Check your epistemology. You think that if billionaires just died out without the need for the proletariat to rise up and come together you would somehow end up with a world in which the proletariat would know to rise up and come together to stop it from getting bad again?

If anything you’d be lessening the spirit of revolution because you would be literally robbing the proletariat of it. You’d get more neoliberals and people who say shit like “see it all works out in the end” building a prime environment to slip right back into fascism when you die and stop enforcing the billionaire death penalty.

And if by “let the communists implement communism with no organized opposition” you meant slaughtering people who were opposed to whatever specific brand of communism you wanted most, I think Kira might be hiding in your mirror…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

That's just accelerationism.

You don't actually need Dialectical Materialism and desperation of the workers in order to get to communism. Marx himself admitted that various indigenous cultures such as the Haudenosaunee were communists. Communism is the natural state of humanity. If you remove all the capitalists maintaining the system, communism will naturally win because it's how humans naturally think.

Note the fact that despite our late stage capitalist society and rampant neoliberalism, children still live under communism. They get free food, free housing, and free education. Either from the state, or from their parents. Anyone who introduced capitalism to children would be considered a monster even in our current society. If you kept a ledger of debts and made your child pay it back at 18, or if you charged competitive market rates for rent to a 10 year old, you'd be called a child abuser. Everyone already knows that capitalism is wrong, we're just trained to selectively ignore that fact. Take away the social pressure brainwashing people, and they'll figure it out themselves.

Also, Light should have made the billionaires donate their fortunes to communist organisations and charities before they died. And made the dictators declare their countries a communist democracy before they died. (Yes, the seconds in command will obviously block these orders from being carried out. That's why Light kills the seconds in command and makes them do the same a week later. After a dozen iterations, all the remaining leaders will get with the plot)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Societies have inertia. Without a force for change, they will not change. Maybe they would tend towards communism but it would be incredibly slow. Most people resist change and the amount of change required to shift even just a single state in the US from where it is at now to communism would be immense.

The amount of effort and required learning would deter many people and if you’ve removed the racketeering of the bourgeoisie, then they’ve you’ve lost the stick and don’t have a carrot.

Killing billionaires won’t undo the decades of “communism bad” and it doesn’t specifically bolster communism either. Hell, if you made people aware that you were killing billionaires to support communism you’d deter more people because “it’s just wrong to kill people”

Furthermore le petite bourgeoisie commit much less obvious sins in the eyes of the masses, but still support and defend capitalism. As billionaires fall, that class becomes larger. You’ll likely end up killing all the way down to small business owners before you’d reach the communist future you desire, and you’d have become the enemy of almost everyone left alive well before then.

You’re also making the same error as Light if you rely on people “getting the plot.” You are building a system that only works while you’re there to provide the threat. It will not last and it will fall to pieces again as soon as you’re gone.

Trees that never dealt with wind will break in the weakest of storms. If you want to fix the world permanently, you cannot do so by simply removing all obstacles magically. When those obstacles return your world will be even less prepared than they were before.

Lastly you make the assumption that you are capable of understanding the whole world, the political and cultural climate of every country, well enough that you can stop or adequately manipulate all the “bad” people and make sure the good ones are protected. You are not omniscient. This is not possible. You are bound to kill innocents in an effort to complete this endeavor, and you are certainly never going to kill every psychopath or misguided individual who fully supports capitalism.

You are Kira because you are holding onto the belief that if you just murdered enough “bad” people, the world would suddenly become and stay a better place, when in reality it’s just temporarily suppression. Those who would worship you would worship you for your power and dominance not for any doctrine of community or empathy. Even Those who you tried to help may face the fear that they’ll do something “against the party” and you’ll end them for it.

But hey maybe it could work, maybe the world would become a temporarily better place with less pain and destruction, but Light could make the same argument.

You are still slaughtering others under the delusion that somehow it will fix everything, that you would play the part of god perfectly and bring to pass a new world.

To paraphrase L: “I can guess your motive and why you're doing this. But what you're doing is evil.”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

If you remove all the capitalists maintaining the system, communism will naturally win because it’s how humans naturally think.

So why then did that system not last forever? Why did capitalists emerge in the first place? Drag is treating them like some kind of external force, as if they were aliens dropped into societies across the globe.

The material conditions of what Marx called primitive communism naturally caused society to develop into the hierarchical structures of early civilization. The development of agriculture created incentives for the division of labor, for states with static borders and organized defenses, and for class structure and involuntary servitude. In a hunter-gatherer society, it's far more efficient to treat everyone (mostly) equally, because either they're going off on their own to hunt or forage or they're coordinating with a group and need to be armed and trusted - but this is no longer the case with agriculture. The people who responded to these (unfortunate) incentives were able to become dominant.

It doesn't actually matter that much how humans "naturally think." If you put a bunch of robots or aliens or whatever into a situation where there's an incentive to do something, then provided they have the ability to innovate, experiment, and try new things, someone will eventually discover the incentive and reap the benefits of it and others will follow, either because they see the benefits or because the benefits strengthen the beneficiaries to the point that they can force everyone else to go along with it.

This whole idea of, "Well Marx said indigenous people were communists so it's trivial to just get rid of the capitalists and go back to that," makes it very clear that Drag hasn't actually read Marx and is just proof-texting, picking out random bits and pieces to support Drag's pre-existing beliefs without actually understanding anything he said. A communist society in the modern day, with technology and capital, would look drastically different from hunter-gatherer societies. There are aspects of hunter-gatherer societies which we can point to as worthy of emulation, but we can't return to a hunter-gatherer economic system (or lack thereof) without the mass starvation of the vast majority of humanity.