lol:
I rest my case!
I feel like many countries lack a healthy dose, now more than ever.
Incentives under communism?
- Thread starter Narz
- Start date
- Status
Snowygerry
Deity
Well I was thinking of the Nordic European countries that typically top the rankings in regard to low corruption, peace index, democratic confidence etc. mentioned above.
They make their wealth according to good old-fashioned free market principles, but they also manage to distribute it relatively equal among their citizens.
It's not just "winner takes all" capitalism.
They make their wealth according to good old-fashioned free market principles, but they also manage to distribute it relatively equal among their citizens.
It's not just "winner takes all" capitalism.
Zardnaar
Deity
No one's claiming capitalism is oerfect tge stick to carrot ratio is off.
But capitalism isn’t the thread title. It's the incentive in communusm running into the basic foundation of it which is essentially murder and steal and how to practically apply that.
It's failed for a reason. Capitalism might fail as well but it's had a 400 year run.
Social democratic is about the best we have pulled off in practice and in theory.
Problem for Communists is it undermines their whole arguments. One can achieve their goals without resorting to force or Marxs thoughts which fail hard in practice.
It's not the far right that's the enemy it's anyone to the right of Mao Zedong.
Social Demicracy can fail I suppose if the voters choose something else.
So how do you make communism work or what's the incentive if the people don't want it? You gave 1 choice then. Well two really the other one is don't do it.
Hell progressives can't reliably win an election anywhere. Communists make up a minute fraction of the population.
Nobody's claiming that the USSR or China were / are perfect, either.
Again - consistency. It shouldn't be too much to ask for. Like look at this, just absolute nonsense that nobody ever said:
How is this not a strawman?
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2010
- Messages
- 8,873
Damn you'd never guess what other countries homosexuality was illegal in at the time - basically the entire bloody planet!
I think that the Soviet Union had an extremely poor record on LGBT rights, even by Eastern Bloc standards, but to complain that Communism was uniquely awful in regards to queer rights in the 1920s is just complete poppycock.
Zardnaar
Deity
Nobody's claiming that the USSR or China were / are perfect, either.
Again - consistency. It shouldn't be too much to ask for. Like look at this, just absolute nonsense that nobody ever said:
How is this not a strawman?
Not you personally true
. More than a few here wete downplaying/denying the crimes of various regimes and repeating the more extreme versions Maoists repeat elsewhere (kulaks deserved it etc).
USA has plenty of issues but there's other capitalist countries one can use as an example.
Democracies worst problems are the voters, autocracy is usually worse espicially the 20th century versions of it.
What I'm saying it that it's a strawman regardless of who you think said it.Not you personally true
More than a few here wete downplaying/denying the crimes of various regimes and repeating the more extreme versions Maoists repeat elsewhere (kulaks deserved it etc).
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Ah well, you know, that's been the whole thread eh? I mean from the beginning we've had to question the premise of the thread which is that communism needs to incentivize anyone. Indeed what is an "incentive?" But we have had no productive inquiry into these questions because every single attempt to do so gets derailed by mind-numbing garbage about fundamental evils and liberal pieties. And then we get dragged into pointless debates about what happened in the past, which is all historiography and always conveniently cultivated in a way to justify the poster's outlook. Now let's say y'all accuse me of that. Fair enough, but I own it. I know why histories are written and what the purpose of writing a history is. I also know how to interrogate other people's histories and question their unexamined assumptions. Needless to say there's not been a lot of willingness to consider that point which brings us to the absurdity of on the 73rd page, still trying to drill down the point that if you can criticize communism because of communist countries, you can also criticize capitalism because of capitalist countries. But the anti-communist position here is explicitly "no, we cannot use the worst examples of capitalism as examples of capitalism." So, who cares?
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Probably the biggest obstacle is that the thread puts the cart before the horse. "Incentives" - which, as I've said, always contains the unsaid adjective "monetary" - in the form of wages are seen as the magic that makes a worker work. It is, in fact, quite the other way around. The existence of a working class produces wages, as a way of administering the very bare minimum of their survival. In many ways, a wage is an obfuscation of an obfuscation; namely, that labour-power, the capability of working, has been turned into a commodity for purchase and sale - its value becomes murky and unclear, the struggle being moved on a different ground. Instead of the question, why are we all on the labour market, the new one is why am I getting a lower wage than XYZ? Now, the anticommunists here will leap out and say, a-ha, here's an example of man's innate cruelty - here's why the only way to keep the peace is by having jackbooted thugs that break necks and crush skulls. History, however, seems somewhat more ambiguous. There are just as many examples of betrayal - for an example, the way the German working classes stayed inert once they got their precious Weimar Republic; or the white, racist and exclusivist unions in the U.S - as many examples of solidarity cutting across chauvinist lines in union strikes, anti-war demonstrations and defections.
Someone will, likely, also opine on the fact that wage labour has existed in Antiquity. That is fair enough - but unfortunately, there's one issue. One's purely quantitative - for every pot made by a Roman craftsman who baked the clay, painted it over, sold it, etc, one has to assume that there's a thousand other pots made with slave labour from the quarry to the workshop. The second is still relating to the mode of production - again, here, the existence of slaves precedes money. You can have all the money you want, but you cannot buy a single slave if they're not on the market. The main circuit of exchange here is around the sale and purchase of slave labour and nothing else; it is the dominant, determinant mode of production.
I await your sincere, good-faith and reasonable contributions and comments to the thread, as always.
Someone will, likely, also opine on the fact that wage labour has existed in Antiquity. That is fair enough - but unfortunately, there's one issue. One's purely quantitative - for every pot made by a Roman craftsman who baked the clay, painted it over, sold it, etc, one has to assume that there's a thousand other pots made with slave labour from the quarry to the workshop. The second is still relating to the mode of production - again, here, the existence of slaves precedes money. You can have all the money you want, but you cannot buy a single slave if they're not on the market. The main circuit of exchange here is around the sale and purchase of slave labour and nothing else; it is the dominant, determinant mode of production.
I await your sincere, good-faith and reasonable contributions and comments to the thread, as always.
Zardnaar
Deity
Well your Roman example is a good point. A lot of drudge work has been done by slaves.
Maori here practiced slavery. If you can't or won't pay slavery sadly has been a go to for multiple cultures across multiple economic systems including gommunism as attempted.
The incentive then is fo this or else. People won't voluntarily do a lot of drudge work with pay, duress, force or left with no other choice
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Are you talking about the keeping of Maori as slaves by white settlers?
Lexicus
Deity
It is worth pointing out that wage labor was rather common in classical antiquity as well, and that it appears to have developed from the practice of masters renting out slaves to third parties for a fee expressed as an amount of money per unit of time. Naturally, more highly skilled or otherwise desirable slaves could command a higher wage (the wage obviously was payable to the owner, not to the slave). A hint of this remains in the legal doctrine of respondat superior (lit. "The master will answer") still in use in many jurisdictions, including the US, today: the idea being that a master was answerable for a tort committed by a slave (slaves in ancient rome could not be subject to prosecution since they were not legal persons). Similarly, an employer is liable for a tort committed by an employee in the course of the employee's work duties (e.g. a truck driver hits a pedestrian while driving on the job, and the pedestrian sues the driver's employer).
@Hygro don't think i forgot the incentives post it'll drop soon
Last edited:
Zardnaar
Deity
No the Maori weren't enslaved as such. Some were used as convict labour 19th century. So we're whites and they got released.
The tribes enslaved other Maori pre Colonial days. British stamped it out and some tribes allied with them so they didn't get preyed on by other Maori.
Iwi done here was here to avoid the war up north.
One of the more well known examples.
Moriori genocide - Wikipedia
Zardnaar
Deity
Well the Maori weren't enslaved as I said. War captives got transferred down here. They were PoWs in effect.
After the wars were over they got sent back up north.
You're aware PoWs in WW2 were used as labour on farms etc?
Chattel slavery was practiced by the Maori.
Mōkai - Slavery in Colonial Times
As in many other cultures, slavery was a key element of Maori society, in Te Tau Ihu and across New Zealand.
www.theprow.org.nz
I'm well aware. We're in a thread where "gulags" is a word used rather liberally, yeah?
We know what a gulag is, right? If you're trying to split a hair between "indentured servitude" and "slavery", I wish you the best* of luck.
*not really, sorry.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
what is the point of this line of discussion beyond muddying the waters
Lexicus
Deity
Indenture and chattel slavery are absolutely two different things. The conflation of the two is how you get modern reactionaries arguing "the Irish were slaves too!" in the US context.
Lexicus
Deity
Collapsing the distinctions between racialized chattel slavery and every other form of unfree labor is a common rhetorical move by the right wishing to relativize and ultimately absolve responsibility for racialized chattel slavery in the modern period.
They're different things, but the liberal perspective of prison as an institution doesn't lend itself to good faith arguments about it (either way).
Here we have "look they weren't enslaved, they were just colonised, look at the <demographic name> enslaving each other, they can't help it" kind of line. Which is why any attempt at splitting the definition is useless, because it's all muddying the waters. You're right, gay_Aleks is right, I'm somewhere in the mix. Not entirely sure where. It's just . . . this freaking "lol i got u" kind of centrist logic is really grinding my gears.
tl;dr: you're right, but they can't explain why you're right.
- Status
