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Whenever I read one of these communist stories, I immediately think of the 1985 film “Brazil.” Who decides who gets what and how much? Whatever person or instit

Whenever I read one of these communist stories, I immediately think of the 1985 film “Brazil.” Who decides who gets what and how much? Whatever person or institution has the ability to allocate resources holds the power over the recipients. At least in a capitalist system, the power is supposed to be held by the people who invest their capital into marketplace winners. A bureaucratic system of allocation doesn’t incentivize efficiency.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Who decides who gets what and how much? The answer to that would be not to make such choices. Everyone gets the same amount, whether they're unemployed or a billionaire.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  I can see that maybe working with a lot of things, but what to do about housing? Land is non-fungible, and if more people want to live in a place than its currently built capacity allows for, "everyone gets the same amount" doesn't mean much.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I don't think UBI needs to allow people to live in their preferred location. It's a social welfare program. If they want to live in an expensive city, they can get a job to augment the UBI. Or they can live somewhere less expensive.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
There are two varieties of communism you should understand. The dominant form of communism has been Marxist Leninist, with centralized power, vanguard parties, authoritarian leadership, heavy bureaucracy etc Another form that deserves attention is what has been called libertarian communism, a kind of anarchism. The goal is the same but without authoritarian power hierarchies. Marxist Leninist communism is an enemy to this. You can still have leadership and roles and rules, but done through other cooperative frameworks such as sociocracy (consent based, not consensus based)
- guerrilla 4y ago
  For more information, https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  There’s an almost infinite number of strains of communism. But no matter what you pick, someone has to have the power to allocate resources. If it’s the individual that’s given power, as in some variants of anarchocommunism, there has to be strong external controls to prevent markets from re-emerging or you end up in ancapistan. My personal opinion is that Maoism takes capitalism the most realistically, and the cultural revolution is an example of the measures needed to prevent capitalism from re-emerging amoung the more competent laborers at the expense of the less competent. Anarcho communism is a bit of a joke because it assumes the ground reality does not have runaway cybernetic feedback loops, which have been demonstrated to exist in technocapital.
weatherlight 4y ago
It's not communist. It's Democratic Socialism. There's nuance there. The kind of nuance that would result in the answer to your question. > Who decides who gets what and how much? The collective would own the corporation, not the small cabal of shareholders and the small group of executives are beholden to their whims. > At least in a capitalist system, the power is supposed to be held by the people who invest their capital This is a very small portion of the populace. Therefor the people who are allowed to make decisions are those with capital, those who have more capital are allowed to make more decisions. > A bureaucratic system of allocation doesn’t incentivize efficiency. Any democratic system of significant size will be inefficient by design, that's a good thing. Different agents in a democratic system have different terminal goals, it takes time to reach consensus. I leave you with a quote from Karl Marx “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” JK, that was Abraham Lincoln https://abrahamlincoln.org/features/speeches-writings/abraham-lincoln-quotes/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLabor%20is%20prior%20to%2C%20and,deserves%20much%20the%20higher%20consideration.%E2%80%9D https://abrahamlincoln.org/features/speeches-writings/abraha...
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  I’m using the term “communist” to mean the means of production are controlled by laborers as opposed to “capitalist” system where the means of production are controlled by private owners of capital. Using this definition, Democratic Socialist is certainly communist - not to be confused with lowercase democratic socialist mixed economies which are the prevalent form of production today. These mixed economies use both capitalist and communist ownership processes. Who speaks for the collective? If you’ve ever been to church, it’s certainly a collective but certain members have more power to speak than others. It’s the same at protests- having attended them, it’s important not to say anything that could attract the attention of the mob or you may lose more than a few hairs. Collective decision making is a myth that hides the actual source of power vested in specific individuals within that collective. I agree that to create a communist system, inefficiency is not only an output but also a necessary design feature, since efficiencies tend towards positive feedback loops of technocapital. But, whether that’s “good” depends on believing in some kind of transcendence beyond matter. What’s “good” in a material sense is a process which is able to continue to exist within matter while a “bad” process is one that self destructs. Since communism is inherently less efficient, it must be universal or non communist feedback loops of technocapital will accelerate and devour the sheep.
Mizoguchi 4y ago
Communism is just redistribution of wealth and power from one sector of society (the rich, upper and middle classes) to a single group (top members of the party). The difference is under communism there's absolutely no chance for anyone to ever escape poverty, because together with violence and terror, hunger is a fundamental tool for the regime to control the population (it's very difficult to revolt when you are surviving on a 1000 calories/day diet of mostly carbs).
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  That’s not anarcho communism at all. You’re spreading nonsense
  - Mizoguchi 4y ago
    I grew up in it so I know well what communism is.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      You grew up in Marxist Leninist communism which is tyrannical indeed
fluxinflex 4y ago
Ironically if you work in a big company you are living in a communist state: CEO tells the workers what to do and everyone is following the plan. Ok, you get brided by your salary to do it and if you behave like a good communist, you might even get a payrise. Strange how we have communist structures at the core of our liberal, capitalist west. Edit: it is ironic that a dictatorship is an efficient way ahead if the dictator happens to have the interests of everyone at heart. Company structures, as they generally are in the west, are designed to be focussed on achieving certain goals efficiently, a democratic system won't be as efficient. You could also look at how armies are structured - there tends to be no democratic structures within armies.
- mordae 4y ago
  That's not communism. Closest analogy would be dictatorship. There are no 5-year plans regarding building residential housing for every employee or a company-owned hospital.
  - panarky 4y ago
    Because the most horrifying thing about communism is housing and healthcare for everyone.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      No, that is not the most horrifying thing about it. The most horrifying thing about communism is the close to 100 million people who have already died in the pursuit of this ideology. While national socialism has been nearly universally relegated to the pile of bad ideas not to be tried again international socialism - which is the precursor to communism but in reality the end stage since the 'classless society' promised by communism has been proven to be impossible - just keeps on popping up again and again with nearly identical and equally disastrous results, time and time again.
panarky 4y ago
Even if I could hold my nose and accept extreme, hideous inequality as the price of efficiency, the fact that the deal is a one-way bet for capitalists is just too much. After capitalists invest in "winners" and extract even more capital for themselves, they always use that power to force everyone else to subsidize their bets on "losers". They threaten "systemic failure" and "contagion" if public funds aren't used to bail out their losses. They win when they win, and they win when they lose. And then, decades later, after they've socialized their losses and made us pay for their bad and lazy decisions, we discover that even their winners were losers. Their winners didn't make us healthy, or intelligent, or moral. Their winners didn't house us or feed us or make us safe and secure. We accepted outrageous inequality, we impoverished the public sector, became wage slaves for them, and all we got in return was clicks, and ads, and grift, and memes, and anxiety, and depression, and hate, and conflict and war.
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  Who is your “we” and who gave you the authority to speak for us? You are assuming power here, which does feel great to do psychologically just as it was great for Louis XIV. I don’t see any proof in what you said that I should follow your authority as opposed to these evil capitalists- at least they seem to be honest in their self interest while your twisting claims of priestly morality try to undermine others for your own benefit.
  - panarky 4y ago
    "We" are those of us who believe billionaires can take care of themselves, and shouldn't coerce us to pay for their mistakes and failures.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
While we generally associate Capitalism with market economy and Communism with planned economy (with its corresponding bureaucracy), that does not mean that Capitalism vs. bureaucracy is a valid dichotomy, not even in the sense of being two ends of a continuous spectrum. Capitalism and Communism are types of ownership of the means of production, while market economies vs. planned/bureaucratic economies are ways of distributing or allocating produce. Capitalism is ownership of the means of production and its produce by individuals who are not those who exert labour to produce, while Communism (in its myriad of varieties) can be summarised as ownership of the means of production and its produce by those who exert their labour. One can have extremely bureaucratic regimes in a capitalist economic system (for instance, the highly bureaucratic health insurance system in the USA as compared to how straightforward non-capitalist universal healthcare systems are). On the other side, one can have an essentially communist ownership structure operating in a market economy (e.g. worker-owned cooperatives competing with each other in a free market). That's not to say that Capitalism doesn't very often go hand-in-hand with market economies, but it is a mistake to attribute the merit of the free market as an efficient allocator of resources to Capitalism itself, in a "merit by association". Furthermore, while a (perfect) free market may be provably the most efficient way of distributing resources, the efficiency of a market has no value as of itself; it depends on what resources are being exchanged in the market and to what extent the interests of the market participants are compatible with each other (a human being with a limited lifespan and need for survival does not make the same kind of decisions as a potentially immortal institution).
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  The USA is a mixed economy, like most advanced economies. That means it uses both communist and capitalist ownerships of production in different situations. Health care is an interesting failure case, where the specific mix of private and public ownership has failed in some ways (note that concierge services in the USA are not available in all countries, and there are many treatments that are only available in the USA and cannot be easily accessed elsewhere so there are some advantages). Communism must utilize some sort of bureaucratic system as otherwise technocapital feedback loops will re-emerge. So there has to be a human control system in place to monitor and squash these sprouts of cancerous growth. A worker owned cooperative would not be a communist system, since the means of production are held by a private collective and not by the public society. It’s no different than a private family owning capital, albeit less incestuous.

rootusrootus 4y ago

> Who decides who gets what and how much? The answer to that would be not to make such choices. Everyone gets the same amount, whether they're unemployed or a billionaire.

ryukafalz 4y ago
I can see that maybe working with a lot of things, but what to do about housing? Land is non-fungible, and if more people want to live in a place than its currently built capacity allows for, "everyone gets the same amount" doesn't mean much.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I don't think UBI needs to allow people to live in their preferred location. It's a social welfare program. If they want to live in an expensive city, they can get a job to augment the UBI. Or they can live somewhere less expensive.

wahnfrieden 4y ago

There are two varieties of communism you should understand. The dominant form of communism has been Marxist Leninist, with centralized power, vanguard parties, authoritarian leadership, heavy bureaucracy etc Another form that deserves attention is what has been called libertarian communism, a kind of anarchism. The goal is the same but without authoritarian power hierarchies. Marxist Leninist communism is an enemy to this. You can still have leadership and roles and rules, but done through other cooperative frameworks such as sociocracy (consent based, not consensus based)

guerrilla 4y ago
For more information, https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide
simple-thoughts 4y ago
There’s an almost infinite number of strains of communism. But no matter what you pick, someone has to have the power to allocate resources. If it’s the individual that’s given power, as in some variants of anarchocommunism, there has to be strong external controls to prevent markets from re-emerging or you end up in ancapistan. My personal opinion is that Maoism takes capitalism the most realistically, and the cultural revolution is an example of the measures needed to prevent capitalism from re-emerging amoung the more competent laborers at the expense of the less competent. Anarcho communism is a bit of a joke because it assumes the ground reality does not have runaway cybernetic feedback loops, which have been demonstrated to exist in technocapital.

weatherlight 4y ago

It's not communist. It's Democratic Socialism. There's nuance there. The kind of nuance that would result in the answer to your question. > Who decides who gets what and how much? The collective would own the corporation, not the small cabal of shareholders and the small group of executives are beholden to their whims. > At least in a capitalist system, the power is supposed to be held by the people who invest their capital This is a very small portion of the populace. Therefor the people who are allowed to make decisions are those with capital, those who have more capital are allowed to make more decisions. > A bureaucratic system of allocation doesn’t incentivize efficiency. Any democratic system of significant size will be inefficient by design, that's a good thing. Different agents in a democratic system have different terminal goals, it takes time to reach consensus. I leave you with a quote from Karl Marx “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” JK, that was Abraham Lincoln https://abrahamlincoln.org/features/speeches-writings/abraham-lincoln-quotes/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLabor%20is%20prior%20to%2C%20and,deserves%20much%20the%20higher%20consideration.%E2%80%9D https://abrahamlincoln.org/features/speeches-writings/abraha...

simple-thoughts 4y ago
I’m using the term “communist” to mean the means of production are controlled by laborers as opposed to “capitalist” system where the means of production are controlled by private owners of capital. Using this definition, Democratic Socialist is certainly communist - not to be confused with lowercase democratic socialist mixed economies which are the prevalent form of production today. These mixed economies use both capitalist and communist ownership processes. Who speaks for the collective? If you’ve ever been to church, it’s certainly a collective but certain members have more power to speak than others. It’s the same at protests- having attended them, it’s important not to say anything that could attract the attention of the mob or you may lose more than a few hairs. Collective decision making is a myth that hides the actual source of power vested in specific individuals within that collective. I agree that to create a communist system, inefficiency is not only an output but also a necessary design feature, since efficiencies tend towards positive feedback loops of technocapital. But, whether that’s “good” depends on believing in some kind of transcendence beyond matter. What’s “good” in a material sense is a process which is able to continue to exist within matter while a “bad” process is one that self destructs. Since communism is inherently less efficient, it must be universal or non communist feedback loops of technocapital will accelerate and devour the sheep.

Mizoguchi 4y ago

Communism is just redistribution of wealth and power from one sector of society (the rich, upper and middle classes) to a single group (top members of the party). The difference is under communism there's absolutely no chance for anyone to ever escape poverty, because together with violence and terror, hunger is a fundamental tool for the regime to control the population (it's very difficult to revolt when you are surviving on a 1000 calories/day diet of mostly carbs).

wahnfrieden 4y ago
That’s not anarcho communism at all. You’re spreading nonsense
- Mizoguchi 4y ago
  I grew up in it so I know well what communism is.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    You grew up in Marxist Leninist communism which is tyrannical indeed

fluxinflex 4y ago

Ironically if you work in a big company you are living in a communist state: CEO tells the workers what to do and everyone is following the plan. Ok, you get brided by your salary to do it and if you behave like a good communist, you might even get a payrise. Strange how we have communist structures at the core of our liberal, capitalist west. Edit: it is ironic that a dictatorship is an efficient way ahead if the dictator happens to have the interests of everyone at heart. Company structures, as they generally are in the west, are designed to be focussed on achieving certain goals efficiently, a democratic system won't be as efficient. You could also look at how armies are structured - there tends to be no democratic structures within armies.

mordae 4y ago
That's not communism. Closest analogy would be dictatorship. There are no 5-year plans regarding building residential housing for every employee or a company-owned hospital.
- panarky 4y ago
  Because the most horrifying thing about communism is housing and healthcare for everyone.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    No, that is not the most horrifying thing about it. The most horrifying thing about communism is the close to 100 million people who have already died in the pursuit of this ideology. While national socialism has been nearly universally relegated to the pile of bad ideas not to be tried again international socialism - which is the precursor to communism but in reality the end stage since the 'classless society' promised by communism has been proven to be impossible - just keeps on popping up again and again with nearly identical and equally disastrous results, time and time again.

panarky 4y ago

Even if I could hold my nose and accept extreme, hideous inequality as the price of efficiency, the fact that the deal is a one-way bet for capitalists is just too much. After capitalists invest in "winners" and extract even more capital for themselves, they always use that power to force everyone else to subsidize their bets on "losers". They threaten "systemic failure" and "contagion" if public funds aren't used to bail out their losses. They win when they win, and they win when they lose. And then, decades later, after they've socialized their losses and made us pay for their bad and lazy decisions, we discover that even their winners were losers. Their winners didn't make us healthy, or intelligent, or moral. Their winners didn't house us or feed us or make us safe and secure. We accepted outrageous inequality, we impoverished the public sector, became wage slaves for them, and all we got in return was clicks, and ads, and grift, and memes, and anxiety, and depression, and hate, and conflict and war.

simple-thoughts 4y ago
Who is your “we” and who gave you the authority to speak for us? You are assuming power here, which does feel great to do psychologically just as it was great for Louis XIV. I don’t see any proof in what you said that I should follow your authority as opposed to these evil capitalists- at least they seem to be honest in their self interest while your twisting claims of priestly morality try to undermine others for your own benefit.
- panarky 4y ago
  "We" are those of us who believe billionaires can take care of themselves, and shouldn't coerce us to pay for their mistakes and failures.

Mordisquitos 4y ago

While we generally associate Capitalism with market economy and Communism with planned economy (with its corresponding bureaucracy), that does not mean that Capitalism vs. bureaucracy is a valid dichotomy, not even in the sense of being two ends of a continuous spectrum. Capitalism and Communism are types of ownership of the means of production, while market economies vs. planned/bureaucratic economies are ways of distributing or allocating produce. Capitalism is ownership of the means of production and its produce by individuals who are not those who exert labour to produce, while Communism (in its myriad of varieties) can be summarised as ownership of the means of production and its produce by those who exert their labour. One can have extremely bureaucratic regimes in a capitalist economic system (for instance, the highly bureaucratic health insurance system in the USA as compared to how straightforward non-capitalist universal healthcare systems are). On the other side, one can have an essentially communist ownership structure operating in a market economy (e.g. worker-owned cooperatives competing with each other in a free market). That's not to say that Capitalism doesn't very often go hand-in-hand with market economies, but it is a mistake to attribute the merit of the free market as an efficient allocator of resources to Capitalism itself, in a "merit by association". Furthermore, while a (perfect) free market may be provably the most efficient way of distributing resources, the efficiency of a market has no value as of itself; it depends on what resources are being exchanged in the market and to what extent the interests of the market participants are compatible with each other (a human being with a limited lifespan and need for survival does not make the same kind of decisions as a potentially immortal institution).

simple-thoughts 4y ago
The USA is a mixed economy, like most advanced economies. That means it uses both communist and capitalist ownerships of production in different situations. Health care is an interesting failure case, where the specific mix of private and public ownership has failed in some ways (note that concierge services in the USA are not available in all countries, and there are many treatments that are only available in the USA and cannot be easily accessed elsewhere so there are some advantages). Communism must utilize some sort of bureaucratic system as otherwise technocapital feedback loops will re-emerge. So there has to be a human control system in place to monitor and squash these sprouts of cancerous growth. A worker owned cooperative would not be a communist system, since the means of production are held by a private collective and not by the public society. It’s no different than a private family owning capital, albeit less incestuous.