NPR

[Username17]

But private property is almost a thing of the past anyway. Not just because the government is larger, though it is, but because of corporatism. Almost none of the means of production are actually held privately, they are held publicly by corporations. Ten years ago, 51 of the world's top 100 economies were corporations (the remainder being actual countries).

It really has nothing to do with the government seizing things or people rebelling or any of that shit. Private property is simply an obsolete concept and even capitalists are marginalizing it.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

How so?

[Username17]

How so?

Private property does not mean "you own your clothes" or even "when your grandfather dies, you get his watch". Property ownership means that you actually own capital-P Property. And that further you have full capital-O Ownership of it, and everything that entails - including being responsible for it. All the time.

That's simply not a very efficient way to run things. Anything. People have to sleep and shit, and one person can't be responsible for everything. So projects get collectivized, and responsibilities get distributed. And some of these are called communes and some of them are called corporations, but basically it's just the way shit gets done these days. Specialization and cooperation drive the economy, and at this point they do so totally.

Now under corporatism, the governance and profits of the collective are apportioned plutocratically, where the people who "bought in" more get more say and more of the profits irrespective of how much work they do or what leadership credentials they have or do not have. But it's still a collective. The "person" ultimately responsible for the actions of the property is just the corporate charter itself. There's no real person doing the ownership. Even "privately held" corporations are run the same way, there simply happens to be one plutocrat acting as dictator over that fiefdom. But if the corporation fails, the single owner can still walk away because the corporation is still an entity separate from him.

-Username17

[Goldor]

Because when this:

rocks up to take this:


away from you, you'll let them know who's boss!

(I know Frank was the one who said the fuzz would be there asking for them, but at the point where the government actually decides to go through with such a thing, they know to just let the military do it.)

I'll tell Sgt. Hoppenberg he needs to come by more often, and that he should have brought the rest of the platoon with him. I'll go get him some beers and we can figure out how we are going to set up defenses.

You are fairly well retarded if you believe that the military just follows orders, fuck, even the dumbass jarheads question shit far more than you people think that anyone in the military does. The majority would tell you to go fuck yourself if something like that happens, you would seriously go from having 3rd division to being able to muster a at most brigade. Likely half if your fucking lucky. And that's if they let you put them in cuffs and they don't move out with all your fucking gear. Fuck there was actually a popular conversation that dealt with us being ordered to do so, even the Col. When asked stated he wouldn't follow that order, and would instead have us gear up for the civil war that would fucking erupt shortly after the orders went down.

[RobbyPants]

So you're saying all the horror stories I've heard about green lieutenants leading groups of men into death traps are because the troops were all collectively stupid, and not because they weren't questioning orders?

Perhaps you've heard or Milgrim's experiment? And remember, these soldiers have it firmly ingrained to not question orders.

[Grek]

Repealling the second ammendment is not something that you could do in America with the current political climate. The fact that it is even debatable weather the military would accept orders to go around collecting guns from citizens makes it too politically untenable to pass congress. Assuming that you even wanted to do that in the first place. It's not required for the first stages of progressing towards a communist society, so if you want to do that at all, it's because you have something against guns, not because you want to disarm the other side before having an armed coup of the country.

Point of fact: a Communist Revolution is more akin to the Industrial Revolution, or the Green Revolution than the Revolutionary War. It would, in fact, go over much better if you didn't use military/police forces at all, and specifically stated that everyone can keep their personal possessions, including their guns. Instead, you just have the government leverage their massive amounts of capital to buy out of various corperations who's property the government wants/needs for their plans. Like, you buy Walmart, and then have Walmart sell goods at little-to-no profit while paying their workers a fair wage.

Once you've been at that for a couple decades, assuming that the whole "groceries are 50$ a week" thing is popular enough to keep the other parties from shitting all over your plans by reprivatizing all of the stuff you bought, then you can start in on the whole abolition of private property, inheritence, etc. and try for a classless society.

[mean_liar]

The problems come when communities clash over common resources. Say, water. Or arable land. ...just like primitive tribes did.

So? When that happens Communes settle such clashes in one manner or another, violence, negotiation, merging, ect.

Doesn't actually have anything to do with the fact that private property is given up voluntarily quite often without bloody revolution.

It's not giving up some property that's really at issue. It's all property.

I'd give special emphasis on settling the clashes by violence, since that's why anarchism has the inverse problem of sovereignty. In communism there has to be a collective decision that will eventually screw someone, and at that point the people need to trust that the screwers will act judiciously as they have no power other than the collective that's screwing them - no power to effectively revolt, as an absolute minimum measure, as they lack any self-sufficiency outside the collective; in anarchism, they need to trust that the screwers are insufficiently powerful to actually do anything.

Human nature being what it is, the screwers are not going to act judiciously and they're going to be powerful since they already absorbed or co-opted the weaker social forces and communities.

Honestly, without capitalism's social mobility between classes - and its encouragement for same - I don't see how communism can easily rectify the classes that will emerge once you eliminate the old ones.


...


Don't let Frank fool you. The one thing that you really, truly need to own is yourself. Once the collective tells you that they need you to do X, you don't even own yourself: apportioning of effort is something that the collective necessarily needs to decide, and you can't opt out.

[Kaelik]

It's not giving up some property that's really at issue. It's all property.

Yes, communes give up all the property, do you have any other completely irrelevant comments that you will attempt to use to defend to the death your assertion that private property as a concept can never be given up without violence despite the fact that you are objectively wrong because it has already been done many times?

[Username17]

Don't let Frank fool you. The one thing that you really, truly need to own is yourself. Once the collective tells you that they need you to do X, you don't even own yourself: apportioning of effort is something that the collective necessarily needs to decide, and you can't opt out.

What the fuck are you talking about? State ownership of the corporations does not say anything at all about how work is apportioned. Nor does it say anything about what positive and negative incentives are to be used to encourage people to work. Those are fascinating discussions, but totally orthogonal to the question of where the profits from factories go.

State property doesn't mean that magically everyone plugs their brains into a Borg Collective and slaves away for the good of the hive. It just means that all the corporations are government owned and any profits they make go to the general fund. Those funds could then be spent by an iron fisted dictator or a hyper democratic universal legislature or anything in between. The actual workers within the corporate entities might be assigned to them by some central work assignment system based on their aptitudes, or they might have to shop themselves around, submitting job resumes to various managers like we do right now. Or something else.

A good analogy is Alpha Centauri. Your government and your economy have a lot of different toggles on them, where your society can be structured differently in a lot of separate ways. The private property thing is literally just the ownership of the productive corporate entities and the apportionment of the profit from the value added of the people who work in them. Just that, nothing else. Whether you otherwise live in a Star Trek Utopia or Matrix Dystopia is a separate concern. Actually, it's a fuck tonne of separate concerns that all aggregate together to paint a picture of heaven or hell - or more likely just yet another way to structure society that has advantages and disadvantages that people can argue about.

But yeah, your primary problem seems to be that you're stressing out about "ownership of property" as if it applies to your shoes. It fucking doesn't. There have been cultures where no one owned their shoes and all that shit was considered to be on loan from the tribe, but that's not even relevant. We're talking about ownership of property in the sense that people who didn't own property before 1840 could not vote in most states. None of those states were going to let you vote because you fucking owned shoes, and the ownership of effects is not touched upon in primary communist theory at all. It's just a monstrous straw man, whether you know it or not. Marx did not give a flying rat's ass whether your belt was considered a publicly owned object that you happened to be wearing or a personally owned object that you happened to be wearing. And since then there have been communist groups that have answered that question a thousand different ways.

But the radical communism of the early Christian Church, where even secret ownership of personal items was a killing offense (Acts 4:32-5:11) is considered batshit insane, and more importantly completely pointless by most modern communists. When commies talk about Property, they are talking about big-P Property like Factories and Farmland, and not little-p property like your hat and glasses. In all cases.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

It's not giving up some property that's really at issue. It's all property.

Yes, communes give up all the property, do you have any other completely irrelevant comments that you will attempt to use to defend to the death your assertion that private property as a concept can never be given up without violence despite the fact that you are objectively wrong because it has already been done many times?

Oh? How many times as a successful national government? I must have missed those.

My point was that what communes do doesn't fucking matter, because they're pissant players in a very large game. Once their needs clash with someone else's, you necessarily have to rely on an arbiter that, lacking resources of your own, you are most likely powerless against.

[mean_liar]

What the fuck are you talking about? State ownership of the corporations does not say anything at all about how work is apportioned. Nor does it say anything about what positive and negative incentives are to be used to encourage people to work. Those are fascinating discussions, but totally orthogonal to the question of where the profits from factories go.

State property doesn't mean that magically everyone plugs their brains into a Borg Collective and slaves away for the good of the hive. It just means that all the corporations are government owned and any profits they make go to the general fund. Those funds could then be spent by an iron fisted dictator or a hyper democratic universal legislature or anything in between. The actual workers within the corporate entities might be assigned to them by some central work assignment system based on their aptitudes, or they might have to shop themselves around, submitting job resumes to various managers like we do right now. Or something else.

There are too many questions unanswered by that, and answers from communism paint a significantly different picture than what you're talking about.

Where do people live? What's the medium of exchange? Who lives in the shitty parts of town? Who lives in the nice parts? Without ownership of your land, who decides who gets to live where? Do you think they'll be living in the shitty parts of town? That's some low-hanging fruit.

There's a reason Lenin moved to the New Economic Policy, and it wasn't because of the great success of communism.

Socialism works because there are some goods and services that are more efficiently allocated through central planning, but assuming that necessarily holds for all vital goods and services is a mistake of hubris.

[Kaelik]

Oh? How many times as a successful national government? I must have missed those.

My point was that what communes do doesn't fucking matter, because they're pissant players in a very large game. Once their needs clash with someone else's, you necessarily have to rely on an arbiter that, lacking resources of your own, you are most likely powerless against.

Don't be like Roy and Zinegata:

You: "Eradication of private property is only going to happen through bloody revolution and aggressive enforcement. "

Me: "That is false. It has been done without revolution or aggressive enforcement many times."

Now, do you have to keep talking about irrelevant shit like it somehow supports your false assertion? Or can you just fucking say "Okay, I guess I was wrong, you can eradicate private property without bloody revolution or aggressive enforcement."

[mean_liar]

Ah, I see the problem now. I was writing in polite English.

When I write, "pissant players in a very large game. Once their needs clash with someone else's..." I'm referring to this:

[Allow me to translate to Kaelik-ese]

"You fucking moron, read the shit I wrote and stop shitting up this thread with your lies. What you and your mom did with your eight uncles in the 60s doesn't fucking matter, what matters is when you take a set of pretty fucking intense cultural norms that are held only in a subset of a state's population and attempt to enforce them across everyone all at once regardless of what they fucking believe."

It's not a good translation since I never really display a clinical lack of empathy or socialization, but it's close.

"Eradication of private property (UNDERSTOOD CONTEXT: across all society) is only going to happen through bloody revolution and aggressive enforcement".

Did you really think my argument was that any elimination of private property at all was necessitated by bloody revolution? That a monk could never be an ascetic without somehow assaulting himself? Why are you that stupid?

[Sashi]

This thread turned weird.

[The Lunatic Fringe]

Socialism works because there are some goods and services that are more efficiently allocated through central planning, but assuming that necessarily holds for all vital goods and services is a mistake of hubris.

This seems to be basically what Frank is saying when he distinguishes between Property and property.