Needs a Spongbob style “5 minutes laturrr” voiceover between the 3rd and 4th panel.

Oh no, someone criticized our glorious leader!

It’s from Thailand so likely Buddhism.

My bad. I fixed it.

You’re working on the assumption that violence just creates random inequality whenever it occurs, rather than that the use of violence in our current system is a tool used with intent to maintain the status quo.

Well, you’re working on the assumption that violence CAN be used to create both inequality and equality, it just depends on who is using it. Since it’s obviously nonsensical to argue that it’s literally the person that’s making the difference (otherwise, monarchy could potentially do just as good a job at creating or maintaining equality as communism could), it must be the intention behind the use of violence that makes the difference.

That leads to the unproven assertion that it is the intention of capitalism to create unjust inequality, when instead the intention is to allow people to freely choose their employment or source of income based on what they do best, and reward people based on how much they contribute to society.

Sure, you can say that maybe that used to be the case at one point and it’s all gone out of whack since then, but that would only prove that intention doesn’t guarantee outcome, hence there would be no reason to assume that communism would have any better chance at creating a better outcome for everyone in the long run.

Deciding we shouldn’t make any change to our economic system because police would still be necessary is, frankly, an absurd stance to take. To be clear, communism is not an alternative to democracy, it’s an economic not political system, though of course its ideals do align with democracy.

If communism isn’t a political system, why does it require a revolution in order to implement? If it’s only about economics, then it should be possible to implement on a smaller scale (say, a single company) in any political system. And if it is so clearly superior to capitalism, then such a company would outperform its competitors and naturally lead to a proliferation of communism that way, because most or all of its competitors would end up adopting it. Yet you never see any communists arguing for that sort of approach, it’s always “smash everything with fist first and then rebuild from the ashes”. That’s why I can’t help but feel like violence is, in fact, the whole point.

So you don’t support any political system? Or do you have some magic solution in which everyone magically lives in harmony?

Neither. I don’t support any political system because politics is simply arguing about who gets to point the gun at whom. Any political solution to anything always involves violence. And I don’t have a magical solution either because the only alternative I see is to educate people in order to help them realize this, in the hopes that one day, enough people will see that there can, in fact, never be a political solution without violence, and therefore stop looking for such solutions and instead work together to try and resolve their disputes on their own instead of looking for another powerful man with a gun to get them what’s theirs.

Indeed, Preview really is excellent. Does almost everything you’ll ever need and nothing you don’t.

I’m on Windows 11 and it opens PDF files in Edge by default. While I find it kind of silly to use a web browser for that purpose, the built-in PDF reader is actually fairly good, it can even read your documents out loud using text-to-speech.

violence isn’t part of democracy itself.

That’s where you wrong, because violence IS part of democracy, since the majority gets to inflict its will on the minority (or at least choose representatives who will do so on their behalf) via the use of the police, who are authorized to use any violence necessary in order to get people to comply with the laws.

If communism doesn’t have any plans for achieving their goals without the use of police (or violent enforcers by any other name), then it stands to reason that it will just be violence-based as that which is it seeks to replace, and therefore just as prone to causing inequality among people, regardless of its intentions.

As I said before, violence will never lead to peace, at best you will get a temporary truce whenever people are tired of fighting. But it will always be prone to erupt again. That’s why I don’t support communism. And yes, I don’t support democracy, monarchy, or dictatorship either, for the same reason.

You realize that getting upset over this isn’t helping to prove your point, right? If anything, it proves you’re out of arguments and you think you can bully me into into accepting your point of view.

Sorry, not going to happen.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Marx passionately and repeatedly made the case that violence and inequality in a capitalist system are intrinsically connected, i.e. that a capitalist system requires violence in order to enforce and maintain the inequality that is present. But you (and Marx) also say that communists can (and should) violence to bring about equality.

My question, therefore, is simply this: if inequality is the result of violence, how can communism ever hope to achieve equality in the future by using the same means that it claims causes inequality in the present? That’s simply fighting fire with fire. If their violence justifies our violence, our violence will justify theirs. And on and on it goes. No amount of violence will ever stop violence. It just won’t.

Okay, that was always allowed.

Right. I believe that idea is called socialism, not communism. Unlike communism, which demands a complete overthrow and reform of the system in order to be established, socialists are generally happy to bring about reform within the system by just passing laws requiring various amounts of wealth redistribution.

I’m certainly not against it as long as it doesn’t remove too many incentives for people to be able to improve their standard of living by working harder. Having a reasonable social safety system that ensures nobody has to live on the streets unless they absolutely want to certainly seems desirable. And yes the US could probably improve in that area.

Okay, but that’s excusing one genocide with another genocide.

The difference is that capitalism doesn’t require genocide in order to establish itself, even if it sometimes occurs in the pursuit of it. Or are you saying that when people first figured out to, say, use sea shells as a method of accounting and facilitating trade, it involved killing a bunch of people before anyone was convinced that it was preferable to trading goods against each other?

Capitalism (or free trade, rather) can evolve naturally and spontaneously among a group of individuals who seek to maximize everyone’s utility. When the currency had collapsed after WW2, people traded with cigarettes instead of money, even if they were non-smokers, because it was practical and convenient, no one forced them to. And yes, there was genocide before that, but it didn’t happen in order to get people to start trading in cigarettes.

Again, I’m not saying that capitalism is by definition non-violent, or that violence in pursuit of capitalism is more acceptable than it is in the pursuit of communism. Absolutely not. All I’m saying is that it can be non-violent, whereas communism always seems to make violence a prerequisite in order to get everyone on the same page.

Also, I think it would help any further discussion if we could make a distinction between capitalism and free trade, as the two are often conflated. There certainly is a case to be made about usury being bad, because it helps to increase and accelerate the divide between rich and poor, and always leads to wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of a few. The word “capitalism” kind of implies that it’s the capital doing the work, i.e. usury is part and parcel of the system, and then people tend to focus only on the predations of banks and neglect the advantages of free trade over forced association and planned economies as it is common under communism.

But there’s a reason the founding father of the US were so vehemently against the creation of a central bank. And it seems that they’re proven right by the fact that ever since our government decided to create one anyways, the gap between rich and poor has risen much faster than it used to. So maybe, just maybe, “capitalism” isn’t the root of our problems, but state-sponsored usury is, because when the government is in control of the money supply, they can always simply choose to arbitrarily inflate everyone’s wealth away, which always tends to hit the poor much harder than the rich, because they don’t have easy access to inflation-proof investments.

I don’t now man, 2020 isn’t that long ago, I remember the protests fairly vividly, along with the demands for dismantling any and all police.

Unless you’re going to tell me those weren’t real communists. In which case, believe me, I’ve heard that one before.

So no, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that communists hate the police, if only, as you admit, because they don’t work for them, not based on any principle.

Also, I didn’t say that that from 1-4 follows that communism is bad, just that it is no better than the capitalism it seeks to replace, because it does nothing to address the violence it claims is fundamental to capitalist oppression. It’s more accurate to say that communism is dumb because it engages in magical thinking, i.e. the belief that violence can be good if only it was being done by the right people.

Yes, perhaps things would get better for some people for some time. But in the end, it will always suffer from the same type of corruption as any other violence-based system, so there is no reason to believe it would be preferable to what we have now. It will just end up perpetuating the same cycle of violence that it claims is at the root of all of our problems.

Yes, I understand that, and I already answered that argument here:

Are you saying that because they went by income instead of by race, it technically wasn’t genocide, just mass murder? I’m not sure that makes it any better. Also, don’t forget that a lot of the poor people died as well, so it didn’t even help those it was supposed to benefit.

Let me put it this way: I’ve never met a communist who argued that it was possible to bring about communism nonviolently, much less that it was desirable or even essential to do so in order for it to succeed. It’s always “we may have to do a little bit of violence at first, but after that, we’ll all be nice a peaceful, because all our problems will have been solved and there’ll be no reason to be violent anymore.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. Like I said, violence begets more violence. Once you agree that it could potentially be a solution, there is no reason not to use it when push comes to shove, that’s why there will never be an end to it.

Also, my point about ACAB wasn’t that you personally support it, just that communists overwhelming hate the police and see them as a tool of fascist oppression when they’re in the hands of capitalists, but as warriors of peace when they’re in the hands of communists. Their violent enforcers: corrupt and evil. Our violent enforcers: stunning and brave. Basically it all comes down to arguing fairness is a matter of who is on top. The problem with that is that power always corrupts, not matter how good its intentions. I know that’s likely not going to convince you, but I’m only explaining my point of view on why I don’t find communism very convincing.

ACAB isn’t some international stance the left takes. It’s a reaction to the frequently racist, violent and corrupt policing specifically in the USA. And it certainly doesn’t mean there should be no law enforcement whatsoever - you’d be extremely hard pressed to find anybody who would take that stance.

Right. As usual, when you press people on it, they’ll end up admitting that none of their principles are really absolute and they’re always willing to make an exception as long as it’s in their own favor.

Counterexamples: the British suffragette movement (which was notably extraordinarily violent, despite its common modern image as a quiet, polite disagreement), the American civil war, the Swedish coup of 1809, the Ukrainian defensive resistance in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.

Not super familiar with examples 1 and 3, but would you say that violence against women remains an ongoing problem in the UK? Has there really been no political violence in Sweden since 1809? I don’t think I even need to point out that America remains an extraordinarily violent society according to leftists (and even many people on the right) or that there literally still IS war in the Ukraine to this day.

“Violence begets more violence” doesn’t mean that violence will always continue to escalate (if it did, we’d clearly all be dead already), it means that violence never ends violence. At best, all of its victories will be temporary. All you ever get is a momentary truce once everyone is tired of fighting, but as soon as they recuperate, violence is back on the menu.

And just to be clear, I never claimed that violence was the goal of communism, just that communists seem to universally agree that violence is acceptable in order to reach their goals.

As far as the Ghandi quote goes, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what he could have meant by this, and the best explanation I can come up with is that he may have sought to differentiate between non-violent action and non-action (which is nonviolent by definition). In other words, if you are being demonstrably mistreated, it’s better to stand up and do something about it (even if violent), but it’s better yet (even infinitely superior) to do something that doesn’t involve violence (like protesting peacefully). Violent resistance in the face of injustice takes some courage, but non-violent resistance takes far more courage yet.

Okay, so genocide in the past justifies genocide in the present? That means genocide in the present will justify genocide in the future. I’m not sure how we’ll ever get to a better world that way.

Also, most, if not all of these things happened under colonialism. I’m not sure that it’s accurate to blame capitalism for that. Rather, the problem appears to be concentration of power in the hands of government. The lesson appears to be that if you give a small number of people enough power to solve all your problems, they’ll either murder their way to a solution or decide that you are the problem that needs to be solved. Doesn’t matter if their coats are red, yellow, or blue.

What I don’t understand is why communists don’t spend more time trying to build decentralized networks. Lemmy is actually a good example of the kind of infrastructure there should be more of. But that’s hard, thankless work, isn’t it? And there’s no guarantee of success either. I can see the appeal of mass murder, I really do, but do you really want to face your children one day and explain to them how murdering our way to a better life is just what we do, and if they don’t do it first, someone else will murder them? I don’t.

At least in capitalism, we try not to murder people systemically, because as you might now, that’s kinda bad for business when it’s found out. Not bad enough, you might say, because it keeps happening, but as it turns out, whenever it happens on a larger scale, it usually involves the government in one way or another.

No, the only way to ensure a future without government sponsored mass murder is to focus on decentralization. That’s the only way the people can take power back into their own hands, by resisting the urge for any quick, and dare I say, “final” solutions, and working to educate others on how to be more self-sufficient instead.

Well I’m glad we can at least agree that genocide isn’t ideal and generally a suboptimal way to solve any problems.

Straight from the manifesto, page 12:

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Accuse me of picking and choosing the most salient passage, but I would say this doesn’t leave too much room for interpretation about what the word “forcible” means. And no, you don’t get to talk your way out by saying ‘overthrowing the status quo via legislation enforced by police would be considered “by force”, regardless of whether the police use violence.’ Isn’t ACAB a quintessentially leftist term? Or does it not apply when the police work for you instead of against you?

Also, just to give a counterexample to your “evil autocrat” problem: Gandhi managed to get rid of British colonial rule without ever advocating for or using violence. So no, the idea that violent oppression justifies a violent response is flawed. Violence always begets more violence, there is literally no exception. You can’t murder your way to a fair and just society, it always ends in oppression.

The big issue with “trying” communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that violent revolution is exactly what Marx said was essential in order to bring about the communist utopia he envisioned. That’s precisely why communism has such a bad rep among anyone but edgy teenagers and college students. Are you telling me Marx was wrong about this? If so, please elaborate.