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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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They are so desperate for validations they've managed to twist this into evidence of communism as a superior ideology.
It's hard to argue that communism as imagined by the tankies is better in any way than the souless capitalism that we all suffer under. However, real communism as imagined by Marx (but not Lenin) is vastly superior.
See, Marx saw the workers owning the means of production on a local scale. The example being factory workers owning the factory they worked in. Workers would directly profit from their own labor.
Lenin envisioned the State owning the means of production. Workers would work for the good of the State, or else.
Marx postulated that economies followed a sort of progression, feudalism led to capitalism, which in turn led to communism.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work in neat, linear progressions.
Marx imagined a utopia, and Lenin, in an attempt to create something like it, reinvented feudalism with different masters. Which is not surprising, as Russia was still living under feudalism when Lenin was born.
My prediction for the future of government is as follows; as the climate crisis and automation crisis progress, there will be four types of government.
The first are failed states. They will have lost the climate roulette. Their populations are either fled or dead.
The second are puppet states. These will exist mostly for resource extraction. Their populations will still exist, but many will have fled or died. The rest will toil in resource extraction to feed the last two categories.
The penultimate is the fascist police state. China and Russia are well on their way to this outcome, and the US is actively flirting with it. This is the end game of capitalism. A new feudalism where the serfs are disposable and interchangeable, instead of tied to the land and part of an inheritance. The only saving grace is that fascism always leads to an unstable mess of a government that almost inevitably crashes and burns when the strongman dictator dies.
The final category is the automated utopia. Automation takes off fast enough to put everyone out of work, and the governments realize that money is just something we made up and decides to just let anyone have whatever they want (within reason) because it takes no human effort to produce anything.
The automated utopia is a dream, I hope it happens. It would look sort of like a cross between Marx's dream of communism and UBI with no strings attached.
Yeah, that's fucking stupid and based entirely on Marx's completely unrealistic view of the world being divided in "the workers" and "the bad people who exploit them".
Tell me this: If I am a repairman, and I want to "own the means of production" what do I do?
Are my means of production my tools? If so, then every and all self-employed workers are already living the communist dream, and no revolution is necessary.
But then, if I improve someone else's means of production, and they are therefore able to produce more value, are they not stealing my surplus value? Am I now somehow a co-owner? Do they owe me royalties until they replace the machines? Would them changing the machines make any difference, since one could argue they were able to upgrade at least in part thanks to my intervention?
Also I fundamentally disagree that simply turning every business into a co-op takes us away from a fundamentally capitalist system. It just makes the "capitalists" into companies instead of single individuals.
Capitalism according to Marx isn't bad because individuals create this relationship of value-theft with the proles, it's bad because these relationships are allowed to exist and fundamental to the system's survival and function.
But in a world where workers own the entirety of their businesses, companies/outfits/co-ops will still produce surplus value and that value will still need to be re-circulated in the economy in order for new enterprises to be created.
This has to be the case because if the non-vital productive endeavors didn't produce surplus, there would be no way for society to compensate the labour of the producers of necessary goods like food or maintainers of vital infrastructure like acqueducts and electrical grids, whose work is necessary no matter what, unlike say a factory making lava lamps somewhere.
So then you have 2 options, either:
this surplus exists and will need to be allocated somehow, and no workers would waste it without some return, since the alternative is to just pay themselves more and be done with it, hence returning straight back to the concept of capital injections and investments or,
this surplus is requisitioned and redistributed by some central authority, and that's how you become a tankie. Doesn't matter how many layers of "democractic" decision making you tack onto how this central authority works or is selected, at the end of the day you are giving a specific group the power to decide who eats and who doesn't, by virtue of deciding the allocation of society's surplus into different endeavors.
If I want to go out and create something, I'll need resources to do it. In a capitalist world all I need to get that done is to find someone willing to believe my idea can make them back the money they invested plus some interest. This is to offset the risk of losing the money in case their assessment is wrong.
In a world where "the workers own the means of production" I will have to convince a group of people of the same basic contention and will probably have the same deal with them instead than a single person. Probably harder as groups tend to be slower at making decisions and less likely to take big risks.
In a world where a single entity controls the allocation of surplus I still have to convince them, and if they don't see value in my idea, I have to either give up on it and do whatever they assign me to do, or starve (no communist society is a work-free society).
My guy, did you just erase the second law of thermodynamics from reality?
Entropy is inescapable. All this premise does is make labour worthless, it does nothing to provision resources to actually make the "whatever they want (within reason)."
That shit would still be valuable even if it were endless, and most of what we use daily is made with finite resources (petrol, metals) anyway so you would still need to trade in some way, which means you will still need to make surplus to compensate, or worse you'll need to conquer the regions that have the materials your society needs to be able to fulfill the needs of this society.
Ancient Rome had free food and free circus shows for everyone, it did it by exploiting an entire continent and parts of others. Resources are finite, labour among them. Making labour infinite (or rather a byproduct of a different resource, power as opposed to food) doesn't make the other resources less scarce.
I don't think anyone is currently advocating to somehow go to a 100% co-op system. There will always be elements of capitalism in any system, just like no system is ever 100% capitalism. But getting closer to that would certainly lead to a more fair society. As it stands there is already micro elements of socialism built into capitalism, it just generally benefits the rich because they own the means of production.
I refer you to all of breadtube, for people who are advocating precisely for that.
Not only that but most of the big ones (Vaush, Hasan, Philosophytube, Contrapoints) had mask slip moments where they said more or less explicitly that that would just be a stepping stone to "full communism" and that even that already extreme market socialist position is only to maintain palatability with the mainstream.
It's hard to imagine the Utopia imagined in the chronicles of Narnia could be worse than what we currently have under capitalism.
But like Carl Marx and what his followers imagine it's not real. its made up fantasy. Real societies function on proven functioning principles. Not made up nonsense.
You can say
But they never can be because everyone is different and so by definition of their own individual existence cannot be. They only way to make everyone equal is to kill everyone. And that's what communism does best.
You're confusing Marx and Lenin. They had two vastly different ideas about what communism should be.
We have a century of Lenin, and yes, it came with death and destruction, including Leninist communists murdering Marxist communists.
You also don't seem to understand that capitalism is so much worse. If you have no value in a fully capitalist society, you die far faster than even in a Leninist feudal society pretending to be communist.
The two East Indies Companies are prime examples of what capitalism run rampant get you. Murder and genocide in the name of profit, and the thing is, that shit is still going on. People elsewhere in the world are being exploited and murdered on a daily basis, so that you can live in a happy capitalist society.
Jesus fucking Christ
Okay, you've now told me that you don't understand communism, or capitalism.
First is the lie that capitalism is some sort of ancient invention. This is a lie because it ignores what capitalism actually is. Capitalism is not just "trading things for money". That's a child's understanding, and like more explanations for children, it's fundamentally wrong while still having elements of the truth.
Capitalism requires the private investment, and re-investment, in production of goods in order to make more wealth. Most trade prior to the late middle ages was simply moving goods from a cheap market to an expensive market. Buying from one lord and selling to another.
An important point is that the lords used the power of the State, i.e. their military, to extract wealth from their lands. This was called feudalism, and was not capitalism.
Did you know that prior to the Norman conquest, people in England just grew food wherever they wanted? Just so long as they gave most of it to their lord, they could do what they wanted with the land.
Anyway, capitalism then kicked into high gear after the bubonic plague. Suddenly you had a lot of land free, and mass migration to cities in the wake of the plague.
Then things really kicked off with what I like to call the official start, the formation of the Dutch East Indies Company. See, this was the first time that a company was formed without a built-in expiration date. Before this, you could make a company and sell shares, but at the end of the trade caravan or whatnot, the company was dissolved and everyone was paid out of the profit. The Dutch East Indies Company sold shares that paid dividends, with no expectation of the company dissolving. They actually had to get laws changed to make it possible.
And they were the most brutal, and violent organization to ever exist. They committed several genocides to seize islands from locals so that they could sell shit to Europeans. Particularly for nutmeg.
As to your misunderstanding of communism. Here, read this.
I lumped mercantilism in with capitalism. I mean, they are two flavors of a very similar thing, it's just that before the Dutch East India Company, a company had to disband when the reason it was formed was over, but you know that eventually someone was going to come up with the idea to just not do that, and they did with the Dutch East Indies Company.
The direct government involvement of mercantilism also carried on into what became capitalism. Which makes it harder to separate the two. Especially as capitalists started buying governments (or using military force, either their own, or a friendly government)
This just shows how little you understand about nature and economies
Did you know that the World Anti-communist League smuggled Nazi war criminals out of Europe so that they could arm them and set them loose in South America with orders to murder anyone who they suspected of being even slightly left leaning? All in the name of spreading capitalism.
That's the level of threat that the rich and powerful see in the dream of communism.
Your lies about the "nature" of things are just that. Pretty lies that you tell yourself to justify the horrific suffering that capitalism has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on the world today.
Did you know that communist killed millions in Russia, China, North Korea? Like objectively more than Hitler? Nazis and communist can both fuck off.