Dude why do people think communism means you can’t own anything. There’s a difference between private and personal properties. You can own a house, and a car, hell even a whole farm. What you cannot do is hold capital.
Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that’s a misunderstanding of communism.
That’s not a feature of communism, it’s a compromise based on the recognition that private ownership produces more efficient outcomes at scale. According to the collective farming wiki:
A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by private farms despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.
No one wants to recreate the Great Famine (The most deadly famine in human history - caused entirely by communism and specifically collectivized farms).
There’s also Holomodor in the USSR which lead to similarly deadly outcomes.
Fun fact for you: The famines were largely caused by Stalin appointing a guy to do agriculture policy who knew less than nothing about agriculture. He forced farmers to plant crops too densely because “communist crops will not compete for nutrients” causing the crops to just die. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Most dictators are absolute troglodytes and Stalin was no exception.
One point in time does not constitute a robust conclusion. Consider any time before and how collectivism did yield considerable agriculture gains for the USSR. Like do we really think they fought WW2 with the same or less agricultural efficiency they had before their revolution?
“A fledgling Nation failed after the most powerful nations on earth collectively conspired to hold it back and ideally topple it so every similar nation most also fail.” And these people were paranoid for some reason, could you imagine?
Oversimplified for brevity, but basically: You may not be able to OWN a farm in the sense that the land itself is collectivized (not even always true under socialism, depends on specific policies and also whether you consider the “farm” to be a different entity from the land it’s sitting on, in that case you often own the farm itself, just look at home ownership rates in socialist countries), but you can USE and WORK ON the farm to generate products for yourself and society at large. I don’t see it as that different practically from the perspective of the farmer, since they’re still living on the land and taking advantage of its productivity.
I think that’s certainly better than renting or mortgaging the land and having to deal with landlords and banks. Collectivization usually freed farmers from their obligation to their landlord or private bank and they just continued farming as normal. It’s the landlords who had their “livelihood” taken away (i.e. land that they owned but someone else was living and working on), not the farmers doing the actual work.
Perhaps you have a source on the collective farms of the Great Leap Forward years in Communist China, or a URL that points to the collective farms in the Ukraine and how it made the farmers better off?
There are no unbiased sources. Zero. Because that’s not how politics or the world works.
Also, I fail to see how they’re badly cited. It’s literally a giant list of links to books, historical records, news articles, and write-ups by other socialists that are also cited.
The sources range wildly, some are just images and links to podcasts or articles. For example the “How many people did the Great Leap Forward kill” link just goes to a Reddit comment on r/communism where the OP just says “it’s fine… there were famines all the time in China!”.
Because in practice the line between capital and personal property is very thin. Can a car or apartment not be used to generate income in a modern economy?
When the soviets were in power they would force multiple families under one roof (kommunalka). Think 4-8 families sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Each family was given just one room and all housing was considered communal housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment?wprov=sfti1
After Stalin’s death families began receiving single family apartments due to massive housing reform by Kruschev, but were hastily built and called ‘khrushchyoba,’ a cross between Khrushchev’s name and the Russian term for slums. That by the way still leaves a multigenerational period from 1917-1954 where the kommunalka would have been the primary unit of housing.
You can generate money with a car or a farm. The whole problem with capitalism is getting money without working because you let people work with your stuff. So owning a car and use ist as a taxi is fine with communism. Having a taxi company is not. But you can form a taxi company with others. The difference is no one has financial power over others. No one just profits because he/she is the owner. There are people in charge but they are in charge because they have the knowledge and ability not just because they own everything and can do what they want.
People accuse leftists of idealist thinking but in what fantasy world are you thinking your personal savings from selling your labor is ever going to come close to what would be considered “capital” in the sense being discussed here?
You’re right that wealth is concentrated, but I was saying that the assets are collectively owned. For example I am a shareholder of Amazon, a publicly-traded company that Jeff Bezos owns a large stake in. So Amazon is “collectively owned” but each share gets one vote instead of one person.
Shares only give you voting power if you have a massive amount of them. In the vast majority of cases shares function as either a place to store wealth to protect it from inflation or as speculative gambling, the majority of use cases is not to signify ownership. I would not classify that as collective ownership, maybe only in theory if you don’t look into it too much but real world application of shares is definitely not collective ownership.
I’m very much in favour of businesses being actually collectively owned through a coop business model though.
It’s not extracted it’s combined with labour to produce higher output than labour or capital on their own.
For example a worker with a shovel could only dig a small hole a day, but with the injection of capital (ie a backhoe) they can dig many more holes. The worker can increase their pay compared to what they would’ve made with just a shovel and the person that provided the backhoe can also generate a healthy return for their capital contribution.
How is it healthy that some rich investor gets to play golf all day because he can afford to buy backhoes and hire people to use them? How is it healthy that he earns more money if he pays them less, or that he alone is in charge of resources that a whole community worked to produce? What is healthy about any of this?
What you are describing is the entire fucking premise of socialism: workers cannot afford the means of production, so production ends up controlled by a handful of wealthy capitalists with perverse incentives and no loyalty to the rest of the human race. An entire tradition of thought is dedicated to how unhealthy that is.
Again, capital is extracted from labor. Who do you think built the back hoe? It didn’t fall off the back hoe tree. Workers built it, workers designed it. If some capitalist pig didn’t own it, then the laborers could just use it.
Even a labourer who has saved up can buy a back-ho. The backho could have been produced by a communist country or work co-op. Who produced the back-ho is not important.
The important thing is that value is stored, invested and combined with labour to make everyone better off. This is why wages are higher in countries with more capital such as the USA.
Why should you get money for doing nothing? I think that is a good question. If your investments are earning money, for example because you invested in real estate, then you’ve driven up the price of rent for the rest of us.
But anyway, in reality almost all of the money in the stock market is held by people who are not like you, people who didn’t save their money by working a nine to five for 10 or 20 years.
Nobody is stopping you from leaving your money sitting in a bank account. Nobody is suggesting you shouldn’t save money.
If you want to work to earn some money and then save it and then later spend it, great. But you’re not content with that.
Let’s look at a simple example. Suppose you take your savings and you buy a rental property and start renting it out. You’re taking a risk that perhaps property prices will go down, or that maybe you’ll run into a string of 10 bad tenants in a row, and you might lose some money. All the while, you’re sitting there doing absolutely nothing, and probably you’re getting paid for it. But what about your tenants? What’s the risk they’re taking? They could pay rent on time for decades and yet never be able to qualify for a loan to buy property of their own, because people like you have bought up what used to be more widely available. A huge percent of the population is working paycheck to paycheck, and if they have a string of bad luck that lasts more than a month or two then they’re going to end up homeless. Of course their life expectancy will be slashed in a second. In other words, my friend, you’re risking some extra money while they’re risking their lives.
Also, as several of us have pointed out, most investment money is held by the rich so that they can get richer at our expense. Many people would prefer to get rid of that system rather than try and piggyback on it. There are other ways to structure society so that you can retire in comfort.
How dare you make fiscally responsible investments and expect some return in exchange for the risk you’re taking on by letting others use your stuff. How. Dare. You. /s
Risk is an idiot’s justification. Anyone who owns a business knows the whole point of a limited liability corporation is it removes any risk in case of failure.
If Walmart went tits up today the Walton’s would still be rich. It’s the workers who bear all the risk.
That was a really fascinating read, thanks. Checked out a few of the other links from the wiki. Do you happen to have or know where I can see interior pictures and floorplans?
I’ll try looking it up myself in the meantime; I love stuff of that nature
One of the thousands of nuanced use cases that generalist communist revolutionaries haven’t even thought about let alone have the skills to provide solutions for.
Wild how even when they were going full-on gulags , their peak imprisonment rate didn’t surpass the United States. And we’ve got plenty of bullets for those that run or resist arrest.
Rule of thumb and there are always exceptions, land that you live and work on is usually personal property, land that you own but someone else pays you for the privilege of living and working on is private property.
Dude why do people think communism means you can’t own anything. There’s a difference between private and personal properties. You can own a house, and a car, hell even a whole farm. What you cannot do is hold capital.
A farm is means of production, therefore it would classify as public property. You cannot own production under communism, only products.
Therefore it could count as a means of production but in general in Communism personal farms of reasonable size and constant use are encouraged. Again, that’s a misunderstanding of communism.
That’s not a feature of communism, it’s a compromise based on the recognition that private ownership produces more efficient outcomes at scale. According to the collective farming wiki: A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by private farms despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms.
No one wants to recreate the Great Famine (The most deadly famine in human history - caused entirely by communism and specifically collectivized farms).
There’s also Holomodor in the USSR which lead to similarly deadly outcomes.
Fun fact for you: The famines were largely caused by Stalin appointing a guy to do agriculture policy who knew less than nothing about agriculture. He forced farmers to plant crops too densely because “communist crops will not compete for nutrients” causing the crops to just die. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Most dictators are absolute troglodytes and Stalin was no exception.
One point in time does not constitute a robust conclusion. Consider any time before and how collectivism did yield considerable agriculture gains for the USSR. Like do we really think they fought WW2 with the same or less agricultural efficiency they had before their revolution?
This.
“A fledgling Nation failed after the most powerful nations on earth collectively conspired to hold it back and ideally topple it so every similar nation most also fail.” And these people were paranoid for some reason, could you imagine?
Y’all just in here doing good work, absolutely wrecking these guys.
Oversimplified for brevity, but basically: You may not be able to OWN a farm in the sense that the land itself is collectivized (not even always true under socialism, depends on specific policies and also whether you consider the “farm” to be a different entity from the land it’s sitting on, in that case you often own the farm itself, just look at home ownership rates in socialist countries), but you can USE and WORK ON the farm to generate products for yourself and society at large. I don’t see it as that different practically from the perspective of the farmer, since they’re still living on the land and taking advantage of its productivity.
I think that’s certainly better than renting or mortgaging the land and having to deal with landlords and banks. Collectivization usually freed farmers from their obligation to their landlord or private bank and they just continued farming as normal. It’s the landlords who had their “livelihood” taken away (i.e. land that they owned but someone else was living and working on), not the farmers doing the actual work.
Perhaps you have a source on the collective farms of the Great Leap Forward years in Communist China, or a URL that points to the collective farms in the Ukraine and how it made the farmers better off?
Once again I will refer to Dessalines’ links.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#on-mao-maoism-and-marxism-leninism-maoism-and-the-prc
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#on-the-ussr – has links about Ukraine
These are bad links because they are from a biased source and not properly cited.
There are no unbiased sources. Zero. Because that’s not how politics or the world works.
Also, I fail to see how they’re badly cited. It’s literally a giant list of links to books, historical records, news articles, and write-ups by other socialists that are also cited.
The sources range wildly, some are just images and links to podcasts or articles. For example the “How many people did the Great Leap Forward kill” link just goes to a Reddit comment on r/communism where the OP just says “it’s fine… there were famines all the time in China!”.
Because in practice the line between capital and personal property is very thin. Can a car or apartment not be used to generate income in a modern economy?
When the soviets were in power they would force multiple families under one roof (kommunalka). Think 4-8 families sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Each family was given just one room and all housing was considered communal housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment?wprov=sfti1
After Stalin’s death families began receiving single family apartments due to massive housing reform by Kruschev, but were hastily built and called ‘khrushchyoba,’ a cross between Khrushchev’s name and the Russian term for slums. That by the way still leaves a multigenerational period from 1917-1954 where the kommunalka would have been the primary unit of housing.
You can generate money with a car or a farm. The whole problem with capitalism is getting money without working because you let people work with your stuff. So owning a car and use ist as a taxi is fine with communism. Having a taxi company is not. But you can form a taxi company with others. The difference is no one has financial power over others. No one just profits because he/she is the owner. There are people in charge but they are in charge because they have the knowledge and ability not just because they own everything and can do what they want.
Listen, I’m a worker who saved money through my labour. Why should I not get to use my saved labour by deploying it into an investment?
People accuse leftists of idealist thinking but in what fantasy world are you thinking your personal savings from selling your labor is ever going to come close to what would be considered “capital” in the sense being discussed here?
It’s directly deployed in stocks and real estate, what do you mean?
Most capital is “collectively owned” through public corporations, pension funds, etc.
Not most, in the US around 400 individuals own over 50% of wealth. Similar situation in Russia.
You’re right that wealth is concentrated, but I was saying that the assets are collectively owned. For example I am a shareholder of Amazon, a publicly-traded company that Jeff Bezos owns a large stake in. So Amazon is “collectively owned” but each share gets one vote instead of one person.
Shares only give you voting power if you have a massive amount of them. In the vast majority of cases shares function as either a place to store wealth to protect it from inflation or as speculative gambling, the majority of use cases is not to signify ownership. I would not classify that as collective ownership, maybe only in theory if you don’t look into it too much but real world application of shares is definitely not collective ownership.
I’m very much in favour of businesses being actually collectively owned through a coop business model though.
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Where do you think the value for your return on investment comes from? It’s extracted from the labor of workers.
It’s not extracted it’s combined with labour to produce higher output than labour or capital on their own.
For example a worker with a shovel could only dig a small hole a day, but with the injection of capital (ie a backhoe) they can dig many more holes. The worker can increase their pay compared to what they would’ve made with just a shovel and the person that provided the backhoe can also generate a healthy return for their capital contribution.
How is it healthy that some rich investor gets to play golf all day because he can afford to buy backhoes and hire people to use them? How is it healthy that he earns more money if he pays them less, or that he alone is in charge of resources that a whole community worked to produce? What is healthy about any of this?
What you are describing is the entire fucking premise of socialism: workers cannot afford the means of production, so production ends up controlled by a handful of wealthy capitalists with perverse incentives and no loyalty to the rest of the human race. An entire tradition of thought is dedicated to how unhealthy that is.
Again, capital is extracted from labor. Who do you think built the back hoe? It didn’t fall off the back hoe tree. Workers built it, workers designed it. If some capitalist pig didn’t own it, then the laborers could just use it.
Even a labourer who has saved up can buy a back-ho. The backho could have been produced by a communist country or work co-op. Who produced the back-ho is not important.
The important thing is that value is stored, invested and combined with labour to make everyone better off. This is why wages are higher in countries with more capital such as the USA.
Why should you get money for doing nothing? I think that is a good question. If your investments are earning money, for example because you invested in real estate, then you’ve driven up the price of rent for the rest of us.
But anyway, in reality almost all of the money in the stock market is held by people who are not like you, people who didn’t save their money by working a nine to five for 10 or 20 years.
Nobody is stopping you from leaving your money sitting in a bank account. Nobody is suggesting you shouldn’t save money.
You keep saying “doing nothing” but I earned that money and now I am risking it in investments with uncertain returns.
You work for your money. But the people making the big investments don’t.
If you want to work to earn some money and then save it and then later spend it, great. But you’re not content with that.
Let’s look at a simple example. Suppose you take your savings and you buy a rental property and start renting it out. You’re taking a risk that perhaps property prices will go down, or that maybe you’ll run into a string of 10 bad tenants in a row, and you might lose some money. All the while, you’re sitting there doing absolutely nothing, and probably you’re getting paid for it. But what about your tenants? What’s the risk they’re taking? They could pay rent on time for decades and yet never be able to qualify for a loan to buy property of their own, because people like you have bought up what used to be more widely available. A huge percent of the population is working paycheck to paycheck, and if they have a string of bad luck that lasts more than a month or two then they’re going to end up homeless. Of course their life expectancy will be slashed in a second. In other words, my friend, you’re risking some extra money while they’re risking their lives.
Also, as several of us have pointed out, most investment money is held by the rich so that they can get richer at our expense. Many people would prefer to get rid of that system rather than try and piggyback on it. There are other ways to structure society so that you can retire in comfort.
How dare you make fiscally responsible investments and expect some return in exchange for the risk you’re taking on by letting others use your stuff. How. Dare. You. /s
Being responsible isn’t an excuse to own other people’s livelihood.
Risk is an idiot’s justification. Anyone who owns a business knows the whole point of a limited liability corporation is it removes any risk in case of failure.
If Walmart went tits up today the Walton’s would still be rich. It’s the workers who bear all the risk.
The worker can walk away at any time to another job, can even change entire industries.
Hmm, I got a feeling that there is no such thing called “investment” under communism.
Why are you hoarding wealth?
Like what else would i do with it? Wreck the environment by spending it on things i don’t need?
Maybe don’t charge as much?
😂
Invest in what?
That was a really fascinating read, thanks. Checked out a few of the other links from the wiki. Do you happen to have or know where I can see interior pictures and floorplans?
I’ll try looking it up myself in the meantime; I love stuff of that nature
You should check out “The Cold War Podcast”. The housing episode is really good.
So when does a farm go from personal to private property? Is it the moment you rent it or employ other people on it?
One of the thousands of nuanced use cases that generalist communist revolutionaries haven’t even thought about let alone have the skills to provide solutions for.
They have a solution, it’s labor camps or bullets to any citizen who doesn’t follow orders.
Wild how even when they were going full-on gulags , their peak imprisonment rate didn’t surpass the United States. And we’ve got plenty of bullets for those that run or resist arrest.
What about it?
It’s an oversimplification, but… Sort of, yeah. Property you “own” to keep from others, and make money from owning it.
actual results may vary
Not sure what you mean
Rule of thumb and there are always exceptions, land that you live and work on is usually personal property, land that you own but someone else pays you for the privilege of living and working on is private property.
Because the dictionary definitions of those words don’t match the way you’re using them.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/private
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personal
I think definition b on private covers what he was talking about
Also merriam Webster is not the end all be all of how language is used
My car “belongs to […] an individual person”, doesn’t it?
A car can not only belong to one person, but it can be operated by one person.
A key distinction I’ve heard is: whether a property has to be collectively operated or can it be individually operated?
Tell that to the kulaks
I’m ashamed to admit I had no idea, until I stumbled upon this video. https://youtu.be/Krl_CUxW14Y