Is pure communism a free market?

Okay, so as far as I understand it, communism is based off collective ownership and abolishing private property. After you've lenin'd it for a while the state will wither away because there are no classes anymore. The state is just the apparatus needed to exert class power.

This means that factories and other things will simply be possessed by the workers, and they will be able to engage in collective management, making decisions democratically. Communes will also be set up and will manage local affairs. Larger scale stuff will be governed by a fluid confederation of co-operating communes or soviets or whatever who elect delegates to manage stuff.

However this is not a state, because there are no classes, and the delegates aren't a class because they come from the workers and can be recalled through direct democracy if they piss people off. The anarchist or pure communist confederation is also not a state, because all of the communes can leave and join a different confederation.

All communes have free association based on their internal democracy. This is necessarily so as a result of A: the abolition of private property, and B: the withering away of the state.

This necessarily means that there is a market between communes, measured not in money but in the evaluations of worth different democratic units are making.

This necessarily means that exclusion still exists (this is a good thing), but that it is based on worker control and democracy instead of bourgeois dictatorship and tyranny.

Therefore pure communism/anarcho-communism is a free market. It's just a free market in which private property isn't enforced.

This makes communism seem way more attractive to me, and I am now eager to become a communist. The only question is whether this theory is true or not.

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Where did I go wrong? Did I go wrong?

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Pretty much, yes.

I'd prefer it to be entirely without the barter system, where everything is commissioned and given rather than traded for, but such a society could only exist post-scarcity, so bartering on non-monetary trade units will have to do until then.

Right, but even then, transcending barter, different communes would have different commission systems and different rules imposed democratically.

So, if that's true, where does this meme come from that communism would destroy difference and diversity?

Fascist projection mixed with conflating the authoritarian dictatorships of people like Stalin, Mao and Un with communism.

And here's an example of communist competition.

In a moneyless, propertyless scenario. Imagine a commune with factories that make goods, and they want to go into a confederation with a raw goods supplier. They want iron awe, and there are a number of communes supplying it, some at different distances, but some with different efficiencies due to better management by different groups of workers. The commune will have to choose who to associate with so that it can best create goods to go in the common stock for people to take according to need. A decision will be made on the basis of which association with which suppliers best supplies the most of the needed raw material at the best quality.

Again, the difference is that instead of the anarchy in production of price signals, the workers of the commune will be able to make rational decisions just by observing the results of associating with one iron awe producing commune versus another.

Those communities that are dedicated most to producing raw materials will themselves need to pick out the best communes for finished goods.

ore

Can you motherfuckers stop using private property to mean absentee ownership? This is part of the reason normies misunderstand you yiu fucking speak gibberish.

Is personally fucking workers in the ass somehow better than delegating people to fuck workers in the ass?

Ideally yes, unfortunately we also have to communicate with each other, and we are kind of stuck with it now.

We should probably just say "absentee ownership" instead of private property, yes, but it's hard to change.

I don't think you understand. If you don't have absentee ownership rights, you wouldn't be able to delegate someone to exploit the workers in the first place, since having rights means that the state is enforcing it, and if the state isn't enforcing it, the workers don't have to listen and have de facto expropriated the factory.

Likewise, if you do it personally, without the state to enforce it, the workers again have nothing compelling them to respect your property rights.

Therefore you don't actually have ownership.

Nevermind that capitalism would rapidly break down if you had to personally be in your factory by law in order to own it.

even still considering post scarcity, there will still be people who decide to get into arts, crafts and trades for the simple sake of mastery and sharing the products of their love/labour. They may well keep some or much of the produce for themselves, but in most cases, they'll end up having to give some away. It initially may go to friends, but occasionally people may ask to commission pieces or to trade for it. So in the instance of handmade goods, I think barter will still exist.

Going back to barter is RETARDED. There is a fucking BIG and OBVIOUS reason money arose almost immediately after barter, it makes trade easier on the whole. Why the fuck would youn want to regress and make trade harder?

READ the Critique if the Gotha Program. You don't want to step back to barter and independent producers, you want to move towards directly social production and recognition of value. Jesus fucking Christ.

No. Why would you even think that?

Market implies exchange of goods.

No, it doesn't.

Communist economy is post-scarcity economy. "Worth" does not make sense, since there is an abundance. It's like selling air. You can freely gift away all the air in your room and be no poorer than you were before - it's will naturally flow back in.

In the same vein, community in a Communist economy can freely give away their products - and be no poorer. If you still need to keep track of things to keep up living standards, then you still have scarcity - i.e. no Communism. And this means Socialist economy.

Please, don't. We already have R.D.Wolff who is neither Communist, nor Marxist - even if he pretends otherwise - and his cultists students.

No, it's not. What you are talking about is much closer to Anarcho-Capitalism than to Communism.

shut up aw you fucking faggot

slideshare.net/conormccabe/david-38961122

No.

Social ownership.

It is not just semantics to differentiate between social and collective ownership, because the former implies ownership in immediate participation and occupancy, thereby excluding any such thing as participatory boundaries (like a labor contract or ordnance of belonging) to use means of production and the product of one's labor within a productive space. Meanwhile, while the latter [collective ownership] refers to one of many fenced off microcosms in which property is collective regulated and this only works within the context of an economic system where these seperate firms compete in production.

Watch WEBM related and read: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/.

There:

In post scarcity, bartering and trade would go like this:

"Hey you make good thing, and I do not wish to learn how to achieve the level of mastery you have at this moment, can you make thing for me?"

"Sure, here is thing"

"Thanks!"

The end.

No barter, no trade, no swapping.

No. It is the regional/provincial/national/continental/global/whatever level that includes both the factories and the raw material providers that will decide what goes where.

How does the post scarcity meme hold up in a material world of finite resources?

Nice, Top of the class.

Now, how to get there. (This is the beginning of your despair and bouncy balling between voting and revolutionary violence)

No, as there is central planning of goods and servces

Come the fuck on OP

Space communism.

Is this infographic true?

Is this the last generation of technology?

Are we really about to go full Stone Age again?

...

Well, yeah, but I wanted everyone to live like Porky, not nobody.

I wanted that space age utopia of dazzling architecture and luxury, not a return to log cabins and grass huts.

And instead we're headed to Mad Max land. Fucking great. Thanks capitalism, you dickheads.

We can still achieve post-scarcity in food and heavy industry, just not cheap toys and electronics.

That's assuming we don't find an alternative for our electrical products.

Humans need certain things, I'm not fussed that I may not have a cell phone for instant porn gratification in the future, but I'm right now sick of renting a shoebox in an overcrowded house in exchange for my wages and eating bloody muesli and protein powder.

As long I can use the internet, I think I'll manage.

There is an exchange of goods going on. It's just "free" in the sense that it's for need and no one has to pay.

The exchange takes place in the sense that freely associating communes would be choosing to form confederations or leave them on the basis of what they provide. So, the commune would be the basic unit of society and not a property owning individual.

Post-scarcity is impossible. Communism is a classless stateless society with common ownership of the means of production, and has nothing to do with magic. You can have less scarcity than today, but you can't be post-scarcity because resources are finite.

This is wrong. Post-scarcity is impossible.

You can give things away for free without having the magic ability to conjure infinite resources at any one time. You just have to ration them.

Even if resources never ran out, you can't produce infinite goods at once and store them in a magic dimension, so everyone would be able to take as they need until they hit a limit. There would have to be rationing. The difference between socialism and pure communism is only that in socialism you might have labor notes, whereas in the highest stage of communist society, you wouldn't need to exchange labor for goods. Post-scarcity doesn't come into it. Even fictional societies like Star Trek aren't post-scarcity and need replicator credits.

Wrong. If there is no private property, and no classes, and no money, where is the capitalism? Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron anyway that could never exist.

You might be getting confused by the term "free association" which is an old socialist anarchist term.

Christ, learn what post scarcity means instead of taking it at face value like a fucking moron.

Post scarcity doesn't make resources infinite, but ensures that no necessities are unobtainable by anyone (prices, hoarding, perfectly fine things being trashed)

Someone doesn't need to hoard in the first place when they can rest assured they can get their necessities when needed.

Now please visit >>>/suicide/ and enjoy your stay over there.

Then social ownership is necessarily incompatible with pure communism, since it could not be stateless. There would have to be a fixed class of leaders making sure that communes can't freely associate.

If, instead, as under anarcho-communist ideals, you have recallable delegates and direct democracy, then there would necessarily be fluid relations between different communes and not fixed ones. Free association would be ensured.

It's impossible to not have participatory boundaries, since the workers in a cracker factory are going to possess it and exclude some idiot randomly coming in and fucking with their machinery. Communism doesn't mean no exclusion. No exclusion is unworkable. Communism means that exclusionary decisions proceed according to direct democracy and collective occupancy instead of private property and bossism.

But obviously the workers in the cracker factory have different skills to the ones in the iron foundary. And obviously different iron foundaries in different spots are going to be more or less efficient or closer to the factories they supply, so there would be changes in terms of which communes have relations with which others. Confederations would change to befit the needs of their constituent communes.

If power comes from the bottom up, through the power of the workers, this is necessarily so, and if instead this is not so, something has gone wrong, and a fixed hierarchy has emerged in production, AKA a class.

They're not fenced off, first of all.

Secondly, I explained in the first few posts why competition is necessarily a feature of a society that has no classes or private property. Different collections of workers will still exist, for pure geographic and resource distribution inequalities, besides a myriad of other things.

If you have a town with some communes in it, those communes will still have to how to get goods before they apply further stages to them. They might all join in a local confederation, or half of them might make a confederation with some communes in a nearby town, or whatever. This will all be decided on the bottom up decisions of the workers through the fluid leadership of the delegates, and if this is not so, then you don't have a classless society.

Eradicating competition just means someone has won the competition. The purpose of communism isn't to eradicate decision making in production, but to make the decision making rational and for labor to get its full value. Even without money, and without classes, competition is still a thing, because communes that are less good at producing are going to be looked over for ones that are better. It doesn't matter if the decisions are being made by workers, or whether the goods are free. The relations still occur on the basis of decision making, which discriminates between one thing and another, and the flip side of this is competition for attention.

Maybe you should just call it very very low scarcity then.

Prices, hoarding, trashing have nothing to do with scarcity, so I suggest you learn what the terms mean instead.

Considering YOU brought up hoarding, I don't know where you going with this, but please by all means, carry on the conversion you are having with yourself.

>Now please visit >>>/suicide/ and enjoy your stay over there.

You're acting just like the Holla Forumsyps. This is a more mature board. Fuck off if you don't want to discuss things without sperging out because I challenged your dogma.

There is no scarcity in post scarcity (and no, it doesn't mean "infinite resources". Read the post again you stupid fucker.

How the fuck do you have central planning without fixed hierarchy?

If you centralize it you make it less easy to democratize, because instead of individual communes making democratic decisions about moment to moment interactions with other communes, you'd have to have everyone voting in a big pool to decide the relations between units and I don't think a mass of people can vote on that many decisions at once. Each voter would have to add his vote on the decision for each shipment of resources in the entire economy.

Obviously, that's absurd you say, because we could just have representatives do it for us, and a civil service, but then you'd just be applying the shitty republic system we have now but to the economy and not just the superstructure.

If you centralize like that, I doubt you could recall them whenever the voters get pissed off, so instead you'd have to work out terms and so on, but at this point this sounds more like a state. You'd need to decentralize into communes freely associating if you wanted to abolish the state.

Why did socialists forget the idea of free association? It was one of the big ideas of the 19th Century. Did we drop it just because it sounded too much like muh free market?

I don't think a society that challenges hierarchy can work if it is centralized though. Obviously, there's the transitional socialism, but at the end it has to wither away into free association, otherwise the hierarchies are still relatively fixed and not bottom up enough.

Don't get angry about your own stupidity. Getting rid of the ability to have private property, prices, trashing, and hoarding doesn't mean no scarcity.

You are saying that it would, correct?

This is wrong. While this would reduce scarcity, there would still remain the natural scarcity of A: only a certain number of resources existing on the planet in ways we can easily access, and B: only a certain productive ability to access a certain amount of them at a time.

This necessarily means rationing. There's nothing wrong with this, this is just reality. At least we get rid of capitalists creating extra scarcity on top of this so they can make profit.

Post scarcity in this context refers to necessities no longer being scarce thus unobtainable to some, which communism implies.

Can you even read my post again? Said it twice, the term doesn't mean infinite resources where everything can be produced as much as wanted, but that which is needed.

The fact that resources on this planet will be exhausted at a point doesn't mean scarcity either, since it is rather difficulty at obtaining something, and endless amounts of food (example) is not needed to be past scarcity.

As time and technology advances, scarcity will effectively be eliminated. But by all means keep telling yourself that it is impossible because scarcity = finite resources.

Yes it does. That is part of the literal meaning of things being scarce. Things can be scarce in space and then scarce in time.

Wrong. If I go to the collective store and ask for 10,000 bricks to put in my truck so I can build a building (coz I feel like it), then they'll probably say WHOOPS OUT OF STOCK

So yes, scarcity will always exist. Substitute 10,000 for an arbitrary number, and bricks for anything you like.

Bien hecho, te la comiste mi pana.

And I explained this isn't true. If I ask for an amount of pizzas they don't have, they can't give me that either, and it's not because they're hoarding.

That's not hoarding. They literally can't provide it because they don't have it.

You can go to Venezuela whenever you want pal, they are already heading to mad max.

then do it, keyboard warrior

can't? then shut the fuck up and stop fronting like the bitch you are

There is a reason why we icepick some "Communists".

When we (sane, educated people) are talking economy, we are talking about economic relations. The sum of those relations is generally abstracted into some term - for the sake of simplicity. That doesn't mean that each and every single economic action that happens is following this abstract term to the letter.

You don't claim that our economy is gift economy, if someone gave you a gift? Nor do you claim Feudalism, if landlord demands a rent from you. Most of your activity is conducted via market economy and Capitalism: you get your daily necessities by selling yourself into wage slavery.

So - yes. It is called post-scarcity if your economic everyday activity is described as post-scarcity: you can get a comfortable housing at a moments notice, have a good dinner, get fashionable clothes and a modern smartphone - and you are not obligated to give anything in return.

You don't need to be able to deliver to every single person a hundred golden palaces to have Communism. That's kindergarten level of understanding economy.

Simply abolishing money is not Socialism, nor is it Communism.

P.s. stop breathing, if you still don't believe in post-scarcity. Air is post-scarcity for you.

Sooooo a backed currency?
Money is literally just an abstraction of trade, it IS trade

Dont upset the ancoms. They try to get to "communism" in one go but they have to invent money-not-money and a state-not-state in order to do so.

Alright see you on the street friendo

sorry m8 I don't carry cash on me

you'll have to hit up another john ;)