5 ms·

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
    - michaelscott 5y ago
      A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc. It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them. That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc. This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
- lobocinza 5y ago
  > Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    > Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices. > Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital. > Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds. > It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy. Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey! Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_and_resilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
ModernMech 5y ago
This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production. Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the healthcare system. If it benefits society, society owns it. You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own. Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example: [0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI. [1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising. [2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois. [3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police. [4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more. I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?) My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements. "[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]" Meanwhile workers movements seem to spring up all the time and they must be put down by the state or corporations before they take root. Because corporations know what workers movements do; ultimately, all of these deaths and spilled blood that occurred in the 20th century at the hand of the American government and corporations earned us the 5 day workweek, worker safety regulations, paid overtime, healthcare, a minimum wage, and more. This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident! Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_the_state_militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre
int_19h 5y ago
You missed the crucial word in that definition - communal ownership of the means of production. Which means that freely buying and selling things is perfectly fine; it's freely buying and selling capital that's somehow limited.
DarylZero 5y ago
Better a freedom to consume things than a freedom to buy and sell things.

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.

beaconstudios 5y ago

Or, it requires a community that shares things - like tribes or... Communes. I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate. Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. There's a reason "socialism" starts with "social".

fallingknife 5y ago
Well most people are not your wife, friend, or neighbor, and since you don't give a single fuck about the kid who made your phone, the system falls apart at scale.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  joke's on you, I actually would rather my phone wasn't made by child labour. Also a communal system would scale with delegations and councils, not "everybody has to know each other". That's just the local basis.
  - michaelscott 5y ago
    A concentration of group "power" into any individual/s will introduce a hierarchy to the system, which begets inequality in power, which begets class systems, which begets corruption, etc. It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      I don't understand the willingness to give up on the idea so readily. Human nature is extremely malleable, we have many creative options for reducing accumulation of power, and even a delegate anarchist system would be an improvement over representative democracy and capitalism, because the power flows upwards from the people as democracy is supposed to enable, and moving from capitalism to collective ownership would enable greater individual freedom, reduced alienation, moral economics etc.
PeterisP 5y ago
Human behavior that works well on the scale of groups where everyone knows each other (like households, certain types of tribes, extended family "clan" structures, cooperatives or communes; perhaps kibbutzim in 1950s/60s are a relevant example), probably limited by Dumbar's number, does not scale in an equivalent way to large groups where almost noone knows each other. We homo sapiens simply don't treat strangers in the same way as our community, so a "community" of thousands or millions is a very different kind of "community" than one of a hundred people, so it's a bit misleading to use the same word for them. That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc. This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
lobocinza 5y ago
> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  > Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices. > Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital. > Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust. That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds. > It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy. Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey! Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_and_resilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...

ModernMech 5y ago

This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production. Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the healthcare system. If it benefits society, society owns it. You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.

fallingknife 5y ago
But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own. Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example: [0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI. [1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising. [2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois. [3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police. [4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more. I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?) My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements. "[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]" Meanwhile workers movements seem to spring up all the time and they must be put down by the state or corporations before they take root. Because corporations know what workers movements do; ultimately, all of these deaths and spilled blood that occurred in the 20th century at the hand of the American government and corporations earned us the 5 day workweek, worker safety regulations, paid overtime, healthcare, a minimum wage, and more. This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident! Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_the_state_militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_th... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre

int_19h 5y ago

You missed the crucial word in that definition - communal ownership of the means of production. Which means that freely buying and selling things is perfectly fine; it's freely buying and selling capital that's somehow limited.

DarylZero 5y ago

Better a freedom to consume things than a freedom to buy and sell things.