I am a capitalist. I would like a discussion asking questions to the peoppe of this board. I do not want arguments...

I am a capitalist. I would like a discussion asking questions to the peoppe of this board. I do not want arguments, I want thought-provoking discussion. To start such a discussion, I will ask some general questions that I have been curious for the answer.

- Do you oppose or support authortitarian regime in a government?

- I usually hear the claim, "All socialist states fall because of outside involvement, like how the US affected Cuba.". Is there any evidence to this claim?

- What is your opinion on antifa communists / modern day liberal far left?

- Not a question, but please explain communism/socialism in your point of view and what sect of communism or socialism you follow.


Please, do not berate me. I'm looking for a conversation. I may be "un-informed", but that is no reason to shoot down my questions.

Other urls found in this thread:

muse.jhu.edu/article/198813.
thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain
reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/3i4xoy/is_there_worker_control_of_factories_and_other/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I genuinely want to answer but I'm upset that you're a tripfag.

Firstly, no leftist fully supports the notion of a permanent state anyway. So this renders your question to be pointless, of course we don't.

There has never been an actual "socialist state" -_-, all of the states you probably think of as socialist were either state capitalist, welfare capitalist or social democratic (arguably the same thing).

Antifa is a broad left movement, not just consisting of capitalists. I think they're alright, better than some alternative groups that are fucking stupid like CPUSA.

Did you actually call liberals far left? Liberals are delusional, and in support of capitalism.

Leftists have the same understanding of what communism is, it is a stateless, moneyless, classless society. Where we differ, and where the different "types" of communism arise is how we think that communism will be achieved. I think that we should abolish the state immediately, others think we should have a transitional state to make sure we have a clean way of achieving communism (like Leninists).

OP, these are questions every person asks when they are first learning about communism, they aren't exactly going to provoke much discussion. However it's good that you wanna learn some shit, I suggest staying around on the board anyway.

*Not just consisting of communists, typo.

Respond to this meme then we will talk

Do you own means of production and exploit workers for profit?

Humans are inherently sinful. Doesn't that mean that a moneyless, classles society
cannot exist?

Also, is it bad to be nationalistic?


I'm talking about the type of liberals who suppot Bernie Sanders and reject capitalism.


I see alot of people say that, if the communist party seizes the means of production, it is socialism. Is it, or is it not?

It is impossible for money to not exist, isn't it? Even monkeys developed a form of currency using tree nuts when a scientist studied them. Isn't it a natural response to have money because it is the logical step up from trading things?

Also, what do you gus think of social justice? Do you agree with it?

Why do leftists laugh at the notion of race, yet they endlessly go on about how the white man has exploited countless groups of people?

The authoritarian-libertarian dichotomy is non-existent. Any form of social cohesion innately rests upon power, either in the form of a repressive or ideological apparatus. All we have is our discipline.

If we can even call places like Cuba that have kept (or even empowered) since their takeover by Marxist-Leninist socialists such things as a chamber of local and internaitonal commerce, the money value form and wage labor 'socialist', we still see the effect of foreign policy guided by the strongarms of global capital attempt to either overthrow or subvert them. This is because, at best, places like Cuba reject the globalization of capital by being isolationist. This threatens the very foundation of the larger empires of capital, which need to grow financially, and what better way to do that than toppling secular states and oiling the arms market?

Misguided and ineffectual activism born from a lack of discipline. Read: muse.jhu.edu/article/198813.

Socialism: social ownership of production. Communism: political movement to bring about a society absent of economic classes, the state and money.

Leninist communism.

H U M A N N A T U R E

Neither, I agree with

Some socialist states faced problems, I don't think I need to prove you that Cuba and North Korea would be much better off without embargoes and shit. But that claim is absolutely wrong. Socialist states failed because of (right-wing) revisionists who got into power and crushed the economy, and (possibly) because the preexisting conditions were lacking (like China, but I'm not an expert on it).

Liberals are shit (as always) and most antifa are probably anarkiddies and trots, so they're useful idiots at most. Of course I'm in favour of rioting and smashing fascists\porkies.

like said, I'm for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that will wither away into communism. I'm a marxist-leninist

Oppose, personally.


"All of them" is a stupid claim, some like Maoist China were plainly stupid. However, there is heaps and heaps of evidence that during the middle of the Cold War, the US was balls deep in international affairs at the expense of the wishes of local citizens. Operation Condor and the coup d'etats in South America for example. They also openly mandated the ostracism of countries that didn't toe their line in general like Yugoslavia, and even supported authoritarian regimes as long as they weren't leftist, kissing apartheid era South Africa's ass to no end.


They are just college kids LARPing.


Socialism is the next logical step after capitalism once the inherent contradictions in capitalism become readily apparent and it is no longer useful as a mode of production. Similarly, capitalism was a step forward from feudalism. All of history builds onto itself, this is how the material view of philosophy works.

cannot exist?
Money, class and state are some of the causations of what you would consider "sinful" actions. Of course humans have natural traits that an economic system wouldn't fix, we'd at least like to get rid of the ones we can fix, like the ones caused by capitalism.

Yes, nationalism is a tool used by the ruling class to split up the oppressed classes making them easier to control.

Those liberals are centre-left, and they don't reject capitalism. What they say when they refer to "democratic socialism" is in reality social democracy, where they don't want the workers to own the means of production (that's what socialism is, by the way), they want the lower classes to be supported by the state. But the point is they still want a class system, making them not socialists. No liberal can be a socialist, no matter how much they say it.

The people seize the means of production for a socialist society to arise. Just because a communist party says they are making socialism happen, doesn't make it so. Socialism only happens when the workers have seized the means of production. Also, to answer your next question, just because parties call themselves communists and like the colour red, doesn't make them actual communists. The revolution must always be lead by the people, for the people/

We are pro social justice, of course. We want ultimate equality. But if you're referring to sjws, we just see them as another type of identity politics (politics based off of race, gender, religion etc, which strays from what we really must fight, which is the economic system. we must unite)

oppose. A truly decent and free world can only exist free of government and corporate influence and meddling.

an ambarrsement
liberals are not left

democratic worker control of the means of production and devolvement of political power to local councils and soviets.

Greed can not be fixed. Does greed not break communism?

No.
Sort of. All the best socialist states have fallen because of outside involvement, for two reasons: firstly, everything needs to fall somehow, and if something's good it's not going to fall because of its own faults: secondly, they opposed the Bolsheviks, which meant they got no support from them and usually got stomped on by them.

However, none of them were weaker because they were socialist. A capitalist state would've been equally fucked (and in many cases were: Makhno got fucked in Ukraine, but so did the nationalists).
Spooked motherfuckers no better than anyone else.
I'm an Egoist.

No ideology is good enough for me. Everything wants to order me in some way, and I don't want to be ordered. But, alternately, nothing can truly order me. It becomes a question of what ideologies I can indulge myself best in, which also means what ideologies will indulge others (because I am not a psychopath).

Socialism is only a tool. I do agree with many of its beliefs, in that certain conditions would give rise to true socialism. I also think true socialism would be pretty cool. But, unlike most socialists I do not think it's inevitable, and unlike most socialists I do not think it's the only thing that would be cool. I also subscribe to a kind of lesser-evilism, in that I think modern capitalist nations are an okay thing to put up with.

Ultimately I want to help people because it makes me feel all fuzzy inside. Socialism looks like a good method, better than any other I've seen, but that doesn't mean it's always better. A jackhammer is better than a spade, but sometimes you want to use a spade.

I'm like the specialist snowflake egoistic-socialist here though.

Humans don't exist.
It has existed before, or so we think. Look into the copper-age cities, or the gangetic civilisation.
It is masochistic.

No, because society and justice are both spooks.

What? Let me quote myself because it looks like you didn't read my post:

Unless you mean that you are part of the bourgeoisie (you own means of production of some sort), you are not a capitalist, you are a supporter of capitalism. Capitalist is not the opposite of communist.

Oppose it.

As said, there haven't exactly been any "socialist states" but if we look at socialist societies and state capitalist states in general there is plenty of historical evidence to support that claim. Some examples are:
The Paris Commune (the French army practically massacred everyone)
Chile (CIA starts a coup, finances riots, and puts Pinochet in power after Allende commits suicide)
Cuba (has been pressured by the USA ever since its revolution, there have been hundreds of assassination attempts towards Fidel Castro, embargos etc.)
USSR (although it's collapse can be blamed on itself and it's overly authoritarian nature, it's common knowledge that the USA did everything in it's power to lead to the USSR's collapse. Just look at the cold war in general)

There are countless different groups, so that question can not be answered fully. Antifa isn't bad in my opinion, they take a lot of direct action, which is something I like about them.

Communism: comes after decades of succesful socialism, is a classless, stateless, moneyless society.
Socialism: refers to all communist ideologies in general. As long as private property is abolished, it's considered socialism.

I personally follow Libertarian Socialism/Luxemburgism, becase I believe that while we need a state to succesfully overthrow capitalism and suppress counter-revolution (or at least is much more feasible with a state, rather than without), we need to avoid authoritarian bureaucracies, like for example the USSR's system of goverment. I personally agree with Rosa Luxemburg's proposed system of local councils and a central parliament, which control the state.

Greed's pretty fucking nebulous as a concept. Is there any evidence that there is some inner drive to accumulate in excess of what one can consume that isn't socially conditioned or forced by circumstance?

Even if this 'greed' of yours did exist, f you're saying that a socialist system wouldn't work because of it, that's plainly absurd. Under a socialist system, one would be unable to get more consumer goods without doing more work, so greed would be a neutral force at most.

If you're talking about the so-called "tragedy of the commons", I'm sorry to say that it's based on faulty premises and the historical record suggests the exact opposite - resources held in common were usually managed rather well and had mechanisms against one guy just using everything up for himself (which would ultimately end up hurting the guy in question in the long run as well, realistically speaking.) (c.f. thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain )

This is a bad meme. Leftists go on about exploitation, liberals go on about how exploitation is bad when it's not a diverse group of people doing it.


You can be involved in enterprise without capitalism, if that's the part that bothers you about the left.

Trash, right wing from this boards perspective.


Humans are a result of their envirinment, their "material conditions". You only know what humans are inherently like within a pervasive capitalist system.


More trash, COINTELPRO coopted by the FBI and interior security services to derail class struggle. Look up the progressive stack in Occupy Wall Street.

I support as much democracy as possible for the working class.

Not all of them failed because of this, though a lot. The evidence for the ones effected by the CIA at least is the fact they flat out admit it by this point because it was so long ago.

what?


Socialism = Worker ownership of the means of production
Communism = Stateless, classless, currencyless society after decades of successful socialism

I myself am a Leninist. I believe we need to apply Marxism to our own modern contexts in the same way Lenin did for his, analysing the types of problems prevalent in our time that were not as much in Marxs. For Lenin it was things like Imperialism, the war and trying to build Socialism in a third world country, while for us it might be things like climate change or globalism.

No


Depends. Every socialist country was assaulted by outside forces to one degree or another, and in every case it certainly contributed to the problems that they faced. That being said there are some inherent problems with Marxism-Leninism (the brand of socialism used by almost every socialist country) that would still have existed without outside interference.


Antifa can be good or shitty depending on their behaviour. Sometimes they knock the heads of genuine skinheads, other times they attack more moderate conservatives and just look like asshats. The liberal "left" is a joke. They have almost no concern for class conflict, and if they do they see it as just another equal factor in their "intersectional" systems instead of the system by which all hierarchies emerge.


Communism is a society that lacks distinct social classes, money, or the state. Socialism is the democratic and worker control of the means of production. Personally I'm a Syndicalist, although I think Market Socialism is a necessary transitional period.

When was the last time we had "I'm a Capitalist" thread? Was it two weeks ago or more?

Moving away from the narrow conception of greed for a bit,

Most scientific evidence indicates behavior is mediated by both genetic predisposition and environment. Saying that behavior motivated by malevolent self-interest (i.e. self interested pursuit of power over others and self-aggrandizement at the expense of others) simply won't exist under socialism or communism, and therefore isn't worth discussing, is an unsubstantiated claim and will not be recognized as a valid argument by most people.

If we assume that selfishness is at least partially latent and humanity is to a degree incorrigible, what level of malevolent self-interested motivation do you think a communist or socialist society tolerate among its members before degeneration? Also, while I acknowledge that the removal of capitalism from the picture will ultimately reduce these drives, you will still need to deal with them when your society is first established.

All volunteers are hereby ordered to use clubs rather than guns.

Wrong thread, unfunny meme.

The problem is that our present organization of society is such that excessive self-interest is encouraged and altruism discouraged by the structure of the system. I'd recommend you read Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin, it's one of the seminal works on the topic of altruism in nature as a positive adaptation.

I'd say it's rather on you to show how a reasonable amount of self-interest would cripple socialism, rather than expecting us to prove a negative.

Look up crime rates in the USSR, it wasn't low because muh gulags (look how ineffectual a deterrent capital punishment is).

OK, I'll check out the book.

Also, I'm not assuming it would cripple socialism; I asked what degree of it you thought society could tolerate. I don't think socialism would ever work out if everyone was constantly trying to shaft everyone else, but I would think there is a threshold for stability somewhere, and it should by no means be required to make humanity into some unattainable ideal in order to have socialism or communism. The secondary question was how you think society should act to protect itself from the bad actors, either by law, ideology, resistance by the masses in collective self-interest, or other methods.

Only good post in the thread tbh.

Well, the thing is, what mechanisms would you have to fuck over people over under a socialist system, assuming no production for profit or private property? It would have to be some form of fraud, counterfeiting, producing shoddy goods or whatever - and all of those can be dealt with just as they are under the present state of society.

In any case, the main way people are exploited under capitalist society is through exploitation of surplus value - ie, you produce more value for your boss than he pays you in wages, as well as usury and straight up violence. The idea is to eliminate these institutions and replace them with ones that are neither exploitative nor prone to crisis. (Granted, we need to work on that, Stalin's conception of socialist society wasn't the very best, though in our defense it's not like we've been given many opportunities to try alternative models.)

No, it is not. Money is just a way to exchange commodities, there is nothing special about it, and it's only relevant in a market economy, which is just one way of organizing an economy.

Your ordinary High School textbook will usually say something along the lines of "a market economy is a way of distributing scarce resources to the people who need it." In a sense, it's a form of rationing. However, unlike most forms of rationing, where the goods are distributed based on need or merit or just handed out equally, markets distribute them to the people with the most money, leaving those who need it but can't afford it with nothing.
More to the point, a market economy presumes that there is scarcity. In fact, it starts falling apart the moment there is enough of something for everyone.
Take food, for example: We produce more than enough food to feed the entire world, and yet 800 million are starving. What happens to all that surplus food? It's thrown out, or it's used to feed the growing obesity epidemic.
In the US, there are more vacant, perfectly good houses than there are homeless people. Most of those homes are owned by banks, who got them when their former owners foreclosed, and they can't sell them because the people who need those houses can't afford them (and are probably the same people who were forced out of those houses). So they just sit and rot.
To quote a series called the Culture: "Money implies poverty." Because no matter how advanced or economically powerful a state is, the way markets distribute goods means that there will always be an underclass of poor people, even when there is more than enough for everyone to live comfortably.

So to rephrase the original question: What would you do if money was not an issue, if you could live comfortably your entire life without having to spend a dime? Would you do nothing?

Oink oink, piggu. Joking aside, you are only a capitalist if you are in the capitalist class. Most likely you are a proletarian.

molly.jpeg

I lean anarchist so oppose. I would support the establishment of a constitutional democratic government that established socialism, as a transitional state. I would then immediately start pushing for replacing the state with a more equitable system. It's just at this point, the left is so disjointed that almost any leftist paradigm shift would be an improvement.

The most notable ones failed because they fucked up the socialism part. I'm in the camp that says the USSR was never socialist except in the sense that it was part of a socialist or communist movement (ostensibly at least).

Antifa are castrated version of the Left. Liberals are not leftist, they're center-right if you have to plot it on a spectrum.

Communism:
1. A society absent of class (economic inequality to sum up), states, or money
2. A movement attempting to bring about 1

Socialism:
1. An economic system absent of class - that is to say, every worker owns a stake in their workplace/society according to the work they do. That is to say, the workers "own the means of production" collectively instead of a capitalist class owning the shares and buying labor in a market (which allows them to pay workers less than their value). The goal is for society to become so efficient at meeting people's needs that we reach post-scarcity and transition to Communism.
2. A movement attempting to bring about 1

Regarding mechanisms to fuck people over, the same thing which motivates people to attach themselves to pyramid schemes could, if selfish sentiment was sufficiently prevalent, have the power to turn a socialist state into a totalitarian one. It can be difficult to spur collective action of people against threats to their well being as should be extremely clear in our current society, so I'm not sure if collective enforcement of norms is reasonable, though it would have great stability properties, particularly if rationally based. So, if maintenance of the stability of society falls on people employed in service of the state, you would then need mechanisms to protect positions within the state from being taken over by the people motivated by self-interest, as has happened in most countries at this point. From there, the tenets of socialism could be eroded and exploitation could return.

No matter what, I don't see how people could afford to become complacent in such a society, and I am not convinced eternal vigilance can be expected of a people.

I suppose the eternal socialist state is an excessively high standard, but I would want to do what I could to ensure its stability for as long as possible.

Oh whoops I missed
I'm of the opinion that theory is good and all but the Left is sorely missing field tests. I would like to see a multi-party democratic socialist system established wherein the different leftist ideologies could try out their various plans. That way we'd find out which ones work the best. Meanwhile I'd be trying to convince people to organize in anarchist societies (libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist more or less) to try that system outside of the state. Ultimately, people should be free to move to whichever system they find suits them best until we either maximize the effectiveness of socialism or arrive at communism.

The problem is that by the time socialism is likely to come about, nearly everyone will have no interest in returning to capitalism, just as we today under capitalism have no interest in returning to feudalism, on the basis that the vast majority of people would be significantly worse off (although, as capitalism progresses towards its end, we may see a return to a kind of neo-feudalism if initial attempts to build socialism are unsuccessful.)

I'd be equally doubtful of any return to exploitation. Unless you use violence, nobody is going to voluntarily agree to make 90% less money so that 1% of the population can live in palaces. And in order to ensure that violence is not an option, you have strong gun rights, worker's militias, directly democratic institutions, and so on. That's pretty much the best insurance against that sort of shit, imo.

"Authoritarian" is somewhat of a subjective term, so naturally what I or others here see as fairly non-authoritarian will seem like Stalin-level to others. Namely most people who have taken in capitalist ideology hold private property rights to be the only rights that truly matter, so the abolition of said private property is seen as utter heresy. For the sake of our own liberation, the abolition of private property is an absolute necessity, though obviously people are still free to maintain personal property.
Overall no though, I do not support the general notion of authoritarian regimes in the traditional state-form due to the self-defeating nature of centralizing all power under an organization and expecting it to abolish itself.

Depends on what you mean by "socialist states." If you're referring to mostly Cold War era states that followed Soviet party line, then you can safely say most of them never actually achieved socialism. For those instances, the Cold War itself is littered with instances of US-backed coups, overthrows, and backing guerilla groups. Take the Sandinista-Contra conflict in Nicaragua: that prolonged war absolutely decimated the country and its resources, despite the fact that the Contras were neither a truly popular movement nor would have had any means of holding out that long without the MASSIVE amounts of aid that the CIA was sending them.
You did have a few actual instances of socialism: most anarchist experiments, Yugoslavia, Paris Commune, etc. In all such cases except Yugo, they were pretty blatantly cases of outside involvement ruining it. Yugo was a bit different: it was technically socialist in the sense that it put ownership of the means of production more directly in the hands of the workers while also breaking away from the tradition of planned economies in favor of markets. Ultimately overspending, overreliance on IMF loans, and Tito's failure to prepare the country for his death did them in.

Antifa is pretty broad, consisting of a lot of ideological tendencies that are operating together under only a fairly vague pretext. I've been highly critical of them as any sort of mass movement in the past, but I've gained a bit more respect for them as of recently after realizing that they were never meant to be a revolutionary force unto their own. Fascism has never relied on having a true mass movement backing it: it has always been an opportunistic ideology that utilizes a small minority of ultraviolent groups to essentially bully their way into positions of power, then consolidating state power under whatever positions they can get ahold of. Disruption of these groups in their earlier stages ultimately makes sense, as the state itself will take very few measures to check their power.
Also liberals can hardly be considered "far left," no matter how "radical" some of the idpol social positions they take may be.

Socialism is an economic system characterized by system-wide worker's ownership of the means of production.
Communism is a society that has abolished class, the state (or at least the traditional understanding of the state), and currency (somewhat debated considering some still advocate for things like labor vouchers, at least as a transitional apparatus).
As for my specific ideological strain: anarcho-syndicalism. Basically a strategy of achieving anarcho-communism that favors direct action, organization of the worker's movement at the workplace/union level, and eventually the creation of a democratic decentralized planned economy managed by confederations of unions / trade unions / syndicates. I'm simplifying massively obviously.

oppose

There is truth to it, but it's a pathetic argument to fall back on, since there will never be a situation where a socialist state will not have to defend itself from outside capitalist influence, and also it should be strong enough to stand on it's feet despite that. States have "failed" in the past for a number of reasons, but a recurring theme is lack of actual socialist democracy and worker's controlling the means of production, as well as various coups invasions, destabilisations etc. You would be hard pressed to deny at least an attempted US/CIA involvement in every nation that ever declared any socialist leanings, but again, a socialist state needs to be strong enough to deal with that. I think the biggest example of this is Spain and it's civil war, though, and while both sides gained foreign involvement it was certainly in the favour of fascist forces.

I have no problem with people beating up fascists, what I have a problem with is the liberal idea of labeling everything a fascist, and using that as an excuse to destroy free speech etc. The modern liberal "left" is a joke and it should be derided, people see the only option against capitalism as liberal capitalism, and in fact shoot themselves in the foot by fighting over causes that split the working class.

Communism is a world where we don't produce what we need and want simply for profit. We produce to supply the world with wants and needs. We have the technology and resources to do this, but we don't because it's not in the interests of the people that own the means to produce privately.

name me a reason how cuba is not a socialist/communist state

The workers of Cuba do not control the means of production.

Control of production is merely done on their behalf by the state. The state is run by bureaucrats who have their own interests in mind.

Yes. In addition to what has already been mentioned, co-operatives have been the dominant form of production in agriculture for a long time now. I'm quoting my own work on the topic if anyone is wondering. Peasant co-ops have existed for decades and the ailing state farms began transitioning to co-operatives called UBPCs in the early 1990s:

The overwhelming majority of workers took up the offer to become co-operativistas, making them the collective owners of all of the means of agricultural production belonging to the former state farms, except for the land which is leased from the state in usufruct, for free in perpetuity so long as it is used for agricultural production. UBPCs are organized around a central worker's assembly which operates “according to the principle of one person, one vote, and members of the general assembly of each UBPC is the maximum authority for all of its decisions,” while “each assembly elects from its own an administrative board whose members can be recalled at any time by the assembly” (Diaz Gonzalez 2004:155).

So in Cuba today, the vast majority of workers/farmers in the agrarian sector are the legal owners of the means of production and the products of their labour. Land is a bit of an exception: peasants are the legal owners of their lands, while the land comprising the former state farm co-ops is owned in common by the state and leased in permanent usufruct for free.

The establishment of the UBPCs makes co-operative production the dominant form of agriculture in the nation and opens up the potential for moving closer to a system of democratic, yet scientific and technically sound, management of rural production by workers and farmers themselves. The authors of an early sociological study on the adoption of co-operative forms of production in Cuban agriculture, despite noting numerous difficulties with transition problems for co-ops, concluded that: The co-operatization of the state farm sector has the potential to generate a profound transformation in Cuban agrarian class relations. To the extent that the UBPCs become truly participatory and self-managed units, the Cuban transition could generate more profoundly 'socialist' (or collectivist) relations of production than those evident in the statist model of the last 30 year (Deere et al. 1997:230).

Cuban social scientist Diaz Gonzalez (2004) comes to a similar finding: The creation of the UBPC constituted a step forward in the process of democratization of the Cuban countryside that was initiated with the first Agrarian Reform Law of 1959. It has created greater potential for a transition towards sustainable rural and agrarian development in Cuba by making possible a greater and more direct form of direct participation of the producers themselves in decision-making, making them protagonists in their own process of development (p. 156).

So this is far from a perfect system of course, most of the state farms were an absolute tire fire in the 1990s when the transition became and some farms in the UBPC sector are still in dire straits. There is also the problem of working out the proper level of autonomy for enterprises vis the state, which farms are contractually obligated to provide a certain quota of product to. The producers need autonomy as both a means and an end of socialist development, yet there also has to be some level of national regulation of production that takes into account the needs of the nation for food and other agricultural use-values. Suffice it to say, they are continually working on refining this relationship.

This accounts for millions of workers/farmers in Cuba, who are the literal owners and managers of the means of production in agriculture, which is not only one of the most important sectors in economic terms, but also for the strategic value in assuring sovereignty over the national food system.

reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/3i4xoy/is_there_worker_control_of_factories_and_other/

Antifa is anti-fascist, that doesn't automatically make them communist by default. That's like saying if you dislike Coke, you must be a Pepsi guy.

At first the revolution requires a state to ensure everyone remains fed and supplied during the transitional period, but once it is no longer needed it is to be dibanded immediately as to not create a bureaucratic regime a la USSR.

Antifa is needed as a vangaurd to keep the temporary communist state from plunging into fascism, a la North Korea.

Liberals are not far left, we are the far left. Liberals are very centrist.


Firstly socialism is not communism. It relies on centralized government to take care of the people.

Communism is a communal based system where everyone works together to benefit their community directly, instead of the profit (in a moneyless society, read products of labor) going to some faraway corporation then a fraction of it trickling back down to the actual workers.

Such a society would create an abundance of goods, a lack of destitution poverty brings and a far larger amount of personal leisure time. War would not kill off good workers like it does now, so there would never be a shortage in the workplus. If anything, there would be such a surplus each person would hardly have to do anything to keep the same quality of production we have today.

For example, in a capitalist society, automation merely means a faster pace of work for the human assistants to the machinery, as profit is the main goal of production. In a communist society where the demand is the only driving force, factory workers would not have to work so hard or so long.


Morality is a spook - that is to say, its an abstract ideal that humans choose to put meaning into, not something that actually has inherent meaning. Sin is merely religion's definition of what disobeys it.

To answer your question, I shall ask you a question. What are tribes?

And then I want you to take the concept of a tribe and extrapolate that internationally - one big tribe, one big planet, all working together to benefit their in-group, which in this case is the human species.


Yes, arbitrary borders and otherism creates fear and defensiveness where there shouldn't be. It's time to evolve beyond territorial instinct.

Even those supported capitalism, they just wanted to socialize it.

If the leftist state seizes the means of production and it keeps it and centralizes it, that is socialism. If it gives it to the working class and then disbands itself at the behest of the people, it is communism.


Not at all. The idea of [x] amount of [y] is worth [x] amount of [z] is completely arbitrary, and generally grows the amount of z (aka money) over time because of a profit-based economy.

In an economy not driven by profit, a diamond ring is worth just as much as a bag of chips. If you have worked to contribute to the community, you are just as entitled to one as you are the other.

Pre-emptively
Firstly, if you are contributing to the success of your community, just like a o job under capitalism you are invested in seeing it do well, because you know that in turn benefits you, even moreso when you and your community directly reap the reward of labor instead of faraway entities.

Secondly, if you are greedy and you do clear out the whole store, you will have a very angry community to face when they find out.

That generally falls under identity politics, and we're more focused on economics here. If it's any help, as a gay person I feel right at home here - I don't feel shunned, hated or oppressed here. My homosexuality doesn't matter because it doesn't affect anything, so I find everyone here to be pretty tolerant (except for a few Holla Forums posters that come in, they're obvious though).

That makes two of us!

workplace

a job

Sorry for the typos

No democratic control of the means of production.

State control is not democratic control. If socialism meant "the government controls the economy" then every monarchy that ever existed was "socialist."

see

Particularly baffling if you say you dislike Coke then spend all your time smashing crates of Sprite

What is the difference between personal and private property?

Personal property is in near-permanent occupancy and/or use of an individual, e.g. your house and toothbrush.

Private property is a social relationship between the owner and persons deprived (not a relationship between person and thing), e.g., artifacts, factories, mines, dams, infrastructure, natural vegetation, mountains, deserts, seas, etc.

Personal property is stuff you own, like your toothbrush or whatever.
Private property is stuff that's used for production, that is, to render goods or services in the economy.

You keep other people from using your toothbrush because it's your thing that you use for yourself and so that other people won't deal with your bad breath.
Bourgeoisie keep other people from using their factories because they want to rent them out to workers (the rent is subtracted from their pay). The bourgeoisie keep a virtual monopoly on all the MoP so that in order to work (and in order to make a living) workers must sell their labor for less than its value. If the MoP were socialized, workers could use it pretty much at their discretion and take away the full value that the product of their labor was exchanged for. The math gets kind of complicated, but basically your pay is determined based on how much work you do, and this is approved democratically among the workers. In capitalism there is a labor market where the workers sell to the capitalists, but the capitalists hold all the MoP so they have ludicrous bargaining power and wind up paying workers a fraction of the value they generate.

I believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat to transition to communism, but not an authoritarian regime like the USSR. Dictatorship of the proletariat, not dictatorship over the proletariat. I believe in the use of workers' councils to run the state and redistribute the wealth of the bourgeoisie.
explains my views on this fairly well.
Antifa is pretty based, but I'm irritated that they don't really have a plan outside of caving in the skulls of fascists. Beating up Nazis is all well and good, but it can put off some people from the left. Antifa should do more in the way of helping people affected by fascist violence, like setting up mutual aid, or setting up self-defense lessons. Just something to give them more credibility in the eyes of the public. And no, Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. He is a moderate social democrat.
I'm a council communist. I believe that workers' councils are the most legitimate form of working-class representation, and must form the basis of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Don't worry, it was fine before. Instead of being anticap they are antifa, in order to protect liberal status quo.