3 ms·

> As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Euro

by rsj_hn 5y ago

> As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.

int_19h 5y ago
There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed to social democracy that is often mislabelled as socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to banning them. Authoritarian varieties generally advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. (Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend. Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies. So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before. There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

int_19h 5y ago

There are different flavors. You're broadly correct that communism (and, in general, actual socialism, as opposed to social democracy that is often mislabelled as socialism) is opposed to private ownership of the means of production - but it doesn't necessarily translate to banning them. Authoritarian varieties generally advocate for that. Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. (Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)

rsj_hn 5y ago
> Libertarian ones are more likely to say that abstract private property, on the contrary, is what requires state enforcement by violence (e.g. evicting squatters) - and thus, if you get rid of that enforcement, you get rid of private property as such, leaving only personal property / right-of-use in place. Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend. Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies. So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before. There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Not quite. We're not talking about a free-for-all here, in a sense that if you can forcibly take it, it's yours. We're talking about what kinds of property are recognized (and enforced) above that by society at large. Abstract property rights, where "X owns Y" is true if there's a central registry that says so, are one thing. Property rights based on use and occupation are another - but they still have to be enforced by the society to be effective. And this all is actually orthogonal to whether the society has centralized governance or not - you could have a strong central government that still refuses to recognize & enforce some property rights. As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.