this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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My country used to have communism. Niche shops like this barely ever started as small businesses and instead usually started out as specialized departments of large all-encompassing state corporations. Instead of there being a company that specialized in making furniture, the furniture would be made by the logging company. The company that ran a chemical plant would directly sell shampoos, paints, toothpaste, fertillizer, etc. It cut out middle men but the products were usually crap quality because it couldn't focus on each product individually. This stifled progress. My dad wanted to learn programming (this was the late 80s) but because the government was too oldschool to open a computer science degree programme, the only way to get near a computer was to go to a university that specialized in mining and take a programme in mining machine automation.
On the flipside, it's not illegal anywhere in capitalismland™ for the workers to own the means of production. It's called a cooperative. Get a bunch of your comrades together, sign a few legal documents, pool your money for a downpayment, get a loan. Badabing, badaboom, "communist" unicycle repair shop.
(The bank might however disagree with you that a unicycle repair shop is a viable business venture in most cities, but hey in my book that still beats a Central Planning Bureau telling you "Nyet, no-one needs unicycles, however we need you at the mines, glory to Arstotzka!").
Agreed. Actually a capitalism with cooperatives is the flavor of capitalism that I support.
I believe you should look up market socialism if that interests you.
It works until a guy with too much money decides it must stops. That's the problem with capitalism: it basically recreates feudalism.
The biggest question is who gets the power. A dictatorial state or an oligarchy of capitalists is the same.
Liberalism won against USSR because they restrained themselves just long enough for USSR to collapse.
I was not talking about liberalism... ? Cooperatives work. The statutes can say whatever they want about wealth distribution as long as the company keeps paying its creditors.
Saying "It works until a guy with too much money decides it must stops" is just a huge self-own coming from a communist, because if the internal and democratic redistribution of wealth of a co-op stops working... well capitalism ain't anything to go with that, that's just communism falling in on itself and (as happened with all real communist states) turning into an authoritarian kleptocracy.
Still, overall co-ops work pretty well. Lots of banks are famously co-ops (i.e. credit unions). Obviously they haven't solved the problems of greed or poverty, but that's only surprising if you think that "seizing the means of production" is the only condition required for complete emancipation of the proletariat (which one would only think if they had never taken a single look at the history of the USSR).
It's also not illegal in capitalismland™ to use economic chicanery to outcompete and either destroy or swallow any productive organization that doesn't sacrifice everything to the profit principle - which might explain why there is no need for it to make co-ops illegal.
Bad management is not the the specialty of communism. In fact, this is a governance problem: is it lead by an idiot and how can people change the lead to solve this problem. Capitalism has this problem currently with governments and companies directions totally unable to do anything about climate change and wealth inequalities.
People always mistaken dictature or oligarchy with communism unfortunately.