Society without property?

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

Let me take some points in isolation here:

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nly in extremely small groups of people, maybe not much larger than 40 or 50 people, possibly smaller.

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That's purely a communications bandwidth problem. The internet solved it.

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And it was not a very high standard of living by modern standards and life was brutally short.

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Of course, but that is BECAUSE they had low technology, not BECAUSE they were organised on a communist basis.

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Do you think it possible, short of some sort of huge human die off, that we would ever again have people living in small communes of related people, isolated from most everyone else?

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No - but then, that would be Communitarianism, not Communism.

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Supply of what? Demand for what?

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Everything.

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For food? It hasn't been til modern times that we have had more than spotty excesses of food.

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Right. but it IS the modern day.

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Supply exceeding demand usually causes price drops and reductions in production until things balence out and prices can stabalize. But without property/money ( money is a sort of property ) that's kind of a moot point.

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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 Property relations have superceded human relations; indeed, property can be endowed with human rights in a perverse act of illogic.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

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No, it was a "that's all the land would support without technology and/or farming" problem. Early societies were always scrambling around for food and lived nomadically. It wasn't until they started farming that they stayed in one spot and started creating civilizations.

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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.

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I'm not sure what you mean when you talk about communism and what you define as property under communism.

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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.

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Again I have never said that the US has the best society. I do think capitalism (being reinbursed for what you do according to your contribution) works better than communism ( get what you need (maybe) no matter what your contribution is to society) as long as capitalism is regulated so that it doesn't trod too heavily on the working class.

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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.

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That said, if those problems were dealt with, we still have to figure out how to motivate people without giving them anything in return except for the basics. This would work for some truly altruistic people, but the majority would want an extra chicken in the pot, or even better another big SUV in the driveway if they toil harder than their neighbor.

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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.

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You would have to almost have one world government staffed only with altruistic people to truly provide for everyone. Not sure this is possible.

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Of course its totally impossible,. But becuase this is a system that does NOT depend on altruism in any respect, the proposition is irrelevant.

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A lot of starving people are living under despots and totarian governments who may sell off a countries assets for their own personal gain.

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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.

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I think a change would have to be made in the political sphere to really make any change.

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Politics and economics are essentially the same endeavour.

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There have in the past been plenty of despost bankrolled by communist countries.

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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.

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You seem intent an blaming all the worlds ills on only one cause, and that is those evil capitalists. The world and it's problems are not that simple.

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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

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Like democracy, regulated capitalism is the worst system of allocating economic resources, except for all the others. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when someone seriously suggets "destroying capitalism". There are only two systems of organization: free market enterprise, and feudalism. True communism does not exist except in the pages of Marxist philosophy, and in practice it leads, without fail, to ruin. Self-declared communists are fooling themselves. You are communists because a shallow exploration of 'ugly' capitalism leads you to believe there are alternatives. There aren't. There are only variations around the amount of regulation business will endure in a given jurisdiction. And claiming that capitalism has only served a few elite is just plain stupid.

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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

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That's strange-these perfectly communist societies, where are they today? The problem isn't that societies needed to industrialize, it's that communism doesn't work.

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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.

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May I point out that on average, a single member of a hunter-gatherer society needs something like ten or twenty times as large an area of land to support their livelihood than does a member of an agriculturally advanced, capitalistic society. How do you propose to extend this lifestyle to the 6.2 billion or so people currently residing on earth?

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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.

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Would you consider, say Sweeden or France to be a post-industrialist society, organized in a semi-Marxist fashion?

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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.

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What happens when universal social programs fail because there is simply not enough production to support them?

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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.

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What modern countries would you single out as being closest to exhibiting a system of 'pure' communism?

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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.

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Has our technology really advanced that far? We would need methods of production that were fully automated, self-repairing, and productive enough to maintain standards of living, correct?

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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.

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Point blank: What does it mean for the likes of me? The middle class American who is fighting to maintain his $15.66 an hour job that he has earned and deserves? Communism would make a lot of people better off but I am not so sure that I, as a middle class American, would be any better off unless I had a college degree. I am not about to support helping the poor impoverished masses if it means that I must sacrifice my well being in order to do so. That is why the wealthy elite have the American middle class on their side...we want to keep our piece of the pie even if it is unfair to the world. Sorry I am so arrogant...but I don't want to be the class that suffers for the good of the "many".

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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 economyWhat 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