|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
EvC Forum active members: 66 (9164 total) |
| |
ChatGPT | |
Total: 916,477 Year: 3,734/9,624 Month: 605/974 Week: 218/276 Day: 58/34 Hour: 1/3 |
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Society without property? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
It might be worth considering how property works in present society first, so that its effects can be understood.
This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-12-2005 10:18 AM
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
Let me take some points in isolation here:
quote: That's purely a communications bandwidth problem. The internet solved it.
quote: Of course, but that is BECAUSE they had low technology, not BECAUSE they were organised on a communist basis.
quote: No - but then, that would be Communitarianism, not Communism.
quote: Everything.
quote: Right. but it IS the modern day.
quote: Yes, and shows manifest flaws in the system. Remember we are talking not about demand, but effective demand. Thus, during the infamous famine in Ireland, Ireland was a large exporter of grain to England. People were starving becuase they had no money, and thus did not exercise effective demand - despite the fact the food was there. Human lives could have been saved, were it not for capitalism. That vignette highlights how divorced the notions of property-based society are from real life as it is lived. Property relations have superceded human relations; indeed, property can be endowed with human rights in a perverse act of illogic. The economy is supposed to be a tool humans use to live in this world, but it has become both the means and the motive for vast quantities of human suffering. This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-12-2005 10:59 AM
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: That is correct - that is whay I said it was a problem related to a low level of technology, not a problem related to their social organisation and the absence of private property.
quote: Communism is a mode of production (which is bigger than a system of government) in which the necessities of sustenance production are owned collectively and exploited collectively. A typical example is shared pasturage and activities like transhumance.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: But the priblem is that is NOT how capitalism works. People are NOT rewarded according to their contribution - they are remunerated according to how hard they are to replace. Thats why capitalism does not do what it says on the tin. By contrast, given the meeting of needs, all EXCESs production can easily be rewarded directly without compromising anyone elses survival. Hence, communism actually does what capitalism only claims to do.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: But WHY do we have to figure that out when that is NOT how communism works? You see, for the umpteenth time, what you are attacking is a straw man. You are NOT attacking communism at all - you are attacking a systematic MISREPRESENTATION of communism. Communism explicitly DOES reward according to ability - thats is abundantly clear in the original document, Capital. If you are going to criticise communism, please criticise communism, not the straw man.
quote: Of course its totally impossible,. But becuase this is a system that does NOT depend on altruism in any respect, the proposition is irrelevant.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: And exactly the same thing happens under capitalism, and we call it Good. The scenario arises when, say, a given manufacturing plant can be moved to the third world where wages are lower. So, the original host countries productive assets are moved or sold for the personal gain of the owning capitalist - and Wall Street cheers and slaps them on the back for their sound business decision. It IS a sound decision from their personal perspective, but it is a disaster for ordinary workers depending on employment.
quote: Politics and economics are essentially the same endeavour.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: True of course - but that merely begs the question, were they communist countries? Is the concept of a "communist country" even valid in the first place? It's entirely contradictory to communism that there can be a communist "state". Communism, as I said, is a mode of PRODUCTION not a methodology of governance. There have been no communist countries at all - there have instead been state capitalisms, and they certainly did bankroll despots. But that is indeed symptomatic of capitalism, which treats people only as an input to production.
quote: Nonsense - has anyone claimed capitalism causes the common cold? These criticisms are specific, targeted, and methodical. The problems in capitalism are inherent to its structure. Capitalism does manufacture misery, because misery is profitable. Simply denying that there is anything wrong is simplisitic. This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-13-2005 05:12 AM
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: No Alexander, you demonstrate absolutely no familiarity with Communism at all, or even the discussion from which it emerged. It is arrant nonsense to say there are only two types of organisation, fuedalism and capitalism, becuase the existance of hunter-gatherer society falsifies this straight away. What your argument demonstrates is that it emerges from the very short-sighted and self-regarding theories of mercantalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. You have not even dealt with the much more developed series of economic forms that Marx compiled or which has been gathered by subsequent anthropologists. I say YOUR understanding of Communism is superficial, and frankly don't think you understand capitalism very well either. Yours is the high-minded, Utopian idealism, not mine - this is abundantly clear when you follishly declare that it is stupid to recognise that capitalism serves only an elite. Seeing as you bandy phrases like "superficial criticism" about, may I ask if you have read Capital? Is your criticism of Communism well founded, or superficial? This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-13-2005 04:49 AM
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: So you claim that human survival for a hundred thousand years with only stone tools is a demonstration of FAILURE? Now you see, thats the bizarre sort of logical knot that Capitalist dogma forces you to tie. Furthermore, if you had ever bothered to investiogate communism, you would be well aware that a sizable chunk of its documentation discusses exactly the process of how primitive communism was superceeded by class-divided, heirarchical societies that were better able to leverage productive assets. But it is important to note recent research that the net level og human health declined when we became agriculturalists. It is defintely not as simple as saying something stupid and mainfestly wrong as "communism doesn't work" - what we need to be doing is looking at the material constraints and contextual changes that were going on in order to understand what is happening. That is the basis of the communist theory of history, that historic circumstances change, and that the available modes of production change accordingly. Yes, technology and progress require specialisation - that is a material limit not an ideological position. But in advancing this objection, you run straight into the main reason that communism is vioable again today in our highly technical world: BECUASE high technology requires specialisation, a huge chunk of our societies are specialised and trained in highly technical disciplines - we are competent to engage in the business of running the state. I mean thats already implicit, otherwise we would not have the vote. It is BECUASe society is high tech and specialised, and becuase it has necessarily trained a technically proficient and specialised workforce, that "industrial communism" is not only possible but urgently necessary.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Ridiuculous - YOU are poisoning the well. NOBODY HAS SUGGESTED REVERTING TO A NON-TECHNICAL SOCIETY EVER, AND TO MISREPRESENT THE ARGUMENT AS SUCH IS OPENLY DISHONEST. The point is the SOCIAL organisation of these people. Their societies did not immediately collapse becuase nobody was charging land rent; the fact that nobody was charging land rent made their free and communal exploitation of the land possible. Please address the argument that is actually being advanced, not a series of straw men.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: sort of, but also not at all. These states - including the US - are social democracies that exhibit some decidedly non-capitalist features, such as social security, state pensions, health caree systems subsised schools, and progressive income tax on a sliding scale. All of these are Socialist modifications to capitalism already, and ironically, many capitalists include these features in their view of capitalism. The disturbances of the 18th and 19th centuiry have already moved the world towards communism from its starting point in the industrial revolution. The distinctions between America and Sweden are not illusory, but they are also much much less important than modern bourgeois politics would have you believe. They are both modified capitalisms, only to a differing degree.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Short of the physical destruction of the means of production in war, this never happens. Production very seldom declines - what can happen though, as happened in 1929, is that capitalists suspend production becuase it is not in their economic interests to maintain it. There is no mechanical, physical, unsolvable problem here: no drought, no famine, no natural disaster - it is purely a disaster of social organisation. All that poverty and misery, all the breadlines of of the Great Depression, were brought about purely through the healthy operation of capitalism. Boom and bust is inescapable in capitalism, because of the necessary tendency for the rate of profit to decline. It is not MERELY that Capitalism is Utopian, elitist and cruel: it is also inefficient in the long term and undergoes unavoidable periodic collapses.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: None whatsoever. Its as meaningless a question as asking which of the monarchies of medieval europe was a democracy - the question is inherently illogical. It is also the case that IF such a society magically appeared in the midst of a capitalist world - which is to say, a generally capitalist mode of production - then it would be immediately jumped on and crushed. It would have no army, would not control borders, and offers and implicit criticism of other states. It is both dangerous and defenceless. The analogy I use most often for this is that of a peasant commune in medieval europe. There was no possibility for peasants or burghers to raise themselves up as a democracy under the mode of production of the day. If they did NOT have a feudal lord, who could command military power on the basis of vassalage, their territory will immediately be scooped up by the neighbouring powers who do have such might at their command. That is why it took nearly a thousand years and a massive increase in the technical base before bourgeois democracies were possible. Communications technologies had to reach a certain level (the printing press); military technology had to become democratised (the fall of the knight). Without those technical changes, the mere will to change was insufficient. The NEXT stage of social change, driven by the technical changes that have already occurred in the last two centuries, will bring about industrial communism, necessarily on a global scale, says Marx.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: No. We were arguably over the threshold before 1900. We don't need magic technology, just highly productive technology, which we already have. In point of fact, if we ONLY wanted to maintain the standard of living we have today, we would probably do much less work, say half. This is because a huge amount of our economic activity is non-productive, and only services dead capital. That, in fact, is another feature of primitive communism that I regard as superior to the modern way of working: when primitive people have got as much as they need, they stop. This does not apply in capitalism, becuase all investments must be worked as much as possible before they are technically redundant. This is a feature of capitalist competition, not a feature inherent to production. Hence, we work until we have enough, and then we keep working and working and working in order to maximise profit. Therefore, quite predictably, despite the fact that our machinery is hundreds and thousands of times more productively efficient than that of a bronze age society, most of us have less free time than they did. Similarly, there is a direct relationship between working hours and the intensity of capitalist ideology; European workers have generally shorter hours and more public holidays than their American counterparts.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Let me respond to this in a number of steps. 1) Are you really middle class?I know that in common speech you fall in that category, but is it technically accurate? The middle class are defined as small property holders - the individual farmer, the mom-and-pop store owner, the American Dream, in short. They are quite different from major industrial barrons, but also quite different from workers dependant on a wage. Capitalism has virtually wiped out the middle class, due to efficiencies of scale - supermarkets like WalMart being a good example of the process in action. So, are you middle class, or are you working class like me, as a wage earner? If you are holding on to a hourly waged job, you are most certainly working class. You are dependant on your employer, unlike the real middle class who are self-employed and much more independant. 2) Would you be worse off under a communist mode of production?Explicitly not. Lets look at thre breakdown: - you have the absolute and unconstrained right to subsistence, unlike capitalism, as long as you are contributing productively - you have the right to work in your chosen field as long as there is demand in that field to be fulfilled - you will be rewarded according to the proportion of your output in relation to the aggregate output of the product across the whole economy What this means is: if you work twice as hard as others in your field, you will be rewarded twice as well. Note the ABSENCE of any mention of college degrees (which are in any case mostly a class barrier). If your role did require a college degree, the LABOUR you invested in your own education would be recompensed through your production rewards (that is, it is taken into account in an assesment of your efficiency). And yes, thats right - education is not a valubale thing to have because it makes you employable; education is instead a necessary component of the production process and you are rewarded for undertaking it. Now please note, before anyone tries to tease inconsistencies out of this post: I have NOT discussed the Labour Theory of Value anbd hence how and why this works. I am making simple statements as to the outcomes. But, this should indicate that I have absolutely no expectation that average "middle class" american will suffer at all. As I have tried to make clear time and time again, this is a system designed for and by educated workers living in cities, not peasants in the field. By people like us. This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-13-2005 06:59 AM
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024