Hong Kong holds 'patriots only' local elections after shutting out opposition

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to World News@lemmy.world – 159 points –
Hong Kong holds 'patriots only' local elections after shutting out opposition
france24.com
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Owned by the people not the state

Communism doesn’t really have government because that would put people above others

That's an over-simplification. Marx's stateless society was a prediction of the natural outcome of a post-capitalist world and is probably the most utopian aspiration of the philosophy.

Communism does not mean "no government". You need a government. Or rather, whatever system of decision-making and distribution emerges is the government. Any form of cooperation and collective agreement is government. Don't tell the anarchists, they won't get it.

It doesn't have to be heirarchal in the same way but ultimately if you live in a society then at some point someone is going to tell you what to do.

You have people with expertise come up and say x would be best

But no one is bound to it

And then three people say to the fourth, "stop driving your car through this garden" and there aren't laws or courts to handle the dispute so instead they use violence or intimidation.

People cannot self-police on a societal scale.

The state can’t police on a societal scale either because it will be more concerned with protecting itself than it’s people

It’s why we call it late-stage capitalism instead of capitalism

It’s why the flaws of late stage are the same flaws that it tried to fix in the Mercantilist systems

It’s the same flaws Moses tried to ban

It’s not a feature of Communism and your argument that it has to be because people can never tried Communism doesn’t work. It just means that communism doesn’t work because people can never implement it

If I'm honest, your point is being let down by your grammar.

The state polices on a societal scale to the benefit of the public all the time. Environmental and safety regulations on businesses is one of the most obvious and successful. We can see historically and currently that, without the credible threat of legal consquence, people will just leave their trash wherever or over-harvest fish and game or accidentally set fire to a forest. Like, it happens anyway all the time but on a smaller scale.

Late-capitalism mostly describes how everything is commodified and owned by a handful of multinational megacorps. It's got nothing to do with the specifics of Bronze Age mercantilism, nor much to do with the definition of government nor heirarchal systems within society. Regulatory capture is a big problem but that's not unique to the current system. Without the current governments these corporations would just be cyberpunk Corporate States at best or warlords at worst.

Anarchist communism, in my opinion, doesn't scale well beyond the neighborhood and is rubbish at the kinds of efficiencies needed to sustain billions of people.

Environmental and safety regulations on businesses is one of the most obvious and successful.

That’s not Capitalism

Also in practice it just offshores the damage

You're saying that we shouldn't have environmental regulations because all it accomplishes is polluting somewhere else? As if industry doesn't exist in places where they aren't allowed to dump all their waste in the nearest river?