Capital Flight

What assets are they going to flee with? Financial assets don't have meaningful worth under socialism, physical capital is too expensive to remove in many situations, and intellectual property is actually impossible to move.

Well, it's a better idea than most. Not sure how I feel about mass surveillance, but it's definitely a method.

See
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Financial aspects have a big influence in the short-term when people are panicking/scrambling.

It's impossible to move, but large-scale trade agreements like TPP make it possible to "transfer" the schematics to other countries.

Getting IP requires proof of concept in most countries, not a physical documentation of how it works.

holy revisionism batman

Companies do it all the time in the USA. People jump from Indiana to Ohio with their factories because of ridiculous Indiana tax rates. Same thing happens with Massholes buying shit in New Hampshire all the time. It's a pretty common occurrence that only needs a month or two to implement, honestly.

I don't really see many other options. And hey, they've been using shit like that against us for years.

cbpp.org/research/tax-flight-is-a-myth
cbpp.org/research/proposal-to-strengthen-minimum-wage-would-help-low-wage-workers-with-little-impact-on?fa=view&id=4075

Yes amigo, I am. Especially expensive key components of the production that can be refitted to work in other facilities. But anything that can be dismantled and moved with out exeding it's own value is at risk.
If you need a example, a metal work shop will have some kind of water jet cutter to work with sheet metal. These are not very big, but cost a lot of money. The owner will porbably be willing to pay 6K USD to have it moved to another country if it retails at 150K USD.
his suit, no problem, his personal sports car, no problem. The fleet of trucks in his transportation company, yes problem, the boeings of a air lain company, yes problem, a thankship full of oil or natural gass, yes problem.

Im sorry mate, you got to help me out here, how exactly is porky going to do that?

Who is he going to sell the factories to, in order to get money and flee? Impending revolution makes his factories useless, and he can't put them in a bag and leave.

You can take your jewels and gold, but you can't carry farmland, factories or machinery with you. And jewels don't produce, farmland, factories and machinery do.

A slight dent into the stockpiles while porky tries to panic sell them on the global market are merely a consequence we have to deal with. If the economy is bad enough for revolution, then porky scrambling in panic is not going to do a lot of damage. People who "flee" with the capitalist would not have helped with the cause anyway, you can't force them to stay and work. Metal, wood and whatnot are not easily put into your back pocket, it takes time to transport these.

The least of our worries is intellectual property. The only thing it takes is one spare copy to be left on a harddrive somewhere, or just reverse engineering, and we will have it. Copyright and patents hold no power if there is no agency that enforces them, and since we are socialists, we will not enforce copyright and whatnot from foreign capitalists.

I am not quite certain who this "porky" is but you let him go. You can even help him to pack all the stuff he wants to take. And secure his exit through borders.

Stuff is meaningless. Even gold has little practical value (mostly in electronics) and you can get that amount of gold easily.

You are after intellectual capital.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_capital

Fiat money is paper and has little intrinsic value. Stuff has also a little value in terms of raw resources.

But, if you have intellectual capital than only thing you need is raw materials that can be obtained with a little effort.

And if "porky" has left the building you do not have mouth to feed and obstructions.

look kiddo, we're not just talking about physical assets here, although certainly those would be in danger as well, we're talking about actual money. If you want whatever country you're in to still maintain some level of trade with the rest of the world they'd need to use the currency they already had or one based/initially transferable with it.

The US is the biggest capital market in the world. Our total financial assets is around 120 trillion, imagine if we lost that to capital flight! It would be devastating.

look kiddo, we're not just talking about physical assets here, although certainly those would be in danger as well, we're talking about actual stock in slave-owning companies. If you want whatever country you're in to still maintain some level of civilization they'd need to use these important financial assets. Imagine if we lost that to slave-owner flight! It would be devastating. That's why, when we abolish slavery, we need to make sure to also confiscate all the shares of slave-owning companies, so we can re-invest them.

Bro. Do you even grasp the basic workings of currency?

They can't just "take money", their money is invested in capital or exists as debt from a bank. The bank can't pay them cash even if they wanted to, they dont have the money. This leaves us with two options:

1. Somehow he does get the cash and takes it away from the country

2. He does not get the cash and has to sell his debt to someone for other currency.

In situation one, the capitalist would land in a capitalist nation with money that is now completely worthless. All traders are dumping their currency on the market, noone wants to buy it and the socialists are probably going to abolish the money, putting a limit on how much one person is allowed to exchange. Thus, you have a suitcase full of fancy looking toilet paper, do not go to start, do not collect 20k.

In situation two, the capitalists will be forced to trade his debt to someone who is willing to buy it. Noone will be. The debt he has is owed to him by people who are owed their money by people who are about to have their debts dismissed by the new government. You now have a load of virtual money that you can't exchange, that you can't sell or can't use.

The entirety of fiat currency will be working against the capitalists in this scenario. The money is intrinsically valueless. As soon as it is clear that the currency is going to be abolished and you can't exchange it or use it, it becomes worthless.

Your "financial assets" are all made up of debts, bank deposits, bonds and stocks. All of those will not be refunded, they have no actual physical assets behind them. Burning or taking away your bonds or stocks, taking away debt or bank deposit papers means NOTHING if the agencies, people and groups that owe you or guarantee you the value, dont exist anymore, or wont pay you back. Taking your stocks won't do shit, the factories and companies will not change just because you claim you own them. With no government to enforce your claims of ownership, your piece of paper is nothing more than that. A piece of paper.

So take away your digital bank accounts, take away your government bonds, take away your stocks and all of that. Your financial assets will be useless if we don't accept them, and any financial assets that would exist in capitalist countries would get frozen as soon as we would have a socialist revolution, since we won't hold up the trade agreements that allowed all this virtual and imaginary wealth to come into existence.

ITT: an-fags thinking we'll let the bourgies take anything.

Good luck taking building
Who's gonna load it?
Who's gonna pilot them?

You idiots!
Without workers the bourgies have nothing!

Mcdonalds can leave and so can RBS and I will be glad to see them go.

are you completely retarded? You do realize that the plantations and such that dealt with slaves weren't gone after the civil war. Unless you want to go full stalinism or full anarcho-primitivism you'll need those financial assets to keep the firms we have going and international trade going.

I hope you realize there wasn't even that much stock of slave owning companies, most of those companies, i.e. plantations were just owned by one person/family.

You can't print your own money to pay for shit AND use that money to trade with other countries because then it will have lost relative value and the inflation would be huge unless you have all prices determined by the state, or whatever organization anarchists like to call it.

But let's say that you do that, you take over all the means of production although the rich take their financial assets and cash them in elsewhere. You completely eliminate money and replace it with labor vouchers or whatever, maybe you just give shit out according to estimated need. Well, for one you'd be cut off from the rest of the captitalist world. So, in order for you to survive you'd have to be a large country like the US, USSR, China or India to survive anyway. Let's take the US for example.

Much of our industrial output would have to be rebuilt after years of outsourcing it to China and Mexico. But in the short term you'd experience a very large shortage of goods. This could lead to a large black market like there was in eastern europe and in North Korea atm. But, if the government is powerful enough (so anarchist organization is out the window at this point), they can stop a black market from taking force and reasserting capitalism. Sure, people won't go hungry, the US is one of the largest producers of bread and other foodstuffs, but they'll be without many luxuries and simple amenities much like in Eastern Europe in the 70's and 80's. So we're right back into the twentieth century.

You're missing one of the biggest problems. Revolution is almost never instantaneous. The bourgeoisie will have some time to cash in all their financial assets before they become worthless and just invest in a different foreign reserve currency, and with the speed of technology and markets today most of them would do it long before revolutionaries take full control. Just like that stupid tweet JK Rowling made about Brexit. The rich can gamble in foreign currency when shit goes down in one country. It's the ordinary people who'll have to pay the price.

I think you're underestimating the effects of market panic.

kek, joking aside though…

I was just pointing out that IP can be "moved" in the sense that the original schematics that the factory runs on can be easily removed/moved around (and that trade agreements fuck over the ability to ignore IP in a lot of ways).

The issue with "reverse-engineering" is that it's a lot harder than movies and TV make it out to be. Take a USB drive for instance- anyone could "build" a USB drive, but the proprietary programmable logic inside of it is a lot harder to crack. There's a lot of PLCs used in equipment that when exposed to light or air (the only way to really get inside of them), it chemically erases the data. Sure you could theoretically just take it to a special lab to remove it, but will a special lab be working in the near future (4-12 months) when people are rioting and shit is hitting the fan?

Anyone can say "we'll just make it on our own" and they're correct, under ideal circumstances they could. Ignoring the 20-90% of the population that won't be eager to drop everything and who are now jobless/pennyless is political suicide though in an economic collapse or severe recession/depression that could result from capital flight.

If a couple hundred black folks can shut down an entire city and require police from around the state just to keep them in check, I'd hate to imagine what even 1% of the population rioting could do, let alone 3% or 10%.

On the contrary, powerful nations would want to buy it so they could use it as an excuse to invade if a regime change does happen (unless they perceive the threat to be larger than their potential returns).

Again, this assumes you're the king of the hill when the currency is abolished. If you aren't the king of the hill, you just became a target for every opportunist nation on the planet.

How's the factory going to fly away? The apartment complex? The farmland?

Another thing to point out is rare-earth elements.

These are necessary for small/advanced electronics. Last time I checked, there are six or seven rare-earth mines in the world because you have to separate them by atomic weight at a minute level due to similar properties. The one that they were trying to start in California/Nevada went bankrupt. If you truly want to get rid of international trade in its entirety (what your nation would effectively be saying if it did things according to the folks I quoted above), then you would need to find an alternative to rare-earth mines or be ready to hold scientists and engineers at gunpoint/hope they don't flee when you have them reopen the bankrupt facility in Nevada. You'd effectively need those rare-earth elements if you want to automate anything past 1970s-tier equipment.

I already explained to you why they can't just "cash in their assets". The brexit situation is completely different from a socialist revolution. Brittain will always keep with the trade agreements, they will always keep trading, keep enforcing debt and ownership claims. A socialist country will not, and as such there is noone to sell the assets to, because nobody will buy what will be worthless. At best, the price of debt and stock plummets because there are a few idiots who think they can get money from this, but the value will most likely be close to zero.

But hey, if you want to belief that you can sell money that you are at risk of not being able to use, exchange or debt that you cant get paid for, thats on you.

A socialist revolution is already a hard reset, the value of all "stock" will plummet, the currency will become useless. A revolution is by definition the rock bottom from which to go up. Trade will, however, continue as soon as anything is offered on the market. Oil is oil, wood is wood. And as soon as there is trade, the value of currency will steadily increase again.

Good argument, what is market panic going to do? Destroy factories, collapse mines and poison farmland? At best its just going to shut down the economy, which is already going to happen, because there is a fucking revolution.

How do you want to "remove" schematics if the factory already exists? Are you going to sabotage all of your infrastructure and wipe all of the drives and backup?

Fuck off mate, for half the shit on the market, the board shematics are already available if you know where to look. Sure there will be some software thats going to be locked due to some form of verification to a foreign server, but most factories and such do not have this, because this is detrimental to the efficiency and most software was developed for that specific factory, with all the documentation being present for repairs and maintenance.

If we have revolution, having a few people temporarily jobless is not a cause of concern, because there already was a massive population that already was. Revolutions dont come out of thin air, they happen when everything goes down the shitter.

They don't need a stupid excuse such as "I have stock in commiestan". If history teaches us anything, its that as soon as there is revolution, they will be at our throat. The fact that companies have assets there means that they will try to enforce it, the government won't have to buy it. See banana republic.

A factory is its mechanical components, not the building.

As has been pointed out above, the parts in a factory are quite easy to move around already if you're doing so for tax evasion purposes. This has been happening to Indiana for decades now as they continuously raise taxes on companies. A 100k piece of equipment is typically small enough and expensive enough that a porky is willing to spend about 10-20% of its price to have it shipped.

The upside of capitalism is that even if the governments that have those resources in their area ban trade with us, we will get our hands on it. It will simply go through proxy trade. Money is money, and as soon as we sell shit, we have foreign currency which we can use to buy shit, which then leads to a natural establishment of exchange rates between ours and foreign currency, due to our citizens exchanging their foreign capital for local etc etc.

Maybe I should conclude it:

Will some shit get shipped out? Yes. Will it be most of it? No.

Should we just give up on socialism just because porky will try to GTFO of there? Fuck no. I would rather have some of the factories than not having any, but being forced to work in them with no say in the matter.

I'm not asking anyone to give up anything.

I'm just pointing out that capital flight is a lot worse than people make it out to be, and is something to seriously consider.

You still don't seem to get it. People will buy these assests because they are essentially betting on the failure of the revolution, no revolution is absolutely certain to succeed and you know the adage, buy low sell high. There will always be a buyer.

As for trade, do you not remember how the us used free trade to cut off of the communist bloc from international markets

how many people are still holding on to sugar planations in cuba

holding on to the deeds for*

Well a quick google search…

archive.is/oowaZ

And how will that change anything then? The price of our currency is going to plummet anyway, regardless of buyers or sellers, but the things that can't be moved won't move.

Yup, but any first world country is too well positioned to not be allowed to trade, and they have not enforced any of these things anymore due to the red scare being gone. Venezuela was allowed to trade, and if the US really does embargo us, we can always sell to china, which is arguably the largest economy in the world, or russia, which will refuse to embargo us purely to spite NATO.

Our mines will remain, ours farmland will remain, most of our equipment will remain, most intellectual capital (people) will remain, and some will be attracted if we create the right climate.

You are just making a ridiculous argument when you say that somehow the capitalists will strip the country of raw materials and heavy industrial equipment. They'll take themselves and their now-worthless money and maybe their luxury goods but that's really it.

Fucking porkys.

That's exactly the point tho. Our currency would plummet as would the price of all our exports. This can be avoided tho if we take control of the government before they expect anything.

Not to mention the amount of power we'd have if we prevented capital flight.

In this example the us has undergone a socialist revolution, meaning capital would find another center of power to make its heart, probably China or Russia, ironically enough, they'd be the ones doing the embargoing along with Europe.

In what kind of socialism would we be using the same currency after the revolution. It would be better to just void the national currency and only make trades in USD/Euros until a proper system was established.

That pic makes me think that the American Civil War is a great example of what psychologically separates the left and the right.

If evil is necessary to maintain a system by design, then why should that system not be destroyed? It's easy to moralize about human beings as chattel, but much, much easier to pander to natural human fear of change. You can contend forever that it's just necessary in the short term, but this short term slowly warps into a long term where no one wins.

Well that's not gonna be easy either. If and when the capitalists cut you off from the international banking system its going to be very hard to get those currencies.

Because there's no such thing as evil, only the strong and the weak.

This is a meme. The sad part is most of the theories for socialism here rely on and assume it. It is why Holla Forums and left/pol/ can never have meaningful discussion.

yeah its not gonna happen like that, probably. most people here don't tend to take reality into account in their plans to a transition to socialism.

Yeah, I'd noticed. Then the same people chuck around 'idealist' as an insult. If socialists could be more pragmatic they'd get more support. Sometimes I get the feeling that some are using it as some kind of moral grandstanding, 'Well, X, Y and Z are shit but I'm above this shit cause I'm a socialist'.

yeah, "the point is to change it" and everything. Entryism and market socialism I think is definitely the most pragmatic thing to do right now, and imo, what is likely to produce to most results.

Now kiss!

Change for changes sake is fucking cancer.

Very point. much rebuttal.

The point you're trying to make here is pretty stupid tbh.

It's like saying it's pointless to go at war, because the enemy can move his soldiers and supplies.

How in anyway was that what I was advocating for.

A revolution is a long process. Very long. Up until now, every revolution has been centuries long.

And by the way, history already gives us the example of a successful global revolution: the capitalist one.

Dumbass, the point is not to simply not go to war because the enemy can move his soldiers and supplies. It's to STOP HIM from moving his soldiers and supplies. If you can strike first in war you do so to shut down your enemy's mobility and offensive capabilities. Why do you think the Japanese went after pearl harbor? It's because almost the entire US fleet was stationed there along with its fuel reserves. The fuel reserves were also supposed to be hit, but they decided to retreat before they did, a huge mistake because if they had hit the fuel reserves they would have shut down the entire navy in the pacific for MONTHS!

You didn't.

So the revolution is happening now?

That was top-down. Most of the world was illiterate when it happened so they just went along with their governments. I don't see governments advocating for the removal of governments.

I've admittedly been sleeping this whole time, but is there a reason you're impersonating fam?

No, I turned on the flag in another thread and didn't feel turning it off. There isn't an exclusive ownership of flags.

A vanguard/militia could prevent this by force.

Irrelevant. The claim addressed wasn't about physical things, but about tokens that are linked to certain rights, while the extent of these rights is massively changed. Hence the comparison with financial stock in slave-owning companies.

The point is this: Slave-owning companies were traded on the stock market. With abolishing slavery, the stock of any company primarily doing that American slave thang took a nosevide. The idea of both abolishing slavery and keeping the market-value of those shares up at the same time would be absurd. A more moderate change, like giving slave more rights, would have resulted in that stock losing value as well, though in a less extreme way. Likewise, when the rights of bosses get a reduction, the power of money is reduced. When the right of bosses get a massive cut, this undermines the very meaning of what money is. So who gives a shit then what you do with that money.

>But let's say that you do that, you take over all the means of production although the rich take their financial assets and cash them in elsewhere.
You don't get it. The value of such financial assets vaporizes when ownership rights are fundamentally changed, this follows from the fucking definition of what a financial asset is.