In practical real life modern day terms, and not fantasy fully automated luxury gay space communism...

In practical real life modern day terms, and not fantasy fully automated luxury gay space communism, how big should the state be?
As in, how much power should the government have, and why?

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Under socialism, I think the best way to think of the state is like your parents while you are at uni: you are mostly doing shit yourself, deciding how you study, shopping, running your own affairs, you don't live under their house so you can speak your mind: but they're there if you need help, need somewhere to fall back too, and sometimes they will ask you for a favour while you're up there and vice versa. But most of the time, you are not interacting with them, you are interacting with university societies and organisations: the things that have replaced what your home was.

**State = home
Government = parents
University = socialist economy
University societies and organisations = syndicates, soviets and shit**

Thats a nice analogy and all, but it gives us zero practical policies and doesn't answer the question.

Who builds the road? When building the road, some people may be required to relocate, how is this handled? Some people's homes may become more valuable and more desirable, more convenient. This creates conflict, who decides where the road goes, thus who decides who benefits from being near it? If the settlement is small, and money have to be taken from other settlements taxes, how is this defended in the public eye? Why am I paying for a road 200 miles away that I won't use?

Stuff like that.

as big as it needs to be.
Gut feeling: whatever % of GDP government spending was in Sweden under Olof Palme, then add 10% for good measure.

The government should be building an obscene amount of homes (there should, as an insurance policy, always be a housing surplus - even if this is mostly in the form of tower flats with some empty blocks.), own most major infrastructure hubs (airports, railways, seaports), probably engineering firms of national importance (i.e. BAe Systems) although this might not be necessary, majority of healthcare provision (i.e. NHS+), and generally all the other lovely stuff you could expect with social democracy. This also means welfare should be generous, work should be a social obligation with zero-to-minimal enforcement of jobseeking, means testing for disability benefits should take place within the healthcare system instead of the social security system. It's tempting to also place banks under state ownership and control, although some other form of arms-length socialisation of credit may be more functional. Finally, all national resources (mines, forestry, oil) should be nationalised with all profits from extraction flowing to the treasury instead of to private companies.

And that's really where things get much messier: It's quite easy to envision what the state should be doing, but it's also quite possible to find innovative ways of doing those things. In her last years, British Rail was sectorised - you had Network Southeast, Intercity, Scotrail and so on. There's little reason you can't have "British Rail" as the state brand, and each subdivision of British Rail state owned and operated, but with a greater degree of locally devolved control. You can decentralise control while keeping central ownership and standard-setting. Also, you could as a rather out-there idea, have competition between state enterprises - a particularly tempting option in the case of some kind of arms-length socialised bank.

Finally you should naturally have countercylical government spending and nice Keynesian things like that.

It's probably easier to deliniate what doesn't need to be state owned, but I'm in a rush at the moment so instead I'll go on a tangent:
The main opposition - but also booster - to state power should be the trade union movement, and while trade unions should be independent of the state they should operate in close synthesis with it to keep the bourgeoisie behaving. That makes the internal structure of the trade unions a very open question since you want them to keep representing workers, and their real individual interests instead of pushing the system out of equilibrium and enabling the dismantling of the system. Indeed, assuming somehow we were establishing such a system that must be the main concern. While the state I describe here would be democratic it must by design - and since this is very international, it's quite hard to design this in - make it difficult to impossible to retrench the state's role in society. In short, I want a managed social democracy. The target model for democracy must be Sweden, with her perpetually dominant SAP, not Britain with her perpetually weak Labour party and occasionally pragmatic Conservative party.

As I say, in a rush, can't articulate more. This is full of things that would require further detail.

The dictatorship of the proletariat? As much as is necessary to carry out the historical task of eliminating the capitalist class.
Its enemies? None.

We are not in the business of devising fantastical states of affairs. At best we aim to with the greatest expediency achieve a number of goals comprising a revolutionary communist transformation of human civilisation as such.

Zero, because nobody should impose their will over people.

Note that this does not preclude the existence of the state, as in a bureaucratic machinery watching over bureaucratic matters and making necessary, uncontroversial bureaucratic decisions.


People decide if and where to build the road (the state acts as a mediator if a conflict arises). Then they gather the necessary resources (the state may act as an intermediary in organizing specialist work, materials, or help from a shared public pool if necessary).
Then the state oversees and monitors the construction process to make sure it goes according to previously agreed plan and update shared knowledge pool (i.e. maps).

"Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato"

We know you're a fascist, you don't need to broadcast it on every fucking thread.

sasuga fash-kun

Believe it or not, it is quite possible to appreciate aspects of a persons body of work while still overall reviling that person.
Historically Sorel was a person that leftists were able to overall revile while still appreciating some of his ideas in a vacuum.
Indeed just a few months back on this very board we had a thread on Mosley that was filled with people celebrating his 'early period', isolating his ideas from that period away from ideas expressed in his later periods.

I have always been quite open as to my position as a Totalitarian, as such I a posted a quote that nicely summarizes my position on the ideal scope of the state.
It is a quote presented in a vacuum, separated from any other ideas of the person who originated that quote.
Those other ideas are not only irrelevant to my positions, but I do assuredly find them objectionable.

filteries.com/politics

Can some of you fill this in, and post screenshots with the results?
Its an early version thing, but it has enough customization to get the idea forward.

There seems to be some disparity.

I don't know - by what measure will you gauge the bigness, and what counts as a state? To establish this is by no means trivial since we are are socialists and so aim to overcome capital, which is deeply to tied to the modern state, but also to our conceptions of just how "big" the state is. Usually today we measure by fraction of GDP, but this quickly becomes a fraught concept when a lot of production is communized and produces for use. I think.

Also, to preempt naysayers, you can't just not call it a state.

meaningless anglo meme
makes 0 sense
dumb anglo scum

By "practical real life modern day terms" I interpreted it as remaining within the scope of capitalism, while the other poster seems to be articulating something closer to socialism, particularly given the direct reference to gathering resources instead of funding.


Messed around with it again. Set law options but hid them because I didn't want to put much thought into social issues.
The industry part seems weird and fiddly, as does trying to balance between sectors in general. So for that reason, as a general rule, consider health and education expenditure too low, and the makeup of GDP a very rough guide. ("Manufacturing good, Finance bad, Government builds houses.")

Well, in my mind, businesses would be "reresentative democracies" that would work something like this. Pick an industry. Remove all of the Capitalists. From there, the workers will pick someone to oversee them, and to designate workflow, etc… general leadership. This person at the individual workplace will, in turn, have a higher up that "governs" so many businesses, and so forth until an industry is governed in such a way. The overall government would be in higher authority though, so if x industry decides they will stop producing, the government will intervene on behalf of the people in the industries. Now this is an idea I just had, but I think it makes sense. For the industries, people can "vote in" their own boss, but they can't vote in someone elses. In theory, let's say there are nine workplaces, three regions of three workplaces, and one overall industry. The leader(s) of industry would be elected by the leader(s) of the regions who would be elected by the leader(s) of the workplaces who would be elected by the workers. This reduces mob rule, and allows highlevel decisions to be made by experts while allowing workers to still have impact by the "experts" they choose. The government would more or less be kept the same as it is, but, obviously, without Capitalist laws due to the lack of a market and such for them to even apply to. The salaries for government officials would also be heavily reduced, and they would be made more accountable, which I can not be certain of how this could be done, considering the variance between one country to another. I hope this """theory""" post helped you.

How "big" can be measured in what power administrative an executive branches of the state have over the life and decision making of the individual.

For example, a state that regulates what dyes can be used in foods is "bigger" than the same state which doesn't do that.
A state that demands certain criteria are met to make a building viable for living is bigger than one that doesn't.
A state that demands all cars, boats, guns are registered so that it is known who owns what is bigger than one that doesn't.

Regulation == big in that case. The state is telling you what to do, or what to not do more like.

You are aware anything more than 2% is considered high currently, right?
Anyway, thanks for filling it in, good to see other people's opinions laid down like that.

i'd say it should be about 59 % of the average practical modern day term in relation to the populations Autism Level on world scale minus physical shortcomings due to health issues divided through the number of dicks OP is sucking on a daily bases

Those aren't measurable things, though. Those are soft notions of bigness which can be used to make some subjective comparisons, but they aren't things with values that can be calculated and compared objectively. A state which does X is bigger than a state that doesn't do X, but how MUCH bigger?

% of GDP is good because that is an objective, measurable value. In order for us to discuss "bigness", we need to be able to discuss it in concrete terms.

Okay that's fair, but it is more of a general view than nitty gritty. For your example:
Well the economic organisations; my personal preference the construction syndicate.
Ehh, most of the time that doesn't happen anymore.
Well the ideal socialist state would not tax the individual, but in fact tax the productive forces of society (Like Most Marxist-Leninist states engaged; Albania had no income tax), so the point of "who pays for it" is kinda mute, it is payed for by productive forces, not individuals.

If we have communism there would not be a state as Marxists understand a state

I'm not sure what the percentages correlate to. In cash-terms it seems military funding is