I'm coming from the libertarian right but gaining interest in the libertarian left/anarcho communism. The libertarian right places a heavy emphasis on economics and what I'm trying to understand is how would a communist society function economically without the profit incentive?
I'm coming from the libertarian right but gaining interest in the libertarian left/anarcho communism...
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Reputation economics. Personally, I suspect fashion would be the driving force. Degenerates from future.
Either way, why should you care? I'm for Communism mostly because I like steps in the middle.
How are you going to reach Communism?
Communism is by definition post scarcity, most of activity is automated, money don't even exist and people are free to do what they want, without worrying for their future.
You maybe meant how things works under socialism, which is the previous stage. There is still scarcity and currency, but the workers owns their means of production so they fully get what they work for.
The profit is not the only motivation to do things, it's not even a motivation in itself for most people."I want money" usually means "i don't want to starve."
Something on motivation.
youtube.com
lmao, at least with Christian Utopianism you get to party with Jesus when it happens
Building off of this, you can still have a market in socialism, so what people want to buy can signal to the laborers what to provide. Since people get paid for the value they generate, rather than the business owner skimming most if it off the top, they make a lot more money and basically have a much easier time affording what they need. The workers are therefore probably making enough to live comfortably, and motivated instead to do work that benefits society.
One of the biggest problems with capitalism is alienation. People are treated as cogs in the machine instead of working people. They are detached from the value of their labor for one - both its exchange value (how much it's worth to the company) and its use value (how it benefits the recipient of the product). One reason depression and loneliness are so common is because workers toil in isolation with no awareness of what their work accimplishes.
Its an end stage, an ideal to strive for.
But hey, you go advocate christian uropianism if you think we can't reach a point where so much is automated that money will essentially have little to no use as most jobs are done voluntary and products cost jack shit.
Did Marx ever say he imagined most work could be automated, or any of the other big-name communists from before the collapse of communist states? I was under the impression this idea only started to gain in popularity among socialists/communists fairly recently.
We could already be there tbh. Most of our jobs are pointless fucking around that only exists so the employees have money to buy other useless products. If there was no explicit need to buy food and shelter, people could already mostly not work.
Most activity will end up getting automated tough. There won't be enough jobs for everyone so either capitalism collapse because of riots, or capitalists succesfully exterminate the now useless masses and find themselves rulers of a fully automated productive system with no one to buy their shit… and money become useless anyway.
How exactly do we transition?
Haven't read Capital yet, but given the progress of automation in the late XX and beginning of XXI century i could be very well a fairly recent thing, we're seeing beginning of automated journalsim, they're talking about automating the cashier's jobs should the minimum wage be raised… Who know what profession will be next?
From what? Capitalism or socialism?
How would a communist society function properly?
Once people's needs are entirely satisfied, and scarcity no longer exists. The state slowly abolishes itself, and we're eventually left with a classless, money-less "nation."
Well, since you're interested in the anti-state side of leftism
have you heard of the studies around how people are motivated? apparently, money as a reward for performance actually hinders creativity and productivity in creative tasks. testing of individuals has confirmed this, and testing of groups (workers in a workplace), specifically showed that around 70,000$ average salary, increasing salary based on performance actually hindered performance! Very strange, but it makes sense. People perform much better when they are working for the intrinsic value of working, when they have enough money that they don't have to worry about any needs and can pursue hobbies and self actualization
open source software is an example of communist-like production. people voluntarily contribute to the software for any number of reasons (like programming, feel like they are helping others, the admiration of their colleagues) and everyone has equal access to what is produced.
Now over a long enough period of time, I think technology makes this arrangement inevitable, without necessarily having a socialist step along the way
I agree with state socialism (democratic ofc), providing everyone a guaranteed standard of living and then providing people volunteer jobs that are also productive. as long as technology continues advancing and making the necessary remunerated labor less over time, when that becomes zero, we can work to abolish the state (decrease it's power and make participation voluntary)
OP was asking about anarchists, who know better than to believe this drivel.
Of course it's purely ideal that such a thing would occur, but only fools think humans can go from living under a figurehead for the past several thousand years of their existence into pure anarchy in the span of a few generations. The transition from socialism into communism is one of slow progress.
Im not the OP but do you have links to those studies?
MLs are the worst kind of reformists.
It's the youtube vid linked in this post
So your proposal is to revolt against the socialist state to put in power commnism?
It's not my proposal, it's an inevitability, should a "socialist" state achieve power. At the very least, if we are to progress from that point. Otherwise it will just dissolve back into full capitalism.
I'm a big fan of technocracy inc's solution of energy certificates. Every month each citzen is assigned a certain amount of energy credits each month that they can exchange for goods and services. There is no way to earn more. They expire in a set period of time and they cannot be exchanged from person to person. There also not uses to purchase basic essential like food, healthcare or housing which are priced free of charge. It's simply a way for the technocracy to see what goods and services people are interested in and allocate resources accordingly.
There's no way of knowing whether or not it is inevitable until it actually occurs. I'm in favor of a republic democratic socialist state, that way a communist party still exists.
So there is your problem m8
There are a couple of ways. In a market socialist system the profit motive still exists so there you go.
Planned socialist systems usually use something like labor vouchers. You work for a certain amount to get access to the results of production. Number of vouchers received is proportional to amount of work done. Ideally, as automation accelerates, labor vouchers become more valuable and thus, less work needs to be done by everyone.