Do Communists favor redristribution of wealth, not just property?

[Gears]

I was wondering if anyone is in favor of redistribution of wealth to different people? Is it a measure usually supported by most Communists, or is it usually a Marxist-Leninist thing?

Would it work as simply as seizing money from the rich and distributing an equal amount to lower incomes?

Thanks.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Marx suggests the redistribution of economic, not personal property. If you have a huge mirror collection, that's yours. If you have a huge stamp collection, that's also yours.

As for money ... that really depends, but many Socialists in general that a Communist society would phase out the use of money over time in a period of State Capitalism or make it less relevant as exchange becomes replaced as the main means of supplying goods. But society won't care about your property insofar as it doesn't (a) accumulate or (b) offer something which would be very useful for the collective good, and even then you may have some kind of compensation as in modern society (though it would obviously take different forms)

Mere stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is a Robin hood ideology, and doesn't fix the social inequalities. Taxing the rich and redistributing to the poor might alleviate some ills, but again doesn't really fix the deeper problems. Marx recommended a more systemic change, and I think the fate of one man's money is a little irrelevant in the long run

[smk]

I was wondering if anyone is in favor of redistribution of wealth to different people? Is it a measure usually supported by most Communists, or is it usually a Marxist-Leninist thing?

Would it work as simply as seizing money from the rich and distributing an equal amount to lower incomes?

Thanks.

Redistribution of property = redistribution of wealth in the long term. If no one owns the means of production, how could someone accumulate financial wealth? Very quickly after the means of production are redistributed, the financial wealth will also be evened out.
therefore, if you are for redistribution of property, you are for redistribution of wealth. both are capital in some form. most(all?) far leftists would espouse this.
At the point where everyone has the same amount of money as everyone else, there wouldn't be any point in money at all. Money would be unnecessary.

[mikelepore]

I would argue that redistribution is the wrong word. The concept implies that the property goes somewhere. It doesn't go anywhere. It is just given a different handling process. What was formerly administered according to what a private communication said to do is now going to be admnistered according to a public communication says to do. The mine, mill or factory, etc. is redescribed as being a public institution.

This is why people should stop all worries about whether the ruling class "would be willing to give up" their property when the people "take it" -- phrases that we often hear, phrases that indicate that the nature of the revolution is misunderstood. Nothing physical is to be taken, and nothing physical is to be given up. What really happens is that, formerly, only stockholders were invited to discuss and vote, and now all of the the workers or community members are invited to discuss and vote. The physical facility may be exactly what it was before.

In a sense it may be called a "taking" and a "giving up" when the documents that used to be called stock certificates are now to be regarded as meaningless pieces of paper, and the people who used to find quarterly dividend checks magically appearing in their mailboxes suddenly stop receiving them, but nothing material has been confiscated or redistributed. The administrative procedures have changed.

[Tablo]

No money. We don't redistribute it, we burn it.

[StalinFanboy]

I would argue that redistribution is the wrong word. The concept implies that the property goes somewhere. It doesn't go anywhere. It is just given a different handling process. What was formerly administered according to what a private communication said to do is now going to be admnistered according to a public communication says to do. The mine, mill or factory, etc. is redescribed as being a public institution.

This is why people should stop all worries about whether the ruling class "would be willing to give up" their property when the people "take it" -- phrases that we often hear, phrases that indicate that the nature of the revolution is misunderstood. Nothing physical is to be taken, and nothing physical is to be given up. What really happens is that, formerly, only stockholders were invited to discuss and vote, and now all of the the workers or community members are invited to discuss and vote. The physical facility may be exactly what it was before.

In a sense it may be called a "taking" and a "giving up" when the documents that used to be called stock certificates are now to be regarded as meaningless pieces of paper, and the people who used to find quarterly dividend checks magically appearing in their mailboxes suddenly stop receiving them, but nothing material has been confiscated or redistributed. The administrative procedures have changed.

So, you think communism is just the self-management of the economy?

[Die Rote Fahne]

Marx suggests the redistribution of economic, not personal property. If you have a huge mirror collection, that's yours. If you have a huge stamp collection, that's also yours.

As for money ... that really depends, but many Socialists in general that a Communist society would phase out the use of money over time in a period of State Capitalism or make it less relevant as exchange becomes replaced as the main means of supplying goods. But society won't care about your property insofar as it doesn't (a) accumulate or (b) offer something which would be very useful for the collective good, and even then you may have some kind of compensation as in modern society (though it would obviously take different forms)

Mere stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is a Robin hood ideology, and doesn't fix the social inequalities. Taxing the rich and redistributing to the poor might alleviate some ills, but again doesn't really fix the deeper problems. Marx recommended a more systemic change, and I think the fate of one man's money is a little irrelevant in the long run

Where is this idea of state capitalism being equivelant to the dictatorship of the proletariat coming from?

[Ocean Seal]

Well realistically if you have amassed wealth from owning the means of production and you have billions of dollars lying around, it simply isn't enough to take private property. Take all excesses gained by the labor of others. Its just silly to let the billionaires be after they have been oppressing the working class for so long. I don't think that its a good idea to take everyone's home/ personal property so long as they are proletarians and they have earned more or less according to their labor (as in although a television host or a pop star might earn a salary, the amount of money that they made is far too much for a single person and their labor doesn't account for how much they earned).

[Rafiq]

The worker's would eliminate the US dollar as a currency, thus making bourgeois 'wealth' nothing but asswipe paper.

Secondly, as one user mentioned, the workers would take over the means of production, and that is the source of all wealth, in all places.

[S.Artesian]

We don't redistribute, we expropriate. We seize, confiscate.

Does that include the personal property of the bourgeoisie. Absolutely.

Does that include their personal wealth. Sure thing.

[Gears]

Thanks everyone for a reply.

I was asking this question because the phrase "redistribution of wealth" is used a lot by Tea Partiers and Conservatives as the main function and sole purpose of Socialism and Communism.


I think the thing is, that Glenn Beck and his horde of idiots seem to conclude that redistribution of wealth is taxing the middle class and lower classes, and handing it out for free to the unemployed and bums.

But from I what I see, wealth in this phrase is meant to refer to land or any other tangible object which was used for the sole purpose of industry and commodity making.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Where is this idea of state capitalism being equivelant to the dictatorship of the proletariat coming from?

I was just observing Lenin's policies up through the NEP, which included a phase of state capitalism, but I didn't say that state capitalism was the only possible path. I also didn't mean to imply that those two terms were analogous.

[S.Artesian]

Where is this idea of state capitalism being equivelant to the dictatorship of the proletariat coming from?


It comes, unfortunately, from Lenin's assertion that socialism, or the DOTP, is nothing but state monopoly capitalism operating on behalf of the people.... a terrible, terrible forumlation.

The background to this, of course, is the "linear developmentalism" that the Marxists of the 2nd International postulated in the overcoming of capitalism-- i.e that capitalism creates socialism not by creating the capitalists' negation in the proletariat; not by compelling increased productivity of labor that undermines the ability of capital to accumulate and requires the overthrow the property organization at the root of capital; but rather by morphing from capitalism to monopoly capitalism to state monopoly capitalism; and then to state monopoly capitalism socialism.

Lenin, confronting the immense legacy of uneven and combined development looked upon state capitalism as an advance over Russia's petty commodity production [his description] that endured beyond the revolution and the civil war.

[Fulanito de Tal]

As I understand it, the central theme was ownership of the means of production. That is what property is.

Having a bunch of wrenches is not property in that sense. However, if people needed the wrenches in order to produce commodities, then it becomes property and one should not be able to exploit others because of that.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

I don't see how seizing what is rightfully ours is necessarily redistributing.

[Fulanito de Tal]

I don't see how seizing what is rightfully ours is necessarily redistributing.

That would depend on the definition of rightfully ours.

The son of a billionaire capitalist might see his father's wealth as rightfully his, while I see the wealth as belonging to the workers that produced it.

[S.Artesian]

That would depend on the definition of rightfully ours.

The son of a billionaire capitalist might see his father's wealth as rightfully his, while I see the wealth as belonging to the workers that produced it.


Right. It's a class thing. The billionaire sees it as his or hers or his son's or her son's, but we know differently. We know it is the product of expropriated, alienated labor.

So the source of that wealth, that expropriated labor, expropriates the expropriator.

And makes what was rightfully its, rightfully its. Goodbye billionaires.

[mikelepore]

So, you think communism is just the self-management of the economy?

What else do you want to do besides manage the economy democratically?

I would say there are two main things: operate production on a non-profit basis, and implement an economic one-person-one-vote. I consider those two fundamental. All other details are opinions about how to adjust the form to make it function the best.

[robbo203]

I was wondering if anyone is in favor of redistribution of wealth to different people? Is it a measure usually supported by most Communists, or is it usually a Marxist-Leninist thing?

Would it work as simply as seizing money from the rich and distributing an equal amount to lower incomes?

Thanks.


The mode of distribution as Marx pointed out is dependent on the mode of production. The existence of money denotes the existence of economic exchange and hence the existence of sectional ownership of the means of production, not class ownership. So you still have a class system and a class system cannot but function but without skewing the distribution of power and wealth in favour of the dominant class.

In short, seizing money from the rich and redistributing it - even if this were possible - would achieve nothing in the long run. Some would in due course would come in due course come to accumulate wealth at the the expense of others - you cannot have a system of economic competition without winners and losers - and we would be back to a fully flefged capitalist society. This would happen, in my view, even without the process of primitive accumulation that historically got capitalism going. Primitive accumulation merely speeded up capitalism's arrival.

The real solution to economic inequality under capitalism is to tackle its basic cause - to eliminate the fundamental socio-economic relationships that define capitalism and necessitate money in the first place

[hatzel]

I vaguely remember reading something about Rothschild and five shillings and Frankfurt and for some reason I feel it's relevant to this discussion, but I can't for the life of me remember why...:rolleyes:

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I think the word you are looking for here is expropriation.

Expropriation of dormant wealth is something that i'm particularly interested in. It should be the job of any interim revolutionary Socialist government to freeze and expropriate the mainland assets of the bourgeoisie. This will enable us to defeat them and their counter-revolution without the blood-letting that would result in an all out pitched battle.

Most people don't have much wealth, other than some minor personal possessions and perhaps a few hundred or few thousand in the bank, so expropriation of property is something that is akin, to most people, to a redistribution of wealth, the idea being that there shouldn't really be a housing problem and that, for me, much of the shortage comes from inequalities that do need redistributing, but that this must involve expropriation, it cannot simply be legislated for via 'tax and spend' style redistributive policies.