Troper Communist Hangout

Simply wearing communist symbols gets you two years in jail, but destroying cemeteries and defacing them with swastikas gets you one year? The hell?

Both should get two years, but the police is so ineffective and/or lazy that anyone gets rarely punished. When media intervene, investigation and trials suddenly gain momentum in fear of public opinion.

No communist, Soviet.

edited 29th Nov '12 12:23:11 PM by CaptainKatsura

Hello! Just a fellow commie coming to say hello.

Hey, Jammy, dear~

...You know, there should be a day for raising awareness about communism, and dispelling misconceptions of it.

Jammy is a communist? Not sure what I am.

He got converted to our cause by me.

Morgi is definitely left-leaning. Though I'm not sure how much of that is because the left is more friendly towards people like me.

The social left. Not necessarily the economic left, unfortunately. Even some forms of communism are of a more authoritarian bent, while some forms of laissez faire capitalism would be very friendly to members of the LGBT community. That being said, people with left-wing economics tend to be more left-wing when it comes to social issues in the modern world and the opposite is true of people with right-wing economics, again in the modern world. The main exception to that is the libertarian movement, though there might be others I'm not aware of.

I want you to be a communist, but not for the wrong reasons, and being one based on social, rather than economic, issues is the wrong reason, in my opinion.

edited 3rd Dec '12 7:29:48 PM by deathpigeon

Let's see.

When it comes to social issues I'm definitely left inclined, emphasizing that one of roles of the government is to provide equal chances to everyone. But as for economical issues, I'm for free market economy with some intervention from the government, but only when it's absolutely necessary. The more private companies competing in given field the better, since from my experience not only quality of services and goods rises, but their price lowers. The state should have monopoly only in most vital fields, such as military.

Living in a country with planned economy and no private initiative would be a nightmare to me, and I would be among the first rising to overthrow its government, even by force if necessary.

If you want a planned economy, look to the Marxists, not the Anarcho-Communists. We want wealth collectivized, not state run. State run is the opposite of what we want. We want no state.

Of course, I'm an extremist on both fronts.

A good place to help you see where you stand is this website, as it avoids the classic linear left-right scale in favor of a two dimensional score, with one axis being economics, and the other axis being social issues, and it's pretty accurate, from what I've seen.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=-1.25&soc=-4.67

My political stance. It seems I'm moderately Social Liberal. Just as I thought.

Here is mine. http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=-6.38&soc=-6.46

Eh, they have a tendency of thinking discrimination "is a private right".

In Poland the parliament enacted an act that revokes right of private owners to decide who dispose of their trash and gives it to local administration who can chose only one company per gmina (principal unit of administrative division of Poland at its lowest uniform level). Usually, sometimes even eight trash disposal companies used to compete on average, but this act institutes a monopoly of one company. It is estimated by independent experts that prices of service will rise even by 200 %.

It shows that competition at free market definitely has its good side and too extreme intervention of government is something bad. Now people will be even more inclined to leave trash in forests to avoid paying for overpriced service.

Even so, they have Anarcho-Capitalist tendencies, which makes them socially left and economically right, thus breaking the current trend of people being right or left in both economically and socially that exists in the modern world.

While, if they didn't have to pay for their trash to be disposed, they'd all be getting it disposed. That plan suffered from the same problem as the Marxists, a lack of boldness. It only went half-way. If you're going to intervene there, then go all the way and nationalize trash pick up, and have it funded through taxes, then require no one to pay to have their trash disposed of. Boldness is a virtue.

Personally, I lie right down in the bottom left corner, there.

Planned economy clearly doesn't work in our country. We had something like that, and our country was in huge mess, except for brief period when the government borrowed money from the West which it wasted on everything else than investing. The subsequent period of another economical crisis lead to, ironically, revolution of working class which undermined communist authoritarian regime and instituted free market democracy.

I get that, but your problem with what they did with the trash pick up was a problem of them going half way. Either they should let there be competition, or they should go all the way and fund the sucker to make it free. The problem there wasn't that the government interfered with the economy. It was that the government didn't interfere with the economy smartly, and only went halfway. The problems caused by them interfering wouldn't have existed if they had gone all the way.

Actually, I'd argue that the problem wasn't a planned economy, but a planned economy run by a government which had no input from the people. This allowed corrupt officials to take and hold positions for extended periods of time. If said government officials were elected by the people and there were elections for them regularly, said corrupt officials would've been booted from office when they came up for reelection.

Basically, I see the problem as having been one of an authoritarian regime, rather than one of a communist regime.

We would still have to bear with given set of people meddling with our economy for 4 years before they got kicked out of their seats by democratic elections. A recipe for crisis. Nobody here would trust government to take care of regulating every single thing. Riots would be too common. When our government signed ACTA, people were so pissed off that they backed out of this idea out of fear. Basically, introducing planned economy here would mean popular revolution as soon as price would rise, especially meat's (Sausage is Serious Business). Many anti-communist riots sparked here because the government dare to limit available sausage or increase its price. They only survived so long due to Soviet backing. Stalin once said that if Red Army withdrew from Poland, Polish communists would drop like flies.

And that attitude your people have is one that derived from the horrible mismanagement and corruption under the authoritarian communist regime. Because of that, they have lost trust in communism. It's the (justified) loss of trust that would cause your people to rise up against communism and planned economies. This does not mean that neither work, in general.

Also, I'd say that 4 years is probably too long. Maybe every year or every other year?

edited 4th Dec '12 12:07:25 PM by deathpigeon

That's a bad example, really. Not that there aren't exceptions to that trend, for sure, but "anarcho"-capitalists by and large don't give a shit about social issues. They think the market will decide everything. Apartheid is moral, as long private property is respected. They tend to be socially conservative also.

I think my problem is I don't know much about how the economy works. I try to figure it out, but the ideas that make the most sense to me usually get shouted down as socialism or what not.

...Ok, Anarcho-Capitalism is probably not the best example, but I still think the libertarian movement is. They are in favor of gay marriage (except for the few who want no legal recognition of any marriages, but that would still lead to equality of marriage) and marijuana legalization, for example.

The thing is, socialism isn't a bad thing, so dismissing things for being socialist isn't a good thing. :/

I'm beginning to think some conservatives are just using "socialist" as a blanket term for anything they don't like.

Well, communism lost lots of its credibility among Polish society long before, because many of Polish communists, including non-bolsheviks like Luksemburg, openly questioned importance of Polish independence, claiming that communist revolution has priority over it and Poles are better off more integrated into their conquerors' economies. Socialist on the other hand emphasized Polish independence as necessary requirement to implement tenets of socialism. Later on, when socialists formed a leftist military junta after mobilizing workers and military to stage a coup, they jailed some of communists under accusation of being Soviet spies, which ironically saved their lives for Stalin's plan to purge Polish Communist Party.

Polish socialist military junta was quite an odd hybrid. Free market economy with unrestricted private initiative, but at the same heavy involvement of the state and contribution from the society. Whole cities were built by the state itself and voluntary donations from citizens. Socialistic yet full of patriotic fervor befitting more right leaning parties, despite the persecution of nationalists (some people of that age even claimed that Poland is a great power and should claim colonies for itself. There were weird plans to buy Madagascar, or deport all Polish Jews so they could establish a second "Poland" in Palestine). Theoretically democratic but the system was rigged so that it could be easily manipulated by the establishment to make citizens choose proper candidates. Main leaders of the country weren't even part of the government. In the way how it treated ethnic minorities it could be likened to modern Israel. Israel is basically a child of the Second Polish Republic as all their first leaders and majority of citizens were brought up and educated in Poland. Even in 1960s it was relatively easy to survive there with only knowledge of Polish.

In spite of being such odd hybrid and the global crisis rampaging everywhere it get shit done better than the communist dictatorship enforced by Soviets. It collapsed only because both Germans and Soviets attacked it, and the Allies didn't give a single fuck about the fate of Poland, sitting on their asses till Germans made another move against them. Notably Poland lasted longer than France supported by Britain, partly due to sheer tenacity.

One year terms cause too much chaos too. There is no enough time for new government to adjust at least to do something.

That's pretty much precisely what happens.

Yes, but, again, that's not a problem with communism. That's a problem with Polish communists.

...That sounds like an interesting experiment... Not something I'd be in favor of, since it sounds way to authoritarian to me, but also a case of showing how it would be possible to have heavy government involvement in the economy, but still have a successful economy.

What about two year terms, which would be frequent enough to be an effective check on the leaders, but infrequent enough to allow for proper functioning.