I see this way too often here on Lemmy, so I want to post this. Starting a commune is legal in most countries. If you believe in communism, you can found a commune and show us all how great it is.
You lack money? Well, that is literally what stock markets and venture capitalists are created to solve. If you are ready for an IPO, you can sell shares to raise funds. If you are not, you can get Venture Capital in exchange for shares until you are ready for an IPO.
Getting rid of capitalism means you need to find a different way to obtain funding. And if your system relies on government charity (some government board handing you money) or on taking it violently, than your system sucks.
Ah, see, that’s a different question than how you get funding under communism under capitalism.
So what is the difference? How does it work under communism? Some planning committee? So when someone wants to make an independent news broadcast, episode of South Park, or Fuck the government T-Shirt, they need to ask the government commission?
What about more serious things like abortion pills, anti-conception, hormone therapy for transgender people, a religious symbol? You want to entrust almost every aspect of your life (everything you can get in exchange for your work) to a committee?
You’d rather entrust almost every aspect of your live to the benevolence of some people that do not have any oversight by the populous that they have power over by the means of controlling the capital?
I trust the greed of rich people. If people are willing to pay for something, at least some will invest in it to profit off of it.
Also, unlike with a commission, I don’t need a majority of them to do so. That’s the advantage of the capitalistic solution, you don’t really need much trust.
There is one problem with this: what’s profitable and what’s beneficial for society do not necessarily align.
Am I saying that we should give corporations a free run of the country? No, we should legislate them until they look like a models of virtue comparatively to now.
But the smart way to do it is to align their greed with our interests. As an example, creating a carbon tax is much better then government trying to implements specific green initiatives. The corporate greed will find efficient and innovative way to reduce emissions compared to the heavy handed and inefficient regulations the governments do.
If that is not possible, then just legislate them normally. Or even make a government run/funded competitors. In Slovak republic, insurance companies are private except one that is government run and serves as a lowest bar that others have to compete with.
Let corporations do what they do best, which is optimizing the economy and let governments regulate what needs to be regulated.
One example where that doesn’t seem to work is public infrastructure. There is just no way to make this profitable and simultaneously provide a service that actually meets the needs of the public in terms of availability and price.
Did I say it always worked? IMO USA is definitely too capitalistic right now. There are things like healthcare, utilities, emergency services, infrastructure and many more that are better of government run (or as mentioned above, at least have government compete), either because it is impractical to have real competition in these areas or because they are so important it is better for them to be inefficient than cutting corners.
But making the leap from this to communism is ridiculous IMO. Gradual improvements to the system that we know works because we live in it is the way to go.
Socialism light? There’s a beginning point somewhere.
I’m not well read enough on communism to know smart people’s ideas there, but the way I see it it gives room for any system of experimentation the people want. Maybe you pitch your idea to the government instead of investors, and they give you resources. In a system with small markets, you can start in the market and, if it does well, get upgraded to governments operated. “Communism” doesn’t mean one thing, and there’s a lot of room for variety, do we could we decide to try one of these systems but then switch to another, allowing better adaptation than capitalism where profit is the only way.
I take hormone therapy for transgender people (hi, I am transgender people) and I’m already at the whims of the government. Perhaps a communist government might not make it free for me if the political climate said no, but as long as it’s not outright banned and there is some alternate system to the government’s plan, I could still get it. That’s not far off where I am now, actually (Florida). Perhaps we could write this sort of going around other government to some degree (perhaps by small market) into the constitution as a layer of safety.
I’ve been saying “let the government do [x]” a lot, and if you’re from a neoliberal country you might have heard “excessive bureaucracy”, but that’s a result of capitalism ruining your government. Government doesn’t have to be bad, nor even a monolith. Most forms of communism I’ve heard of have multiple levels, from committees covering broad country-level goals to committees on local-level details, each level getting a fair degree of autonomy. But also, you can talk to or even get on the committees! They’re made of citizens like you, and with no corporate interests or lobbying!
First of all, thank you for a sensible and pleasant reply. It really is a breath of fresh 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 high 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 of people. But again, various things could be tried and capitalism has these issues to a lesser extent as well.
That is, if we have more than one try… 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 a 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 capitalist countries that are very nice to live in (like the Nordics, Switzerland, Netherlands, …). So we know this is possible and even more or less how to get there.
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.
If you think this, you are likely severely underestimating how important modern financial markets are to doing anything. You redistribute the wealth suddenly enough and I expect the great depression will seem like nostalgic good times.
More importantly, 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.
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.