this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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I know I am doing your homework here
The reason I am posting this anyway is that I hope you'll learn something from it. Please read it and try to understand it.
The first thing to say here is that capitalism/communism is not a binary thing at all, even though many people (especially from the US) seem to believe.
Instead, there is a whole spectrum between pure capitalism and pure communism. In fact, there has never been any large-scale real-world implementation of either pure capitalism or pure communism.
But let's start with definitions.
Pure capitalism
In a pure capitalistic system, the state basically doesn't exist. This is often called anarchocapitalism, because for pure capitalism to exist, you also need an absence of government => anarchism.
In such a system there is no regulation, no taxes, none of the basic services are provided by a government. Instead, money is king. In pure capitalism money doesn't equal power, it is the only power. There is only a completely free market as the only mechanism that is supposed to balance anything out.
Pure communism
In a pure communist system, there is no private sector and even no private property. The whole power lies solely with the state, money has no meaning. For the state to be able to really govern everything that a capitalist system does with money, it pretty much needs full control over everything.
Why can pure capitalism not work?
In a pure capitalist system, if you have more money, you have more power, which makes it easier to gain more money, and with more money comes more power and so on. Without any regulation the free market is unstable and tends towards monopolies. Basically, once you gain an advantage over your competitors, you can use your money to suppress or buy out your competitors until there are none left. If anyone tries to enter your market segment, you just buy them out or e.g. buy their suppliers. (Google Standard Oil for a good example.)
So for the free market to work, you need to have regulation.
The other side here is that in a completely free market, employers have ample options to exploit their employees. Until they band together, strike/revolt/start a revolution, and make sure that the free market isn't as free any more, meaning that they get treated fairly and get a bigger share.
Why does pure communism not work?
Well, even the Sowjet Union wasn't a pure communistic system. There is some level of personal property that people need to have as an incentive to work. If it doesn't matter what you do at work and you always get the same reward, no matter whether you even show up for work, then your system will also fall apart.
What exists between capitalism and communism?
There's a massive spectrum in between. There are countries that are quite capitalist, like the US. Here you have a mostly capitalist system, but basic services are still provided by the state.
There is social market economy, like many European countries are using. Here you have state-owned companies in all important sectors, that have to compete with private companies. More than just the basic needs are covered by the state.
And then you have something like the UDSSR, which is mostly communist, but you are still allowed to have some private property.
Back to your questions: Since your answer above likely included the word “capital”, what is capital?
Capital is any kind of property belonging to persons, that can be used to influence the behaviour of others by trading. Money, companies, stocks, real estate, basically anything that can be sold. Depending on the specific system, even humans.
How does capitalism empower people to own what they produce? Or, how does capitalism strip people of their control over what they produce?
The question really misses the point. If you have the capital, it the product will belong to you. If you don't, it won't.
Say you are an individual who sells something you create. Are you a capitalist?
Again, misses the point. If you are a slave who produces something and then has the task to sell it for your master, you definitely aren't a capitalist.
If you are the master, who doesn't produce and doesn't sell, but earn from the work of others, then you are a capitalist.
If you are the above person, can you exist in both capitalist society and one in which private property has been abolished?
False dichotomy. Neither a pure capitalst nor a pure communist society exists.
Say you create and sell some product regularly (as above), but have more orders than you can fulfill alone. Is there any way to expand your operation and meet demand without using capitalist methods (such as hiring wage workers or selling your recipes / process to local franchisees for a cut of their proceeds, etc)?
Again, false dichotomy. Cooperation also exists in a communist-oriented (or even a theoretical pure communist) system.
And actually, even in a capitalist-oriented system you don't have to use any of these methods. You can just cooperate with others on a same level. E.g. I build X to sell. I could ask someone to join and that person could run their own business side-by-side doing the same thing. We wouldn't need to have a business partnership at all. Both independently build and sell. Of course, that would mean that I'd have no control over the other guy and I don't earn money from their work. But there's no law telling me I have to.
Is the distinction between a worker cooperative and a more traditional business important? Why is the distinction important?
Yes, google it yourself.___
I think your misundertand the concept of private property and communism. Which could be skewing your opinion on the matter
Specifically conflating private and personal property.
In pure communism, there is no private or personal property.
But there has never been any purely communist society of significant size or duration, specifically for this issue. There have been a few short-lived small-scale experiments, like e.g. the "United Order" the Church of Jesus Christ tried to implement in the 1830s among it's members, but even with this being a voluntary thing among a religiously motivated group it didn't even last a year.
I have to agree with @[email protected], you aren't working with an accurate definition of communism. You said pure communism revolves around the state which is explicitly false. Pure communism is, by definition, moneyless, classless, and stateless. Historically, there have been state-socialists who believe that sort of system can provide a viable alternative to grassroots revolution in transitioning from a capitalist to a communist society. However, pure communism is anarchic, there is no state. Cooperation is spontaneous.
Additionally, it does not preclude personal property: items an individual keeps for personal use, e.g. your house, your car, your TV. What it does preclude is private property: items an individual keeps to charge others for their use, e.g. a rental property, a taxi, a movie theater.
Respectfully, you might want to brush up on your communist theory.
I might have simplified, but the points remain exactly the same.
If the system (Question, who is the system?) precludes (Question, who precludes?) from renting property (Question, who determines what what renting is?), there needs to be a system in place that needs to enforce all that.
Otherwise you aren't talking about communism, you are talking about anarchism. Anarchism has no inherent link to communism, so if communism is supposed to exist at all, it needs a government. There is no way around it.
If we go by your distinction between personal and private property, what is to stop anyone from renting out their personal property? If I have the coolest movie projector in the community, what is stopping me from charging for access in an anarchist society? If I have more, I can make more and then I'm a capitalist again.
But explaining one impossible construct (pure communism) with another impossible construct (anarchism) doesn't make the first one more probable.
Anarchism is inherently a non-stable system. You have natural power imbalances and anarchism has no mechanisms to balance them out. An anarchist society where no democratic processes are used leads directly to mafia-like organisations taking control.
Anarchism is based on the idea that a power vacuum is sustainable.
Where did you get that idea? Anarchism is explicitly a left-wing political ideology that emerged from general socialist thought. The two are intimately linked in their development, and heavily influenced one another with the "purest" form of either by their own principles independently culminating in anarcho-communism. You can debate the viability of this system all you like, but the definition of the term is what it is.
It is defined as implicitly free of hierarchies, including the state. If you want to talk about a system with a state, you're no longer taking about communism. We can talk about pragmatic incarnations of socialist policy, we can talk about the conditions necessary to foster a communist society, we can talk about the consequences of either. But if the subject is the definition of communism, none of that is relevant.
A lack of money for one. The existence of other cool projectors, if you didn't build the cool projector by yourself, that can be communally held. If you built it yourself, and decide to hoarde it yourself, presumably other members of the community would hesitate to share their cool stuff with you. Patents and IP are private property, so anyone with skill in projector-making can try to copy it.
If you recognize the benefit of sharing your cool stuff in exchange for others sharing their cool stuff with you, everyone gets to use lots of cool stuff. If you hoarde the cool stuff you personally invented, no one will let you use the cool stuff they personally invented, and you'll only get to use the cool things you personally invented.
Have you never heard of anarchocapitalism?
I believe they might have the etymology in common - probably because the word anarchism became sort of a synonym for any type of "chaos", but anarchism as a political movement is widely known as an extreme left-winged ideology! Which is explicitly against all forms of institution, specially corporations
Anarchocapitalism is the direct result of anarchism if you put any little bit of realistic thought into that matter.
You always have an imbalance of power between people. There's always someone who is stronger, more intelligent, more charismatic and/or who has more stuff. Because people aren't exact replicas of each other.
Communist anarchism thinks that everyone is going to play nice, and even those with more power will just yield that and be nice.
Anarchocapitalism is the more realistic view on the same situation: Whoever has a bit more power will use that power to gain an advantage. That advantage will increase that person's power and that person will come to dominate the society, and will eventually take the role of the government.
This situation is essentially the mafia in any society where the government leaves enough of a power vacuum that somebody else can snatch some power.
I recommend reading up on real-world anarchism experiments, e.g. Kowloon Walled City, which directly turned into an anarchocapitalist nightmare town, or Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, which basically reinvented democracy but still calls it Anarchism.
Christiania is actually a really fun story. It starts with the government giving up on some military barracks. Squatters moved in to form an anarchist society. So they get together, everyone starts making their home there. But then there are things that need to be organized together, so they make up small councils that they call Områdemøde. These councils discuss local issues and decide who to send to the higher level council, the Fællesmøde, which decides stuff for all of Christiania. It's of course not democracy here, and the people who are sent to the Fællesmøde to represent the different Områdemøde, they are of course not elected politicians.
Residents have to pay money that goes into a pot to finance upkeep of community resources and areas. These payments are mandatory, but of course they are not taxes.
When 10 residents died in 1979 from overdoses, the Fællesmøde started to decide hard rules for the community. One such rule was that hard drugs were not allowed to be sold, owned or consumed in Christiania. Of course, these rules weren't laws, just mandatory rules. To enforce these rules, some strong men were enlisted to patrol Christiania, and remove offenders from the commune. They'd call Copenhagen's police to the entrance of Christiania and hand those offenders over to be dealt with by the official police. Of course, these strong men weren't Christiania's police.
In the 80s, the Bullshit Motorcycle Club basically invaded Christiania and made a center of their drug operation. Residents of Christiania, the police and the Hells Angels united to get rid of the Bulllshitters and since then biker jackets are banned in Christiania. Again, not to be confused with a law, this is just a mandatory rule.
TLDR:
This anarchist community is a straight-up democracy with councils, representative democracy, laws, taxes and an informal police force.
Anarchism, by definition, cannot exist. It either turns into democracy if people work together, or into a dictatorship if someone manages to play the masses.
thanks for sharing the stories. I'm not myself an anarchist, as I also agree with that reasoning.
however, not being practical doesn't prevent people from defending it from an idealistic point of view. and to be fair, I think we always have to be open-minded about the limitations imposed by our contemporary mindset - remember that some people can't even conceive a world without capitalism because of them, where it could be perfectly possible (and we should probably do it hehe)
I've also heard of vegan milk.
As others have pointed out, it's an oxymoronic misnomer used by right-wing "libertarian" neo-feudalists. The hierarchy inherent to capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with anarchism.
Same as anarchism is inherently incompatible with humans.
Over the last few thousand years there hasn't been a single documented case where an anarchist society stayed anarchist if more than a handful of people participated for more than a handful of weeks.
And yes, extremists on all sides of the spectrum dream of a world where no government tells them what to do. That's not unique to communists.
But regardless, it's a fever dream, and discussing it as if it was a real thing is a lot like saying that midi-clorians are fundamentally incompatible with Jedis and lightsabers.
You're further deviating from the initial point.
If you want to opine about the finer points of the implementation of a system, be my guest. I won't pretend that human civilization, at present, is compatible with the tenets of communism. One day, maybe.
But if you're going to talk about a system, talk about the system. Don't strawman a McCarthyist Frankenstein of right-wing propaganda to make your point. Engage the concepts as they are defined, and speak to the deficiencies in the actual system as they exist.
Are there problems with communism? Maybe, probably, sure. None of them come from authoritarian states, because communism has no authoritarian states. We're there lots of regimes who claimed to be communist for the PR? Totally, definitely. There were lots of shitty attempts at ornithopters and DaVinci helicopters before the Wright Brothers too, doesn't invalidate the thence unrealized principles of aerodynamics.
No, not really. My point was that communism in reality cannot exist with a strong government. You said that pure communism depends on anarchism.
Anarchism is strictly impossible. And if the dependency is impossible, communism in that style is as well.
The fundamental issue is that any group of people that interact with eachother will at some point have disagreements/conflicts where an agreement cannot be reached. At that point, one group of people will get their wish and the others won't. And depending on the circumstances, either the most powerfull will decide (=>dictatorship, monarchy, mafia pseudogovernment) or the majority decides (=>some form of democracy).
So with anarchism being impossible on the most basic level, anarchistic communism is also ruled out.
And yes, anarchocapitalism is about equally as realistic as it instantly devolves into a corporate dictatorship.
I repeat, if you want to talk about the viability of various schemas, go ahead. I'm sure you think you're much smarter than every communist theorist to ever live (unironically, I really do believe you think that). I'm sure you are doubtlessly certain of what is and isn't possible, and I'm sure you can't derive any additional nuance from reading those who have dedicated extensive thought and analysis to the topic
Nonetheless, I think even you can understand that strawmanning is the refuge of idiots with no actual merit, and whether or not you think communism is "possible", it is best to actually talk about the topic instead of some silly oxymoron (like "authoritarian state communism")
As futile as it sounds, I do think you might benefit from anarcho-communist research. I'll leave it at that.
Ok, show me a single example of a community of at least 1000 people who managed to keep an anarcho-communist stable for at least a year.
I think, that's a super low bar. Any remotely viable social system should have been able to clear that bar in hundreds or thousands of instances.
So it should be easy to give just a single one.
Tbh, being a theorist doesn't mean you produce viable stuff. There are more than enough examples of larger schools of theorists who never produced anything remotely viable across many different fields.
Again, not the topic. My only point is "Don't misrepresent the topics you're debating"
I don't think communism is presently viable. I do think communism might be viable in coming generations, maybe.
My political acumen is negligible. My semantic acumen, however...
Even if communism will never work, characterizing it by a central state is categorically false. Your words are wrong. If you want to talk about authoritarian states masquerading as communism to engender public appeal, say that. That's not communism though. If you want to argue against such a state, do that. Still not communism.
If you want to argue against the merits of a non-hierarchic, moneyless, classless, stateless, anarchic system, feel free to do so while you call it communism. But don't call something that isn't communism "communism" and then say that communism doesn't work for the reasons your strawman non-communistic "communism" doesn't work. Use the right words.
I'm not here to fix your politics, I'm here to fix your words.
I'm not so sure your political acumen is negligible, but your semantic acumen is certainly impressive.
This is absolutely worthless. I shall cherish it always.
Ok, now I get where you are coming from.
I still disagree. While there is a single "pure" form of capitalism (which is basically "let the market run wild without any kind of intervention"), "pure" communism is much less easy to put in a bucket, since it derived mainly from the concept of "not capitalism". But in what way it is "not capitalism" is not so simple.
You are talking about social anarchism or anarcho-communism, which are both forms of anarchism or communism, but neither are "the" anarchism or communism. There is also e.g. individualist anarchism, which is totally anarchism as well, but puts a very non-communist spin on it.
In the communism category, there are multiple other different schools of thought, e.g. various forms of Marxism, which think that a strong state is necessary to balance the capitalistic tendencies of an unregulated economy, other forms of Marxism which think that that would be just state-capitalism, Leninism, which totally thinks that a string state is necessary, Pre-Marxism which had no plan about anything and religious communism which essentially trades a strong state with a strong church.
Argueing "This is the only theoretically pure kind of communism" or even of anarchism is mostly besides the point.
And yes, I am also guilty of that in my first post, where I summarized all of communism into the versions that are even remotely viable to be stable, and they all require a strong state (or whatever you want to call a central power that is strong enough to keep an inherently instable system stable).
What gave you the idea that capitalism is a singular pure concept and communism is not? Either your definition of capitalism is so simplified that there's an singular communistic counterpart, or your definition of communism is so specific that there are dozens of capitalistic counterparts. Be consistent. You haven't been talking about communism at all.
Your "communism category" is compromised solely of decidedly not-communistic transitory states, some with the stated goal of eventually facilitating communism. They are by definition not communism by virtue of being states. You call them communism because they have been called such by several non-communists: authoritarians leaders trying to sway their population, terrified capitalists trying to deceive the proletariat, 'temporarily-embarassed-millionaires' parroting pundit talking points.
Read the literature: communism, real communism, is by nature anarchic. It is definitely free of hierarchies, coersion, profit extraction. Anarchy, real anarchy, is by nature communistic. There can be no money in anarchy, because money creates class and class creates hierarchy.
Anarcho-capitalism is a fake idea. Private property is inevitably leveraged into power, and the power vacuum doesn't stay empty long. The only true anarchism is spontaneous cooperation in a purely horizonal democracy. Any deviation from anarcho-communism is no longer anarchy, and no longer communism.
Again, is communism sustainable? Probably not right now, definitely not at any point in the past, probably not for quite some time, if ever. Doesn't legitimize fake masquerade communism wrapped around the decidedly non-communistic authoritarian government as an example of the ideology.
It's all fake ideas. You sound exactly like a member of some religious sect claiming that all the other religious sects "don't believe in the true God", because they don't fit into your neat little box.
How is anarchocapaitalism (which is unsustainable and hasn't ever really existed) more or less a "fake idea" than anarchocommunism (which is unsustainable and hasn't ever existed)?
How can an idea even be fake?
Not sectarian, mathematical.
It's an oxymoron, like vegan milk or square circle. It is a contradiction, logically impossible. Implicit to capitalism is the employer-employee hierarchy, and hierarchy is by definition antithetical to anarchism.
Same as anarcho-communism then.
Anarcho-capitalism is based on the idea that there is no state or other entity that prohibits what you are allowed to do, so you are free to make any kinds of contracts that you like, which then leads to a form of unregulated capitalism. That's a logical progression that sounds very plausible. They define anarchism here as having no government and allowing everyone total freedom in their interaction with other people.
Anarcho-communism is based on the idea that there is no hirarchy and that it is prohibited to enter any contracts that would implicitly form a hirarchy. But to ensure any kind of prohibition, you need somebody tasked with making sure it doesn't happen. And that in it self is a hirarchy and thus a contradiction.
You'd even need some body that is able to discern between the edge cases between regular cooperation (which anarcho-COMMUNism requires) and employee-employer relationships. And then you'd need some organisation that enforces this kind of judgement. And you need a system of penalizing the parties.
That is a very strong contradiction to me.
No actually, very different.
With a state or any other entity, who enforces the contracts?
That aside, capitalism specifically (distinct from market economies which I reiterate are not in and of themselves capitalistic) is defined by profit, which is defined as the difference between the sale price of an item and the cost (including labor). If there is no capatal-owning employer and wage-earning employee, it's not capitalism. If there is, it cannot be anarchy.
Musings about contracts (which, again, require some authority to enforce anyway) are not relevant to capitalism. The existence of contracts is neither necessary not sufficient for capitalism; certainly they can and do exist in capitalism, but they are not a defining feature. The employer-employee hierarchy isthe defining feature.
Communism (actual communism) depends on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation. Every "communist state" was not communist, but rather some individual or group's conception of a suitable transitory government to establish the conditions necessary for communism to emerge. I will not argue that their conceptions were indeed suitable, because I don't believe they were. Personally, I think we are at least several generations and a great deal of technological advancement away from the conditions necessary for communism.
We could probably do pretty decent co-op-based market socialism, which I would actually personally advocate, but this isn't a conversation about presently practical socio-economic ideologies. This is a conversation about the definition of communism. And the definition of communism (not of socialism, or transitory-states-with-the-eventual-end-goal-of-communism) is a moneyless, classless, stateless, non-hierarchic (and, consequentially, anarchic) society based on spontaneous, voluntary cooperation.
If it involves a hierarchic state, it ain't communism. Simple as.
Whatever that hierarchic-state-claiming-to-be-communism is, you can certainly argue against for its many flaws. I'll happily join you. But that thing ain't communism, and the second a state pops out of actual communism, it by definition stops being communism.
Words matter.
Purpously forking the discussion here, since it's two separate points and I don't want one to overshadow the other.
Capitalism theory is ex-post, while communism theory is ex-ante.
Or to put it differenlty: Capitalism just happens while communism is a design.
Every single society that has ever existed spontaneously forms hirarchies.
So capitalism theory is about how to mitigate or exploit (depending on what side of the discussion the theorist is on) these hirarchies.
Communist theory instead is like a what-if-fanfiction to capitalism. What if nobody wants power? What if nobody wants an advantage?
There are essentially two ways communist theorists go. Either they split the world into bourgeoisie vs proletariat, believing that they are two separate species of humans and only the bourgeuisie wants hirarchy, so if they kill them everyone else has no wish to ever have an advantage over others, which is obviously flawed thinking. The proletariat is not in power because they can't, not because they wouldn't want to.
The other option is to proclaim the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (a term coined by Marx and Engels, which I guess, according to your definition aren't real communists either then), embrace hirarchies and have a central instance that governs and enforces their view of communism.
There's a simple reason why hirarchies emerge. People aren't identical. There's always someone who is more intelligent, has more knowledge/experience, is more charismatic, speaks/writes better, can naturally get people to follow them. Boom, there's a hirarchy.
And if that person is consistently the person others turn to, this hirarchy becomes solidified.
That's exactly my point though: Anarchism in any form is a contradiction. Communist anarchism is not less of a contradiction than capitalist anarchism.
Capitalist anarchism is, as you say, lacking an authority that enforces contracts and that authority will spontaneously appear due to the (translated from German) "right of the stronger", meaning whoever is stronger will enforce contracts and the other party is out of luck. That's what could be observed in real-life examples like the Kowloon Walled City, where the Triads became the de-facto government.
Communist anarchism depends on the stronger playing nice and not forcing their will on the other people and it also depends on people not banding together to form a democracy to oppose the stronger people/stop them from forming the de-facto government.
Capitalist anarchism is instable since it directly drops into an Oligarchy.
Communist anarchism is a direct contradiction.
What are you going on about? You're not reading what I said, and at this point this level of "ignorance" really seems deliberate and in bad faith.
Anarchy isn't "no regulations", it's "no hierarchies". Yes, "no regulations" is considerably easier to accomplish (temporarily) than "no hierarchies", but that's not what the word means. If you want to talk about unregulated capitalism, do so. There's nothing anarchic about it though. As you admit, capitalism spontaneously generates hierarchy in a vacuum.
"No hierarchies" is substantially more difficult to attain, but that's what the word means, and the synonym is communism. I'm not here, like you apparently are, to speak to the pragmatism of that ideology. I will repeat, slowly, since I've done so many times without your understanding and I wish to do so no longer:
COMMUNISM IS NOT STABLE IN THE PRESENT WORLD
THAT IS IRRELEVANT TO ITS DEFINITION
THE EXISTENCE OF AUTHORITY PRECLUDES COMMUNISM
IDEOLOGIES WITH AUTHORITY ARE NOT COMMUNISM
MANY AUTHORITIES HAVE CLAIMED TO BE COMMUNISM
THEY ARE LYING, IT IS A CONTRACTION
I'm not going to keep saying the same thing. I'm done. Either you can't read or you're trolling, deliberately misunderstanding in bad faith. Reread my statements. I thought my last post quite deftly cut to the heart of it, you keep taking past me to a conversation I'm not having. You're taking to yourself, or a ghost of the conversation you think you're having, or there's an inefficiency in translation.
Review my posts. I'm done. Das Gespräch ist kaputt. There is no continuation.
Someone's got a temper, and someone believes he's the only one who is allowed to define terms.
Seems like a case of "ex falso quodlibet".
Emphasis, not anger. Necessary due only to your continued disregard.
I did not define my terms, I used their definitions. You're the one trying to provide unique definitions.
Again, I'm done. Everything I have to say I've said already. Review for clarity.