Communism, Capitalism and ideology

The capitalist certainly does have despotic control of the workplace. The law says you must obey him or leave.

I don't think in terms of rights. People will need to trust each other, if you are afraid people use your house while you are gone. You don't have to go. But if you do, you are going to need to trust your neighbors have your back. We all depend on each other, even in capitalism.

Laws come from the assemblies in either an anarchist society or state society. Except state laws that are affecting a large number are made by a small number. Minority rule does not protect the individual. Now community assemblies in an anarchist society can have delegates who's role is only to communicate the beliefs and desires of said community to create larger scale agreements, and if the person doesn't fulfill that role they can be removed immediately. The founding fathers left out billions when they wrote the constitution.

No, I don't think the same can be said about the motivations of communists and capitalists. The motivation for a capitalist is to buy a bigger house, a better car, a bigger TV, etc. The motivation for a communist, at least in the type of society RK is talking about, is to live a sustainable existence that takes the environment and needs of future generations into direct account.

Capitalism is inherently driven by wealth accumulation. It's true that environmental responsibility can exist to some extent within a capitalist society, but so long as wealth accumulation takes priority over everything else I don't think environmentalism can be truly sustainable. Perhaps a capitalist system that regulates the market in a way that forces businesses to pay for externalities and/or heavily controls land management, waste management, pollution output, and other factors, but by then you're so far removed from what is typically thought of by market capitalism that you might as well be talking about a form of communism as far as most capitalists are concerned.

Not in the sort of society RK is talking about. No one is trying to say that all communists everywhere are never motivated by those sorts of things, we're just conceiving of a society where those motivations aren't primary like they are in capitalism.

And what capitalist society would that be? The primary goal in every capitalist society has been wealth accumulation. To change that not only would you need the majority of people within a capitalist society to ignore the governing rule of the society you live in and reject consumerism, but then you would also end up with far less employment because of far less demand. Capitalism is imply not set up that way, the "drivers" of industry are interested in the proliferation of economic development, not the slowing of it.

For that to happen you would either need all the heads of industry to be motivated by environmental concerns first and profit second or you would need some sort of government control that makes environmentalism profitable, which again flies in the face of the idea of market capitalism.

What, exactly, is so unrealistic about the idea of a society where people are not motivated by wealth accumulation but by creating a sustainable environment for themselves and the generations to follow?

Also, even if you're going to call that unrealistic, I would argue it is not equally unrealistic as the capitalist society you are talking about. As I said, the structure of capitalist society flies in the face of environmental interests trumping monetary interests. The structure of this communist society does fit perfectly with environmental interests (minor asterisk, as RK and my conceptions are a bit different, but at any rate the governing idea in his society doesn't run counter to environmentalism), it's simply the case that it has never existed on a large scale (well, that's not strictly true, but we'll not dwell on technicalities).

We know how people think, now, do we? Don't we have an exceptional insight into the nature of the human mind.

There are plenty of examples of collectivist and anarcho-collectivist societies in the past. Frankly, I don't think analogies to the past are extremely effective, but if you're going to go that route I think it weakens your argument rather than strengthens it.

No we're not. You're talking about that sort of society, I'm talking about a society where people's behavior changes because its structure has changed.

The structure of capitalist society puts profit first.

I think all the communists in the world should meet and create their own country. Maybe give them New Jersey or something like that.

At least one of you guys should read The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels so that you can actually know what you're talking about when you're talking about communism. You guys are having a hypothetical discussion about air.

@thegerg: There have been fairly large-scale anarcho-collectivist societies in the past. Perhaps not very centralized, but large nonetheless. As to them failing, that says nothing about why they failed, how they failed, or if past failure necessarily means future failure. Furthermore, you're again taking a very specific form of collectivism and applying its failure to all possible forms of collectivism. I think both RK and I have made it clear that we're not talking about Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, or most other actual manifestations of communist governments from the past.

No you're not., in fact you're talking about exactly the opposite.

Which means that private owners of industry try to accumulate capital and in so doing extract natural resources and cause environmental degradation with little regard to the surrounding environment and/or the generations that succeed them.

@sonicare: I might like that, except communists never seem to get along. Funny story, when Marx first moved to Paris he tried to create a pseudo-commune with two other families, himself, and his wife in an apartment, it didn't last long. Actually, Marx was notorious for not getting along with anyone but his wife and Engels. Anyways, unanimity leads to stagnation. I believe communism is a tool used to address specific problems, but it doesn't solve those problems with a snap of the fingers. Successful implementation would require individuals to have a critical mindset towards problem-solving, which in part means having individuals who are skeptical of its chances of success within the society. I'm also not keen on the idea of starting from scratch, I think the state and federal government are still practical necessities right now regardless of their aversion to communism. This is basically what Rush King and I were disagreeing about earlier. He'd probably like getting an autonomous state, I prefer to start smaller.

@capaho: Erm, the Manifesto was meant to be a broad political statement that could be used as a mission statement by communists everywhere (in the eighteenth century, I might add). It's more akin to the Declaration of Independence than the Second Treatise of Government. It probably has the least substance of Marx's works, not to mention that even the totality of Marx's works are hardly exhaustive of communist thought. RK, for example, is arguing for a form of communism that takes its philosophic underpinnings from individualist thought (arguing for the liberation of individuals from capitalist entities that restrict their personal rights and freedoms). Though I personally take some cues from Marx, it's less the Manifesto and more the ideas of social evolution, alienation in capitalist society, ownership of one's own labor, and structural approach to history and economics. I'm especially not fond of his rather callous view of history as a millstone, I believe he called it, or in other words I don't agree that communism can only take place first in an authoritarian form before it evolves into a more benevolent one.

No you're not. You're talking about scenarios in which the agents in a capitalist system exhibit different behavior with different results, that's behavior changing the structure and not the other way around.

They are inevitable. You have a system which encourages wealth accumulation with the means to do so in the hands of a select group of individuals. These individuals, motivated by profit and therefore by the most efficient means of accumulating profit, i.e. supply and demand, go about obtaining as much profit as possible, which includes expanding to regions that they have little experiential knowledge of and very little long-term interest in, and extracting their resources. This is the structure of capitalism, this is how it has worked since the days of Adam Smith.

Communism sounds great on paper, but it has failed everywhere it's been practiced. The implementation requires giving too much power to too few people.

Have you actually read it? You said that communism can only take place first in an authoritarian form, but that's not what Marx and Engels said.

The dictatorships that sprung up under the banner of communism were not true communist states. Marx and Engels placed an emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was actually their term for government by the people given that the proletariat is the working class. They wanted to turn the system upside down. Instead of having a small, wealthy elite ruling class that reaped the bulk of the benefits of the labor of others, they wanted the benefits of labor to be equally divided among all those who actually did the labor, which, under communism, would be everyone who was physically able. There would be no ruling elite whose benefits exceeded their contributions to the labor effort.

@RushKing: The fundamental flaw in communism is that people care more about themselves than anyone else. After that, Friends and Family. Finally, strangers. There will always be people who act in their self interest and will take advantage of themselves and others: either by leeching of the system or by taking control and changing the status quo to create their own "state".

@Jacobistheman: That's the fundamental flaw in communism? You do realize that the commun part of communism comes from communal, don't you? Caring more about yourself than others and acting in your own self-interest is not communal. Those characteristics are more commonly associated with capitalism.

That's exactly what Marx said. In his essay Private Property and Communism he refers to the initial stage of communism as crude communism and compares it to prostituting the worker out to the general community.

No I'm not. What form of capitalism doesn't rest on the acquisition of capital by owners of private industry?

What change in structure is going to take place? The only change in structure that could possibly result in environmentalism having a primary position within capitalism is to forcibly control the market to make it so, which flies in the face of market capitalism. The only other possibility for change is to change the attitudes and behaviors of the agents acting within the system, which as I said, is not structural.

No, you have a system which encourages work from a desire to do a specific type of work with the means to do so in the hands of of the workers themselves.

I never said they weren't applicable, I said I find the analogy to be of limited value. Besides, I'm not talking about different capitalist societies, I'm talking about our own society in an earlier stage. I find comparisons to Native American societies, for example, to be limited in value because we're talking about individuals with different sets of values and social circumstances.

I don't think it's narrow-minded, I think it's a realistic assertion of how humans operate within a capitalist system supported by centuries of evidence. You yourself haven't given any positive explanations of how the structure of capitalist society can change, so until you do it seems your view is just as narrow as mine save for the fact that you still hold on to a possibility.

That is basically the definition of capitalism, I don't see how you could change that and still have capitalism.

That's not changing the structure of capitalism, that's changing the behavior of those acting within capitalism. That's also what's happening right now and the results are not overwhelming.

Why is a system that benefits everyone within it utopian? There have been societies before that have rested on the principle of mutual benefit, that in itself is not utopian. I'm simply proposing a system where the producers of labor own the means of production, and therefore are motivated more by the preservation of the environment in which their business is based, unlike capitalist businesses which have the luxury of moving from location to location in order to extract resources, often leaving them damaged when they leave. There is a structural change in my system, there is no structural change in yours.

I don't view you as the arbiter of what is realistic and what is not.

Then I wasn't talking about a specific form of capitalism, I was talking about capitalist systems in general.,

You're not changing the structure of capitalism, you're changing the way different agents (e.g. the government, businesses, private citizens) operate within capitalism. You can have the EPA, for instance, but that doesn't all of the sudden make businesses want to be environmentally friendly. They are still motivated by profit and they will still shirk their environmental responsibility when they can if it means better profit.

And I'm saying you can't do that without changing the very definition of capitalism.

The structure of capitalism places profit in a primary position. I'm not saying environmentalist concerns can't have a prominent place in a capitalist system, but they will always be secondary to profit. Furthermore, the placing of environmentalist concerns in a higher or lower position within capitalist society is not dependent on the structure of capitalism itself but upon the behavior of agents acting within the capitalist system.

You can keep calling me narrow-minded all you want, doesn't make it true.

Agents of capitalism. Sounds so nefarious.

The structure is the problem, and if we changed it, we would no longer have capitalism.

Any kind of system that theone wants, I don't want. Any kind of system rushking wants, I REALLY don't want. Now you know that when they both want the same things that it's not going to end well for you.

What about my system?

Now, same system but with xenoscum and heretics to purge. On board yet?

Heretics to purge...? I'm in.

@airshocker: I'm hurt, I'm not quite sure I'll ever be able to overcome the loss of your approval. Perhaps I should ragequit life right now.

Also, I'm using agent in the sense of someone who is, to some degree, in charge of their own actions, but acting within an existing framework. There's no nefarious connotation there, I could talk about agents acting within a communist system in the same sense.

I also don't want the same thing as RK. He's more of an anarchist/revolutionary. I'm not talking about overthrowing society.

You can't remove profit from a primary position in capitalism and still have capitalism, at least not without introducing measures that seriously compromise the definition of capitalism. As I said before, you can mandate that the market be governed first by environmental concerns and then by profit, but most capitalists would argue that runs counter to the idea of capitalism.

A change in structure would be a change in the way the market operates at a fundamental level. Changing the attitudes of, say, the heads of industry does not constitute a change in structure, it changes the behavior of the people operating within that structure.

Oh okay, then we won't have to purge you.