[The Immortal Goon]

This is really the problem with these kinds of threads.

"Tell me specifics about exactly what the future would be like."
"We don't really do that...Nobody can."
"Fine, your own personal idea."
"My personal idea is..."
"That doesn't make sense! Communism is a repressive dystopia!"

On paper, according to communists, the hermit is for all intents and purposes wiped out by bourgeois society.

Honestly, if you can find a place to set up a shack, it probably wouldn't be too different than bums today. If you checked in with the people near by and they had no use for the land, I don't know why that wouldn't be fine.

But you wouldn't personally own the land. The notion is already hazy and difficult to justify now.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

"That doesn't make sense! Communism is a repressive dystopia!"

I don't know if that's based on my post, but I did not mean to imply I think communism is dystopic or repressive: I identify myself as a socialist on some days, and more of a communist on others. Some communists I've spoken to think capital, land, resources, means of production are among the things to be stripped of privatization, while one's personal possessions separate from those definitions remains personal property. I simply strongly find myself in disagreement with communists who say this:

Personally I think once Private Property has been thrown down from the alter and smashed the whole concept of possessions isn't far behind it.

And the rest of the post is in the context of personal property.

On paper, according to communists, the hermit is for all intents and purposes wiped out by bourgeois society.

Honestly, if you can find a place to set up a shack, it probably wouldn't be too different than bums today. If you checked in with the people near by and they had no use for the land, I don't know why that wouldn't be fine.

But you wouldn't personally own the land. The notion is already hazy and difficult to justify now.

In an ideal world, I'd like to live somewhere isolated and perhaps build a cabin or comfortable enough home, miles and miles away from people, perhaps somewhere in Alaska. I wouldn't mind hunting and fishing. I wouldn't live like a bum, but I have an extremely strong desire to live like a hermit. The way you've described it sounds to me like a reasonable situation in a "true" communist society: as long as the house can be built on some land somewhere isolated, and it's fine to hunt, it shouldn't be a problem.

[Rainbow Crow]

The thing is, you don't prove anything wrong Mike. You post irrelevant garbage like socialist libertarianism and then double down when you get proven wrong. Just like in this thread. You somehow mistake derision for jealousy, as if someone like me could be jealous of a gay libertarian undergrad who relies on government loans to do other people's research for them.

[mikema63]

What a load of irrelevant, out of date, tripe.

[Rainbow Crow]

You just posted today that you were losing your grants

[mikema63]

A grant isnt a loan.

I am not a libertarian.

I am not a libertarian socialist.

I don't recall ever being disproven on libertarian socialism being that I've never really been a libertarian socialist.

I am working on my own research not someone elses.

I did not mistake your derision as jelousy, I see it as an attempt to bully me out of using my knowledge when it inconveniences you.

I do not care if your jealous of me or not and that is not my goal.

I hardly see what my sexual orientation has to do with anything.

[Rainbow Crow]

OK, I probably shouldn't have snapped at you, sorry.

[The Immortal Goon]

I don't know if that's based on my post, but I did not mean to imply I think communism is dystopic or repressive: I identify myself as a socialist on some days, and more of a communist on others.

No, it wasn't directed at you. More the memory in my head of a dozen threads like this.

All I can really say about this issue is that I think Marx's interpretation of history is correct. I think that some of the things we've seen in the past century and change have had certain ramifications for how the majority of people that work for a living view the world. I think there is a big class division and that history can really be boiled down to how these classes interact with each other and make things.

It makes sense to me.

And since that makes sense, some of the conclusions make sense about how class dynamics change, the origin of capital, why we make things, etc.

So from here we can get a general idea of what stressers are in the current system and what forces from now will contribute to the creation of a new dynamic.

What that dynamic will be exactly is hard to say, but even taking a glance at how much more integrated everyone is today than they were even five years ago should at least provide an indication. It's something Marx and Engels recognized in their own time of telegraphs and electricity.

But more specific things, like how a pencil will be produced and how someone that wants to live far out in the wilderness will be regarded are very difficult to answer; it's like asking a feudal peasant what international fiat capitalism will be like. At some point, if you went back in time to feudal France at the right time, you could look around and see how all the commercial traders were getting richer and more powerful than the aristocracy and the church was becoming increasingly less powerful and you could draw conclusions about what society might be structured like when the merchants get tired of listening to the aristocracy and enough peasants moved into the towns after the farms were enclosed. But you wouldn't be able to say how a pencil would be made after these events or what people may think of a hermit.

The truth is that communism, in its final glory, is nothing. Nobody would call it communism because it wouldn't be a system. It is the end of class conflict because there are no more classes as everyone has been integrated. I very much doubt that anyone would think any more of someone going to live out in the woods as you might think of your cousin doing the same thing.

[Dagoth Ur]

Like how the Borg have different lasers on the sides of their heads.

Naw Borg have different parts based on their different functions, ie pure utilitarianism. Communism is not utilitarian.

If you are alienated from the control of what you produce, then privately controlling that production for yourself (no wage labor necessary here) reconnects you to it. Abolishing private property seems to be the opposite of reducing alienation, when you only need to get rid of wage labor.

Which is precisely what communists aim to do. But for everyone not just you. Workers will control all property and all will be freed by it.

Could you eventually remove the necessity for division of labor? You could if you wanted less efficient production. You could also advance materialistically until human toil is largely irrelevant in the face of automation, and provide for each control of a fully mechanized form of production and resource acquisition. On the other hand, if this sounds too utopian for you, you could always engage in violent revolution (again) until people decide to undivide their labor.

Actually we could so away with it without automation. Specializing labor is inefficient because you make painters spend all their time on a construction site, you keep workers from education because they are used up by their occupation. Now your example of a sink is inherently flawed because ending the division of labor doesn't mean people don't do different jobs they simply aren't specialized into formal roles. One person isn't forced to dry dishes forever, he takes turns doing the other parts. This is more efficient than one person doing the exact same thing over and over and over.

Some people enjoy solitude and being surrounded by nature. Perhaps someone will want to meditate or be creative in beautiful surroundings without any of the distractions or neuroses inherent to civilisation.

That's fine, there will still be a wilderness. Just don't try to take from us when you go. We won't have warlords set up in the wastes.

Shouldn't people have the right to choose? Not everyone wants to socialize, live in the city, live in the suburbs, or take an active role in mainstream society. What possibly precludes someone in a communist utopia from choosing to isolate themselves from society for personal, or spiritual, reasons and live alone, and farm/hunt alone? Every communist has their own vision of what communism is and how it would be applied: in yours, people would be forbidden from living isolated lives? It sounds like you're saying primitive lifestyle would be illegal, if not officially discouraged. You sound like you're saying people shouldn't be allowed from the tone of questioning in your post, which I am curious to see if you want to expand on that, and possibly clarify if you think my interpretation of your tone is incorrect.

No to be sure I believe in human liberation. If you want to leave our super advanced society that would be cool, cray but cool. We won't allow you to take from us on your way but if you wanna try to survive in the wilderness I see no reason to stop you.

And let's be clear about my statement about possessiveness ending. I don't think this is desirable or undesirable, but I think our successors are gonna look back at our selfishness with confusion. I love possessions like everyone else but that's because I was made in this space/time.

[Technology]

Which is precisely what communists aim to do. But for everyone not just you. Workers will control all property and all will be freed by it.

But the sticking point for me is that in distributism, the workers control their own property, and then may also form co-operatives and have other forms of industry which are collective. In communism, the workers can only control productive property at the behest and direction of the rest of the community, as the concept is not "spread out private ownership to each", but "abolish private ownership and replace it with collective ownership".

Private ownership means personal control, and the ability to generally do what I like with (including trade) the item/s or place/s in question, including the right to exclusion of that item/s or place/s. Common ownership, in contrast, means that everyone has a common right to access those things, and the control of them is performed co-operatively.

How far does this go though? I understand that possession is fine as we outlined, but how severe should the limitations on ownership of means of production be? How far does the common ownership you advocate extend? Is it something more sensible and restrained like: the community owns things like factories and capital equipment, big powerful machines, and working vehicles like bulldozers and so on, and these things are accessed and used at the behest of the community (Representatives, councils, democracy?).

Or... is it something insane and extreme like: I have to see a worker's council for permission to get things like power drills, 3-D printers, lathe machines, shovels, and so on?

[fuser]

No one can tell you the exact details. The face of communism would be decided by the nature of socialism aka dictatorship of proletarian through which it must pass.

[Technology]

No one can tell you the exact details. The face of communism would be decided by the nature of socialism aka dictatorship of proletarian through which it must pass.

No one can tell me the exact details of the future, but you're pitching an ideology here. What do you intend to happen, and what do you advocate when you say "abolish private property". I take it that your personal advocation is "leave it to the proletarian state", but as you would be part of such a state, putting your input in as a worker (or perhaps a vanguardist?), we should still arrive at the question what sort of property construction you would desire. Ask that question of enough communists and you have a better idea of where the communist movement intends to end up at, and what communism actually is.

[The Immortal Goon]

If it helps:

The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.

Communism, still political in nature – democratic or despotic; with the abolition of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property, i.e., by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism already is aware of being reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

||V| The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.

...Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed].

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.

[fuser]

abolish private property because it is the basis of exploitation of working class. How exactly will a communist society look without private property? I don't know.

[Technology]

If it helps:

It seems that Marx considers the sense of having to be something that disconnects us from our humanity, that much is clear. That's a very spiritual passage to me.

Still, it only explains some of what Marx dislikes about private property, without adequately defining how far its diminishing should go, which is my question. I guess I should take communism as the constant process of diminishing property over time, but the problem is that there's no fine line between a "means of production" and items not suited for production, so if you set no limits we'd eventually get down to things like spades which perform productive action in the garden being taken from private owners and put in the community storage center for some community mechanism to determine who gets them for what need. What exactly do we mean when we say "common ownership of the means of production"?

[Dagoth Ur]

You're trying to get too specific but suffice to say that centralization is only desirable as to make it easier to seize. We aim to socialize property, it's not yours altogether but you still have parts of it and benefit accordingly. A carpenter has the tools he needs, he doesn't request them, the heavy machine operator has the machines he needs, the officer worker has pens, and so on. Bureaucracy is required to make the transition to communism, but it is a diminishing role as we aim to liquidate the state altogether.

And the MoP are purely means of production because they are producing. An empty factory, a salted field, a broken-down taxi, these are all examples of things that could be Capital but aren't. I mean what value would there ever be in seizing the garden spades of little old ladies?

[Technology]

We aim to socialize property, it's not yours altogether but you still have parts of it and benefit accordingly. A carpenter has the tools he needs, he doesn't request them, the heavy machine operator has the machines he needs, the officer worker has pens, and so on.

In what sense are these things not the private property of these people? You are letting them hold on to them, and allowing them personal control of them according to their own needs and will. If you are doing that, then where is the socialization? Recall by democratic community decree? If production stops on one thing do people get to move onto use their tools on some other production as they please?

I mean what value would there ever be in seizing the garden spades of little old ladies?

So that answers my question, I guess. You only want to seize means of production that have significant social impact (or are used by multiple people?) then.

Not "abolish private property", but limit it on the basis of who works it? It seems to me that you then have individual ownership as in distributism and mutualism, but then simply have co-ops for that which is used by many.

[Dagoth Ur]

Private Property has always been defined as productive property. Possessiveness I feel is an outgrowth of our base being private property but how much that is changed can only be determined by history.

[The Immortal Goon]

You only want to seize means of production that have significant social impact (or are used by multiple people?) then.

Not "abolish private property", but limit it on the basis of who works it? It seems to me that you then have individual ownership as in distributism and mutualism, but then simply have co-ops for that which is used by many.

Seizing is probably necessary at some point, but in communism that's long since passed. But private property is a concept that we created, and since we created the concept and interact with it, we have grown to see the world through it and identified it with ourselves. Again:

Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world.

An object, a spade or a factory belt or whatever, no longer belongs to you or the collective property of twelve people, but can now simply exist; and people themselves are free from interacting with it as an extension of themselves or someone else; thus freeing themselves to simply exist instead of being an extension of someone else.

We were speaking of being isolated in a cabin in rural Alaska. This is an attempt to gain through property what the abolition of property provides. Whereas now living in a cabin in rural Alaska necessarily still chains you to the worry and toil that comes with property, the identification of one's self with that property and its limitations, we will undo it all.

This goes off into a tangent, but this is part of the reason the definition of socialism is important. While the Stalinists will say that the Soviet Union had been socialist, I don't think this is the case. Marx plainly points out that even in full communism there is an infection of people still thinking upon the lines of property to help explain to themselves what their relation to the world is.

One does not simply have a revolution, call it complete, and then begin creating official forms of art, official forms of morality, and official lines of thought that must be in line with the way things were the moment the revolution was declared complete and a new form of material reality in action.

Instead of stifling such things one must, as Lenin conceded, allow them to grow and for the old generation to die not knowing their own children's thoughts and reality. And this should be repeated until, as Marx suggests, the conception of man to himself and his surroundings is more fundamentally altered than our own is to feudal society.

[Technology]

An object, a spade or a factory belt or whatever, no longer belongs to you or the collective property of twelve people, but can now simply exist; and people themselves are free from interacting with it as an extension of themselves or someone else; thus freeing themselves to simply exist instead of being an extension of someone else.

Ah. So you're saying that if communism is achieved most people simply won't think to exclude people from things? The problem for me is that spades and factory belts have a limited amount of users at one time, so there has to be some deliberation over who gets something at any one time. This implies that there must be some community administration to decide whose need for that means of production are more vital at that one time than another use. Use of one thing creates an opportunity cost of its other uses.

How does communist philosophy sought this problem out?

This goes off into a tangent, but this is part of the reason the definition of socialism is important. While the Stalinists will say that the Soviet Union had been socialist, I don't think this is the case. Marx plainly points out that even in full communism there is an infection of people still thinking upon the lines of property to help explain to themselves what their relation to the world is.

One does not simply have a revolution, call it complete, and then begin creating official forms of art, official forms of morality, and official lines of thought that must be in line with the way things were the moment the revolution was declared complete and a new form of material reality in action.

Instead of stifling such things one must, as Lenin conceded, allow them to grow and for the old generation to die not knowing their own children's thoughts and reality. And this should be repeated until, as Marx suggests, the conception of man to himself and his surroundings is more fundamentally altered than our own is to feudal society.

So to achieve communism we educate people in the communist intent until as many old generations die off as to wash away the old conception of property, and make the new conception dominant. That seems fair, but people have to know exactly what that conception involves in order for it to reasonably maintain itself as a practical and useful conception.