Opting out of communism?

[liberlict]

Free access, on one side (though this might in general be modified by forms of rationing - and here I need to add that rationing doesn't presuppose an institution which can be called a state), and on the other, wages and ridiculous oppression for the sake of primitive accumulation. Yeah, sounds great.

But I don't think that has ever been in dispute, has it? Not many are going to choose exploitation over abundance, apart from some insane folks.

[liberlict]

No. There would not be better incentives. Free wins all the time. The better incentives come from the direction of the consumer, not the worker. There is no reaon for the latter to work for the capitalist toilet paper manufacturer when the people's plant supplies all that is needed.

I know that. I was just playing along with the assumptions.

[Baseball]

Uld

It is quite conceivable that some form of rationing for some goods might exists alongside free access for others. Marx somewhat unenthusiastically promoted the idea of labour vouchers as a form of ratioining in what he called the lower phase of communism. This would not constitute money since these vouchers could not circulate and would apply to all consumer goods. Labour vouchers would disappear and be replaced by free access in higher communism

I personally think the labour voucher proposal is bureaucratically unwieldy and morever that there is a need to discriminate between consumer goods in terms of their relative scarcity which the system of labour vopuchers does not allow for. That scarcity will be a function of decisions made at the point of production concerning the allocation of resources. One important consideration affecting this allocation process will be the perceived utlity of the end products in question. Where a particular factor is scarce it will be allocated according to what society itself considers more important among rival end products. High priority goods which will almost certainly be things like food, sanitation, decent housing etc will therefore tend to be produced in abundance and accordingly distributed on the basis of free access. Low priority goods, on the other hand, such as certain luxury items will as result automatically tend to be produced in quantities insufficient to meet consumer demand and here is where some form of rationing can come into play - in respect of these goods only


This is a rough and ready approach admittedly but it is important to have in place the basic insititutions that enable a resolution of the problem of allocation. It is the direction of decisionmaking that counts ; the precise destination of perfect allocation is always going to be something that will elude us under any system.

There is something about the likely mechanisms involved here

http://socialistcommonwealth.webs.co...capitalism.htm

In particular look at the article "The “Economic Calculation” controversy: unravelling of a myth

As for the process of rationing itself I favour one which disciriminates on the basis of the perceived quality of housing stock, using a points system. The advantage is that we already have such a system in place for the purpose of local tax collection. Housing stock is assessed on the basis of certain criteria and housing units are then placed in one of several bands. This system of physical assessment can be adapted to a communist society although of course there will be a no taxes to collect in such a society

Since housing is such a major component of one's quality of life and since a communist society at least in its early period will inherit huge inequalities in respect of the quality of housing stock which cannot quickly be eliminated, it makes intuitive sense to ground a system of rationing in quality of housing stock. Its what I call the "compensation model" of rationing. Those living in relatively poor quality housing stock can by way of "compensation" be granted priority access to rationed goods.

There are of course all sorts of ways in which this might be done but for the moment it is important to grasp the basic principle at stake

The thread, as it developed over the past couple of days, concluded that capitalism would never make inroads in a socialist community because everything is free and available for the taking. Why would anyone pay?
Now the claim that this happy view of socialism may not entirely be accurate- there might not be available the 500 air conditioners needed.
Perhaps capitalism could survive in the socialist community is by filling in the flaws of socialism?

[robbo203]

Uld

The thread, as it developed over the past couple of days, concluded that capitalism would never make inroads in a socialist community because everything is free and available for the taking. Why would anyone pay?
Now the claim that this happy view of socialism may not entirely be accurate- there might not be available the 500 air conditioners needed.
Perhaps capitalism could survive in the socialist community is by filling in the flaws of socialism?

No society is perfect including a hypothetical future socialist society. However it does not follow from that that capitalism might survive in such society just becuase its not perrfect. For capitalism even to exist presupposes private ownership of the previously commonly owned means of production by some and the resultant alienation of others from these means. That requires coercive force and the renactment of a process of primitive accumulation. How is that going to happen? What leverage can a few exercise of the majority when all have free access to the means of liviing and labour is performed on a purely voluntary basis?


No, its just not realistically going to happen. Once capitalism has gone it will be gone for good. There can be no turning back thankfully. The problems that a socialist/communist society will have to contend with will need to be dealt with on a socialist/communist basis

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

Communism implies that the material conditions render anything else but impossible, so, no.

Communism is like the T-virus, there is no escape.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

Communism is like the T-virus, there is no escape.

hah, that sounds like a tag-line for a fifties B-movie

[Popular Front of Judea]

There was such a movie. It was called "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" ...

hah, that sounds like a tag-line for a fifties B-movie

[Baseball]

No society is perfect including a hypothetical future socialist society. However it does not follow from that that capitalism might survive in such society just becuase its not perrfect. For capitalism even to exist presupposes private ownership of the previously commonly owned means of production by some and the resultant alienation of others from these means. That requires coercive force and the renactment of a process of primitive accumulation. How is that going to happen? What leverage can a few exercise of the majority when all have free access to the means of liviing and labour is performed on a purely voluntary basis?


No, its just not realistically going to happen. Once capitalism has gone it will be gone for good. There can be no turning back thankfully. The problems that a socialist/communist society will have to contend with will need to be dealt with on a socialist/communist basis

At this point, we know that the socialist system will not be able to provide goods and services upon demand. We can certainly expect that black markets, bartering will develop so as to pick up the slack. At this point, one would need to examine the socialist system as constructed to determine how less than perfect it is.

[servusmoderni]

I think a state is primordial for a progressive society. I don't think we could fly to the moon with a few bamboo sticks attached together. There's no such thing as no state. If we fail to provide one, others will, and most of the time their society will be tribal, and highly autocratic. And there we go all over again.

[robbo203]

At this point, we know that the socialist system will not be able to provide goods and services upon demand. We can certainly expect that black markets, bartering will develop so as to pick up the slack. At this point, one would need to examine the socialist system as constructed to determine how less than perfect it is.

I said socialism will not be a perfect society. I did not say it "would not be able to provide goods and services upon demand". Most of what will be demanded will be provided. In fact the people doing the "demanding" and the people doing the "providing" will be one and the same. There will be no barrier in that sense to them producing what they need. We are not talking about an "us" and "them" situation anymore

The issue that we are talking about is what is to be done should certain kinds of goods not be available in sufficient quantitites to meet demand. Some form of rationing is the obvious answer, I would suggest. That does not preclude efforts at increasing the stock of such goods in the meanwhile e.g. technological innovation

Capitalist markets or pre-capitalist barter or any kind of quid pro quo economic exchange are not the answer because the conditions under which these things could exist will simply not exist. You cant install capitalism except by coercive force which presupposes you have some leverage over the population in the first place. To the contrary , in a socialist society based on free access and vol;untary labour, political power
dissolves and the state disappears completely

If there is a "slack" to be picked up then people will pick it up in a socialist manner. Do we want to increase the suppply of a certain good? Fine then there's only one thing for it. We will have to put in a bit more time and effort at doing that it. No one else is going to do it for us.

This is the thing about a socialist society, see. It will be a society in which we recognise our complete interdependence - our social nature. It is a society that will therefore encourage a sense of self responsibility in a way that is perhaps unimaginable in our contemporary dog-eat-dog capitalist society

[Creative Destruction]

I suppose it could be done, just not very well. Assuming there's not some communist horde that will come along to dismantle them, their economics probably wouldn't work out very well considering -- since we're speaking hypothetically -- in a communist society, there would be super abundance and, pretty much, a gift economy. There'd be no reason for an ancap society other than "just because." And ancaps are really theorizers of industry, in that their society is based off these ideas of working in an industrialized society. No self-respecting worker would work in such horrible conditions, especially if the alternative is being free from capital bondage.

To get to a communist society, human society would undergo a revolution that would render ancap meaningless and irrelevant, more so than it is now. I'd imagine a "Galt's Gulch" basically the way one would conceive it now: a bunch of self-interested, egotistical people convinced that they are the masters of the world in every sense of the phrase. The "makers" as it were.

[Baseball]

The issue that we are talking about is what is to be done should certain kinds of goods not be available in sufficient quantitites to meet demand. Some form of rationing is the obvious answer, I would suggest. That does not preclude efforts at increasing the stock of such goods in the meanwhile e.g. technological innovation

Capitalist markets or pre-capitalist barter or any kind of quid pro quo economic exchange are not the answer because the conditions under which these things could exist will simply not exist. You cant install capitalism except by coercive force which presupposes you have some leverage over the population in the first place. To the contrary , in a socialist society based on free access and vol;untary labour, political power
dissolves and the state disappears completely

If there is a "slack" to be picked up then people will pick it up in a socialist manner. Do we want to increase the suppply of a certain good? Fine then there's only one thing for it. We will have to put in a bit more time and effort at doing that it. No one else is going to do it for us.

This is the thing about a socialist society, see. It will be a society in which we recognise our complete interdependence - our social nature. It is a society that will therefore encourage a sense of self responsibility in a way that is perhaps unimaginable in our contemporary dog-eat-dog capitalist society

1. How does the socialist community eliminate the condition when one worker may wish to seap one item for another? How about building items on the side to be exchanged for goods which are rationed?

2. Does.not socialism promise workers less work AND more goods? How does working harder to produce more goods square with this? How does working harder and longer solve a problem of shorages of component parts of production?

[robbo203]

1. How does the socialist community eliminate the condition when one worker may wish to seap one item for another? How about building items on the side to be exchanged for goods which are rationed?

But why? Whats the point in swapping things if you have free access at the point of distribution to what you need? There can be no quid pro quo economic exchanges in a society where the means of prpduction are owned in common. The idea is illogical and absurd.

What there might possibly be are "gift exchanges" - most likely in the form of personalised art/craft products or perhaps produce from your vegetable garden offered to your neighbour and that sort of thing. But these are essentially moral transactions not economic transactions - if you are familiar with the literature on the gift economy. Their purpose would be to cement and strengthen social relationships rather than separate individuals into "buyers" and "sellers" who confront each in a marketplace with opposing interests and haggle over the price of the object to be exchanged

2. Does.not socialism promise workers less work AND more goods? How does working harder to produce more goods square with this? How does working harder and longer solve a problem of shorages of component parts of production?

Socialism is not about remunerating people according to their work in any sense whatsoever. IN fact , socialism completely cuts the link between production and consumption in the sense that what you consume is not dependent on your productive input. You have to try to resist the temptation to extrapolate from existing capitalist society and impose the kind of assumptions that are operable in this society on a future socialist society.


Remember also that most of the work that we do today in capitalism - at least in the formal official economy - will no longer be required in a socialist society . This applies to all those job catergories directly tied up with the money system - from cashiers to insurance brokers - as well as the coercive state. That in itself will release vast amounts of human resources and materials for socially useful production and with many more people to share the workload the per capita workload will be significantly reduced. This is to say nothing of the completely transformed conditions under which people will work. Even under capitalism a very significant amount of work is unpaid and voluntary. Numerous studies have shown that volunteer work is more highly motivated than paid work and that in fact contrary to popular perception money is a disincentive. It induces a frame of mind that comes to regard work as a disutlity rather than an expression of on's need for creative activity.


So yes a socialisrt society will reduce the amount of work we need to do but
thius I suggest, is not where the primary emphasis should lie. Rather socialism will be about the transformation of what we call "work" today.


A socialist society will of course be able to identity where and when more is required via its self regulating system of stock control. If there are shortages of particular goods in relation to the flow of demand, the production units would quite easily be able to flag up or signal the need for more labour inputs. I imagine something akin to today's job centres would exist in the socialist communities where volunteers can go to. Or alternatively there might community websites on which production units could register their requirements. The possibilities are endless...

The point is to try engage with the concept of a socialist society imaginatively and with empathy. How do you think a population that had just consciously and democratically brought about a socialist society, would set about operating it? Some of the links I provided earlier go some way to answeriing that question....

[#FF0000]

The thread, as it developed over the past couple of days, concluded that capitalism would never make inroads in a socialist community because everything is free and available for the taking. Why would anyone pay?
Now the claim that this happy view of socialism may not entirely be accurate- there might not be available the 500 air conditioners needed.

That's a neat hypothetical but I've come to the conclusion that, at this point, scarcity for all but the rarest materials and things, is artificial, and bullshit. We produce more than enough food for everybody on the planet, and yet we still have starvation because the food is ultimately controlled by four or five agribusiness giants. In the United States alone, there are four times as many homes are there are homeless. There are people who die or suffer from life-long complications from easy to cure and easily preventable illnesses like influenza, when we have plants that produce 200,000,000 doses of vaccine in three months on two and a half production lines (I worked in one, and that's exactly what we did).

What isn't accurate is this happy view of capitalism -- of the market magically putting everything in its right place, the Horatio Alger myth and good and fair reward for a protestant work ethic.

I mean, good lord, we nearly watched this system collapse because of itself. We're in an age where people my age in America are trying to scrap together a life in a world where getting $9.00 an hour for a 6 month job is the norm while student debt is skyrocketing and a diploma scarcely means anything as far as a chance for a career goes (maybe you can get an unpaid internship and work 80 hours a week for free for "exposure and experience". We have people fighting for something resembling a living wage (but is still a far cry from a wage tied to worker productivity) in the service industry, which is on the verge of being mostly automated!

And imagine that! A world where labor saving technological advancement is something to be feared because it further immiserates people.

This is why a communist society in this age is something no one in their right mind would opt out of: because the alternative is masochism.

[Brotto Rühle]

Communism means no private property. Just in case you were wondering.

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

That's a neat hypothetical but I've come to the conclusion that, at this point, scarcity for all but the rarest materials and things, is artificial, and bullshit. We produce more than enough food for everybody on the planet, and yet we still have starvation because the food is ultimately controlled by four or five agribusiness giants.

The very worst part of this is how much of that surplus food is simply destroyed to keep prices artificially high :/ It's one example I've always used when people trot out the line about Capitalism being efficient and not wasteful and so on.

[Remus Bleys]

It is not enough for communism to succeed, capitalism must fail.

[Blake's Baby]

'Luckily' then capitalism is a fucking disaster for about 95% of the planet, and arguably not brilliant long-term for the other 5%. It is failing, has been for a century, and in failing it's dragging us into an abyss.

However, the 'luckily' is a bit ironic as it's perfectly possible that the capitalist mode of production will end up killing all of us.

It's not enough for capitalism to fail, communism must succeed.

[Vireya]

'Luckily' then capitalism is a fucking disaster for about 95% of the planet, and arguably not brilliant long-term for the other 5%. It is failing, has been for a century, and in failing it's dragging us into an abyss.

However, the 'luckily' is a bit ironic as it's perfectly possible that the capitalist mode of production will end up killing all of us.

It's not enough for capitalism to fail, communism must succeed.

It's failing from a humanitarian POV, yes, but it is quite efficient at its intended purpose, to enrich the few and extort the many. Socialism must irradicate all traces of Capitalism everywhere.

[Baseball]

But why? Whats the point in swapping things if you have free access at the point of distribution to what you need? There can be no quid pro quo economic exchanges in a society where the means of prpduction are owned in common. The idea is illogical and

The suggestion was made after somebody said rationing might occur in the socialist community.