Communism isn't some "radical" boogeyman, it's just a process to eliminate inequality. (Why should there be any inequality at all?) We don't need to be diminutive about relatively different ideas; that's unhelpful at best.
Communism is a very specific ideology with a well-known, well-documented content and intellectual history. It isn't "just a process" for anything.
Communism is evil because its ideology has no relationship with reality and will inevitably be a practical disaster anywhere it's implemented to the degree that it's implemented as a result. There's no escaping it any more than you can escape the laws of physics.
By that description, it sounds like a Bogeyman [1] to me.
Anyway, I live in a mostly Capitalist system, and it's also authoritarian. The only thing that seems to keep it from spiraling into complete evil is that a democratic Leviathan [2] happens to rule over it. (Of course, the capitalism is always in a constant assault for control).
What's funny to me is that I have several neighbors who fervently describe themselves as pro-capitalist libertarians. Yet, when I'm out of coffee or I need my driveway plowed, they do it for free. Why is that? Probably because we are all friends and have common culture and mutual trust.
When people invoke the idea of communism they usually mean: why can't we all have a society where we all act as neighbors. Sure, that's a daunting goal, of course. But, it's no less impossible as when people invented the idea of the social contract. Or any of the other million inventions that people said were crazy or impossible.
> What's funny to me is that I have several neighbors who fervently describe themselves as pro-capitalist libertarians. Yet, when I'm out of coffee or I need my driveway plowed, they do it for free. Why is that? Probably because we are all friends and have common culture and mutual trust.
I don't wish to presume anything about you specifically, but I find that your neighbor's behavior only seems paradoxical to those who don't understand what it's actually like to think like and be a libertarian. It's not that libertarians want to assign a price tag to every interaction (as if money were the only thing of value) it's that they would rather appeal to people's self interest to achieve social outcomes than resort to force (which they see as an inevitable result of any form of socialism/communism).
> When people invoke the idea of communism they usually mean: why can't we all have a society where we all act as neighbors. Sure, that's a daunting goal, of course. But, it's no less impossible as when people invented the idea of the social contract. Or any of the other million inventions that people said were crazy or impossible.
A distributist/communitarian might say that, regardless of whether we can be neighborly with all of mankind, we can certainly be neighborly with people who are actually our neighbors, and thus we should aspire to the former without sacrificing the latter. Yet sacrificing the latter is what I tend to see from those who invoke the idea of communism.
Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.
But most aggression comes from disgreement over who property belongs to! Whose property is Israel/Palestine again? Who "owns" the air and can expliit the resource of increasing its CO2 contents?
Is it obvious that humans can own large areas of land simply because their grandfather did? If so, then in the case of US, why do you start tracking property after the natives who originally used it were forced off the land? And so on.
Property is not a simple concept and something to easily be for or against.
Property is almost always disputed and almost always linked to use of force somehow.
Yes, but we recognize that as a disagreement over who has legitimate claim to the property. With taxes, we take property that practically everyone, except the most snobbish socialist intellectual, and certainly the courts, would recognize as belonging to the individual.
It's on a totally different scale in terms of how certain we can be that it's a violation of property rights.
I disagree that it is obvious. Most of the taxes are a cut of income that would not have been generated if taxes had not been invested 20 years ago in education and defense and infrastructure.
And who granted anyone else the ownership right to destroy the air I breathe and destroy the climate I depend on? Some taxes are a way to compensate for that.
It is more like a forced VC capital investment in your life... you get a big chunk of education and defense and security paid for you, but if you hit it big you have to pay a lot back for it.
If I mow your lawn without your asking, and you set up a lemonade stand on your lawn, and as a result, benefit financially from the lawn mowing service I provided, because it led to more people visiting your lemonade stand, that does not give me the right to threaten to imprison you to force you to pay me $20 for the service.
At least make the example straight: The majority of the neighborhood decided that all lawns should be mowed, because they don't want unmowed lawns that are bad for the economy.
And that neighborhood are the only ones who protect you from the squatters outside with nuclear weapons ready to take the lawn, so they think they have a say. (Unfortunately you are surrounded by neighbors on all sides, so they cannot stop rendering protection services due to laws of geometry). And they are the descendants of the neighbors who helped your great-great-grandfather take the lawn from the Indians in the first place.
I don't agree that there are cleae cut simple examples when it comes to property.
I'm not talking about unmowed laws that are bad for the economy though. That's a negative externality for which there are many more justifications for government intervention (though not for an income tax).
It you want to nitpick on my thought experiment, you could also bring up the fact that a lawn is on top of land, and that there are strong moral arguments against an individual having a natural right to absolute private ownership over land, which in turns provides various justifications for government dictating land-use rules and collecting taxes on land/real-estate.
But I was not trying to make a comment on negative externalities or the right to private land ownership.
I was making the point that the government spending money on something, and this action ending up benefiting you, does not grant the government the moral right to threaten you with imprisonment to force you to pay for that something.
Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression.
I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society.
Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
What evidence are you using to claim that laws against 'stealing' are one of the basic laws of society? I assume you mean after codified laws and surely after agriculture. And, probably post-enlightenment, right?
But, at that point, laws are no longer 'basic laws of society' but laws of the sovereign - to maintain their power and control. And, interestingly, the soverign is the only one allowed to steal. I'm suggesting that maybe those 'laws' are no longer useful or at least may need to be modified. And, I think it's a cop-out to not try to think beyond that.
But, let's go back before the king. Did people really own land then? Doubtful. Did they even have individual property rights? Probably not in the sense that we do today. Most 'property' was collective. And, people didn't own land, which was thought as sacred.
In fact, behavior within families and kin groups is not much different then it was 12,0000 years ago. And, of all families and kin groups that I know, I see young children taught to share within the group. Where that breaks down is when they encounter strangers or 'invading' groups. And, only then do they rely on the laws of the state to make transactions.
So, that's what I mean when I point out my neighbors' behavior. Their natural inclination is to share (at least with those of their kin group).
Again, I don't think capitalism or communism are the answer. I don't know what is. I just think we can imagine something better.
>8. If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold therefor; if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death.
>9. If any one lose an article, and find it in the possession of another: if the person in whose possession the thing is found say "A merchant sold it to me, I paid for it before witnesses," and if the owner of the thing say, "I will bring witnesses who know my property," then shall the purchaser bring the merchant who sold it to him, and the witnesses before whom he bought it, and the owner shall bring witnesses who can identify his property. The judge shall examine their testimony--both of the witnesses before whom the price was paid, and of the witnesses who identify the lost article on oath. The merchant is then proved to be a thief and shall be put to death. The owner of the lost article receives his property, and he who bought it receives the money he paid from the estate of the merchant.
>Plutarch, another ancient source for Draco, in his Life of Solon , claims that the penalty for the theft of an apple or a cabbage was death, and you could have someone made your personal slave if they owed you money. The writer also records that when Draco was asked the reason for making execution the punishment for most offences, the reply was that ‘Small ones deserve that (i.e. death), and I have no higher for the greater crimes.’
>The process of the law was one of political negotiation that involved everyone in the community. When there was a dispute, the elders met to discuss the punishments: their word was LAW. Offences regarded as unlawful included the unauthorised killing of a person, sacrilege, incest, adultery, theft, unauthorised assault, insult and neglect of kinship obligations. Punishments could range from making compensation over an agreed period of time to having to face a squad of spearmen, with only a shield and that person's ability to protect himself.
The reason laws against theft are universally found is that theft creates harmful incentives. It doesn't matter what stage of civilization we reach: the fundamental dynamics of multiple parties co-existing make theft harmful to creating economic value.
This is something I would argue is self-evident. Not sure why you're so desperate to question the moral principle that theft is wrong.
>I just think we can imagine something better.
Moral principles are timeless. There is nothing "better" than not stealing, because it is a basic requirement for a functioning society. The only type of configuration better than 'not stealing' is 'not stealing' + doing something good. But not stealing, murdering, assaulting etc are the foundational principles that a functioning society has to build on top of.
Ultimately every conception of rights is subjective, but property is generally recognized as that which we acquire through First Possession (a principle observed throughout the Animal Kingdom), and Homesteading (taking unclaimed natural resources and reconfiguring them into a more valuable resource).
First Possession at least has been shown in Game Theory simulations to lead to stable equilibriums, so it's not surprising that property rights are so widely observed. I think observance of the Homesteading principle naturally emerges from observance of the First Possession principle.
Where it gets fuzzy, in my opinion, is property rights over natural resources like land, which derive almost all of their value from their natural form, rather than the value done to them by their original appropriator.
How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later?
There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
>How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent?
How do we determine that you assaulted me? It's your word against mine. We're not talking about the complexity of determining the true account of events, which is obviously great. We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.
>What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case?
Then common law, which springs from the first principles of personal and property rights, would preside.
We'd have a similarly difficult time determining if a hockey fight classifies as assault. Or if in a traffic altercation, you stepping out of your car and aggressively approaching me justified my preemptive (or aggressive?) first punch.
>There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.
The system of laws being complicated does not mean that it is not generally straightforward to determine what a person has property rights to. The complexity comes from the edge cases, but most cases are not edge cases.
>We're talking about the complexity of establishing what property rights are. It's not complicated at all.
Okay so what are they? What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?
Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
Again, there are answers to these questions, but they are complicated and even within libertarian thought, people disagree about them.
>What makes your claim to own the things you own correct and someone else's invalid?
The fact that I made it, or acquired it from someone else through trade.
>Or more generally, how do you go from a world with no property rights, to one where everything has a defined owner, in a way that is simple and obviously fair?
The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that value-added thing.
The only 'artificial' private property is scarce natural resources, most importantly land, and that is because much if not most of its value comes from its natural form, rather than anything added to it by its original homesteader, and it is this class of property which society has a moral right to create rules/taxes on.
With respect to this latter class of property, once the rules on its use have been established (say a rule asserting that a property title owner must pay a rent equal to 1% of the value of their land to the government each year) anything the title owner earns in accordance with the rules (e.g. anything they earn on top of the 1% tax) is theirs by right.
And sure, these are reasonable answers, but they're starting to show complexity, and people aren't necessarily going to agree that they're obviously fair.
Society is complex, and trying to explain a principle and its application in all possible permutations will require an indepth explanation, but the overall concept is coherent and straightforward. I wouldn't call it ambiguous.
Regarding people disagreeing: people also didn't agree that ending ritual sacrifice and slavery were fair, but I don't believe many reasonable people would disagree on the general outlines of what private property is if the discussion is permitted to progress far enough.
I believe counter-notions are mostly a result of demagoguery and would dissipate in the face of reasoned inquiry.
Well for what it's worth, I think property is an effective economic system which should be utilised to the extent that it leads to good outcomes. I think arguing about a philosophical notion of property rights is ultimately pointless if a system that enforces them doesn't lead to better outcomes than one that flagrantly violates them.
I guess we can agree to disagree on that. I think if we step out of the philosophical, it's clear what private property rights are at the level of principle. True, there is a lot of disagreement in relation to specific cases, but I think that's due to superficial understandings people have about these cases, and that once the complexities of the given situation are elucidated, there would mostly be agreement on what a person has private property rights to.
As for outcomes, knowing what we know about incentives and how they affect the behavior of economic agents, and extrapolating the effect of the evolutionary processes of the market, it's inconceivable to me that violating private property rights would result in better outcomes in relation to increasing economic output over the long-run, than protecting them.
My impression is that completely unhindered property rights lead to ever amplifying inequality, as those who own capital are more able to earn money than those who do not.
I think a Capitalist system needs to be paired with a wealth redistribution mechanism to damp that amplification, such that inequality can only ever be maintained by constant effort.
EDIT: And while you may be right, I think being unable to conceive of ways in which you may be wrong speaks poorly of your imagination.
I don't believe that inequality justifies violence to force people to give up the currency they receive in private trade (to pay an income tax).
I also don't believe that inequality is a natural outcome of a market economy. The market will favor efficiency above all things, because it is an iterative process that rewards good utilizers/investors of capital with greater allocations of capital, and it is not efficient for 5 people to own and direct as much capital as 150 million people. More individual owners of capital means much more attention being given in the management of each unit of capital, resulting in higher returns on it.
The sources of income inequality need to be found in the government either not fulfilling its responsibility to manage the commons in the interest of the public, or in authoritarian prohibitions that disproportionately harm the less wealthy and the poor.
Free-market inhibiting factors that could be contributing to income disparity:
* high fixed-costs for participating in business. Fixed costs, unlike variable costs, punish small businesses. Regulations are known in the economics field as a source of fixed costs. A very basic example: you can't offer stock in your company on a stock exchange without having millions of dollars to pay lawyers. This excludes millions of small businesses from one of the best sources of capital: the public stock market. More on regulations causing an upward distribution of income: Working Paper: The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...
* high market transaction costs as a result of regulations and taxes. Why do high market transaction costs contribute to income disparity? Because non-market transactions internal to an organization are not subject to the costs imposed by regulations and taxes. This will result in large corporations having a competitive advantage over small ones that rely on market transactions for a greater portion of their activity. For example, a large corporation doesn't need to pay a sales tax to have its accounting department do an accounting job for it. A small corporation that pays an external company to do it does.
Fair question, the answer is that you cannot. However, note that I did not say libertarians reject all uses of force, only that "they would rather appeal to people's self interest to achieve social outcomes than resort to force".
I think we would both agree that the generosity of your neighbors represents the ideal. But if they weren't so generous, how you get them to share their coffee plow your drive way? Would you lobby for regulations to be passed to force them to stop hoarding their coffee? Have the police requisition their plow for the greater good?
Or would you offer to compensate them for their goods and services? And if they refused, would you peacefully resign yourself to some other means of getting your needs met?
The socialist often invokes the spirit of generosity with his rhetoric, but when others are (in his view) insufficiently generous, he is too quick to trade the pen for the club.
> What's funny to me is that I have several neighbors who fervently describe themselves as pro-capitalist libertarians. Yet, when I'm out of coffee or I need my driveway plowed, they do it for free. Why is that? Probably because we are all friends and have common culture and mutual trust.
Even if there is no money involved, you may repay such favors in the future when they ask you. So it's more like borrowing a favor.
> why can't we all have a society where we all act as neighbors
Why can't we have that within capitalism? What does "act as neighbor" even mean? Does it helping one another for free? That already occurs for small tasks.
With regard to neighbors, there is hard-wired reciprocity involved. And, if one doesn't reciprocate, they may eventually be cut off from future generosity. On the other hand, many people genuinely get pleasure out of helping others. And, there are certain classes of people to whom special treatment is given - like the elderly and children.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a communist, and I'm not completely against capitalism. Capitalism can be beneficial, especially in distributing resources. And, I understand and agree that capitalism is not a zero sum game (at least at the instant of the transaction). But, transactions are rarely equally beneficial. In fact, in the long run, transactions can actually harm one or more parties, especially those indirectly affected. And, based on my observations, it seems easiest to 'win at capitalism' via monopoly, deception, manipulation, trickery, and abusing intent.
Furthermore, what do we with those who are just unable to produce anything of value? it's implied that they just die.
So, generally, I'm not a fan of it (although I've also made a lot of money from it). But, what I dislike even more is the cop-out that it's somehow impossible for us to do better - that somehow 'natural laws' prevent it.
It's not really a donation if it's not voluntary. Whether someone should be supported by the government is an interesting question but calling taxes and welfare donations is doublespeak.
The way evil is used as a word by most people, your definition stretches far too wide. The connotation of "evil" is far more appalling than merely anything negative for human well-being. By your definition far too many things are evil to the point where the word is pretty mild, which is not how most people use it.
In short: you are doing poor communication to redefine it so differently from normal use.
Of course it's just a process. Capitalism is a process which centralizes surplus and power, i.e., increases inequality, and communism is a process which decentralizes surplus and power, i.e. decreases inequality. Calling communism unrealistic and disastrous is again just being diminutive.
Communists want for people who do productive work to have an equal say in how work is done and what happens to the product. Not complicated, not unrealistic, and certainly not an inevitable disaster.
In empirical terms, there's a lot more evidence for the disaster-causing tendency of capitalism than communism. At the very worst, the end result of communism is empirically unknown, since, to date, communism has not been allowed to flourish on a noteworthy scale.
Capitalism is a process that respects individual rights and in particular, contract law. It is a process that is responsible for more poverty reduction than any other in history, and for which there is a trove of evidence indicating that it boosts economic growth rates.
Communism is evil on a nightmarish scale because it advocates for violating an entire population's right to 1. their property, and to 2. engage in economic activity with other consenting adults.
Neither 1 or 2 are required for communism or socialism. Regarding #1, socialism distinguishes between personal private property and productive assets. Nobody is advocating for violating personal private property. And #2 is not something most mainstream socialists advocate for either, so it's mostly a strawman.
The only substantial difference between socialism and capitalism is the democratic control of the workplace. Capitalism's idea of a workplace is inherently totalitarian, socialism's is democratic. That's it.
It sounds like you are confusing communism with central ownership or state ownership. Communism is only concerned with the ability of workers to have meaningful control of work activity and output.
No I am not confusing anything. Marx laid out what mainstream Communism is, and that includes expropriating property from people, and denying the people the right to engage in voluntary economic interactions.
You may be confused as to what 'voluntary economic interactions' means, so I'll explain:
This would be any kind trade enter into by two consenting adults, like for example, doing a number of hours of work in exchange for a number of units of currency. By denying the right of employers to hire workers on any terms other than giving workers all of the revenue generated by the business, communism denies the right to engage in the aforementioned class of voluntary economic interactions.
I really recommend you think about these concepts. You seem to have a very shallow understanding of what communism is, and the implications of what it advocates for.
To advocate for radical reconfigurations of society, brought about by force, without thinking through the moral implications, is very reckless and morally irresponsible.
You seem to have a very particular idea of one kind of communism, and you seem happy to interpose it into my opinions.
Having said nothing about how or even if communism should be brought about, I certainly acknowledge that it seeks to bar certain apparently voluntary economic interactions on the grounds that they are not as voluntary as they first seem.
Take the rest of your strawman with you, I have no use for it.
>I certainly acknowledge that it seeks to bar certain apparently voluntary economic interactions on the grounds that they are not as voluntary as they first seem.
It would bar transactions that any court of law would find to be consensual. It's not a just system.
You're right I can't criticize your views that much because you do not actually outline what they are beyond vaguely saying they're communism but not saying specifically what that means in terms of what happens to the property we earn in private trade, and what private trades we're allowed to engage in.
That suggests to me that you are hiding what you truly believe in because you know it is not palatable while still promoting the 'communism' brand, knowing full well what most interpret that as.
No, to the extent that Communism can be considered evil, it is because it leads to terrible outcomes. You can argue that the outcomes are a consequence of not enforcing a property system, but it's still the outcomes themselves which are bad.
The advocacy of violating human rights, in denying people a right to engage in voluntary economic interactions, and to the property they earn in said interactions, is also evil.
First of all, without the principle, human economic activity would simply be impossible. In fact, it is the most central principle of all human rights. Without homesteading, we cannot own our own bodies. Appropriation of natural resources is the process by which we assert a right over the bodily material that food (originally unclaimed natural resources) turns into.
Second, if the government merely stopped protecting private property from aggressive seizure, that would be one thing. But communism advocates the government being the primary instrument by which people aggressively prevent others from existing as independent economic agents (homesteading natural resources).
>without the principle, human economic activity would simply be impossible.
Nonsense, non-captialist societies may have been less effective, but they were obviously still engaged in economic activity. Unless you define economic activity to mean "trade within a property system" in which case it's a meaningless tautology.
> Without homesteading, we cannot own our own bodies. Appropriation of natural resources is the process by which we assert a right over the bodily material that food (originally unclaimed natural resources) turns into.
That seems like an unnecessarily morbid way to derive the kind of morality you're talking about. (Seriously, we can only have rights because we turned food we owned into our flesh?) I prefer to define my morality in terms of people not property.
>But communism advocates the government being the primary instrument by which people aggressively prevent others from existing as independent economic agents
By which you mean, prevent them from withholding resources from other people.
Again, I'm not saying Communism is good, I just object to the way you're arguing that the problem is breaking some arbitrary principles you like, rather than the very real suffering it caused.
>Nonsense, non-captialist societies may have been less effective, but they were obviously still engaged in economic activity.
There has never been an economic system that has has zero defence for private property rights (in the abstract sense of one having exclusive rights to that which they appropriate from the natural world or receive from another legitimate owner). The soviet union had small privately owned farms. North Korea has black markets that are widely tolerated by authorities. But even at a more basic level, having an exclusive right to the food that the state gives you is an exercise of private property rights. Economic existence would not be possible with zero observance of economic independence between individuals.
>That seems like an unnecessarily morbid way to derive the kind of morality you're talking about. (Seriously, we can only have rights because we turned food we owned into our flesh?)
I see it in an opposite way. I see property as really our own person. I use the term 'property' because that is better understood. But morally, I think it's more appropriate to see the things we own as an extension of our person, and not as a separate class of matter we call property.
>By which you mean, prevent them from withholding resources from other people.
Withholding resources you created through your own effort, or acquired through private trade trade, is self-defense in my opinion. I think this is common sense and consistent with how we commonly define rights.
Maybe on paper; in practice, communism has been a process of structuring inequality differently: the criteria is how good are you in serving your current leader/mentor/sponsor and how lucky/good are you in choosing your next one.
While this criteria exists in all systems, it is the most defining one in communism and other authoritarian systems.
This is a classic 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. If you would like to avoid the fallacy, you could make arguments such as 'more socialist systems are associated with _ positive outcome', or socialism is more moral because _. I lean strongly against socialism, but would prefer everyone made better arguments for their causes; G.A. Cohen is a good starting point for moral/ethical arguments in favor of socialism.
Update: parent comment was substantially changed since my comment was written. It originally said something to the effect of: 'but true socialism has never been implemented'. Perhaps I should have quoted it to avoid this confusion/deception.
This isn't a no true scotsman, that commentor is correct. The state building ideologies of the 20th century are inherently authoritarian, but if you think they're the only components to socialist thought then you're simply uninformed. There are a multitude of anti-authoritarian socialist schools of thought, most notably anarcho-communism. There's also mutualism which is a market based socialist system.
Socialism isn't about state control, the socialist states that existed (and still do sort of exist, notably Cuba) see themselves as transitionary states between capitalism and socialism, up until the time they're no longer necessary (I don't defend this approach, there's multiple reasons why I believe this is wrong). These states never claimed to be practicing socialism, but they remain socialist states because of their end goal.
If you're interested in stronger well structured arguments for socialism, from an anti-authoritarian perspective I recommend reading the writings of Bakunin and Proudhon for more theoretical looks at property and the state. Kropotkin is great for anarcho-communism. Here's some books I recommend with free links:
And not particularly an ideology book, but an interesting firsthand recount by George Orwell of his time fighting with Socialists and Anarchists against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War which is called "Homage to Catalonia"
I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to provide this information. I wish more people understood that communism and anarchism are legitimate forms of government that haven't been well tried and are widely misunderstood.
You have no moral right to use violent force against someone to force them to give up their private property for the crime of having more than another person. The goal of eliminating resource inequality absolutely does not justify this violation.
What you say would be true if property would be an issue with two people when they meet one-to-one.
There are different kinds of property on a sliding scale.
1) Your personal belongings, tools of trad and other things needed for living are considered yours by everyone in practically all cultures. That's property protected by ethics and morality.
2) Anything past that is service that society/government provides for people living in advanced society. It's not a moral issue anymore. It's a issue of society agreeing on tax rate and forms of property protection.
It would be helpful to at least acknowledge that most people dont' agree with unlimited property rights morals and stop preaching like it's god given truth.
That is just an arbitrary distinction to justify your greed for the property of others.
We either have a moral right to make exclusive use of natural resources or we do not. Whatever argument you make for the right to appropriate natural resources as 'personal' property can be applied to the right to appropriate natural resources as 'non-personal' property.
These debates get very philosophical, but when you step out of the theoretical for a moment, and think about what it means to tax someone's income, it's self-evident what property rights are, and that violating them is an authoritarian infringement upon human rights.
Taxing income requires a law demanding that a person disclose personal information on all of their private income to the government. Anyone who refuses to surrender their privacy and disclose this extremely personal information faces the potential punishment of being thrown in prison, where they are kept in a small enclosure, and where they often develop mental illness, and suffer from physical and sexual abuse. This is overt mass-surveillance enforced through threats of incarceration.
Then, once a person has disclosed this personal information under threat of imprisonment, a tax on income requires demanding that people hand over a share of this currency that they've received in private trade. This tax debt is unlike other types of debt. It's a debt obligation that a person assumes without their consent.
If I receive currency in private trade, that's my property. If you came up to me in the street, and demanded I give you a share, and attacked me when I refused, you would know, instinctively, that you're being an aggressor, and so would every bystander who witnessed the assault. It's merely the obfuscation provided by using layers of government intermediaries that obscures this fact when you do the same thing through the political process.
>We either have a moral right to make exclusive use of natural resources or we do not.
Others don't have the obligation to protect what you think is your right. Imagine the value of your property rights, if neither law nor law enforcement would protect it.
>it's self-evident
If most people disagree with you, it's not self evident. No amount of sidestepping arguments of others and continued preaching is going to convince others. Essentially you are just stating your ideology and calling it self evident.
This is like abortion issue where minority of people asserts that fetus has rights but majority don't see it.
>Others don't have the obligation to protect what you think is your right.
True, but they also don't have a moral right to violate my rights.
If the government merely stopped protecting private property from aggressive seizure, that would be one thing. But thanks to "social democracy" (demagogic democracy), the government has become the primary instrument by which people aggressively seize the property of others.
>If most people disagree with you, it's not self evident.
I disagree that most people disagree with me. Most people do not consider the steps involved in money that someone earns going into their own bank account thanks to government intervention.
If they did consider it, I believe it would be self-evident to most what property rights are, and that violating them is an authoritarian infringement upon human rights.
>If they did consider it, I believe it would be self-evident to most what property rights are, and that violating them is an authoritarian infringement upon human rights.
So, you work on the assumption that me and most of the people you argue against are just misinformed and if you preach to them enough, this self evident universal morals is revealed to them?
>So, you work on the assumption that me and most of the people you argue against are just misinformed and if you preach to them enough, this self evident universal morals is revealed to them?
Yes, though I don't consider it preaching. I consider it informing.
There is a silverlining to loss of financial privacy due to taxes. It enables insurance. It reduces principal agent problem when you have many layers of employees. It enables safer voluntary transfer of wealth. It gives you some leverage against government by shopping tax jurisdictions for your business.
You can provide your personal information voluntarily, and all the benefits you mention would be conferred from this, without any privacy rights being violated.
There have been nowhere near enough actual trials of communism to conclude anything fully. The core examples were all poorer countries with various problems, corruption… To reject communism as a concept over the atrocities of Stalin et al is as reasonable as rejecting capitalism because the U.S. was built on slavery and the genocide of first peoples.
The atrocities were real, and they did connect to economics, but to just assert that capitalism is the slavery of U.S. history or that communism just is gulags and bread lines is extremely short-sighted. Neither system was anything like the core principles of the economic models (which are just models, so we should reject anyone who focuses only on the models and not on practical reality, but we can't treat each real-world case as the definitive case either).
While you are right, many people (e.g. Hayek) argue that collectivism entails authoritarianism and control. That the two are inextricably linked, due primarily to the local knowledge problem.
I'm not necessarily arguing that that is the case just trying to explain why people make this argument. The idea is that, logically, any economically communist country will, by definition, eventually come to resemble the Soviet Union, China, and other negative instances.
We can debate whether or not that is so, but I think it's a legitimate debate to have, especially being that all known examples have in fact worked out that way.
All you're saying is that attempts at communism have all had major problems. That's true, but it's not enough to be conclusive.
If you want to pick examples that point various ways, you can note that Cuba has corruption, lack of democracy, is an impoverished island suffering the effects of significant economic embargoes in the global system and yet still vies for having one of the best health care systems. They even a top country in providing doctors to serve abroad in troubled places!
And the Soviet Union was a horrendously corrupt place that failed in most
respects to live up to communist ideals and yet still managed to compete
technologically with the richest countries on the planet despite being
economically far far far weaker in fundamentals. The U.S. only barely beat the
Soviets in the space race etc while being massively richer. The Soviets had
many orders of magnitude more losses in WWII also.
The history of Communism is one where anti-communists did everything they could
to undermine any success, the trials were full of corruption and abuse, and
even still they had notable successes.
The kibbutzen failed not strictly because all the ideas were unworkable. They
failed because they had to function economically in a larger context. None of
them had wealth along the lines of successful capitalists either. Capitalists
have only ever operated capably by controlling a lot of capital or getting
subsidy, at least in the form of law enforcement that serves the side of
capital.
We can conclude that all attempts at communism so far have had serious flaws.
We can also conclude that capitalism has always had serious flaws too. Anyone
who takes a polarized one-sided view on this stuff can be rejected as just
being dogmatic. Piketty is not one of these one-sided dogmatic people, he's
actually interested in studying empirical evidence and not concluding more than
the evidence can truly support.
That's a bit of an understatement. It has a pretty much 0% success rate, for both coercive and voluntary attempts.
> capitalism has always had serious flaws too
Yes, but nothing like the communist failures, and capitalism has had incredible success stories.
> The Soviets had many orders of magnitude more losses in WWII also.
Nobody doubts the heroism and sacrifice of the Red Army in WW2. That's a whole 'nother topic, though.
> The U.S. only barely beat the Soviets in the space race etc while being massively richer.
The USSR was able to direct massive resources at single problems, at the sacrifice at most everything else, but the US could do it with little sacrifice.
> did everything they could to undermine any success
Nobody made the communist countries perform mass slaughter.
> The kibbutzen failed not strictly because all the ideas were unworkable.
They couldn't feed themselves. No communist system has ever been able to feed itself. All have required imports from capitalist economies, or starved, or tolerated capitalist farmers.
> Nobody made the communist countries perform mass slaughter.
And communist ideas also had zero to do with those countries committing mass
slaughter.
Communism, even in a very flawed form, has indeed succeeded. See Cuba. The
main reason they would be wealthier with capitalism is because the U.S. would
have proactive economic ties instead of working to isolate them. Given their
isolation and inherent lack-of-wealth relatively speaking, communism there is
at least in a state no reasonable person can describe as 0% successful, even if
you have points of criticism.
In terms of kibbutzen, you do realize that the entire premise of
self-suffiency, i.e. sustinance farming, is basically the definition of
poverty, right? I mean, the whole premise that a small community can achieve
for themselves in isolation a whole decent standard of living is nonsense. We
acheive the greatest standards of living through widespread connection in
larger groups on larger scales. Trade and all and specialization… No effort for
tiny isolated communes could ever achieve the quality of life of large
cosmopolitan economies, That issue isn't a strictly communist vs capitalist
one.
Communism is indeed a simplistic model that is unworkable in a rigid dogmatic
sense, just like anarchy or capitalism. There's no example of pure version of
any of these ever existing.
Being closed to discussing the actual ideas of communism by just talking about
Stalin's atrocities or tiny communes failing is a good way to just close
yourself to actually engaging with the intellectual questions. Obviously, all
philosophical / political principles are distinct from the complexity of
real-world economic practice. We can still discuss the principles as a way to
think about and explore the issues. Communist principles, as ideas, have
nothing to do with mass slaughter.
..simply do not produce enough to sustain themselves. Capitalist farmers do, with a surplus they sell. All such voluntary collectives have collapsed (unless they get subsidies from the government).
> have nothing to do with mass slaughter
I strongly suggest reading "The Black Book of Communism". Every advocate of communism needs to read it, if only to prepare an answer.
You're right that nothing in the principles of communism suggest mass slaughter. But those who try to implement it time and again resort to it. The reason is fairly straightforward - people resist having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives. The response is to kill them.
I'm not an "advocate of communism". And it's nonsense to say that capitalist farmers produce enough to feed themselves as a response to my point about internal isolation. No capitalist farmer with the same amount of resources and wealth as a kibbutz would be all that productive without utilizing the benefits of the rest of our complex market economy and what that provides to them. In other words, it's the larger context that is the factor, not the internal structure of the farm. The kibbutzen were only communist in an internal way, not living in a communist world.
"having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives" is also not a principle of communism. Forced labor is not a communist value.
In simple terms, capitalist farmers produce a surplus, kibbutz farmers produce a deficit. Kibbutzen operate within a market economy and have all the resources of it that are available to the capitalist farmer - they still can't make a go of it.
> not a principle of communism.
Collective ownership of the means of production means confiscating it.
> Forced labor
When the collective decides that certain work must be done, and with no market forces, that means assigning people to the jobs. I.e. forced labor.
Anyone who views any of these ideas with a rigid dogma is misguided. The broad scope of varied ideas that fall under the concepts of communism do not exclude the concept of markets. Markets are extremely valuable.
If you wanted to say that there are major fundamental problems with having no markets, I'd agree completely. Communism is not a set of ideas necessarily anti-market.
Or, to be pragmatic, if we agreed for this exchange that "communism" meant precisely an economic structure without markets, then I'd agree that's simply unworkable. All of my points in this thread rely on my assumption that the term "communism" refers to a wider scope of ideas and models, some of which have some merit but which nobody ever should dogmatically advocate (nor should they dogmatically reject as being synonymous with Lenin/Stalin/Mao).
To the best of my understanding, market socialism is just worker coops operating within a traditional market economy. That would mean it's not an actual political ideology.
The only important question in terms of test subjects dying is whether they
don't die under some other circumstance. The U.S.S.R and Chinese dictatorships
were/are horrendous. On the other hand, Cuba has major ethical problems but
subjects dying isn't these days really among them. Cuba does a better job of
keeping people healthy and secure than the U.S. does. There's no homeless sick
people in Cuba basically. Everyone gets quality medical care even though the
country is massively poorer in fundamental resources than the U.S.
The people dying in the cases you are referencing did not die because of the ideas of communism. The atrocities were carried out in the name of communism but had no basis in actual communist ideas.
You can say the same thing about National-Socialism or any other ideology out there. There are just not enough countries to try them all on, and I am not sure why should we...
National Socialism (i.e. Hitler) was based fundamentally on nationalism and racism. We can reject it because the principles themselves are unethical. We can reject it even if it had succeeded economically!
If you want to make an argument that the principles of communism are unethical, that's an independent argument from the claim that certain historic attempts had various atrocities and therefore you reject the principles (even though many of the atrocities are not related to the principles — Stalin disappearing his political enemies has no basis in communist principles…
1. My argument was about "National Socialism and any other ideology out there", you focused only on the first part. Even if you filter out unethical ones (not sure how, but let's say you can), there would still be too many to try, and not sure why should we keep trying theories instead of letting the society evolve in a natural way.
2. Specifically about giving communism a fair trial despite all past failures because it is "ethical": no thanks. I find its principle of "dictatorship of the proletariat" unethical and proven disastrous.
3. Stalin disappearing his political enemies was rooted at least in part in Lenin's cornerstone principle of "democratic centralism" which was critical ingredient for the success of the communist revolution. Trying to decouple the two doesn't do history justice.
The point is that you should argue why you find "dictatorship of the proletariat" unethical and not confuse the difference between ethics and economic viability.
There's definitely philosophical problems with communism and communist thinkers of various sorts. No denying that. But the screwed up crappy attempts at something like communism simply don't invalidate all of the principles which must be considered separately.
Basically, if you run a shitty version of an experiment, you don't get to then claim you proved the null hypothesis. It's one thing to say "we can't afford to experiment" and another to say "we had [shitty] experiments and so now we can conclude things."
You could argue for no more trials and still accept the fact that we never got any good trials from which to conclude enough about the real principles.
> We can reject it because the principles [nationalism and racism] themselves are unethical
I'd also contend that it's unethical for a society to reward all people the same regardless of effort and talent.
Should I make as much money as a singer as Taylor Swift? I have terrible pitch. I can't write music. I can't play an instrument. I have no stage presence.
Now, you might say that based on my talents, I shouldn't be allowed to be a singer at all. But not allowing someone to choose what they do with their life also seems unethical.
If deaths caused by leaders purporting to advance communist ideals can be attributed to communism, then how many have died at the hands of those purporting to advance capitalist ideals? Would it be reasonable to attribute these deaths to capitalism as well? I really don't these type of conclusions are a positive contribution to economic discourse.
Are there significant examples of that in history? I would be looking only at governments causing the deaths of their own citizens. I don't think it'd be fair to count foreign wars there.
EDIT: Just to be clear, i'm not implying that they do not exist. Genuinely don't know of any and would be curious if you do.
The great famine of 1876 [1] in Bengal is a possible example. I'm not very familiar with it, but it seems that exports of grains were at an all time high while an estimated 5.5 million people starved to death. Grains were allocated to maximise revenue, and feeding the poor was not the most lucrative option. Of course reality is more complicated than this short paragraph, but this tragedy doesn't reflect well on laissez-faire...
That is certainly an interesting example. I'm somewhat tempted to say that that feels like a consequence of colonialism moreso than capitalism, though?
I'm not sure. It seems like the British forced India to export its grain. They may have been paying higher prices, but that's not made particularly clear, at least not from the article. And of course, they'd have to be paying pretty substantially higher prices to cover also the very high costs of transport at that time, especially for such a bulky commodity as grain.
That being said, it's certainly possible for something like that to happen in principle. That is, a country exporting a product that its citizens need because others are willing to pay more for them.
I suppose though, the capitalist would argue that that would enrich the exporters of that product, causing them to spend more money in their hometowns, thereby enriching the local population sufficiently to compete with the prices paid by foreigners for whatever the product is.
Two potential problems with that, I guess are:
1. The means of production of product X being owned by foreign companies, which is not uncommon.
2. Even if they are owned locally, the owners of the capital might buy mostly imported items, stimulating the economy comparatively little.
It's certainly an interesting issue. One that is probably best resolved by an empirical analysis of foreign investment and laissez-faire policies in relation to income growth for the poorest people of those countries. Certainly there are great success stories, e.g. South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil maybe to a lesser extent? Cuba is probably the closest thing to a success story in the contrary case (communist policies), and that doesn't seem like much of a success.
American civil war is probably the clearest example. That was a war to defend the private ownership of the means of production. Then there are atrocities committed by capitalist governments, for example the Tasmanian genocide. [1]
Since I am headed for bed, let me preemptively quote from the Georgia's declaration of seperation [2]:
>> The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.
Thanks for the response. But is the civil war really a great example of that? Slavery seems largely orthogonal to capitalism. That's a war that could have happened in a communist or capitalist country.
Thanks for that. That seems like a pretty solid example. In reading about it, I would nitpick one detail that seems non-capitalist to me: they didn't allow the currency to float. This is a pretty big deal, from my admittedly limited understanding of economics.
If you don't allow the currency to float, your import/export ratios can't respond to market forces, and in a globalized economy this can be catastrophic, especially during a global downturn. To quote from the wiki:
"One of the junta's economic moves was fixing the exchange rate in the early 1980s, leading to a boom in imports and a collapse of domestic industrial production; this together with a world recession caused a serious economic crisis in 1982, where GDP plummeted by 14%, and unemployment reached 33%"
Of course, you can't prove a counter-factual. There's no way to know for sure what would have happened if they hadn't done this. But it seems to me that this, at least somewhat, mitigates the significance of this particular example.
Carrying a communist (or capitalist, or ...) banner around as you pillage doesn't make you a communist (or a capitalist, or ...). Attack the system, not those who usurp its name. Only then we can have a discussion.
I am painfully aware that this argument seems prone to a "no true Scotsman" defense, but really, the basic principles of communism are very much at odds with many of its famous "proponents" (usurpers).
Usually communism requires totalitarianism. I don't know of any examples where communism didn't require totalitarian as long as we are talking about the country level. But I'd like to hear some counter examples I'm not thinking of.
No countries actually had communism, but if we're talking about socialism, then you're mostly right. My opinion is that there are many reasons for it, including:
- Those countries were poor and without sufficiently established democratic institutions.
- Those countries had to immediately mobilize to defend from richer capitalist countries (lead by the US) trying to undermine them in any possible way. Constant defense mode leads to totalitarianism.
That doesn't mean that socialism requires totalitarianism by nature.
Central planning is not a requirement for socialism.
In fact, the only significant difference between capitalism and socialism is a democratically controlled workplace, which is inherently less authoritarian than capitalistic totalitarian workplace governance.
It's also ironic how people constantly conflate "democracy" and "capitalism" on one hand, and "totalitarianism" and "communism" on the other, while completely accepting totalitarianism during a significant portion of their life -- their workplace.
>> Only now can we fully appreciate the correctness of Engels' remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of combining the words “freedom” and “state”. So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.
And millions were killed by fascism, by colonialism, and by other -isms. There is nothing inherent to communism/socialism that necessitates killing, plus historical context is a thing.
