WHY

If we had the money to buy masses of land we wouldn't need to steal liberate them for the people.

Also building a commune doesnt solve capitalism and its problems. Socialism in one toilet bowl and all that.

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First of all because 'leftists' includes much more than socialists, anarchists or communists, including ideologies that directly oppose socialism, anarchism or communism.

Second of all because socialism, like capitalism, must be international. Neither can live side by side.

You say this in jest but it's pretty fucking accurate. Leftists won't be happy til misery is equitably distributed.

Because capitalists will just sabotage/invade and force us to live by their rules. Like they do with other socialist countries.

ACQUIRE NUKES!

Why? Capitalism is already doing that job well enough.

Name one other ideology/economic system that, in response to an increase in productivity in the automobile industry that would allow us to give everyone cars for free, instead responds by shutting down all the car factories and kicking out all the workers into the streets. Or one that forces people to sleep in the streets while houses and apartment buildings lie empty and unused. Or one that produces 3000 calories a day for every person on earth while millions starve. I'll wait.

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why?

Meh. Regardless, as things stand true communism would mean balancing out the poverty across the globe. So the poorest africans and asians would be slightly better off, the rest of the world worse off. That is the reality of the system you're endorsing as things stand.

Soros funds liberals, not communists.

If he thought he could profit from it, he'd fund commies.

Not at all. I don't think you have a very good handle on what communism and socialism actually mean, so I'd suggest lurking more and maybe reading a bit of theory. Here's a book to help you out.

See, I think you're making the mistake of thinking that there exists a finite amount of wealth per person at the moment, in terms of cars, houses, corn, PCs, guns and so on and so on (sniff) and that the current scarcity is a result of there literally not being enough stuff, labour or raw resources to give everyone a good lifestyle.

This is not the case at all. Under the current capitalist system, we are beholden to the curious paradox whereby greater efficiency due to automation and technological improvements effectively cuts people out of the workforce and causes markets to shrink, thus reducing the amount of people who can buy cars and thus the amount of cars that can be profitably produced.

A switch to a socialist system where the profit motive is absent wouldn't average out poverty, it would put is in a state of permanent post-war boom, and make all the factories work round the clock until every formerly starving African has a Rolls-Royce and a (formerly) $5000 gaming PC. As it stands, we're closing them all down, despite an ample amount of raw resources, people willing to work and people in need of cars. This is the failure of capitalism!

Not to mention planned obsolescence, farmers getting paid not to grow crops, substandard goods, the industrial reserve army and the exploitation of surplus value. If you'd like to think of it this way, socialism is simply capitalism with the bad parts taken out.

And I'd like to be emphatic, it is NOT a system where you take from the rich and give to the poor to balance things out, as many mistakenly believe - rather it's a reordering of the relations that allow some people to get much richer than others at the expense of others. But the point for me is not to cure inequality, it's to solve inefficiency.

wut lmao

Fair enough.

I realise that money is just a marker we invented to facilitate trade and as such is not physically limited. But even leaving money oiut of the equation I still think that shortages and scarcity are real. The main physical scarcity is water but there are others. For example it is estimated it would take between three and four earths for everyone to live like an american. 3 for everyone to live like a European. There is scarcity. I don't see how inequal access to resources can be addressed with current tech without redistribution.

That said, neo-liberalism is doing a fine job or redistributing, at least from the middle classes on the west to the near slave labourers in the east.

Depends on how far automation can go famalam.

jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

I might have phrased that poorly - there's scarcity and shortage, but I mean to say that it is not caused by physical/natural limits but instead by the fucked up system. We actually have the labour power and the technological base necessary to produce WAY more than we're currently doing. We could very easily eliminate scarcity, and for certain goods, we're already post-scarcity but firms and states are intentionally hindering production in order to keep prices from collapsing.

Neoliberalism is less redistribution and more a reaction to falling rates of profit - cutting labour costs and taxes (and thus services) is just the normal thing to do when automation and overproduction makes it hard for firms to stay profitable - naturally their owners are very good at influencing government, so that's what they push for - globalization and austerity, mostly for short-term profit.

Worldwide communism (if we dare to dream of it) might have us being more stingy with certain things, but we'd have a whole lot more other shit and free time to make up for it. Do you have a source for the water thing, by the way? It might not be as bad as you imagine.

I accept we have more potential for productivity but we're not there yet and trying to revolution where your post revolution society is entirely dependent on tech we don't yet have is a big issue for me.

The beauty of it is that by the time the technological foundations of communism are laid, capitalism of the current type will be rendered unsustainable by those very same advances, through the process I've described in previous posts. If you want to see the biggest warning sign of impending communism, look at Detroit - a city literally destroyed by increased productivity, and many more like it in the Rust Belt besides.

Of course, the risk is that the bourgeois powers that be reform it into an equally horrible but slightly more resilient beast, like we saw almost happen with Keynesianism (although thankfully they didn't follow through on Keynes' suggestions and it started going to shit anyway - and who knows whether it would've worked if they did.) On the bright side, the ruling class have proven to be exceptionally short-sighted through history, and they're unlikely to put long-term stability over short-term gain.

tbh I don't generally consider myself a 'leftist' but I can absolutely see the benefits of a planned economy. I also happen to think though that it is much more feasible on a local/national level, at least for the foreseeable future.

Sure but the offshoot of this policy is hundreds of thousands of jobs going from Europe and the US to the far east. May not be by design (though I suspect it is), but this is a kind or re-balancing.

The long term effects and end result of this is to my mind a kind of neo-fudalism, where you boss is also your landlord is also your 'elected' official.

I've got a couple of infographics…

But this has long been know to be an issue. In the Middle east it is already manifesting

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(Jordan_river)

There are other instances in the ME where a water supply has been disrupted or subverted to the benefit of one population at the expense of another.

There are plenty of articles if you type 'aquifer depletion' into google. This is the real issue, groundwater being overused, combined with higher temperatures threatens to desert many regions in the areas already physically stressed.

I think you could be right (at least in very broad sense of the word). My concern is can technology keep pace with the rising population?

I don't have any answers but IMO environmental shit/sustainable development has to be the key for now.

If you're not a Malthusian, yes.

I think the concerns he raised are legitimate. Simply looking at the maps I posted above and comparing to charts of population growth suggest we're heading towards something giving.

what those maps seem to suggest is that the mechanisms for distributing water internationally are not effective.

Ester Boserup is an alright place to start on population growth and scarcity actually.

Because capitalists will try and conquer the socialist country, like they did with the whole world in the last centuries.

My concern is the 'physical scarcity' and 'approaching physical scarcity' bits. How many people do you think live in MENA and that top half of China? Even assuming we have a massive breakthrough in desalination, distributing water to a billion plus people is no small ask. Consider also that Africa's population is set to (already is) explode, I land back at my concern of will tech keep up. If not, the plan B will be mass-mass migrations, potentially in the billions. I think this will slow progress too.

Are your local store's shelves empty?

No but then I'm not Venezuelan.

So your point is that the Venezuelan stores are empty because there aren't enough production capacities in the world to fill them?

No. That wasn't my point at all. I've not said anywhere in this thread we are going to run out of food, though a single bad year in the US severely affects global supply, so we're not quite post scarcity, even for food. My point about scarcity has mostly focused on water. I'd like to think I've given you enough to at least consider the prospect and if you disagree, come back with something debunking me, instead of dragging it off on a tangent.

I'm not the same user you've talking to before, mate.

Well, as concerns water, I'll remind you that desalination plants are in fact a thing and once we're on a socialist mode of production it will probably be much easier to establish them where they are most pressingly needed. Also, a socialist system doesn't necessarily have to be centrally planned - it could just be a readjustment of institutions in order to promote decentralized socialist development. As it is, central planning is basically all stick - the bureaucrats tell you what to build, how much of it, where to work, etc. In that case, you only have disincentives in the form of violence for not cooperating. You could very well have a system built on the carrot, where you incentivize development of industry that produces for use, allowing profit under certain circumstances so as to stimulate growth and use market forces to prevent shortage or misallocation of labour and resources.

I agree 100%. None of this is worth shit if we've destroyed or depleted our natural resources in the short term so that billions will starve no matter the economic system.

Incidentally, this is the scenario of my RPG setting. I'm still looking for players if anyone is interested. PDF related.

Venezuelan stores are empty because Venezuela is an incompetently-managed bureaucratic socdem state which uses socialist rhetoric to mask corruption and cluelessness.

I don't into theory but I struggle to picture any other way shit gets done.

It's a scenario I've long predicted that seems more and more likely. In fact the 'rentism' in the article jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/ describes it to a degree.

By building the system in such a way as to allow people to make a profit if they contribute to an industry where production does not meet demand or if they make something new and wonderful that people want. You can still use the stick too, but my point is that it's often easier to give people an objective and an incentive and let them worry about how to get there specifically, instead of having a central office that decides literally every aspect of production and distribution arbitrarily and unilaterally.

Of course, any revolutionary programme will probably be all stick, but I'm talking about developing a post-revolutionary socialist society where it might not be wise to base everything on threat of violence.

Serious question time, do you think there will be a revolution in the west?

They have numerous times.
It always fails over something.

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Probably, it depends on a lot of things. I'm very curious to see how the US state will handle this coming depression. Without some kind of massive New Deal or war I think the possibility is very high. Of course, it's hard to tell what kind of revolution it would be, which is why I consider it very important that the left spend its time agitating, educating and gaining followers for when that time comes. It could very well be a Trump 3.0 or Louis Napoleon instead of a socialist, and if some bloody-minded opportunist gets in power you will see a lot of violence as they try the wrong things to fix the problems and have to repress the resultant unrest when they fail.

I have no doubts that humanity will see communism if we survive the coming century, but the difference we can make is to decide whether that transition will be one of massive death and atrocities or something relatively fast and bloodless.

Because Marx already BTFO'd utopian socialism decades ago

and the worst offender of all

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Sure, we have a few hundred million dollars to buy enough quality land to sustain a reasonable population and a few hundred million more to develop it.
Nigga, the only wealthy leftists Im aware of are Zizek and Chomsky and one of them eats from the trash.

Has been tried, doesn't work.