to you in fear of being labeled commies ;)
HN is supposed to be a forum for entrepreneurs but many of the visitors here are hired workers doing stuff for BigCos and that means trading our ability to close tickets for money. As a junior engineer you are told: "here is this nagging bug, go fix it", and as you become a senior you may hear something more glorious like: "ok we are going to expand to this new market so our system needs to scale tenfold. go figure how to do it" and reap some substantial material benefits along the way but it's really the same thing. Sure the whole process requires creativity and novel ideas in the small but nobody cares about your ideas in the large. I guess much of the sympathy for the workers' ideals of old comes from growing appreciation that we are in fact the lever - wielding great power but unable to do something meaningful with it.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher.
Not a communist, but having ideas isn’t labor, execution of ideas is.
In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier.
The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).
> This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives. It really doesn't matter if the designer is one person or a committee of the proletariat. That's an NP-ridiculous problem.
In the fact of that, I'd rather individuals make decisions about their own lives.
I'd argue, in this regard, there is nothing qualitatively different about being an IT worker compared to any other occupation or any other time under capitalism. Marx never considered labour power to be a purely physical act. Otherwise technology alone would be a source of value, too. Of course, we are the only source of value because of our innate creativity, our ideas; our hands or interaction with others, merely sets it in motion.
I'm not sure to what extent they are adhering to the "Labour Theory of Value", but 'labour power' is a relatively esoteric concept from Marxist economics. In Marxists economics, labour value is the full price of goods produced with that labour and labour power is the stuff that employees get paid for, and it is traded. The difference is exploitation. It gets into a lot of hair splitting as classical economists poked leaks into Marx's theories and he adjusted.
The big difference between classical and Marxist economics is that Marxist use labour as the fundamental unit of value while classicals use utility as the unit/definition of value.
I'm far from a Marxist, but I've read Das Capital. Interesting read from a history of ideas perspective.
I considered myself a communist when I was younger, and would say I'm politically agnostic now. I don't think you can reconcile it with a pure labor valuation, you have to reject it. Tech people see crazy amounts of money concentrated into the hands of a small number of organizations, and at the same time pretty horrible poverty in the global south. It seems natural to connect the two, tech sweatshops producing the devices software we write runs on, and see global redistribution of wealth as a healthy productive way to even those things out and technology as the means to do so. With that being said, I think drawing on failed Marxist experiments is not the way to get people to jump on board.
Not a self-professed communist, but is not generating and applying ideas labor? Labor is not simply putting fingers to the keyboard. How would one reconcile ability to be creative with pure labor valuation, in a manner similar to dollars-for-hours exchanges? Why not simply measure the return on those ideas? If your work brings in $5000 a month, for example, that is the value of your work, of your ability to be creative.
Well, I never thought I'd see the day libcom was posted up on here. I spend a bit of time on their forums about 10 years ago - used to be a bit of a bearpit, don't know what it's like now.
The archive is interesting, though. A lot of material from outside what you'd strictly call libertarian communism, but just niche even within the already niche worlds of anarchist/Marxist/etc theory.
(Thought I'd better post something before it gets flagged to the bottom of the ocean.)
Who is misrepresenting? In 1962, the USSR had markets where people exchanged rubles for potatos, just as in the 1962 USA, there were markets where people exchanged dollars for currency. Not much difference marketwise, other than the currency.
After reading the page it looks like a lot of communism and very little libertarianism.. Why is libertarianism mentioned? To me libertarianism requires at least giving people the freedom to buy and sell while this libcom site argues "the problem is that everything has a price".
Classical libertarianism is libertarian communism. The term libertarianism originates with the French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacques back in the 19th century, and was championed by groups like the Socialist League in the UK (which was supported by Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx amongst others).
Modern-day right-wing libertarianism is the new kid on the block.
Basically in the late 1800's the main split between anarchists and communists in the First International was not predominantly their end goal.
E.g. consider the famous concept of the "whithering away of the state" (coined by Friedrich Engels, but Engels attributed the idea to Marx): that given that according to Marxism the state is predominantly a tool of class rule, and that communism by their definition is the stage of society where there no longer are any classes, the state will cease to have a political purpose and will "whither away". So anarchists and communists agreed the state was a tool of oppression and that this oppression must be removed, and that the state will eventually disappear.
The split was over methods. How to get there. The anarchists generally favoured a quicker, more immediate, dismantling of the state (whether by taking control and orderly dismantling it, or by rising up and destroying it), while communists generally favoured an intermediate transitional stage. In Marxism the intermediate stage is socialism: A phase where the proletariat is meant to take control of the state (hence the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast with Marx description of capitalist democracies as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"), and for the first time wield it as a weapon of the majority against the minority, and use it to remove the class differences. So communists traditionally saw the state as a tool for the working class.
Eventually this lead to the split of the First International, where Marx came out victorious, and most of the anarchists left when Bakunin was thrown out. Not long after, new libertarian socialist/communist tendencies started "filling the gap" in the International left by the anarchists.
The extent of support for a strong state varied greatly amongst people who called themselves communists, leading to screeds like Lenins "Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder", which targeted exactly libertarian Communists which opposed his ideas of a vanguard.
This definition of Libertarianism should not be confused with what is called Libertarianism in the USA, which is an extreme protector of individual property rights. It is confusing because this definition arose originally in Europe and understood to be a form of socialism, not at all like the American definition.
No. Classical libertarianism would be of a "left wing" type, as libertarian was a word used on the left since the 19th century. Only in the post-WWII US did some on the right begin using the term.
This is basically a reboot of Marx's 19th century ideas with a trendy fresh look. In fact, he predicted this stage (which he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat") in the evolution of "Political Economy" that will, in his mind, eventually lead inexorably to "True Communism." [0]
His "theory of alienation"[1] pretty accurately describes the angst that motivates the "workers" to want to move away from the Capitalist system of production and explore ideas such as libcom.org.
For those with an interest, you should read Das Kapital...Marx was a true intellectual powerhouse and his chops were both deep and wide.
IMO, It all sounds very good in theory, but always seems to always fail during implementation, like a bad software project,
The history of attempts with Communism shows little in the way of success as far as providing "the masses" with an increased standard of living and overall happiness, so I'll always be wary of such proposals.
Personally, I believe Sartre's Existentialism better describes the human condition, although even he eventually adopted Marx. in lieu of Capitalism, which will, I believe, always be hated by the intellectuals.
> read Das Kapital...sounds very good in theory, but always seems to fail during implementation
What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".
Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.
Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).
We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?
No, the problem is that everything has a relative value and someone needs to figure out what that value is. In free-market capitalist societies (and I'd argue in the other ones as well), money serves as an important heuristic for value.
More concretely, do we, as a society, produce more fuel efficient cars or do we produce electric ones? In a free market, it's clear the one that sells will be produced. In a controlled economy, the process is murkier and runs through bureaucracies (and therefore lobbyists) and possibly lawmakers (and therefore more lobbyists).
So free market capitalism is really a form of crowd-sourced decision-making. Alternatives would need to invent a working model that can prioritize (in the face of difficult facts, even) in an egalitarian way, balancing the needs of different interests.
I read through the linked page. I didn't see anything describing how that would work, even in the Chomsky link.
It is a strange thing to use cars as an example of a free market. The government just bailed out the auto industry. The government bailed out Chrysler with loans and government contracts in the 1970s as well. The auto industry lobbied for and got massive public subsidies for highway and road construction, while lobbying against mass transit, or just smashing it like GM did with NCL. Not to mention the federal government reviving Depression-racked Detroit's fortunes when the industrial plants began having tanks roll out during WWII. The auto industry never wanted to operate in a "free market".
If you want both Liberty and Community to emerge as the dominant platform, you are going to have to explore other avenues than legislating it or convincing people of it. You are going to have to re-align incentives. It is going to have to emerge through a catallaxy of people pursuing different goals. This can be done by creating a society where:
1. Money spent in and around the community brings more benefit than money spent in a far off place.
2. Success at a higher level of administration is dependent on the success of lower levels of administration(probably also controlled by the the flows of voluntary tax revenue).
Even then, the type of 'communism' that develops won't be a top down variety that we saw fail miserably in the 20th century, but a bottom up version that is highly anti-fragile and able to move very quickly to take advantage of volatility.
Libertarianism is hugely flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. I don't think anything incorporating hugely flawed philosophies is ever going to be a good idea.
The communist ideology resulted in that in the same sense that the capitalist ideology resulted in the genocide of Native Americans, the creation of largest imprisoned population in the world, and centuries of slavery.
Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist states survived without forgetting to feed their own people.
That was state socialism, not a true communist society. Any form of repression, coercion and control are condemned by anarchists / libertarian socialists. The USSR was certainly a state which was did of that.
The reason why the USSR was trumpeted as socialist was that it suited both sides' propaganda to do so. For the Americans, to vilify socialism, and for the Russians to give their rule the appearance of genuine socialism. When both of the major propoganda systems in the world agree on something it's bound to become a popular conception.
But let us not also forget that hundreds of millions starved in non-communist India, which suffered terrible famines up to 1948.
South and Central America was a horror chamber throughout the 1950's-1980's under violent brutal capitalist dictatorships supported by the USA. Many Asian countries too.
The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Communism has executed exactly 0 people. Communism is just an economic system, don't confuse it with the totalitarian dictators who may have used it. America has murdered, tortured, and committed genocide and terrorism against countless people, but that's not directly related to the economic system.
Capitalism has been responsible for slavery, sweatshops, child labor, pollution, etc. On the other hand, it also brought us the iPhone, so it's not all bad ;)
Well I guess because communism, unlike nazism, doesn't have hatred hardcoded in ideology.
On the other hand there is difference between theory and practice, you can have any ideological system, but if you depend on totalitarian dictator everything can fall apart - You depend on mood of that person/party.
Why do people think it's ok to say they're christians, despite the genocides carried out in the name of God?
Because they can see that their beliefs have minimal relation other than a name and somewhat shared history with the philosophies behind those genocides.
Should we write off the term "democracy" because of places like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea?
> People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children".
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?
I have read the whole thing and I was really surprised that they didn't mention anything about individualism or non-authoritarian decentralized governance given the "libertarian" label in their name and unless I'm mistaken, they sound more collectivist-leaning than individualist-leaning and this is very troubling esp. for communists as they tend historically to favor heavy-handed measures to reach or realize their political goals even if it means to oppress and intimidate their opponents.
BTW: I'm a leftie myself but very skeptical of collectivists and statists whether on the right or the left.
As others have said the term 'libertarian' has historically and outside the USA had much more 'collectivist' connotations and early on bore much more resemblance to anarchist and communist movements- it recognized that controlling property and capital (or having it kept from you) was a factor in your individual liberty, could be used to force you to work, etc.
libertarian communist is to put it crassly an attempt to re-brand and re-merge the anarchist and socialist traditions (which are much more diverse than mao and stalin) and to remove the supposed schizm between libertarianism and communism. not to propose any single template but to stop taking for granted the current social/political/economic orders and explore new ways of organizing society, etc.
To be clear this libertarianism has nothing to do with libertarianism as it's called in the USA, which essentially is an extreme protector of individual property rights.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLDQGdKyh7s&index=1&list=PLE...
Edit: here is the text of the lecture if you'd rather read it. https://libcom.org/library/government-future-noam-chomsky
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
Do you have a similar great and concise introduction to Nazism or other related extremist totalitarian ideologies?
[+] [-] nateabele|10 years ago|reply
This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match.
So, if the value (benefit? effectiveness?) of our work is measured by our ability to be creative, how does one reconcile that with pure labour valuation, which is evocative of the standard-dollars-for-hours exchange?
I'd be interested to hear from any self-professed communists about this.
[+] [-] dunkelheit|10 years ago|reply
HN is supposed to be a forum for entrepreneurs but many of the visitors here are hired workers doing stuff for BigCos and that means trading our ability to close tickets for money. As a junior engineer you are told: "here is this nagging bug, go fix it", and as you become a senior you may hear something more glorious like: "ok we are going to expand to this new market so our system needs to scale tenfold. go figure how to do it" and reap some substantial material benefits along the way but it's really the same thing. Sure the whole process requires creativity and novel ideas in the small but nobody cares about your ideas in the large. I guess much of the sympathy for the workers' ideals of old comes from growing appreciation that we are in fact the lever - wielding great power but unable to do something meaningful with it.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher.
[+] [-] noblethrasher|10 years ago|reply
In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one.
Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier.
The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).
[+] [-] humanrebar|10 years ago|reply
The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives. It really doesn't matter if the designer is one person or a committee of the proletariat. That's an NP-ridiculous problem.
In the fact of that, I'd rather individuals make decisions about their own lives.
[+] [-] leg100|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|10 years ago|reply
The big difference between classical and Marxist economics is that Marxist use labour as the fundamental unit of value while classicals use utility as the unit/definition of value.
I'm far from a Marxist, but I've read Das Capital. Interesting read from a history of ideas perspective.
[+] [-] werber|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xlm1717|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tragic|10 years ago|reply
The archive is interesting, though. A lot of material from outside what you'd strictly call libertarian communism, but just niche even within the already niche worlds of anarchist/Marxist/etc theory.
(Thought I'd better post something before it gets flagged to the bottom of the ocean.)
[+] [-] vegancap|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pastProlog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trengrj|10 years ago|reply
Are we going to have to start using the words "classical libertarianism" soon? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism#Meaning...
[+] [-] vidarh|10 years ago|reply
Modern-day right-wing libertarianism is the new kid on the block.
Basically in the late 1800's the main split between anarchists and communists in the First International was not predominantly their end goal.
E.g. consider the famous concept of the "whithering away of the state" (coined by Friedrich Engels, but Engels attributed the idea to Marx): that given that according to Marxism the state is predominantly a tool of class rule, and that communism by their definition is the stage of society where there no longer are any classes, the state will cease to have a political purpose and will "whither away". So anarchists and communists agreed the state was a tool of oppression and that this oppression must be removed, and that the state will eventually disappear.
The split was over methods. How to get there. The anarchists generally favoured a quicker, more immediate, dismantling of the state (whether by taking control and orderly dismantling it, or by rising up and destroying it), while communists generally favoured an intermediate transitional stage. In Marxism the intermediate stage is socialism: A phase where the proletariat is meant to take control of the state (hence the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast with Marx description of capitalist democracies as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"), and for the first time wield it as a weapon of the majority against the minority, and use it to remove the class differences. So communists traditionally saw the state as a tool for the working class.
Eventually this lead to the split of the First International, where Marx came out victorious, and most of the anarchists left when Bakunin was thrown out. Not long after, new libertarian socialist/communist tendencies started "filling the gap" in the International left by the anarchists.
The extent of support for a strong state varied greatly amongst people who called themselves communists, leading to screeds like Lenins "Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder", which targeted exactly libertarian Communists which opposed his ideas of a vanguard.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pastProlog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubano|10 years ago|reply
His "theory of alienation"[1] pretty accurately describes the angst that motivates the "workers" to want to move away from the Capitalist system of production and explore ideas such as libcom.org.
For those with an interest, you should read Das Kapital...Marx was a true intellectual powerhouse and his chops were both deep and wide.
IMO, It all sounds very good in theory, but always seems to always fail during implementation, like a bad software project,
The history of attempts with Communism shows little in the way of success as far as providing "the masses" with an increased standard of living and overall happiness, so I'll always be wary of such proposals.
Personally, I believe Sartre's Existentialism better describes the human condition, although even he eventually adopted Marx. in lieu of Capitalism, which will, I believe, always be hated by the intellectuals.
[0] http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/marxs_vision.php
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
[+] [-] pastProlog|10 years ago|reply
What fails during implementation? When leftists of his time demanded plans from Marx, he scoffed and said he was not August Comte, and refused to "write recipes for the kitchens of the future".
Marx and Engels did note changes in production led to changes in relations of production, and the superstructure (society). Some scientists think human hunting and fishing being what is was may have led to behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago. This led to a different form of primitive communism. 10000 years ago slavery and agriculture arose. 1600 years ago feudalism began to arise. 600 years ago capitalism as a dominant economic system began to arise.
Since men began painting pictures of horses in caves 50,000 years ago, the world has seen four major economic systems. The current one is capitalism. You seem to say it is immutable, the three previous ones were flimsy, but you seem to say our current economic system is the final one (although the previous one said that as well - the czar was claiming God, the creator of the world, ruler of a life after life had appointed him to his throne - claimed this until he was felled by the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers).
We are entering a world where I film a video, or record audio, or write code, push a button and with almost no cost in replication, can have it distributed to billions. We are entering a world where with continual improvements in robotics and AI, there may eventually be no job a human can do that an AI robot can't do (and perhaps do better - my memory, prefrontal cortex processing etc. is limited by bandwidth, space and this sort of thing in a way that a neural network translating speech to text is not). When there is no need any more for humans to farm, or mine, or even to program, will the world still be under a system of capitalism?
[+] [-] humanrebar|10 years ago|reply
No, the problem is that everything has a relative value and someone needs to figure out what that value is. In free-market capitalist societies (and I'd argue in the other ones as well), money serves as an important heuristic for value.
More concretely, do we, as a society, produce more fuel efficient cars or do we produce electric ones? In a free market, it's clear the one that sells will be produced. In a controlled economy, the process is murkier and runs through bureaucracies (and therefore lobbyists) and possibly lawmakers (and therefore more lobbyists).
So free market capitalism is really a form of crowd-sourced decision-making. Alternatives would need to invent a working model that can prioritize (in the face of difficult facts, even) in an egalitarian way, balancing the needs of different interests.
I read through the linked page. I didn't see anything describing how that would work, even in the Chomsky link.
[+] [-] pastProlog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skilesare|10 years ago|reply
1. Money spent in and around the community brings more benefit than money spent in a far off place. 2. Success at a higher level of administration is dependent on the success of lower levels of administration(probably also controlled by the the flows of voluntary tax revenue).
Even then, the type of 'communism' that develops won't be a top down variety that we saw fail miserably in the 20th century, but a bottom up version that is highly anti-fragile and able to move very quickly to take advantage of volatility.
[+] [-] TomGullen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children".
So why do people think it's OK to say they're a communist?
[+] [-] krisdol|10 years ago|reply
Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist states survived without forgetting to feed their own people.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
The reason why the USSR was trumpeted as socialist was that it suited both sides' propaganda to do so. For the Americans, to vilify socialism, and for the Russians to give their rule the appearance of genuine socialism. When both of the major propoganda systems in the world agree on something it's bound to become a popular conception.
But let us not also forget that hundreds of millions starved in non-communist India, which suffered terrible famines up to 1948.
South and Central America was a horror chamber throughout the 1950's-1980's under violent brutal capitalist dictatorships supported by the USA. Many Asian countries too.
The rise of communism in China, although violent and of the state-socialist kind, also brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
[+] [-] JDDunn9|10 years ago|reply
Capitalism has been responsible for slavery, sweatshops, child labor, pollution, etc. On the other hand, it also brought us the iPhone, so it's not all bad ;)
[+] [-] popee|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand there is difference between theory and practice, you can have any ideological system, but if you depend on totalitarian dictator everything can fall apart - You depend on mood of that person/party.
Just guessing ;-)
[+] [-] TomGullen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|10 years ago|reply
Because they can see that their beliefs have minimal relation other than a name and somewhat shared history with the philosophies behind those genocides.
Should we write off the term "democracy" because of places like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea?
[+] [-] monstruoso|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pastProlog|10 years ago|reply
I guess you are unaware of the activities of Golden Dawn in Greece, or some of the more reactionary groups when meeting Syrian refugees in Europe etc. Or in the West Bank Kahanist hilltop settlements for that matter.
Until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist - not socialists saying they were working toward communism, but actual communism.
Is it OK for the communist hunter-gatherers in the Amazon wilderness to be the communists they are? Or should they get on their knees and say mea culpas for what some Laotian commissar did during a party purge half a century ago?
[+] [-] notNow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notNow|10 years ago|reply
BTW: I'm a leftie myself but very skeptical of collectivists and statists whether on the right or the left.
[+] [-] erikdstock|10 years ago|reply
libertarian communist is to put it crassly an attempt to re-brand and re-merge the anarchist and socialist traditions (which are much more diverse than mao and stalin) and to remove the supposed schizm between libertarianism and communism. not to propose any single template but to stop taking for granted the current social/political/economic orders and explore new ways of organizing society, etc.
[+] [-] zoner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jevgeni|10 years ago|reply