This isn’t really a meme
Can you have your own garden for food?
Yes. What this is saying is large industries that are meant to feed people or provide commodities cannot belong to just one person. We are seeing the effects of monopolization right now in our time.
How do new means of production come to be? Like, if a community really wanted a unicycle repair shop, how would that get started? How would it be decided that we use resources for that shop instead of, say, a pogo stick repair shop? Would that be up to a local government (or some other governing body)? Honest question.
My country used to have communism. Niche shops like this barely ever started as small businesses and instead usually started out as specialized departments of large all-encompassing state corporations. Instead of there being a company that specialized in making furniture, the furniture would be made by the logging company. The company that ran a chemical plant would directly sell shampoos, paints, toothpaste, fertillizer, etc. It cut out middle men but the products were usually crap quality because it couldn’t focus on each product individually. This stifled progress. My dad wanted to learn programming (this was the late 80s) but because the government was too oldschool to open a computer science degree programme, the only way to get near a computer was to go to a university that specialized in mining and take a programme in mining machine automation.
Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not?
A small garage shop with a workbench and a tool wall is obvious enough, but can you own a separate workshop outside your home? Can it be far down the street, or out in a barn somewhere, or in the outskirts of town among large factories? Can you own a lathe? Can you own a CNC machine?
What tools are ownable and what tools are not? What’s the scale-cutoff?
Bandsaws, drill presses, welders, large trucks, small trucks, cranes, sheet metal cutters and benders, pipe benders, etc.
Can you buy material? How much? Should it be limited by something else than your funds?
If you take on jobs that are too much for you to handle on your own, do you have to either make your means of small scale production communal, or give up the job?
Please draw some lines for me here.
Honest question, at what point does a workshop transition from ownable to not
If you also live in it, it becomes personal property - ie, ownable by you personally.
or in the outdoors of town among large factories?
I mean, that pretty much means it already is factory-like and no, it doesn’t become ownable (unless you also live in it). If it involves other people’s labor, then all the grey areas vanishes - it becomes communal.
The picture above is not completely accurate - a community might decide, for instance, that all firearms must be communally owned - ie, as in a communal arsenal (essentially a library for guns) - which, let’s face it, would probably be necessary anywhere in the US (because it has more guns than people - and far less sense).
I don’t like communism then.
Letting the “commune” take over a workshop would immediately break everything.
That’s the thing… there won’t be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit. If you have people working in that workshop, nothing will stop them from appropriating it from you and running it as a co-op for the benefit of the community and not you exclusively. This is why the wealthy and the privileged hates socialism.
No, I mean if you and your cousins have unlimited access to the machines, the machines will break.
No, I mean there won’t be police around to protect your private property for you - which means that no-one is going to be forced to labor for your profit.
I thought owning the means of production was the point, but requiring a consistent argument from a communist is like requiring a consistent argument from a communist.
But that’s what this meme says
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An individual can’t own the means of production, it’s supposed to be “owned” by the people. I’m not a communist, but that argument never changed.
“Common ownership” as in the workers collectively own the means of production. You, individually, don’t get to own it, but a union of workers, a local collective, or the state might own it and decisions would be made, ostensibly, by the workers who make up those entities.
or the state might own it
In other words… the workers don’t own squat.
Y’all should move to Cuba
Food is rationned, meaning everybody has food, and healthcare is great.
Yes, yes plenty of food and healthcare is so professional, it’s like paradise on earth.
L take, communism and socialism don’t work and never will. There’s a reason every communist or socialist country has failed or fallen back into capitalism for the masses and authoritarianism for the top.
“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.” Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
read a book you moronic dipshit, specifically this one ,[https://valleysunderground.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf] , look it’s even free, you have 0 excuses to not educate yourself, you’re welcome
And the reason is the US coup’ed every single one of those experiments.
What if I want to make my own farm?
I don’t think most communists would have a problem with people trading crops that they grow themselves. The problem comes in when someone hires employees to grow more crops for them, starts collecting profits, and grows the farm even bigger. All under the expectation that they own everything that their employees worked for. Cause that’s literally capitalism on a small scale.
Of course it needs to be possible for multiple people to come together and start growing crops, but only as long as no single person can take over the entire operation. Leaders would be elected, and be given a somewhat higher salary to reflect the additional responsibility.
you going to manage a 10 acre farm by yourself and eat everything?
you can grow a few vegetables in a garden, but as long as people help you do it, it’s not really personal property
10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
Yes. But don’t worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries “never make the same mistakes as their predecessors,” so if we starve it’ll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
Here’s the main difference:
“Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn’t repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely.”
It’s a little different than “nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real.”
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
You could have a personal garden, but to have a farm you’d have to obtain a lot of land. Then you’d have to make the land productive with either large and resource hungry machinery i.e. capital or you’d have to obtain and exploit the labor of farm workers to work by hand.
What if i agree with some of my friends that we will join our yards to make one big field and work it together? We could also ask others for help and pay them for their work, the amount of money we both agree with.
You and your community collectively owning and operating a farm is literally a communal farm.
but if some of my friends dont want to work it they can just sell me the land. And if we produce more food than we need we can sell it so we can buy other things we don’t produce. I dont understand why its wrong to own a farm.
Substance farming is different than owning a farm that exists by its own production of food and selling those produced goods at market price.
Personal property is for personal use. That’s it.
Once you start to accumulate surplus property then its very obviously not personal anymore. A person that doesn’t want a garden won’t have one to sell you, because they wouldn’t have one in the first place.
Don’t think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. Think materially.
what if their father left them the garden and they want to sell it to me? what if they want to move somewhere else and they decide to sell me their property?
Inheritance is antithetical to meritocracy is the basis for generational wealth and capitalist dynasties.
Everything must go, use it lose it.
A person who could actually assemble a farm through small land acquisitions through the power of friendship probably deserves it tbh
Who decides what constitutes surplus?
The democratically elected central committee, or some other process whereby everyone decides together what our fair share is.
No cars though. Fuck cars.
I’ll never understand how owning guns is normalized.
Note, the idea doesn’t support the idea of carry permits. Personally, dont have an issue with a hunting rifle or shotgun kept in a safe at home, but carry and especially cc permits are absolutely insane. You do not need a firearm that can be hidden for either home defence or hunting.
It was normalized in the US because white settlers always had to be ready to commit genocide against indigenous people or put down slave revolts - that’s what the 2nd amendment was really all about. In a socialist community, firearms will be necessary because there will always be nazis about (not to mention their ex-cop friends).
So basically nothing will change in it for you! Don’t worry, you lose nothing.
(but your chains)
And your fucking tooth brush /s
There’s no need for tooth brushes cause we all share the same tooth
A good system to level off achievement and remove all the incentives to be productive.
You mean capitalism?
How’s about a website that generates money, like Facebook or YouTube? Can you own that?
What about products that designed to create ongoing streams of revenue, like a patent on an invention or a piece of art you can collect royalties from every time it is displayed? The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
Under communism, how does the stock market work? I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s pretty hard to imagine getting rid of it now that the global economy is pretty much dependent on it.
Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Of those five, none have achieved actual communism, and several have inarguably embraced capitalism to a great extent. All of them have essentially authoritarian governments. Which is unsurprising, since a dictatorship of the proletariat is central to the Marxist vision of how to create a communist society, and involves the creation of a single-party transitional government that forcibly suppresses all its critics and rivals.
I’m not big into capitalism and I think we should implement plenty of socialist reforms, but I will never understand why some people on the Left—or anyone for that matter—think communism is what we should be striving for.
The USSR famously took ownership of Tetris away from its creator.
He developed the game on company time. If he’d lived in a capitalist country, the government wouldn’t have taken control of Tetris, but the company would have. Every software company contract I’ve ever heard of has a clause that says the company owns any code you produce while working there.
Yes, but you choose to work for a company. Don’t pretend that’s the same as the government of the country you happen to be born in taking ownership of your creations. In a capitalist country, had Alexey Pajitnov chosen to develop the game himself, he would have made much more from it. If he had done that in the USSR, he’d still have his creation and all its monetary proceeds taken away from him.
Under capitalism your choice is to sell yourself or become destitute. That’s not really a choice, it’s just indirect coercion.
Not going to waste my time with someone who has such absolutist views untethered to reality.
Xoxo 💋
“Today, five countries exist that can be said to be communist: China, Russia”
Tell me you have no idea what you are talking about without directly telling me you have no idea what you are talking about. In what way can today’s Russia “be said to be communist”, and how does its current, very explicitly anti-communist government, contribute to the point you are making?
You can replace Russia with North Korea if it suits you, I forgot to include that one. Yes, the USSR was communist, while modern day Russia much less so. Doesn’t change my point and doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Dude, what you just said is on the level of saying 2+2=5. Or, “like any forms of sandwich, bananas are sentient.” It was THAT level of incorrect and detached from reality.
think communism is what we should be striving for.
Simple - it’s the ideal. Will we ever get there? Possibly not. Is it even desirable? Debatable. But it’s always better to know where to go and not know how to get there than having the option of going anywhere and not knowing where to go.
Simple - it’s the ideal.
Not in my view. I don’t want the State owning all sources of wealth and material goods. The problem with capitalism is that too much of that stuff gets funneled into too few hands. Communism is the same problem, just different people. No thanks.
I don’t want the State owning all sources of wealth and material goods.
Good news - neither do communists! In fact communists want NO state :D
No you can’t own a platform like youtube or facebook, but you could make content on it, intellectul propriety is not a thing as you don’t have to produce art just to get a monetary return, but just because you enjoy doing so, there’s no need of a stock market in an ideal communist world because everyone gets what they need based on what they can provide, but if it’s just a country i guess it’s the government who takes care of it.
Regarding those 5 countries i’m not sure of every one of them, but talking about China as you said it’s not a communist country but it is not a dictatorship of the proletarian either, as it’s not the proletarian class nor their democratically elected representatives who govern the country.
In the end i’ll add that greed is not more “human nature” that wishing to kill someone annoying.
Give me an example of a communist country that has not resulted in the creation of an authoritarian government.
Give me an example of any single communist country with an authoritarian government
And note that what I just asked for is like asking for a sandwich without bread
Those websites are highly capitalistic and never brought any innovation, all technologies related to the internet were researched by public money.
Look into patent trolls. Patents are bad, publicly funded research is always better, but it doesn’t prevent people from spending money to do research, but it doesn’t entitle them for the profits.
I’m not advocating FOR communism, I’m just trying to dispel myths.
Socialism is soluble with capitalism.
Never brought any innovation? VP9, AV1, zstd, GraphQL, React, and many more were made/contributed to by Google/Facebook specifically to improve those services. We benefit from this as they release these programs/formats.
Programs and format are not research. Nothing new was invented, they’re just alternative to existing things.
How is this different from socialism?
Socialism is the stage previous to communism when there’s a State in which the proletariat is in power, the purpose of the State is to use its repressive forces by one class over the other to oppress them and keep them in place, capitalism (also called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) has the bourgeois as its ruling class and oppresses the proletariat, socialism (also called the dictatorship of the proletariat) utilizes the State to oppress the bourgeoisie until global socialism is achieved, on that point on class society is abolished and the State is dissolved. This late stage is what we call communism.
You just described healthcare system in soviet union. Instead of money vodka was used, as money was worthless, and there were no foods in grocery stores. Doctors were drunk and barley came to work. Communism just makes everything even more worse than it already is. There so many horror stories you don’t hear.
it was totalitarian, nobody wants a totalitarian state. communism and totalitarianism are different things
why don’t you quote the homeless people in the US and the drug problems of philadelphia, the capitalism of south africa, and saudi arabia?
we disagree, it’s okay.
Still communist tho
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