Styxx, I will just respond to your post here, since this is the appropriate thread anyway:
Any of the allegedly "communist" societies of the 20th century. All of them started as attempts at pure communism, but the inherent flaws in the system forced them to detour into authoritative societies.
None of them started as attempts at pure communism; they started as more or less a power struggle between a couple of guys all wanting control of a nation. And here is the main part that it has not worked so far: all of them started through
revolution. The attempted change from feudalism to capitalism was very gradual in all example in history, and so it allowed enough time for the culture to catch up with the change, while the attempted change from capitalism to communism has always been through revolution. A lasting communism will not come about through revolution because people are fed up with capitalism; it will come about because of the
success of capitalism.
Simple - you assume that you can in fact get everyone to work under a communist system (an erroneous assumption, at that). If the same assumption is made for a capitalist system (and that's exactly what an ideal capitalist system would have), the production would be much larger than the one on the communist system, simply because of the rewards provided to the workers. See below.
What would the rewards have to do with production rates? And don't give me the "incentive" thing, since that can easily be changed over time by propagandic conditioning.
My point is, this concept is as old as humanity itself, and it never worked for any significant period of time. You just can't keep it working long enough for it to be effective. If it was so effective, why was slavery abolished? I'm sure it wasn't because of "ethical" constraints... Unless you're willing to admit that such constraints have a much larger effect on our society than you ever admited before.
As I said earlier, the reason it did not work was that it was not carried through slowly. And what does slavery have to do with communism?
Wrong, try writing a real argument next time. The very basis of communism is to provide everyone with everything they need, in equal amounts to the whole population. This degenerates into serious problems when applied to real models, where there is people with varying degrees of skills, interest and effort. It just doesn't work - and inevitably derails into revolt or authoriarian systems. You really shouldn't be trying to debate if you don't know the basics of it.
You're trying to throw me off with petty insults once again, eh? Now show me where I said that your second sentence there was not true; I was saying exactly that. As for the rest of the part, even today the people can be partitioned to work in the areas appropriate to their skills/interest/effort, but what I am talking about is applicability to a generation of the far future, where one human and another will be more or less the same thing. (and the evolution of societies is always is in that direction)
Flawed concept again. Humans cannot be consistently "controlled and herded", as history has proven several times. Freedom is something that must be taken into any equation of social evolution, simply because the human of today regards it as one of their basic needs, which negates their usefulness as "automatons". Capitalism is the only system where you can get the highest production rate possible from each individual, by a simple - and yet supremely effective - effort/reward method. If you want to say otherwise, go ahead and provide proof or real life examples, it's easy to talk about something - being right about it is the hard part.
When has history proven this? History has shown
exactly the opposite.
(e.g. look at religion) The human has certain weaknesses in his very methods of thinking and acting, and these can be exploited to great effect. The human of
today does indeed regard personal freedom as a high virtue, but these things are constantly changing. Why do you think that people value freedom so much today? It is because they have been taught to do that and nothing else (and I don't mean through schools either; I am talking about what they see in their surroundings at all times as they live their lives), and the idea lives on in every generation to become stronger than it was in the previous one. Then you really started to twist my words; I never said that capitalism is anything but the best method for
today's cultural system. Capitalism will be by far the best economic system out there for at least another thousand years. It will be successful beyond the highest expectations of analysts today. The communism will gradually come right out of the capitalism over many millennia. (if you want to know the exact reasons for this, see that book written by Schumpeter I mentioned earlier to you)
Good will?
A combination of cultural change and secret police will work.
Actually, the primary motivating force will be exactly the selfishness you were talking about earlier; it is this selfishness that has driven all of human society up to this point, and it is the selfishness that will continue to drive things on. These communist systems will form to last only when man is as selfish (defining the objective) as can be, but also as logical (defining the method) as possible. There can be a communism even less ethical than capitalism but that still thrives.
Poll
