Is there a single lolbert argument against socialism that isn't a giant strawman...

"There is no incentive to work in communism"

No.

There is no incentive to work above the absolute bare minimum*
Don't fall to their level, you yourself are strawmanning.

Voting to exploit yourself or doing so by consensus is not socialism.

Isn't that exactly what happens under capitalism? Cashiers and retail workers just passing the time waiting, because in reality there is so little to do, and the pay is paltry?
People pretending to work while browsing social media and playing games? Workers putting in the absolute minimum effort because there just isn't a point with lowered over-time pay and loss of benefits? Even managers from experience tend to just pretend they're adding value.

In socialism every worker receives what he puts in. In communism any work is for personal enjoyment.
The argument that "There is no incentive to work above the absolute bare minimum" has more relevance to capitalism than socialism.

libcom.org/library/iii-petty-bourgeois-distortion-features-communist-society-syndicalist-enterprise-sociali

IMO most 20th century arguments against "socialism" are arguments against the USSR.

You know, and I say this unironically, people like Mises had a better understanding of what socialism would mean than many other "socialists" of his time ever did, because he understood socialism as the end of prices (queue the dozens of influential "socialists" who understood socialism merely as horizontalized capitalism). Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth quite ironically works as a good critique of things like Fourier's utopia, who still thought in terms of calculated surplus that is indeed going to constitute economic force.

At the end it's an utterly phantasmic problem libertarians level: that society, now absent of capital, would of course have a different volume of output than one with capital constantly demanding expansion. When production starts to be directly influenced by man to man instead of from' man to object to man, and production doesn't occur to first sate the demands of value (is done for its own sake), consumption and production would heavily be altered as well. Demand comes from productive decision making, and under generalized commodity production (capitalism) is informed by what's profitable before anything. The argument cannot address the radicality of what communism suggests.

This Trot rag (surprisingly) does a good job of tackling this: worldsocialism.org/english/world-socialist-no2-winter-1984/how-socialism-can-organise-production-without-money-1.

Is there a single socialist argument against libertarianism that isn't a giant strawman? See how fucking stupid you sound?

Libertarianism is just an utopian thought experiment. It's more interesting to look at Mises's criticisms.

Thanks, that article was a good read.

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This isn't a sincere question. I don't believe you've read socialist arguments against libertarianism.

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Lolbertarianism is not utopian. It's dystopian. Even its adherants expect it to turn the world into a nightmare.

Well, since you asked nicely…

Sounds like anarcho-tankieism TBH.

The commas are there to separate them.

Communist critique of lolbertarianiam always works like this:

i don't get how end of prices would work.
Right now, necessary products (food, water, etc.) are cheap and luxury bullshit is expensive. How would this work in a price-less economy?

Its been said before but socialism is the natural conclusion to enlightenment values. The left should push this point stronger.

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I've argued with many AynCraps and can confirm this. "Dunno we'll figure it out" is a common theme amongst lolberts.

Also check out: karipolanyilevitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/3_KP-Functionalist-Theory-of-Society.pdf. An Austrian Marxist BTFOing his proto-lolbertarian compatriot live.

Price is a nominal reflection of (exchange) value in money, money being the supreme commodity. The end of capitalism necessarily means the end of measuring things by their exchange value, because exchange value is established in exchange and this is then only possible because isolated producers (private property) rob themselves of the utility of they produce towards this exchange, being necessarily compensated only again in an amount of value in money inferior to the amount of value they actually produce (a wage).

Because the amount of labour time that goes into producing the average amount of what you call livable goods is much lower, and the linear rate of their consumption is tied to the fact that they are goods and services most prized in their utility (despite still being commodities).

Utility would mediate everything rather than first value (expressed in a price) and then utility. Under underdeveloped conditions, this could mean something like labour notes: objects that note how many hours were spent on a good and that would entitle an individual to a surplus object worth an equal amount of labour time and [the labour notes] are then destroyed. Marx hypothesized this in Critique of the Gotha Programme and elaborates on it a little in volume 2 of Capital.

So everyone would spend a lot more time to produce goods because that would mean they'd be able to get more labor notes, which would mean labor note inflation and a lack of goods because of the slowdown of manufacturing.

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See, this is what Marx would called the pervasiveness of ruling ideology and was precisely what he wrote about in Capital: that the logic of capital makes it incredibly hard to envision a world absent of value. In Capital, subtitled critique of political economy (political economy being the title of a discipline we call "economics" today), Marx noted how thinking about economics within its own terms and in its own realm, we can only assess temporal reality as it is and but go in circles if we try to think of alternatives. We need to look at economics outside of economics, particularly from a historical and materialist angle.

Now that that's out of the way:
And? The notes serve for only one thing: retaking from surplus product when utility needs to be sated. This surplus is already the product of labour time that can't all be consumed at once. If it can be, people would simply access the non-isolated and privately owned means of production and acquire their utility there and create some more surplus to be taken on identification of a labour note worth an equal amount of time. There is no man-commodity-man relationship here anymore, and thus effectively the end of an economy, or at least the end of economy as something external to man pressuring him to sate its laws before any utility can be acquired. Surplus here exists exclusively to be rationed, not to be exchanged for more value under the pressure of socially necessary labour time.

The only truly logistical problem of communism is that of properly assessing supply and demand. While many will say communism means to end of work as in labour as alienated activity: labour performed to acquire the means to acquire utility, there would still be work in the sense that it would be vitally necessary. The communist society of freely associated individuals would thus have to centrally organize itself to meet one another's vital needs adequately with resupply. Just like single man on a deserted island would have to apportion daily hours into necessity by planning for utilities without private property isolating him from others, so would ten men who do not isolate productivity and undertake the process of giving a centralized response to all of their individual needs.

Again, inflation, the decrease of exchange value, is attribuable to an inability to keep productivity high enough to acquire more value in exchange. Labour notes store only one thing: the total amount of time spent labouring towards directly appropriated utility and utility stored in surplus. Their value is determined by nothing else. The existence of (exchange) value, and its highest form money, determine an exchange rate which is what allows for fluctuations in exchange rate largely determinated by an inability to keep the rate of profit up and socially necessary labour adequately apportioned.

(From Capital vol. 2, chp. 18, I)

read a book faggot

Or to use a more modern term coined by Mark Fisher (RIP): capitalist realism. youtu.be/_x0h3tKFQKA?t=9m33s

You seem to not like reading books, so I'll just give you this
britannica.com/topic/dictatorship-of-the-proletariat

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Take off that flag.

WSM isn't Trot, it's Impossibilist (a tradition originating with DeLeon, not Lenin)

This is gold

For the "how", you can always go check out the Soviet Cybernetics thread, read about the Chilean project known as Cybersyn, and/or read Cockshott (best option).

If you want to actually educate yourself, read this

Consider the following: the more men you kill on the island, the better off you will be, because there will be more resources for you.
I don't see how this would not devolve into "Lord of the flies" without a central planning authority that also has a violence monopoly.

Fuck, I meant to post this

Sounds like a drink served in gay bars.

Why isn't my PDF working? okay here
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/

lol no he didn't you dumb fuck. He thought a market for consumer goods or labor were applicable to socialism so long as a market for means of production was absent. Taking the old slogan "common ownership" to an absurd extreme

Yeah I just realized that wasn't a good way to put it.

I hope you realize that lord of the flies is utopian to an extent. It's idealistic that all men answer to me. It's idealistic that I keep women as my property, and I am the controller of all within my grasp, and decide who lives on my island. Holla Forums talks about being an egoist, yet at the same time wants to condem things like "sexism".

Sexism is alright.

But realistically speaking if you kept a waifu sex slave harem for profit, under communism it would be the duty of the people to put a stop to it.

It's my pet peeve to call them Trots because of their condemnation of Stalinist Russia as "state capitalism" on virtually the same points as Trotsky and Trotskyism does, rather than simply calling it "capitalism" ("state capitalism" suggests that capital is subordinate to the state or that value production is not driver, while in any case it was and always had been).

Yeah it's probably more correct to call them impossibilists. Also, though De Leon was at the origin of the term impossibilism, I'd say the position (in all but name) was already a thing for self-fancied Marxists long before by parties like the POF and was very influential on orthodox Marxists like Luxemburg and councilists like Gorter.

Except man is not one-dimensional: the needs he finds in his peers are determined by his environment, experience and the cumulative influence of historical processes. If man's first instinct was to kill another man, we would have to wonder how there are still men. We would also have to wonder why man creates structures to prevent the killing of man if man is a ruthless utilitarian, and why man only created such structures millenia into its history as a species, and also wonder why only when certain conditions were met it was even conceivable or possible to do as such. Then we would have to challenge recorded history showing us that we have existed peacefully and without isolated production for millenia as well and ask ourselves: is man first an instinctive animal, or is man an architectural and inventive animal like (almost) no other (to such extents)?

And I have to wonder again: if you posit such vulgar utilitarianism, why do you instinctively view murder as its maxim? Wouldn't enslavement (hint: slave society), landed rule (hint: feudalism) or generalization of property (hint: capitalism) not be much more effective, as it enables the extraction of their exploits to your benefit? Fuck, before we get all historical materialist, why can't you just keep them around for a chat?

Again you presuppose that there is a single, overriding essence of the human species but then fail to invoke the necessary explanation for why this doesn't pervade in every other occurence of daily life today or how it is possible that we collectively limit ourselves to it outside of idealistically presupposing this as a dual side of our "nature" without explaining why.

I have disagreements with Zizek but look at this: youtube.com/watch?v=XcG2z20w2WE.

I'm gonna crawl through my EPUB of Socialist Commonwealth and directly cite you the parts in which Mises asserts that socialism means the lack of prices (and conversely his point was that socialism, or at least his crude understanding of it, would inevitably mean that price would reappear again and assert itself as regulator anyways).

Like I said, Mises' understanding of socialism was better than 95% of "socialists" but it was still shit.

That's literally the enduring maxim of capital's abolition bub. Excluded access can only be justified on a directly utility-based principle with the abolition of capital: i.e. not letting children and fools into the power plant because they could cause a catastrophy (communism) versus not letting in electricians because they're not hired at the firm.

Wow, thanks for posting that. That has completely cleared up any misconception I had about how fucking vague "the workers will operate the means of production" means when actually applied to the production process, given that many facets of production require extensive scientific/technical knowledge.

I mean here I was wondering exactly how "the workers" would "socialise" say, a mine, when half of the miners probably don't have much more than a highschool education. What, they'll just jointly vote on whether to expand production?

Under capitalism, this mine would be owned by a capitalist who would "expand production" based on what would provide him the most economic benefit. The problem here is that without working in the mine himself, the capitalist will take no issue with disregarding worker's safety if it means more profit. The capitalist also has control of the destination of these resources, and he will sell them to whoever is willing to offer the highest price. Under socialism, the workers would democratically decide their working conditions and the destination of what they have produced, based not on profit but common sense. This does not mean an educated opinion won't hold more sway, it simply means that one man cannot rig the production process in his favor. Also, assuming a miner would make poor decisions about mining because "muh highschool diploma" is borderline retarded. Since when do high schools teach fucking mining?

Bordiga can go fuck himself.

If Bordiga's ideas are socialism, then I'm not a socialist.

Fortunately, he's just an obscure, irrelevant pedant that accomplished nothing besides getting a small cabal of autists to obsess over him.

lurk most faggot.
marxist feminists hate us

Oh that's good, here I was thinking you were providing vague solutions, I am reassured now. It's amazing how more people aren't socialists if all production in a socialist society would just be based on "common sense" (whatever the hell that means).

I'm saying that giving everyone from the truckers and cleaners with a highschool diploma to the engineers and geologists involved in the mining process the exact same input over the process is fucking retarded.

Except it's not just bordiga you fucking spastic, the notion that socialism is simply "the extension of democracy to the workplace and economy" is incompatible with marxist theory. If commodity production has not been abolished then socialism does not fucking exist, no amount of "economic democracy" will change this.

Simply abolishing commodity production isn't socialism either. Ancient palace economies didn't have commodity production either, were they socialism?

Socialism is hardly Democracy.
Without arguing the technicalities of how slave ownership becomes legal in every Socialist utopia produced in history, Socialism is not only dangerous when utilized incorrectly and incompatible with numerable social conglomerates, but it is a blunt method of organization in a modern technocracy.

Wew, that lolbert "history"

There was a working class and a ruling class, so no.

hi lassalle

Bordiga does little more than reassert the basic Marxist understanding of the capitalist mode of production and what its abolition would entail, virtually the exact same as Marx, but also Engels, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, et cetera. There exists no proper Marxist on earth who thinks that there is a particular "idea" or "version" of socialism personal to one's fancies that is to or can even replace capitalism (yet another mode of production that you can't personalize the essence of). Post-capitalism's daily reality can only be hypothesized. What can be solidified is our understanding of its essential prerequisites and what steps must be taken to alter society as it has hitherto developed itself towards it.

As a Marxist, he wouldn't have wanted him to be the one to accomplish more than a faithful tailing of the communist movement as it appeared, but since you're desperately looking to Great Manify everything: (1) he established the first communist party in Italy, splitting from the "socialist" party that did everything in its might to stop workers from doing more, (2) lead a party that became so large it was the second biggest in Europe, netting him a seat in the Communist International with Lenin's compliments and (3) made his party be the only political organization in Italy to fight both the fascist Blackshirts and the police units of bourgeois democracy (who ended up betraying those who merely attacked the fascists in an alliance with them!).

Some more food: marxists.org/archive/damen/1970/bordiga-obituary.htm.

They did have commodity production, because they have capital. The way commodities are then processed to complete capital circuits and accumulate capital is irrelevant; what matters is that they do.

The notion of "gift economy" as you'd want your palace economy to qualify as non-capitalist, is entirely misled when you realize that a "gift" is just the delayed exchange of commodities. Reciprocity as such is a two-entity exchange relationship that we call a "gift", but isn't. The commodity arising from the existence of capital is merely a form of indebting the giftee with the law of value-driven need to then in turn produce capital and exchange it once more. If this wants to go, there must be a time lag between the gift and returned favor of a gift, meaning one must always be in debt of the other, or there is no relationship. Gift or generalized reciprocity is the exchange of goods and services without keeping track of their exact value, but often with the expectation that their value will balance out over time. Balanced or Symmetrical reciprocity occurs when someone gives to someone else, expecting a fair and tangible return at a specified amount, time, and place. Market or Negative reciprocity is the exchange of goods and services where each party intends to profit from the exchange, often at the expense of the other. Gift economies, or generalized reciprocity, occurred within closely knit kin groups, and the more distant the exchange partner, the more balanced or negative the exchange became. Your palace economy is effectively this third type of gift under the assumption that it is the second with a hint of the first.

Please do take off that flag.

OP here. I am not saying that socialism is just the extension of democracy to the economy and workplace and nothing more, but that it is a necessary component of it, without which you just have state capitalism.

>just democracy in the workplace
Socialism isn't even democracy in the workplace, for socialism does not know a place of work nor the need for democracy. Democracy is a mode of management that truly only exists today as a means to mediate inherently undemocratic and impersonal economic forces between people, just like [democracy] did when its inventors (the ruling classes of ancient class societies!) felt that it was necessary. Socialism implies a free association of individuals and their labour, as Marx put it, which means that majoritarianism cannot and has no need to serve as ultimate or even intermediary arbiter in affairs, because there is no need for something like democracy just like there is no need for dictatorship under a world absent of economic dictation. Marx understood this (see his Critique of Philosophy of Right), Lenin did (lacan.com/jambadiou.htm) and even certain anarchists do (theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-debunking-democracy, how ironic that Bob Black is useful for once).

Are you suggesting that there is no need for collective decision making under socialism?

"Collective decision-making" implies the mutual understanding of peoples, this there will be, and it will in fact be the entire basis for a world absent of relationships mediated through objects and by economic laws. The point is that this needn't principally be a majoritarian engagement, or at least in principle. Democracy only needs to and can be the basis of things in a society where other forces demand it.

But if there is collective decision making then you have to expect that these decisions will often not be unanimous, in which case you need a mechanism for determining the proper course of action. What I'm trying to determine is exactly what you are suggesting that mechanism ought to be if not democracy.

The fact is that when there is disagreement and it is impossible to please everybody, you either abide by the will of the majority or of the minority, since any decision you make will appeal to one or the other. So it seems no matter what you either end up with de facto democracy or de facto oligarchy.

If you indeed describe democracy as the reality of communism: its very essence, then sure, communism would be the most direct or "true" democracy there is (Marx called it as such, or least he called it "the battle of democracy won"). The point I'm making is that democracy was in its creation and hitherto never a direct expression of something established. Rather, democracy was a particular mode devised by the ruling classes (ruling ideology, i.e. the product of the mode of production in place) to better manage a particular mode of production. In fact, all things we would at first consider positive like suffrage, women's suffrage, and so forth, were considered and desired by rulers for the toiling masses way before these toiling masses even started actively militating for them.

I say we let the leftcoms be massive pedants in gulag.

That would be really undemocratic!

really? So, the French absolute monarchy cared about suffrage before the Revolution?

How would labour vouchers function with automation? Would the labour voucher decrease as the amount of time spent making a good decreases or would it just count the human maintaining of machinery as actual labour?

Your picture is retarded, market socialists oppose a formal system of economic planning.

I thought Keynesians were the dominant school of economics in modern academia.

Then again, I'm getting a meme degree, so I guess I wouldn't know.

You know I can grow your one-nation social democracy's GDP way better than with slave labour. I'ma make one of the old East Bloc-type jazz bands and even export my commodities beyond the national market to really help the motherland get those Rubles. I'll self-crit at the same time, dw.

Real talk though, has anyone ITT heard how good jazz was under Stalinism and post-Stalinism? Check out these channels: youtube.com/user/mishapanfilov/undefined, youtube.com/channel/UCHp3vvz2b2ChlacaJ9JsfwA/undefined. They upload the most commercially successful jazz music from the place and era. Really cool, see for example this Polish band from the PRL epoch: youtube.com/watch?v=d4HOWU5U5d8.

Exactly the same as I described, but the more there would be automation and effective planning the less they would be necessary.

Labour notes fulfill the need to properly aportion goods and services post-value under "lower stage" communism, where rationing, human centralization and effective planning are not yet fully developed towards the "higher stage". In such a "higher stage", proper planning and automation (more the former than the latter, really) would less and less make labour notes necessary.

No, vouchers will forever be worth the amount of time laboured and nothing more. They are unlike money, price and other metrics of value not subject to fluctuations relevant to accumulation, profit and expansion. They are truly but an instrument, whereas money and before it gold developed as higher forms of the commodity.

Not since the late '60s. Neoclassical theory reigns supreme today, with experimental shit like MMT being much more relevant than classical Keynesianism is. There's post-Keynesianism too but it's far from dominant.

This. I was under the impression that the rights that rights that proles currently do have under liberalism were won with bloody struggle in the streets. I guess the revolutions of 1848 were just the ruling class playing 10^128 dimensional chess against itself?

Many were, many weren't (again: the bourgeoisie is only personified capital, and by its naturally competing and isolated position does not think like a hivemind, meaning it has no unified concept of its best interests!).

What I alluded to was the fact that many in the ruling class have been in favor of improving the conditions of the subordinate classes before these subordinate classes even started wanting them, sometimes even without the subordinate classes even needing to want them. My biggest example of this would be the modern welfare state, which started under the mercantile Prussian state, was manufactured and pushed for entirely by the Bismarckian regime. An important enough part of the bourgeoisie recognized the need of a welfare state for long-term exploitation and securing a healthy and strong working class. This excerpt of a Michael Heinrich talk on the subject elaborates on this and many other things further: youtube.com/watch?v=0cEzK5Mz0OA.

To build on the point of , Keynesianism was never even taken seriously in terms of how it was applied versus what Keynes actually wrote (and he was much more straightforward than, say, Proudhon or Marx). Keynesianism, strictly speaking, is not "state spending under capitalism".
In fact, a lot of its economics have their origins in Proudhon's economics, but with the metaphysics of flux and change stripped away in favor of the eternally static monotony of a positivistic basis and both the labor theory of value and corresponding notion of surplus value extraction at the point of production removed, among other things.
anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secG3.html#secg36
Lots of Post-Keynesians across their blogs have pointed the discrepancy between "Keynesianism as written" and "Keynesianism as practiced" out as well. FDR, for example, took lots of different ideas and tested them out (even some elements of the "fascist economic solution" and Soviet-style state Taylorism where they didn't threaten certain sectors of the American bourgeoisie) and amalgamated them into something that was "not-free markets". Certain elements of Keynesianism got thrown in, yes, but that doesn't make FDR's policies any more explicitly Keynesian than they were Stalinist or fascist-corporatist (corporatism generally better summarizes the general character of it than Keynesianism, tbqh).

The notion that Russia at the time was not socialist (as Trotsky in fact accepted) but rather a peculiar form of capitalism has its origins with Miasnikov (considered a leftcom AFAIK, broadly similar but unconnected to the Dutch/German council communists).
libcom.org/library/chapter-7-makhaevism-after-machajski
Also, DeLeon was an Orthodox Marxist (that is, part of the positivistic deviation).

There's multiple schools of Keynesianism.
The dominant school is the New Keynesians, who're obsessed with things like sticky prices (the simplest example: It costs money and time to change the paper labels on products - so sometimes prices are higher/lower than the ideal if those costs didn't exist) but basically understand the economy through a neoclassical lens, with constant reference to equilibrium.

New Keynesianism is indeed a dominant school of economic thought, but it owes as much - if not more - to neoclassical economics than it does to Keynesian economics. (I think there's some demarkation disputes here between microeconomics and macroeconomics, and whether they're to be treated differently or whether macro should just be applied micro. Neoclassicals don't really like macroeconomics iirc.) This comes together in the New Neoclassical Synthesis, which is basically just the new classical and new keynesian schools together.

Post-Keynesians are the "real" Keynesians, and are far less influential. (Though not completely irrelevant.)
In political analogy terms: New Keynesian = Neoliberal, New Classical/Neoclassical = Libertarian, Post-Keynesian = SocDem.

Sexism is a spook in the sense that it is gendered dichotomy. If you only hate women and not men, you are spooked by the idea that women are different from men.

yeah, its just that most lolbergs are morons who have read nearly none of their own literature.

wtf i love labour vouchers and stalin era and post stalin era jazz

*now

>and stalin era and post stalin era
Can't have both I'm afraid.

damn

I'm going to give lolbert literature a try and see how much I can last