Ask a Red III

[luiz]

Historically speaking, communal systems have proven more stable and less prone to violence than propertarian systems, so I'm not convinced that these claims actually have a sound empirical basis.

At any rate, you're making a logic jump from "seizure of material goods" to "property" which I don't think is actually present. I could walk into a shop and "seize" a can of coke, but that doesn't mean that I have established a property relation between myself and the rest of society, it just means that I am at that moment holding onto a can of coke. "Property" is a structure that we give to our collective material reproduction, which is more complex than merely "seizing" something that takes your fancy and clinging on to it.

For a can of coke, sure. But what about a mine or a water source? If a group manages to extract additional material wealth from it, and improve their relative power position with it, wouldn't that essentially amount to property?

As for the historical stability of communal systems, do you think that was mostly because of the low rate of technological change, low rate of population growth, lack of communication, etc., or genuinely stable characteristics of the system?

 

[Leoreth]

I'm not, I'm suggesting that people threatened with violence will defend themselves.

How is people defending themselves when someone wants to seize communal property different from defending yourself when someone wants to take your private property?

When you say that private property is inherently violent because it can only be maintained by force, how can you come to another conclusion when use of violence to maintain communal property is part of your reasoning?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Historically speaking, communal systems have proven more stable and less prone to violence than propertarian systems, so I'm not convinced that these claims actually have a sound empirical basis.

What kind of communal systems do you refer to? Tribal cultures? Hunter and gatherers? They have a pretty terrible track record of engaging in violence with each other. So what empirics say is, that while communal systems may experience internal peaceful coexistence, they get pretty messy with each other. But way more importantly: Due to their small size, the potential for internal violence is very different to the potential in a society which by sheer necessity of its size is quit unpersonalized. Neuroscience can also tell you why. We are biological not capable to perceive more than 300 or so humans as actual people. The rest just is send off into a system of stereo-types. Which means, that it is biological implausible to translate the internal workings of a small communal group onto a large impersonal society.

But it is disappointing, that you argue with such IMO dubious empirics, instead of engaging the source of instability I suggested.

At any rate, you're making a logic jump from "seizure of material goods" to "property" which I don't think is actually present. I could walk into a shop and "seize" a can of coke, but that doesn't mean that I have established a property relation between myself and the rest of society, it just means that I am at that moment holding onto a can of coke. "Property" is a structure that we give to our collective material reproduction, which is more complex than merely "seizing" something that takes your fancy and clinging on to it.

Property is the concept of assigning the right to own something and the practice of defending this right by force, no? If I seize material goods, the IMO natural assumption is that I did not only want to try how it feels to theoretically own it, but that I intend to claim ownership and that I intend to enforce ownership. Otherwise seizing something is pointless to begin with.

edit: I hope you don't feel like I am trying to corner you or something. I am genuinely interested in your and other Reds perceptive of things. Why you advocate what you advocate. That is most of all so, because I find myself dissatisfied with contemporary economic models. At the same time though, I hold great despise for advocating an alternative just for finding it likable. I seek good and sound reason to do so. Which is why I am making an effort to look for things which seem implausible to me.

 

[ParkCungHee]

So you simply reject public policy as a valid concept.

Yes. This is why I'm an anarchist as well as a pacifist, and believe the two concepts are essentially the same.

Now let's assume that enough people thought like you did, to erode the public monopoly of force. So basically the end of the enforcement of public law. Do you think this would result in more or less violence?

I believe it would result in less. Those who resort to violence out of practical means, by which we can include professional criminals, do so mainly because they live in a society that neccesitates and endorses the use of force to achieve practical means. I mean this not only in "the government is a bad role-model" sense of this, but in the sense that the fact is that violence enforces everyone's economic position, and so they respond with alternative violence. Landholders make bandits, shipping magnates make pirates, etc. The strongest evidence of this is that primitive societies there are rarely accounts of professional criminals. The average man would prefer to work than to steal, and he steals because they cannot work.

Now, there are of course aberrant exceptions. Violently inclined sociopaths do exist, and it may be that is it impossible to reason with them, and get them to behave in a benevolent and loving manner.
However, such individuals are exceptionally rare, and the whole apparatus of violence that has been built around us is totally out of proportion to the Charles Mansons of the world.

However, all of this is based on a consequentialist view of ethics, which is something I cannot accept, because your actions will always be compared to a theoretical alternative, based on your own ideas about an alternative history. If the World History forums teaches me anything, it's that most people are really, really bad at Alternative History.

It also places someones moral imperatives outside themselves entirely, and therefor I feel it is anti-humanist because it reduces the moral actor to a tool to achieve an outcome. Based on the actions of others, according to a consequentialist, I should be a saint, or a muderer, or a thief, or a liar. But I have no real control over my moral imperatives, and I have no fundamental purpose. As I've said in the other thread, I believe virtue precedes before man, and man's purpose is to be virtuous. It is the ultimate fulfillment of your existence. Consequentialism, as well as being factually messy, ultimately reduces the human to whatever is needed to achieve a certain outcome, and for that reason, we can be replaced if need be.

 

[Traitorfish]

For a can of coke, sure. But what about a mine or a water source? If a group manages to extract additional material wealth from it, and improve their relative power position with it, wouldn't that essentially amount to property?

What is the nature of this "group"? How do they go about accumulating "wealth", in a world devoid of money? Why would the rest of the world be captive to their arbitrary remands? These aren't things that we can simply assume.

As for the historical stability of communal systems, do you think that was mostly because of the low rate of technological change, low rate of population growth, lack of communication, etc., or genuinely stable characteristics of the system?

To the extent that communalism can be abstracted from its historical context, yes, I believe that the system is genuinely more stable than propertarian systems. Property doesn't actually represent a resolution of interpersonal conflict, merely a suspension of it; contended control pervades capitalist society, we simply find ourselves with a state apparatus able to mobilised a sufficient level of violence to keep it just repressed enough to tick over from day to day. When we actually do see compromises emerging in a propertarian systems, through state intervention or the demands organisation of labour, they represent a partial abrogation of private property, a movement against the fundamental logic of capitalist society, which even if it may salvage the system in the short term, can only threaten it in the long term.

How is people defending themselves when someone wants to seize communal property different from defending yourself when someone wants to take your private property?

When you say that private property is inherently violent because it can only be maintained by force, how can you come to another conclusion when use of violence to maintain communal property is part of your reasoning?

It's a case of internal and external violence. Capitalist violence is "internal", emerging from within the social relations of production. It is necessary to maintain the internal structures of capitalist society, because only through the threat (and, inevitably, use) of violence can maintain the dispossession of labour which is necessary to bind it to capital. (Without a state security force, every strike could become an occupation, every occupation a permanent seizure, every seizure a revolution; nobody would be able to stop it.)
In contract, violence in communist society would be "external", a response to threats originating outside of the social relations of production. Some jerk who spontaneously elects to go around doing violence to other people does not represent the explosion of the internal contradictions of that society, he just represents "some jerk", as external to the internal dynamics of the society as the weather, so the use of violence in response to his belligerence represents violence to an essentially external threat.

By way of analogy, take a medieval village. If the villagers riot against the lord and he uses violence against them, this is an internal violence, a structural response a violence necessary to the straining of the social relations of feudalism. In contrast, if a wolf wanders into a village and the villagers shoot it, this is an external violence, a contingent response to an existential threat originating outside of their society. The former is a specifically feudal violence, the expression of a particular set of social antagonisms, while the latter is a "generic" violence, lacking any class-character.

What kind of communal systems do you refer to? Tribal cultures? Hunter and gatherers? They have a pretty terrible track record of engaging in violence with each other. So what empirics say is, that while communal systems may experience internal peaceful coexistence, they get pretty messy with each other.

Well, firstly, many primitive societies are indeed quite violent, but the violence is inter-tribal, rather than intra-tribal; it is a violence between rather than within social groups. That represents a different sort of conflict than the one I am talking about.

Secondly, I wasn't actually talking about "primitive communism", but about any form of communalism, and those extent far beyond hunter-gatherer societies. Some degree of agrarian communalism is found in all pre-modern societies, and predominated even across most of Europe until five, maybe six hundred years ago. (Even in Britain, the birthplace of capitalist manufacture, communal systems of land-ownership existed in the Scottish Highlands as recently as two hundred years ago.) These systems, many of which still exist today in many parts of Africa, China, the Middle East and in some areas of Latin America and India, do not to my knowledge express any of the dynamics that you attribute to them.

But way more importantly: Due to their small size, the potential for internal violence is very different to the potential in a society which by sheer necessity of its size is quit unpersonalized. Neuroscience can also tell you why. We are biological not capable to perceive more than 300 or so humans as actual people. The rest just is send off into a system of stereo-types. Which means, that it is biological implausible to translate the internal workings of a small communal group onto a large impersonal society.

Would you be able to expand on this point? I'm not really sure what complication it is that you see as implicit in this. As far as I can see, it simply implies that we would not be expected to deal with more than three hundred people in much depth on a regular basis, and that doesn't seem to me a particularly big hurdle to jump.

Property is the concept of assigning the right to own something and the practice of defending this right by force, no? If I seize material goods, the IMO natural assumption is that I did not only want to try how it feels to theoretically own it, but that I intend to claim ownership and that I intend to enforce ownership. Otherwise seizing something is pointless to begin with.

Defining property in terms of ownership is tautological, because to own something is to possess it as a property; it amounts to "ownership is ownership". What's necessary is to explain what it actually is to "own" something, as opposed to simply possessing it, and I would argue that the difference is that ownership is fundamentally a social relationship: that property represents an agreement between individuals about an entitlement to disposal of a given material quantity. As such, "property" can only really be understood to exist to the extent that a consensus (voluntary or coerced) exists between those people. If you "seize" an object and propose to defend your seizure with violence, and I respond with a refusal to accept this seizure, then we don't have property, we have a fight. The emergence of private property thus supposes the possibility that people beyond this bandit-chappy will actually accept his claims, and it is not apparent to me that anyone in a communist society would have any reason to feel so moved.

edit: I hope you don't feel like I am trying to corner you or something. I am genuinely interested in your and other Reds perceptive of things. Why you advocate what you advocate. That is most of all so, because I find myself dissatisfied with contemporary economic models. At the same time though, I hold great despise for advocating an alternative just for finding it likable. I seek good and sound reason to do so. Which is why I am making an effort to look for things which seem implausible to me.

Well, to be honest, part of the problem we're encountering is that I don't really understand myself as offering an alternative to the current system, because I simply don't think that's how society works. Anything I can offer about a hypothetical post-capitalist societies is necessary vague and sketchy, at best a set of principles and those largely negative, so I wouldn't be surprised if those are not found convincing.

 

[Gary Childress]

Yes and yes, in different senses. Communism can't just be understood as a matter of transforming private property into public property, but of a dissolution of property relations as such, that is, the end to all absolute claims to disposal, be it on behalf of an individual or a collective. Rather, what would we see is that the distribution of all material things becomes consciously negotiated (and renegotiated), and agreement arrived at by the concerned parties to use a given physical quantity in the manner that seems best to them. This as true of a toothbrush as it is of a factory, it's simply that nobody is likely to want your toothbrush but you, while a factory actually requires the direct and indirect cooperation of a great many individuals to function.

As it stands now there isn't much fighting over my computer I'm sitting here typing on. Under the laws of today's "regime" I am entitled to this computer and no one else is. It's pretty well understood and most honest people don't fight over my computer. Of course if I left it sitting on the street somewhere someone might make off with it. Then a fight might ensue. But that is why I don't leave it on the street and take precautions myself to prevent a fight over it. But if we share everything communally, including scarce resources, then what is going to prevent others from fighting over those resources? If no one has privy to this computer then how is it determined who gets to use this computer at a particular moment? Does it come down to whoever is the strongest or whoever can convince the most followers to help him or her? How does this "negotiation" take place? And suppose there is "negotiation". I wonder how many people will sit there after "negotiation" takes place and say to themselves and others around them that the "negotiation" didn't end fairly because it didn't come out the way they as individuals wanted. I suspect there would still be social unrest and discontentment.

Granted I'm an only child so I haven't had much experience with sharing things. But it seems to me that "disolution" of private property can only function in small tribal societies or else only in someone's imagination.

What about others here who have siblings? How does sharing among siblings occur? And is the sharing of something with a sibling on the same level as sharing something with a complete stranger? My understanding is that siblings often fight and quarrel over things. If that is true then among strangers I'm sure at some point it would more likely involve physical violence.

What we have now is not perfect and it never will be. All we as individuals can do is try to be as peaceful as we can and solve our differences in a reasonable manner.

 

[Traitorfish]

@Gary Childress: Those are legitimate concerns, and issues that any people experiencing a process of communisation would have to address. However, I don't think that the resolution of those issues precedes communism, because I don't think that abstract political schematics precede social developments. Communism is the expression of the irreconcilable antagonisms of capitalist society, and whatever form the overcoming of those antagonisms take can only, from our limited vantage-point, be described as a loose, primarily negative hypothesis. Communism is not properly an ideal to which we aspire, but the emancipatory impulse as it exists for wage-labour.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence

Whether or not I can make a good case for communism is, in the final analysis, irrelevant. All I can do is sketch out my own speculation, and others can make of that what they may.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

It's a case of internal and external violence. Capitalist violence is "internal", emerging from within the social relations of production. It is necessary to maintain the internal structures of capitalist society, because only through the threat (and, inevitably, use) of violence can maintain the dispossession of labour which is necessary to bind it to capital. (Without a state security force, every strike could become an occupation, every occupation a permanent seizure, every seizure a revolution; nobody would be able to stop it.)
In contract, violence in communist society would be "external", a response to threats originating outside of the social relations of production. Some jerk who spontaneously elects to go around doing violence to other people does not represent the explosion of the internal contradictions of that society, he just represents "some jerk", as external to the internal dynamics of the society as the weather, so the use of violence in response to his belligerence represents violence to an essentially external threat.

So violence against the principles of a Communist society must be unnecessary and bad, violence against the principles of a private-property-based system is necessitated by this system and hence inevitable?
Both make use of violence because they for whatever reason are not content with how the system works, right? Your accusation that in Communism this would have to be a "jerk" to me seems very presumptuous. Because in both systems you can feel treated unfair, or do you debate that? And who are you to universally decide which feeling of unfairness is justified and which isn't? What the system calls for and what not? Can the lack of property guarantee that one isn't suppressed simply by the power of the majority? In light of that, I feel your distinction between external and internal violence is most of all founded on you picking righteous and not righteous violence as it suits you, not on a coherent objective distinction.
To illustrate with your own analogy:

Assume the medieval village was free of property. Now assume that a majority of those villagers create a priviliged class of their own, by allowing a minority of villagers less of a given scarce ressource. If this minority was to rise up, seizing goods, according to your distinction, they are wolves by not abiding with the democratic rule of the whole.

I assume that you assume that this simply would not happen, for the supposed peacefulness of communalism. There are a few things I want to say about that.

Well, firstly, many primitive societies are indeed quite violent, but the violence is inter-tribal, rather than intra-tribal; it is a violence between rather than within social groups. That represents a different sort of conflict than the one I am talking about.

You are right of course. But is it really realistic to view a densely populated society of possibly many millions as one big commune? Or could they not just as well be perceived as a set of various communes, making your distinction not applicable to modern societies? Especially, as those various communes will likely have to negotiate over scarce and essential resources. Food, water, minerals. A lot of potential for conflict. And here it comes relevant what you asked me to expand on.

Would you be able to expand on this point? I'm not really sure what complication it is that you see as implicit in this. As far as I can see, it simply implies that we would not be expected to deal with more than three hundred people in much depth on a regular basis, and that doesn't seem to me a particularly big hurdle to jump.

I think that a whole universe of complication is implicit. A communist society is based on peaceful cooperation / negotiation, right? You cite as historic example Communes of hunter&gathers or agriculture communes and stress their peacefulness. On what was/is this peacefulness founded? The obvious answer: Trust, a sense of a shared destiny, a communal spirit. But what enabled those social dynamics in the first place? Personal relations. Knowing the other communal members. A personal bound ship. And this requires that you actually see fellow humans as persons. You don't trust stereo-types, because you have no intimate relationship to them. So when our brain is not fit to establish to more than about 300 people such a relationship, the dynamics which make those Communes so peaceful can not be applied on a society of millions. Hence also my suggestion of a great number of different defacto communes, rather than one big one. It of course is possible for those various communes to also peacefully co-exist with each other, I don't want to argue that. But do we have any, and I litterally mean any, compelling reason to assume so as a given?
What it comes down to is, is that where is a lack of personal trust, there is always the seed of mistrust, of vilifying other groups, of a us-vs-them-mentality and so forth. You argue that property means the suppression of people. Why the assumption that million of people are on the long run even capable to peacefully co-exist on their own, when we lack any kind of empirics to assume so? But when in fact on a fundamental level evolution has programmed humans to tend to think in the manner of small potentially rivaling groups? And to get back to the orignal discussion: I think it is fair to say that as soon a Communist society is shaken up by violent conflict, it is at risk to break down and property may reemerge in some way or another.

Dame it I would like post more and reply to the rest of your post, as I would like to reply to ParkCungHee, but my time is running short. I'll be back next week.

 

[luiz]

What is the nature of this "group"? How do they go about accumulating "wealth", in a world devoid of money? Why would the rest of the world be captive to their arbitrary remands? These aren't things that we can simply assume.

It can be a commune within a larger commune, it can be a federal republic within a communist world government, etc. It can be any group that by virtue of location or geography happens to have physical control over an important resource needed elsewhere, and decide to use this control in order to further their position. Being devoid of money would not matter, wealth can take many forms and power is power even in communal societies.

To the extent that communalism can be abstracted from its historical context, yes, I believe that the system is genuinely more stable than propertarian systems. Property doesn't actually represent a resolution of interpersonal conflict, merely a suspension of it; contended control pervades capitalist society, we simply find ourselves with a state apparatus able to mobilised a sufficient level of violence to keep it just repressed enough to tick over from day to day. When we actually do see compromises emerging in a propertarian systems, through state intervention or the demands organisation of labour, they represent a partial abrogation of private property, a movement against the fundamental logic of capitalist society, which even if it may salvage the system in the short term, can only threaten it in the long term.

I honestly don't have an opinion on whether communal systems are more stable than propertarian ones. I can see your point, but I can see points the other way as well (communal systems tend to die out in contact with non-communal systems). At any rate, the position I find hard to defend is that once a global communal society is established it can't ever "slip back" into a propertarian system.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, to be honest, I wouldn't say that property couldn't re-emerge out of communism, I just don't think that it would. In the Marxian model of social development, property-forms emerge and develop as an expression of class-relations within a given society, and in a classless society the necessary dynamics would be absent. We could certainly see incidents of power-disparity, which is why the sort of counter-powers I mentioned previously are always necessary, but that would not for me constitute a property-form.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

He has demonstrated that our current system is far from meaning an ideal allocation and use of resources. Or in short: The imperfectness of this system when it comes to productivity. To realize this and point this out is certainly a first good step. As is every revelation about the nature of something. But it only becomes useful in a political sense, if it leads to an economic concept that not only in theory has a more ideal allocation and use of resources, but where it is also realistic to assume that such a concept could work in practice. Now I am not saying that such a thing would not exist. In deed, I am very eager to get to know such a concept. But sadly, I have not seen such a thing demonstrated so far. So if assuming that you agree with me that it is necessary to do so: What is the concept you support? If you don't agree - why not?

What you are asking for is conclusive proof that some future, non-existent system will be better in every conceivable way from the present. I can't give you that, I don't have that, I don't know that. From what I do know, I am led to believe that it can be so, and that it's worth the effort to try. The following video (which I feel like I'm posting every other page now) should help to dispel some of your apprehensions about motivation.


Link to video.

Well frankly, I don't care how "insulting" something is. I only care about its feasibility. But consider the stressful daily routine job. Think of the cashier who has to mindlessly act like a biological machine, every word and move part of a routine optimized for his or her specific task, performed hours and hours, day after day. This job sucks. It is revolting to the human senses. But people do it anyway, because they are "coerced" to do so. Directly by their employers, but indirectly by the market forces, which in turn directly coerce the employers to coerce you. And this results in remarkable productivity. You are very productive as a cashier. But the experience of doing so so is unfulfilling and knows little human dignity.

Without an idea of what is unproductive, we have no metric of what is productive. So by what measurement are you qualifying this work as being "immensely productive?" The traditional justification in capitalism is that compelling workers to go to factories is more productive than letting them work on those things in their cottages and small craftsman shops; but that's not the dreadful alternative any more.

This basic mechanism of coercion, by the forces of the free market against the employer and by the employer against you, is troublesome when it comes to the living quality of the employee. But is it not very productive? And when productivity is a result of reduced living quality during production, is it so unreasonable - or insulting - to assume that people are - overall, in the pig picture, exceptions non-withstanding - most productive when coerced to do so?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I like to think that people will do things without the imminent threat of starvation as imposed by another person, though.

Do you find it feasible to have most people do what they do for humanity's sake?

No. I didn't say that either.

An in the end abstract concept? Isn't everything we do in the end born out of the need to satisfy an individual desire? What desire would be satisfied by committing yourself to helping humanity? How would one go about creating such a desire an ensuring its existence?

Yes. The realization of socialism is that collective efforts yield greater individual benefits, as compared to competing individual efforts. We are taught the old morality that personal selfishness is what drives people the best. Perhaps. But history is rife with examples otherwise. Marxists prefer to think that morality and cultural norms are dictated by the societies that use them, and so in a society which glorifies selfishness and disregard for the well-being of anyone but oneself, it should not be surprising that people behave thusly. It is not unthinkable to imagine that in a different society, people can be motivated differently. Remember that the merchant, the model of a "successful" person in capitalism, was held in great disdain once, and his trade branded as sinful, dirty, and unbecoming of a Christian. It took a lot to convince people, either by polemics or force (more often the latter, actually) to accept the changes to society which eventually created what we know as capitalism: the destruction of the guild system, removal of aristocratic privileges, the "primitive accumulation" of driving people off the land and into factories (or the cities, to factories thus), the abolition of rural communal properties...

I wouldn't say Popper disproved Marxism, broadly speaking, but he (and many others) certainly did irreparable damage to the historical determinism that is part of of orthodox Marxist thought.

The first paragraph of your reply is the one where I sense historical determinism. Wouldn't you say human interactions form too complex a system for us to be able to predict a "final outcome"? Conflict is a permanent feature of human societies, it existed when we were communal hunter-gatherers and it exists in our complex capitalist world. Do you think it can be permanently resolved?

Conflict, in the sense that people disagree and have different concerns? Certainly. What I see an end to is class conflict, that struggle to make a secure life for oneself where it would not exist otherwise. Class struggle is when a worker tries to get that promotion or that raise, it is when a student invests tens of thousands of dollars in an education on the gamble that he can get a good job afterwards, and create a better life for his children than he had for himself. It is every effort by every underprivileged person to try and obtain for themselves some of the wealth that is hoarded by the wealthy few at the top. That sort of struggle is not something that is necessary, it is something imposed upon us by the puppet-wranglers in boardrooms and managerial offices around the world. Sill talked about motivation earlier: what is motivation in our society? It is compulsion to work for the benefit of other people, in the hope that they might give us some of the wealth we helped create, out of the kindness of their hearts. I don't see that as productive or natural, it is forced, imposed upon us for their benefit. We can do away with that. It is the stuff of imperialism, the stuff of wars, the stuff of poverty and misery and chauvinism and all the dividers of mankind.

The conflict you speak of is personal conflict. I live in the valley, another man lives on a hill, he lets his fields wash into mine by not properly plowing it so that it won't erode. Thus we have a conflict. That's not a class conflict, it's a personal one, it's independent of any political system.

Is it unthinkable that say, the people of a region/province sitting on mineral wealth or even a water source that supplies other regions would try to "seize" said resources, in the sense of using them to improve their power relation regarding their neighbors?

Unthinkable? No. But unsustainable? Yes. I should think that such a thing as holding the world hostage would not be thought of very highly by the rest of the world. I should also think that in a communist society (by which I do mean communist, not the struggle-ridden path to get there), such an effort would be thought of as unnecessary by those citizens, because for all they give to the world, they get back in return (or the other way around; whatever, the point is the same). It's a symbiosis that shouldn't be ignored; when you think about it, it's really kind of the realization of Smith's comparative advantage.

But let's say that these people don't care about that. They gamble that they can last longer without the rest of the world than the rest of the world can without their "unobtainium." Is force at that point acceptable? I think so, if it were dire enough. Not because some place refuses to trade its particular brand of wheat with us, but if it were a serious problem of supply, then yes, I would support force to end the situation.

Even in a communist society some people would be better off than others, even if all have their material needs met.

I don't see how that could be the case. People get what the need from society, society gets what it needs from them. I mean, I could see how some people might not be satisfied with having a certain amount of something, but if there's only so much to go around, and it's distributed equitably, then I could hardly care about their problem.

So I think it could happen that a group could be tempted to exploit resources at their hand in order to better their relative standing. I'm not saying such thing would necessarily happen, but I find it hard to argue it could never happen. I can imagine many scenarios in which a classless, "post-property" society would again develop and enforce the concept of property. I don't think History is marching on any direction.

Well if such a thing did happen, I would say it is a sign that communism isn't fully achieved yet. It's supposed to be defined by an absence of such things. I see communism as being the end result of class conflict; if by some great failure, socialism fails to achieve that result, then the dialectic will continue through other future systems until humanity does achieve equality. It is like the lowest geographical point, and society is water running down the hillside: it is going to keep trying indefatigably until it gets there.

I honestly don't have an opinion on whether communal systems are more stable than propertarian ones. I can see your point, but I can see points the other way as well (communal systems tend to die out in contact with non-communal systems). At any rate, the position I find hard to defend is that once a global communal society is established it can't ever "slip back" into a propertarian system.

I see a communal "system" as being much further down the road than Day:1 of the revolution. It's one of the big reasons I dislike the communes that spring up in places like Occupy or Haight-Ashbury (but not the rural communes like Mineral or Twin Oaks, those places are pretty cool); I think it's too far down the road to be something to be worried about right now. Social collectivism on that level is fairly abstract, I think it requires a greater tendency to think and feel in that capacity, and thus is naturally exclusionary towards most people in our society. Rather, I prefer the first route to be one that is already far more collectivized than most people realize: business. My vision of industrial democracy is one by which each company is effectively incorporated upon creation, with the sole stock owners being the workers (and thus also making them the "owners"), and stocks being split evenly between them. Most corporations are already structured on a democratic, committee-driven decision-making system, the problem is that it only includes management, it doesn't go to the factory floor. Extend it there, give all workers equal ownership, and that's basically socialism. The social stuff: health care, banking, electricity, education, all that's really secondary. Certainly not unimportant, but there can only be one "most important" thing. All else will flow from industrial democracy. It's both the most natural and most effective starting point for the eventual collectivization of society.

 

[Old Hippy]

What is the nature of this "group"? How do they go about accumulating "wealth", in a world devoid of money? Why would the rest of the world be captive to their arbitrary remands? These aren't things that we can simply assume.

as an example California gets its water by acquiring property rights to it... it destroyed a valuable farming community in the process (they even dynamited channels and pipe lines to save it) hence the property right was acquired by force when this was prevented by armed guards...

now do away with property rights (water here) and people could once again farm the areas that the water is now forcefully bypassed

how would this be resolved under a "red system" do you continue to give water to California (maintain property rights) or allow people to use their own resources

I pretty left wing but quandaries like this lead me to a more hybrid political view
interested in your point of view

 

[Mouthwash]

How do you respond to Dunbar's Number (that must be like a curse word to you)?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

How do you respond to Dunbar's Number (that must be like a curse word to you)?

I had to look it up, I'd never heard of it before. An utterly useless concept with regards to critiquing socialism.

 

[Traitorfish]

as an example California gets its water by acquiring property rights to it... it destroyed a valuable farming community in the process (they even dynamited channels and pipe lines to save it) hence the property right was acquired by force when this was prevented by armed guards...

now do away with property rights (water here) and people could once again farm the areas that the water is now forcefully bypassed

how would this be resolved under a "red system" do you continue to give water to California (maintain property rights) or allow people to use their own resources

I pretty left wing but quandaries like this lead me to a more hybrid political view
interested in your point of view

To be honesty with you, I don't know how it would be resolved. For me, communism is not a matter of reaching this or that conclusion, but of an active struggle against domination, mediation and alienation. All I can suggest is that, in a stateless, propertyless society, all those concerned with the water supply in question would have to work out between themselves exactly how the resource should be disposed of, and it's beyond me to suggest exactly how that would be done.

How do you respond to Dunbar's Number (that must be like a curse word to you)?

What makes you say that?

(If anything, it appears to me that a decentralised and communalistic society would present far less complications than the centralised hyper-collectivism of capitalist society.)

 

[kristopherb]

A few Questions for you, form a self appointed socialist , I hold most, if not all socialist views I always have few questions that i cannot answer or have problems with. I've been to some rallies and held "in depth" talks on the subject and I'm highly considering the socialist party (UK).
1) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is good, in theory" but i never have a response.
2) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is evil look what stalin did" what would be your response?
3) Am i the only one finds the "lingo/ propaganda" a bit too hardcore?, sure its great and very informative but to gain support we may need to tone it down a bit.
4) As much as this cause brings people together, do you find some of people you meet a bit "weird"?.

Ideas?

 

[aelf]

A few Questions for you, form a self appointed socialist , I hold most, if not all socialist views I always have few questions that i cannot answer or have problems with. I've been to some rallies and held "in depth" talks on the subject and I'm highly considering the socialist party (UK).
1) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is good, in theory" but i never have a response.

"Democracy is good, in theory."

2) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is evil look what stalin did" what would be your response?

"Tell me what you mean by communism." The answer probably boils down to, "The Stalinist system is what everybody calls communism." There should be some pretty simple avenues of counterattack from here on, though I have to say people are pretty thick regarding this and will probably simply insist they are right no matter what.

3) Am i the only one finds the "lingo/ propaganda" a bit too hardcore?, sure its great and very informative but to gain support we may need to tone it down a bit.

It all depends on the audience. Who are we speaking to?

4) As much as this cause brings people together, do you find some of people you meet a bit "weird"?.

Yes. I imagine less conventional ideas would tend to attract a less conventional mix of people.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

1) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is good, in theory"

Similar things were said about capitalism before it caught on. It was against human nature, it was sinful, it was utopian. The fact is that society and the economy has had a general trend towards greater collectivization, brought on by technology and population growth, and that this trend is not going to be reversed; not out of ideology, but because of practicality. Things just work better collectively as size increases.

2) If in passing someone says "communism/socialism is evil look what stalin did" what would be your response?

Capitalism is evil, look what Churchill or King Leopold did.

3) Am i the only one finds the "lingo/ propaganda" a bit too hardcore?, sure its great and very informative but to gain support we may need to tone it down a bit.

It can be. Part of the trick is to take the complicated and obscure and make it understandable and relatable to people. Find everyday problems and explain how they relate to the problems of capitalism. Find out what makes people mad and explain the roots of it. Use commonplace examples and "down to earth" language, and be a Bill Nye of communism. If the average person can't understand it, then it's not very useful to us. Using the jargon and concepts can have its place; for example, in polemics like in this thread, but the key is to know when to turn it on and off. I would certainly never talk to my co-workers in terms of labor theory of value, or reification, but I would point out how our boss makes twice or three times what we do, despite not actually making any of the stuff we sell. I would point out how he uses fear tactics and bullying to keep us in line, but if we were to be similarly critical of his job performance we would be fired for it. So do more of that.

4) As much as this cause brings people together, do you find some of people you meet a bit "weird"?.

Certainly. There are weird people everywhere. Most of the socialists and communists I know are pretty regular guys and girls. They drink beer, they talk sports, they caught the last episode of How I Met Your Mother. Each person has their quirks, and there is no ideology with a monopoly on that.

 

[Perfection]

Does being red influence your choice in fashion?

If so, how?

 

[Traitorfish]

I have an EZLN shirt that I bought at some benefit gig. That's about it.