Comment on If you want communusm, you can start a commune
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months agoFirst of all, thank you for a sensible and pleasant reply. It really is a breath fresh of air in here :)
I think the small markets only go so far. Many things in a modern economy don’t work well on a small scale. This is actually where many of the worst examples of capitalism come from too. With barriers to entry into areas like mobile phones, medicine, social networks, utilities etc. some companies become near monopolies. But as you say, various solutions could be tried.
Another issue I can see is the difficulty of ensuring power is not too concentrated in a small group. But again, various things could be tried and capitalism has these issues to lesser extent as well.
The thing that concerns me most is how to try them out without driving the economy off a cliff and without violence. If we could try these systems on smaller scale next to capitalism, than I am all for it, lets experiment. But most people here talk about a revolution or confiscating all wealth above a threshold (dismantling the capitalist system). If this is really the only way to try communism, then I think it is much more sensible to work on gradually improving capitalism instead. There are capitalists countries like the Nordics, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. that are capitalist and are very nice to live in.
zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Seizing the means of production and putting it in the ownership of the workers will, realistically, require revolution or damn well near it. But, workers owning their work doesn’t require an end to our current markets. We can keep them mostly as is, besides, of course, the rich and powerful people who currently do no work and just “own” things. From that state, it can be a more gradual transition.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If you think this, you are likely severely misunderstanding how modern financial markets work. You redistribute the wealth suddenly enough and the great depression will seem like nostalgic good times.
Also, is the difference between what we know is possible without a revolution (countries I listed above) so much worse than communism it would be worth the lives lost in a revolution? I don’t see it.
zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Plenty of people die daily in first-world countries that could have been saved in a different economic system, because saving them was not profitable. Even more die elsewhere, where the first-world countries have outsourced a lot of their miserable jobs. Cobalt mines in the Congo, used for certain lithium-ion battery chemistries for instance, have terrible working conditions and child labor. Another example is climate change: how many people will die this century from famine and water scarcity caused by a changing climate? Externalities don’t factor into capitalist profits, and the governments are usually under their control so they’ll just pay lip service to action or very slowly and reluctantly enact regulation.
Revolution is a one-time cost. It’ll suck, I hate it, but it seems to me like it’d be worth it in the long run. I’d also love to avoid revolution entirely, but that threatens capitalist profit so I really doubt governments (again, controlled by the interests of capitalists) will make it easy.
Another thing worth noting: revolution doesn’t mean financial markets have to immediately change. Companies can still act capitalist (at the start), they’d just be controlled by the workers now. Once workers own everything, and government infrastructure is set up to facilitate the sort of democracy and management communism would need, we can phase in changes. With control of the government, there could also be subsidies set up to help stabilize the market during transitions; for the US at least, there’s about ~$700 billion/year for the military as it stands, that seems like a sizeable fund to pinch from for such subsidies in the short term.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ah, we are going there. Ok. First of all, look at your government, your elections and tell me people will vote for sacrificing their comforts to preserve ecology under any democratic system…
Second of all, the global GDP per capita is $12.688. That is yearly. So after you redistribute the world wealth equally, you get $1057 before tax, capital investment and capital amortization monthly. The issue isn’t really the economic system, it is that there isn’t enough resources for 8 billion people to live comfortably.