wdhmbt
But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts...
Chase Evans
Other urls found in this thread:
marxists.org
marxisthumanistinitiative.org
marxists.org
kapitalism101.wordpress.com
internationalmarxisthumanist.org
reddit.com
twitter.com
Mason Perez
do me a favor and post this quote every day, I'm not even kidding
most people here have no better grasp of socialism than right-wingers do, thinking it just means socialized capitalism
David Campbell
Liam Garcia
If you don't revolutionise the means of production you don't have a revolution. None of the social democratic states that came to power in the 20th century revolutionised the means of production and eliminated production for exchange. Therefore, none of them came close to socialism.
Andrew Lee
That socialism is not just worker management of society under different schemes (cooperative, state-centralized, etc.), but rather the workers ending the automatic reproduction of capital and by consequence their own existence as (waged) workers.
Lenin had a habit of doing this crap (reformulating "socialism" to mean just about anything), despite clearly understanding value-form theory. In On Cooperation he does the exact same shit when he states that "the system of civilized cooperators is the system of socialism." It seems to me that he liked to use the term socialism to refer to whichever policies he judged to be useful at any given time, probably because it made for better propaganda than saying it was the least bad version of capitalism they could aim for at the time (at least when we could still conceive of the RSFSR as a proletarian dictatorship). I mean, don't we all remember "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!" and other gems by him, especially right after he formally worked towards the abolition of the workers' councils (Soviets) and their influence which had spontaneously been established almost 20 years prior by the workers themselves and formed the entire source of power he and the Bolsheviks first drew from?
Anyways, the quote in the OP image is from this: marxists.org
Chase Hernandez
That Stalin looks almost fuckable now.
Bentley Green
It's almost like he explained what he considered to be the distinction between socialism and communism in an earlier work.
>I mean, don't we all remember "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country!"
It's almost like context is important and you're a disingenuous sack of shit.
Cooper Thomas
Both Lenin and Stalin understood this perfectly well, they just also knew it was not attainable in an isolated Russia.
Chase Phillips
Which is fine but their historic limitations shouldn't define what socialism is.
Eli Brown
This, basically. Too many MLs think we hate Lenin or something.
Isaac Harris
Hey leftcomposter (I don't know how many good leftcom posters there are, so forgive me if you aren't the one who posted this in the first place)
I was reading through some articles posted regarding the transition away from indirectly social labour and toward directly social labour, namely:
kapitalism101.wordpress.com
In both of these pieces, they quote Critique of the Gotha Program in saying that the lower phase of communism would be run on a system where any hour of labour is exactly equal to any other hour, ie, if you took 5 hours to make something that another person took 1 hour to make, you would be remunerated for 5 hours labour and the other person would be remunerated for only 1 hour. The first article then says that while labour remuneration would be based on hours worked, the prices of goods would still correspond to the socially necessary labour time.
I'm fully willing to accept that I have misunderstood this, but to me this system sounds completely unworkable. It sounds to me like some bizarro-capitalism - a system where not only is the main incentive to work as langourously as possible, but one where this incentive leads the prices of goods to continually rise, forcing quick, efficient, and productive workers to slow down and become less efficient to maximise their billable hours, so that they might afford the necessities of life.
The higher phase of communism sounds quite reasonable to me - free access to goods, no barriers between workplaces and public places, etc, etc. It's just the lower phase described in those articles that sounds bonkers to me.
It also seems to me that a better view of directly social production is given in the second article. Hudis describes the 'patriarchal mode of production', ie, that of the household, in which each act of production is in direct fulfilment of the need of another person in the household.
It seems to me that a communist society could hypothetically run on a similar system with a society-wide remit - after all, the only reason we don't run the entire economy like a household is because we lack the information-processing tools to do so.
If everyone was on a massive 'economic network', they could just register their demands onto it, and people with the capacity to fulfil those demands could do so. It would be just like a household, only writ across an entire economy.
Now, I understand that the autistic screech of a hypothetical scenario above has a whole bunch of implementation issues (like reconciling supply/demand according to location, time, etc, and also the open question about whether such a system would even be computable), but doesn't it at least make more sense than actively incentivising slowdown?
Also does that 'giant network of demand/supply mediated through a massive network' thing not actually transcend the law of value? Let me know.
Jace Anderson
How the fuck did you catch him out doing this?
Colton Sanchez
There is a certain leftcom poster who constantly posts the same shit on reddit and here and gets called out on it, lmao
Lucas Perez
Is reddit getting even more cancerous?
Owen Rogers
Im the most anarchist anarchist around and still think daddy Stalin was cute
even though he was a manlet
Nathan Gray
I was one of those 4 people.
Isaiah Brown
ugh
Jack Moore
Different person, but here is an idea: under the system you described, people are renumerated based on socially necessary labor time. Take this to mean the minimal amount of labor time needed to produce a commodity. This time can be recorded in some kind of ledger, as the basis for converting hours of labor producing a given widget into labor tokens, which can be tied to a given laborer (so that they can't be exchanged).
Jordan Kelly
BAN LEFTCOM CANCER
Thomas Young
Both of the articles I posted state that remuneration based on SNLT is capitalism, though.
Hunter Brooks
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Hunter Edwards
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