I am making my own blunder there and referring to the idea of the “communist state”, I suppose closer to what we understand as socialism, rather than the idealistic communist society which, like you say, is moneyless (and stateless, which immediately separates it from say the USSR or whatever).
Yeah, but that’s the problem. Communism sort of relies on that communist state transition period. Or at least, that’s where every single communist state has turned into a dictatorship. The party-in-the-meantime never gives up their power “after a communist utopia sprouts.” That’s really the main leftist communism critique.
Socialists, communists, anarchists all have very similar ideas of a socialist utopia. But it’s how we get there where we all differ. Anarchism is communism minus the ruling party while relying on people to be good, self sustain, and fight back together when under attack. It would be great if we could have some left unity, but….well, ask the FAI how that went.
A reminder - or possibly just some information - because I see this misconception so often. You can have money in communist or anarchist societies. You can reward shitty jobs, or even all jobs with money to be used for luxuries! This does not go against the principles of these social systems, despite what people often imagine. You may not have individuals racking up huge amounts of assets in the form of business empires, but you as an individual can still, idk, do work and use the output of that work to buy beer or whatever.
That is not to say that everyone will agree that these societies should have that… But just consider this before you make the “what about the sewage workers” argument.
Personally though I’m sceptical that money can be without hierarchy, or that the distinction between necessities and luxuries is all that meaningful, since it’s all very relative
I mean if you redefine communism, sure. But a communist society as described by Marx is moneyless, classless and with not central government. Because if all your needs are met and resources shared amongst the commune, what purpose would money serve?
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand your response, we can’t redefine communism if you play the “communism has never been tried” card based on a rigid definition?
Yes, linguistic descriptivism is fine… unless you engage in linguistic prescriptivism on the same subject.
Yes, you can redefine communism… so long as you’re not one of those people whose defense of communism heavily involves a particular definition of communism.
If that’s not you, personally - great. You know how a conditional statement works.
People talking shit about communism are obviously referring to the several countries which were allegedly headed that direction, and - for some reason! - super didn’t get there.
Defending the apparently-nonexistant utopian ideal is not a meaningful response to even the shittiest and least-informed criticism of those very real countries and their very real problems. It’s like if conservative dipshits tried arguing that capitalism is only when perfectly rational consumers have unlimited information, so “capitalism has never been tried.” It’s a stupid dodge. You know what words are used to mean.
The fundamental issue I have with anyone who doesn’t understand communism is the massive authoritarian government it takes to kill the millions of civilians. Wait was that not apart of the books? Weird how it keeps happening then
The fundamental issue I have with anyone who doesn’t understand capitalism is that it is still directly resulting in mass poverty, starvation, wars for resource robbery, ignored climate crisis but somehow the grand promises of everyone being able to become rich beyond their needs or plausible desires is dangled in front of their eyes while they they are shoved all of the above problems plus pettiest sugar grain up their asses.
Given how such people can’t even wait 5 minutes in a line or traffic with the physical workings of the efficient and beneficial systems being very apparent, it is not weird how it keeps perpetuating.
People live in an artificial binary where they believe communism and capitalism are the only two economic systems in the entire world.
I’ll be bold and say it outright: communism is a fundamentally broken idea and sucks balls, and so is capitalism, but both in similar-yet-different ways.
Communism is faulty economics and fails to differentiate between man-made capital and god-given land and natural resources, grouping both as “the means of production”. The problem with this is land and capital have very different properties. Where land (and natural resources) cannot be created and are zero-sum, capital must be created and is not zero-sum. Communism blatantly ignores this and has a zero-sum view on capital, meaning it suggests policies that fail to effectively produce new capital, and thus fail to effectively produce new wealth and prosperity. Further, when the state takes monopolistic control over land and capital (in addition to its existing monopoly on violence), it concentrates far too much power, which is why communist countries keep on becoming brutal dictatorships.
Capitalism, on the other hand, also fails to differentiate between land and capital, but in a different way. Instead of socializing both, it privatizes both, allowing massive rent-seeking and exploitation as a result of monopolization of land and natural resources. It also often willfully ignores that negative externalities and other market failures actually make society, on the net, poorer and less prosperous. Further, this concentration of wealth into the rent-seeking, monopolist class grants them more political power to make it even easier to rent-seek, further concentrating their own power and wealth.
What I want instead is a Georgist system that correctly identifies this distinction between land and capital, and then uses economically proven policies that respect the inherent differences between land and capital.
Capitalism v. communism is certainly a false dilemma. There are other alternatives such as Georgism as you noted. I would go further and advocate a Georgist economic democracy where all firms are structured as worker coops. Similar to the problem you identify with capitalism in that it fails to treat land and capital differently, the mainstream of Georgist thought fails to differentiate labor from capital in an important respect. Labor can't factually be transferred unlike capital @196
I agree that I think worker coops elegantly solve certain problems (notably the principal-agent problem), but they also have certain drawbacks. Notably, they have more difficulty raising funds, they tend to be more risk-averse, they tend to be more growth-averse (people don’t like to dilute their own stake within the company with more people, but this means they don’t typically scale as easily or quickly to benefit economies of scale), and they tend to pay worse than hierarchical companies (counterintuitive as that may seem at first if the whole goal of market socialism is to have workers get more of their value back).
So is the solution to just throw our hands up and say, “Screw it, nothing we can do but let hierarchical organizations win”? Not quite. We still do see plenty of successful coops, notably in the form of credit unions. We also have unions and syndicalist solutions. We still have minimum wages (which are supported by most economists, as it turns out you can raise minimum wages a certain amount without raising unemployment because there’s often a non-zero amount of monopsony power in the labor market).
Further, I do think a Georgist system would empower labor much more than now. Without a housing crisis (thanks to LVT and YIMBYism), with a citizen’s dividend, with quality public education (education has positive externalities and thus deserves a Pigouvian subsidy), with more jobs (thanks to more economic growth and less rent-seeking), and with public works projects (essentially Pigouvian subsidies for things like environmental cleanup), I think labor would have much more bargaining power with employers.
For instance, the professional class right now gets good pay and generally good quality of life , despite rarely having unions or worker coops, precisely because they have high negotiating power with prospective employers.
My inclination is to strive for a more Georgist system, encourage unions, use minimum wages and government spending technocratically, and then see if more is yet needed.
The challenges you mention don't really refute the main arguments for worker coops, inalienable rights theory, even if they were unsolvable problems that couldn't be solved no matter what other changes were made. Economic democracy aims for workers to get the positive and negative fruits of their labor in property rights terms not value. This is based on the tenet that legal and de facto responsibility should match. Capitalist firms don't satisfy this basic tenet. They are thus illegitimate @196
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not a troll.
Times where that happens are exclusively when the previous systems have been overthrown by revolution leaving a power vacuum that bad faith actors have taken advantage of to assume dictatorial power for themselves and claim they are communist, make awful decisions not backed by experts or agreed upon by the masses, that leads to mass death, usually by famine.
We also have examples of countries democratically going socialist, but can’t comment on their long term success as they usually get disposed by American backed death gangs or CIA organised Coups.
Oh yeah lemme just rear cattle. Not like it’s a job that requires specific skill to be good at. Also, who’s gonna make the equipment to do those things?
"Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world. "
It’s funny how that imaginary Chad Stalin quote implies that you can’t do any of that stuff under capitalism, or that capitalism requires any person to be limited to “one sphere of activity.” In the USA we do have the freedom to choose to do any or all of that, and our only limitations towards doing them all are time and resources.
That is generally how it works in most of the world, except for primitive hunter-gatherer societies that live beyond modern civilization.
Except that most countries do have social services to support the needy. If you are poor in the USA, you can get free food and free healthcare from local county governments.
Lots of people have to work 40+ hours just to survive, that doesn’t leave much energy to do things other than your paid job. And you can’t just switch jobs willy nilly, pretty soon nobody would hire you anymore if your cv is full of jobs you’ve only held for a few weeks or months
There is no law that says you can’t switch jobs whenever you want. We literally do have the freedom to do that within the framework of capitalism and the laws that govern the citizens of the USA. The reality of the situation is of course that employers generally don’t like that, but employers are not the government and they don’t own us. We still have our freedom to choose to pursue whatever we want for employment. These are generally good features of capitalist democracy - it’s also good that employers are free not to choose unreliable candidates.
That’s not because it’s not a communist society, that’s because our government is run by shills paid by corporations to keep it that way.
Who runs a communist society? The people? Do we all take turns being president? What happens if it’s a bad dude’s turn and they don’t want to relinquish power?
The problem isn’t necessarily the economic system, the problem is the leadership appointed, combined with the people’s willful ignorance of their actions. Late-stage capitalism is definitely a problem, but in its current implementation more of a symptom of the points above.
tl;dr every system suffers from the same vulnerability: shitty people
Who runs a communist society? The people? Do we all take turns being president? What happens if it’s a bad dude’s turn and they don’t want to relinquish power?
No one said communism and limits on the government/a constitution are mutually exclusive (If your communist society even has a government, which technically they aren’t supposed to, not that I’ve seen any details on how that is supposed to work).
Right limited time and resources. You get more time and resources by earning more, quicker. You typically do that by becoming more skilled. You do THAT by… Specializing in one sphere of activity.
You absolutely can do whatever you want in a capitalist society, but let’s not pretend there’s no incentive to stick in one lane and specialize.
No, it’s how specialization works. True, as you do one thing more, you get better at it. This inherently disincentivizes jumping around and learning multiple skills, if we tie that to earning ability within capitalism. This does not have to be how we assign value, or earning, however. We could do any number of things differently, to incentivize different things.
One radical idea just off the top of my head would be pegging earning to age. Specialists get to specialize if they love a particular thing, and it won’t hurt their earnings. Jack of all trades still finds earnings more aligned to their actual worth to society - flexibility. Right now, being an okay person at everything is pretty crappily rewarded, because you only earn more by doing something REALLY well.
Again, this is just off the top of my head. I don’t think it’s necessarily the way to reorganize earnings in our society. It’s just an example of how labor doesn’t necessarily intrinsically have to lead to specialization earning more.
But society already values flexibility as well. As a basic example, I was hired in my current job in large part because I have a relatively broad range of skills within my field, rather than being hyper-specialized in one particular thing. Sure, in an abstract world where replacing employees is frictionless and firms are all megacorps with tens of thousands of employees (or more), tremendous specialization would probably be more commonplace. But in our real world, companies value flexible employees who can respond to changing projects, requirements, conditions, etc., because just firing and hiring a new specialist costs times and money, and many companies (startups especially) can’t afford having thousands of specialists in every niche they touch upon.
Further, even specialists have to communicate and collaborate with other specialists, and they need to be able to understand each other well enough to do so. If you wanted to build robotics to pick tomatoes automatically, for instance, it would be ridiculous to hire one tomato farmer and one roboticist who know nothing about each other’s respective specializations. If neither has any flexibility or breadth of knowledge, it will be very difficult for them to communicate and collaborate to get the project working.
It’s not saying you can just roll a dice and pick a random highly skilled job every day.
View it as this person’s responsibility is to get food. So he can fish if he wants to or hunt or raise animals, farm, forage etc. Anything that brings food for the commune. (And like anyone can and should be a critic)
If he got tired of that he could change responsibilities entirely, depending on how labour is distributed in the commune. If he wants to be a lawyer he will have to study law, and if he wants to become a scientist he will have to study a scientific field too.
But how does this scale? Because everyone is going to want a few jobs, and nobody is going to want to do the crappy chore jobs. Anyone with roommates will have had a conflict over messes, how is that different than a commune at a smaller scale?
I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but it’d be better if you just read a book on communist theory. Because I cab give you a summery of 1 of the possible solutions but without further context it will just generate more questions.
But if you don’t want that summary: people that work less desirable jobs get more benefits like early retirement or priority for certain luxury goods or something like that, but would ultimately have to be decided on by the community at large.
If a society is to function people need to be doing the work that isn’t enjoyable as well as the work that’s enjoyable.
There’s likely not enough people that get genuine enjoyment out of being a garbage man or sewer maintenance worker for a world with everyone doing what they want to work.
You have to add incentives for the less desirable labour or else the system collapses under its own weight.
The USSR gave early retirement to those that worked undesirable jobs, pretty decent incentive. Having undesirable jobs doesn’t make Communism collapse.
The solution capitalism gives us is that those jobs pay less. Any able-bodied person can clean toilets, so supply and demand results in little pay for cleaning toilets. However, those same people deserve a basic human life with food, shelter, and companionship, yet they are easily priced out of this. The “incentive” you speak of is the threat of starvation.
Communism actually recognizes this. Everyone pitches in to get the basic, necessary work done. This tends to be a lot less than generally expected. Most people today are not doing work that is necessary at all.
In my home town a sanitation worker makes double the provincial minimum wage and gets benefits. That’s an incentive for a job that has a low barrier to entry but undesirable labour.
The benefit of this system is that you can in fact choose this role instead of being assigned it based on the requirements of society. If the compensation isn’t tempting enough then the employer will increase the compensation until it makes sense. That’s how it’s supposed to work at the very least.
If the current implementation isn’t working then you address the issues with the implementation, you don’t tear it all down and try something completely different.
Which in America, is fuck all, and the biggest capitalists have actively stopped them from being instituted. The same people who benefit a lot from having a workforce that is cheap and easily replaceable.
I’m saying that your support is irrelevant. If you tried to be put them into place, you would be fought by extremely powerful interests. This is the only possible way capitalism could be moral, we’ve tried to do it, and it’s not happening.
What exactly makes you think that communism is going to remove people having power over other people? That seems to just be intrinsic to humans in general, your economic system isn’t going to change that.
And you can absolutely have social support systems in place if the populous pushes for them. Homeless shelters and welfare aren’t impossible ideas, they’re actively implemented across the world. The same goes for basic needs like healthcare.
Just because your government or community hasn’t implemented it doesn’t mean it’s not possible to do so. It means you need to convince those around you that it’s a good idea.
There are many paths to this, and I’m not yet settled on anything quite yet. I am convinced that the Marxist-Leninist branch (basically the USSR and Maoist China and the like) went completely down the wrong path; its focus on a vanguard party makes it particularly susceptible to cults of personality. Not just in the Soviet Union and such, but even much smaller groups aligned with that branch that pop up on college campuses.
A good start is getting everyone unionized. Beyond that, there is lots of theory behind mutual aid (such as (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution)[en.wikipedia.org/…/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut…], which also is something of a precursor to kin selection theory in evolution), and Anarcho-Syndicalists also have some ideas on how to organize groups into almost completely flat hierarchies that all work to mutual benefit.
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