Significantly less, since commerce and the ability to trade things for a different value forms the basis for civilization. It’s easy to grow and hunt your own food, because that’s immediate and concrete. The farther away you get from that, the more abstract that thing becomes. It’s going to be harder for people to feel any sense of connection and purpose with making the rubber that goes into a seal on the International Space Station when they don’t see any direct benefit from the research done there, and they likely can’t even see the indirect benefit of that fundamental research.
For good or ill, commerce is how civilizations universally work, and you’d have to imagine a completely different species that evolved under vastly different circumstances to have anything else.
So you think we’d have to be an entirely different species for communism to work?
I’d argue a hell of a lot different, try n stop someone from doing something (sure keep them fed, sheltered, all the good stuff) but give them absolutely nothing to do. Try n keep them from killing themselves lol, sounds like actual hell to me
For communism to work as intended past a tribal or perhaps city-state level, yeah, I’d say that we would need to be a different species. Communism works fantastically well when everyone is pretty closely connected; the larger a society gets, the less well it ends up working, without having draconian measures in place that largely eliminate all personal liberty.
I’m not saying that capitalism works well, unless you have a perverse definition of “well”. Capitalism does tend to give individuals some kind of incentive to work for what is nominally the greater good by creating the appearance that their own personal effort is tied to the results that they get. Conversely, communism, in large societies, has your input largely decoupled from what you get back. On a large scale, I think that democratic socialism will give the best overall results, but you have to ensure that no one has the ability to entirely fuck off and leech off the labor of everyone else without risking that infecting everyone, and resulting in nothing at all getting done.
I think you’re conflating commerce with capitalism. I don’t think you could have communism without commerce. Even if you did away with currency and the rubber farmer is paid with grain and other foodstuffs that would still be commerce.
Significantly less, since commerce and the ability to trade things for a different value forms the basis for civilization. It’s easy to grow and hunt your own food, because that’s immediate and concrete. The farther away you get from that, the more abstract that thing becomes. It’s going to be harder for people to feel any sense of connection and purpose with making the rubber that goes into a seal on the International Space Station when they don’t see any direct benefit from the research done there, and they likely can’t even see the indirect benefit of that fundamental research.
For good or ill, commerce is how civilizations universally work, and you’d have to imagine a completely different species that evolved under vastly different circumstances to have anything else.
So you think we’d have to be an entirely different species for communism to work?
I’d argue a hell of a lot different, try n stop someone from doing something (sure keep them fed, sheltered, all the good stuff) but give them absolutely nothing to do. Try n keep them from killing themselves lol, sounds like actual hell to me
For communism to work as intended past a tribal or perhaps city-state level, yeah, I’d say that we would need to be a different species. Communism works fantastically well when everyone is pretty closely connected; the larger a society gets, the less well it ends up working, without having draconian measures in place that largely eliminate all personal liberty.
I’m not saying that capitalism works well, unless you have a perverse definition of “well”. Capitalism does tend to give individuals some kind of incentive to work for what is nominally the greater good by creating the appearance that their own personal effort is tied to the results that they get. Conversely, communism, in large societies, has your input largely decoupled from what you get back. On a large scale, I think that democratic socialism will give the best overall results, but you have to ensure that no one has the ability to entirely fuck off and leech off the labor of everyone else without risking that infecting everyone, and resulting in nothing at all getting done.
I think you’re conflating commerce with capitalism. I don’t think you could have communism without commerce. Even if you did away with currency and the rubber farmer is paid with grain and other foodstuffs that would still be commerce.