How can you explain communism/socialism to a libertarian who mostly hangs out with right wingers, randroids...

How can you explain communism/socialism to a libertarian who mostly hangs out with right wingers, randroids, von mises types, and generally just people who are all studying engineering or hard sciences for the sake of getting rich trough the free market?

I never really cared about politics, because of my political views. I dont really think there is any demand for more.. politicians or politics, and I also never went on any sort of public march or whatever. I think that technology is what solves problems these days, so I just focus on that, people need engineers is what I think, there's already too much supply in politics and activism and that sort of crap.
But out of boredom I wanted to talk about politics, and everyone I know is either right winger or a lolbert, so I wanna ask people here about a few things:

I talked with an economy professor once, asked him about socialism/communism, told him I am interested in it because I dont know anything about it, and it seems like a huge thing because there are tons of people interested in it, well not in my school (never heard anyone talking politics here) but in soft sciences and art and philosophy places leftism seems to be really trendy, while right wing politics are really popular with people who pay taxes, that's my way of seeing it.
And he gave me the 'classroom' example: he said that he took a class, divided them along their political leanings, gave them the same test, but those who prefer socialism were allowed to all work together collectively for their mock exam, while others all worked for themselves. And every time, people all working together to pass the test would fail because average students would prepare for it how they always do, slackers would always fail their part, and people who worked hard would just get really pissed off by the whole situation and constantly ask to leave the group.

He also told me about labor theory of value being completely false: basically value comes out of labor times efficiency, not just labor.
Take farmers for example: all of these farmers work the same hours, and all of them are equally healthy and physically able. And all of them work really hard. But one of these farmers is just a crazy guy, instead of jacking off or getting drunk or whatever, he decides to invest all of his free time in studying chemistry and biology, to understand his farming further, and he comes up with pesticide and fertilizer. But the guy is so personally invested in his farming, he even goes so far to study math and physics and comes up with.. farming mechanization (think of giant tractors etc).
And now out of all these farmers who all have identical farms, this one guy is suddenly a millionaire among these farmers who all started out the same.

So basically according to modern economy: value comes out of working hard AND working smart, humans require incentives (profit motive, competition, urgency, etc), venture capitalists are always on the look out for young, talented, worthy individuals to invest in, investment makes sure no one is poor for no reason, and people who suck just suck and cant be helped.

And finally he told me that left wing politics are for jealous people who just suck. He told me that if you have access to internet, you have nothing to complain about. But as well all know, people do not use internet to learn open heart surgeries, most of the traffic is videogames and porn. And this is why most of the people arent as rich as a few of the people. Most of the people find an excuse. Few of the people find a way. And that's all there is to economy and politics.

My question to this board is: was he wrong, and if he was, can you make an extremely simplified examples, so that anyone can understand (as Einstein said, if you cant explain it to a child, you dont know it yourself..)
Thanks for reading.

Other urls found in this thread:

prole.info/texts/hamburgervalue.html.
youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

So basically a professor tried to convince you with a retarded anecdote that has nothing to do with economics and by attacking the labor theory of value, which not all socialists even agree with. Sounds like he had a grand total of zero good arguments.

I will be coming by a bit later to read the responses, really interested in what the people have to say, if I am not replying right now I will be later on, really interested to see if I walk away from here still being a lolbert.

well no, not exactly, he told me that all leftist models lack this sense of personal responsibility and a sense of urgency and that is why the eastern side of the berlin wall got jumped
meanwhile all the fortune 500 companies are just apolitical, working hard * working smart, tech companies that just focus on pleasing people, and that is what makes someone rich, serving other people in the market, that's all there is to it

he told me that leftist models lack these incentives and so all they produce is failure and excuses, and nobody wants to buy excuses

he told me to never join or invest in anything leftist based on promises, but to let them build their thing first instead

Best way to explain simply is to read this pdf.
Basically, because a handful of people own the Means of Production (like factories) they can force people to work for less than the value of their labor. You have to either work for less than your value or starve. And people aren't aware that this is happening because the value of their labor is hidden from them. They sit and work all day but they don't see how that work contributes to the product being made. The only measure of the value of their work that they see is their pay, which is decided by the employer based on how little they can get away with paying you.

As production got more efficient over time, due to improved techniques and technology, the value a laborer could generate increased. This is also hidden from workers. Let's say technology makes building a widget twice as efficient. This means one hour of labor now produces twice the value it did before. In a fair system, this would mean the workers could work half as long and still make the same money as before. Instead, the employer fires half the workers and keeps the rest working for the same hours and pay. The difference in cost of production vs. revenue for sales goes only to profits. And this process of efficiency only helping the owners has been going on for hundreds of years. Is it any wonder that there's a huge divide between the working class and the plutocrats?

whereas in capitalism, the business explicitly has no responsibility for society (just profits) and the employer has no responsibility for their employees
In socialism because you own things you are going to be directly invested in taking care of them. In capitalism a worker who sees something going wrong at work will likely shrug and go "not my job" because there's no incentive to fix it (they won't get a bonus). In socialism, what people get (whether in compensation or just from society's overall productivity) is affected and they know it, so if they see something up, they feel directly responsible for it and will do something. Wolff gave an example of this with someone leaving water or electricity running at work and proles not caring because it only hurts the employer, while workers in socialism would have a stake in the resources and want to prevent waste because it does affect them.

By the way, now's probably not the best time to ask this question. People are having some problems with the reply feature, and I don't think the types who write up big refutations and such will be posting too much until the problem is fixed.

polite sage for offtopic

But why would the genius who figured out a way to increase everyone else's productivity make this tech improvement, and then just gift it away to the workers.

I was told to pay attention specifically to this. People on my side of the fence say that workers are poor simply because their work is worth that much to the general population buying their work, not because of the exploitation.

Take a look at the richest businesses today:
General motors, Tesla motors, Shell, Facebook, Google, China's national electric provider (but basically a fully privatized thing)etc etc.
All ran by engineers. All made by engineers. Not financiers.
The stereotype wouldnt be fat monocle tophat monopoly guy. The stereotype should be… some engineer caricature.

So "the worker" is a falsehood, because there are trillion shades of "the worker", and not 2 of them are equally entitled to the labor of other workers. You just do what you do, and then you exchange the thing you do for things other people do.. you dont get to own a yacht because you are 'a worker' who 'works' for a blogging news blog thingie, or serving fast food, etc.

You cant say "I made a yacht, I'm a worker" and "I made a burger, I'm a worker", burger maker is not being exploited, he just made a less desirable thing.

This guy has a point. When I click the post # to reply, it opens a new tab that I have to close.

Read this: prole.info/texts/hamburgervalue.html.

Liberal af but a good start to understand incetives and motivations: youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Also please consider what "wanting something" means under capitalism and why we have massive industries focused at making you want something and why product cycles are ever shortening.

This is a good point, people on my side of the fence dont really care about the collective good, like letting the water running, but I still do not understand the personal work, like how exactly do you know just how much do you deserve?

This is easy when it comes to manual labor, sure. But screw manual labor, I am asking for evaluation of intellectual labor. How do you know how much to pay someone who just cured cancer or invented a much more efficient machine etc?

That professor repeats that meme about socialism = taxing some hard-working pioneers so there will be gibmedats for lazy bums, which is obviously incorrect.
It's hard or even absurd to give an equivalent of socialism and capitalism for student exams, mostly since the core socioeconomic relationships for those economic models(like wage labour for capitalism) are absent. After all, the "capitalist" students did not hire anybody to do their work in exchange for some wage, did they?
Mein gott, this is not even wikipedia-tier marxian LTV. Even after a cursory glance at his concepts you will find out about so-called socially necessary labour time(often shortened to SNLT), which indeed takes productivity in the account.

The efficiency of labour is accounted for in Marx's Labour Theory of Value. It his why he uses the term "Socially Necessary Labour Time", which is basically the average labour required assuming an average work intensity with average quality materials and means of production etc etc. So during one hour of intense skilled work you could produce 1.5h of value because you are better at producing something than the social average.

If that is the interjection your professor really had than it seems he actually agrees with the LTV of Marx without actually knowing it (Most likely because he hasn't actually read it from the source).

What does this even mean? Companies have entire departments for R&D.

Pay is adjusted by the labor market. The capitalists hold most of the cards here, especially right now when there's more labor available than the need for it. The basic value of labor that gets adjusted can be thought of as the cost to reproduce it. People need food to keep living and gas to drive to work, etc. This also includes the cost of education and other investment into the worker to make them capable of working. The value tends to be adjusted lower when the market favors capital, because when there are 300 applicants for a job, the employer will pick the most desperate (willing to accept least pay / most exploitation) who can still do the job.

Financier doesn't equate to capitalist. The distinction you draw here is in the type of labor people do or type of business they're in. Financiers are kind of a special case where their product only has abstract value, but being an engineer or having your field be engineering doesn't make you not a capitalist. Capitalist/proletarian is a matter of what role you play in the process of producing [whatever]. An engineer who owns an engineering firm is a capitalist. A number cruncher working for a financial firm is a prole (even if the product is abstract, they're still exchanging labor for a wage and having surplus value extracted).

By "shades" you're just referring to what product is being produced, but that's completely irrelevant. What matters is the system by which products are produced. Capitalism turns any product into a commodity, so that it can be seen and used in the context of being sold on a market to make the most profit possible. In pursuing this goal the worker - any worker - gets paid less than the value they put into the product. Read this PDF. It explains it more efficiently than a bunch of us replying to your questions ITT.

Marx developed mathematical formulae to calculate this and other people have done the same. Start by reading Capital or one of the many works that make Capital more coherent to someone not familiar with those kinds of books.

You can easily measure the amount of value extracted from all the laborers at a company (in the context of market values) because that number is simply the profit the company makes. In a market based but classless economy, individual pay would be negotiated similarly to how unions used to negotiate pay for workers, just without a capitalist holding everyone hostage.

You might as well tell him to try out a dragon dildo while you're at it.

...

PDF related

Jealousy is not my motivation for being a communist. I don't want the kind of "success" that is offered in this society. I don't need any more material wealth. What I want is more free time to study philosophy and play music, I want less alienation, I want mutual cooperation with my fellow man in building a more lively community, I want people around me to be less dumb and stupified by the drudgery of wage slavery, and I don't want people to starve when we have enough for everyone. I'm selfish, and my selfish desire is for a less dumb, ugly and brutish society.

This, fam. I just want to be able to work as much as is needed and spend the rest of my time with my community drinking homebrewed beer with the adults while talking science and philosophy and GMing tabletop games for the kids to help reinforce arithmetic, literature, and history. I'll settle for trying to bring that world about

Take farmers for example: all of these farmers work the same hours, and all of them are equally healthy and physically able. And all of them work really hard. But one of these farmers is just a crazy guy, instead of jacking off or getting drunk or whatever, he decides to invest all of his free time in studying chemistry and biology, to understand his farming further, and he comes up with pesticide and fertilizer. But the guy is so personally invested in his farming, he even goes so far to study math and physics and comes up with.. farming mechanization (think of giant tractors etc).
And now out of all these farmers who all have identical farms, this one guy is suddenly a millionaire among these farmers who all started out the same.

I don't see how this contradicts the LTV. Effectivising the production of bread would eventually cause the cost of bread to go down since less labour time is now necessary in its production

Socialism is non-hierarchial democtratic control over the MoP or the real movement to abolish the present state of things if you're autistic. I encourage you to read because there's a lot to cover, Einstein's Why Socialism ie bretty good.

This is beyond retarded and your professor is a faggot. What he described was pitfalls of teamwork which exists in capitalist firms, projects often tank because someone doesn't give a fuck and half-asses their part or management forces a stupid direction that fails. And frankly if the average score is a failing grade that says more about the professor's teaching ability than his method of grading.

It's SNLT, efficency is factored in. Your professor didn't even bother to google, which honestly isn't surprising.

The reason not everyone is making 6 mil a month off the internet is because a lack of capital and the economy being unable to handle that. The capitalist economy couldn't function if everyone ran some business selling shit online ir was a ceo, it needs labor to produce shit and for every engineer that becomes a CEO theres a hundred making peanuts and for every success story of entrepenurship, not even millionaire tier success mind you, there is a shit load of failures who can't try again because their credit is shit and they owe 20 years to a bank.

Simply tell him: It has never worked and never will

I agree, libertarianism is stupid.

To build on this, this sort of thing happens because in capitalism the workers are selling their labor power - their ability to do labor. The capitalist pays for their capacity to work for a given amount of time. The capitalist doesn't pay for a set amount of work. The result is an incentive to do the least work that you can without getting fired.

We carry a new world in our hearts, comrade.

OP here, I am reading one of the PDF's.

Anyway, weirdest thing is, none of you are mentioning the best example of communism, which is that one smaller Soviet town I cant remember, where a bunch of workers stereotypically enough worked the factory without a boss and most of them said their time spent there was the best in their lives (town was abandoned after the fall of SU).

Anyway I agree with communist economy when it comes to manual labor, but I do not understand how exactly do you value intellectual work, which is like 90% of the modern work. If not trough voluntary exchange (you simply give an offer for that new type of machine, or some other intellectual work like that), which is what the market is, how exactly do you pay a person that cures a disease and so on?

If you simply take their work away by brute force trough the state, I dont think anyone would innovate or cure diseases or do ANY intellectual work.
Manual labor should be regulated with vouchers, sure, by the state and central planning, yeah, whatever.

But what about intellectual work, like curing diseases, or building better radars, computers, cars, etc, no one wants to do this essential, extremely important work if he isnt getting his 6 digits salary.
And capitalism already gives these people their 6 digits for this sort of work.

One of the foundational social relations of capitalism is wage labour. Communists wish to abolish this. This goes for intellectual labour as well.

It is not a question of taking someones intellectual work (How this is even supposed to work) but the fact that most people who engage in important work in science and such do so despite of the money situation rather than because of it.

Most scientists who work in places like ITER and CERN could probably triple their salary if they went and worked for porky instead. People want to engage in intellectually stimulating activities and people want to contribute.

Besides, you need state force to uphold intellectual property, to not uphold it requires literally no force at all so I don't understand why you think it's the opposite. All property requires a third party with access to a great amount of force that recognizes that property as your's.

Science doesn't get paid based on good results. It gets paid on results period. Probably the single biggest problem with science right now is that it's hard to get funding if your experiments don't get a particular "confirmed" result. Experiments where the hypothesis is refuted tend to have a very hard time getting supported via publishing or financing because people have an extremely meme-tier understanding of science. This also produces ridiculous inefficiency because when a hypothesis-refuted experiment doesn't get published it's likely to get repeated by other people who never heard of it and in turn don't publish. Scientific work needs to be funded or otherwise supported at a constant rate because you can't predict what results you're going to get. Science is not at all representative of general "intellecutal labor".

Look at the difference between "living labor" and "dead labor". At the point of a commodity being produced, the work that was put into building the machines is "dead labor". In a factory with no workers or where the workers providing "living labor" are not being exploited, the profit that remains is the value extracted from dead labor. The thing about intellectual products (machine designs) is that they're infinitely reproducible and not subject to scarcity. This is where the idea of "fully automated luxury communism" comes from. The amount of necessary labor to make the productive machines approaches zero, and it will either eventually hit zero or it will go low enough that the necessary labor remaining can be done by people who would like to do it for fun. Intellectual property or trade secrets are artificial scarcity that is used to give one firm an edge in the market. This is because (covered in the intro to Marxist Economics) once an innovation permeates the field, the rate of profit falls. Thus the incentive is to restrict innovation so it can only help the proprietary owners.

The free software movement disagrees. And you're not "taking their work away". The person who discovers an idea doesn't get to own it. They get to reap the benefit of improved efficiency and so does everyone else. People will try to innovate to reduce SNLT for more leisure time.

People don't want to work for Microsoft or Apple (basically sweatshops where their creative ability is bent toward very specific profit-maximizing goals where increased efficiency doesn't reduce their work or increase their pay). The problem here is you are basically saying "it can't work because of human nature" but your idea of human nature is based on how humans act in a specific circumstance where their options are restricted. What we're arguing for is changing the circumstance so people don't have the same pressures on them making them behave this way.

Forgot to include this part. Also pic related.

Me personally I want to abolish wage labour, so I don't want to pay people in money for their contributions to society.

Even so, thoughts and ideas shouldn't be made into property. In order for a person to be able to invent great things, he must have received countless hours of nurture, education, reading and discussions with other human beings. The thoughts of inventors didn't magically appear out of nowhere, they are the result of a tremendous amount of unpaid reproductive labour giving him the tools to do the thinking he does. Therefore, he alone shouldn't be able to fence off these ideas off from the rest of the world or make a profit, the ideas should be rightfully socialized. The reward of your community appreciating your contributions to society, and your own feelings of fulfillment is "worth" far more than any amount of money.


This is simply not true as that other user pointed out

I agree.

What I don't get about cappies is that they only rock the human nature argument when it suits them. People are lazy by nature so we should drive them on to working way more than is natural by means of a Skinnerite pricing system, managers breathing down your neck and the threat of poverty == logical according to cappies as long as its the market forcing and manipulating people and not a commie state (which actually used a comparable incentive system), because then it's horrible tyranny. It's a bit weird.

Capitalism is great for material wealth, whether this is through political or economic pressures is another question, but whatever. That's not really the point tho. It's also a bit of a fucked up system. Ads bombard you constantly, manipulating you, and getting better at that every year. We're so weak-willed and well-played we can't even stop eating: so while the stress and frustration of some meaningless, hyper-specialized and boring job is driving us to depression, we're also getting obese, while jacking off to porn making us so tolerant we can't have a proper sex life or bother about finding any real romance. Capitalism wants your free will.

Meanwhile, we're rapidly destroying and exhausting the earth because both consumer and producer in a market economy treat the environment as an externality. Competition drives destruction. Capitalism made us richer than we've ever been, but it is also the system that is getting us killed.

Using the classroom example, a group of 5 people all study for the same test and take it. One person is the "onwer, and he takes 1/4 of everyone's individual total score to get his total score. Everyone else is left with the end result after 1/4 of the points has been taken away"

Not really that compelling, to be fair tho

As usual, his arguments don't apply to market socialism or mutualism.

Except that's literally how a business works. Employees don't work in completely isolated environments, they're expected to work together and play their part in the business in order to guarantee the company's overall success. Only, in the end, instead of sharing the net profits the business makes the "owners" take it for themselves.

They barely apply to Marxism from the looks of this thread