Convert me /lefty pol/

Profit motive sucks, workers should not have their surplus value extracted by a class that do nothing, Living of having your name put on a piece of land that you never even stepped upon is stupid.
You gotta give us more to work with, what do you believe and why?

I think that a free market allows for greater surplus due to the profit motive which you mentioned.
I am young, still studying and learning the ways of the world.
I don't know if I'm capable of accepting communist or anarchist ideals but at the very least they will strengthen my current position.
My views are based on my family upbringing and my experiences but I expect my views to shift over time, it's just which way will it shift.

I am now walking home thus I will finish reading when I get home. Interesting read so far for sure!

There is no such thing as the free market. There never has been and there never will be. Governments provide the conditions for a market to exist. Even in a fabled anarchist paradise, the end goal of any market is always consolidation. Everyone is competing to increase profit at their competitors' expense. And when a critical share of the market is obtained by any one competitor, they develop the ability to undercut upcoming competition through tactics predicating on their greater amounts capital, thus decreasing the freedom of the market.

Op here.
Just some more info:
I'm a straight white male living in a 1st world developed country.
I will probably after my formal education become part of the bourgeois class.
I just want to challenge or strengthen my current views

hahaha funny joke comrade come with me i want to talk to you in privet for a moment

Acquiring property and/or capital doesn't require a degree of you already have the means to obtain it.

If you think you're certain to come into a large sum of lucrative property, you could have just saved yourself the effort and skipped the debt trap.

Use a flag

Just read on democracy both Trotsky and Chomsky and decide for yourself

My parents are funding my university degree.
You do raise a good point, however I would like some formal education.

Except that is extremely difficult. First you need capital to buy land and start a business, but a lot of rich people hold land and do nothing with it just to increase the demand and price for land. Say you made it over that hurdle the next step is competing with a massive corporation that got a name brand that people know and the infrastructure to support it. But maybe you're lucky your product gets out there and you start making money to support yourself then one of many things might happen. A company that you're competing with for profit is threatened and tries to buy you out but you're probably a strong idealist that believe in the system and won't crumble before profit in a profit driven system right? So they get annoyed and buy out your suppliers instead or maybe land around you and not develop it to devalue your business. Prehaps you will get past all of this and make it but it is an extremely rigged game from the start and the best you can hope for with trying to go at it yourself is slightly above the masses.

The profit motive has rarely worked for making things better, i'm not an avid fan of nationalization either but it is clear in most cases that around former soc dems countires that has gotten more and more neoliberal that as the services that has been privatized becuase the text books says thats better services has declined, wages has dropped and more money has just been collecting in the hands of a few rich. Ever since the 80's when restrictions on the rich we're lifted by governments around the world more and more money has been collecting in fewer and fewer companies. Comparing the profit driven healthcare with that of other industrialized nations it has a much greater focus on profit and meanwhile it's much more expensive and less effective. Even science reports are hampered by the profit motive with researchers scrambling for controversial or stupid studies so that they can get paid more for publishing it while carefully examing subjects that has already been published will get you less if anything.

Anyway, here are some videos you might be interested in that might help with the basics.
youtu.be/eGOA2WedIQo
youtu.be/hy8y2CCGcwo

P.S. - Watch the whole law of value series, starting with that video, not just the video

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I'm guessing that most of the anti-Stalin posters are 14-19 or uneducated blowhards from your debate tactics.

What is your stance on profit motive making the rich abandon the ever stagnating west for more lucrative areas like china where labour is cheaper and health and enviromental standards are lower? Should western workers just accept that they need to live more like people over there to be able to support themselves? If they're gonna find a way to support themselves they're gonna need to seize land of those that have at which point completely arbitrary standards for property needs to be established or the workers own it equally.

Yet western standards of living and wages continue to rise?
There's a trend that the gap between 1st world and 3rd world is continuing to rise.
If they abandon western workers then they loose access to the markets here - which would hurt them massively.

monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

Wages have been stagnating since the '70s actually. The only reason 1st world lifestyles continued to exist is because women went into the workplace with their spouses and people turned to credit. The unsustainable credit bubble collapsed in the housing market in 2008 and it will happen again because nothing has been resolved.

Our standard of living is increasing though under this big bad capitalist system.
Sure the upper class are profiting/gaining more from it but there's a greater overall surplus to be distributed then in a communist system

Actually Millenials may well be the first generation that has it worse than the previous one.

And what is this baseline idea of surplus under communism that you are thinking of? As it turns out, enterprises with democratized workplaces are more productive and efficient on average than traditional capitalist enterprises.

if you're referring to internet and cellphones those have by and large become tools to control us ie the tools of the elites. the really important stuff, healthcare and housing and food, have shot up in price.

People are getting more stressed and depressed as jobs are disapearing all across industrialized nations, Living standards have always increased with technology. The family works more on average than ever to support themselves and if current trends continue younger generations are gonna be worse of than their parents as they can't get a job to get a house and other such nonsense you need to survive.

There's a lot of inherent problems with this line of thinking, but I'll go with some pretty bare-bones explanation.

So under your system, a dissatisfied worker need only start a business to rise above poor conditions. Let's take a moment to think of what that actually entails.
First would be getting the money to actually start up a business in the first place. For your average wage worker, they're not going to have enough accumulated capital to handle the expenses alone, so they'll have to take a loan (actually it would probably be multiple loans). Depending on pre-existing conditions, getting a loan may be more difficult than not, considering things like socioeconomic background will inevitably effect things like credit score, past employment, value/location of existing property, etc. Even if a loan is secured under such conditions, it may have terms and interest rates that are unsustainable or downright predatory. In other words, it's hard to get ahead if you don't have a running start: some people are simply going to be born into conditions where they will likely never be able to achieve capitalist "success," thus ensnaring them in a permanent state of a low-earning wage worker.
Next you'd obviously set up shop attempting to corner some part of the market. Problem is that different corners are going to have different barriers of entry, and the low-hanging-fruits so to speak are usually oversaturated by other startups. Let's say for the moment though that you go for what you can anyways.
After all preparations are made (glossing over quite a bit of detail here, but a lot of it isn't terribly relevant), the waiting game begins. Even if you min-max operation costs and profits to the greatest extent you are capable, no amount of blood sweat and tears will make a terrible lot of difference on the scale of the larger market. You still have about a 80-90% chance that you're business will crumble within the first 4-5 years, even larger chance after that. If you're unlucky enough to have it happen earlier rather than later, you'll almost certainly will not earn enough returns to pay off the loans you took. So you'll inevitably board up the windows and be forced to go back to being a wage worker for the next 10+ years to pay off your debt (and good luck trying to repeat the process over again). Your success or failure beyond the basics of simply setting up a sustainable profit margin is largely at the whim of the markets and other forces outside of individual control/effort. If your not operating in an "untapped market" (which, again, would likely require a good deal of starting capital to secure), you're going to be competing with already large and well entrenched competition. They operate on a degree of efficiency that you are unlikely to be able to meet at a small scale, and they'll do their best to see you pushed out of the way. If you had a horseshoe up your ass through this whole process, you MIGHT make it past the 4-5 year mark. At this point, you're likely to have to consign yourself to small/intermediate scale for your business if bigger competitors haven't caught up to you yet, sell out to those competitors if they HAVE caught up with you, or wait for agonizing and slow financial starvation as the bigger competitors choke you out. Either way, whether you made out with a bit of profit or not, you're back to wage labor again: the likelihood that you'll find better success next time is about just as slim as round one.

And there it is: virtually roads eventually lead back to being a slave to wages.

Only in the United States, and that's over now.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=T9Whccunka4&it=52m45s

We live in a society that fetishizes the idea of "start your own business" and "become your own boss," but really it's a means by which capitalism tries to ease the alienation of the worker without actually altering the underlying system. It peddles a false hope of economic self-determination for all, but the underlying mechanisms that capitalism is founded upon ensures that those who already dominate the means of production and control the greatest capital will maintain that position. This desire to break away from alienation in labor cannot be alleviated unless the workers take upon themselves the means of production, which requires a united effort to combat the existing power held by the bourgeoisie. I'd go so far as to argue that, due to capitalism's current reliance and fixation on credit as a means of sustenance and motivation, the system you have proposed only further benefits the existing capitalist elite. The failure of business after business is not THAT big of a deal to a bank, so long as they can rely on the owners of those failed businesses to return to wage labor to pay off their debts. In this way, both the banks (through the interest they earn from the loans) and those who employ said born-again worker increase their systemic power (the worker is under enough economic pressure that they MUST work, thus they are more easily susceptible to deterioration of working conditions and wages).

Even if it's not here yet there is an ever looming threat that things will turn the way of greece and Peurto Rico as the need to sustain current living standards drive loans by governments promising to solve everything in a peacful traditional capitalist way through the roof. Just because the worst has yet to come doesn't mean you shouldn't worry what has happened to other places won't happen here. Not to be a doomsayer but things need to be done about property issues soon and building a wall to keep the mexicans from runing back home won't solve it.

Well first off you can get your shit memes off my board.

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Stop trying to indoctrinate him with your meme ideology, anarkiddies

leftypol as a whole is too smug and full of idiots to convert anyone. Those that actually can reach out someone such as myself are pushed into obscurity by the obnoxious shitposters.

Lemme count for ya
9 shitposts, 19 actual posts of people trying to help and 10 posts from OP.

And you have only posted one shitpost so far.

Whose economic freedom
What free market

That's no different than saying if a citizen an oppressive country is unhappy with the regime, he can just move to another country or start his own. Why not fix the root of the problem instead of avoiding it by switching to another job/country or creating an entirely new one?

donate all your wealth to niggers because 10 of them were treated like slaves 1000 years ago

Holla Forums is a salad bar of various leftist ideologies. It doesn't have one specific ideology

Choose your favorite first by reading through Wiki articles

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This. DO NOT listen to tankies EVER.

Yeah, it's definitely not Marxist Leninism though, cause that's been a repeated failure.

If you look into Anarchism though, you'll find a wide array of viable and fulfilling arrangements that have been proven to work, time after time, throughout history. The more left-wing socialisms are good too, a market pleb such as yourself should probably look into Market Socialism at the very least.

You know, anarchism has failed multiple times as well, albeit for different reasons.

Is it impossible to try and take the best elements of both movements?

You get left-coms

1st world Anarchism failed because of constant imperialism and propaganda. 1930s Spain, for example, was attacked by like 4 different countries. These tensions however can be overcome through organization, education, and democratic means. Also, we would have nukes and the most military advanced country on the planet now, so should we ever take control, the threat of mutual destruction would deem us successful.

Marxist Leninism is fundamentally flawed however and has never even bothered to give up the MoP. Che Guevara Cuba, Lenin USSR, etc. etc.

What is a good element of Marxist Leninism, unless you like state capitalism?

meant this

for this

Hey OP, I'm kinda in the same boat as you, both politically and effectively. I don't often come here, but I've sparingly dropped by and lurked for a minute or two in the past; more-so now that Holla Forums is becoming so increasingly hostile to differing ideologies. Honestly, it's just so stifling and unwelcoming over there. Needless to say, it isn't Holla Forums's responsibility to be welcoming, but I'm just sayin'. I'm also interested in learning more about you guys over here.

Read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. This is the Bible of environmental wackos who want to convert "dirty" black power into white power.

Agreed tankies are unbearable and you just should ignore them or pretend to put up with them as most of us do here. They are very aggressive nowadays as well.

Hey everyone,
OP here.
I went to bed early last night so I missed alot of your replies.
I'm interested in keeping this discussion going further and reading the resources/watching the videos you have provided!
Thanks

I've browsed Holla Forums a bit but honestly the stormfags are getting too annoying now.
That and the constant shit posting/aggressiveness to non alt-righters

Well,
At least in my high school economics class the textbook and teacher taught us that in a capitalist/market system there will be a greater overall surplus of goods and services due to the profit motive.

Well,
My parents enjoy a higher standard of living then their parents before them and there parents before them.
Maybe this trend will stop but my parents are upper-middle class without any university degrees simply because they are hard working.
I still believe the dream of owning your own house, car etc is possible for my generation

Because I don't really see major problems in our current system.
No 1st world country bar the US is really completely capitalist anyway.
They are mixed market economies/SocDem's

Screenshotted your suggestion will add to my list

I'm a co-founder of a small collective and I can directly relate to every point in your post & I imagine this is the case in most industries.

A huge majority of people will never start their own business. Between the ideology and conditioning keeping them (ideally) complacent as part of a hierarchy at their jobs, the insane regulations to jump through and the asshole-gaping you need to perform to start your own business it's not a surprise.

Did you think you can just go to the bank and get a $1,000,000 loan? Banks won't touch you until you've got 2 years of operation under your belt, but how the fuck you gonna pay for 2 years+ of rent and operating costs without capital?

Who do you think can afford to start businesses? Who do you think can afford a failed business? Not the working class that's for sure.

No.

It's all falling apart and things are only going to get worse.

Start at the beginning OP, read the Manifesto.

It's less than a hundred pages and goes through basically everything, but remember that it's a document issued by a political party during a revolution so it is written in a propagandistic manner and contains some stuff that was only relevant in 1848 which can confuse people.

If you don't want to wade through something like that, read "The Principles of Communism". It's basically the Manifesto in q&a form.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Representative democracy. You elect people whom you think will make good decisions with the ability to replace them democratically when their decisions aren't to the benefit of the majority of people.

Well, for starters, I too believe in the free market. I believe that, as long as definitions are established, and both parties agree to a set of standards in the workplace (wage, work environment, etc.), a company is well within its right to behave how it wants, just like a worker is well within their right to work somewhere else, or quit whenever they feel that they are being mistreated, or start their own business. Now, I understand that there are reasons why someone might be unable to work somewhere else or start their own business, that doesn't change the fact that they have the ability to do so.

I think the definition of 'ability' is where most of us start to deviate; as I understand it, you guys are all saying that anyone without an already stable financial foundation is unable to start their own business, and therefore does not have the ability to do so, whereas I'm saying that no force is going to step in and say that someone is not allowed to create their business.

Additionally, in my experience, a democratic environment is not always the best environment for the workplace. I'm currently going to school to get my 3rd mate license to work on ships, and let me tell you, in an industry where the person in charge of your environment is literally called the Master on paper, I can tell you right now, hierarchy works. You need to make hard split decisions all the time on board a ship, and if everything had to be settled democratically on a ship, not only would nothing ever get done when it needed to get done, but it could easily lead to endangering the lives of the people on board, say, if you need to make a split-second course change for example. Everyone on board has their domain that they're in charge of; the Engineers and Deckhands stay out of each other's way, the mates let each other do their thing, and everyone waits for their equally-distributed watch shift. There are too many decisions in each person's day to receive differing ideas and opinions on how things should be done, so everyone sticks to their one job, and just makes sure that they're doing it well. It's efficient this way. This industry hasn't changed for the last hundreds of years, because the system just works. Don't fix what ain't broken, you know?

see

Sorry, I deleted my comment after proofreading it.

If it came down to the point where your decisions weren't to the benefit of the majority of people, you'd have to find yourself a new job.

Please tell that to the CEOs of innumerable multinational corporations.

I firmly believe that most 'too big to fail' companies would go the way Enron did if the government never steps in to bail them out.

Living in a world where its easier to get a smartphone than buy groceries is not what I would call an increase standard of living its just technological advancement.

Yeah but if you allowed all of those massive banking institutions crash in 2008 then there would have been a global economic crash on par with the great depression.

The system is so overblown it cant even stand on its own two feet anymore.

Production under capitalism isn't organized to benefit people but to maximize the owner's profits. See:

That the market is the only player in the redistribution of goods is only historical contingency.

Honestly, when I said that, I was referring to my specific case.

I think most people here are going to automatically disregard this thinking because they'll only view it through their own ideological biases.

"nuh uh, not possible"

But it is possible, it happens every day. That's reality.

the Principles explain communism better than the Manifesto honestly, Marx can be a bit overbearing when it comes to economics and stuff

Socialism is against heirachy of class rather than a heirachy of talent.

Skilled and useful people would have more responsibility in an industry if that is what is more efficient. The only difference with capitalism is that in a socialist society they are in that position at the will of their fellow workers, rather than a private owner.

Bureaucracy is needed to manage society in some degrees, but the point is to make a bureaucracy that is made up of, and set up by the working class for their own interests.

You want to fix the parts that are broken, and leave the parts that work. You want to make heirachy work for people rather than individuals.

Surplus is still surplus i.e. NOT NEEDED. Surplus value does not actually exist, the only value which exists is material.

Not inviting Moses to rain on your parade, am I right?