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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?

I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.

And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.

Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.

Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)

Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here

I do not believe that intellectual arguments generally have much impact on Marxists. As a notable case in point, Thomas Sowell (perhaps the most insightful political thinker of the late 20th century) was a Marxist when he began studying for his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. He did his dissertation under George Stigler and studied extensively with Milton Freidman, both of whom were Nobel laureates in economics and vigorous free market advocates. If intellectual arguments, well-formed and directed at a capable, open mind, are the cure for Marxism, Sowell should have been the poster child for the red pill by the time he graduated. In fact, however, Sowell was still a Marxist when he received his doctorate.

After spending years under the rigorous tutelage of some of the world's foremost free marked economists without a dent in his Marxist zeal, Sowell began working as an intern for the US Department of Laor. Within three months he had renounced Marxism -- not as a result of any intellectual argument, but as a result of seeing how the sausage of leftist government is made. Sowell went on to write A Conflict of Visions, which I believe was largely inspired by his own red pill experience. The thesis of the book is that ideological differences are not born of errors in reasoning on one side or the other, but of different ways of seeing the world. These ways of seeing, AKA worldviews (or visions as Sowell calls them) are not the result of conscious deliberation or argumentation. On the contrary, they are the stage on which deliberation and argumentation take place. Sowell holds that people with different worldviews talk past each other because they literally see different worlds and speak different languages, even when they look at the same events and use the same words. I believe he is quite correct.

As a rule, people do not argue themselves into a worldview and they do not get argued out of a worldview. What changes one's worldview, in general as in Sowell's case, is not argument but experience. Fortunately, the experience that shapes one's worldview does not have to be a lived out in the flesh. As Jordan Peterson has recently advocated in his We Who Wrestle With God lecture tour, the virtual experience induced by hearing a story can also shape one's worldview. That is why people of all times and cultures spend so much time telling and listening to stories (and watching screen plays on television, reading novels, etc.). Peterson says, "A story is the lens through which we see the world". I would say that a worldview is the lens through which we see the world, and stories are a crucial device by which worldviews are promulgated and passed down.

In particular, values of a culture are transmitted through stories of heroes and villains who live out the virtues and vices of that culture. This is why the vast majority of material in sacred texts consists of stories. Of the roughly 23,000 verses in the Hebrew Bible, only 613 are commandments and the rest is storytelling. The works of Homer and Hesiod -- the principal religious texts of classical Greece -- were nothing but stories of heroes and villains, and this is not uncommon for sacred texts around the world. I hypothesize that peoples' natural capacities for spiritual experience , for hypnotic trance, and for the appreciation of music, co-evolved as a mechanism for passing down the worldviews of a culture. Language evolved for passing down declarative knowledge, and entranced storytelling evolved as a mechanism for imparting the shared cultural worldviews in which that declarative knowledge is situated. Want to change someone's values? Entrance them and tell them a story. That is how Milton Erickson did it; that's how Gerry Spence does it, and that is how Jesus did it. Great influencers are great hypnotists and great storytellers. This is why religious sermons are given by a well lit speaker against a dark background, begin and end with music, and consist mostly of stories. TV Shows and movies are conducted that way, too. This is why children's bedtime stories are a tradition in every culture: sleepy children are entranced.

I would guess more people have broken free of Marxist brainwashing by reading Orwell's Animal Farm than by reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (I've heard of both anecdotally, but more of the former). But the story that is truly the bane of Marxism is the Holy Bible. Marxists know their enemies, and that is why they make war on that book everywhere, and to whatever extent, they take the stage. We saw that, for example, in the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics. Evangelical Christians lean Republican by two to one [source], while atheists lean Democrat by four to one [source]. Women ages 18-29 lean Democrat by only two to one [source]. About the only salient group that leans left harder than atheists are gays. So unless you think you can turn a gay person straight, the most effective red pill transformation you can make is to convert an atheist into an Evangelical Christian. Turning an atheist into a Christian is a stronger blow against Marxism than turning a young woman into an old man (and who would want to do that anyway?). Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists, recently lamented that perhaps by creating atheists he is also creating Marxist zealots. Of course he is, and even new atheist Richard Dawkins now tends to agree with that assessment [source].

Moreover, I believe we think of "taking the red pill" the wrong way. At this point, many if not most people -- even most Democrats -- already know that wokeness is intellectually preposterous and morally toxic, but they are scared to say so publicly. That means that the younger generation only hears one side of the story and the infamous march through the institutions ploughs ahead. What is chiefly needed to fight Marxism is not more arguments, or even more people to agree with us, but greater courage among those who already believe: the willingness to actually fight the culture war. The culture war is not a literal war, but is a literal fight in the sense that if you participate you may well suffer materially for it. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "It is not syllogisms that keep reluctant nerves and muscles at their post in the tenth hour of a bombardment." Whatever it is that keeps them there, that is what we need more of, and it doesn't come from arguments. It doesn't even come from the side of the brain that formulates and evaluates arguments.

So, want to red pill a normie? Don't argue with them; tell them stories heroes who embody the virtues honored by patriots of the West -- especially courage and integrity. Read them George Washington's first inaugural address, or his letter from Valley Forge. Or read them Sam Adam's speech to the Philadelphia State House, or Socrates's Apologia. But if you want to fire-engine-red pill a normie, share the Gospel with them. Christian communists might be a thing, but they aren't really much of a thing.

My 7 year old son asked me this morning, "Do monsters draw people with big sharp teeth?" It's a natural assumption; children (and cartoonists) often draw monsters with either exaggeratedly big sharp teeth, or claws, or horns (or all three) -- presumably because the fangs of an apex predators are primally frightening to people, especially to children. I said, "No, monsters draw people holding Bibles".

Directly take some of their stuff and give it away to someone else because they "need it more". Force gifted kids to break their back doing their entire class's work because they are "more able" while the less academic students get to fart around drawing or playing games.

I've always seen the argument as simple: in a communist system, the government gets to tell you what you can do to get money and how you are allowed to spend money. Also, you aren't allowed to own your shoes.

Close to 100% of people are a "hard no" on one or both ends of that.

I think that if you want to convince people that Communism is bad, the best way to do that is to explain that Socialism is something else entirely. My general experience is that people want a social safety net and some degree of regulation, but once you explain the idea of leaving The Government in charge they at least realize they don't want The Other Side to ever gain that sort of power. There's also a huge wealth of historical examples to work from, here.

Now, if you want to convince people that Socialism is bad, that's a very different conversation...

I appreciate the comments everybody else left here. That said, most of them miss the forest for the trees. The question itself is incorrect. It's a nice thought exercise, but all of those arguments come up again and again in communist vs. capitalist debates and they don't make a dent.

The reason why those arguments don't work is that you can never (or at least very rarely) logic away ideas that were created by feelings. The reason why the question itself is incorrect is that "normies" do not exist.

Feels over reals

Imagine that you are feeling bad for one reason or another. It might be a mental health issue; it might be some kind of physical health issue; it might be some kind of issue at work; it might be some kind of personal issue that deeply affects you emotionally. When you spend time on algorithmic social media, you are constantly exposed to fringe ideas (like communism). Content creators and regular posters might post something that you empathize with - a meme, a video, a TikTok, a "my boss bad" post, whatever, it doesn't matter. This post registers on an emotional level: "Actually, it's the world that is bad and unfair, and it's not just my personal issue. We live in a society where everyone experiences this". You see that a lot of people are feeling the same way as you did. The thoughts that might go through one's head are:

  • It's not that I'm depressed; it's our society that is fundamentally depressing. (The greatest example of this thinking is Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. The author famously refused to try medication for his depression and killed himself)
  • It's not that my particular job is bad; all bosses are bad.
  • It's not that my health issue made me feel vulnerable and unsafe; it's that our society doesn't care about vulnerable people in a proper way.

After that, the algorithm picks up that you liked this particular fringe idea and feeds you more. Then, you fall into a pipeline, where you are served more content. Maybe you join an online community that posts memes about communism. Gradually, by way of memes, you get inoculated against all of the arguments that people have provided here. Normies start reading effortposts. Normies start reading Marxist/anarchist economics books, which retroactively provide a twisted logic to the emotions they are experiencing. At this point, they have both moral and logical arguments to delude themselves with. One can't logically argue against someone who fell into a fringe ideology pipeline - they have all of the answers they need.

The logical arguments everybody makes here do not make any emotional impact. Try to imagine yourself: which one is a more appealing pattern of thinking for a depressed person, for example?

  • I'm feeling bad, but it's normal because society is structured in a way that makes me feel bad.
  • I'm feeling bad, but if I try hard enough to improve my life, I'll feel better.

The former is easy. The latter is hard. Thus, it's simpler to continue taking the path of least resistance: more festering in online communities and commiserating, more of trying to find how a magical imaginary society would work that wouldn't make people feel bad in the way that I feel bad. None of those things require hard work to fix your life.

This is why Jordan Peterson resonates with young men so well. His arguments first make sense on an emotional level. Hearing him describe societal challenges young men experience is validating for young men, who then proceed to take his advice on how to fix their lives. The same way, hearing communists describe societal challenges is also validating, but instead of providing actionable advice, the communists rope you into a cult that worships the destruction of society as we know it.

I haven't ever seen libertarians or conservatives or even liberals address the societal challenges in the same way as communists address them: on a feels level. On an emotional level. Instead, we get Pinker, for example, who says that everything is actually good, or at least, much better than it was before. Pinker makes a logical argument directed at someone experiencing an emotional state. Maybe some people can be logic'd out of the emotional state, but it seems like it's not very effective.

Normies do not exist

Memes are ubiquitous. Everybody is online. Spending time on social media is the norm nowadays. The majority of the social media landscape is dominated by algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic feeds have become the default way to kill time for many. Social media algorithms play a crucial role in radicalization: they gradually expose users to more extreme content and potentially push them towards fringe ideas. This process of algorithmic radicalization doesn't discriminate – it affects people across the spectrum, not just a select few. So, the idea of a "normie" assumes a stable, average individual untouched by internet culture. In reality, this kind of individual doesn't exist, and everyone is influenced by online discourse to some degree.

The discourse itself has changed: 4chan's cultural norms have migrated to the internet at large. Hasan Piker is the largest streamer on Twitch. Among progressives, how many do we think are communists who maintain a kayfabe like Hasan? Yesterday's fringe is today's mainstream.

So who are the "normies"? Regular people spending time on the mainstream internet? Just regular people in your life? If that is so, they are already online and probably regularly spend time in a space that promotes a fringe ideology that is appealing on an emotional level, be it MAGA, Blue MAGA, progressivism, trans ideology, or communism. Take this socialist substack series (which is now, unfortunately, paywalled) and see for yourself where 19-year-olds learn their communist ideas. One of the interviewees' answer is Instagram, and I was shocked that even a "normie" platform like Instagram has full-blown socialist, communist, and anarchist communities.

Ignoring all of the above is ignoring the social reality: our logical arguments will be drowned out by the sea of emotion that your average normie is exposed to from a very early age.

If logic doesn't work, what does? Just spitballing ideas, so no concrete suggestions:

  • Create a community that answers emotional needs, but leads down the pipeline that teaches critical thinking and rationalism. The downside is that the memes are antithetical to what rationalism is, to an extent.
  • Use relatable narratives. Change "My boss sucks, so we need to destroy the society as it exists" to "My boss sucks, and here's how to improve the situation"
  • Community should emphasize personal responsibility, but in a positive and supportive way, which is seemingly what "normies" want.

E:

  • Defining categories of who we are targeting might also help. "Normies" is abstract. For example, teaching kids the values of being self-sufficient and how current system encourages the best in human nature is much more doable

Normies do not exist

You just said that right after a section which said "most people are affected by emotional impact, not logical arguments like you guys are". That's pretty much "normies exist".

Acting like a rationalist is weird. Being convinced like a rationalist would be convinced is doubly so.

"Normies" as defined by "not rationalist/everybody else" isn't obvious to me. In general, the word is used differently in different contexts and for me the default meaning is "a normal person who isn't too online". This is useless for the context of trying to convince people to accept that communism is bad because everybody is online.

I think I know the kind of normies you are referencing here. There are roughly two stripes of normies -- people who don't think deeply / interrogate concepts -- that don't think "Communism is bad:"

  1. The normies who buy into the general media narrative that right-wingers are mean to minorities so anything to the left of them is kind, and that the right uses "Communism" to scare people into being mean, so it must be OK.
  2. The normies who think free stuff has no costs, because they aren't direct costs. (I had a conversation once with a guy from Latin America who was self-declared "pro-freedom," but to him freedom meant freedom from hunger + freedom from poverty).

I wouldn't try to get into a philosophical discussion with someone who doesn't think philosophically. I think you have to take a practical approach, like:

What should happen to people who don't want to participate? What if the government tells you your job is to dig ditches all day every day, and you would rather knit or fix cars or answer phones? Or, worse, start your own business? They say no, you will dig ditches. What should happen to you? What if you accept being forced to dig ditches, but want to talk to your fellow ditch-diggers about how you don't like digging ditches? The government (your boss) tells you to stop talking about that. What should happen to you if you keep talking about it? What if you think of a better, more efficient way to get the ditch dug, that requires less effort on your part, and your boss doesn't care? Communism isn't creative; it doesn't allow for individual initiative/enterprise (except for political climbers, but watch out for the other political climbers!). Every person is a cog in a machine and if you are not a cog in the machine you are a problem. It doesn't matter if the machine is efficient or even operable, you are there to do what you're told, or you're a problem. This is why Communuist countries do not allow their citizens to leave and invariably turn into prisons/death camps.

The Marxist argument against capitalism is that there are a lot of real problems with capitalism, and it presents itself as an idealized solution to the problems of capitalism. The problem with this is that people are imperfect and any system run by people will be imperfect, including Communism. There is no Utopia. All of the same human failings that Communism wants to eliminate will be present inside Communism. There will always be problems. In a centralized system, the problems created by that system are distributed throughout the entire system. One important person makes a mistake or does something evil, and everyone downstream of that important person has to confront the consequences and has no recourse to fix the mistake -- you may not even be able to acknowledge the mistake without consequences!

Capitalism is decentralized, so it's a bunch of people making their own mistakes, and these mistakes have a smaller impact because those downstream are fewer and may be able to navigate their own mitigation strategies. Of course, these people might not make a mistake but do something good that will have good effects on anyone downstream from them. Communism essentially precludes the possibility of the good thing happening and instead locks everyone into the shared mistake path.

As a sort of libertarian, I've been accused of favoring my own Utopian ideal, but really it's the opposite: an anti-utopian ideal. People will do things badly and hurt themselves, and the best way to minimize the effects of this is to keep power limited and allow people the flexibility to fix their own mistakes or mold their circumstances to avoid the worst effects of others' mistakes. Meanwhile, we can share in the benefits from people who do the good things by choosing to trade with them and work on our own good things that give us purpose.

Suppose communism is bad. How do you teach normies this?

You poisoned derailed the discussion by leading with this. Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree. At worst they have some uninformed ideas that, if you squint, can sort of seem communist-adjacent. Stuff like supporting price ceilings or floors in competitive industries. But even these aren't really doing much damage. Things like "building more housing leads to higher housing + rent prices" has been much more disruptive to a flourishing society, and it doesn't spring from anything related to communism, but rather from ignorance of basic economics.

Normies in Latin America keep voting for communists. Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez. Nicaraguans elected Daniel Ortega. Peruvians elected Pedro Castillo.

Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree.

I put forward that normies think Nazism is bad. If you display a swastika, you are likely to suffer immediate social and possibly even legal consequences due to this belief.

What social and possibly even legal results do you observe from people displaying the hammer and sickle? If you observe a disparity, how large is that disparity? If it is indeed quite large, do you think it is perhaps too large, that the reaction to the hammer and sickle should conform more to that of the swastika? If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?

The conflict with Nazism is a conflict theory conflict. Nazis have it good under Nazism, so they cannot be reasoned out of trying to do a Nazism, only suppressed.

The conflict with Communism is much more of a mistake theory conflict. Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism, and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.

It's the same "the right thinks the left is stupid, the left thinks the right is evil" thing, which rings true in the first place because the right-wing ideologies are usually the pragmatically selfish ones.

Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism, and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.

The notable problem with Communism is not that it made people generally poor. The problem is the vast amounts of rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery, mass starvation, occasionally intentionally induced, and the general pattern of systemic efforts to mutilate the souls of those unfortunate enough to be held in its thrall. The fact that you have bypassed these to argue for common knowledge that Communism is bad because even elites weren't as rich as westerners rather underlines the point.

Communism is in fact a conflict theory. It is in fact predicated on making things good for Communists, and is explicit that this should come at the expense of non-communists, who are to be exterminated without mercy. It cannot even be argued that "non-communist" was a category one chose for themselves; communists routinely assigned the label on the basis of who your family was, and even on ethnicity when convinient.

I firmly believe that the left is evil, and am baffled that others are confused on this point. Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism.

Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism.

Nazi Germany, Pol Pot, Japanese Empire, Aztecs are strong contenders.

One of those four was part of the Communist empire, and another allied with them to initiate wars of aggression.

Still, "among the most evil empires in history" is far more fitting than "Certainly there has never been an empire more evil than Communism."

How many of them lasted as long, or held so many in thrall, or caused so much damage, or brought us so close to much, much worse?

I stand by my original statement. The nazis lasted twelve years, and roughly the same for the Japanese empire. The communists held power for nearly a century, and ruled something like a third of the whole world for roughly two generations, killing and brutalizing an absolutely staggering number of people in that time.

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The fact that you have bypassed these to argue for common knowledge that Communism is bad because even elites weren't as rich as westerners rather underlines the point.

As others have noted, there were rape, torture, hideous murder, rampant slavery and starvation in many states across history, generally eased back on as such atrocities started to be less economically efficient and contributing to state security than not doing those things. So the notable thing about Communism is that they decided to do those things, up to eleven, and got nothing good in return. Elsewhere you say that those things would be immoral even if they resulted in great economic efficiency, and I agree, but I could find quite a few people even here on this forum who seem to be ready to return to premodern atrocity levels in return for some societal gains.

Communism is in fact a conflict theory. It is in fact predicated on making things good for Communists, and is explicit that this should come at the expense of non-communists, who are to be exterminated without mercy. It cannot even be argued that "non-communist" was a category one chose for themselves; communists routinely assigned the label on the basis of who your family was, and even on ethnicity when convinient.

I think it's obvious the way Nazis determined their outgroup was quite a lot more rigid and, dare I say, final, than the way Communists did it. I'd guess there were more Communists of noble or otherwise undesirable descent than there were Jewish Nazis.

When there's no basis of injecting yourself into the power structure other than power, it doesn't look as bleak as having to be a blonde blue-eyed white man.

Also, I don't mean to say that Communism is a mistake theory, but that normies view "current society vs communism" as a mistake theory fight, as opposed to "current society vs nazism".

I firmly believe that the left is evil, and am baffled that others are confused on this point.

When you call an entire half of the political axis evil without even stating where you believe the center it, it does get confusing, yes.

The notable problem with Communism is not that it made people generally poor.

Of course this is the problem with communism. If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now. The fact that the economic systems failed utterly is what makes communism disastrous. The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world. What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.

Of course this is the problem with communism.

I fundamentally disagree.

If all of the horrors of the USSR and red China had resulted in societies five times as prosperous as the US in material terms we’d all be communists now.

In the first place, if the USSR and Red China could actually produce five times the prosperity as the US, they likely would not have needed to resort to the violence. This is the basis of plausibility for "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism".

In the second place, I don't think torture, rape and murder can or will ever produce superior prosperity to their absence, so I don't think the question is actually meaningful. If we're going to chase the hypothetical, though, I'll happily reject the idea that economic abundance and moral justice are mutually fungible. It is not immoral to be poor. It is immoral to murder, rape and torture. This does not change even if the torture, rape and murder are enormously economically productive. Those who think otherwise and manage to make a go of it should be properly categorized as hostis humani generis. No mortal man is fit to prey on his fellows. Those who forget this should be reminded of their mortality.

The torture, the killing, the brutality, (I exclude the starvation, which is a direct consequence of communism as an economic failure state), that is all sadly very human, very common, very widespread (certainly until very recently) in every corner of the world.

I am skeptical that Communist Russia is actually typical in its rates of torture, murder and brutality. I think we can find other regimes that were similarly brutal, but those regimes are likewise unusual.

What is particularly communist is that on not one occasion did it achieve anything like the mass popular prosperity achieved in comparable nations under capitalism.

What is particularly communist is that it created notable brutality more or less out of whole cloth. We can accept that the Aztecs, in the end, gradually devolved into a society built on slavery and murder. What is surprising is that the Communists built such a society from scratch overnight, out of otherwise reasonably decent, peaceful human beings.

so they cannot be reasoned out of trying to do a Nazism, only suppressed.

The conflict with Communism is much more of a mistake theory conflict. Even the Communist elites had it worse than Capitalist elites under Communism

That doesn't mean they can be reasoned out of communism. I've made this point before, but ideologies based on good intentions are often no better than ones based on blind hate. There's no limit to what a man can do, if you convince him it's all in the service of the greater good.

and it's more of a common knowledge that Communism was bad for everyone in general. That's why it doesn't need as much suppression.

This makes no sense. If fewer people believed communism was bad, than you'd have even more people arguing it doesn't need to be suppressed.

I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism. That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop. If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.

If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?

It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it. Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.

Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution)

You are thinking of the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution (which was devastating to China and cost 1-2 million lives, but is a separate incident).

You're right, I get the two confused.

It's hard to do the same for death camps.

We have people who argue that on this very forum. Out yonder, in the broader universe, normies who believe whatever's on TV-that-isn't-H2, are not making informed studies of the holocaust to argue that it couldn't have been an accident. They're being told it was deliberate. The holocaust is just like evolution; people don't make up their minds after seeing evidence. They make up their minds on the basis of conformity and then seek out evidence to confirm it.

Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies

A huge chunk of the elites of society are informed by people who are actual literal out and out marxists who use falsified marxist postulates as inputs in their theorems. Very little of this has to do with support for command economics, and you can have non-marxist totalitarian command economies.

A huge chunk of the elites of society are informed by people who are actual literal out and out marxists who use falsified marxist postulates as inputs in their theorems. Very little of this has to do with support for command economics, and you can have non-marxist totalitarian command economies.

And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?

Communism and Nazi sympathies are contrarianism born from negative partisanship, not genuine broad support for those ideologies.

And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?

Considering that interviewing a Nazi and promoting the interview aren't indicative of any sort of positive opinion on Nazism - in fact, both behaviors are pretty much orthogonal to one's support of or opposition to the ideology, or any ideology - I'm not sure how this could be claimed to be evidence of such a thing.

This idea only works if a person is seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits rather than using that as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views. Tucker and the people who watch him might not fully agree with Nazi viewpoints as they're espoused, but they probably agree with at least some of them, and more importantly wish they were in the Overton Window in order to make their own views more palatable.

Sure, but you have no credibility with which to make the judgment whether they're seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits or using it as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views that they want to pull into the Overton window. In general, very few people have that level of credibility when talking about other people's behaviors, and specifically, if those other people are people one disagrees with or dislikes, then they definitely have no credibility in determining such things. If I disagree with them, then regardless of the underlying reality, of course I'll convince myself that these bad people with bad ideas are dishonest cynics who are cynically being dishonest in order to sneak in their bad ideas to the mainstream, and as such, my conclusion that that's what they're doing carries no weight.

This is why, again, interviewing a Nazi or promoting such an interview tells us nothing about how anti- or pro-Nazi they are; it's some dimension other than the actual ground-level ideological/political beliefs that determines if someone believes that publicizing an interview with [ideological/political beliefs they disagree with] is bad. It's either ideological hubris or ideological authoritarianism or some combination of both that are the determinants.

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"Interviewing a Nazi" is not analagous to "teaching Marxism".

Who's "teaching marxism" here? The person I responded to deliberately chose fairly wishy-washy language of "informed by people" because more forceful positions like "teaching marxism" aren't backed up by evidence of being widespread.

I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism.

I agree, object to this disparity in perception, and think it is reasonably described as "not believing that communism is bad". It's probably true that, in a sense, most people believe that french fries are bad. I think it's pretty clear that most people think smoking is bad. It seems to me that to the extent that normies consider Communism "bad", they consider it less bad than french fries. I think they should consider it more bad than smoking, and roughly as bad as naziism.

That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop.

Communism has no shortage of deliberate exterminations, starvations, mass rape, mass torture, the whole shebang. The Cambodian communists killed one in four of their population. The Russian communists committed every atrocity imaginable at considerable scale. If there is no shortage of historical atrocity, why should we accept such an extreme difference in perception between the two ideologies? Isn't this disparity a problem? Isn't education the obvious solution? Why treat the present state as some immutable fact of nature, rather than critiquing it as we do other social phenomena?

If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.

Do people squint in this way for Nazi atrocities? Do we, generally speaking, tolerate those inclined to do so? Why should it be different for the many, many deliberate atrocities on the part of the Communists? Or is it your argument that no such atrocities exist, that the public perception is correct?

It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it.

I would readily concede that they believe "communism is bad" in the sense that "french fries are bad". I see no evidence that they believe it in the sense that "smoking is bad", much less "naziism is bad." It seems obvious to me that the latter is necessary, given the amount of damage that Communism as an ideology has done and might do again.

Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.

I can't speak for the community at large, but in my own experience I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence with the tacit support of their local institutions, as well as local, state and federal governments. Further, I note that Communist ideology appears to be alive and well within the Overton window, while our society chases absurdly diminished returns seeking to further marginalize the already marginalized Nazis. I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio. I disagree with this state of affairs and believe it should be rectified. Again, "teach normies that Communism is bad" seems like a reasonable shorthand for this aim, which seems obviously unachieved at the present.

and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence with the tacit support of their local institutions, as well as local, state and federal governments.

Are you sure? How many are actually communist? US Antifa is much more extensively anarchist than it is communist (antifa is non-hierarchal), and outside of that, most of the rioters aren't espousing much in the way of an economic political ideology. Why do you think they are actually communist thugs? Being anti-fascist and/or anti-capitalist is not the same thing as being communist after all.

If communism had even reasonable approval you would have an actually influential communist party, and Trump using communist as an attack against Harris, would not be worth doing (because people would not see it as bad), nor would she have to say she isn't in response. In fact only 14% of Americans even have a favorable opinion of the term communism. (55% have a favorable opinion of the term capitalism just to contrast and socialism at 40%, 10% for Nazism/fascism).

I agree that worldwide communism is roughly as bad as Nazism, in as much as we are balancing huge amounts of horror. But in the US, the reason (in my opinion) why Nazism is seen as worse is that your own history is tangled up with racialized politics. Communism has no real significant negative history inside your nation, nor does it have any real chance of overturning your free(ish) market capitalism. Whereas you had an entire Civil War over an ideology that treated people differently because of race, which pattern matches much closer to Nazism, than Communism. That plus your "golden age" was just after defeating the Nazis and before the Cold War grew monstrously, so seeing the Nazis as the ultimate evil which the US defeated is part of the redemption myth-arc that many conservatives value. In overcoming a racist ideology, you began to overcome your own demons. It's not just left wingers who see Nazis as worse after all. The Silent Generation and Boomers dislike communism more than younger generations, but even they dislike fascism even more (roughly 43% think fascism is the most violent ideology, about 25% think communism or Marxism.)

You (as a nation) dislike Communism, but you HATE Nazis, because your own history is closer to almost becoming Nazis, than it is to becoming Communists. A nation that has emerged from Communism will probably hate Communists more than Nazis (Ukraine and Azov brigade as an example perhaps?) because of their experiences, not because they are making a rationally weighted decision that Communism is worse across the globe and all time than Nazism. So I think wanting America to hate Nazis and Communists just as much is only going to happen after you have a significant Communist government or civil war split across Communism vs Capitalism. Which I do not view as very likely, I admit.

(All stats are taken from polls commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which works to try and educate Americans as to the fact that Communism/Marxism is as dangerous/more dangerous than fascism, so should if anything be swaying respondents to communism being bad. To be fair they do say: "Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States. We have a solemn obligation to expose the lies of Marxism for the naïve who say they are willing to give collectivism another chance." so they agree with you directionally. Their own figures still show that it is regarded pretty negatively overall. They do accept donations and run museums and sponsor teacher certifications and the like, so if you do feel strongly about their mission, they do seem to be right up your alley so to speak. For transparency, I have donated to them before.)

Are you sure? How many are actually communist?

I suppose that depends on how one defines "communist".

Let's suppose I define it as "generally-left-wing revolutionaries drawing significant ideological influence from Marx and the leaders of the various communist revolutions, rejecting capitalism and the existing rule-of-law and embracing lawless violence against their opponents." It seems to me that this definition covers the vast majority of the black-clad thugs committing lawless violence in numerous American cities, and that these thugs enjoy significant institutional support even from purportedly law-abiding progressive elites and institutions.

In concrete terms, what does this definition cost me in terms of predictive accuracy? Does it harm my ability to predict who they will ally with, who they will fight against, who will provide them with institutional protection and cover for their violence, which communities will allow them to operate and which they will avoid, etc? If it does not harm predictive accuracy in these matters, where does the predictive accuracy start breaking down, and what salient misconceptions result?

If communism had even reasonable approval you would have an actually influential communist party, and Trump using communist as an attack against Harris, would not be worth doing (because people would not see it as bad), nor would she have to say she isn't in response.

And yet, Communist gunmen can publicly take over portions of American cities, threaten people, even shoot people, and the police, local authorities and media look the other way and refuse to enforce the law against them. And because the media is actively covering for them, the public doesn't appear to grasp that this has happened, or why it is a serious problem.

Do you think there's a straightforward way to ensure that the law is enforced against such violent communist gangs, going forward?

If not, how should people like me go about securing similar tacit approval for our own armed, public infliction of violence on the people we deem deserving?

If the latter does not seem practicable, would it be fair to say that violent communist thugs, as I've defined them above, observably enjoy greater leniency than law-abiding Red Tribe types?

You (as a nation) dislike Communism, but you HATE Nazis, because your own history is closer to almost becoming Nazis, than it is to becoming Communists.

I don't think this is actually true. It seems obvious to me that communism was much more popular and for much longer than Naziism ever was, especially with my nation's elites and leadership. To the extent that America was never close to Gulags and mass starvation as a punitive policy, it was likewise never close to extermination camps. To the extent that it approached authoritarianism, it is not obvious to me that this potential authoritarianism was significantly more fascist than it was communist. Then too, it does not seem to me that the communists were actually immune to persecuting and even exterminating large groups of people on the basis of ethnicity.

I also note that countries that came far closer to falling to communism, like much of Western Europe, and even countries that partially DID fall to Communism, like Germany, conspicuously lack the antibodies to Communism that your argument implies they should possess.

I propose an alternative hypothesis: my nation dislikes Communism but HATES Naziism, because large and influential portions of my country's elite have been broadly sympathetic to Communism, and have systematically downplayed its evils in the public consciousness. There is no principled reason why Communist Atrocity should not be its own film category, in the manner of Holocaust films. There is no principled reason why our history education focuses so much on the one and so consistently ignores the other. Having spent some effort to educate myself, I find I am capable of hating them both, and see no reason why my fellow countrymen should not share this capacity. I note that academia and the media seem obsessed with maintaining the hatred one way, and have a long history of hagiography for the other, from Duranty on down to the evergreen academic studies on Marx and Lenin and Mao as serious, useful thinkers.

(All stats are taken from polls commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation which works to try and educate Americans as to the fact that Communism/Marxism is as dangerous/more dangerous than fascism, so should if anything be swaying respondents to communism being bad.

What's their plan for changing attitudes on this issue? How does it compare to Progressive plans for changing attitudes toward, say, LGBT+ issues?

It hinders your accuracy because it elides the differences inside the group. If they are Marxist communists then you are at risk of a Stalinist totalitarian state. If they are anarchists they might want to tear down the state but do not want it replaced. They'll be happy to burn a police station, but aren't going to reintroduce the Stasi.

Both might be the same now, but one is much more dangerous long term. You are always going to have people who want to tear down whatever the current system is. That is a given. Anarchists are a low threat though overall, they won't harness state power for gulags, or death camps. They're street level problems. Marxist communists onnthe other hand are a different kettle of fish.

Also it will mean you will miss steps (see Hitler vs Rohm) If antifa gained any sort of power, and starts infighting (which given it is a coalition defined by being against something and has multiple factions who disagree on what should be built instead it will) it is absolutely crucial to understand whether Marxist communists or anarchists or whoever started it and who is winning. Because that is going to be crucial as to what happens next. Out-group homogenity bias means you lose information about your opponents. If you are correct and elites are communist friendly. Then it is highly likely they will have to purge or get rid of an anarchist antifa for example. Again see Rohm. Is an elite clamp down on antifa proof of moderation or proof they are cleaning house to take over more thoroughly? Is it a welcome return to law and order or another Night of Long Knives? Without considering that antifa is not all the same, and understanding factionalism inside it, you will have no clue.

Now I am not arguing if you are caught in a dark alley with black bloc, it makes much of a difference, but socio-politically it really does.

As for the foundation, here is the link. So you can evaluate for yourself.

https://victimsofcommunism.org/

If they are Marxist communists then you are at risk of a Stalinist totalitarian state. If they are anarchists they might want to tear down the state but do not want it replaced. They'll be happy to burn a police station, but aren't going to reintroduce the Stasi.

Then how do you explain the notable role Anarchists played in both the Bolshevik movement and in the construction of the actual Stalinist totalitarian state? I understand that they, like many of their Marxist Communist brethren, were subsequently murdered by the Stalinist totalitarian state that they had worked so hard together to build, but that doesn't change the fact that they did in fact build it, does it?

Likewise, you appear to be aware that Anarchists and Marxist Communists fight together here and now with the explicit goal of destroying our present society, and you appear to be explicitly claiming that we shouldn't worry about the Anarchists because if they're only active, dedicated allies of the people who want to commit mass murder, not planning mass murder themselves. I have zero confidence that even a pure Anarchist revolution would not generate mass murder, since I do not believe their ideology is even slightly coherent or grounded in reality, and I observe that utopian left-wing revolutionaries have a long track record of papering over the failures of their ideologies by killing the people they find most visibly inconvenient. Marxist Communism likewise had no history of mass murder until it actually won, and then the mass murders began immediately. Why should we suppose it would be different for the Anarchists, even if by some miracle they should manage not to simply empower another Stalin like they did the last several times?

The other part that I don't get is how you recognize that both of these groups are actively working to destroy the present peace, and then expect, should they succeed, for the results to somehow bifurcate based on which of the two is dominant over the other. Again, you seem to recognize that there is no observable separation between the two in their current actions, which are directed at destroying the relative peace and order of our present society. To the extent that they succeed in that goal, the next step is not that we get either an Anarchist or a Marxist Communist revolution, but rather Reds joining the political violence game wholesale, decisively ending peace and order for the foreseeable future. Avoiding that eventuality should be your priority, and in this there is no meaningful distinction between them. To the extent that you are willing either to tolerate either lawless violence from the Anarchists or the tacit support granted that violence by Blue institutions, it seems to me that you are, wittingly or not, endorsing Red violence as well. To the extent that you wish to forestall Red violence, it behooves you to forestall Anarchist violence and the tacit support granted to it in equal measure to Marxist Communist violence.

Is an elite clamp down on antifa proof of moderation or proof they are cleaning house to take over more thoroughly? Is it a welcome return to law and order or another Night of Long Knives? Without considering that antifa is not all the same, and understanding factionalism inside it, you will have no clue.

I disagree, because it does not seem to me that the nature of Antifa allows tight coordination with the authorities such that this sort of factionalism would be a concern. Antifa are thugs, and they are utilized as a deniable, arms-length tool by Blue elites. Their usefulness begins and ends with using violence to shut down and demoralize Reds, and all that the Elites provide for this is turning a blind eye. There is no plausible scenario where Antifa themselves actually end up in power. Their significance begins and ends with their ability to inflict lawless violence without consequence, and that significance is not altered by the ideological peculiarities of the various factions. They attack people Blues don't like, and Blues let them because Blues derive social and political advantage from the resulting chaos and dismay. The ultimate concern is the Blues running this system, and it is difficult to see how the differences between Marxist Communists and Anarchists register compared to the reality of the system as a whole. Likewise if one faction or the other were to be purged; the problem is the people in control of the system, not the pawns. Are they allowing lawless violence, or are they punishing it? If they arrest one faction and tell the other that they have to lay low, then they're not tolerating violence. If they arrest one faction but give the other free reign, they are tolerating violence. Which faction is doing or not doing the violence is irrelevant.

Now I am not arguing if you are caught in a dark alley with black bloc, it makes much of a difference, but socio-politically it really does.

Blue Tribe toleration of their violence can permanently destroy peace and order either way, and their differences don't materially impact that destruction in any meaningful way. So no, I don't think it really does, socio-politically or in any other way.

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Antifa’s closet historical analogues are the Tsarist Black Hundreds, urban lumpenproletariat thugs doing violence against the working class in the service of a failed dictatorship.

I was more describing why people felt that way rather than claiming it was correct. It was on the "is" side of the "is-ought" divide. Staying on that side for a moment, I can't think of any atrocities committed by Communists that had the same death toll x deliberateness that the Holocaust had. It had some with plausibly higher death totals, and some that were just as deliberate, but none that were both.

Moving to the "ought" part, I think Communism should be lumped in with Nazism broadly as "Authoritarianism" and stand in contrast to Democracy or Liberalism. We can quibble over exactly how much proportional guilt should be assigned to something like the Cultural Revolution compared to the Holocaust (0.5x? 0.8x?) but any measurements would pale in comparison to how relatively well-behaved democracies have been. They've obviously done some bad things themselves (e.g. Japanese internment), but the difference in scale and severity is readily apparent.

I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence

ANTIFA is not guilty of widespread political violence since it's not popular enough to generate such action, and BLM can't reasonably be called communist.

I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio.

Deranged leftists on Twitter are not evidence of widespread communist sympathies. At least, they're no more evidence than deranged right-wingers on 4chan or this very site(!) are of widespread Nazi sympathies.

The reason the hammer and sickle doesn't draw the same level of opprobrium as the swastika is the same reason anything associated with the Ottomans, or the Mongols,.or the Huns, or the Sudanese, or any other murderous regime doesn't either. There's a tacit understanding that this kind of behavior is historically common and continues to be common until a civilization reaches a certain level of development. Russia had always been a backwater so it was easy to dismiss Stalin as a thug, and most other Communist countries were even further behind economically, culturally, scientifically, and socially. Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe, and had been viewed as such for a long time. The Holocaust wasn't the same kind of mass butchery that had always existed; it was a high-tech process optimized for efficiency with every detail down to the amount of gold extracted from dental fillings meticulously recorded, perpetrated by an army of bureaucrats in business suits and a leader who had been popularly elected. The idea that "progress" could lead to something like that was terrifying.

Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe

The Soviets were treated in the media as one of the most advanced countries in the world.

I'll suggest the conflict theory explanation instead: The average person doesn't think Communism is very bad because decades of leftist media propaganda has tried to minimize any bad things that Communists did from at least the 1960s until Communism died out. And even afterwards, they never tried to stir up hysteria about Communists being around every corner like they did with fascists.

Suppose communism is bad. How do you teach normies this?

This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.

I'll try and create a basic walk-through of the general argument. Every single part of it has been greatly elaborated on.

Step 1: The golden rule. Treat others how you'd like to be treated. Establish this first to create some basic level of empathy, and to expand into the idea of rights.

Step 2: Self-Ownership. All humans own three things: their life, their actions, and their body. Taking control of these things from them without their consent is murder, slavery, or rape. Hopefully whoever you are talking with is on board with this.

Step 3: Property-ownership. Humans like to possess things. This is mostly a practical matter. Start small with something the person you know likes to possess, their phone, their car, their clothes, etc. Dyed in the wool communists will generally try to make a distinction between "possession" and "ownership". Don't let them, the distinction is mostly meaningless. Possession is just about how immediately visible your ownership is. Just slowly expand the physical distance between them and their possessions to help them get the point. "You dropped your phone, do you no longer possess it? You left your phone somewhere, should whoever finds it get to keep it?"

Step 4: Examples. You have enough at this point to tear down any communist system. (even just step 1 and 2 might be enough, but step 3 makes it easy). Ask them to provide examples of a communist system or setup, and then show how it violates one of the things they already agreed on. Be aware that communist systems lean heavily into slavery and forced work, so if they don't want to provide examples ask them how a communist system will deal with lazy people / bad jobs / difficult jobs.

This has been a goal of the libertarian and classical liberal movements for the last century.

And that approach is failing miserably before our eyes.

Despite the state of government I'm not that pessimistic about the results. I think without either movement we would be in a much worse spot.

Are they winning? No, of course not. But they do impact the discourse and the Overton window.

I consider the classical liberals a sort of permanent opposition elite. They are fully capable of using academia and the courts to fight their battles, and they are probably more represented in those institutions than run of the mill religious conservatives.

You might find this interesting - if not for the purpose of developing effective propaganda, then at least for your own edification. It has a bit of a bibliography for further reading.

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism:

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.

Thank you for the link, it is an excellent pointer to further reading about "what happened to the Marxists."

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies? Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

...And if you don't agree with the above, would you agree that hypothetically, if the above were the reality of the situation, it would be a case of communists converting to "liberalism", only for their "liberalism" to recapitulate communism?

Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies?

I think that Antifa would qualify as such, yes. My impression is that lately they've been less active in terms of large public actions than they were during the height of the Trump years, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention as much.

Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?

Yes.

Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

Generally, I'm in a position where I want to believe in the capacity of cultural production and academic thought to have impacts outside of their own provincial spheres, but I don't know if the evidence actually supports such a claim.

The author of the linked post may be suffering from a bit of myopia. He gives a historical account of certain trends within analytic philosophy departments. But you can certainly still find people in non-analytic philosophy departments, people in non-philosophy departments (English, sociology, the menagerie of "Studies", etc), and people outside of academic altogether, who call themselves Marxists. (Of course, the authenticity and seriousness of such commitments are always open to questioning.)

Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.

Then where did she and the infrastructure supporting and defending her come from? IIRC, she's a lifelong academic.

I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.

I'd agree that it's a tricky business, but it seems to me there's no way to avoid engaging with that business. Further, it seems to me that we've been engaging in that business routinely more or less forever. I engage in that business every time I consider an argument about strutural racism or sexism or colonialism or any of the other basic arguments of the progressive worldview. I reject the progressive arguments not because the question is too nebulous to draw a conclusion, but because I examine the evidence and draw conclusions. It seems to me that the sort of uncertianty you describe seems to pop up when the sort of critique that is usually applied by progressives is instead turned on them, and it seems to me that it pops up even when those applying this critique to progressivism have much, much better evidence to support their critique than the progressives generally do.

For an example, it is routine in our society to attribute violent crime rates to socio-economic factors, and to claim that these violent crime rates can be increased or decreased by various policy interventions. Well, we just witnessed an extremely powerful cluster of policy interventions, and we can observe that it was immediately followed by the largest change in violent crime rates ever rigorously observed. And yet when I suggest a causative linkage, the same people who have spent years telling me that I should take the impact of socio-economic factors on the crime rate more seriously suddenly start claiming that the whole issue is an impenetrable fog, and real knowledge is simply impossible.

Likewise in this case, I observe that there's a long and quite sordid history of involvement in communist activism on the part of Academia, that academia seems to be ground-zero for the current crop of communist thugs, and that academia takes public steps to organize and defend their thuggery. I'm not sure where the uncertainty is coming from, or how we might reduce it. Would an analysis of association between Antifa and Academia be sufficient?

Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.”

Oh, how the turn tables. Where is all that "liberal egalitarianism" now, in the era of "only white people can be racist"?

They got eaten by the actual Marxists.

Well, the twist is that the "actual" Marxism came from a lot of the people that were just described as having converted to liberalism.

Because Marxism was always bullshit.

That's a bit low effort and antagonistic, so even though the message is perfectly fine, the form might get you modded.

In any case I don't follow. If they converted to liberalism how does Marxism enter into it? Or are you saying their conversion was bullshit, because they were Marxist?

As @Primaprimaprima observed, once they stripped away the bullshit, all that was left was old-fashioned "spirit of '89" style revolutionary leftism. Turns out that the ideas that make Marxism distinct and for lack of a better word "marxist" are all bullshit.

Thinking of it like a Git repo, they returned thier ideological branch to an earlier liberal state by reverting Marx's committs. But the master branch being run by [current year] progressives still includes them.

There is a lot of tension in the problem statement that has been pointed out a few times. To what extent can "low IQ normies" actually understand somewhat complex topics that require a fair amount of marinating and perspective? So, I guess I'll contribute one little route that helps with one little ingredient that can go into the marinade and hopefully help them gain perspective over time. Hopefully, it's a simple enough contribution that it can actually somewhat stick with a normie. It's not meant to be a "now you oppose communism" point, but just a little contribution to make them slightly less susceptible and slightly more likely to fit other pieces into the puzzle. The first part is heavily lifted from Russ Roberts talking to Mike Munger in EconTalk.

The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of "fairness", as other folks have pointed out here. They imagine that you can just just elect the right politicians to grab the "fairness" knob and turn it toward "good", with no ill consequences. They obviously wouldn't be willing to trade off "fairness" for something as cold as "economic efficiency", which sounds like how capitalists exploit everyone. So, the point is to use two examples to argue that 1) Yes, you absolutely would give up some amount of fairness for some amount of efficiency, and 2) In fact, we have easy-to-understand historical examples of the relentless drive toward "fairness" being wildly harmful. The first proceeds with a theoretical exercise that feels practical enough to be within every normie's daily experience, and the latter hopefully helps connect the idea to practice in case they think it's just too disconnected and theoretical.

The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".

(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)

The bonus could actually be a good connection to the second thing, which is a real-world example of exactly how the commie logic goes. Not only can you not do any of the fun things in life (or even get through an intersection to get to work), but you certainly can't acquire anything that could even help you do work. The Khmer Rouge took commie logic as logic, "fairness" above all else. Absolutely no chance that any Big Men of Capitalism could arise. In order to do that, you simply have to ban free enterprise. No one can hoard goods or money if they can't build an evil Big Business. If you let them just go start a business, they might make a bunch of money, and then we get inequality and unfairness. So, everybody works on the State farm, and they're definitely not allowed to do stuff that makes them rich, unequal, and unfair. At least, not without one of those "societal conversations" (don't ask when those actually happen, but spoiler, it's only when we want to give Party Insiders extra goodies). Don't even think about getting a computer; if you had a computer, you might program something and start a tech company, which might make you rich, unequal, and unfair. Hammers? Ladders? Literally anything that could be used to make money with? Banned, unless it's owned by the State, for use on State projects, which have presumably had a "societal conversation" approving them. Hell, the Khmer literally banned people who wanted to have a little more food for their family (because they apparently weren't satisfied by the outcome of the "societal conversation") from going out into the countryside and picking berries. Because that's "hoarding goods", and besides, you might try to sell them for other stuff, acquiring extra wealth, becoming rich, unequal, and unfair.

The result is hopefully that they can see that, while there is often an intuitive drive toward "fairness" (and some amount of this intuition may be fine), it actually gets extremely wonky as you blow it up in scale. It's directly connected to how it would negatively impact their normie life and a historical example of exactly that happening. They'll hopefully realize that they will, deep down, be willing to trade some amount of "fairness" for some amount of "efficiency", and I think that's enough of an accomplishment for a normie who is commie-curious. They'll definitely need more marinating to go much beyond that.

So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous.

The reality is, it wont really matter who needs to go first. The person who will get to go first is whoever is most in-favor with the boss in charge of that intersection. And best way to ensure that you get to go first is to be a toady to that boss and spread lies about how the other people at the intersection hate that boss. And even then, the boss will let the dipshit nephew of his boss go first, because he's also a toady. And soon it turns out that no one in charge of intersections is actually good at running intersections, they're just the better ass-kissers.

Agreed. Another plan of attack is to point out that these "societal conversations" will actually be completely managed by Party members, for the purpose of giving good outcomes only to Party members in good standing, judged primarily on how influential you are in the Party. I think that's a follow-on conversation that happens once they're at least open to the idea of tradeoffs, and you can introduce them to the concept of public choice theory. If they're still in the completely fresh phase of "some outcome seems unfair in the world", you'll have to warm them up to thinking about how different systems manage that tradeoff better/worse.

My standard explanation is "in school or college, were you ever assigned at random to a group which had to complete a group assignment, and there was one person in the group who didn't lift a finger but got the same grade as you? Communism is that, but scaled up to an entire nation."

The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that some people might truthfully answer "no" to this question - because they were the freeloader. Not coincidentally, such people are disproportionately likely to endorse communism as a philosophy.

Well, the standard argument is that most people grew up in a family that is basically communistic. The children are basically freeloaders. They might do a few light chores, but they're not earning money, they just get everything provided to them for free. And many things, like the furniture and kitchen equipment, are shared jointly by the whole family. It works fine for a small group like a family. I wouldn't try to scale that up to an entire nation, but many things break when you try to scale them up that far.

The flip side to that is that the parents are dictators and the kids lack agency precisely because they are kids. The intention is not for the kids to be free loaders the rest of their lives but to grow up into fully functioning adults.

Communism, if understood literally (and how else would you understand it), is a spectacularly unpopular ideology in all Western countries, particularly among the "normies". Generally this hasn't needed a specific effort as, due to history, for most people "communism" has been associated with the period when the communists (generally in Soviet Union) killed your grandfather or great-grandfather, or at least took their house, or threatened to drop the nuke on them during the Cold War and then, if they survived, kill them or take their house.

If we mean excessive government involvement in economy in general, that's been generally dealt with a serious man in a serious suit, or less commonly a serious woman in a serious pantsuit or with a serious skirt, going on a TV discussion on whatever measure is proposed and saying that it will harm the economy, which means less jobs and less money for the normies. Of course, how well that works depends on how much the normies trust the expert class, which is probably somewhat less so these days than before the pandemic.

Indeed, even in the US it has been my experience that it's not "the normies" that need convincing.

Of course, how well that works depends on how much the normies trust the expert class

And the expert class being united in a belief that such measures are bad. That can't be taken for granted either.

I think pointing out that most people won’t work and will help out tremendously. Most people have personal experience with freeloading and if their hard work is not rewarded or worse taken and given to others who did nothing, they deeply resent those freeloading people. Explained that way, communist ideas lose quite a bit of luster.

As western capitalism trends closer an closer to a command economy through mergers, acquisitions and consolidation you will have a harder and harder time arguing against communism.

About 5 companies make all beer. About 6 companies make all media. It's hard to really argue that single digit values of competition produce the level of innovation that a state run monopoly could never rather than simply producing collusion. It's hard to believe that internally the level of competence will not steadily trend towards that of the DMV.

Economies of scale at hyperscale will always produce single digit mega-firm competition. The advantages of this over government-and-single-firm planning are incalculable.

But that's not the point. The point is that new entrants at a smaller scale should be able to enter markets without government approval or interference of any kind. The law of compounding is real; the tiny two-guys-in-their-garage today turns into Apple in 30 short years. In the absence of that, we're all still using IBM mainframes to send dick picks.

To return to the brewery example from the post above (and my post below), we can see that dynamic at work there as well. While it's not true that the market has homogenized and the big consolidated firms aren't actually crowding out competition, it's also true that there would almost certainly be many, many more little breweries all over the place in the absence of government regulation. Would someone on my block turn their garage into a little storefront if they were allowed to just sell home-brewed bottles without requiring a whole raft of government licenses? Almost certainly yes. If someone wants to argue that the licensing and inspection regime is necessary to prevent bad things, that's fine, I can probably find points of agreement, but the tradeoff in tamping down startups has to be acknowledged.

If there's a problem that's stopping startups, it isn't "western capitalism" that's going so, unless this is just calling out that western capitalism tends to have substantial regulatory capture.

Why is it hard to argue? It's an empirical question and empirically these companies do work better than state run monopolies. You are also eliding all the foreign competition and small firms that could scale up if the big ones ever get bad enough.

G. K. Chesterton made a similar point a century ago.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

Right. That’s why Thatcher allowed people in social housing to buy their house cheaply. It worked for about 40 years, but created a housing bubble that I think has now undermined the effect.

  1. The question with consolidation is whether there are large barriers to entrance. If no, then consolidation allows some degree of economies of scale whilst preventing monopolistic pricing.

  2. We see that play out in the beer space. Small barriers to entrance means there are numerous craft brewery options and such beers are actually more expensive vis-à-vis the mass produced beer. You would expect if there truly was monopolistic pricing and consolidation prices to rise drastically but we don’t see that.

About 5 companies make all beer.

This is a pretty funny example of homogenization to use during an era when small, independently owned breweries exploded. I don't even live in a large city and there are a half dozen little brewery taprooms within walking distance and many more within biking distance.

This sounds like CCP-style state capitalism (which, for all its faults, is at least tremendously efficient) rather than communism either as historically practised or as envisioned by Marx and Engels.

I'd approach this from a different perspective. To the extent that economic leftist thought finds support in the US, how much of that is driven by

  1. the trainwreck that is the student debt bubble
  2. the peculiarities (so to speak) of the healthcare system
  3. the fatal consequences of multiple social policies that turned inner cities into wastelands

?

None at all. 1 and 3 are downstream of leftist thought in the US.

I'm sure one can make the argument that inner city urban decay and the student debt bubble are the consequence of leftist policies from decades ago, fair enough. But I'm referring to the present. Again, to the extent that young people in the US are radicalized by leftist ideology, how much of that is explained by the current conditions of the student debt bubble and the healthcare system, for example?

Essentially none. Young people are radicalized by leftist ideology today because they're being propagandized into it, same as before. It's hard to overstate how much the message from the media and institutions is "leftism is good, rightism is bad". Healthcare is not much an issue for young people, because young people are generally healthy (and the modern cost of health "insurance" is... well, thanks Obamacare). And if it was about the student debt bubble, we wouldn't see so many radicalized FAANG employees for whom the debt can be paid off in a couple of years.

The issues are just excuses to hang the ideology off of.

So you think that explains all of it? "Media and institutions"?

It explains the vast majority of it. There's also the point that leftist ideologies are inherently attractive to those who figure they'll be on the receiving end of transfers, which would apply to a lot of young people (because they're just starting out), though that obviously fails to explain the FAANG people.

fails to explain the FAANG people

A lot of them probably expect to be on the receiving end of transfers of social status rather than economic status.

Yeah, they'll be sadly disappointed in that too. Social status goes to those who can play the social game, always.

(if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in)

Ding ding ding. Or at least, I'm far from convinced that a lot of things called "communist" are bad in all circumstances. There's more than one thing that gets called "communism" by laymen, though.

  1. Communism-proper - what the Marxists call communism. Note that the Marxist nations have never claimed to achieve communism; the USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the PRC claims to have "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Communism, as the Marxists define it, is a state of enlightenment where no government or money is necessary because people want to help each other. Communism does work on small scales - as the name suggests, communes - where Dunbar's number is not exceeded and rare exploiters can't hide. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism would probably also work with minimal shepherding due to abundance. Genetically engineering humans for greater altruism would probably also work. Outside of those three cases, this is in opposition to human nature and can't work - even Marx TTBOMK thought this would take a very long time and some sort of change in human nature to happen. With regard to policies that attempt to move things in the direction of communism outside of trying to create those cases, point out that loads of people are greedy/lazy/evil. If that doesn't work, then yeah, I think you are back to "tell them to shut up and take it".

  2. Command economy, partial or total. In other words, decide how much of X gets made and what attributes X has by some means other than "what will maximise profit for the makers of X?", for some or all values of X. I think there are some very real gains to be made in this area. Controlled obsolescence, for instance, is entirely a product of a capitalist system, as is modern predatory advertising, as are the predatory features of social media. I also think the losses could be made less severe these days than they were in the 20th century, because we have these nice things called computers to crunch economic numbers for us. There is a big skill-dependence, though, so while trying to command the economy is IMO not inherently dumb, many specific attempts to command the economy are dumb, and they can be opposed on their individual merits.

There is a big skill-dependence, though, so while trying to command the economy is IMO not inherently dumb, many specific attempts to command the economy are dumb, and they can be opposed on their individual merits.

I would compare capitalism to training a LLM using reinforcement learning, while a command economy is trying to program a LLM directly, manually with only whatever inputs you type in yourself by hand. I don't know that I would describe it as "inherently dumb", but it is systematically going to fail because there is way too much data for you to handle. The modern economy is the most ridiculously complex system that any living being has ever constructed, and it's a miracle that it works as well as it does, despite all the bugs.

Capitalism's main strength is not that it rewards people who deserve to be rewarded (though it sometimes does that), it's that to aligns incentives and sends signals via prices. How are you going to figure out whether a cheap Chinese wooden spoon for $1 is a better deal than a fancy hand crafted artisan wooden spoon for $10? Or whether the cheap Chinese knife for $5 is better deal than a fancy stainless steel knife for $10? Value is created by satisfying customer preferences, and these are often implicit and hard to capture just via surveys or whatever objective list of standards your command economy is going to use. But customer preferences and buying patterns? Those are powerful. Not infinitely powerful, they can be tricked, but still pretty powerful. And automatically applied in free market capitalism. You can invent a brand new product that nobody has ever heard of before and nobody knows what properties of it are valuable or how much in relation to each other, and capitalism will automatically figure it out emergently in real time as people decide whether or not to buy it.

Your command economy is not powerful enough, it is not smart enough, it's going to have bugs. And so is the capitalist economy, but it has fewer, just like a reinforcement trained LLM is going to have fewer bugs than a hand-crafted one. And when we're in the economy bugs mean poverty.

And so is the capitalist economy, but it has fewer, just like a reinforcement trained LLM is going to have fewer bugs than a hand-crafted one. And when we're in the economy bugs mean poverty.

Social media has caused a depression epidemic so bad suicide's a notable cause of death and torn the politics of half the West asunder by serving up Shiri's Scissor for clicks. Offshoring manufacturing has left the Chinese with a significant strategic advantage. Over a percent of US GDP is thrown down the drain on advertising, plus whatever's lost to obesity as a result of that advertising, plus 4% on the bloated financial sector.

Yes, the USSR sucked at command economy. But you've got to admit that cybersocialism hasn't actually been tried (aside from Project Cybersyn, which was never fully implemented AIUI before Pinochet shut it down and AFAIK seemed to work okay - also we've many orders of magnitude more computing power than the early 1970s); you're basically asking me to take it on faith that it'd necessarily be more terrible.

It's not the computing power, it's the actually putting in all the parameters. We're talking about people's preferences for which goods and services are more valuable compared to others. Which is worth more, tickets for a Taylor Swift concert, or a food dehydrator? A gallon of gas or a gallon of milk? A fancy looking shirt with a flower print or a comfy shirt that feels silky smooth? Is it worth paying an extra $5 on your grocery bill if the store is literally across the street instead of making you drive halfway across town for the cheaper store? What if it's an extra $20? Is it worth an extra $10 to get chicken flavored cat food instead of whitefish because your cat refuses to eat the latter?

All of these are variables which are going to depend on the specific customers and the idiosyncrasies of their preferences and their lifestyles. And these in turn emergently place demands on the economy. How do you know how much chicken flavored cat food to produce versus how much whitefish except via the demands placed by customers? But what if the chicken flavored cat food costs $10 more to produce (or the equivalent in terms of resources and labor), so it's inefficient and you want to disincentivize people from buying it unless they actually prefer it to the whitefish. Ie customers buy it if and only if it's actually going to improve their lives (via their cats health and happiness) by at least $10 worth of value.

How do you capture all of that, simultaneously understanding customer preferences AND incentivize customers to choose more efficient options while still allowing deviations if they want/need the more expensive version badly enough AND update in realtime as supply and demand change AND keep the manufacturers and whoever is in charge of the system from exploiting the crap out of it to enrich all their friends and political allies?

Obviously capitalism doesn't solve all of those issues entirely. But competition and the threat of bankruptcy does an excellent job of keeping things grounded in some reality. Negative feedback loops. It can get kind of bad, but if it goes too far off the rails the company goes bankrupt and gets replaced, even if nobody understands why. It's emergent. Nobody can understand and predict the entire economy at once. With capitalism you don't have to, and it mostly kinda works anyway. With socialism small problems get magnified and snowball because nobody can enrich themselves by fixing them.

How do you know how much chicken flavored cat food to produce versus how much whitefish except via the demands placed by customers?

You don't, but "how much chicken is bought vs. how much whitefish" is pretty easy to record and I'm not suggesting that it not be an input to your equations. I'm also not suggesting that money be abolished; that's really more of a communist thing than a socialist thing, and while I certainly wouldn't object to Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism I don't see a path there in the foreseeable future other than "gamble the human race on neural net AI not going Skynet on our arses" (which is unconscionable).

I'm saying "command economy with information tech" hasn't actually been tried and found wanting; it's been left untried. So I hear your position ("the economy is too complicated for command to work"), but I'm left quite sceptical; I think it's worth giving it a serious go somewhere (not everywhere at once; I'm not a lunatic).

Associate communism with a universally hated enemy if talking to strangers, or a specific enemy if talking to an individual with known preference profiles. This is INCREDIBLY easy since communism, especially modern communism, has parasited itself to literally everything except productive prosocial socioeconomic development models.

Bob hates gays and trannies? Point to the DSA trying to make communism fully gay and trans.

Carla hates welfare queens? Point to /r/antiwork and show how these lazy fucks just don't want to work ever.

Ahmed hates colonial exploiters? Look at expansionist communist countries and how they treat their minorities.

Suzuka hates conservative values? See how communist countries persecute gays.

Etc etc etc.

For every shit thing a commie does, it is possible to level the same accusation against a capitalist or monarchist or whathaveyou. But normies don't care about winning an argument, they care about an emotional valence right in their pain point. And there is one universal pain point commies will never be able to refute:

'Commies want to take your stuff and give it to the shithead down the street.'

Dress it up however you want, no commie wants to refute that. All this guff about 'personal property is not private property' breaks down with the slightest investigative breeze, so commies have to focus on overintellectualized utopian dreams to justify their existence.

Normies will not like communism. Even losers scrabbling at the dirt don't like communism because they ultimately want to keep bennies they ultimately scrounge up. It is only failed class aspirants who want communism, because being the guiding hand on the lever gives the illusion of power even if the machine is broken.

Commies want to take your stuff and give it to the shithead down the street

In practice, communists tended to enslave the ne’erdowells that collect welfare in western countries.

The asskisser who pivots from tendieposting to bootlicking gets the crumbs before the boot. Commissars first rounded up the kulaks before the invalids, since there was time pressure to seize the outputs of production. You can take your time crushing Sergey the town drunk if he isn't going anywhere.

Point to actually existing government. "Do you really want Joe Biden/Donald Trump deciding how much toilet paper you're allotted or what books are worthy of being published?" (Choose which depending on your audience's political valence.)

It's a little bit unfair to how the USSR actually handled capital allocation, but not that unfair. If someone brings up Albania or something a bit more sophisticated, they're not a normie.

Point to actually existing government. "Do you really want Joe Biden/Donald Trump deciding how much toilet paper you're allotted or what books are worthy of being published?"

Yes, I like to say, "Never support giving the government any power you wouldn't want your least favorite politician to possess." It's remarkably unpersuasive, because the notion that the means of government is more important than the ends is completely lost on post-1960s liberalism.

EDIT: IMO this is why it's so easy for the right to assume that the left supports electoral fraud: it would be insane to want an all-powerful government and also support literally Hitler having a shot at winning. Of course, you would fix an election to prevent that from happening.

The best answers are the oldest and simplest.

  • Collective/Social justice by it's nature demands individual injustice.

  • "From each according to thier ability to each according to thier needs" is little more than a thin veneer over robbing Peter to pay Paul.

  • Labor is not meaningful indicator of value. In fact labor can easily destroy/have negative value. See the classic example of the spoiled cake. Or (if you want to get spicey) go the full "Albrecht Macht Frie".

TLDR Marx's core axioms are simply wrong.

Here are some arguments I've found somewhat effective on normies:

Clearly draw the distinction between consumption and capital allocation. Capitalism isn't about who gets to live a lavish lifestyle — in practice, higher-ups in communist countries often get to do this, and you can, in principle, limit it as much as you like under capitalism with consumption or luxury goods taxes. Capitalism is really about who gets to decide where to invest resources to maximize growth. Most people recognize that politicians and government bureaucrats probably aren't going to be the best at deciding e.g. which new technologies to invest in.

Point out that the ultra-rich, who they've probably been told are hoarding wealth, mostly just own shares of companies. Bezos or Musk aren't sitting on warehouses full of food that could feed the hungry or vast portfolios of real estate that could house the homeless. They've got Amazon and Tesla shares. Those companies themselves aren't sitting on very much physical wealth either; most of their value comes from the fact that people believe they'll make money in the future. So even if you liquidated their assets, there would be little benefit for the have-nots.

Compare the scale of billionaire wealth with government resources, e.g. point out that the federal government spends the equivalent of Musk's entire fortune every 12 days or so. I find that this helps dispel the idea that famous (or infamous) capitalists really have 'too much' power. Use this to make the point that taking wealth out of the hands of capitalists wouldn't actually serve to deconcentrate power, but to further concentrate it.

Point out that US government spending on education and healthcare often already exceeds that of European social democracies in absolute terms; emphasize that the reason we don't have better schools and free healthcare is because of ineffective government spending, not private wealth hoarding. Ask if it really makes sense to let the political mechanisms that have produced these inefficiencies control of even more of the economy.

Explain that capitalism is just a scaled version of a natural sort of voluntary exchange. If I make birdhouses in my garage and trade them to my neighbor for tomatoes they grow in their garden, we're technically doing capitalism. A communist system has to come in at some point — maybe, in practice, not at the point where I'm exchanging a handful of birdhouses a year, but certainly at some point if I start making and exchanging a lot of them — and tell me I'm not allowed to do this. The state is already supplying the citizenry with the quantity and quality of birdhouses and tomatoes it deems necessary, and I'm undermining the system. Most people will intuitively grasp that there's something screwy about this, that I'm not actually harming anyone by making and exchanging birdhouses, and that the state really has no business telling me I can't.

Point out that capitalism is, in fact, actually doing a very good job of delivering the kind of outcomes they probably desire from communism. For instance it has substantially reduced working hours in rich countries, has made the poor and the middle class in the US vastly better off (and this didn't stop in the '70s as they've probably been told, per the last chart here), and has lifted billions of people out of poverty globally over the last few decades. If they invoke environmental concerns, point out that the USSR actually had a fairly atrocious environmental record, while almost all new electricity generation in the US is already carbon-free.

That's counting batteries as "generation" rather than load shifting, btw. And it's like a 48GW real increase on a 1300GW system, or 3.7%. whereas all the "electrification" programs predict doubling demand by 2030 due to electric everything. So less than half the growth rate required.

And next year Biden's 100% tariffs on EVs, solar and batteries hit.
Well, calling them "biden's tariffs" is a bit of a joke when he probably never even drooled on the order, but you know what I mean.

Edit: oh Jesus Christ they literally used nameplate capacity for solar. So multiply all the solar figures by .12, meaning all the solar built in the US will produce ~4x as much as the single nuclear plant built in that same year, and probably less than we lost from the decommissioned coal plants

Edit: after doing the math an absolutely optimal setup in the SW US might be more like .2 than .12. Germany's "energy revolution" dragged down global solar capacity factor along with their economy lol

Jesus Christ they literally used nameplate capacity for solar. So multiply all the solar figures by .12

While this error is atrocious, capacity factor of solar in the entire US is around double that, almost tripple for the sun belt.

next year Biden's 100% tariffs on EVs, solar and batteries hit

Will be interesting how/if that changes the installation numbers. The Chinese are sitting on close to 1 TW of yearly production capacity. They'll probably lower prices, again.

I know a guy who directly imported the newest generation of 400W panels for his farm from China himself. He jokes that the panels are now cheaper than glass, cheaper than wall cladding and almost cheaper than fencing. He puts them on everything. 100% tariffs wouldn't change things much at this point.

Also, right now installation costs are dominating the price of new solar capacity anyway.

I guess the solar build out in Germany produced some worst-case capacity figures, didn't it. Is it really that good in the sun belt?

And yeah, I priced out a solar build recently and noticed concrete, posts, and especially wire would cost far more than the panels. Let alone all the charger and inverter kit.

All of Germany is north of Minneapolis and Halifax (to choose two famously cold North American cities). This doesn't matter as much as you think if you are doing utility-scale solar, because you can pitch south-facing panels to match the latitude so they face the midday sun directly. (You need more space between panels so they don't shade each other, but in the world we live in utility-scale solar is investment-limited, not land-limited.) If you are just sticking panels to roughly-south-facing pitched roofs the way most subsidised solar installs do, then it matters a lot.

The other issue is that most of the Midwest is a semi-desert, and therefore sunnier than Europe. Minneapolis gets 2711 hours of sunshine a year. Halifax, which is coastal, gets 1962. Berlin gets 1728 and Munich gets 1777.

There is a reason why the UK has more installed wind than solar, despite solar being a generally superior technology.

I did the math for my location (similar lat to Paris), and even with best seasonal angle practices you're still only getting 10% of what you would in summer (while non-industrial energy use more than doubles due to heating). Germany's significantly further north with worse weather as you say.

It hadn't really struck me that Texas and Arizona are basically as good as North Africa for solar. I should run the numbers for that and get a cap factor estimate.

Edit: fixed 31 degree angle in Phoenix AZ, you're getting a 25% base capacity factor minus probably at least 15% losses to AC delivered.
So more like 20% CF than the 36% you figured. But there's only 24% lower output in winter than summer, which is amazing compared to up north.

Of course all this excludes noon curtailment losses, which are going to be a big deal very shortly. The entire new battery capacity listed as "generation" in the doc doesn't even begin to cover for that.

You look at what they have that you don't have and you rob them because you need it more.

Less pithily, you don't. You wait until they live under Communism.

The reason it persists, even beyond the economic injustices and inequalities that show up under the distorted and state-muddled mess that is modern capitalism, is that everyone from the highest paid CEO to the lowest serf hates competition. Competition is stressful, it's hard, and you have to be in a state of near-constant fear that you are being constantly undercut and/or outperformed by one of the other seven billion broken apes. Half the smarter investing advice comes down to 'find the moat'.

Even people who say they want the playing field to be fair don't really want it to be fair, because of the risk they'd lose. People hate losing. The more there is to lose, the less you want the field to be fair.

But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage".

Go back to reddit and read some of the pro-commie shit. You'll hate this less afterwards.

For competent and industrious normies, just ask them to consider working for the common good under the maxim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". But ask them to consider working under that maxim in a group consisting of one of them plus ten of the laziest, least competent, most demanding assholes they've ever had the misfortune to meet. That's Communism at its best; the real thing is worse.

Communism sucks because it will be run by the people who run the DMV. Every would-be communist imagines that the bureaucrats who run the command economy will be intelligent, capable, and moral. Angels, in other words. The simplest diffuser of Communism is asking if whether or not they want the people who can't get children to be literate or lead out of their drinking water to be responsible for the entire economy.

I think the surest path to success is to play dirty. Play the man and not the ball.

Make communism look creepy and weird. Hammer home imagery of some fat, ugly blue-haired woman, or this soyboy: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIbHYhPVoAEIxzs.jpg

Then dive deep into Beria's sex crimes and pedophilia, Mao's sex crimes and venereal diseases, his rotten teeth... Establish that communism is led by losers, it's run for losers and makes winners into losers. Dive into the gruesome crimes of NKVD officials, the torture, the encouragement of children to report on their parents. Focus on how everything was broken, how Soviet televisions exploded from time to time, they couldn't get anything done correctly... Imply that the benefits of communism flow solely to a class of ugly, bald, fat middle-aged men who are the best connivers and plotters. It doesn't need to be coherent that we're casting communists as ineffectual weaklings and dangerous criminals, this isn't a rational argument but an aesthetic one.

Resist at all costs the urge to glamourize it as a mighty dragon that we have slain. No Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 memes. No World in Conflict cutscenes or Soviet military parades. Choke out all evidence of vital energy and coolness.

Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool. They had supersonic jet travel, H-bombs, sick uniforms, big strong men marching in columns, enormous halls, the vigorous and manly Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. Lots of Nazis liked the show (or the 5 minute edits made of it), they skipped the boring bits about how eugenics was so bad and the angst of women and gays. No amount of hamfisted 'oh the Nazis go around destroying American monuments and eventually retreat from America for no good reason' could undo the damage those few minutes showing the Volkshalle did.

Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool. They had supersonic jet travel, H-bombs, sick uniforms, big strong men marching in columns, enormous halls, the vigorous and manly Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. Lots of Nazis liked the show (or the 5 minute edits made of it), they skipped the boring bits about how eugenics was so bad and the angst of women and gays. No amount of hamfisted 'oh the Nazis go around destroying American monuments and eventually retreat from America for no good reason' could undo the damage those few minutes showing the Volkshalle did.

I will admit, by the end of Man in the High Castle, I wasn't entirely against the Nazis. Perhaps a part of it was the rapidly deteriorating state of my own world, paying an ever increasing diversity tax in an increasingly violent and low trust society. Perhaps a part of it was the way the show had not the founding stock, and founding principles, of America rising up to save it. Instead that task fell to black communist who rescue an America only too happy to collaborate with the Nazi's (but which suddenly found themselves free of them) from their own rotten soul. I mean, if you make me choose between black communist and Nazi's, I'm choosing the Nazi's 1000% of the time.

The black Communist didn't save America. John Smith was supposed to have -- he was supposed to have been playing the long game, rising to the top of the American Nazi hierarchy and then breaking with Berlin and restoring America, but he turned Nazi in truth. It's implied that after his suicide, his second in command (Bill Whitcroft, as white a guy as you can ask for) in fact will do this.

The Bill Whitcroft character is the weakest of window dressing to the moral themes the show is muddling through. He barely exist. Tell me how many episodes he was in? Tell me one other thing about him? What was his character arc? What does he stand for? He's in the background, nearly invisible for an amount of time I can scarcely recall, then suddenly he asserts himself like a Deus Ex Machine in the last episode or two? He might as well be Harrison Ford's phoned in voice over at the end of Blade Runner. He's a meaningless non entity, a utilitarian script gimmick, who does not engage with the themes of show what so ever. And the themes are clear, and they draw from fictitious historical works like the 1619 Project, especially towards the end as the black communist story arc progresses, and they become the moral center of the show, who's principles go entirely unexamined and unchallenged, even as they monologue that the Nazi's and the American's weren't all that different to them.

The Bill Whitcroft character is the weakest of window dressing to the moral themes the show is muddling through. He barely exist.

He's there to hold out the hope of some sort of positive ending that, given the conditions, simply should not be possible, which is why he's so weak as a character. Yes, a deus ex machina, but the fact that the writers felt the need to have that (rather than let the black communists win, or just devolving into chaos) is significant. The idea of Smith playing the long game isn't weak like that, they hint at it throughout at least the later seasons.

That the black communists in the show think the Americans and the Nazis were pretty much the same is what you'd expect from such a group (compare Muhammad Ali's "No Viet Cong ever called me [the N-word]") but it doesn't mean the show was actually endorsing that view. Kido essentially makes the same claim to Frank Frink at Manzanar; are we supposed to believe him too? No, the show clearly prefers the old America over Nazi or Japanese rule, even if it refuses to idealize it.

Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool.

I had the same thought about Wolfenstein: The New Order, weirdly enough. Nazi-controlled London in that game looked substantially grander than the real London ever did.

Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool. They had supersonic jet travel, H-bombs, sick uniforms, big strong men marching in columns, enormous halls, the vigorous and manly Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. Lots of Nazis liked the show (or the 5 minute edits made of it), they skipped the boring bits about how eugenics was so bad and the angst of women and gays.

I'd say that was all a calculated ruse. They packed Season 1, especially the first part, with Nazi aesthetics in order to lure in the chuds, the dudebros, all the middle-class grillers that are at least sympathetic to the less cucky expressions of rightism. They did that to fool them and keep them watching, with them hoping that it'll stay that way, but in the later seasons, they were hit with the usual woke shit.

It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)

Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world

Oh, well, this is a first for me. Merging two current and active threads.

There is an interesting potential connection to this thread (tagging @jeroboam for awareness).

What if a way to encourage more children is to simply have a bunch of posters of attractive young people pumping out babies.

Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

Yes, on two level. First, hate to say this, but Musk does code as .... weird. A lot of the Musk superfans are that precisely because they see Captain Aspergers doing so well and think, "one of us! one of us!" Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.

Second, he's a pretty awful model for paternal responsibility. By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women. Although those aren't Antonio Cromartie numbers, they're still up there. Again, a bad model for normies.

We need conserva-Chads. The frackas with Harrison Butker a few months back showed how those battle lines could get drawn.

Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.

On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.

On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.

By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women.

6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.

His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.

What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.

To me, there needs to be a way to distill the James Taggarts of the fictional world into an image. Rand wrote outlandish heroes but compelling villains. That imagery is effective.

E/acc version: https://x.com/yasser_elsaid_/status/1827755425443328139

Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems. Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.

Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all. Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie. For every 10 Che simps there are 1000 posters of capitalists to simp over. But commies have ONLY Che to adorn.

Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie.

Stalin looks like a respectable head of state, and was (according to women)quite fetching in his younger days.

Brezhnev. Mao and Kim Il Sung counted as average-looking men in their respective societies, I'd say. And Castro was a handsome man, supposedly.

Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems.

That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.

Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.

Still better than capitalist attempts at beautiful art we are currently being served. We just had a thread about how capitalism can't even do proper pop-culture slop anymore.

Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all.

In capitalism the mere suggestion that we should have beautiful public spaces will get you purged from the party.

That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.

Who are marxists in all but name.

Even Newsweek has acknowledged that republicans are more attractive

Well, I included Trump on the list, he's no Adonis either.

Ben Garrison shows us the Trumps we see in our hearts but not our eyes, for his radiance burns our feeble eyeballs.

Age will have that effect, dude is 78.

Yea I get that, I truly truly truly do! Modern DEI wokism gives us distorted faces from ME:Andromeda and Star Wars Outlaws to design shitpiles like Concord or Dustborn, while the successors of communism give us gacha ptsd waifus and robot fuckdolls.

BUT that doesn't change the fact that communism is STILL ugly. Modern Starbucks seattle commies overlap with the capitalist class you rightly decry, pinning the hammer and sickle badges on their newsboy caps as they slave under capitalism, showing that true commies can't make anything beautiful. I think even the commie furries make ugly shit, with anything resembling beauty overlapping with nazbol furries.

I do not mean to be purely combative, but I really wish to know: what communist beauty actually is there? I am probably cheating by excluding modern China and its cultural/physical outputs, but like I really don't see communists producing anything beautiful historically.

If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.

/images/17254340944042058.webp

That space realism shit they had going on in frescas was great, you got your muscular dude grabing the atom flying through space, you got your worker man and woman both beutifully detailed with their muscles wrangling a work implement vaguely in the direction of forward or upward. At least the artists in the CCCP knew what human beuty looked like.

Just look at it.

The west has lost even the will to depict this energy. I want my mass media to tell me, we're fucking going to space, and you and your wife will toil to make it happen. We're getting on that bloody moon rock or die trying.

Are you telling me that Memphis Corporate doesn't get you fucking JACKED UP to knock out some spreadsheets?!

Ok this one goes pretty hard. I dont put much stock in soviet films, architecture or music (plastic people of the universe arent soviet and its not possible to enjoy their music sober), and i already expressed disdain for soviet realism, but this poster fucks.

I personally blame the hays code for the weird plastic archie comics style plasticised all american boy aesthetic that permeated even the space raygun era of american science fiction art. ironically, watching out for commies made the outputs commie level fails. thanks hoover.

I do not mean to be purely combative,

That's ok, I was mostly being contrarian for the fun of it, though it is interesting just how far I can take stuff like I wrote above without leaning into LARPing.

Though one problem I have with the question you're asking is that the parameters aren't clear. What is "communist beauty"?

  • They do get some points in my book for preserving / restoring the beauty of the past, which is rather controversial under contemporary capitalism. Does it count? Or do we say it doesn't because someone else built it? If the latter:
  • Does any work created under communism count? They did have some bangers. Good fantasy, good scifi, some decent songs... though you might say they're just a product of their local cultures, and not exclusive to communism, and therefore they don't count, so:
  • Do only works created under communism for the glory of communism count? Because if we do that for capitalism, we're only left with Ayn Rand. I think only the religious were able to pull that one off, and they lost their mojo by the time we started getting Christian Rock.

They do get some points in my book for preserving / restoring the beauty of the past, which is rather controversial under contemporary capitalism.

Not just purely preservational/restorative. The Saint Petersburg and Moscow metros are gorgeous and clean. Compare to the metros in American cities, where you have a decent chance of having to step over poop or deal with a meth addict smoking on the train, surrounded by Corporate Memphis posters.

The ONLY thing appealing about communism is 'we promise to get rid of the degenerates you hate'. The low hanging fruit of public drunks and mentally incapacitated malcontents is a universal scourge everyone cheers to have removed. It is when the jackboots search for more necks to step on when the appeal loses out.

Whether the removed are helped or locked up is inconsequential. We just son't want them enshittifying our public space.

The downfall of western public spaces is entirely because criminal malcontents, especially but not limited to the highly melanated, act freely without sanction. Get rid of them and the animating disgust normies have will no longer be misdirected towards progcommie 'harm reduction' bullshit.

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I thought the St Petersburg metro got started under the Tsar? If they continued to expand it while keeping it's style, I guess that should still count.

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I think emphasising the emotional tone of the imagery is an important point. I don't think tankies would exist if the yellow hammer-and-sickle on the red flag wasn't such a striking image, or if Katyusha wasn't such a banger, or if there weren't those giant statues of Lenin, or if socialist realism wasn't a recipe for such great posters. No one wants to drape themselves in the imagery of a pathetic loser - they want to drape themselves in the imagery of strength and purpose. The same aesthetic ingredients that make Red Alert such a fun game also make Soviet or communist ideology appealing.

Communism today still has a lot of left-over cachet from the Cold War, where it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy. If you don't like the current system and want something else... it's there. I don't think it made it to the main blog (frankly I think the ACX readership has very questionable taste in book reviews), but the 2024 ACX reviews included Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, which I thought helped to convey the way that it was the default alternative. If you didn't like capitalism, it was the natural place to go.

In the current moment, memory of Cold-War-era horrors is fading, and surviving communist states from that era are either dismissable or have reformed in less communist ways (most obviously China, of course, but modern Vietnam is probably a more typical example), but there's still a lingering sense that communism is the alternative.

The combination of that status as the most prominent alternative, a really cool or appealing aesthetic, and a simple and intuitive pitch makes it relatively easy to sell.

Communism today still has a lot of left-over cachet from the Cold War, where it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy.

It is worth noting that social democratic parties who reject the Russian Revolution as a model and "Communist" as a label and kick out tankies come into being almost immediately - the first unequivocal example being the SPD/USPD split in the 1918 German revolution. By 1922 the dominant left-wing parties in the UK, France and Germany are all explicitly anti-Communist.

it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy. If you don't like the current system and want something else... it's there.

The cruel irony is that rather than being an alternative to the potential failures of capitalism, Communism merely fortifies all of those failure modesand traps them into a single funnel that's certain to fail. You don't like being exploited by any number of employers? Now there's only one employer who will treat you even worse, and you can never quit your job!

Well, at least somebody read my book review!

That was yours? I thought it was excellent.

I enjoyed it! Thank you for the window into that short period of history where sincere, self-confident Marxism-Leninism seemed to be on the ascendant, and proudly evangelised itself as such.

Isn’t the simple response “the millions upon millions dead plus the remaining in abject poverty speak for themselves.” Even if the interlocutor responds with a no true Scotsmans defense, point out it was tried a lot more than once and every time it ends in perdition.

This does not secure one against the all too common delusion that if noble men were in charge, none of the horrible stuff would have happened.

You have to confront people with their own ability to do evil. Otherwise you are talking about aliens. You need to remind people that Stalin was not a mystical creature of unfathomable evil, but just a man like you or I.

if noble men were in charge,

If noble men were in charge it wouldn't be communism, it would be an aristocracy.

This does not secure one against the all too common delusion that if noble men were in charge, none of the horrible stuff would have happened.

I used to scoff at this too, but I warmed up to it somewhat. Communists have easily been in the Top 3 Most Bad Faith Groups in my experience, and while I can imagine a noble man bumbling his way into a famine, I have a harder time imagining him endorsing the early revolutionary terror.

The response to that is 1) men wouldn’t need government if they were angels and 2) animal farm seemed to happen quite often — odd that each and every commie experiment was carried out by a Napoleon.

The problem with Communism is that it's able to be packaged in such a simple appeal. It's like if there was a sexy way to sell flat earth. Most people really and truly can't understand the proofs for spherical earth. They have no hope at groking at any real level a critique of theoretical economic systems. They can handle memetic things like "communists are envious" but trying to explain the value of price signals or anything that would give them an actual feel for the fundamental disagreement is impossible. It's one of those areas where I'm sympathetic to the "platforming" argument by anti-free-speech people. Arguing with communists makes it seem like they have a competitive system that actually works and we could feasibly replace what we have with it. When in fact they don't. They don't have a system that has ever meaningfully been applied. The stuff they have actually accomplished in the real world amounts to "capitalism but with regulation" from which there has been a mixed bag of results but not one of them were evidence that communism is possible. And communists do their best to blur the lines. They'll call the 8 day work week a communist addition rather than an addition that communists lobbied for. These are silly points that any serious discussion instantly disregards but it's what the lay person is actually convinced by.

Kuhn pointed out that scientific paradigms refuse to disappear until a superior alternative is discovered. You can say the same for ideologies. Communism will continue having supporters until you have a better answer than "Sorry, the rich have to horde all the wealth, that's just how it works!" Logic won't change anything. It's an -ism, a creed. You don't disprove it

scientific paradigms refuse to disappear until

Scientific paradigms refuse to disappear until the scientists who hold them die off and are replaced by a newer crop of students. The only things which can disrupt a scientific paradigm is the obviousnes of some invention's extreme success at whatever it is doing or moneyed interest, or just people being replaced and indoctrinated in other ways.

I like it.

Bringing in Lakatos, liberalism/capitalism and communism both have hard cores (their central principles--free markets and property rights vs class struggle and state ownership), along with belts of auxiliary hypotheses and heuristics (policies and praxis). People can adopt either, and both can be used to model the world in a coherent way. What makes them different is whether they name new problems and generate new, useful hypotheses for answering them, except instead of knowledge it's human flourishing.

Communism is more or less dead, but liberalism is a zombie. Still motile, but unspeaking. So you have people grasp for old programs that have failed but do no worse for the person grasping than the currently dominant program.

This is an interesting way to consider the problem of arguing to normies why socialism/communism is bad. While I agree that whipping out a supply-demand curve probably isn't the best way of doing it, I'm not sure that offering an alternative to capitalism is right either. I think it's more about knocking out a few load-bearing beliefs about how the capitalist world actually works and what it would looks like with the ultra wealthy gone, starting with the the basic premise of your statement:

  1. The rich, not even the uber wealthy, "horde wealth" in any way that actually matters. If Jeff Bezos has $100 billion in calculated net worth, that does not mean that he's sitting on a hundred billion-dollar vaults full of gold, cars, cures for cancer, and unobtanium. If you ate the rich, you wouldn't get any of these things—you'd get a millionth owning stake in a yacht. How does this change your life? If you got rid of all those private jets, the commercial ones, the one that proletarians like you or I fly on, will still be producing a lion's share of transport emissions.

  2. Those CEOs don't really make all that much money. If you ate them all, the workers under them might see their wages increase by a few cents per hour. Who is going to make the choices now? Imagine just how dumb the people you've worked alongside have been, and those are (ostensibly) the people some would like to see in charge. For every boneheaded decision some suit makes, how much worse do you think it could get with that moron Joey lead cashier in charge? Susan from the Department of Agriculture?

  3. Capitalism doesn't actually say anything about who gets to consume how much. You can do all kinds of wonderful and terrible consumptive redistribution schemes and as long as the capital remains privately owned, it's still capitalism. You don't have to have factories and farms ran by state bureaucrats or line workers to do MMT and give everyone free money. These approaches have the same costs and problems regardless if who is ultimately in charge of organizing production. During COVID we gave a bunch of money to everyone in perhaps the most direct way possible and it made you poorer. How would this change if the state were in charge of the factories?

  4. Capitalism isn't when the government doesn't do things, and the less things it does, the more capitalister it is. The government can still do stuff under capitalism, but because capital is almost always being used near to its maximum extent at any given time (this isn't a feature unique to capitalism, but history suggest that it does it better), the way the government does stuff almost always takes the form of redirecting consumption into production. It can do this through taxes, and it can also do this by printing money. Since the wealthy actually have a pretty tiny overall consumptive footprint, there's actually very little consumption that can be redirected away from them. So it actually winds up getting largely redirected away from you, because you outnumber the wealthy. Getting you to use paper instead of plastic actually does help the environment more than stopping a short-haul private flight because it's compounded by ten million.

  5. Capitalism isn't when private companies get to do whatever they want, and the more people they kill, the more capitalism it is. In fact, some famous capitalists have even argued that capitalism simply cannot be done without a state setting the stage for a market to operate such as setting basic rules and enforcing contracts. It may be possible to run a small scale food market when your brother could avenge your death if you were sold tainted bread, but could be difficult to imagine a global food market without quality controls. Capitalism doesn't say you can't regulate negative externalities, and some would even say you can't really do capitalism without it.

  6. Your job doesn't suck to make fat cats rich. The reason your job sucks is because it was optimized to suck the life out of you in order to deliver maximum value to the customer, who does not care how much your job sucks. When you go to the grocery store, which scrapes about 2% off the total cost of the prices you complain about, you do not care how badly those jobs suck to keep the prices low enough to keep you coming back. You do not care how much the farmer's job sucks, or the truck driver's job sucks, or the grocer's job sucks, and they don't care how much yours sucks. Rich suits get rewarded only for coming up with new and innovative ways for you to not care how much other people's jobs suck, and you always reward their ingenuity.

You'd probably have to adjust the verbiage to your audience, but I think the basic arguments above attack some of the basic perceptions about how the world works that underpin normie anti-capitalist sentiment. Advanced anti-capitalist sentiment is almost always a very different creature and would need to be contended with very differently.

The rich, not even the uber wealthy, "horde wealth" in any way that actually matters.

Those CEOs don't really make all that much money

I don't think those arguments work because the objection is that "those people are fucking up too much and do too little Tangible Work for the compensation they get, it's just Viscerally Unfair". Naked apes are wired for perceiving relative status, not absolute status. They don't want the CEO eaten because the other workers would get more. They want the CEO eaten so that there's no more CEO (and maybe some few sympathetic cancer patients can get treatment).

Your job doesn't suck to make fat cats rich. The reason your job sucks is because it was optimized to suck the life out of you in order to deliver maximum value to the customer

I don't think that's even true. What about raising the value of shares? Certainly, all of us as customers of various companies have observed the phenomenon of enshittification. If companies exist to deliver maximum value to the customer, they've really been fucking up.

They don't want the CEO eaten because the other workers would get more. They want the CEO eaten so that there's no more CEO (and maybe some few sympathetic cancer patients can get treatment).

I like the post you're responding to, but this is a key point you raise. You could tell a lot of people that banning billionaires wouldn't measurably improve the lives of the poorest people, and many of them would respond with "I don't care, we shouldn't have billionaires while there are people starving or without proper healthcare".

Jim/Stephanie Sterling (if anyone here knows who that is) was prolific with statements of this kind. "No one needs a billion dollars" or "You don't make a billion dollars, you take a billion dollars" are two ones I recall them frequently making.

In fact, some famous capitalists have even argued that capitalism simply cannot be done without a state setting the stage for a market to operate such as setting basic rules and enforcing contracts.

To me a certain form of this idea seems so obviously true that I am sometimes surprised when people even act like it has to be argued for. A form of capitalism without a state can work in situations where conquering others is simply so expensive that it is much easier to just trade and forget about conquest. Imagine some old-school type of trading where you send gold to China and they send you back silk on the Silk Road, back in the day, for example. But in modern, dense technological civilization, with large population densities and powerful military technologies that can strike half-way across the world within minutes, what would happen if we attempted capitalism without a state is simply that warlord gangs would form, they would seize control of the capitalist structures, and then eventually one of them would defeat the others and become a new state.

On a side note, I think one nice argument against communism is that communist systems generally forbid people from practicing capitalism, but capitalism does not forbid people from practicing communism, except in the sense that capitalist systems tax people and thus pull some of their resources away from attempts to build communism. If you live in a capitalist society but you think that communism is a workable economic system, you are welcome to create a communist or communism-esque organization like a worker's co-op or whatever.

Communism will continue having supporters until you have a better answer than "Sorry, the rich have to horde all the wealth, that's just how it works!"

This isn't the answer. But sure, people that are too slow-witted or malevolent to understand how investment and production actually work believing that this is how things work is exactly how communism and other collectivist ideologies persist despite being completely vapid.

One could argue this has already happened. Actual workers party communists are not the dominant form of leftism anymore, and they're even routinely called "far right".

The broad moral tendency that motivates it and other such ideologies is eternal and in some sense, desirable and eugenic.

It is in your interest that you should want to topple a society where you have no hope to win. There is no arguing against the simple game theory of it.

You could look at early Cold War anti-communist education to get an idea of what worked, I think?

Unfortunately a lot of what worked probably isn't going to strike you as all that rational. "Communism is atheist" is a popular argument that was very influential, even though it's technically fallacious. Something like this sounds a lot like complaints about woke indoctrination today, except it emphasises atheism more.

Likewise they hate our freedom, they're all sketchy conformist drones, they conquered eastern Europe and massacred people, and so on. Images are often more powerful than words - the argument that communism is bad for economic growth and development sounds very dry, but this 1909 poster makes that argument in the form of a hideous ape-monster strangling attractive virginal Britannia, and that's the sort of thing that gets lodged in your head. The spectre of attacks on women is popular.

If you want a substantive argument you'll need more than that, of course, but in general the masses are convinced not so much with reason, but with emotion. You can overdo it, and lurid imagery like some of the above posters can get too absurd to work, but in general what you want to do is clearly link, in people's heads, the idea of communism and the idea of poverty or misery. A modern equivalent of this is probably people talking about Venezuela. "Those communist ideas sound appealing but this is what they lead to" followed by Venezuela is a sensible strategy, even if it might also be getting a bit too cliché to work.

I'd also suggest that the contrast can be effectively heightened the more that capitalism is seen to be working and delivering on promises of prosperity. Anti-communist propaganda in the Cold War went hand-in-hand with a positive message of American prosperity. That's much easier to push if the economy is actually doing well and people feel that their quality of life is improving. So having something positive to point to is a big help too - for every "evil empire" to scare you, a "morning in America" to console and inspire you.

I think you have to be careful with some of the early Cold War material because the McCarthy era anti-communists were anti-communist in much the same way that modern anti-racists are anti-racist - while they did oppose communism, they were far more interested in using it as a stick to beat their domestic political opponents with than actually defeating it.

In particular, the Canadair advert makes far more sense if you read it as using the spectre of communism to oppose secular education (which was a live political issue in several Canadian provinces at the time) rather than using the spectre of secular education to oppose communism. The same could be said about propaganda linking Communism to a wide range of centre-left causes including civil rights, unions, feminism, and water flouridation.

During the Cold War, "Communism is the ideology of the people who are pointing nukes at us and invading our allies" was probably the best argument against it from a normie perspective. In the early Cold War UK, "Remember the Nazi-Soviet Pact" was also a powerful argument. This was particularly important because "We were the people who opposed fascism first and most consistently, including through being the base of the Resistance" was the best argument made for Communism by the western European Communist parties post-WW2.

I wouldn't recommend doing the exact same thing, no. One theme I was surprised to find when I looked up a lot of early anti-communist material was the regular return to the idea of a threat to our women (Marx himself tries to dispute this in The Communist Manifesto - it seems like "they will socialise your wife!" was an accusation with some traction), and I'd guess messaging that invokes a kind of male chivalry is an adaptation to a male-only electorate. If the demographic I'm trying to convince includes women, I would probably take a different tack.

In other words, you're right that it's highly contextual - in general it seems like the strategy for anti-communists is to associate communism with other bad things as much as possible (atheism, envy, rapaciousness, poverty, lack of patriotism, etc.), and for communists is to associate communism with good things (equality, fairness, economic growth, anti-fascism, etc.). The objective merits of communist policies is rather beside the point. The key question is what you can plausibly tie communism to in the minds of the public.

The brief period of "abolish the family, socialize sexual access for all!" after the Russian revolution is really understudied. Lenin cracked down on it alongside the counter-revolution of "he who does not work shall not eat", but just like in Spain there was a brief but real complete social takeover by that faction of the left I'd probably get modded for naming and linking to

Here you’ll get modded for not speaking plainly.

Hard to separate from the regular rape and pillage of the enemy in wartime in the few places it happened.

I think his Spain example is anarchist Catalonia, which started out commie-controlled and later got beat up by the nationalists. There was rape and pillage of nuns but it doesn’t seem connected to the free love thing.

Well, they got beat up by the other Republicans first. The whole split between "we must deepen the revolution by rooting out and destroying all social norms" vs "hey we need the gun factories to work, you can lynch the manager's family later"

I mean, eventually they revised history to blame the purges on the Soviet handlers targeting trotskyist deviationists or whatever, but before Stalin fell out of Western intellectual favor in the 50s the anarchists were denounced as traitors even by their friends. Which is why Orwell couldn't get Homage published by the UK communist press.

(Was it Hemingway whose anarchist buddies got executed by the Republic, and he wrote some excuse of the "can't help breaking a few eggs" sort?)

None of this should imply any sort of sympathy towards either the anarchists or republicans: it was just two groups of monsters devouring each other. If it hadn't been for the need to fight Franco, the leftist government would have happily kept allowing the anarchists to torture and murder every class enemy of the new regime, from nuns to families.

I'd say it's indistinguishable; communism comes from treating your neighbor as the enemy (whereas capitalism's strength is forcing the majority of human beings to serve their neighbor to get ahead- which predicts most people who are communists are net takers, and this is what we observe more generally).

Same thing for police excusing criminal activity provided the perpetrators pass a paper bag test; the "enemy" in this case are the natives the crime is happening to.

Get modded on the Motte? I think you can plainly name groups you think do bad things around here. The bar is apparently at or below SecureSignals, so reddit-forbidden levels of wrongthink seem to be allowed.

Short list of some modern ones: Noah berlatsky, Sophie Lewis, jacob breslow, Katie Cruz, Allyn Walker, Randy Wicker, etc.

I've ragged on the pedophiles there more than the family abolitionists, but mostly because there's so many of the latter in academia that it's impossible to keep track: it's basically the default position now. Didn't include obvious examples like Vaush and "Ana Valens" because that would of course be called nutpucking or whatever.
Also despite their irl relevance in destroying communities, I didn't include any of the revcom Antifa lumpenprole "spiteful mutant" demographic, because most don't have any coherent policy statements.

The general theme is "after the revolution we can destroy the last of existing society and rebuild it to satisfy our fetishes." They make up a big chunk of the low level propagandists in communist revolutions for the usual party loyalty reasons, but inevitably get purged once the state has to deal with the consequences (in the Soviet case, an unmanageable number of orphans from post-war free-love couplings)

The west is in an usual situation where these types get to run a permanent social revolution because the real one never happens, and the damage they do is (currently) being absorbed by the surplus produced by capitalism.
For example, you are all paying every gay men tens of thousands of dollars a year to take AIDs prevention drugs, and that's why your "health insurance" is so high. Whereas Cuba's public health system doesn't do that because there is no surplus.

Thanks for this explanation.

Incidentally, have you actually been modded on reddit for accusing pedophiles from a century ago? Or I suppose modern youtubers on the infamous recent tack of "I thought they were very short sexy goblins".

So leftist pedo history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes?

The usual pattern is "that's a crazy conspiracy theory, all good leftists want to throw pedos into a woodchipper!", and then they get very angry when you show them evidence that the official John Hopkins position is now "destigmatize and accept this oppressed queer sexuality"

Bit too early for them to do "that's not happening and it's good that it is," so the programming defaults to the basic abuse routine. Same reaction as you used to get posting proof they genital surgery on kids was happening when the official position hadn't updated to "it's rare and also why do you care"

It's how you know you've hit a nerve of the blob.

Hm, I think you point at something correct, but I'd like to precisify it a bit more? It seems to me that there are at least three rough factions in this general area, which I'm going to name the Free Lovers, the Paedophiles, and the Family Abolitionists. There's overlap between all three camps, to a degree that should probably concern every non-paedophile here, but it makes sense to distinguish between them, to me.

The Free Lovers are straightforward enough - more sex, fewer rules, inhibition and repression are the enemies, marriage and monogamy are at best not for everyone and at worst inherently oppressive, patriarchal institutions. I don't think they're as large a force today as they were historically, but we can see their descendants around parts of the LGBT movement. Any time people start talking about sexual freedom or relational authenticity, they're likely drawing from this well. The core idea is that one's innate sexual desires are good and should be liberated, and ideologies that impose limits or controls on one's sexual behaviour are inherently oppressive. Normally the Free Lovers still accept some minimal limits around consent or harm, but when they don't, you get...

The Paedophiles, whose primary goal is, well, something I'm a little too delicate to discuss openly. Uncharitably they're just people with twisted fetishes who want to use children for their own satisfaction. Charitably, they have a high view of the agency and responsibility of children and think that children can meaningfully make sexual choices, and frequently other choices as well. For the most part this group are pariahs today, but again they had more influence historically (cf. that French petition in the 70s), and I think you can sometimes see some of their ideas transposed into non-sexual realms - think of e.g. David Runciman advocating lowering the voting age to six years old. (Disclaimer: I have no reason to think that Runciman himself has any inclination towards paedophilia or child abuse. He is merely an example of a 'serious' thinker with a high view of children's agency and moral responsibility.)

The Family Abolitionists believe that the family is an inherently damaging, controlling institution and want to abolish it in favour of some sort of shared or communal approach to child-rearing. The overlap with the Free Lovers' criticism of marriage is clear enough, as is a strategic alliance with the Paedophiles, for whom removing children for parents' protection, or sharing access to children, is desirable. Sophie Lewis is a good example. I don't think I'd agree that this is anything like 'the default position' now, but it's trendy and it sounds progressive, so nobody argues against it, but it's so obviously revolting or enraging to normal people that it has zero chance of happening outside the odd hippie commune. It's ideally placed to be an intellectual fad - it sounds radical, embracing it shows how edgy you are, but it will never happen and thus you will never be on the hook for anything.

Yes, it's demonstrably the case that even saying it's all the perfidious Jews is allowed, so I struggle to think of any group you couldn't safely name.

In this case I don't think he means the Jews, if only because I don't particularly associate them with the promiscuous free-love element of the left? Sexual liberation is definitely an element of many of these left-wing movements, and at times that has gone in grossly repulsive directions (I think particularly of the French petition half a century later), and I'm not surprised that it was around in Russia during the revolution, no more than I'm surprised that it's still around today, but I struggle to point to a single demographic that's clearly responsible.

This is why I like the rule against darkly hinting at things and instead being required to speak plainly. I also don't know who SteveKirk is hinting at. A group that briefly took over in Revolutionary Spain and Russia. "Free-love advocating Jews" doesn't match my understanding of Revolutionary Spain.

But I'm at a loss for which other group is possibly being called out here. Looney anarchists perhaps? Plenty of those in early revolutionary Russia and the brief existence of revolutionary Spain. But you could bitterly complain about anarchists (and jews and jewish anarchists) screwing up leftist revolutions and I don't suppose anyone would much care. Denouncing other sorts of leftists for screwing up leftism is very low hanging fruit.

The most famous free-love advocate in early SU - Alexandra Kollontai - was certainly not Jewish.

The universal method to explain complex ideas in intuitive ways that can be understood and internalized by everyone is art. You need to explore honestly the communist idea, dance with it in some form and reap all the lessons from it.

There's no shortage of such art, including by communists. Art that shows how stupid, arbitrary, petty, envious, it can all be. All the vices it encourages in men.

But the inherent danger is of course that any honest wrestling with the idea has to acknowledge the virtues of it as well. Communism like all modernisms is in fact admirable at least in that it has a project for mankind, a positive vision of the future, a greatness promised in earnest that one can work towards with reason and science.

The attraction to that, or other failed modernisms is not just a whim. And you have to recognize that the vices and virtues that lead people to consider communism are not going away. They are real parts of the human experience that will stay with us forever along with justice, racism, genocide, liberty, greed, sacrifice and everything else.

We should still explore of course. I think one of the greatest pieces of anti communist art was actually produced recently in the Chernobyl HBO series, and though the author probably wished it as anti populist it shines a light on the core problem that toppled the Soviet Union from the top. Its relationship to truth.

You want to make normies understand the flaws of communism? Fund an anime adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, video games about trying to solve the ECP, songs about the pettiness of the bureaucrat, and all other such things.

I agree with much of this take. Two of the greatest anti-communist works ever written, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were written by a socialist. I know that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more broadly a critique of all totalitarianism, and that it was in part inspired by Orwell's experiences with English bureaucracy, but it also was clearly inspired by his experiences of being a socialist who came to realize that Stalinism was brutal and murderous.

And there have been many good anti-communist works produced by ex-socialists and ex-communists. David Horowitz's stuff is one example. He was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who ended up leaving communism once he realized that the radical leftist movements he was involved in both cared more about the success of "the cause" than about truth and reality and that some of them, like the Black Panther Party, had literal murderers involved in running things on a high level.

It would probably help if the people trying to teach the normies actually understood what Communism was and moved beyond a Boomeric “anything I don’t like is Communism” mindset.

Problem is that we've gone so far down that road people said "fuck it" and now you have spicy social democrats claiming to be socialists now and kids larping as pro-Soviet communists because they follow Hasan Piker on TikTok.

The big question is 'what do you mean by communism?'.

No, literally and unironically- you can have a command economy without it being communism(France has done it). You can have a society with substantial state ownership of the means of production without it being communism(modern China). You can have totalitarianism without it being communism(Saudi Arabia). If you ask communists themselves, they'll tell you communism refers to the utopian end state of the worker's paradise.

In practice, people use communism to refer to regimes run by Marxists. And it's worth looking at what Marxism is- definitions are important- Marxism is primarily a theory of history. This theory of history argues for economic processes, by far the most important being class conflict, as driving the events of history independent of great men. Basically everything Marx thought about economics was wrong(although not everything he thought about history was), but importantly, Marxism puts enough epicycles into its psychohistory that Marxists can retreat to unfalsifiability in order to defend their theories. So Marxists in charge of an economy- and all developed economies have at least some level of planning from the top- have economic theories which don't correspond to reality, and Marxists default to conspiracy theories and finger pointing when their plans don't work out. This tends to generate useless and counterproductive reprisals to try to stick to an economic plan with predetermined endpoints, because Marxists just don't stop and think that the labour theory of value prevents their spreadsheets from giving good predictions, and also because that Marxist psychohistory gives a utopian eschatology that justifies whatever the cost to stick to the plan. There is a reason traditional religions usually explicitly hold that our actions on earth can't bring about the apocalypse/mahdi/end of the kali yuga- because putting entire societies behind dumb plans is a bad thing that tends to break the machinery which makes that society run.

I think, in a real way, what makes Marxism so bad is the tendency for it to be a kind of fanaticism for the un-lindy. Religious fundamentalists rarely break the essential functioning of their societies; I suppose fascists probably could, but historical fascist regimes have lost wars instead. And of course monarchs rise to power by making deals and sticking to them, while democracies tend to prevent fanatics from holding unfettered power.

This is of course impossible, and therefore unactionable advice.

People will always carry epithets to just mean bad in the broadest sense, fascists and communists and liberals all know this. But that does not matter. Were communism to rebrand itself as "super capitalism" as /leftypol/ liked to meme, it wouldn't solve it's inherent problems, which is what OP is looking to put a light on.

It is the territory that matters, the map is just an instrumental accessory.

I think this comment encapsulates why we will probably end up with communism again (or at least communism-lite).

It's not about reason-based arguments. It is about signalling and reacting to "boomers" in an effort to increase one's personal social status. The more extreme those beliefs the better. And what's more extreme than advocating for the most destructive ideology of the 20th century?

I’m not trying to be cool or overly snarky. But that generation really abused the term until it lost all meaning. Everything from socialized medicine to five private corporations telling you what you could think fell under the moniker of communism. The FBI hauling dissidents off to the gulag in the middle of the night and listening to all communications was a necessary measure to defeat communism. Obama was an Islamo-Fascist-Communist. Now the highly-regarded zoomers on R/WorldNews are copying their parents and grandparents and calling me a pinko communist because I won’t take up Ronald Reagan’s grand crusade against Russia (they conveniently forget that Russia is no longer communist). I find Kamala Harris horrifying, but calling anything she’s going to do communist is just farcical. I don’t really mind that kind of rhetoric from Trump because he’s always had a rather fluid rhetorical style when it comes to his put downs, but it becomes grating when the serious minds start trying to come up with justifications about why she really is.

I hate to inject current events into a fine discussion of political ideology.

But what else do you call politicians who want to institute wealth taxes for redistribution and price controls? Socialists at the very least to be sure.

I think it's hard for anyone to understand the problems with communism unless they either are above a certain threshold of intelligence and thus able to understand how communism affects incentives, or they are from a communist country and have seen the problems first-hand. And high intelligence is no barrier against believing in communism, as we saw during the 20th century when a large fraction of the entire world's intelligensia were communist. Many of them were very smart people, just deluded.

One of the biggest difficulties with trying to persuade people out of communism is the simple and basic undeniable fact that our modern social/economic/political system really is unfair, to an often ridiculous degree. There is no plausible moral justification for why some people should be born rich, and others poor, out of no merit or fault of their own. The problem with communism is that in practice, it does not actually solve this problem - instead, it makes social problems even worse. But the problem is a real one. There is no justifiable defense of our capitalistic system on moral grounds, you can only justify it by making fairly subtle although correct arguments about how in practice, it is the best system that has actually been proven to work in practice, and all attempts to replace that system with a theoretically nicer, more moral one, just end up actually creating an in-reality worse system. Plus you can try to teach people about how market incentives work, and how because the market has better information-flows and incentives than central planning, it ends up making everybody richer in the long term.

The whole communism/capitalism debate is so covered with mottes and baileys, is so entrenched, at this point, that it is like some WW1 battlefield. I don't think that frontal assaults work well in that context, it may be better to try to seduce people into taking a fresh look at their assumptions. Hours of arguing about politics may not be as effective as simply taking your communist friend out to some fun event and make them see that even though you are anti-communist, you are not a bad person.

It also helps if you support a good level of social welfare redistribution programs despite being a fan of capitalism, instead of being some kind of turbo-capitalist believer who is ideologically strict and is fine with orphans begging for bread in the streets. After all, our American system's success is not explained by the fact that it is turbo-capitalist, because in reality it is not turbo-capitalist at all. Our system is a deep hybrid of capitalism, central planning, and bureaucracy, with a blend of both competition and top-down control. No truly capitalist system, in the sense of how capitalism works in theory, has ever existed on a large scale. And if it did exist, I doubt that it would work well.

There is no justifiable defense of our capitalistic system on moral grounds,

You can defend it on the grounds that it has generated the greatest amount of wealth in human history, something even socialists grant. And that this is good.

The problem is precisely that it has done this, and it has continued to do so despite some deviations from some purer form of free market capitalism. Quite natural for people to then think "well, just a little more fiddling and we'll have it really fair", especially when the downsides of the previous round of fiddling can be very diffuse, the benefits seemingly clear while inequities remain very visible. Everyone knows how much the CEO of Starbucks makes.

I don't think you have to sell most people on avoiding collectivization or central planning at this point. But this sort of slow slide into an allegedly "fairer" capitalism? Very hard. I think people just naturally distrust the market and are biased towards action.

Especially since no one wants to hear that their subsidized X is part of the distortion causing problems or, even worse, they're just not as productive as they think they are. "Skill issue, gg no re" doesn't really work as an argument.

That's what I think of as the consequentialist argument for capitalism.

My experience has been, arguing with communists, that there are basically two planes on which that the argument can occur.

The first plane is the consequentialist one, which usually comes down to empirical data. Forget concerns about abstract justice - what happens when these systems are actually instituted? Which is best for living standards, or economic growth, or whatever your own preferred measurement is? This approach makes a lot of looking at the USSR in practice, or making case studies of one country or other changing its policies - China's embrace of markets, say, or occasionally people try to argue from the welfare state in the direction of socialism. The point is that you just don't worry too much about theoretical justifications, but only look at outcomes.

The second plane is the opposite - the deontological, or in-principle, side of the argument. Here you argue that there's something intrinsically morally wrong with one system or other, or a sacred moral rule that's transgressed. This might be a Marxist using the labour theory of value to argue that capitalists exploit workers by capturing a portion of the value of their labour, or anarcho-capitalist or Randian arguments about how taxation is theft might also fall into this category. I'd say a typical capitalist argument here might be something like the Wilt Chamberlain argument - here the principle is that voluntary transactions shouldn't be obstructed.

In practice I find people tend to operate on both planes, or shift between them strategically. I often find communists or socialists begin with an inchoate feeling of injustice, and then jump between planes as needed to try to explain it. This can be very base (it is deeply frustrating to talk to people who seem to reason "there are injustices in the present system, therefore communism"), or it can be dressed up a bit (for instance, the first third or so of Robinson's Why You Should Be a Socialist is dedicated to pointing at current problems and feeling disgusted at them), but the starting moral impulse is to look around and say, "Something is wrong here! This isn't how it should be. For some people to be rich like this while others are so desperately poor is wrong."

That starting impulse is one I have a lot of sympathy for, especially as, at its best, it's rooted in real empathy. Where I depart from communists/socialists is at the "therefore communism" stage. The observation "this is bad" may be valid, but it's not enough by itself. That observation needs to be interrogated and clarified, and then solutions critically evaluated to see if they would actually improve things.

You just work through examples of how difficult finding the exchange value of labor and objects is, and what the consequences of getting it wrong are (too low: shortages due to high demand and not enough incentive to produce more, too high: fewer people can afford and waste from overproduction).

The main problem of communism is that it assumes finding that value is trivial or unimportant and can just be done by someone guessing. As inefficient capitalism can seem, it allowing prices to adjust according to supply and demand automatically resolves that issue, and simply by that, it outperforms everything else significantly. And so you explain to that person that any time there is a proposition to try and "fix" prices in capitalism, they need to ask themselves: 1. Am I going to fuck with prices that are actually accurately set by an unimpeded, normal market? (if yes, don't do it) 2. If the prices were not being set by a unimpeded market, is my solution bringing it closer to that market, or am I just trying to adjust prices it by vibes? (if just vibes, don't do it!)

Ah, yes, I find handing someone a printout of The Use of Knowledge in Society is a surefire way to win them over.

By the second paragraph you've already lost almost everyone who doesn't have at least like a 110 IQ or so.

The fact that most people can't consider this logical chain is one of the most salient arguments against the masses being in charge of society.

If most people cannot even comprehend the ECP, how is democracy anywhere near a reasonable regime?

If most people cannot even comprehend the ECP, how is democracy anywhere near a reasonable regime?

Because they can comprehend things like "I shouldn't be lynched", and voting for "I shouldn't be lynched" is inextricably tied to voting for how the government acts on the market.

And yet the masses in aggregate are often smarter than any expert.

If you've read Surowiecki and his arguments to that effect, you must know these successes are not those of the masses properly understood but of large collections of individuals.

As soon as the masses become conscious of themselves as masses people start copying or interpreting each other's judgements and encounter the failure modes of crowds that he lists: conformism, division, centralization, etc.

Which is all to say that the wisdom of crowds argument for democracy is actually an argument against democracy and for republics. Republics specifically without political parties and mass suffrage.

I'm amenable to those. But they don't tend to stay this way very long.

What are "the masses" properly understood if not a large collection of individuals?

Groups are more than the sum of their parts.

A political party is more than the sum of it's adherents.

Practically, crowds do not answer the same way as if you interview every member individually. The awareness of one's position within a larger group alters one's responses significantly.

Surowieck's book title is a nod to a much earlier book by Mackay on "the madness of crowds" that lists a number of examples of this effect.

Liberals are often blind to the effects of collectivism because they are not used to consider people as groups, since theirs is an individualistic ideology, but there is a very stark difference between "the masses" or "the nation" or even "the race" and the sum of people involved. One so potent it is magical and the object of many cults.

People will literally castrate themselves or commit mass suicide if they are among peers who all agree it is the correct thing to do.

There is another common line of argument against democracy that uses this to argue the crowd is the natural bride of the demagogue and tyrant. But I think we are veering off topic since our discussion is about mere ability to make correct political decisions.

‘Damn Commies took away the motive to work hard, so the farmers didn’t produce enough food and people starved’ is what we learned in school. It’s inaccurate(people in communist countries did in fact work), but it gets the point across in a layman accessible way. Other lessons I’d heard about communism included that planners liked to rely on under qualified managers, thus driving down production until no one had enough(that one seems to be partially true), or that communists don’t understand the part about not eating their seed corn because they think labor is the only input into their economy.

You provide lots of accurate media representation of communists in power, with emphasis on the early Soviet Union. Or turn it up to 11 as was done with the Nazis, at the cost of integrity and a few contrarians.

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