Your parents extract surplus value from their employees. It belongs to the employees, not your parents. Your parents surely work, a lot probably, but they get to keep the full value of their work, their employees don’t.

After years of surplus extraction your parents accumulate it in capital, that is passed down to their heirs. Their employees can’t accumulate even a decent retirement in this economy. They could if their surplus value wasn’t taken from them.

Your parents aren’t bad people. But they are allowed and compelled to exploit others thanks to them owning the capital.

hey first off you’re amazing and I hope it’s been rewarding to take the first dive into theory

I’d love to address a lot of points but I’ll just address a couple for now because I’m in a time pinch currently

Ideally if we only have one choice we have to make sure it’s the right one, no?

yes, fully correct, 100%. Since the economy is fully democratized and planned, it is up to the state to decide if restricting brand choice is ideal or if it’s actually in the state’s best interest to keep competition alive. Solutions vary on this - I don’t purport to know the best ones, but some examples are fashion would absolutely suck under one state brand and it’d likely be in the state’s best interests to facilitate several simultaneous brands, where something like medicine would do better under one brand, as having all the data on studies/usage/manufacturing under one roof enables safer and faster development. Under capitalism, all we can do is let each industry be dominated by the corporation or corporations that are the most profitable, but under socialism, we are free to choose any mechanism we choose to decide how many brands there are and how they are run.

AFAIK a revolution in a single country did happen right?

yep. This is one of the things that Marx is notoriously wrong about, also that the highly developed world would see socialist revolution first. They tried their best to predict these things and they missed sometimes and you’ll find that there is a ton of modern theory that addresses these gaps nicely.

Thanks for your questions!

Section 18

So I think part of this is based on a really commonly held misconception and another part because of the economic conditions that countries like the USSR and Cuba face(d).

The the first part, when we think of the state having total command of the economy we almost always consider it to be one single company having a monopoly over production.

While this has been the case in some instances, and it can be very beneficial with regards to industries that require or would benefit from standardisation (e.g. railways, utilities, recycling) or that require tight regulation (e.g. water supply, pharmaceuticals), there’s a false notion that competition either cannot exist under socialism or that it did not exist.

In fact, neither are true - the USSR had competing companies operating in the same industry or in monopolies in different regions, with the view that the practices which were most efficient would be expanded and adopted more broadly.

China actually does this with social policy today; they use different regions as test labs to try out changes in policy, to assess their effectiveness and potential consequences, and to either abandon these policy changes or to expand them depending on how successful they are.

The second part of this is that countries like the USSR and Cuba faced extremely harsh economic blockades and they were essentially pre-industrial at the point of their revolutions. The USSR especially had to deal with a huge military buildup in Europe and in Asia (due to having borders in each continent).

The upshot of this is that there were/are limited consumer goods because there were higher priorities, such as preparing for WWII and the need to modernise agriculture and industrialise the nation, meaning that often consumer goods were/are limited.

With this in mind, most western countries have deindustrialised and it’s likely that a revolution in a western country would necessitate a rapid reindustrialisation for reasons that I won’t go into here but I would anticipate that there would be a period of limited consumer goods for a post-revolutionary western country as well.

Do you think this is better for an average person? main things that scare me are that, much like with companies in a market, how could we ensure the state produces things that benefit us and not benefit itself instead?

I have a few thoughts on this.

One thing to consider is that under modern manufacturing, often our consumer goods are produced in factories that are similar if not identical (and often they are produced in the very same factory) using similar or identical raw materials.

A lot of what we see in consumer choice is a mirage or it’s so subtle in its distinction from similar goods that it’s barely a difference at all.

I think that the west upholds the absolute glut of consumer choice as inherently good although I’m not convinced that it’s nearly as beneficial as we are led to believe but I’ll spare you the rant on that particular issue.

Another consideration is that, while an abundance of choice in consumer goods may well be beneficial for the individual, this often is the opposite case for the environment and so we would need to be responsible and weigh the needs of the individual against the needs of the community, the world, and especially the environment.

There would need to be democratic structures in place for a socialist society to function and be sustainable. This would necessarily extend to influence over production of consumer goods as well.

this is what worries me about only having a single national bank too. Ideally if we only have one choice we have to make sure it’s the right one, no?

A single national bank is about the state having total control over fiscal policy and the economy. That doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be regional banking institutions that could operate beneath a national bank at the consumer and/or industry level though.

How would niche things, that benefit some part of the population but not everyone, be produced? Things like… fumo plushies, board games, or to put a less banal example, something that helps a condition that is uncommon and doesn’t spread but still exists, like special shoes to help some kinds of foot deformation for example…

This is a really good question and it’s one that remains to be answered by the future post-revolution society in question.

I envision that there would be the necessity for upholding regional production, especially for marginalised ethnic groups, so that their cultural traditions would be supported (and even strengthened) by the socialist system.

I know it probably sounds odd to put it in these terms since cultural traditions seem abstract, and some definitely are, but so much of what determines a thriving cultural tradition is based on material things - food and food production, clothing, arts and crafts, musical instruments, architecture and so on.

With that in mind, a post-revolutionary society must uphold regional production of goods.

I also think that there will always be a place for artisanal production, whether by necessity due to limited access to raw materials (think of something like truffles or particular wild honey which is culturally significant), or as you’ve mentioned to cater to the needs of people who are outside of the norm for whatever reason. This might be people of unusual stature or body type, for example, and thus there would always be the need for a small but not insignificant industry for bespoke goods. Tailoring and shoemaking would be some example of this sort of small, artisanal production to meet the needs of a small minority of people for whatever reason.

Board games might be produced by hobbyists and enthusiasts in their spare time. This happens more and more under capitalism with the GoFundMe model. There’s no reason why a similar system of government grants couldn’t be established in a socialist society where people could use a democratic process (e.g. voting) to support a particular pre-funded project to create a new board game.

I’m going to use the idea of money just to keep this example simple and easy to relate to but imagine if the government gave every citizen an allocation of credits to use in a national GoFundMe style model. Say each person gets awarded $1000 worth of non-transferable credits for use in this model per year. People could “donate” these credits to support a project and, if successfully funded, the project could be awarded a grant to create their new product.

also, what would inspire innovation if it’s not competition?

I think that there’s a common misconception that the market is the only way to innovate or compete.

Ultimately, people compete and they strive for excellence regardless of market incentives or otherwise; when kids compete in a race, competive sports more generally, or things like gaming, we don’t award food only to the kids who excel. Sure, there can be prizes and money awarded to competitors but typically that’s only in higher level competitions.

It’s worth noting that USSR was extremely technologically innovative during its lifespan.

In many ways the market inhibits innovation due to things like patent law (you know how we’re living through this huge boom in 3D printing, right? That’s only because the patent for 3D printing expired in recent years and for the previous decades there was essentially no innovation because of the way the market works) or financial competition, such as between pharmaceutical companies; pharma corporations do not share their research with one another because they seek to maintain their competitive edge and thus their profit model. This ultimately means that we almost certainly have multiple pharmaceutical companies duplicating research and development rather than dedicating those resources towards expanding a greater, shared body of knowledge on pharmaceuticals.

I’ll try to respond to your other points when I get the chance. Apologies for rambling. I hope that some of this comment is useful to you.

have indeed heard stories that people in socialist countries “only have one or two brands of X”, I’m not sure to what extent that is true but it seems like the natural conclusion from doing this…

Do you think this is better for an average person? main things that scare me are that, much like with companies in a market, how could we ensure the state produces things that benefit us and not benefit itself instead?

Is the time spent finding the cheapest brand of in the store actually valuable? Is there any real difference in canned bean brands. Toothpaste is similar, outside of flavor and specific “sensitive” formulas, is there a point to having many brands?

This actually probably goes for all the different brands in the grocery store. What’s the point of having a “choice” between canned tomatoes from Kroger or Hunts?

Now obviously different flavors/formulas are a bit of a grey area (i.e. Pepsi vs Coke), but at least when it comes to things like beans, toothpaste, and I would argue healthcare, choice actually makes us less free.

lots of good responses in here, i’d just like to throw in that socialist kellogg added a fourth variety of cereal to their production at some point (not sure if that’s in this article but anyway) so there’s an example of workers owning the means of production increasing variety.

https://www.fightbacknews.org/2021/8/8/venezuela-workers-take-over-kellogg-factory-now-known-socialist-kellogg

if there was no competition, every soda fountain could be a coke freestyle and you’d be able to get pepsi flavors and weed out of it too.

Several of these really only apply to a fully socialist fully centralised system, I’ll answer under that assumption.

consumer choice

Instead of this. Where dozens of different companies are all independently pursuing exactly the same thing, wasting the labour of thousands of talented engineers competing to come to exactly the same outcome, you will instead get less of this skilled labour wasted. It takes the labour of one team of engineers to come to this outcome, all the rest of these talented people can be put towards achieving something useful instead.

This parallel construction of the same product that does the same thing with practically no difference is a monumentally huge waste of labour. One of the easiest examples of the inefficiency of markets. Think of what useful and innovative things these people could be doing instead of… This? Making the same shit over and over and over in competition with one another.

How would niche things, that benefit some part of the population but not everyone, be produced? Things like… fumo plushies, board games, or to put a less banal example, something that helps a condition that is uncommon and doesn’t spread but still exists, like special shoes to help some kinds of foot deformation for example…

There’s no reason niche things can’t be produced by a centralised system where inventors bring their things and make a case for them, then the department assesses their usefulness and agrees or does not. For niche things this is actually much more likely to happen than for things that aren’t niche, because it costs considerably fewer resources to do.

Lots of completely useless products will never get invented, simply because there is oversight.

Section 19 I’m curious what communists think about this with a modern lens? AFAIK a revolution in a single country did happen right? And in Russia so none of the places Engels proposed. It didn’t really spread from there.

If the German revolution had succeeded the global revolution was extremely likely. All of Europe, the middle east and asia would have gone to revolution. Africa would have followed easily under these conditions. South America too. The US would have been isolated and followed.

It’s not often in history that killing a single person changes its course, but in the case of the German revolution the killing of Rosa Luxembourg did.

do marxists think only economic class exists? wouldn’t there still be political classes? here it says that classes would end up disappearing because they only form due to division of labour. But isn’t there even in a fully realized socialist state a division of labour? even if everything is nationalized, isn’t there still a difference in power between, like, a furniture factory worker and the bureaucrat that oversees the state’s furniture building company? even if that bureaucrat is not monetarily richer than the worker per se.

Class under capitalism is used to interpret the primary contradiction of capitalism, class war. Between the exploiter and exploited. You could divide up the new system into a hierarchy of power to analyse its contradiction dialectically and try to discover where things will go but you’re flying blind with no historical examples due to the nature of capitalism still existing. We simply don’t know what contradictions will arise in the new society. Certainly history will not end, but this is guessing best left to fictional writers as it is so far in the future to not matter to us.

I have one doubt about what Engels says about democratic socialists, mainly that small capitalists (“petty bourgeoisie”) in general tend to have the same interests as the proletariat.

He’s right about democratic socialists, but you’re right about the petty bougs. The modern interpretation of this class is that they do not hold the interests of the proletariat, and they are the primary class that pushes for fascism.

If competition is erradicated when every line of production is controlled by the state as Engels is proposing, will that mean an end of variety in consumer choice?

the free market already does this in some ways, and socialist states have already solved it in other ways. the free market has a tendency to try to develop economies of scale where the technology can be more economical than the current process, always at the cost of human labor. as marx points out, all value is derived from human labor, so when a technological development lowers the amount of human labor required for the same output, this is a literal lowering of the value of the commodity in question. if i invent a machine that makes it take half as much human labor time on average to make a coat, then the value of the coats i create are halved. all of which to say, in our current epoch, most of what you consume is already produced by relatively homogeneous processes in large factories that produce for a number of entities. peanut butter is a good example. the same factory will produce many different brands of peanut butter, and the difference comes down to the recipe used for a given production time, and then packaging and whatnot. so the nature of commodity production 1) allows for commodity diversification that we already experience in much of our lives, at limited cost to productivity, in a socialist context and 2) this has historically been a possibility in a socialist states that do or have existed. there is also less diversity than you would think in terms of commodity production. so ultimately no, consumer choice for the goods that we currently expect choices for would be largely unchanged except presumably where the current choice is artificially generated by bourgeois social influence.

Do you think this is better … have to make sure it’s the right one, no?

the capital behind commodity choice is itself separable from the brand marketing that presents it socially, so ultimately yes, unifying production plans can in general allow for greater resilience and flexibility. we already see this in certain aspects of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie economy in the us, such as walmart having a near monopoly on commodity distribution and logistics in rural areas (and many (sub)urban areas as well). the idea that anyone ever gets a blank slate of capital that they have to start from scratch with is not an accurate one. the revolution inherits the material conditions of the state that came before it.

niche goods

niche good production is currently allocated by profitability, which is to say, the difference between the cost of the wages for people that produce the product and the capital required and the ability of those who require them to pay for them. capitalist microeconomics i think provides a pretty accurate description of the situation in terms of pricing. of course, depending on the need, the actual human value cost of the production can vary considerably, but ultimately, a revaluation of labor distribution on the grounds of human need instead of profit would see a decrease in the cost of producing necessary niche goods like medicines for rare conditions. a good example of that principle in action is the extremely high quality of medical care in Cuba.

what would inspire innovation if it’s not competition?

in many ways, “innovation” isn’t even required. a shift in the motive of production from profitability to human need under current technological conditions would be enough to feed, clothe, and give medicine to the entire human populace in a relatively short period of production. an extremely large amount of labor and technologically relevant resources are expended for nonsense that can help the biggest capitalist squeeze a little more human labor under their control. freeing that up for benefiting people would be of unfathomable benefit to society.

1/2

Great questions!

Re: Section 24

Small business owners, in some sense, do have more in common with the proletariat than they realize. Their economic situation is usually very precarious - at any time, if business slows down they will find themselves as part of the proletarians if they lose their business. This happens fairly often under capitalism. Further, ruthless competition among capitalists means the capitalist economy trends toward monopoly - squeezing out small business owners.

I have a friend who is a capitalist (inherited the family business). I once asked him what he liked about being a business owner. He didn’t use these exact words, but essentially he loves making a lot of money and being “the boss” i.e. holding power over people. He doesn’t actually care that much about the work itself. And frankly he isn’t very good at it, but the business he inherited was already pretty successful.

Then you have my dad, who is also a small business owner. He doesn’t have any employees. He does it because he loves that line of work; he doesn’t really make that much money from it. But he’s at the age where he could retire but he doesn’t want to because he enjoys the actual work - meeting with people, working with them on solutions, etc.

Under socialism, there’s plenty of opportunities for people like my dad and I suspect your parents as well. You still definitely need people who can manage a team, run an enterprise, etc. My dad could still basically do the exact same work under socialism and it wouldn’t really be any different. In Cuba today, this is actually fairly prevalent, people who basically run their own one-person shops. But this still applies to situations where you manage people. Honestly, there’s no reason your parents couldn’t do what they do now but under socialism. Granted, they may report to some planning entity (or not, depending on the stage and nature of socialism) but all the “managing” stuff is still just as valuable under socialism, if not moreso.

Now what would be different under socialism would be a.) you’re not gonna make a fortune, although income could be higher than people that report to them. This is how every socialist country has operated so far - income distinctions, but not so much that you are creating class distinctions. And b.) you can’t be a dictator over the people that report to you. Workers have rights and socialism usually entails more democracy in the workplace. But even in a situation like a co-op, you need people who can make managerial decisions and “run” the enterprise.

So if you parents enjoy the work for what it is, then no reason they couldn’t enjoy things under socialism (maybe even more, given that the precarity would be gone). But people like my friend, they obviously would hate it but if your reason for being a small business owner is the obscene wealth and controlling people… then yeah socialism isn’t for you.

18 (iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.

Doesn’t mean there will only be one product, but what is meant that the labour market is to be abolished, that the threat of unemployment, starvation and alike is done away with. A fundamental force in capitalist societies which bring out some of the worst things in inter class warfare.

However my main point would be a bit more fundamentally. The text you cite is written by Engels and it is written to be a pamphlet to present the major collective understandings/(underpinnings of communists at that point. It was written before the communist manifesto, too. It is a good easy read especially in the context of the “spring of nations” 1848 and associated revolutions and movements.

I don’t believe that Engels got everything right at that point, but already achieve a good theoretical advanced back bone of communism at the age of 27 back then. Only 20 years later would the first edition of Capital be published.

In my opinion the Russian Revolutions as well as the Chinese Revolution were both Marxist, but they both weren’t quite the type of communist revolutions thought about at that point by Engels. The Revolutions and Civil War which created the Soviet Union was created in a feudalist state with incomplete industrial transition. While serfdom was officially abolished in Russia in 1861 its after effects remained till the Soviet Union. Plenty of reasons were there why the revolution was successful the weakening of the capitalist powers in the country and on the continent were a large part. The vanguard party that modulated the dynamics was also essential, though that meant that the material and social conditions weren’t as older theory suggested.

This isn’t an answer to your questions but a general overview of what people mean when they say socialism. There’s socialism in the sense of having a socialist economy where workers control the means of production and socialism in the sense of a socialist society with a socialist base and socialist superstructure. In simple terms, the base is the economy and the superstructure is politics, so a socialist society has a socialist economy and a socialist politics that reinforce one another. What does a socialist politics entails? It seems an actual democracy (not this farcical version of democracy we have now), it means a completely politicized citizenry who has undying love for humanity and complete hatred for anything that would seek to divide, humiliate, or harm humanity, it means a people completely free of all forms of bigotry and who tremble at the sight of injustice.

In terms of consumer choices, why can’t those choices be something that is consciously discussed within the community? There’s no reason why something like toothpaste flavor can’t be societal discourse, with the end result being whatever consensus that is reached being implemented in real life.You could have a social media post clowning on a particular flavor leading to a lively discussion on various official channels (official Lemmy instance, town hall meeting) about how the flavor sucks leading to an election to recall the surgeon general because they insist on not removing that nasty flavor. For crap like Funko Pop, why should society be oriented towards production of useless junk that no one but a select minority want? There’s a concept within Marxism called “socially necessary labor,” meaning labor that’s actually useful to society. Making useless junk like Funko Pop is arguably not at the level of socially necessary labor and shouldn’t even exist. In terms of things like orthotics, we’re also assuming a certain level of political development within the people, and among this includes the conviction that disabled people ought to live dignified lives. You don’t need a market economy to live in a society where diabetic people get free insulin and trans women get free estrogen pills. If anything, a market economy leads to people overcharging shit (the amount that insulin gets charged compared with the production cost of producing insulin is abominable).

I guess it’s an open question on whether you could have a bigoted socialist society like say a white supremacist socialist society. In my opinion, you can’t have a socialist society that isn’t at least trying to combat bigotry because if bigotry isn’t combated, economic stratification is going to form with the bigoted majority at the top and the targets of bigotry at the bottom. It might not be capitalist, but it really shouldn’t be called socialist either.