Give me a description of what a communist society looks like...

What happens when people disagree on how things should be run? or when there's different opinion on what should be made? I mean management is pretty easy under any system when everybody agrees on everything.

I'll look into it later. also I have to buy it? the torrent lists an action movie

A vote is taken and the majority decision is the one the work place goes with.

Good and definitely not bad.

I don't know where you could pirate the doc from, but it's worth watching. The possibility exists that there may be a copy at a library near you.

...

There wouldn't be retarded threads like this one.

Read this book.

I can assure you the internet would still exist.

I'd work willingly in communism. I mean it's not like it absolutely requires full automation and it's some serious cointelpro bullshit to imply it does.
But leftcoms don't actually read, they think "do nothing" is seriously what bordiga meant.

this

Are costs still determined by supply and demand? Do you get vouchers for making creative works like movies? How do you set up supply chains for complex products like computers and vehicles?

Do more qualified personnel get more votes? Are conflict of interests an issue? An established car factory may not want to learn how to build electric cars for example.

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i want a tldr

This gets into some abstract theory not many people on Holla Forums, myself included, are gonna have a firm grasp on. Supply and demand are aspects of Capitalism and it's economy - Socialism and in particular Communism are about 'abolishing the current state of things' as Marx put it - to put an end to markets, the cycle of capital and pretty much everything as we currently understand it, Lenin touches in State and Revolution about how even the concept of democracy could not be the same under Communism. Sounds weird but there's no way to really know how it would be - predicting the specifics of Communism would be like the ancient Greeks predicting the specifics of Capitalism.

However, for the purpose of making understanding things easier - yes, supply and demand would still be used in conjunction with central planning to determine the amount of resources available and where they are needed, to then be distributed according to need.

I wouldn't imagine so, although if a specific worker coop wanted to run things that way then I guess they could.

This again comes down to the more specifics of the society - some ideologies would say the state would force them to make certain things if they really had to - for instance if it were during war time or something - others would say it's 100% down to the specific factory what they wanna do.

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he fell for it guys

If you don't like how things are run can you start your own factory? How do you get the resources to make a new one?
This also brings up questions about qualifications and what decides what people will study in higher education.

I'll ask again about non-utilitarian goods, since it's the majority of what people consume. I'm starting to get the impression that things like video games and non standard luxuries don't get made/imported.

Well first I run over to my neighbor's house to see if he's finished using the communal toothbrush

Get used to work
Leftcoms will be in the gulag

Who is going to make the video games, the Anime, the miniatures, etc?

We can only make wild and possibly very inaccurate conjectures as to what life in a communist society would look like, as we are currently removed from the material conditions of that society. To speak of it is like an individual living under feudalism explaining what capitalist society would look like; they can deduce some features based on existing trends, but the perspective largely exists within the conceptual framework of (and is thus limited by) feudal life. To suggest we know for certain anything beyond such conjecturing is pure utopianism.

Here is what we MIGHT expect based on the stated goals of communist movements as it pertains to daily life:

I'm being general, but even within an imaginary society that we try to envision, individual lives and routines are going to be different enough that speaking of specifics is not likely sufficient in capturing the general life experience the society at large faces.

That sounds basically the same as what you'd expect if you implemented basic income in a post scarcity capitalism where automation can make most things.

Except without the capitalist overlords who now dominate every aspect of production and who no longer have to even feign any kind of concern for the working class as they've been completely removed from the production process so the masses live off literal crumbs granted by the owners which affords everyone just enough soylent to last a month and a Netflix subscription.

I mean you'd have your basic income, so you wouldn't have to work.
Theoretically employers would have to either increases wages or make working more enjoyable to make it more appealing than doing whatever else you'd want to do with your time.

Yeah I bet we'll be living high on the hog with them UBI bux.

The same people as before.

well, no, I just see the difference with what is describing.

How do you decide which video game projects get made? Everyone and their dog has a video game idea these days.

~democracy~

Our task is not to write recipes for the cook shops of the future.

This is something I want to know more about too. I'm a communist and everything but I don't quite understand how we would determine who gets to make a living on creative work. Obviously work like mining, cooking, healthcare, whatever is useful to society and we don't have to decide whether or not those are valid jobs. And I'm not some art-hating STEMfag who doesn't see the value of art and social science in society - in fact those are my primary interests. But how would we handle the issue of people who think they should be able to get by purely on their creative output, even if their art is terrible? All the Instagram-type people who are "photographers" would think they don't have to do any work because they're taking shitty photos of their friends in parking lots.

It is the assumption that pay just wouldn't exist, especially in relation to creative fields so that all artists could 'make it'. It's a pretty large hand-wave, but that's what you get with utopias.

We will no longer spend as much time on commodities, both less production of them and consumption of them. That will mean more time for fundamental human activity not involving commodities like loving, interhuman play, talking, enjoying each other's company, but also feuding, fighting, gossiping, colluding, etc. Commodities will only server as a subservient facilitator.

Life will become a lot more like soaps or sitcoms, where people are hardly ever shown working. Things take place at work, but the work is not the subject. That will be life under communism. Things that seem petty details take on a bigger significance.

I didn't say life would necessarily be perfect under communism.

Even then, the equipment and technology needed to make collaborative works like movies still need tangible resources. And then you have a situation where you're handing out vouchers to factory workers but not the buy building the movie set. Which could be fine, but the most passionate aren't necessarily the most qualified.

I'm trying to imagine how this would work out, but I still got nothing coherent. The closest thing to voting for creative works I can think of is reddit's new page, but if you know how that works it's not exactly a fair system.

I imagine people would make them in their spare time for fun.

It's not just anyone gets to vote, the people who would actually be creating the game vote. The workers, not the public.

Learn to differentiate between utopian socialism and scientific socialism. That being said, this issue is one reason why I'm skeptical of the idea that we could truly abolish money. Everyone would just opt into being an "artist" if we accepted that as a valid job by itself. We could probably scale down the work week to like 15 or 20 hours if we implemented socialism tomorrow, though, so I guess that would give artists more time to work on their creative output.

Right now it's en vogue among liberals and "progressives" to point out that artists have to work too, just because you enjoy your work doesn't mean it's not work, etc. But honestly most people who make art are fucking terrible at it and we can't have a society where no one wants to roll up their sleeves and make society function because we've normalized this work-relativism. Perhaps under socialism everyone should have to do a little bit of menial labor, and people can use their free time to make art if they want.

What do I have to do, or what countries can I go to, to live in a communist society, all of this sounds really good.

Start a revolution.

It's real easy trust me.

There are currently no communist societies.

Just watch tv:

If you can get enough like minded people you can just find an unused plot of land start your own town with communist rules.
It's been done a number of times in the US at least semi successfully, just not with Communism.

Read theory, economics, and communist history and get physically fit while you wait for capitalism to get worse. We can't do that much as long as capitalism is keeping people sort of fed, but it won't be able to do that for much longer.

I mean, when you have hundreds of different "studios" who want the equipment to make a movie, how do you decide which one gets what they need?

...

Has anyone here read The Dispossessed? I haven't but I've really been meaning to. For many people, art that depicts daily life under communism would be 1000x more convincing than Marx/Lenin quotes and stats and graphs about capitalism.

You just disguise work as a competition. This isn't communism, it's a totalitarian mind controlled society. Work is unpleasant by definition. There will always be unpleasant tasks and people will have to do them, and be rewarded to motivate them if not enough volunteers step up. And it should be advertised as such.

This, we think society where labor becomes indistinct from pleasure is possible and there​ will be enough abundance that no form of rationing will be necessary. But for all we know, the state will continue to be necessary, work will have to remain a distinct part of life (but maybe only for a few hours a week), and raining based on energy consumption and available materials will be necessary (everybody gets 10 k energy credits a week).
I'm ok with a more regimented society like that, as long as poverty and recurring crisis have been abolished. But I do think something like

Is possible eventually

So if no one in my scenario felt it was unpleasant, or were coerced in any way (the main character could have gotten up and went home with zero repercussions) , it isn't work then

Wrong. People who do not attend the problem solving competitions, the hidden work, will face ostracism as competition to achieve the highest score in the one activity that makes the good life possible creates a social hierarchy. To not attend would be to be of the class of undesirables. Communism isn't communism if you just create an absolute hierarchy in another sphere of human flourishing.

What's considered a valid job can get kind of fuzzy then. Imports like bananas or coffee, specialty food like cakes and japanese cuisine, home electronics like video game consoles. They're all non essential and possibly considered a luxury.

No society is going to be perfect mate
And not being famous isn't a repurcussion. There will still be famous artists under communism, and if your not talented that doesn't mean you'll be ostracised. You'll still be embedded in other communities.
I get what your saying though.

The responses in these types of threads always make me want to cry. Most of the time they're just descriptions of the perfect liberal world.

You just went and showed everyone that what you really want is some form of capitalism.

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don't people have to work under Communism to live?

if they don't have to work, then someone must work for them (and this usually means forced appropriation of products of labour, not much better than capitalism)

if they do have to work, they're still forced to work or to starve, similar to sweatshop workers under capitalism

catch 22

He doesn't mean "work" as in any form of labor. What he means is that the separation of labor time from free time will be negated and that self realization will be tied directly to your labor without the imposition of wage labor/work.

Yeah, seems like Communism is being propped up as the morally correct system.
But it sounds like a lot of people here just want to stop being poor.

It's not the worst kind of idea that the communist society is possible with an eternal captcha for the AI that runs the FALC, but it's still a special kind of nightmare.

Who are you, Ricardo?

Well I'm sorry I don't just want to be poor. There is no such thing as a "morally correct system", and politics is never about choosing a "system" you like and trying to force reality around it. It is, to simplify it, about class struggle. To be a communist is mearly to support the working class' struggle for power, ie the workers management of society which will in turn abolish the class system.

This is getting into the realm where I nor anyone else can speculate, as we cannot know what a new society would look like exactly.

What I can tell you though is this - people want games, films, entertainment, people will figure out a way to coordinate and work to creating it for their own enjoyment without Capitalism, just like they were for the thousands of years before Capitalism.

What if some ethnic group, like a collection of African tribes want to live in an exclusive, ethnically and racially homogenous commune, and won't let any outsider in?

I can't see how a society that relies essentially on a bureaucratic priestly class that divies out resources to be anything but a 1984 kind of hell. An agrarian feudal system sounds preferable.

I'm legitimately curious of how Communism plans to fill in the gaps left from out free market economics. I'm not really convinced when a lot of these issues are hand waved away.

eh, we didn't really have video games and movies before capitalism. It's one thing to sing on a street corner but most of our entertainment media requires a supply chain to provide specialized cameras, special effects, etc.

You will find people that would go "meh, their loss" while others would defend a confederalist approch with bigger counsils of communes would intervene when certain standards are threatend in one commune.

You wont find a single answer to this because it's a point on which markets socialists and planners socialist will autistically screech at each others have long and well argumented disputes about which one is the most efficient.
For example, there is a long thread about cybernetics that should be still somewhere in the catalog. On the other extreme, you have people like Richard D Wolff that promote coops, coops everywhere.

So would leniency be extended to, let's say, a white ethnic group, wants to maintain their ethnic independence and exclusivity, as there would be to a non-white group? Or would there be a double standard there, for some reason?

Not an issue. All whites will have been removed from the population at that point.

Efficiency was not an argument I imagined central planners would make.
When you look at the massive supply chain something like a passenger jet requires, there's no way a single perspective can put it together. Even making something seemingly simple like a cheese burger would cause headaches.

Work 6 to 8 hours for 6 days a week. Some months of leave or for vacations exist in most jobs.

Education is free, but much more demanding. Not everyone can become a nuclear physicist unless their marks are as good as the cutoff entrance limit.

Some obvious necessities like hot water, computer,food and heating would be available for free.

Some higher end luxuries like extremely expensive goods would be available only if you save up labour vouchers, tokens or whatever is put in place in that economies as a form of exchange.

All software and entertainment is available for free.

There is no private land property, many private resorts, and walled up suburbs are demolished and become parks.

All housing is communal, whether it is a village or a huge high story apartment building.

Rather than huge and cluttered urban centers and decaying industrial zones, cities become more like pic related. Huge communal domes or buildings housing thousands, that are "mini-states" and have some form of self-administration or representation in politics.

We are not liberals.
SO for an hypothetic white enclave:
You will find people that would go "meh, their loss" while others would defend a confederalist approch with bigger counsils of communes would intervene when certain standards are threatend in one commune.

Hmm…

A Boer socialist republic for only Boers would be cozy af tbh

Allocating ressources is not simple, and Markets are not good at it, as you can see with exterme misery coexisting with over production of goods.

Found an archive of the Cybernetic thread btw.
If Marktes socialists could come in this thread to balance the discussion…

just fuck my shit up
archive.is/q736J

this thread is making me sad guys

What extreme misery?
I assume you mean the over production of food by the amount we throw out, but food is just really cheap to make in large quantities compared to a century ago.

Wake up whenever you want.
Do your arranged 2 hours of labor.
Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't limit anyone for doing anything they want.

sounds like a living hell

Somebody got cucked by capitalism too hard

If you work less you will just get bored.

Also it depends on the work you are assigned to do. Someone who is doing mental work will obviously work less, but his output and performance will have much higher standards.

20-25 work week is a limit guys.

I'm striking against your exploitative regime. Three day work weeks or bust!

Am working 8h 7 nights/week.

How does that sound?

But, yes, user's arbitrary "6" is BS, cause we have to know how much labor is NEEDED, considering the automation levels.

You have my sympathies, I only do 9h5d.

Past food and shelter, how do you balance what good and services are available with hours of mandatory work?

Actually you are totally incorrect here. This was a problem originally solved by Kantorovich way back when. By organising and optimising sparse matrices of material supplies/demands we can optimise an economy with millions of separate goods in polynomial time. It's the same basic idea behind Google's search algorithm. See the attached document and the cybernetics thread for more. Also as said, markets are fuckawful at this job, since they're basically equivalent to a full in-kind economy that's restricted itself to minimising labour time above any and all other concerns, up to and including the satisfaction of total demand.

There are a whole shitload of work that won't need doing under communism, eg most kinds of bureaucracy, most finance, advertising, most service economy jobs done just for rich people, most kinds of government work, etc. Add that to the fact that there would be no structural reason to maintain vast masses of the idle-but-capable reserve army of labourers, and the amount of labour required to maintain everyone's desired level of material wealth would be drastically decreased.

After you get basic needs covered, anything extra is created according to request and availability.
"Hey, catgirl drawfag, can you make me some nice comics?" "Sure user, here!"

Now.
How do we determine basic needs?
Is transportation not basic need? Access to the interwebs? Entertainment?

BUT!
Do you NEED a car, if you can have enough public transport? And so on…

PS.
It's ok. I only work 7months/year.

I wasn't referring to just art and entertainment per se. but should people work an extra 15 minutes a week so we can import bananas, and other fruit we're used to seeing from the other side of the world.
Before anime and video games existed, would a democratic system vote to pull the resources from other projects into creating them in the first place?

Given I haven't read the thread yet. How do you optimize for human preference? How do you measure demand for something when the people demanding don't have to personally sacrifice something else in turn. Even if you could create the cheapest possible airplane, would people want the fastest possible version? would they take the train instead if the plane isn't comfortable enough?
A computer can optimize for a specific situation, but it's not going to predict the human element any better than we can. I guess a simpler example, say your in charge of agriculture; do you make a lot of wheat so people can eat as much as they want, or do you grow a little bit of everything but people have to work harder to get their fill. and every permutation in between.

Markets maximize profits, for better or worse. Even with the whole dragging fiasco AA had a few weeks ago, people are still going to fly with them because cheap flights matter more than good service. On the other end, companies like Zappos wouldn't have gotten off the ground if people just wanted the cheapest possible shoe.

These are very good questions! I will freely admit that I don't have an answer for them. This exact problem is where I disagree most strongly with Cockshott and Cottrell's Towards a New Socialism - they maintain that a limited market in consumer goods based on non-circulating labour tokens will be necessary, but I find their justifications of the necessity of such a system wanting, considering the context of a world with inherently limited human consumption capacity and goods storage capacity in the absence of private property. It's possible that rigorous demand surveying and/or passive measurement based on consumption would be used to inform production goals without requiring price accounting.

However, I consider this an unsolved problem. I'm trying to get as many people as I can reading and thinking about the problem so that we can actually work it out. I find the insistence by many leftists that a system of globally-integrated production without markets will just get magically figured out by workers in the midst of an economic collapse → revolution → civil war scenario frankly insulting. I think we can and should figure out the basic economic principles behind such a system now.

Not to the hungry.

Are you South African? What are things like there now?

Why would you trust a Boer to give you a straight answer on that? The only thing those saffer cunts know how to say is 'de blecks rooint Seth Efrica'

That's not how socialism works…

You know they were made, because people wanted to make them and not be "resource reallocation" right?
I mean… If you have the means to live.. and the time.. and you ask for and get the matterial… and you gather the people… what's to stop you from creating them?

Well, you grow enough corn to have basic need covered, with a bit extra, and then you start covering meat and other stuff. Also, we are talking on a larger scale, not national or communal.

It's never for better.
The more people use a service or product the less the producer cares about customer suttisfaction.
Does Coca Cola care about you getting unhealthy? NOPE! Cause people will buy it, noone regulates them and profits keep rising.
Also, never forget the effects of marketing. Markets are not working in a vacuum. The "Free market = best product" argument is not realistic.

The good themselves are a luxury, to import coffee you'd have to not import ore or whatever else the country might want.
Deciding between luxuries is what I don't get about a system without money.

The standard of entertainment media we have today isn't something people can make with just free time anymore. You'd at least need the help from programmers to make the underlying software who may not be personally interested in video games. Modern movies have hundreds of millions invested in high tech cameras and special effects.

but people drink it out of their own free will, do you want majority vote deciding what you're allowed to eat?
It's true large companies tend to push the envelope as far as they can, but if people were willing to pay more for better service there's almost always another company willing to take their money.
Free market provide the best product for the price people are willing to pay. I don't see how a centrally planned economy would decide to make a product that isn't just bare bones functional.

Why?
Is there not enough coffee and ore for everyone on this earth?

Well, I for one have no problem making more lower budget movies, with better stories and stop making more Transformers BS.

HAAAAA! You're so funny! .. free will… .. Tons of marketing and propaganda.. free will.. HA HAAAA!

Tell me more about telecommunications and how they differ… This is what unregulated capitalism looks like.

I don't see how a conglomarate wouldn't make a product that just looks better than the previous version and is as cheap to make as possible, to maximize profit.

Also, again, I don't see why you need more than enough.

I absolutely do not think capitalism and liberalism are the solution to everything, but I don't think you guys give the mechanics behind free markets enough credits. I'll emphasize the free part, situations where one party can strong arm the other are a drain on the system and are admittedly hard to avoid in some cases. But doing away with markets all together seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I'm pretty skeptical of this approach, entrepreneurs trying to survey for new products often show that there's a pretty drastic difference between asking if someone would buy something vs getting them to actually open their wallet.
Also I don't see how innovation would work with this. People don't ask for things that don't exist.

You have limited man power to make the coffee, or whatever your trading for it. If everybody already has a job, people are either going to work more or work less in other industries if something new is desired.

We'd be stuck with soundless black and white film if people didn't think the technology was worth developing.

did say almost, it's not perfect.
And if you're okay with low budget movies I don't see why you wouldn't be okay with low budget internet, they're both mostly for entertainment.

I was thinking personal eletronics, cars, cloths, etc. You'd be stuck with a crt monitor, 10mb of hard drive space, no smart phone, or any portable phone at all, traveling by air would be very limited, ordering stuff online would be excessive then. Just more than enough cuts a lot of conveniences out of the picture.

This kind of statement betrays a lack of fundamental thought put into the consequences of the abolition of money and markets. The free distribution of goods removes all incentive to acquire 'luxury' goods, since they are purely used as a social signifier of a person's exclusive access to material wealth. Social status would become decoupled from material wealth. "Come and suck my dick because I have lots of gold/ugly louis vuitton gear/ocelots" doesn't make sense when anyone can get those things at any time.

Many of us don't, but I do. I recognise that the prices system does a lot of work in co-ordinating production, consumption, and as a decisionmaking aid. I recognise that it's a big ask to find a new way of doing things that supercedes market-based systems on all of those fronts. However, I also recognise that markets do each of those jobs poorly. I reject markets because the underlying assumption of scarcity makes market mechanisms break down as productivity increases drive prices to zero. Market-based economics drive us to waste and crisis trying to ameliorate this fundamental problem. I think there's a better organisational method out there that is actually capable of handling the overwhelming material abundance we currently face. Unfortunately I don't think leftists have gone to the trouble of figuring out the basis of an alternative system so far - they tend to confuse the innocuous and necessary task of figuring out a new economic base with utopian attempts to dictate the entire structure of a new and perfect society.

I'm aware of this phenomenon! That's why I summed up by saying that demand accounting is an unsolved problem for people trying to figure out the fundamental mechanics of a communist economy. However, I don't think the fact that we currently lack a solution to this problem means that we can't develop one.

Capitalism stifles more innovation than it creates, surprisingly. It's not a coincidence that most of the key inventions of the past century were developed in government or university labs insulated from the drive toward profitability. Innovation only rarely follows monetary reward. More often it's done out of necessity or in pursuit of social acclaim. Free time and access to resources is another key driver of innovation. Market exchange inevitably leads to power law wealth distributions even with uniformly distributed starting wealth (see attachment), thus excluding the majority of the population from the preconditions of innovation (that is, resources and time).

...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

democracy was a mistake

Automation.

You haven't watched Soviet Cinema, in the 80s, have you?

Well, it's not the same if you have slow internet for free and slow internet while you pay for it…
Also, socialism is about progress. AGAIN.

Stop the "communism = stability for ever".
It's mankind's quest for inovation that moves history forward (along with class strugle), not "profit".
The only time "human nature" is true and you don't want to get it. The only human nature that exists is the need to not be bored.

I didn't mean luxury as in extravagant, but just things that aren't required to live. Coffee and chocolate were rare commodities at one point, but they had a massive bounty on their head for anyone who could figure out how to sell them at a reasonable price.

oh yeah I agree. If we're talking about when we figure out some kind of technological singularity debating contemporary economic systems is kind of moot. what's left is how societies should operate ethically, so that does include over consumption, pollution, etc.

Guess I was trying to say that having some form of money doesn't necessarily go against the ideals communist usually have. maybe not.

I know a lot of innovation occurs in an academic setting, but I'm not so sure if it would be brought to the general populous without a profit insensitive. I'll have to come back to this one.

Infinite man power solves a lot of problems with capitalism as well.

Is it any good? Are there any good modern Russian films? I would honestly watch one if it was subtitled.

I thought socialism was about equality

Unless you're posting here between writing your PHD, you're assuming other people are driving to innovate, in an imaginary system that has never been implemented properly.

MY GOTT!
Capitalism needs workers, or there can be no PROFIT!
YOU CANNOT HAVE CAPITALISM WITHOUT PROFIT AND PROFIT CANNOT BE ETERNAL!

Here. Just activate subs. It's also an excelent critique of the 80s USSR and why it wasn't working.
youtube.com/watch?v=QSc3uk8Q5w4

Nope. It's about making a better life for everyone.
Humans inovate regardless of the system and even without profit as a motive.

no? don't know where you're coming from with this. but profit isn't necessarily a bad thing. With enough production power everything would just become super cheap. The average person today has a lot of stuff someone a decade ago would pay an arm and a leg for.

Capitalism has a pretty good track record for doing just this over the past few decades. Except for the countries that don't want to participate in it.

Profit has always been a motive so it's really hard to separate the two

pic related. no further comment.

user, I…

...

First of all, I'm not a capitalist, I don't think everything should be privately owned.
But I don't see the argument here against it. Profit is the intensive for people to try new things, sometimes it pays off, most of the time it doesn't.

An economic system with the core prerogative of fulfilling all demand is better incentivised to expand production of goods in high demand. Of course, what underlying economic mechanism makes communism work this way is one of those niggling open questions that I'm hoping we can actually figure out for once instead of calling the whole task counter-revolutionary utopianism. So yeah, communism's supposed to work better but I again freely admit that I don't know how it'll do that. We've still got work to do.

This is one of the key benefits of an economic system geared solely toward the fulfillment of human need - a clean environment, the survival of future generations, etc are all goods that it is possible to control for. Under a profit-based system, these are negative externalities that are ignored because they don't have anything to do with the immediate minimisation of labour time (which is all 'profit' is actually a measure of).

The contribution of business to the overall R&D process is relatively minimal - being limited to optimising the process for mass production -
and the core incentive that drives product development under capitalism (reduction of labour time required per unit produced) applies equally to the workers producing the good under communism (they will still generally want to minimise their labour expenditure on any given task, even absent a profit motive).

I pointed it out in another post above but I say again, this is exactly the condition that capitalism breaks down under. With our current total productive capacity, there are very few, if any, things that should still have a price. The problem is that you can't make a profit by providing for everyone's needs. The agricultural sector is especially struck by this contradiction. Farmers receive billions of dollars in subsidies every year not to use their fields. Producing enough food for everyone would drive the price through the floor and kill the industry's profitability. Hunger is artificially maintained in order to preserve the system. We communists posit that we need a new economic system that is actually capable of handling the massive productive potential that capitalism has created but been structurally unable to handle.

the last 200 years != 'always'. Even then, as I noted in , profit hasn't driven scientific and technological innovation - more often than not it stifles them. Just ask any scientist.

no wait, I had to reread those a few times to process them.
Is that first panel talking about variable and fixed costs? not how it works.
People aren't paid based on living costs anymore, they're paid as low as people let them. Which can be the same thing when you have a large supply of labor, but this is the part that basic income and automation solves.
I don't get the part about machines not generating surplus. and it's totally possible to generate income without hiring a single person.

You know people do stuff because they like to, right?

mangafox.me/manga/das_kapital/

4shared.com/s/fwYR868iUba

And bourgies will give you free money, why?
And it's profit, surplus, not income.

I know it's a problem with capitalism, I'm not seeing how this works any better in a communism. Aren't the people making decisions still going to make the choices that benefit themselves in the present?

I'd say this plays a bigger part than you're implying, at least from the little history I know. The technology for things like the light bulb, automobile, etc. were around for a few years before investors figured out how to reduce their production costs for mass consumption.

I'm going to need sources on that before I believe it. The worst I've read about is farmers draining water in times of drought to raise almond tree, but that's a different problem.
I understand that grocery stores lock their dumpsters, but people aren't dying from hunger, and that's not on a industrial scale. Also I'm not from the US, so my welfare system is probably a lot better than what you're talking about.

The bulk of human innovation happened in the last 200 years
It's not the only driver, but it definitely helps. stuff like WD-40 and whatever 3M made it's fortune off of were created by accident in a lab, but they probably never would have hit shelves if they didn't think they could sell them. yeah, I could probably think of a better example if I thought about it a bit more.

people also do stuff because they want other stuff, or social status. Don't think we know enough to say that intrinsic motivation is enough to run society.

They already do, in the form of paying for food stamps, healthcare, subsidized housing, arguably increased policing, etc. First world countries already pay to prevent the poor from dying from being poor, by buying a bunch of services, it's not crazy to cut the services and pay you directly to not die.

>mangafox.me/manga/das_kapital/
And I get that Marx was a revolutionary thinker and contributed a lot tot he world, but so was Sigmund Freud. They're relevant in a historical context but I but I don't think you should be taking their words to heart.

Wrong, there's thousands of weirdos who love fucking with computers to constantly improve them.

Now that I think about it, Karl Marx lived during a time before artificial fertilizers were invented and people legitimately believed the world would run out of food.
Is that why people keep bringing up things like artificially maintained hunger and survival wages?

I can't say I've seen anyone bring up either of those, and I've been here over two years. Been reading Wage Labour and Capital now, and I find most of it so far holds up. I mean, sure there's things like robotic automation, chemical engineering and computer algorithms that he couldn't account for, and for that, we need to expand on the theory for the current time, but his basic theses on the social relations of labour really seem to hold true as far as I can see.

commies btfo

If you believe in any private property (private property being economic property like factories etc) you are a capitalist

...

oh shit, guess I'm a capitalist, come at me.
actually going to sleep shortly, I'll leave it for tomorrow.

well it's least twice in this thread now, including the one just posted.

...

but seriously read this book (just mentally update the anachronisms like all entertainment being live)

it's just a statement of fact

go to ball-bearing factory
go home
drink vodka
sleep