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Is Communism good? This poll is closed. |
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375 | 66.25% |
| No |
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191 | 33.75% |
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asdf32 posted:The label profit is ultimately as significant as other labels for money like 'fee' or 'tax' - not significant. What ultimately matters is who gets what portion of the economic pie - not the label for it. Explain to me how profits are the same as fees and taxes.
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Mar 5, 2017 03:26
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The Kingfish posted:Why couldn't a system of communism exist based around some sort constitutionally democratic system with functional checks and balances? That's what I'm interested in achieving. The market is half the check on economic power. If Subaru hadn't made a car I liked I would have bought a Honda. Hence in real life the owners/managers of both spend a ton of time trying to make a product I want. The irony to me is that communists are sure the current democratic system is corrupted by the current economic elite but thinks the solution is to remove half the checks while concentrating economic power further while ignoring that when this was done in the past it ended up as bad as that sounds in exactly the ways you'd expect. The Kingfish posted:Explain to me how profits are the same as fees and taxes. Profit is the label we give to money that goes to capitalists. It's money. It gets paid to humans. It may or may not be 'deserved' in an abstract or economic sense. The humans spend it or save it.
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Mar 5, 2017 03:34
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White Rock posted:You own a large share of a large shoe and clothing company. This is wrong. Dividends aren't shares in growth (what a weird idea), they're just shares in profits. It's entirely possible for your company to make fewer sales at identical prices this year than it did last year while paying you a greater dividend if the contraction in sales is more than offset by a reduction in costs. asdf32 posted:Profit is the label we give to money that goes to capitalists. It's money. It gets paid to humans. It may or may not be 'deserved' in an abstract or economic sense. The humans spend it or save it. No, it's the label we give to the difference between revenue and expenditure. Profits earned by cooperatives are still profits.
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Mar 5, 2017 04:19
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asdf32 posted:The irony to me is that communists are sure the current democratic system is corrupted by the current economic elite but thinks the solution is to remove half the checks while concentrating economic power further while ignoring that when this was done in the past it ended up as bad as that sounds in exactly the ways you'd expect. This is a load of strawman bollocks. Not every stream of communist thought wants a Soviet Union style dictatorship of the proletariat concentrating wealth into the hands of the state. The main point of communism is that industries should be owned collectively by the workers and of the many potential ways of realising this goal centralised state planning is but one. Collectively owned and run industries and services can even function perfectly compatibly with a market economy. Quite simply, as things stand corporations are only answerable to their shareholders. If they were collectively owned by, and thus directly answerable in a meaningful way to their employees, their customers and those effected by their business practices most of the worst excesses of capitalism would be decisively put to bed right there and then.
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Mar 5, 2017 06:19
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TomViolence posted:This is a load of strawman bollocks. Not every stream of communist thought wants a Soviet Union style dictatorship of the proletariat concentrating wealth into the hands of the state. The main point of communism is that industries should be owned collectively by the workers and of the many potential ways of realising this goal centralised state planning is but one. Collectively owned and run industries and services can even function perfectly compatibly with a market economy. Cool story, but how do you put beneficial ownership of industry in the hands of the proletariat and keep it there without a colossal instrument of force (i.e. a State), and what possible reason can you have for thinking this institution is not going to serve its own interests by extracting rents from producers?
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Mar 5, 2017 06:26
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Cool story, but how do you put beneficial ownership of industry in the hands of the proletariat and keep it there without a colossal instrument of force (i.e. a State), and what possible reason can you have for thinking this institution is not going to serve its own interests by extracting rents from producers? Are you some kind of lolbertarian or something? Because the idea that the state inevitably is an institution whose interests stands in opposition to those of the people is pretty drat suspect.
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Mar 5, 2017 08:09
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Cerebral Bore posted:Are you some kind of lolbertarian or something? Extremely not. States are obviously better than the alternative. But I don't think getting them to behave themselves is a trivial engineering problem. quote:Because the idea that the state inevitably is an institution whose interests stands in opposition to those of the people is pretty drat suspect. It's not at all impossible for the interests of the powerful to align with those of the governed. It's keeping them that way that's the issue, and communists, in my experience, have a very difficult time explaining how to stop markets from allocating wealth in ways they don't like by means that don't expose labour to a massive risk of exploitation at the hands of those who control martial power. But of course you're more concerned with what the fact that I thought to ask the question re communism and the principal/agent problem says about me than actually considering the issue. V suspicious that I would want to talk about the practicalities of restraining power. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Mar 5, 2017 |
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Mar 5, 2017 10:15
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Extremely not. In that case you're describing a problem that is at the very least just as prevalent under capitalism, which makes your objection nonsensical and your claim to want to talk about the practicalities of restraining power kinda strange.
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Mar 5, 2017 10:31
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Cerebral Bore posted:In that case you're describing a problem that is at the very least just as prevalent under capitalism, Wow, really!? No poo poo, I hadn't at all noticed the interests of the ruling elite aren't currently aligned with the masses'. quote:which makes your objection nonsensical and your claim to want to talk about the practicalities of restraining power kinda strange. "This problem isn't already solved so it's strange that you'd want to talk about how to solve it."
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Mar 5, 2017 10:41
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Wow, really!? No poo poo, I hadn't at all noticed the interests of the ruling elite aren't currently aligned with the masses'. No, the strange part comes when you object to a proposal to decentralize the economic power in society by acting incredulous about how anybody could possibly think that a socialist state wouldn't inherently set its interests in opposition to those of the people. It doesnät exactly sound like how you start a good faith discussion about how to prevent the abuse of power in a hypothetical socialist society.
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Mar 5, 2017 10:53
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This is pretty funny coming from someone who would so obviously rather discuss why anybody would want to talk about preventing abuses of power than actually talk about preventing abuses of power. I never said I thought the problem was unique to communism, or socialism. Like I said, it's really just the principal/agent problem. It is obviously, however, a much bigger problem for a communist than it is for, say, a social democrat, because the task of a social democratic state isn't to arrest the accumulation of capital and prevent the exploitation of Labour, but to let all that poo poo happen and then skim a bunch off wealth off the top and redistribute it to ease the material suffering of the proletariat. As far as Capital is concerned, a socdem state does basically the same thing as a self-interested aristocracy or monarchy. That it wants to take the rents it extracts from production in the form of taxes and distribute crumbs to the poor rather than letting them starve and instead building golden palaces full of nubile slave girls isn't of much concern to Capital. So long as the same power by which taxes are levied also grants sufficiently robust property rights, Capital doesn't care and is reasonably tolerant of a certain degree of taxation because the threat of capital flight keeps it from getting out of hand. When a socdem state goes feral (as they frequently do) and the custodians decide to keep extracted wealth for themselves instead of giving out bread to the needy, it's just behaving like a self-interested monarchy and Capital still doesn't care because the exact same mechanisms are operating to keep business running relatively smoothly for the capitalist. A communist state, on the other hand, wants to go substantially further. It doesn't just want to skim some off the top of Capital's pie (for whatever reason), it wants to stop Capital from accumulating altogether by placing and keeping beneficial ownership of the means of production in the hands of Labour. Now, even if a Marxist wizard could magically wave his wand and give Labour the means of production instantaneously, he can't just call it a day and have everybody go about producing and trading as free as air with their resources. Some people are going to do less productive things than others and pretty soon you're going to get people making trades that are more to one party's benefit than another, and oh poo poo accumulation of capital is happening again. gently caress. "Laissez-faire communism" being an obvious oxymoron, this is no good. We can't just take all Capital's resources, redistribute it evenly and leave everything alone, so we need something to keep the means of production in Labour's hands. So, before even arriving at the question of whether central planning is strictly necessary, it's clear whatever mechanism or institution whose job it is to keep things egalitarian in a communist society needs substantially more control over production and the allocation of resources than a socdem or even a despotic society does. Is it hoping too much that you see now why the degree of power required to not merely instantiate a transfer of beneficial ownership of the means of production from Capital to Labour, but to keep the exploitation of Labour from re-emerging as competitive forces do their thing in a market environment poses a greater risk to the governed than the power of a socdem or self-interested monarchy? The greater the power, the more urgent the problem of binding it to a particular scope becomes.
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Mar 5, 2017 12:41
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Smudgie Buggler posted:This is wrong. Dividends aren't shares in growth (what a weird idea), they're just shares in profits. It's entirely possible for your company to make fewer sales at identical prices this year than it did last year while paying you a greater dividend if the contraction in sales is more than offset by a reduction in costs. Huh yeah you right, i got dividends and capital gain mixed up, my bad. As for the second point i mention cost cutting as a potential strategy. White Rock posted:So you have a built in incentive to pressure the company into cutting cost, increase the potential customer base or increase the price. Still, the point of the distributed interests of investors, separate from the factory owners, incentives growth still stands. As does the nature of that competition. This was all in response to falcon2424 idea that growth doesn't have to be inherent to capitalistic systems. Do you agree with that hypothesis?
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Mar 5, 2017 14:40
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Smudgie Buggler posted:This is pretty funny coming from someone who would so obviously rather discuss why anybody would want to talk about preventing abuses of power than actually talk about preventing abuses of power. You're the one who came into the discussion being a right rear end and demanding to know how somebody possibly could believe that the state would be non-malevolent and are now falling back on casting thinly-velied aspersions on the motivations of others. Either you're arguing in bad faith, of you're being horribly bad at communicating. Smudgie Buggler posted:I never said I thought the problem was unique to communism, or socialism. Like I said, it's really just the principal/agent problem. Your assumptions are utter horseshit, which explains why your conclusions are so rear end-backwards. First of all ,Capital doesn't "tolerate" an actual Social Democratic state, rather it is completely opposed to its existence and it will work to undermine it as soon as the opportunity arises. See the past forty years and the complete destruction and/or cooption of every single Social Democratic party across the entire western world for a pertinent example. From this immediately follows that if a Social Democratic state is to survive and not degenerate into neoliberalism with a human face, it would need to enact the exact same massive amount of coercion towards Capital that you identify as a problem in the communist case. Even worse, you also fail to realize that once the socialization of the economy has taken place, it would be just as possible to prevent excess capital accumulation by taxation and redistribution as it would in the Social Democratic case. Hence there is no inherent substantial difference between the two cases, and going from one state of affairs to another would at worst be a lateral move. This is why you're talking nonsense, pal.
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Mar 5, 2017 14:51
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TomViolence posted:Quite simply, as things stand corporations are only answerable to their shareholders. Except not at all. Walmart's shareholds could order stores painted pink and stocked with nothing but Anime which is power, but they'd be out of business in a year after customers stopped shopping there. That's power too. Smudgie is exactly right that you can't actually deal with the problems communists want to solve without centralizing power. Competing cooperatives for example ultimately still have profit motive and do nothing to address inequalities or exploitation of others. So power is going to be moved and centralized - not eliminated. The question is whether its new location is well checked against abuse and when the starting point is to remove (or weaken) half the checks that currently exist and centralize that power under a state which is supposedly already corrupted by it it's not an easy case to make. Of course you'd also have to recognize that's what's happening and not pretend capitalist power is unique.
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Mar 5, 2017 16:15
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You can distribute power, that's what democracy is theoretically all about. A central planning apparatus doesn't imply a single party state. The planners would be public servants without power to enact anything without the support of the power structure, be it centralized or distributed.
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Mar 5, 2017 16:33
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Whether democracy alone (after removing many of the checks represented by the market) can contain economic power is a general question which starts by recognizing that capitalists don't hold a super special form of power. The people high up in the state bureaucracy end up with the same level of immediate control over the means of production. Personally because I don't think democracy has already collapsed under pressure from economic power I'm more optimistic about democracy as a check against power than the average communist. Though I think history gives ample reason to worry about what happens when most or all power is moved under the state.
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Mar 5, 2017 17:28
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lol if you think that democracy can coexist with private ownership of the means of production.
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Mar 5, 2017 17:33
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Besides just saying lol I've been wanting a reminder as to why, for example, democracy didn't end in say the robber barron era or at any other time in the past 200+ year history of democracy coexisting with private ownership of the means of production if such a thing is impossible.
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Mar 5, 2017 17:39
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asdf32 posted:Besides just saying lol I've been wanting a reminder as to why, for example, democracy didn't end in say the robber barron era or at any other time in the past 200+ year history of democracy coexisting with private ownership of the means of production if such a thing is impossible. He is saying that it's not really democracy.
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Mar 5, 2017 17:46
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asdf32 posted:Except not at all. Walmart's shareholds could order stores painted pink and stocked with nothing but Anime which is power, but they'd be out of business in a year after customers stopped shopping there. That's power too. Wrong again. If somebody's shopping regularly at a big box store like Walmart do you really think he has that many alternatives in the first place? What if every store chain paints their walls pink or something equally ludicrous, like for instance, sourcing their wares from cheap third world factories and moving jobs out of the country? If every competing business becomes qualitatively and ethically similar, as they tend to be in situations where they control similar market shares, consumer choice doesn't allow the market to self-regulate like you claim. asdf32 posted:Smudgie is exactly right that you can't actually deal with the problems communists want to solve without centralizing power. Competing cooperatives for example ultimately still have profit motive and do nothing to address inequalities or exploitation of others. If the employees own and have democratic control over the business practices of their company they can act much more effectively agaisnt their own exploitation than they can through bullshit like consumer choice.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:08
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asdf32 posted:Except not at all. Walmart's shareholds could order stores painted pink and stocked with nothing but Anime which is power, but they'd be out of business in a year after customers stopped shopping there. That's power too. A shepherd that would starve its flock would also starve himself. Does it mean the sheep have power over him?
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Mar 5, 2017 19:47
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It's basically the Lion King circle of life theory of power distribution. When lions die their bodies feed the grass which in feeds the antelope who the lions eat. Checks and balances.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:55
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Communism is good.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:57
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steinrokkan posted:A shepherd that would starve its flock would also starve himself. Does it mean the sheep have power over him? Sheep are pretty dumb but, say, my 1 year old daughter exerts huge amounts of power over me with nothing other than pointing and crying. It's not law but getting people to pay attention to you and do things you want (that they don't want to do) is as real as power gets. So what did you think you were getting at? And this need not be abstract when we can glance at the history of the Soviet consumer economy to see what it looks like when average people don't actually have meaningful control over the means of production (it means stuff they want isn't produced for them).
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Mar 6, 2017 04:31
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OwlFancier posted:lol if you think that democracy can coexist with private ownership of the means of production. In most of the western world it does and has for centuries now, so I'm not sure what kind of lame rear end burn this is supposed to be.
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Mar 6, 2017 09:31
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It's not so much that can't coexist, but they are becoming (again) increasingly at odds with one another after a relatively long post-war denouement. edit: actually just read everything by Wolfgang Streeck KaptainKrunk fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 09:48
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asdf32 posted:Sheep are pretty dumb but, say, my 1 year old daughter exerts huge amounts of power over me with nothing other than pointing and crying. It's not law but getting people to pay attention to you and do things you want (that they don't want to do) is as real as power gets. The customers can't point at anything and get it. They can point at some of the limited merchandise the corporation offers on the grounds of being profitable, and influence the corporation to order more of it. It is not exercising influence over the business, it is making it more efficient in getting your money. However, in a supply dominated economy businesses can also largely shove the products they find most profitable down the public's throat by giving them more prominent position, reducing choice, making other options less convenient to obtain, etc., thus making the call of what they are going to purchase preemptively for a massive amount of population that can't afford choosing alternatives. Manufacturers will also crowd towards the optimal point of the cost vs demand equation based on aggregate public decision, further eliminating layers of choice available to the average consumer - you can choose whatever you want, as long as it is what everybody else picks as well. "Oh, look, I asked if I can preorder something from their sortiment, and they said yes, we also accept payments in advance. Empowerment!" THe Soviet economy was a travesty, but that doesn't mean the current model is the consumers' dream. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 09:56
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The rest of your post is such a sputtering mess of naïve indignation, I have no confidence you'd come close to getting the message even if I did pick it apart in good faith. But I will address this:Cerebral Bore posted:Even worse, you also fail to realize that once the socialization of the economy has taken place, it would be just as possible to prevent excess capital accumulation by taxation and redistribution as it would in the Social Democratic case. How the hell are you going to tax and redistribute all the drat Capital anybody might accumulate from their endeavours without killing the incentive to produce? Unless, of course, you incentivise productive behaviour by other means. Such as a truncheon. In which case, you're making my case for me.
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Mar 6, 2017 10:27
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Libertarian socialism aka anarcho-communism is good. Authoritarian socialism of the tankie variety with vanguardists that set themselves up in place of the bourgeoisie, not so good. Rojava good, Free catalonia, Mahknovist ukraine, etc good. North Korea, bad.
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Mar 6, 2017 10:55
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Smudgie Buggler posted:The rest of your post is such a sputtering mess of naïve indignation, I have no confidence you'd come close to getting the message even if I did pick it apart in good faith. But I will address this: You're literally projecting so hard that you fail to notice the difference between "excessive" and "all". Also this is a very unsubtle way of trying to dodge the fact that you have no actual rebuttal.
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Mar 6, 2017 11:03
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Arri posted:Libertarian socialism aka anarcho-communism is good. Authoritarian socialism of the tankie variety with vanguardists that set themselves up in place of the bourgeoisie, not so good. How do you keep things communist without a state? Cerebral Bore posted:You're literally projecting so hard that you fail to notice the difference between "excessive" and "all". He stammered, rebutting quite literally nothing at all. Just rephrase the question: How are you going to tax and redistribute any more of the Capital that might accumulate than social democratic states already do without killing the incentive to produce? (We'll just ignore for the sake of argument that the accumulation of Capital full stop the the central question communism seeks to address, and that by permitting a bit of it you've already thrown out the baby with the bathwater.) Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 13:32
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Smudgie Buggler posted:How do you keep things communist without a state? In theory the same way you keep things Capitalist, by having everything in your society work to shape everyone's view in that context and block out less desirable positions. Smudgie Buggler posted:How are you going to tax and redistribute any more of the Capital that might accumulate than social democratic states already do without killing the incentive to produce? By making the motivation to produce something other than personal enrichment.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:35
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OwlFancier posted:In theory the same way you keep things Capitalist, by having everything in your society work to shape everyone's view in that context and block out less desirable positions. Yeah but how do you do that without a mechanism of mass coercion (i.e. a state)? quote:By making the motivation to produce something other than personal enrichment. Same question. This is the problem I encounter over and over again with AnComs. At some point you have to say, "We'll have large participatory institutions that keep people behaving the way we want them to behave" as if simply insisting that what you've just described isn't a state makes it not a state. The way you define words doesn't actually alter the reality they describe. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 13:41
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Smudgie Buggler posted:He stammered, rebutting quite literally nothing at all. So your silver bullet rebuttal is to pretend that A: There's some fixed amount of capital that is redistributed by all Social Democtatic states and B: redistributing even a single red cent more will immediately kill off the incentive to produce? Like, I get that you have a strawman that you really, really, want to argue against, but I don't think I can stand in for the voices in your head as I'm not a mind reader.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:42
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Dude, if you can't answer the question just stop. How are you going to keep people producing if you're going to systematically take away their beneficial ownership of the profits that result and redistribute them to others? Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Mar 6, 2017 |
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Mar 6, 2017 13:44
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Yeah but how do you do that without a mechanism of mass coercion (i.e. a state)? It isn't the state particularly that ingrains capitalist thought into us, it's the fact that we already live in a capitalism-dominated society. We have the very wealthy and they own everything and we have to sell our labour to them to live and we aspire one day to be like them. It is that presence of capitalism that shapes our thought, not the presence of the state. If we lived in a society where from birth we were expected to participate in communal labour because it is considered a moral good to do so, and not doing so is considered wrong, and all our friends, family etc live this way, and where everyone regards capitalist organization as theft from the true builders of communal prosperity, then I think we would believe differently, again with or without a state. The transition between them where you still have counterrevolutionary elements trying to restore the old system is difficult, sure, but that's a different question from "how could a communist society not devolve into capitalism immediately without a state" A transitional society certainly could but I think you've about as much probability of devolving into feudalism in a capitalist society, assuming a stable society.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:49
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Dude, if you can't answer the question just stop. I'm not sure that I can answer a continuous barrage of nonsense assertions, no, espeically not when you jump from one to another without even trying to acknowledge the counterarguments directed towards you. Smudgie Buggler posted:How are you going to keep people producing if you're going to systematically take away their beneficial ownership of the profits that result? This is a pretty weird claim to make when arguing against the idea that the workers should own the means of production, and even stranger because this is literally what happens under Capitalism and people are somehow still managing to produce stuff.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:50
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What do you think a general assembly and participatory democracy is about? The point is to get people involved as members of the community that results in them being engaged and working towards mutual aid. You don't have to force people to do anything if they are in communities shaped by voluntary association. Anarchism doesn't mean no rules or no authority. It means the community is the authority and agrees upon societal standards. We aren't calvinists that worship work for the sake of toil. If someone doesn't want to do something then they don't have to do it. If society agrees then great then if not they kick you out and you can go associate with someone else.
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Mar 6, 2017 13:51
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Dude, if you can't answer the question just stop. Why are you currently working hard for a job that does not give you a % of the profit? Anarchism itself would probably be more inefficient than capitalism. I mean, few people actually wants to build, run and work in Chinese style mega sweatshops. The question then would be what would actually be necessary to produce, and if we have enough of that. So especially food, shelter and energy. Probably you wouldn't have a new iPhone model every year, but that's the trade off you will make.
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Mar 6, 2017 14:01
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Capitalism perpetuates itself through more than a cultural mindset, hell look at the history of the last 200 years, if anything capitalism is rigidly enforced with both physical and economic coercion. That not only takes a state (or a structure that essential acts like a state) but a willingness to regularly devotion of resources in order to maintain dominance. I am not devoted to state socialism, but if you look at the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, how well would they have fared if they were anarcho-communists? (Admittedly, there were honest left-anarchists in the war...they successes were limited (Makhno could only hold portions of SW Ukraine).) State socialism developed because in all honest it was very efficient for the needs of war, and in all honesty any left-wing insurrection will likely face similar opposition. So there is a honest question here do you remain ideologically rigid and likely be crushed or you become more ideologically flexible in order to survive?
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Mar 6, 2017 14:06
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