"Communism sounds great on paper - it just doesn't work in reality!" = most tedious line of conversation EVER?

I once attended the Z M3dia conference put on by Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent of Z Magazin3. He wrote a book called Participatory Economics that basically seems like communism. While he talked about it in the house I think they inherited from her parents, sailboats looked lovely through their window. I recorded Ch0msky speaking. They were very proprietary about it and didn't want me to make it freely available. They live in Woods Hole, on the mainland very near my island. They had absolutely no interest in local politics, their own local economy. It was weird.

:/

I used to love Sargent's "Hotel Satire" columns. I wonder if she does them any more. I haven't read Z in a long time.

He wrote a book called Participatory Economics that basically seems like communism.

I have readed this. It is not so good, and Z is a very strange place.

Like Z are the strawmen our antagonists claim us to be.

z magazine has always been pretty terrible

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/2005/0805/images/pinker1.jpghttp://www.aolcdn.com/red_galleries/carrot-top-celeb-400a062807.jpg

so if carrot top's resources are third party, but he fashions them into props himself, does he control the means of production?

Every time I see a picture of Carrot Top I just stop everything for a second. I know there must be freakier looking people out there but the whole mad ginger hair & make-up & huge buff biceps covered in fucking freckles thing gets me every time. He has chosen to look like that!

Opening post otm.
(I suspect I don't really understand what's being discussed, but I have very little else to do right now and felt like making some sort of comment.)

a bit late in on this but

Dingbod: Not saying communism has ever worked out in reality, just that it's a dull-witted observation as far as political tavern conversation goes. (xpost thanks max)

surely not history-ignorant then?!?!?!?!?!

No, the schmoes I referred to always turn out to be history-ignorant, regardless of the validity of this statement in particular. This is part of why the statement is irritating - it never leads anywhere (except on ILX, apparently, and even that's up for debate) b/c the people involved have nothing to back it up. Which is why I was looking for the origin story of this meme - it has all the earmarks of something that people pick up on because it sounds tidy, insightful, clever and self-flattering, not because they actually understand the history or theory, or care for that matter.

The Simpsons angle isn't bad - but it aired March '94, a year or two after I remember first hearing the phrase. The line is used mainly as a frame for a larger joke about using "in theory" to cover for having no rational objection to the theory...but it also sounds to me like the writers had already heard this meme and were reacting to it.

In attempting to remove capital and the feedback it provides from the system of production and distribution, communism winds up with something much less flexible, intuitive and coherent. How many widgets should the manufacturer make? The number demanded by his clients? The number he feels like? The number insisted upon by a government agency in a city thousands of miles away?

Communism sounds a lot like capitalism on paper...

z magazine has always been pretty terrible

The gathering was cool b/c of the radical ppl there, but I was really off-put by Lydia. She gave a workshop on graphic design and there were some brilliant kids in it. She basically told us that if you have a radical publication, you shouldn't make it look good, because "slickness" was anti-left or something. We tried to bring up Adbusters but she didn't seem to know what that was. They were both just really out of touch, like royalty in their own created universe, taling about smashing the state in this really cushy, sheltered place and seemingly not that open to the outside world or modern influences. Communism doesn't even sound good on paper, but it's that similar thing of imposing ideas from a sort of vacuum. There's also the issue of mediocratization, a sort of distrust of "slickness" (i.e. beauty).

urrgh - that was me

friend brought over La Chinoise tonight. lols.

scott, I was actually thinking about something similar today (mostly in terms related to my thesis). There seems to be these two contrary strands in modern Communism/anti-Capitalism, where they are espousing a populist world view, but taking a very bourgeois stance towards culture. Ie: Oh, if it's slick, that's just to appeal to the masses, which is the cynical purpose of Capitalism. (Adorno, I think, made a similar mistake when his Culture Industry critique - you can't ignore what the masses like and pretend to be populist at the same time.)

damn contenderizer owned the hell out of this thread

hey max, other commies - how's it feel living in ~*THA OWN ZONE*~

What's up with Carrot Top, mascara & 'roids: he's become some sort of mutant Dave Navarro.

isn't it more like, capitalism looks great on paper, but doesn't work in reality?

[i have not read this thread, wherein such 'observation' has probably already been made]

Coronation Street sounds great on paper, etc

Nothing "works" in reality.

capitalism looks great if you can follow the paper trail

i like this thread!

lol

people really missed the point of this fuckin thread huh

well, insofar as the original point was to get everyone to agree that challops are stupid, yes

by people i meant marcello

did he even post on here?

our "democracy" "works" really "well"

Nothing "works" in reality.

beat me to it, Hurting

Results 1 - 10 of about 275 for "communism works on paper". (0.71 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 873 for "communism sounds good on paper". (0.33 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 125 for "communism sounds good in theory". (0.16 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,300 for "communism works in theory".

i don't sound great on paper, and i don't work in reality

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/4/1/1238588167615/G20-protests-and-security-016.jpg

communism doesnt look good on paper or in large crowds

great aesthetic tho, red is such a terrific color

who's hotter: young republicans or commies

^^^^^^ republicans tbh

CAPITALISM ISN'T WORKING

HOW ABOUT TRYING A TUBA

who's hotter: young republicans or commies

we need a hotness v tedious convo scale to really work this out

Is it me, and this is spoken from not a serious leftist by any means, but is there nothing more cringe-worthy than the "lol, communism" attitude of certain people today. I'm talking about shit like this
http://csammisrun.net/images/cparty.jpg and I've heard of people having communist themed parties and stuff like that. I can't imagine anything more frustrating for a committed leftist than this sort of reduction of a history of social theory and action to a petty, unaware, and outright not-funny punchline. This just strikes me as just extremely stupid and uncritical, especially since it's usually not attacks on communism but from left-leaning people (of the Daily Show mindset, though), like this takes "communism sounds great on paper. . ." to a different level, just communism, lol.

Not to mention displays an very complacent attitude toward capitalism as is, nullifying any marxist thought into the some of the least humour out there.

I dunno -- if you do care about the seriousness of socialism or communism as ideas, maybe you should see it as a good thing when people adopt a chuckling ancient-history stance toward some of the folks who once made it seem synonymous with mass murder, labor camps, and violent repression?

I mean, I don't want to alarm you or anything, but if people began to see Soviet or Maoist stuff as just amusing iconography and funny historical figures, that would actually be a pretty big improvement in people's favorability responses to these things

you are certainly going a long way to debunking the idea of communist sympathizers and marxists being humourless, though.

1) its not really communism as such—the "essence" of wealth redistribution & control of the means of production—thats getting lampooned & treated ironically—its "communism" specifically manifested as kitsch, i.e. propaganda & earnest soviet realism & dictator/thinker hero worship.

2) this is less about "our" collective feelings about communism specifically than it is about "our" collective feelings about "history" and "iconography"—if communism seems to be targeted more specifically its because its icons are so strong graphically/historically/etc

tbh i thought saroyan's post was going to be about how offensive it was to advertise a party with a funny picture of a mass-murdering tyrant with a party hat on.

I feel like a "communist party" would be full of bad pick-up lines about forming a "soviet union"

a specter is haunting this party--the specter of dat ass

Apparat dat chik

lets seize control of our own means of production back at my apartment

gangstas unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. oh.