communism vs capitalism

[Spite]

You're thinking in terms of capitalism. 7000 dollars? That's pointless figure in a Communist society. Profit margins, surplus, investment, all become more or less meaningless terms. We have enough productive forces create an abundance of goods and commodities for everyone to benefit from. Through democratic control of the means of production and efficient organization of the workforce we can create a world in which there's plenty of pie for everyone. If you really believe that Communism as a system of economic management needs to be statist and government managed, you are gravely mistaken and have fundamentally misunderstood the ideology. The idea is that worker's councils will manage the economy, for the benefit of the workers themselves. In the early days of the Russian revolution, they had such councils (named Soviets), which were democratic institutions created by the Russian proletariat. It was only after Lenin added his authoritarian flair to the revolution that statism and bureaucracy became involved in the process of economic management, and this type authoritarianism is not representative of actual Communism.

This is actually insane. Money is a measure of resources, resources will not become infinite and therefore some form of allocating them amongst people must exist. Whether you call that "allotment" or "beer tokens" or what then it will exist and it will be money. If anyone can withdraw however much resources they want from the communal pot, then everyone will withdraw different amounts and you'll still have a hierarchy of resource use. If you restrict it, you have money.

 

As I said, everyone might be able to have a toaster under a communist world government, but not everyone can have a private yacht or a jumbo jet or a spaceship or whatever else the 1% have.

 

Workers councils can't manage a complex economy. In the UK alone there are tens of thousands of industries which contribute to the economy. Sure each one could be managed locally, but you'd need higher committees to manage integration of industries, and when you have tiers of communication reaching ever higher guess what - that's government!

[Lannan13]

capitalism is nothing more then athiest tool to oppress workers

That is a composition fallacy. Just because you're atheist does not mean that you are a capitalist and vise versa.

[Doktor Avalanche]

Precisely. Which is one of the reasons I stray from Marxism as much as possible. We don't need a one-party state, or a planned economy; and to think we can or should just regress back to a primitive state of tribalist pre-communism is naive. Because thats what libertarian communism is, pure communism (i.e. primitive communism), right? The idea that everyone will suddenly give up on their money and property is preposterous. And if they won't do it voluntarily, who will make them? Your small band of ancom insurrectionaries?

Exactly. However, according to the philosophy, there is revolution.That revolution died long ago and is only kept alive through balaklava wearing red and black flag waving characters and internet commies nowadays, but meh. Agorism exists in the tight corners of the internet as well, hanging near the cobwebs of Mises' Citical texts, Konkin's California road trip maps and Rothbard's dry humor of Objectivism's banality.

[durmij]

I agree, everyone can agree and act civil in a simple discussion. It's when we get zealots and biggotted close minded people who refuse to listen to other people that things get "edgy."

I think it helps that everyone here is libertarian and not authoritarian, with the variance in how we view economics. We all seem to have the same unfavourable view of governmental interference in personal matters. It's a good common ground to work from.

[Lannan13]

I think it helps that everyone here is libertarian and not authoritarian, with the variance in how we view economics. We all seem to have the same unfavourable view of governmental interference in personal matters. It's a good common ground to work from.

Very true.

[Hereno]

Precisely. Which is one of the reasons I stray from Marxism as much as possible. We don't need a one-party state, or a planned economy; and to think we can or should just regress back to a primitive state of tribalist pre-communism is naive. Because thats what libertarian communism is, pure communism (i.e. primitive communism), right? The idea that everyone will suddenly give up on their money and property is preposterous. And if they won't do it voluntarily, who will make them? Your small band of ancom insurrectionaries?

 

Very few people actually own private property, though. The vast majority of us are workers. We're talking about seizing industry from private organizations and giving each worker ownership over and control over their own labor. As in, making everything cooperatively owned, and if you stop working there, you lose your say and ownership. Communism is all of the libertarian thought that libertarians have, but it goes one step further and eliminates the hierarchy caused by money.

 

Very deep, I give you props there on that. I can agree that there's one thing that makes the world go round, Money. Remove money from the equation, then what? I guess that's what the issue leads to. What do we measure worth with, how does someone "get" something or "use" it? How would I "use" someone's toothbrush (I know you wouldn't, but this is just a hypothetical. I already know you wouldn't use someone else's tooth brush.) Though a lot of the issues that tend to occur with the path that is outlined is it's a cycle. We have Revolution, Independence, Moderation, Slavery (loosing rights and such), then it revolves back around to a revolution. It's a painful endless cycle that we have here. Though if you use the grassroots movements and beliefs of Saul D Alinsky, I believe that you could maintain some of these independence states or anarchial zones longer. Everyone does hate their job, but who wants to be the garbage man or the sewer cleaner? The thing is everything needs to be done and people are going to hate their jobs and there will be jobs to hate.

 

Tell me, what do you think of Directive 10-289?

 

I've never bothered to give Ayn Rand a serious read, but there are ways to incentivize things. The thing about being a communist is that people expect me to be able to sit and have such a working knowledge of every single industry on earth so that I can give them example of how we can do things differently for each one of them. As far as trash men go, a lot of our garbage is created by consumerism. Buying shit we don't need, throwing it away because it's cheaper than fixing it (or the product is made to not be able to be repaired, or any number of reasons), and then throwing it in a landfill and not giving a shit about how we do it because we don't have to think about the trash once it's out of our house. We're talking about a massive re-organization of society where there will not be so much trash and people who are willing to do "dirty jobs", rather than being forced to also accept shitty pay and having everybody else looking down their noses at us, will be recognized for their willingness to do what is needed to be done and probably won't have to work as much. Communists are pro-worker but we are anti-work insofar as we don't want to "create jobs" - ideally, nobody will have to do anything they don't want to do, ever. But reality dictates that sometimes you gotta suck it up and grab the toilet plunger. Oh well, you'll get over it.

 

Exactly. However, according to the philosophy, there is revolution.That revolution died long ago and is only kept alive through balaklava wearing red and black flag waving characters and internet commies nowadays, but meh. Agorism exists in the tight corners of the internet as well, hanging near the cobwebs of Mises' Citical texts, Konkin's California road trip maps and Rothbard's dry humor of Objectivism's banality.

 

Revolution is made necessary by the forces of reaction. We don't WANT to fight anybody, but we also don't recognize the legitimacy of property handed down through generations which is maintained through a combination of force and exploitation.

[Doktor Avalanche]

 

 

Revolution is made necessary by the forces of reaction. We don't WANT to fight anybody, but we also don't recognize the legitimacy of property handed down through generations which is maintained through a combination of force and exploitation.

Define property. it has many meanings to many who make this argument and oddly, it changes with every post after I ask for the definition. So please,I ask you, define Property in the context you implied in great detail so we can continue this discussion respectfully.

[Miles Dyson]

 

Very few people actually own private property, though. The vast majority of us are workers. We're talking about seizing industry from private organizations and giving each worker ownership over and control over their own labor. As in, making everything cooperatively owned, and if you stop working there, you lose your say and ownership. Communism is all of the libertarian thought that libertarians have, but it goes one step further and eliminates the hierarchy caused by money.

 

The means of production would not be cooperatively owned in communism, it would be owned by the community at large. In council communism, workplaces themselves would not self-managed per se, but rather, macromanaged by worker assemblies, i.e. councils. That is economic democracy, not workplace democracy. An economic democracy is planned, with management of workplaces being subjected to the will of the community as a whole, or representatives thereof; which would have basically replaced the state. Not only can this lead to hierarchy, in and of itself, as indeed it has historically, but it is largely inefficient in comparison to less-centralized, more autonomous cooperative models, which promote natural economics. If individuals do not own the means by which they produce for themselves, then they are not reaping the true product of their labor; and seeing as though ownership itself would be abolished, workers would not technically own their labor; and their trades or specialties might by interfered with by individuals who know nothing about that particular field, i.e. the rest of the community. Without a convenient method of exchange, labor value could not be objectively measured. In other words, the community, or councils, would determine how much your labor was worth; not you, or the party you may be bargaining with. Thats not worker ownership, thats voluntary servitude to society; backed by a populist government (general assembly) that promises you access to the world in return for your service. How often has that worked in history? Money, as a concept, as a method of exchange, does not produce hierarchy in and of itself. Artificial restrictions, and interest backed by legal privilege, are what rob money of being representative of the true cost of labor. If individuals do not have the ability to measure the worth of their own work, and compare it to others, than the value of their work becomes arbitrary. 

Edited January 19, 2016 by Miles Dyson

[Hereno]

Define property. it has many meanings to many who make this argument and oddly, it changes with every post after I ask for the definition. So please,I ask you, define Property in the context you implied in great detail so we can continue this discussion respectfully.

 

personal property: things that belong to you that you use in your everyday life. food, water, toothbrush, bicycle, whatever.

private property: things that produce. factories, stores, heavy machinery, farmland, etc.

 

The means of production would not be cooperatively owned in communism, it would be owned by the community at large. In council communism, workplaces themselves would not self-managed per se, but rather, macromanaged by worker assemblies, i.e. councils. That is economic democracy, not workplace democracy. An economic democracy is planned, with management of workplaces being subjected to the will of the community as a whole, or representatives thereof; which would have basically replaced the state. Not only can this lead to hierarchy, in and of itself, as indeed it has historically, but it is largely inefficient in comparison to less-centralized, more autonomous cooperative models, which promote natural economics. If individuals do not own the means by which they produce for themselves, then they are not reaping the true product of their labor; and seeing as though ownership itself would be abolished, workers would not technically own their labor; and their trades or specialties might by interfered with by individuals who know nothing about that particular field, i.e. the rest of the community. Without a convenient method of exchange, labor value could not be objectively measured. In other words, the community, or councils, would determine how much your labor was worth; not you, or the party you may be bargaining with. Thats not worker ownership, thats voluntary servitude to society; backed by a populist government (general assembly) that promises you access to the world in return for your service. How often has that worked in history? Money, as a concept, as a method of exchange, does not produce hierarchy in and of itself. Artificial restrictions, and interest backed by legal privilege, are what rob money of being representative of the true cost of labor. If individuals do not have the ability to measure the worth of their own work, and compare it to others, than the value of their work becomes arbitrary.

No no no no no. Public ownership of the means of production does NOT mean state ownership of the means of production. Just because nothing is privately owned doesn't mean that some idiot halfway around the world gets to tell you what you have to make in your factory today. That's absurd - we are not capitalists. But we are also not against voluntary organization. Our enemy is hierarchy.

[Moreau]

Communism is bad

[Fox Fire]

 

personal property: things that belong to you that you use in your everyday life. food, water, toothbrush, bicycle, whatever.

private property: things that produce. factories, stores, heavy machinery, farmland, etc.

 

 

No no no no no. Public ownership of the means of production does NOT mean state ownership of the means of production. Just because nothing is privately owned doesn't mean that some idiot halfway around the world gets to tell you what you have to make in your factory today. That's absurd - we are not capitalists. But we are also not against voluntary organization. Our enemy is hierarchy.

I think this comment is more appropriate here:

 

 

the term state can be taken literally to mean a "state", point of stasis, or stoppage of time. the constitution is a direct reflection of the character of its writers at the time at which it was written. by force, people who had no control over this have been drafted to defend the people in charge, who also send them to war. but why is force necessary in the first place? why should people have to recognize an artificial hierarchy and be bossed around for their entire lives? if someone has to FORCE me to do what is necessary to feed myself, that is a !@#$ serious problem. none of this shit actually makes sense at all if you think about it. why should we have hierarchy when we can just not? do you really have that little faith in humanity? there will probably always be bad people, and nobody is going to give a shit if we just lock them up. there is no need for a central state, but rather just for human ingenuity and cooperation. take the money out of politics, and by extension, the rest of society.

 

The point of the hierarchy is organization. Sure, we don't have to have the system for humans to live (with the modern population, we actually do), but we do if we want any kind of modern life style. Do you think that things like industrialization would have even been possible without mass, national organization? At some point, somewhere, somebody has to be leading and directing the groups efforts. Why do you think the military is designed around hierarchy? Because it's the most efficient way to survive.

Sure, putting someone in charge is almost guaranteed to lead to corruption, but if everyone were simply allowed to do whatever they want without complex organizational structure in their society, things like the device you're staring at right now could not be possible. How many people do you think it has taken to produce that device? And what about the production of the materials needed to make that device? And you think this could all be done without structure and leadership? How are workers supposed to know what to do if they've never done it before? They need someone with experience, or at least someone who thinks they have an answer. So how do the workers progress in their task if they don't follow the leadership of this person they need? 

The problem with your argument here is that hierarchy is literally a natural order, as social creatures. It starts from the time you're born and have parents.

 

[Mutsuo Toi]

>USA give you a load of money.

>Didn't even listen to an Asian refugees from China, Vietnam instead listen to the states slave.

 

[Fox Fire]

Again, replying here, since it's more on this topic:

 

 

Organization does not require hierarchy.


You really don't understand what I was trying to say?

On such mass scales I think it does. 

It's not that I think communism doesn't work, it just doesn't work on the scale you want it to. A small village, or even a town the size of the one I live it might be able to make a communist society work with the sacrifice of modern living standards, but that's about as good as I see communism ever getting. The reason societies exist in the first place is for the sake of survival. Humans cannot survive on individuality. We are physically weak, highly intellectual, social creatures that rely on cooperation to survive. Leadership is entirely natural in social creatures, because it's the best method of survival. 

Even in this game, we're part of an "anarchist" alliance, but it's really not an anarchy and couldn't operate the way it does without some kind of leadership to make a final judgement. Even if our leadership is soft and lenient, it can and does demand order when needed, and it is indeed needed sometimes. Without leadership then what does a group do in the case of a disagreement? Especially if the disagreement has more than 2 sides? You could organize some kind of group process for making decisions such as democracy, but what then if the minority group simply decides not to participate?

You complain that people are basically forced to follow the system, but the same would be just as true under your idea by default, unless you can explain how it is that people in such a communist society would able to choose to not follow the system, and not have the system fall apart? 

Despite your thinking that society doesn't need leadership, history completely contradicts that thought. Humanity didn't get to where it is now without leaders, and I can't think of any notable achievements made by humans without leadership. In fact it seems to be leaders that can and have inspired people to accomplish amazing feats.

I was really into anarchist communism as a teenager so I completely understand your ideals and why you insist that they can work, but the more I observe the bigger picture of society both past and present, in all it's various forms, the more I realize that hierarchy is an absolutely unavoidable part of human nature. People are always going to follow charismatic people, especially ones with great ideas. In fact I think many polytheistic gods were likely inspired by real human leaders, likely intelligent people who found great solutions to serious problems and later became revered as divine. Communism never includes the factor of the raw nature of life. Life itself, in all of its various forms doesn't operate on a moral standing that all life should be treated the same. It operates on quite the opposite; survival of the fittest. The actual purpose of life seems to be continuation, rather than preservation. 

Edited January 20, 2016 by Fox Fire

[Lannan13]

Communism is bad

What's your RFD?

[Miles Dyson]

 

personal property: things that belong to you that you use in your everyday life. food, water, toothbrush, bicycle, whatever.

private property: things that produce. factories, stores, heavy machinery, farmland, etc.

 

 

No no no no no. Public ownership of the means of production does NOT mean state ownership of the means of production. Just because nothing is privately owned doesn't mean that some idiot halfway around the world gets to tell you what you have to make in your factory today. That's absurd - we are not capitalists. But we are also not against voluntary organization. Our enemy is hierarchy.

 

I never said that public ownership = state ownership; although, typically, it does. I'm not implying that council communism is necessarily statist. I'm saying that it is inefficient for an complex economy, like we have today, to be macromanaged by a larger democratic body; and if money is abolished completely, workers will have no way to measure the value of their labor; instead, cost would be determined by the community, not by free agents participating in a natural, unplanned economy. C.C. may not be vertically centralized, but it does centralize industrial power into the hands of popular assemblies; which in today's post-industrial world, is impractical, not to mention, a blatant disregard for labor value theory. What incentive is there to exceed productive expectations, when everyone's work is valued equally? Workers deserve the right to set a fair price for their labor, that is not up to the community (or state, or capitalists) to decide. 

Edited January 19, 2016 by Miles Dyson

[Redael]

capitalism is nothing more then athiest tool to oppress workers

Atheist? The only non-Christian I'm aware of running for president that has a shot is Bernie sanders, and he ain't capitalist. And The free market gives everyone a chance to not be oppressed, The USA has regulations to stop workers from being treated unfairly, some of them don't make since and need to be lifted, but others are important, but your probably referring to minimum-low wage jobs as oppressing, and anyone trying to support themselves or Thayer family in a low-paying job, should've tried harder to earn a scholarship and graduate college and put in more effort while working. The only reason I see someone not being able to get past college is if they have a mental/physical disability that interferes with their ability, in that case I'm fine with my tax money helping them, I'm also fine giving tax money to help poor kids get scholarships. However, if I had a choice, I wouldn't give my tax money to a person who can't find a job and is in poverty, beacuse 95% it's their fault