Quote (inkanddagger @ Jul 11 2020 11:19am)
All of you people are discussing capitalism and communism and you don’t even have the slightest clue what either of those words mean.
Centrally planned economies are capitalistic (state capitalism) in nature, not communist. Communism is decentralized and has no state. “But China and the USSR were communist!” You all say, without the slightest clue what you’re taking about. No they weren’t. Both of those countries lacked a capitalist system and had an aristocracy and vast peasantry. The objective of the right wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, also known as the Bolsheviks (which simply means majority in Russian, the leftists were Mensheviks or the minority within the party) was to address the problem of there not being a capitalistic system in Russia (which Marx and Engels pointed out is necessary for socialism to ever occur) by destroying the monarchy and aristocracy and peasantry and replacing it with a dictatorship that rapidly set up a capitalist system. Again, socialism and the eventual collapse of the State and the rise of an anarchistic mutual aid society known as communism cannot occur without a capitalistic stage to develop an economy and create the conditions for international socialism (worker ownership over the economy). Socialism is another word you all fail to understand. It has nothing to do with centralized government and economic planning. It’s worker ownership over the means of production. The “means of production” is capital. Vietnam and Kerala are probably the closest to a socialist system on the planet right now, but even they are still capitalist systems with zero worker ownership over the means. Venezuela is another example of state capitalism. Chavism was about bringing the peasantry into a capitalist system and creating the conditions necessary for socialism to eventually replace capitalism. The major difference between capitalism in the United States and the USSR, China, Venezuela, etc. is that those countries practice monopolist capitalism exclusively (actually not exclusively anymore after Deng’s market reforms in China and Venezuela’s economy is still more than 51% privately owned) and the US has a combination of monopolist capitalism with central planning (especially when it comes to agriculture and energy development) alongside a free enterprise system. These are both forms of capitalism. Monopolist capitalism isn’t socialism or communism, as you all incorrectly state.
And finally, capitalism doesn’t mean producing goods and services and buying and selling things. That’s also a goal of socialism. The difference is that capitalists extract profit from the economy (there are only a handful of Capitalists in the entire world) whereas workers would be getting the direct value for their labor in a socialist system. For example, factory workers currently make pennies an hour producing iPhones while the capitalists who own the factories and Apple make billions for no productive labor of their own (developers are also workers, by the way. I’m not talking about them). In a socialist system, the workers (not just the factory workers but also the programmers and other workers) would all be making hundreds of thousands each to produce the iPhone and the unproductive parasitic capitalists would be dead. So we still produce products and buy and sell. The difference is who gets the capital for it (the “means”). So it should be incredibly obvious that the former USSR, China, Venezuela, etc. are/were ruled by a handful of capitalists who have monopoly control over State. They are not ruled by communists, as communism is a final stage of socialism (which we haven’t even achieved anywhere yet), where there is no more need for government and scarcity has been solved.
Quote (inkanddagger @ Jul 11 2020 11:39am)
We’re on our way right now. There are nearly no more peasants or monarchies anywhere in the word. The capitalist system is being globalized which sets up the conditions necessary for workers to eventually kill off the factory owners and landlords and set up a dictatorship of workers. This can’t happen in a single country. Socialism can only happen simultaneously and internationally. Organizations like the world bank, the IMF, the WTO, etc are all providing the tools that will be used to dismantle the systems they are currently perpetuating. The most important objective for revolutionaries is to fight the monopolists everywhere they exist (China, Venezuela, the United States) and to create alternative systems alongside them (ad hoc worker’s committees and local mutual aid systems and yes, even free market enterprise systems) so that when the global revolt occurs (and it will occur) there is an anarchistic system (“communism”) available that will also allow society to continue just without the shackles of government or monopolist capitalists (which, for the most part, are the same thing).
This is some of the least educated bullshit I have ever seen.
Capitalism is not some magical thing where only a few "investors" own things. Capitalism is the basic system where you own the product of your labor, and trade that product for the product of other people's labor. It's a simple system. "Can I trade you this 20 pounds of tomatoes that'll spoil before I have a chance to use them for your 20 pounds of potatoes that'll do the same" is a capitalist question. The capital in question is the produce, and the private ownership of that produce is why you're proposing the trade. That's all capitalism is, the private ownership of your labor. Meaning you own yourself.
Communist systems almost entirely utilize capitalist means to deal with other nations. They have to, or the only way they can get anything is through war. Communism states that there's zero private ownership. Your labor is owned by the community as a whole. This is an inherently inhuman line of thinking. That you're owned by the system, rather than owning yourself makes you a slave. And if you, as a slave of that system, refuse to perform the labor the system dictates, then the system falls apart. So naturally, the system needs enforcers who will insure that you, the slave of the system, perform your role. Somebody has to direct those enforcers. That someone will always, ALWAYS end up as a dictator.
Your attempt to distance communism from the USSR, the CCP, Venezuela, etc. fails to acknowledge that the very system itself is based on slavery, and slavery only works if it's enforced, and enforcement only occurs if it's directed. Communism has never "failed". It has been achieved multiple times in entirely predictable fashion: Millions dead.