to think most people would like us to live in a communist country?

[wannaBe]

"landlords shouldn't be allowed to rent for more than x amount of money."

"People shouldn't be allowed to sell their houses for more than a certain amount of money."

"People shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a certain amount of money (I'm talking salary here not benefits)."

This isn't a thread about who is better off and who can afford to do what - that's been done to death elsewhere.

But do people really think we would be in a better place if we didn't live in a free economy and where we were dictated to by the state how much we could and couldn't earn/whether we could or couldn't sell our house etc? really?

All humans have needs (physiological, safety, belonging, esteem). How exactly one fulfills them in a certain time and place, varies. But having them is what we all share, the human nature.

Quoting Maslow doesn't help in this argument.

We haven't all had the same needs across time and culture, not in the slightest. This is the point, there is no ONE nature. Your modern notions of what human needs are aren't shared even now by each society, let alone throughout time.

Have you watched Dr Zhivago or watched Animal Farm. Definitely not for me.

CogitoErgo
Governments trying to artificially create equality causes a lot of problems. A big reason the Labour government was ousted was that people were fed up working hard only to see other people do nothing and seem to enjoy the same standard of living. Where governments engineer equality to the extent that it squashes ambition, we all lose out. Where were the Soviet Union and China before they embraced free enterprise?.... stuck with a population of very equal but very unmotivated peasants....

Forgive me, but that's absolute rubbish. It leaves out the basic fact that the UK is a post industrual society ie we had our industrial revolution in the 19C.
Russia and China did not start their ind revs until the mid 20C. Admittedly they have become industrialised much faster than we did (they have enormous reserves of raw materials in their countries), but they are both only several decades into the industrialisation process.

OTH the UK relied on its 'empire' for the raw materials to fuel industry - now that has gone we have existed thus far 'servicing' other industrial nations, mostly thro financial institutions. That can't continue. We need a new system.

PS Only capitalism thinks people can only be motivated to be ambitious by money. There are other motivators.... freedom, caring for others, intellectual pursuits, aspirations for social goods etc

so which needs (according to Maslow) are fundamentally different in, say, UK today and Soviet Russia in 1980s, if they depend entirely on society?

I cant see anyone being motivated to clean public loos or shift the citys waste for the greater good and certainly not if the fella in the allocated housing next door gets to be a doctor or party chairman.

I quite like the idea of limiting the opportunity of some to exploit the basic needs of life of others eg housing, essential utilities, food industry, security etc.

It also occurs to me that 'planned economies' are criticised for "waste", which is odd when the capitalist system is fanatastically wasteful, almost beyond belief.

there is a thread going on about insurance. We def. need a national car/home insurance scheme.

I'm not saying people are not motivated by money - just that are other motivators too...

so the cleaner of loos or the dustbin manmight also be motivated to to do a good job because they have some 'civic pride' for example.

No one is going to choose to shovel shit or for their children to be allocated jobs shoveling shit if they have a choice. People do these jobs because they need the money they earn.

Even in your utopia you will have some at the top of the pile and someone at the bottom.

I don't agree with Maslows conception of the hierarchy of needs, so I can't answer that question from your point of view. But the fact that you are seeking to contrast 198O's soviet russia with todays UK belies your lack of understanding of both the psychology and politics. A more accurate comparison would be with a remote amazonian tribe, say.

And why couldn't we all take it turns to shovel shit, and then spend the rest of our time doing other things?

Because some people are just not going to shovel the shit so someone is always going to have to pick up their slack.

Jesus wept!

As of the benefit bashing threads weren't enough now we have McCarthyism!

you don't know that. Maybe in a world where everyone had what they needed and there was no poverty or needless suffering, everyone would be delighted to shovel shit. Or someone would invent robots to do it instead.

Point being, you don't know. There has never been a true communist society, so we have nothing to look at and see how it might work. I find it sad that people can't even try and imagine a truly good world.

Communism which comes after capitalism can't work, and requires extreme measures to keep capitalism at bay.

People can't 'forget' how capitalism works. Without the memory of capitalism (and the measures necessary to ensure the survival of a Communist state), Communism could work perfectly well IMO.

lydia - maybe in my fantasy world, everyone would do their fair share of the crappy jobs - for the good of the community (have I mentioned it will never happen )

re the human nature thing - if there is no such thing as 'human nature' - how come we have developed as we have? Surely our basic nature has shaped the development of our civilisations? And since almost all civilisations that have ever existed have been a few people with all the wealth and power and the rest serving them, poorer, powerless, etc etc - does that not indicate that it's human nature?

If it wasn't, then surely we would have seen many many different formats, not the same basic format (a few living it up at the expense of the many, and people scrabbling for personal gain) with only minor differences repeated over and over and over and over again.

I am no expert in these matters - it's just how it appears to me.

someone up thread made a very good point about the difference between communism and communism.

When some people are taking about how it would be good to live in a communist country, others are taking that to mean that they want to live in a communist country, which is bad because they came from one - but the point is that communism as an ideology is not the same thing as the communist countries that exist.

I think. Something like that. I'm not an expert. It's just my current understanding of it all.

I lived in China for a bit. I would only describe it as being communist in the same way that the UK is called capitalist. Neither pure in any way. The UK has lots of socialist principles mixed into the system and China had one party rule (the people I met who were party members lived very different lives from anyone else and were heavily involved in running the black market ironically). You have to consider the political and the economic systems, not just one or the other.

Not sure anywhere really has a 'pure' system. America is often thought of as being highly capitalist, and it is but it is also very very corporatist. I didn't really realise that until we lived there for a while, but the system is very much set up so that companies (especially large companies) have most of the power.

I live in Canada now, and know that for me a liberal democracy with a generally capitalist set up leavened by a decent dose of socialism (welfare, health and education) and a balance between the power of the state, companies, unions and individuals is what makes a society that feels comfortable to me.

Hekate has already written what I wanted to ask. If people are indeed so different, why don't we have many, many different ways to live? But we don't, they are and have been pretty much the same, just with minor variations (I can't say I know about remote amazonian tribes in detail, but I doubt they have a totally unique way of living either. Do they?) Because people do not want to work first and foremost "for the greater good of the beehive".

I communist country without the gulags and secret police would be lovely.

It's better than living in a capitalist (Democracy , you've gotta laugh) society where the rich pick the poor out as marks for asset stripping exercises.

But why has no communist society ever been truely communist? because people do not want to live like that. Communism is a fantastic idea in theory, but sadly there will always be some who want to force their wishes and wants of other people without doing the work. It is all very well dividing up the finances equally, but what about the work? Why would someone want to spend all day shovelling shit as someone abov mentioned, when their neighbour is getting the same wage for doing much nicer and lighter work. Even in tribal societies, if someone does not want to hunt they did not eat. the sick and disabled, and young and elderly might be looked after, but a younger person would not have gotten away with saying they were going to share the results of the hunt, but stay nice and safe at home.
And that si why communist states have needed secret police and huge state control, to make sure people do the job allocated to them, and do not try to progress. Civic pride did not work, so they employed fear instead.
It is the same in communes, for all the talk of sharing, if one person is constantly put on loo cleanign duties and someone else always shirks duties or gets the nicer duties, the loo cleaner soon gets disillusioned.

The line between "massive sense of entitlement" and "sense of cameraderie" is getting rather fine, yes.

A working Communist commnity is actually pretty easy to create, it just needs a large enough slave class such that there are no jobs that the people don't want to do and there's no cost to the community of a complete freeloader. Of course, the slaves wouldn't be part of the community, but I suspect that's a small price to pay for the communist ideal.

Or everyone takes a turn in doing the crap jobs. THat's how it works in our house. In theory

And if shovelling shit is such a dreadful job it should be paid at a higher level. THen everyone would want to do it.