Poll: Winston Churchill on Socialism

Yet the experiment of trying to get everyone to care for everyone else like brothers and sisters proved not to be as successful as the competitive model that Western countries undertook. Russia essentially failed because of a lack of incentive for workers to work hard; if there’s no incentive to work harder than the next guy, that is, if all are paid the same amount regardless, then people won’t put in any greater effort than required. One reason why capitalist economies work better is because they bring out something quite fundamental in human nature: the will to compete, strive, attain. It could be surmised that the drive to compete in human beings is stronger than the drive to treat everyone as brothers and sisters. Hence why one model works better than the other. The drive to treat everyone as comrades may work in family settings or small communities, but given our massive populations it is very hard to try and make people care about millions of other people they have never met.

A “human nature” does exist. I know denying any human nature is a postmodern trend. It’s used by leftists, feminists etc to try and sprout their slogans of ‘equality’ and justify their anger toward whoever rules, because it’s somehow ‘unfair’ that some people may be more advantaged than others.

While human nature may be to a degree elastic, there are definite traits that have developed over time, (most probably for evolutionary reasons) and the trait of competition has become quite dominant and integral to what “human nature” is today.

I direct you to Xunian’s post concerning comparisons between “the experiment of trying to get everyone to care for everyone else like brothers and sisters” and “the competitive model that Western countries undertook”. (Though, as consistent with my view on the whole Socialism/Communism thing, I do not regard what happened in Russia and other places to which you refer as representative of “the experiment of trying to get everyone to care for everyone else like brothers and sisters” anyway).

There is plenty of incentive to work harder than the next guy under Socialism/Communism. Capitalist advocates tend to regard material incentive as “incentive = on” and no material incentive as “incentive = off”. This is, of course, as ignorant as it is narrow. It’s like saying that kids wouldn’t compete unless they got paid more for winning than losing.

What we saw in the Soviet Union was a State-dictated working class that fought off fierce (competitive model/Capitalist) counter revolution for about 70 years, and saw massive life expectancy increases, economic growth and GDP/capita increases (actually greater than in the following Capitalist years on all accounts). So even using this as an example of Socialism/Communism goes counter to your claim that there was a lack of incentive in such societies.

Arguably a lot of the incentive was from a refusal to let things go back to how they were. But for examples of other incentives to compete that don’t involve this or material gain, just look to the rest of life on earth. Do they compete less because they can’t afford a new limousine for earning alpha male status or winning against their prey? Monetary reward is only a means to an end anyway - usually for the purposes of affording symbols of social prestige (when money doesn’t simply go towards affording one’s simple conditions to live a normal, modest life - like with most of the population). There are all sorts of means to earning symbols of social prestige that don’t disappear as soon as you step outside of Capitalism.

Surely it’s anti-equality to say humans don’t all conform to a particular nature. Lol.

I know you’ve got some kind of malignant issue with postmodernism, but do think about what you’re saying.

I’m not saying that humans exhibit no general trends at this point in time. Right now, certain natures are certainly more brought out of humans than at other points in history. But in terms of history as a whole, “human nature” proves to be elastic beyond identifiability. For every behaviour there seems to be an example of someone going completely against it. For every general trend there seems to be an example of a society of people going against it - and if not yet, there realistically seems to be room for them to do so in future. “Human nature” just seems to be a convenient oversight to help conservatives push their scared ideologies.

The fact remains that capitalist economies have spread wealth and materials more successfully than any socialist system has done. If all these non-material incentives (whatever they are you don’t say) are supposedly so successful, then why aren’t economies like that dominating the world? Nationalism in Russia was the (non-material) incentive to work hard, but ultimately it could not sustain this in the long term. In fact, I couldn’t picture one metaphysical system, that is, a system guided by non-material incentives, that would be successful. Maybe in the past when spirits and gods were considered real there may have been a non-material system of wealth and material creation, but today this is no longer practical.

Leftists aslo appeal to something in human nature to achieve their objective. Yet they fail because the aspect they try and bring out - call to equality, fairness, pity for anything supposedly oppressed - is not as strong as other aspects of human nature. The will to strive, dominate, achieve etc outweighs the will to equality etc.

However, I would surmise the drive of leftists is more motivated on revenge toward the successful, strong, and outgoing than any will to equality. Equality’s merely a mask to sugarcoat a seething underlying hatred of one’s betters. In this sense, the leftist’s will to dominate and achieve is similar to the will of the successful who already have achieved, they just haven’t attained it yet.

While I agree that there are many factors other than material possessions and money that drive people (though from my experience this is the big one by far), my opinion is that every single action a person takes in their life is done for purely ‘selfish’ reasons. For instance… if a guy gives away all his worldly possessions to charity then he is doing so because it lets him feel good about himself or gives him some kind of emotional rise.

Obviously humans are quite different from one another… I do not see how this is an argument against the free market. I don’t see what exactly you mean by ‘type’… certainly you need to have competence and do a good job…but if you are out in the wilderness by yourself you have to be of this ‘type’ to survive also. Of course people do tend to care about people who are not of this ‘type’ also, and I believe would take care of them through charity, if people did not care then there is simply no system that would take care of them.

Socialists always seem to have trouble with some rich kids inheritance which I don’t really understand…why should you care if some guy gets a bunch of inheritance ? It does not affect you. Some people are also born super handsome and smart…is this a problem as well ? Also, the people that have a problem with inheritance can perhaps take some comfort :wink: in the fact that spoiled rich kids born into massive wealth usually tend to have pretty miserable lives
In short, it is necessary to remember that th :wink: ere is no “human nature”.

Let’s not go into discussing history …it never leads to anything fruitful. That said I think that this is just absolute nonsense.

Co-operation vastly outweighs competition in natural systems, in my opinion.

Source/reason/logic/anecdote ??? And while we are onto this can people please stop talking about about how living standards were so great in communist Russia/China/wherever and trying to use it as an argument but providing absolutely no evidence for this. If I came here and defended Nazi Germany saying Jewish peoples living standards actually increased under the Nazi’s… the least you would expect from me is some kind of evidence for this, right ?

The rest I disagree with completely but I’m tired and as I can admit that I am only writing this post for purely selfish reasons, I am going to stop now.

This “fact” needs some support beyond assertion – mostly because it is wrong.

What leads you to believe this is wrong ? Would it be the same source that lead you to your insights that living conditions in communist Russia and China were actually really really great ? ( perhaps the evil greedy ‘capitalists’ just made up all the bad stuff, right ? ).

Anyway, here is what Capitalism actually is if you wish to learn something… youtube.com/watch?v=bFxvy9XyUtg. I hope this forum is a place where people actually seek truth rather than just blindly supporting ‘their’ team.

The EU has the highest GDP, USA second, China third and that’s only because it’s moved toward a capitalist system and away from pure socialism.
Cuba and North Korea, the supposed beacons of a socialist paradise, don’t even make the list. They didn’t even make the top 190 countries.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co … P_(nominal

I can’t believe you think this makes you not right wing. Ok comrade.

Your references to the state are kind of funny. Do you know that Marx’s big utopian dream was the doing away with the state.

The fact is that… the government will recognize that resources are required, a lot later, and a lot less accurately, than combined conscience of the market would. This happened in the Soviet Union. The government decided who needed cars and bread and how much they needed of them. Turns out they couldn’t predict correctly because they were out of touch with how the market works. If people are encouraged to be entrepreneurs, they will see the opportunity to sell resources to people that need them. They will also have an incentive to produce the bread very efficiently and sell it at a low price so they could compete with other entrepreneurs that see the same opportunity. The government official will have very little incentive to make the delivery and production of bread efficient. (I know that you could argue that he is a really moral man and will do his best… His morality unfortunately doesn’t prove his capability to run the bread production and delivery efficiently). The market has no way of correcting for the inefficiency of the government official and thus he remains in place providing bread to the people at a significantly higher societal cost than necessary. If an entrepreneur was inefficient, he wouldn’t make a profit, and thus his business would fail to other more efficient and capable entrepreneurs. (The failed entrepreneur would then find whatever he is good at and provide a service to society a different way…) Thus the market corrects for inefficiency while planned government programs don’t.

If Marx wants to do away with the state… How is he going to keep all those naughty people that want to work hard as poor as everyone else? There needs to be a police presence that keeps order over them.

Meow…

This will become a post sometime in the future.

I would be interested in hearing about this also. Is ‘real’ socialism actually ‘anarcho-socialism’ ?? And I know they might not call it a ‘state’ but if I wish to pay someone a wage for their labor and they wish to accept the deal, then this is a voluntary transaction between two parties. So is some other guy (maybe wearing a uniform or maybe not) going to have to come in between us and if need be use force to stop this transaction ? Also would this 3rd party guy be paid for this ‘service’ or not ? I could be way off here but could someone tell me so I have a better understanding ?

I did some quick wiki research. In the closing 20 years of the Soviet Union, GDP had more than tripled (a steady rate of growth). In the same time period, US GDP had less than doubled.

The US GDP has been higher because it started much higher. In 1970, US GDP was about $4,700 billion whilst Soviet Union GDP was about $430 billion, less than 10 times the GDP - and Soviet growth rates were slowing down by the 70s meaning the starting point of Soviet GDP was proportionally even lower in the previous decades.

You conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was only coming out of what was basically Feudalism in the early 20th century, whilst America had more than a 200 year head start in this respect.
And yet now (less than 100 years later), Russia has the 6th largest GDP (PPP) in the world, ahead of the UK and not far behind Germany. This was despite the complete collapse of its economy after it reintroduced Capitalism. It took 16 years to get the GDP back to similar levels under Capitalism, and now it is back to a similar level to what it would have been if the 70s-90s growth rate under Totalitarianism had continued as steadily as it was (i.e. it’s not got the 6th largest GDP (PPP) in the world because of Capitalism, but rather in spite of Capitalism). America wasn’t at war with the U.S.S.R. because they were sad that everyone was living under Totalitarianism, they were dealing with what was a huge economic threat.

So apparently you don’t know what you’re talking about. And let’s not forget that there’s 4 times less people per square kilometre in Russia than in the US, meaning that less people have been covering larger distances yet still achieving faster growth rates than America. AND let’s not forget that I’m not even advocating Totalitarianism! But have a graph anyway:

As for non-material incentives, do you really need me to tell you about things like “a job well done is reward in itself”? Let’s not disregard all the zillions of years of evolution that happened without any money in the face of only 5000 years of money (only 200 of which have been Capitalist) - and only for humans. Until that point, we were incentivised just fine as part of our very physiology! Other lifeforms remain incentivised to this day, competing and cooperating at all levels just fine. If our physiology was not hard-wired to incentivise us more than enough without money we would all have died out long ago.

But to correct the above paragraph and a couple of things I said in my last post, money should NOT be conflated with material. Material exists with or without money. It would exist under any economic system, even Socialism and Communism :astonished:
The difference is that under Capitalism, excess material can be diverted to the few at the expense of the many - but even then only as a MEANS to an end. The end is power and influence, fame, social respectability - all sorts, as well as the satisfaction of a job well done. And yet, the people who succeed in doing this would be competitive and lust for power even without the ability to divert wealth to them at the expense of others! And guess what, they’re allowed to be just as competitive under actual Socialism and Communism. Power and influence, fame, social respectability and all the rest would still be possible. The satisfaction of a job well done would still exist too.

The only difference is that it wouldn’t take material form of amassing luxuries and means to decadence at the expense of everyone else.

This brings me to my next point, related to this quote:

It’s pretty telling that Capitalist advocates commonly stop here at the superficial “oh they’re just jealous” level of condemnation, rather than taking the intellectual jump to the fact that gross inequality is not the problem in itself. The problem is that gross inequality deprives the majority of people of their ability to maintain an economy that allows anyone to be rich at all. Capitalist individualism has spawned a mentality that rich people become rich all by themselves - as demonstrated recently by everyone’s hailing Steve Jobs as creating the entire Apple empire by himself and being solely responsible for everything that Apple ever did. This is incorrect. Zillions of workers were indispensible to all that, without which Steve would have just been a dreamer with some largely immaterial good ideas.

If you don’t compromise gross inequality for appropriate inequality, everybody loses. Yet Capitalism proves anti-compromising in this way time and time again, and THAT is why Leftists are against gross inequality.

This common superficiality makes it easy to assume that pro-Capitalists are just projecting their jealousy onto those who counter them. Why are today’s pro-Capitalists always so resentful of those they see as lazing around and still getting money for it due to things like the welfare state? They still get fuck all, they just can’t find jobs that aren’t there “coz the market dictates so”. It makes it easy to assume that pro-Capitalists are just jealous because they have to work for their greater quantity of money when others don’t have to work for the tiny amount they get that’s just about liveable on.

But I’m not going to assume pro-Capitalists are uniformly this shallow, just like pro-Capitalists are idiots to assume anti-Capitalists are uniformly shallow.

An inaccurately applied Nietzschean point.

I have already explained that any defining Leftist drive is not a call to equality as an end in itself. It is a social call to greater cooperation that we strive for.

And as even the pro-Capitalist, ags83 correctly points out, “Co-operation vastly outweighs competition in natural systems”.

The social, cooperative desire in humans is not separate from the Nietzschean “strong will”, as you will know from all his talk about “friends”. Capitalism may not be completely without cooperation, but it certainly squanders it. As a result, anyone who is not psychopathic/sociopathic suffers, meaning we squander the untapped potential of 99% of the population, greatly hindering our economic progression.

Whilst I agree that even the guy giving away all his wordly possessions feels good about himself or gets some kind of emotional rise, let us not conflate this kind of selfishness with competitive selfishness that involves someone feeling good about themselves/getting some kind of emotional rise at the expense of others.

The danger of your argument is that associating cooperative selfishness with competitive selfishness often fools people into concluding that since nothing is purely altruistic, cooperation is ingenuine, and therefore one must side with competitive selfishness over cooperative selfishness.

Obviously you and I both see the lack of logic in such a conclusion, meaning “everything is selfish” is no more of an argument for Capitalism than Socialism or Communism or anything else.

Going back to what you said about selfishness just above, the charitable rich are well known for only donating to alleviate their own conscience - which is evident due to a couple of things: throwing money at a cause is simply giving other people permission to sort things out while you get on with your own life, and your own life is afforded by the very same system that puts people into such pitiable conditions in the first place, such that they need charity.

Capitalism is supposed to be unequal for reasons such as providing incentive for the poor to aspire to be rich by contributing to the system. Obviously we know this doesn’t work by now, that was just naive Classical Liberal theory. The poor overwhelmingly tend to stay poor, requiring charity to continue to function. The rich become further and further removed from the poor with rising inequality, thinking they’re just fine with all their designer clothes and relatively up-to-date mobile phones - having not the faintest clue what it’s like to live as one of the poor. So throwing money at them is probably the most productive thing they would be able to do anyway, rather than actually getting involved, which is what REAL charity is.

Being able to give to charity is only really affordable by the more well off, and at base amounts to little more than another channel to lord your excess over your friends and competitors, whilst perpetuating the conditions for you to do so.

You can be as talented and intelligent as you like, but without a dedication that borders on the pathological, you will amount to nothing unless you are extremely lucky. Capitalist “competence” is overwhelmingly about having an instilled or natural instinct to martyr your life and health to your role, to become an effective tool for the use of others. I have nothing against these types of drones, they are essential to keeping an economy going. But if your talents lie elsewhere, if you are not of this “type” then you may as well be thrown out into the wilderness. If I’m not mistaken, any natural system that rewards more variety than just one particular type will have the evolutionary advantage. The value of refinement through narrowing things is only temporarily beneficial, and additionally it tends to be the obedient uncreative mind that backs up the status quo and keeps us restricted to it. Life requires more than the tyranny of the conservatives.

The successful domination of the above type is necessary for assimilating everyone such that free market Capitalism can work. As I said, for phenomena such as “perfect competition” to emerge, people need to have perfect information, mobility and ability. Otherwise the flow of money becomes obstructed at certain points and becomes too unevenly distributed to maintain itself. Your average consumer doesn’t shop everywhere and isn’t an expert on all goods and services - asking perfect information of a human population is too much to ask for. People can’t teleport to be wherever the best deal is, nor do they want to relocate constantly when they build a life in a specific place where their friends and family are - requiring people to not care about these things is to require humans to be inhuman for the sake of some flawed ideology that Capitalism relies on to work. We find that money builds up in professions that are most in demand, without attracting enough competition to bring the profits back into line because people simply aren’t capable or willing enough - they have different abilities and levels of ability that a price mechanism can’t “put into line”.

It’s just not a solution for humans - for all the promise it can potentially show in its beginnings, it doesn’t take long before it shows its ugliness, inhumanity and inappropriateness.

You’re falling for the individualist attitude that Capitalism perpetuates. A rich kid’s inheritance would be fine if people really were islands with absolutely no effect on anyone else - but this is not the case. It’d be lovely if kids could inherit as much as they liked, Leftists aren’t simply about equality for the sake of it and superficial jealousy - I covered that in my last post.

In reality, when money flows to particular people it has flowed away from others in order to collect in such a way. And once it collects in one area it tends to stay in that area. A rich kid with a fat inheritance isn’t going to shop in poor areas and in cheap shops - they spend everything on upmarket stuff, in places that are already rich, whose owner does the same thing, restricting most of the money flow to an elite circle. The only way to try to disrupt this whilst retaining the “free” market is to tax them, but then they just up their prices which nullifies the effect.

Profits are made from the employer sharing his company’s produce unequally so his workers get less - in the name of incentive and room for growth and all that. This is how people get rich - from denying workers a fair share because the market allows them to do so, as long as it’s done across the board, which it is. RELATIVELY, money flows away from the poor and then stays amongst the rich - and it’s this relative ratio that makes all the difference, which means the rich kid getting his inheritance DOES effect others aversely. Going back to the successful capitalist “type”, It’s the “killer instinct” that an employer must have to cause this inequality to come about - a kind of rewarded anti-social “legal” theft.

Unfortunately it’s not nonsense, and there’s plenty of academics out there to back me up on this one. Pro-capitalists predictably don’t like it, which was the whole reason I diverted the issue away from Pinochet as quickly as I could.

Absolutely.

Though I wonder why you favour the system that clearly places competition significantly above cooperation? There isn’t zero cooperation in Capitalism, but surely the winning team is the one that places significantly more emphasis on cooperation…

Oh I can link you to this other thread for evidence in the form of various graphs of stats. My last post has some evidence for you too.

I’m not even saying Totalitarian Russia/China/wherever have/had great living conditions, I’m arguing for Socialism and Communism instead.

I don’t think I’ve denied writing anything for purely selfish reasons, have I? I’ll divert your attention back to the beginning of this post if you’re not sure. For selfish reasons I’m going to stop now too.

The two main merits of Capitalism are its reactivity to the nuanced economic requirements of a vast population, and the constant requirement for better technology to compete against competition.

Ironically, the more refined the technology that it encourages, the better this technology gets at replacing private businessmen at better dealing with the nuanced economic requirements of a vast population. Along with Marx’s theory of diminishing returns etc., Capitalism undoes itself on many levels.

It would be a mistake to equate the Soviet Union’s pre-1990 ability to react to economic requirements with a modern/future post-2010 computerised system for planning a large and complex economy.

To all of the above quoted posters, Marx both heavily critiqued utopian Socialist writers and said very little about Communism, despite his short “Communist Manifesto”. What you’re talking about is Lenin and his books like “The State and Revolution”.

Anarchism is about “doing away with the state”.
Communist revolution via Socialism is about revolutionising the State into something comprised entirely of democratically elected workers, subject to immediate withdrawal and required to be completely open and public about all operations etc. This is the Socialism part.

The Socialism part rids the capitalist/wage labourer class antagonism by requiring only 1 class: the working class. Contrary to right wing misinformation, this is not about everyone being equal, it’s just about everyone being in the same economic class.

Thus this rids the need of a State “body of armed men” to reconcile the class antagonisms that they function to conserve. And here we get the famous phrase “the State withers away” - because the State becomes useless once it has no class antagonism to moderate.

Then we get Communism. (Nothing like the Totalitarian, claimed-to-be-Communist attempts of the past).

No third party State official gets in the way of anything, unless you count worker councils as third parties - since all workers would be voting to make sure direct democracy was inherent in all business.

People who want to work hard are as free as anyone else to work as hard as they like. There’s even room to reward those who work hardest since workers are greatful for hard work and would vote for such things. There is no rule that everyone is as poor/rich as everyone else, it’s all decided directly democratically. The hard workers just don’t get rewarded with ownership of the means of production, because that is where class antagonisms come into play, which is the very thing Communist revolution is supposed to overthrow.

Aristocratic/Totalitarian State class antagonism is no exception. Really get it into your heads, people: the revolutions of the past hold a great deal of value with regard to teaching us about Communist revolution, but they were NOT Communism or Socialism!

I was just reading about socialism vs communism trying to gain an understanding. There seem to either be very bad illogical explanations on the internet or else I am just lacking in comprehension…

So the end goal of communism was to do away with the state, but communism is roughly about “from each according to ones ability to each according to ones need”… but then unless you can so inherently change how a human being is designed so they operate as if they and the collective are basically the same entity … then of course you will need a state to take (steal :slight_smile: ) the products of ones labor to distribute according to need.

From what I read about Socialism…they first say that workers are rewarded based on their productivity … but then I read something like… “as long as it’s all equal”, which seems like a massive contradiction to me.

Could you help me understand this and if I have it about right ?

Firstly I will say that even in ‘relatively’ transparent, ‘honest’ (lol contradiction :slight_smile:) western democracies like the US, GDP is pretty much just a made up fantasy number that in no way represents real wealth (however you wish to define that term) being generated by a society. It includes things like government department transfers and all sorts of nonsense financial movements occurring on wall st. In communist/socialist experiments where the states seem to have far greater power and even less transparency, I would think these numbers to likely be completely made up and not even based upon anything/ At any rate lets not bring up historical data as you can always find contrary ‘evidence’ somewhere.

Are you claiming the incentive of … “a job well done is reward in itself” was somehow driving evolution ? I’m sorry but whilst this might give some emotional ‘reward’, an animal needs food to live… evolution is absolutely about material rewards and good genetics being rewarded in this way so that they may be reproduced.

Also you seem very hung up about the idea of ‘money’… whilst I think fiat money where the state can print as much as it likes to steal from people is appalling … there is nothing wrong with having something that facilitates trade so you do not need to say, figure out how many chickens for an ipod or whatever. All money is is a means of exchange, nothing inherently wrong with about it, unless you see trade as somehow an evil.

You also keep saying that capitalism is about people amassing wealth at the expense of others… but could you actually go into detail about how and why this is so ?

Why is inequality of material wealth a problem in itself ? I personally live a fairly humble existence living off about $500 a month ( mind you it’s a cheap country to live) and I am not particularly interested in many material possessions other than having a good laptop/internet. I do not see this as some massive injustice, in fact thanks to capitalism (I’m sure you might not agree here though :slight_smile: ) the wealthiest people alive 100 years ago could only dream of owning many of the material possessions I currently possess.

Basically, I can only see it as basically the form of petty jealousy that you speak of and of not understanding that owning material possessions (over a certain minimum) are not very correlated with happiness and leading a fulfilled life.

Also, unemployment is not due to the market, but due to government intervention making it illegal for people to work on their own terms (something I have had direct experience in).

Ughhh … come on…

Before you were saying that nature is an example of how horrible and nasty a free market is … now you are trying to say that nature is an example of how wonderful and harmonious centralized planning/communism/socialism is ???

Yes there is necessary ‘destruction’ in a free market, like when the car was invented people who built carriages would have lost their jobs… but this is necessary and society as a whole gains wealth. Nature does not have central planning, it is self organizing from the bottom up.

What if a communist village is picking cotton by hand. A smart person invents a tool that will increase cotton picking efficiency by 100%. He was only able to pick 100 pieces of cotton daily… now he is able to pick 200. He is able to use this tool secretly and increase his cotton picking efficiency. He doesn’t want to show the tool to the government because he knows that they will claim ownership to it. He has no incentive to tell other people about the tool because he has nothing to gain and a lot to lose.

Now imagine if he was allowed to own the means of production. Since his friend works a different shift, imagine that the smart guy wants to lend his friend the tool in return for 20 pieces of cotton a day. His friend would then be able to pick 100 pieces of cotton a day… thus creating value. That value can be split between the two friends in such a way that they are both better off doing the transaction. If the daily rent is 20… the smart guy would be 20 pieces of cotton better of while his friend would be 80 pieces of cotton better off. The rent price is determined by the market demand for such tools. However, it could never exceed 100. If it did exceed 100, than the smart guys friend would not want to make the transaction. A transaction is impossible unless it makes both parties better off. The same argument could be made for a factory.

You will need the police to force people to do what you want them to. If a smart person invents something and doesn’t want to give it up to the government… Somebody is just going to have to take it!

“From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” is that famous Marx quote. It’s just a simple statement of 100% efficiency really, nothing that telling. If everyone is to give the best they are able to give, and people get everything they need then you’ve got yourself the optimal outcome, but it says nothing about how to arrive at that result on its own - and that’s the more interesting part (that defines what “Communism” etc. are). All economies should be aiming for “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” really…

As for this “stealing” comment, you really need to deconstruct your learned definition of “own”. Ownership can take so many forms, each no more objectively grounded than the last. You shouldn’t take your culture’s ideology for granted unless you just want to follow the herd - which is a very useful role.

Ownership is completely psychological. Obviously there is material physiology behind such psychology, which is no doubt significant across all animals, but there is no physical bond between someone and an object they own/have/possess. If you want to take it to extremes, it can be disputed whether one “owns” their “own” body (re-evaluating the english language convention to say it like that). You only “own” it in as far as it is there all the time and it mostly does what you tell it to. Going right back to basics, control and proximity/familiarity pretty much sums up the vague essence of “owning”.

It also has associations with dominance, which ties in with the control thing. To own something is to believe you have power over it. The derivation of the word is something I find interesting, that hints at historical uses of the term. It really does derive from the same place as to “owe”: to “own” is to owe something in return for what you have “acquired” from someone or somewhere. You acquired it in the sense that it’s near you now, or can be controlled/dominated by you. But to owe someone/somewhere for it somewhat detracts from this whole notion of control and dominance because it sounds conditional and like someone owning something is in debt.

Nowadays, the definition hasn’t changed that much at base. Our property laws mean that we are legally entitled to have control over our property and it is something familiar to us as “ours”. If someone threatens this dominance by using it against your will, damaging it or stealing it, we have access to a centralised police force that can back up your dominance with the physical force that you are generally not allowed (and often not able) to implement yourself.

This is the same whether it is a product or the means of production themselves. The workers use the means of production and create the product, often with the owner in a completely separate location with nothing more than some legal documents and the state police to back them up to say that the products and the means of production are “his”. Despite different workers having control over acquiring products or their components, some building the means of production and others controlling them to produce products from them, despite being around them and being the ones that sell them, they don’t “own” them. In fact, not only do they not own them but the owner owns their time and obedience to work! Wage labourers literally sell their labour to capitalists for an agreed wage that is weighted according to who has more power - and this invariably amounts to the capitalist giving proportionally less back to a worker than he contributed “because supply and demand say so”.

And we all just accept this because that’s the way it is, right? This is why the russian revolution involved workers physically removing their employers from the premises and then carrying on working.

So I’ve disputed both worker and capitalist ownership of commodities - it’s whatever you want it to be really. So what is stealing?
It seems as long as nobody complains, ownership and stealing is whatever we’re told it is (organised distribution is no more “stealing” than your employer profiting from paying you less than you produce).

Well you’ve not explained the context, but “equal” is as dodgy as the word “freedom”. Equal in what way? “Freedom yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT??” - Lenin.

Socialist and Communist workers are “equal” in the sense that they are of the same working class, but they are not necessarily “equal” in the sense that they have the same pay and treatment regardless of any other factors.

The thing about both Socialism and Communism is that under direct democracy, anything can potentially be implemented. Though if ownership of the means of production were implemented, it would no longer be Socialism nor Communism.

Highly likely, workers will vote for reward based on productivity. They will most likely have equal voting power, and be equally eligible for this reward, with equal - or at least comparable initial conditions. Though uncontrollably different initial conditions may be adjusted for, causing equality to give way to fairness. There is a huge amount of flexibility here. Just keep the workers in charge through direct democracy and stay away from ownership of the means of production and you’re probably on the right track.

(I don’t mean to speak of Socialism as interchangeable with Communism, they just have a lot in common. The former basically just involves a (worker occupied/operated) State that withers away to give way to Communism).

If people know that they are going to get everything they need regardless of their effort, they don’t give their best effort. Do you really not get it?

Its either you don’t get it… Or you get and you don’t think its not a big deal. I can’t determine which is worse…

And yet if they shared their innovations, everyone would be able to make similar deals, meaning they could all work half as long or be so many pieces of cotton better off, such that demand was much more easily satisfied. Everyone benefits. They would earn everyone the choice of whether to turn their hand to another trade, if the public wanted more of something else, or taking the extra time off to pursue whatever hobbies they have.

What you are doing is assuming a capitalist mindset that demands the tiniest hint of extra perceived value can be squeezed out of you - just as long as your time is completely filled - even if it means adding pointless, draining, completely pointless extra responsibilities to your work (as it often does!) You are assuming the capitalist mindset that strives to achieve private, individual benefit where something is to be gained from not sharing/cooperating - i.e. squandering. Everyone can still acknowledge that you were the one who came up with any innovation (and thus “own” it: everyone “owes” you for it), gaining you all the same respect, fame and ladies or whatever capitalist profits would otherwise buy - even extra material reward if the respect for you earned a vote to increase that for you (assuming it could be afforded, and with better and better technology being much more widely shared, it increasingly can be afforded). You just won’t have anything to gain from squandering excess material all for yourself at the expense of others. What a shame.

You seem a little stuck in capitalist dogma and market economics with its price mechanism and whatnot. Try to think beyond that - more fundamentally.

Well, they won’t get everything they need regardless of their effort… because no effort = no produce. If the work isn’t done, it isn’t done, whatever economy you’re in. And on the other side of the coin, maximum effort = maximum produce! Sounds worth it to me, whatever economy you’re in…

It’s not like the only incentive/reward in the world is squandering excess material all for yourself at the expense of others. Even kids compete to do the best work they can, even though they don’t get paid(!) If some are lagging behind, then workers can vote to look into it pinpoint individuals just like under Capitalism. If it ever comes to that then rewards can be proportioned away from the less productive workers (just like in any natural system!) But usually people synchronise to the optimum work rate whether under Capitalism or otherwise, regulating themselves. And on the other side of the coin, workers can organise incentives such that the best performers can get more recognition and/or material reward - it’s hugely flexible. There’s just no private ownership of the means of production.

There’s much more to gain, but much less to lose. Do you really not get it?

I think you’re imagining Communism as massively different from Capitalism - and indeed, in some very important and influential ways it is. But if it were implemented today, a lot would stay the same - only with better and less unequal results so that the proven superior natural strategy of cooperation could be optimised instead of compromised in favour of too much of an emphasis on competition.