this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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The only way to create a functioning communist state is to enforce it. It is inherently totalitarian in it's very Inception.
It is also assumes that all involved work for the greater good which is so woefully naive and makes any honest attempt at communism vulnerable to the most malevolent.
Blatantly untrue. The state controls the monetary policy and can restrict capitalism through lack of available currency. No force is needed. Barter opens up communal valuations of labor to set a price for a person's time based on what they can personally contribute. Want to hire someone to rewire your house? Better have equivalent skills or time to compensate the electrician.
Capitalism has conditioned people to think that violence is the only alternative to it.
Soo... money?
Barter is the model we are given for a non-currency centric society... It is also not how money less societies work. In a general sense the most common purely non-market socialist societies of the past and present (Communism alocates resources and property on a more rigid basis of "need" as artificially determined by an authority ideally (ideal being the operative word) democratic in nature, socialism just holds specific properties or services as common trust and can be split into multiple ideologies based on what should be considered public trust) had more like a running tab where people aren't really keeping track of how much they are benefiting.
Like if I come over and ask you for some of the wheat you're growing you'll probably say yes because we're neighbours and I helped you build your house and will give you a share of my apple harvests later on. If all of our group keep supporting each other this way and helping each other out we can get everything we need. People do still notice and socially reject shirkers in these systems but it is more like you recognize their stingy behaviour over a longer period. There are still theives who take things they are not welcome to and there does exist a sense of personal property. Trade straight across for roughly equivalent goods still has a place in these societies but in a limited way for people they don't see very often or people they have cause not to trust to hold up their end.
Barter still frames things in money centric (though technically not capitalist) veiw of labour. That it sounds inconvenient is largely the point. It's vaguely propagandist to give you nothing to imagine but a society obsessed with personal ownership of all property that is individualistic in nature.
Not to say that the end goal gor socialists is to revert to these systems. Market socialism basically combines capitalist systems into a blended system as most socialists agree that there are advantages to capitalism worth keeping around, just that unchecked it's a monster that partitions off what should be held in public trust to parties who erode the public good for personal gain that never fully returns to the system.
No. In the example, an electrician is skilled and can provide their skills and experience to your project - but they have a project of their own that they need help with. Unfortunately he wants help converting an old car into an EV, which you don't have experience in so you become unskilled labor for his task. An hour of skilled labor would be worth several unskilled labor hours, in this example, but that value conversion wouldnbe determined by the local community.
No money, just being helpful until the project is done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
Would you mind explaining how any state could prevent this? Whenever money became worthless, people resorted to using something else as a currency. Want someone to rewire your house? That's 5 liters of gasoline / 20 cigarettes / whatever.
It sounds like an interesting idea, but it has a few drawbacks I think. A quick example: If you wanted to move to another city, you may not want to keep every piece of furniture and instead "sell" it. You could just gift them to your neighbors or the next person moving in but you paid for it with vouchers and you don't want to waste the hours worked after all. How would you get rid of the furniture while still keeping its value? With a currency it's trivial - just sell it. But you can't really do this with vouchers, since they can't be transfered by design. You could perhaps trade it, but what if no one has anything you need?
And that's ignoring the glaring privacy issues of a centralised, personalised labor voucher system. Sure, it prevents fraud but it also allows the government a lot of insight into your life.
I don't know, just because you don't struggle doesn't mean you don't want to keep the value of something you worked for. And the value of the furniture (or any product) would be determined by the voucher cost. Something costing a lot of vouchers will be seen as valuable because it takes a lot of time and effort to acquire it.
And I would say there's quite a lot of privacy you're able to achieve, it's just not the default. I live in a country where cash is still the default, often times you're unable to pay with card at all. Plus, there are a few ways to pay anonymously online using certain crypto currencies - although this has a ton of drawbacks and is mostly used for illegal purposes.
That's money too.
If you go by the definition of money : "The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment." (Wikipedia, but it's a workable definition).
It's a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It's a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It's a store of value too, because people don't have to spend it at a particular time. And the "standard of deferred payment" part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.
I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.
Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that's what communists think of. And a strict "non-transferability" would beg the question of why would the "productive forces" (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can't accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).
Even worse : if vouchers don't fulfill the roles people want, you're still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc... as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.
That being said, I never had much respect for Marx' political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.
In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you're going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I'm mistaken, they still had money.
As for Marx... It's more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don't have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.
And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don't make the mistake of believing that all critics don't know what they're talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).
My bad, that may have sounded a bit agressive. I just mean that I know people on Lemmy tends to have very... polarized opinions of the political literacy of other people they disagree with, and I know that I'm not immune to that either. That's more to show my position on this than to point out something you did specifically.
Yep, that exactly my point. Money is kind of central to a complex economy, and the USSR had issues even while still using it.
You may want to look at the opinion of someone like Paul Krugman on that. He makes some interesting parallels in the rapid industrialization of countries like South Korea or Japan and what happened in the USSR before, using the difference between intensive and extensive growth. For him, the gist of it is that authoritarian control of the economy can provide impressive extensive growth (put people to work, mechanize agriculture, provide basic education, infrastructure, etc...), but that once you reach a somewhat prosperous but intermediary state, you need to switch to intensive growth (creating more output value for less inputs) to get to the "next stage", so to speak. He also argues that South Korea and Japan did this, while the USSR never managed and that's why from the 60's onward the economic prosperity of the USSR entered a long period of stagnation.
I mostly disagree with the extreme reductionism of historical materialism, which affirm that the whole of history is the history of the possession of the means of production. That mean that while I understand that the bourgeoisie/proletariat dichotomy as a useful heuristic about social analysis, I don't belive it is necessarily the most useful one in all cases. From there, the notion of the superiority of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" becomes very shaky, so the political theory of action all goes downhill from there. And globally, the whole problem of Economic Calculation make the whole theory of the working of communism I extremely difficult to solve (but to the credit of Marx, this problem would only emerge due to a better understand of market-based economics, half a century later).
Well, I think we'll have disagree here : you take on the calculation problem is the opposite of both my theorical framework and practical experience of industry (I work as an Electrical Engineer).
You can try to predict the demand of course, but the prediction is always fairly different from reality. Often, it's workable. Sometimes it's not.
But to be honest, the Economic Calculation Problem is ill-named, because from a Signal Processing persepctive, it's not really a processing power problem. No, the problem is in the Signal-to-noise ratio of the signals used to do these calculation.
Ultimately, if you have a very noisy signal (and economic signals are incredibly noisy), there's really not much you can do with just more processing power. And I have good reason to believe (based on Psycho-social understanding) that the way these signals are transmitted in Centrally Planned system (socialist or not), are particularly noisy themselves. Much more than prices-and-market based systems.
That being said, I don't think we'll see eye to eye here. Thanks for the discussion tho, it is always interesting to hear how other people think.
Common currency has existed since civilization began for an excellent reason: what you just wrote. The goal of communism is to make sure people aren't unduly exploited for their labor by a ruling class.
There are aspects of human society where some ideologies make more sense than others. Adherence to communism or capitalism exclusively is antithetical to a healthy society.
Sincerely, A mostly socialist
And how would this hypothetical communist but not authoritarian state enforce its will? Polite suggestions? Strongly worded letters? Do you honestly think the wealthy and their allies will just throw up their hands and let them have it?
The same way capitalism does: not participating in the system would cause the loss of home and no prospect of food, water, electricity, or any other service that would require payment as prescribed by the system. No overt force needed - the realization that the rest of their life would be a struggle of their own making will be enough, just like it is today.
If there's no force, there would be nothing stopping "alternative" currencies from emerging (crypto).
Government not always controlled the monetary policy, and it does it only through force. Without it things would quickly revert to its "natural" state, and we would have some sort of Agorist system
You're determined for forceto be used when there is just no need for it. If people and services use alternative currency then that's fine, it will be just like Bitcoin and crypto today where a handful of people put their money into it but ultimate adoption will be few and far between. Right now is like a golden age for crypto and where can you spend it? Very specific places - none of which don't provide shelter or power for living.
Try using only crypto to live and see how that goes for you. Again, no force is needed. Social pressure will solve the outliers when they see how much extra work their own lifestyle is compared to everyone else. If those outliers wish to struggle, go for it. They will be rewarded with the same lifestyle as everyone else, just work way harder for it.
Do you think private property is not enforced in a capitalist state?
For a moment, assume a complete stateless world. Anarchy in the genuine sense - literally no state, just people and the product of what they do. Let's say someone invents a thing and they want to sell it. There's no state to regulate what he does, so selling it isn't out of the question by default. Let's say he buys wood to construct storage facilities, and a store front. That was wood he bought, and he owns the product of it. Again, there's no state, just things to buy/sell and stuff to do. no state to claim the land he built it on, it's just his shop, his wood, his materials, his ideas. Those are privately owned by him, because he collected or bought it himself. Is this the result of enforcement, or is this just a guy who wanted to sell something?
Now consider again an anarchist state, at what point does the collective come into play? It's not his wood, it's everyone's wood! According to who, who decided that? This guy didn't, so it's his. Okay well let's say people have agreed that the means of production are collectively owned. Well, what if this guy doesn't agree? Actually, fuck it, it's my hypothetical, he doesn't agree. I sure wouldn't. I built it, so it's mine. Okay well now we have a group of people that agree they collective own the things I made. How are they gonna make it theirs? Are they gonna take it by force, thereby enforcing the rule?
Private ownership is not enforced, it's achieved. Collective ownership is enforced.
Who is he buying wood from? How did they come to own that wood? What is he using to pay for that wood? That "just things to buy/sell and stuff to do" is hand-waving a lot that goes into running the systems that we have in place. It's a common fallacy to assume capitalist functions are a feature of nature that have and will always exist just because it's the system you're living under.
It's not hand waving, it's a hypothetical lmao. You can't just call it a fallacy and leave without engaging with any of the reasoning, that's just cheating and lazy
You have no reasoning to begin with. I asked basic questions about your little scenario and you couldn't answer them. Again, where is this guy buying the wood from? How did the person who he bought the wood from come to own that wood in the first place? How were they granted the rights to that wood? Did they just stake a claim by calling firsties? First come first chop? What do they accept as payment for that wood? Some form of currency? What gives that currency legitimacy? You're hand-waving crucial details in your little capitalist fantasy but scrutinize collective ownership. You're either completely clueless or you're intentionally skipping over those details because then you'd have to admit the enforcement involved in getting your little capitalist fantasy to actually work out.
Dude there's no way you actually expect me to explain all of this just to illustrate that private ownership doesn't require enforcement. That point has been made, and it's been made clearly. Just because you're confused about specific details doesn't mean I did a poor job of explaining it. But, out of pure stubbornness, I'll indulge:
Either he cut it down or someone else did and sold it to him
Rights are a matter of state. There is no state. Nobody did.
Sure, I guess.
Again, there is no state. Currency is a representation of value legitimized by the state. Without a state, there's no currency. They would use money, and by money, I actually mean the Marxist definition of it. Money is a commodity, something that holds genuine value.
And this is why your questions are annoying to me. Are you under the impression that this was not a hypothetical? Do you think this was an analogy, or a genuine prescription for how a society should run? You're taking scrutiny hyper specific details because you want to argue with what I'm saying, yet what I'm trying to tell you have not even made a passing through your train of though.
My point is this, and only this: It is natural for people to take ownership of things. Any claim that something I gathered, bought, built, or was given as a gift is actually just in my possession would necessarily have to be enforced, otherwise it's just mine.
Okay so this guy went to some random forest and cut trees. Then someone emerges and says "hey, that's my forest, you're cutting my trees", to which the initial guy responds with "I don't see your name on 'em". Now what? Who resolves this dispute? The only point you've made is that you haven't thought your favored ideology through. It doesn't count as enforcement if it's your favored system because only the bad systems require enforcement in your eyes? A hypothetical doesn't work when it falls apart at the most basic level.
No, just seem to be willing to participate in a thought experiment that could contradict your worldview. That's fine, I'll just leave you alone now. Have a good one
You weren't willing to answer basic questions about your own thought experiment because those simple questions challenged your worldview. I've been trying to participate this whole time and it's just made you angry. Do you think participation is just people agreeing with you?
Okay so I just re read our exchange to see if I could see where you were coming from and oh man lol. Like, I do, but before I get to that, I really want you to understand how this exchange went from my perspective. I set up a hypothetical story set in genuine anarchy, and you called the premise of the hypothetical a fallacy. As if it's a fallacy to set up a hypothetical scenario. The point of the story was that taking ownership of something privately does not need enforcement to happen, nothing else. I explicitly said so. Part of the reason I described it as genuine anarchy was because I thought that would be pretty clearly allegorical. It seems like you took it to be an advocation for genuine anarchy in spite of this
Also, the questions you asked were not about the narrative or genuinely engaging. It was 3 in a row about anything you could think of relating to the wood specifically, and acted as if it was hand waving to have not preemptively answered them. That's why I called it cheating and lazy, you could just pick any word I wrote and do that. Why would you expect me to think any of those questions were asked in good faith or leading to anything engaging when you ask them like that?
Then, after I tried clarifying it was a hypothetical you asked several more hyper specific questions and again unfairly called it hand waving for having not already answered them, calling them crucial, and saying it's my fantasy, again implying you think I'm advocating for the world I set my story in. Hoping I might be wrong about that and that you'd respond in good faith, I did answer your questions! I even tried clarifying more explicitly that I'm not saying the story I set up is an ideal world.
Instead of engaging with any of my answers, you asked more hyper specific questions about the lore of the world I set up, call it my "favored system", and then you tell me the world in my story was flawed. You literally explicitly say you think I'm in favor of this world immediately after I explicitly told you I wasn't lol. Honestly, you've just been unpleasant and disagreeable as a whole. You repeatedly misinterpret what I'm saying in a way that I honestly can't tell is willful or not, while simultaneously implying I'm stupid. If you're really look at how you were talking to me right out the gate, can you honestly be surprised no fruitful conversation came of it?
Anyways, I can see why you'd say the same about me just saying what you said was cheating and lazy instead of being clearer about what I was thinking. Sorry about telling you your questions were frustrating because in hindsight that wasn't the issue.
In fact, there's fruitful conversation to be had about the protection of ones property which you were getting at when you mentioned the enforcement that would be required. It's just, when you are clearly insisting on pinning me as the defender of anarchy when I have made it clear I am not, that conversation doesn't really get anywhere good either.
And I'm sorry for the long comment lol hope ya actually read it. I guess it doesn't matter really, you can let me know what you think if you want but I've kinda said my piece so, again, have a good one.
This ignores thousands of years of history pre statehood. Non communist systems have only exist for a tiny fraction of human history, whereas most of our history was spent in systems much closer to communism than anything else.
They just need societal systems in place that would allow for our much larger communities to work properly.
And your comment about working for the greater good is kind of stupid in this regard as well. Communism is not a lawless society where people can do whatever they want without consequence.
You would have cops in your communist state. I wouldn't have a state.
Can you describe how to achieve common ownership without a state?
Then think for yourself