Yes. What this is saying is large industries that are meant to feed people or provide commodities cannot belong to just one person. We are seeing the effects of monopolization right now in our time.
You just described healthcare system in soviet union. Instead of money vodka was used, as money was worthless, and there were no foods in grocery stores. Doctors were drunk and barley came to work. Communism just makes everything even more worse than it already is. There so many horror stories you don’t hear.
Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not?
A small garage shop with a workbench and a tool wall is obvious enough, but can you own a separate workshop outside your home? Can it be far down the street, or out in a barn somewhere, or in the outskirts of town among large factories? Can you own a lathe? Can you own a CNC machine?
What tools are ownable and what tools are not? What’s the scale-cutoff?
Bandsaws, drill presses, welders, large trucks, small trucks, cranes, sheet metal cutters and benders, pipe benders, etc.
Can you buy material? How much? Should it be limited by something else than your funds?
If you take on jobs that are too much for you to handle on your own, do you have to either make your means of small scale production communal, or give up the job?
The line? When you start selling things to people en mass. One or two custom things you sell occasionally? Workshop. Start setting up production lines and hiring people? Now it’s for the people
Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not
If you also live in it, it becomes personal property - ie, ownable by you personally.
or in the outdoors of town among large factories?
I mean, that pretty much means it already is factory-like and no, it doesn’t become ownable (unless you also live in it). If it involves other people’s labor, then all the grey areas vanishes - it becomes communal.
The picture above is not completely accurate - a community might decide, for instance, that all firearms must be communally owned - ie, as in a communal arsenal (essentially a library for guns) - which, let’s face it, would probably be necessary anywhere in the US (because it has more guns than people - and far less sense).
That’s the thing… there won’t be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit. If you have people working in that workshop, nothing will stop them from appropriating it from you and running it as a co-op for the benefit of the community and not you exclusively. This is why the wealthy and the privileged hates socialism.
No, I mean there won’t be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit.
Where are all the dead people? Do you also have there step by step quide on how to achieve this utopia? Also, you do not own anything. Also, fuck off with tankie shit.
I thought owning the means of production was the point, but requiring a consistent argument from a communist is like requiring a consistent argument from a communist.
“Common ownership” as in the workers collectively own the means of production. You, individually, don’t get to own it, but a union of workers, a local collective, or the state might own it and decisions would be made, ostensibly, by the workers who make up those entities.
There would generally be mandatory meetings for workers to attend that would allow for debates on the trajectory of the company. The state would “own” it but the workers would still direct it.
In a very very small way, it is like what Germany does with large corporations. They require a percentage of the board of directors be actual workers so it’s not just a bunch of capitalist parasites making decisions that would hurt workers just to boost their own portfolios/profits.
I was charged $12,000 to stay in an ER room while doctors did test after test on my 3 day old baby. We never got any results given to us and in the end we were told none of those tests were needed.
An X Ray, two spinal taps, a dozen blood draws - not a single result. We went for low blood sugar. The hospital kept giving him tests so they could keep charging us. But that’s what you get when healthcare is for profit.
Yeah the system we’re using right now in the US is amazing. /s
L take, communism and socialism don’t work and never will. There’s a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
Socialism and capitalism work together… Socialist countries do work and have worked. However, none of the successful ones were fully socialist. Mainly because the world isn’t utopian and people are people. Communism and socialism aren’t the same thing. Socialism can be designed to work with capitalism allowing a free market but providing basic human needs like shelter, food, and water. it can also be designed to create fair wages and lower the wealth gap between the wealthy and poor. Communism can not work with capitalism and a free market and can be successful in very small groups but fails in larger groups. Capitalism is not for the masses. It promotes unhealthy work laws and without socialist ideas like unions you wouldn’t have things like fire excapes, limits on the amount of hours one can work without overtime, or the average 8 hour work day. Before you tout capitalism as the most amazing form of an economic system do research on it, look at history, and don’t just take capitalistic indoctrination as truth.
“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
How do new means of production come to be? Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started? How would it be decided that we use resources for that shop instead of, say, a pogo stick repair shop? Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)? Honest question.
Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started?
Pretty much the same way a community would start a co-op right now.
Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)?
Public participation, of course. The community would form councils, where people would collectively decide whether this is a good idea or not. That literally what the word soviet means - councils of people making decisions (which is why the Bolsheviks hijacked them and turned the word into a cruel joke).
My country used to have communism. Niche shops like this barely ever started as small businesses and instead usually started out as specialized departments of large all-encompassing state corporations. Instead of there being a company that specialized in making furniture, the furniture would be made by the logging company. The company that ran a chemical plant would directly sell shampoos, paints, toothpaste, fertillizer, etc. It cut out middle men but the products were usually crap quality because it couldn’t focus on each product individually. This stifled progress. My dad wanted to learn programming (this was the late 80s) but because the government was too oldschool to open a computer science degree programme, the only way to get near a computer was to go to a university that specialized in mining and take a programme in mining machine automation.
On the flipside, it’s not illegal anywhere in capitalismland™ for the workers to own the means of production. It’s called a cooperative. Get a bunch of your comrades together, sign a few legal documents, pool your money for a downpayment, get a loan. Badabing, badaboom, “communist” unicycle repair shop.
(The bank might however disagree with you that a unicycle repair shop is a viable business venture in most cities, but hey in my book that still beats a Central Planning Bureau telling you “Nyet, no-one needs unicycles, however we need you at the mines, glory to Arstotzka!”).
On the flipside, it’s not illegal anywhere in capitalismland™
It’s also not illegal in capitalismland™ to use economic chicanery to outcompete and either destroy or swallow any productive organization that doesn’t sacrifice everything to the profit principle - which might explain why there is no need for it to make co-ops illegal.
Bad management is not the the specialty of communism. In fact, this is a governance problem: is it lead by an idiot and how can people change the lead to solve this problem. Capitalism has this problem currently with governments and companies directions totally unable to do anything about climate change and wealth inequalities.
People always mistaken dictature or oligarchy with communism unfortunately.
Communism meant that there were equal people and some more equal than others. If you have convinced the right people they got funds to do things. But it is highly burocratic and slow unless instructions come from above. Communism also meant that everyone capable of working must work so they made up many-many bullshit jobs where people just spend time.
Very true of the criticisms of the USSR, to be sure. What you have to remember is that the USSR had a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party system implementing the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to, at some point in the future, achieve “true” communism. The USSR was intended more as a transition phase than a permanent form of government & economy. For many reasons, it did not work out.
Well if the comminity really wanted a unicycle repair shop everyone chips in to build the shop, and gets the equipment or the state directly decides you need a unicycle repair shop.
Although you and a few of your buddies could decide to make a unicycle repair co-operative. You don’t have enough money so. You go to the credit union to get extra starting funds, you then use these funds to contract out the building of the shop as you are unicycle repairers by trade. You then get all the equipment and run it as a co-operative.
There are many ways to run a co-operative and in the begining you and your friends are probably going to split the profits directly using your equal shares to recieve divedends. If it takes off and you start needing to hire people, you may start having salary bands instead so everyone will always make X amount of money working with you depending on their position, but will also make a variable amount from dividends depending on the unicycle repair excess profits and might also have a say in how things are run.
This is a more general left-wing idea which can happen in many left-wing, socialist, and communist societies, rather than just communist.
@ChatGPT please explain to these communists why their idealistic model of society is likely to fail and generally results in a power structure which suppresses information about its failures to mitigate its inevitable collapse.
So, a representative democracy, like we have in the US. But hasn’t it been shown that elected leaders do not actually represent the people, just their own interests?
As an example, the mayor of my town has approved the funding for thousands of new homes, destroying the natural surroundings in the process. No one likes it except the builders. She’ll be mayor next reelection. She’ll continue to enjoy lavish dinners and vacations paid for by the construction companies.
It was normalized in the US because white settlers always had to be ready to commit genocide against indigenous people or put down slave revolts - that’s what the 2nd amendment was really all about. In a socialist community, firearms will be necessary because there will always be nazis about (not to mention their ex-cop friends).
Note, the idea doesn’t support the idea of carry permits. Personally, dont have an issue with a hunting rifle or shotgun kept in a safe at home, but carry and especially cc permits are absolutely insane. You do not need a firearm that can be hidden for either home defence or hunting.
Ok, thanks for telling me that it’s impossible for a violent criminal to ever threaten me in my house. Handguns are good for home defense because they are short range, and quick to aim, not because they are easy to hide.(That too, but to a lesser extent)
If you have a home invader, it’s safer to wait for them to open your bedroom door then go hunting. Hearing a shotgun get racked will likely make them shit themselves and leave anyway. Seriously, if you think there’s someone in your house out to get you, the last think you want to do is turn a corner and loose an advantage.
Colt didn’t call it the great equalizer for nothing. Imagine being a 90 lb woman facing rape or death by a 200 lb man. Don’t think for a second anything but a gun will allow her to save herself.
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