[Fasces]

What would make this situation more fair? FOr example, what if one of those owners of AAPL wasn't some rich kid, but a teacher's union pension fund? Does that change anything?

Aside from that, what would be the solution? Eliminate secondary markets for company ownership? Eliminate dividends and stock buy backs? Let's say we did do that, I wouldn't be surprised if some new system were setup where as if you own stock in apple, you become an employee and get paid for doing nothing and in proportion to how much apple you own. These people have all sorts of ways to work around shit.

I mean the solution is literally 'communism', I'm just defining 'surplus value'.

Capitalism is when capital is privately owned and owners not involved in the process of production get paid dividends and thus are exploiting "surplus value". Communism is when capital is collectively owned and workers don't have their surplus value taken from them.

For a market solution within capitalism, Spain has many worker-owned collectives such as Mondragon where workers select their own board of directors and profits are redistributed to the employees rather than far-off guys being paid dividends. Another solution you'll be rightly cynical about is the Chinese model, wherin the party owns and finances an enterprise on behalf of the public, and profits are used to finance functions of state on "behalf of the people".

The point is not to evaluate whether these models are effective and I don't want to get into a debate about whether China is doing right or Mondragon has outsourced is exploitative practices to other firms, simply to point out that alternative models can and do exist to shareholder/owner capitalism.

Of course they are needed, somebody has to pay for the offices, warehouses, factories, materials, shipping vehicles, etc.

It doesn't necessarily have to be an individual or an owner (see the two examples above). Capital can be secured in other ways, or, since this is a communism subforum, you can do away with the need for private capital entirely and distribute it in other ways.

The point here is how do we accurately define the economic value that the labourer and the owner provide

Easily. The labor and physical capital assets used to produce the good is 'value'.

The profit on each widget is 'surplus value'.

When the 'surplus value' is distributed to people who did not contribute to the production of the actual good, who's presence and identity is irrelevent to the production of the good, who could be removed from the equation today without changing a thing about the production of the good (you're smart, you know what I'm saying without a need to go in pedantic circles about it. If every owner that is not also an employee of Apple died today, Apple would still exist and still be able to produce widgets tomorrow. Owners are not a day-to-day requirement of the businesss), Marxists call this exploitative/appropriation and that the profit should be going to the people necessary to the day-to-day production of the good.

You can disagree with the conclusion that this is bad or exploitative, sure - I was just explaining what surplus value is since you guys were still misrepresenting it and talking about 'assemblyline workers earning as much as engineers' or what nonsense.

[Unthinking Majority]

Socialists refuse to know the fact that such things would not otherwise be available. Natural resources, however, would otherwise be available. That is the fact capitalists refuse to know.

Natural resources are already there, ready to use, without any help from their owners or any previous owner. So why are their owners legally entitled to demand that producers pay them just for permission to access the advantages government, the community and nature provide?

The issue is that nature says that any human or animal in the entire world can pick up a shiny rock and claim "this is mine", and they have every right to do that, and if they don't want to let you share the only way you can take it from them is by force, which means violence or threat of violence, so basically theft. Communist countries used violence or threat of violence to steal the private property from everyone especially the rich and claim it as everyone's property.

A country can become 100% socialist but they will want to trade with people in other countries who will also have property they claim as "theirs" and you can't force other countries to be 100% socialist too unless you use violence or they agree willingly. Communism is imperialist against its own people, and sometimes others.

If you want socialism to work you have to paint most of the world red.

And if everyone owns all the property publicly who manages it? Some central government authority? No thanks. They are prone to corruption and cronyism and tyranny. Right now property is managed by individuals and they engage in voluntary transactions, and the government is limited to managing the rules (contracts, regulations), some public property, and some redistribution etc.

Having some social programs is fine and good but otherwise I prefer to look after myself. My country's healthcare is public which I used to support but i'm starting to prefer that it wasn't public, only well-regulated with access for everyone, because the government holds a monopoly and the system is run by fools and tyrants who don't know how to manage it and people suffer or die as a result. The only choice is go to another country and pay out of pocket or suffer. Universal public health is rationed because tax dollars have to pay for everything, and there's never enough tax revenue and the politicians don't want to raise taxes because they want to win elections.

[Unthinking Majority]

It doesn't necessarily have to be an individual or an owner (see the two examples above). Capital can be secured in other ways, or, since this is a communism subforum, you can do away with the need for private capital entirely and distribute it in other ways.

And who manages the investment in communism? Who chooses which business ideas are most valid to allocate resources to vs not, and by how much? In capitalism this is all done by individuals making decisions they think is best for their interests, and consumers buy things they like and don't buy thinks that aren't useful/desirable. What is the mechanism in communism which replaces the market and supply/demand? The government sucks at it, and they shouldn't be making decisions for the consumer themselves because they can't make those decisions better than individuals can make those decisions for themselves.

A co-op owned equally by all workers is also exploitative, except that in this case the less productive workers are leeching unearned surplus off the more productive workers. A crappy worker employed by Apple the co-op would do much better than a decent worker at some mediocre IT company and yet this crappy worker didn't do anything to make Apple the co-op make successful products, he's leeching off the brain of Steve Jobs et al if he were only a labourer.

You can disagree with the conclusion that this is bad or exploitative, sure - I was just explaining what surplus value is since you guys were still misrepresenting it and talking about 'assemblyline workers earning as much as engineers' or what nonsense.

We're not discussing the definition of surplus value, this is already defined by Marx.

[Fasces]

And who manages the investment in communism? Who chooses which business ideas are most valid to allocate resources to vs not, and by how much?

Lots of debate about that in Marxist circles. Workers themselves. A vanguard party. The state. An AI. Dolphins. Yes, indeed.

What is the mechanism in communism which replaces the market and supply/demand?

Why would you "need" to replace the market or supply/demand? Are you confusing 'capital' with 'market'? We're talking about the allocation of capital, not market systems.

Plenty of alternative sources of financing exist in the world today within a market system - see any state owned enterprise financed by taxpayers. They still function in a market and allocate resources using supply and demand, even without privatized ownership.

We're not discussing the definition of surplus value, this is already defined by Marx.

Hey bro, you're the one who said worker x shouldn't earn as much as worker y as if that was relevant to the definition of surplus values.

[ckaihatsu]

If any entire industry is unionized, and workers would have control over pretty much everything at all the companies in a given industry, including deciding their wages/benefits, and the owners aren't adequately rewarded financially for their capital and risk, then yes the owners would be exploited in that case. They couldn't sell the company either (who would want to buy it?) so they'd be screwed. Since you're biased towards workers over owners you probably would never admit this.

What you're describing with the workers having control over pretty much everything, is basically *syndicalism* -- over workplaces, *among* workplaces.

This 'syndicalism' scenario is congruent with a recent slogan of mine, 'Salarize all ownership', meaning that the 'creative' aspect of the company should *really*, 'ethically', be considered as a regular executive-type white-collar work role within the overall corporate bureaucracy.


[7] Syndicalism-Socialism-Communism Transition Diagram

Spoiler: show

---

Just because workers don't have a huge amount of capital to fall back on doesn't automatically mean they sell their labour power for an exploitative wage. A wage is only possibly exploitative if the wage they receive is less than the value of the labour they provide vis a vis the value that the owners are providing also.

Wages are *always* exploitative, by-definition:

A worker who is sufficiently productive can produce an output value greater than what it costs to hire him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

---

The worker needs to be remunerated for the labour they provide and the owner needs to be remunerated for the capital/investment, risk, and labour they provide (management of the company etc).

The capital investment, financial risk, and management of the company are all *systemic* concerns, and the owner would simply *adjust* the specifics of each in order to *optimize* for maximum shareholder value / company profits.

This is to say that it's not about the actual personnel / *persons* who do the labor, and/or manage the portfolio -- they can always be replaced with *others* who are privately selected by ownership.

It's also false that profit/surplus value is created only through exploitation of labour. A company could run entirely on AI machines to produce their goods and still be profitable. Picasso could work alone for himself and still be very profitable. Value added to a product above the costs needed to produce them (profit) is created through creativity. The worker who invented the iPhone is contributing a ton of creativity and economic value, so they're certainly not paid what they're worth. But a labourer on an assembly line is a trained monkey and not providing much if any creativity to the business/product. A machine that doesn't think and only follows instructions could do their job as good as they can. Which is also why an assembly line worker makes little money...anyone could do it, it takes virtually no intelligence.

The 'artisan' craftsperson cottage-industry conception of production won't get you far these days, because modern industrial mass production depends *entirely* on the assembly-line, relegating the white-collar 'creative' aspect to simply being *outsourced*, and similarly *proletarianized*, along with all the blue-collar roles on the production line.

You're showing a particular *chauvinism*, for 'creative' white-collar-type labor, over 'mind-numbing' / 'soul-destroying' *blue*-collar-type labor -- even though *both* kinds of labor are necessary for the production process to take place.

[ckaihatsu]

Ask anyone "who painted Starry Night?" and they'll say, Van Gough. But he painted it in a hospital, so he didn't own the paper, paint, and brushes used to create it.

In the example of Van Gogh, the capital was owned by the hospital - it was the hospital's paints, the hospital's canvas, the hospital's brushes on the hospital's land. Who provided the most value: Van Gogh, who did the labor of painting, or the hospital, which provided the physical capital?

This kind of 'artisanal'-type example / scenario throws into stark relief the sharp distinction between [1] the cost / value of production / manufacture, and [2] the *price* value -- potentially *fluctuating* post-production due to the oscillations of market supply and demand.

Here's from recently:

You're saying 'supply-and-demand', but you haven't addressed the point about this that I've raised previously, about money having to do a physically-impossible *triple-duty* of valuating these three *different* economic components: [1] manufacture, [2] supply-and-demand, and [3] the consumer's own subjective use-value, or 'utility'.

viewtopic.php?p=15253101#p15253101

[ckaihatsu]

At last, it's also not clear if this artist is part of the worker class or part of the bourgeoisie from a Marxian perspective. I can imagine both cases can be made, if the artist doesn't own the physical inputs used to paint he could be a worker but if he does he could be considered a capitalist who's being paid to turn those raw inputs into a piece of art, even if he doesn't hire any assistants and does all the work himself (and even more so if he does hire assistants).

*Is* such a capitalist *really* 'being paid to turn those raw inputs into a piece of art' -- because it's a rather *passive* construction you're using there, wat0n. (grin) (It's creative-capitalist-commodifier as humble-servant to the audience.)

Are we still using the *proactive* artistic genius of *Picasso*, or is there a *newer*, and *plainer* personality being discussed -- ?

The original point was that loans / debt are *not* the same value quantities as liquidity / cash. Cash doesn't have to have *credit ratings agencies* to rate whether the cash is 'risky' or not -- cash is cash, and is the default go-to for *value* for most of the world.

So?

[POINT #01] My *point* is that there's an *empirical* / categorical distinction to be made between *cash*, and fictitious-capital, or *debt*.


Generalizations-Characterizations

Spoiler: show

[ckaihatsu]

(Again.)

It's also false that profit/surplus value is created only through exploitation of labour. A company could run entirely on AI machines to produce their goods and still be profitable. Picasso could work alone for himself and still be very profitable. Value added to a product above the costs needed to produce them (profit) is created through creativity.

'AI machines', by dint of their *automation*, then become *rentier capital*, like *land*, or the aforementioned functioning of a laundromat.

[ckaihatsu]

The issue is that nature says that any human or animal in the entire world can pick up a shiny rock and claim "this is mine", and they have every right to do that, and if they don't want to let you share the only way you can take it from them is by force, which means violence or threat of violence, so basically theft. Communist countries used violence or threat of violence to steal the private property from everyone especially the rich and claim it as everyone's property.

---

The bureaucracy’s path of forced industrialisation in order to match the West militarily had a logic of its own. Production of ‘investment goods’—plant, machinery and raw materials that could be used to produce more plant, machinery and raw materials—rose at the expense of consumer goods. The proportion of investment devoted to producing the means of production rose from 32.8 percent in 1927-28 to 53.3 percent in 1932 and 68.8 percent by 1950.169 But this meant the goods which the peasants wanted in return for feeding the growing mass of industrial workers were not produced.

The only way to obtain the food was by further use of force against the peasants. Stalin followed the logic of this by moving on from seizing grain to seizing land. The collectivisation of land—in reality the state expropriation of the peasantry—was the other side of forced industrialisation. It led to an increase in the surplus available to feed the towns and sell abroad for foreign machinery. But it also resulted in a fall in total agricultural output.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 476

---

A country can become 100% socialist but they will want to trade with people in other countries who will also have property they claim as "theirs" and you can't force other countries to be 100% socialist too unless you use violence or they agree willingly. Communism is imperialist against its own people, and sometimes others.

This is retro-Cold-War, and is *outdated* today.

Also, the USSR wasn't imperialist because it never exported finance capital.

If you want socialism to work you have to paint most of the world red.

And if everyone owns all the property publicly who manages it? Some central government authority? No thanks. They are prone to corruption and cronyism and tyranny.

---

Stalin and Bukharin represented a ruling group which feared and fought anything that might disturb its position of bureaucratic privilege. Its chief characteristic was inertia and complacency. The idea that Russia could simply ignore the outside world, rely on its resources and, as Bukharin famously put it, ‘build socialism at a snail’s pace’, fitted such a mood. That was why every party functionary involved in daily compromises with industrial managers, better-off peasants or get-rich-quick traders rushed to support Stalin and Bukharin in their attacks on those who tried to remind them of workers’ democracy and world revolution. This enabled the ruling group to resort to ever more repressive measures against the opposition, using police to break up a demonstration in support of the opposition by some Petrograd workers on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution,164 expelling the opposition from the party, exiling them to remote areas and finally deporting Trotsky from the USSR.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 474

---

And who manages the investment in communism? Who chooses which business ideas are most valid to allocate resources to vs not, and by how much? In capitalism this is all done by individuals making decisions they think is best for their interests, and consumers buy things they like and don't buy thinks that aren't useful/desirable. What is the mechanism in communism which replaces the market and supply/demand?

Here's from my own post-scarcity / post-capitalist 'labor credits' model, which I advocate:

Instead of allowing the dangers of a standing general bureaucratic administrative 'class' (as described above), all administrative concerns would be limited and circumscribed by each individual policy package. Any policy package that enjoyed adequate social participation to fulfill all of its components -- equipment, resources, liberated labor, sufficient funding of labor credits, winning-out over any competing proposals, available capacity to fulfill formally-expressed social need, internal policy-package proponents specified -- would activate / enable, and *obligate* that policy package's proponents to oversee and fulfill the terms of that formal policy package throughout its implementation.

No exchanges or exchange-values would be required whatsoever because the number of recipients for any and all mass production would be specified upfront as part of the overall policy package. In *practice*, liberated labor might determine that a certain percentage of 'extra' production (say, 25%) would be necessary to satisfy the total of *all* recipients, including any *walk-up* recipients who decided not to participate in the formal demands / requesting process for the policy package. In this way all production would always be free-access and direct-distribution, no questions asked.

I've created a unique framework model myself that uses daily personal survey-type *rankings* (#1, #2, #3, etc.) of 'demands', as for needed material goods and services, and also to indicate relative personal prioritizations for all political matters. The idea is to leverage present-day communications technologies like a RevLeft-style discussion board, and automatic daily ranking *aggregations* over any given locality / localities, to arrive at a tally-sheet-type result showing which ['policy packages'] (or less-developed stages of public initiatives) receive the most ranking-inputs for any given rank (#1, #2, #3, etc.). (Maybe the vicinity of 'Urbanopolis' has tallied 78,921 #2-rankings for 'Proposal A' for October 18, 2017, while 'Proposal B' has the support of 80,031 #1-rankings for the same issue, from the same area, for the same day -- which one would win-out -- ? Technically Proposal B, of course, but it would ultimately be up to the internal organization of relevant liberated labor as to where they put their efforts for any given mass-demands.)

I welcome comments on any / all of this

https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338

[ckaihatsu]

Originally Posted by Anonymous, per request

5. Will there at least be some form of government to ensure fair labour credits, laws of regulation and other formal procedures?


Originally Posted by ckaihatsu

No -- I maintain that all that has to happen is the operability of individual, locality- (or broader) specific PCs for the automated aggregation of the daily individual prioritized demands lists. Here's a particular possible implementation -- for the purpose of providing the aforementioned redundancy, several PC installations could be done, daily, within the following arrangement:


It's actually *not* an institution -- all it is is a computer-sorting function, that would then automatically publish the aggregated mass-prioritizations daily out to the public, as online, at certain locations on displays, and in newspapers, etc.

I've considered that, in the interests of no-institutions and full transparency, the hardware itself could even be replaced on a daily basis with *brand-new* hardware (a regular PC), and those who are so interested could participate in installing the Linux operating system (OS) onto the computer (in an open, public space), then installing the 'sorting' open-source software (compiled fresh from the source code), and putting that PC into service for just that one day. There could also be observers in-person, and live video feeds of this daily process broadcast out over the Internet, with cameras and video feeds remaining pointed at the machine itself over the course of the day so that people can see both in-person and remotely exactly what's going on with this automatic-centralized process of information aggregation and distribution.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338

[wat0n]

*Is* such a capitalist *really* 'being paid to turn those raw inputs into a piece of art' -- because it's a rather *passive* construction you're using there, wat0n. (grin) (It's creative-capitalist-commodifier as humble-servant to the audience.)

Are we still using the *proactive* artistic genius of *Picasso*, or is there a *newer*, and *plainer* personality being discussed -- ?

Plenty of notable artworks were, in fact, commissioned. I'm specially thinking about more capital and labor intensive works such as e.g. sculpture and architecture where commissioning is realistically the only way to fund such endeavors, but can apply to painting and other artworks depending on the case.

[POINT #01] My *point* is that there's an *empirical* / categorical distinction to be made between *cash*, and fictitious-capital, or *debt*.


Generalizations-Characterizations

Spoiler: show

Why is cash relevant in this discussion?

[ckaihatsu]

[POINT #01] My *point* is that there's an *empirical* / categorical distinction to be made between *cash*, and fictitious-capital, or *debt*.

Why is cash relevant in this discussion?

---

The original point was that loans / debt are *not* the same value quantities as liquidity / cash. Cash doesn't have to have *credit ratings agencies* to rate whether the cash is 'risky' or not -- cash is cash, and is the default go-to for *value* for most of the world.

viewtopic.php?p=15262795#p15262795

[Truth To Power]

'AI machines', by dint of their *automation*, then become *rentier capital*, like *land*, or the aforementioned functioning of a laundromat.

No. That is a claim that I have already proved objectively false many times. The land was already there, ready to use, with no help from the owner or any previous owner. The laundromat and AI machines were not. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?

[Truth To Power]

Also, the USSR wasn't imperialist because it never exported finance capital.

^^^ My nomination for Absurd Marxist Non Sequitur of the Month.

Here's from my own post-scarcity / post-capitalist 'labor credits' model, which I advocate:

And which reads like some junior high school kid's notion of How to Make Everything the Way It Should Be.

[Truth To Power]

Wages are *always* exploitative, by-definition:

No, that is absurd Marxist tripe, by definition.

[ckaihatsu]

'AI machines', by dint of their *automation*, then become *rentier capital*, like *land*, or the aforementioned functioning of a laundromat.

No. That is a claim that I have already proved objectively false many times. The land was already there, ready to use, with no help from the owner or any previous owner. The laundromat and AI machines were not. How do you prevent yourself from knowing such self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality?

No -- you're wantonly sidestepping / ignoring that raw land is *not* automatically a commodity, and that raw land requires *labor* to transform it into usable, saleable *real estate*.

Same goes for *any other* kind of rentier capital, like a building, a laundromat, or AI neural networks. They're all 'set-it-and-forget-it', which necessarily implies 'automation' of one kind or another, loosely speaking.

Non-labor-utilizing *rentier capital* provides service *automatically*, by-definition -- non-industrial *gemstones* are a go-to example here since they 'automatically' provide endless 'interest' / 'luxury' / use-value / whatever, just by *looking* at them, potentially for eternity.

[Truth To Power]

I mean the solution is literally 'communism', I'm just defining 'surplus value'.

"Surplus value" is a Marxist anti-concept, and means, "the value of the additional production created by the employer using the producer goods provided by investors that is absurdly and dishonestly claimed by Marxists to belong to the workers who did not create it."

Capitalism is when capital is privately owned and owners not involved in the process of production get paid dividends and thus are exploiting "surplus value".

That is nothing but self-contradictory Marxist nonsense. How could providing producer goods that would not otherwise have been available for the process of production not be "involvement" in that process??

Communism is when capital is collectively owned and workers don't have their surplus value taken from them.

"Their" surplus value?? How could the additional value created by the employer using the producer goods provided by the investor ever get to be the workers' surplus value, hmmmmmm???

The point is not to evaluate whether these models are effective and I don't want to get into a debate about whether China is doing right or Mondragon has outsourced is exploitative practices to other firms, simply to point out that alternative models can and do exist to shareholder/owner capitalism.

Certainly. There's feudalism, despotic slavery, primitive communism, even socialism. They just aren't capable of sustaining a modern market economy's level of production. Only geoism and capitalism are, as far as we know.

It doesn't necessarily have to be an individual or an owner (see the two examples above). Capital can be secured in other ways, or, since this is a communism subforum, you can do away with the need for private capital entirely and distribute it in other ways.

If you ignore economic reality.

Easily. The labor and physical capital assets used to produce the good is 'value'.

No it isn't. Value is what something would trade for.

The profit on each widget is 'surplus value'.

So, the value the employer creates by his labor of arranging for all the production factors to be applied to the production process. Check.

When the 'surplus value' is distributed to people who did not contribute to the production of the actual good,

That does not describe the people who contributed the producer goods that would not otherwise have been available.

who's presence and identity is irrelevent to the production of the good,

That does not describe the people who contributed the producer goods.

who could be removed from the equation today without changing a thing about the production of the good

What an absurd and disingenuous load of Marxist tripe. That's like saying once the meal is cooked, you can take the chef out back and shoot him without affecting the diners' enjoyment of it.

(you're smart,

Wish I could say the same....

you know what I'm saying without a need to go in pedantic circles about it.

I do indeed. In fact, I know it far better than you.

If every owner that is not also an employee of Apple died today, Apple would still exist and still be able to produce widgets tomorrow.

And maybe even for a few days after that...

Owners are not a day-to-day requirement of the businesss), Marxists call this exploitative/appropriation and that the profit should be going to the people necessary to the day-to-day production of the good.

See above re the chef, who, like the provider of producer goods, is no longer "necessary" to the preparation of the meal once it is already on the table.

You can disagree with the conclusion that this is bad or exploitative, sure - I was just explaining what surplus value is since you guys were still misrepresenting it and talking about 'assemblyline workers earning as much as engineers' or what nonsense.

See above for identification of the real nonsense.

[Truth To Power]

No -- you're wantonly sidestepping / ignoring that raw land is *not* automatically a commodity,

No. I am identifying the indisputable fact that it is. Raw land often has astronomical exchange value. That is just a fact. You have simply realized that the preservation of your false and evil beliefs requires you to not know that fact, so you refuse to know it.

and that raw land requires *labor* to transform it into usable, saleable *real estate*.

No, that is just (surprise!) a bald falsehood.

Don't you understand what it means when you always have to resort to bald falsehoods?

Same goes for *any other* kind of rentier capital, like a building, a laundromat, or AI neural networks. They're all 'set-it-and-forget-it', which necessarily implies 'automation' of one kind or another, loosely speaking.

No, that is objectively false. The land was already there. The building, laundromat and AI system had to be provided by someone. You just refuse to know that fact because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Non-labor-utilizing *rentier capital* provides service *automatically*, by-definition --

Anything that -- unlike land -- had to be provided by someone does not provide "service" automatically.

non-industrial *gemstones* are a go-to example here since they 'automatically' provide endless 'interest' / 'luxury' / use-value / whatever, just by *looking* at them, potentially for eternity.

No, that's just more absurd and disingenuous Marxist nonsense from you.

[Truth To Power]

The issue is that nature says that any human or animal in the entire world can pick up a shiny rock and claim "this is mine", and they have every right to do that,

Animals don't have rights; and the act of picking something up removes it from nature, thus creating a "product" that did not previously exist. As the rock is no longer there, it is not something that others would otherwise have been at liberty to use.

and if they don't want to let you share the only way you can take it from them is by force,

But if it is something they have NOT removed from nature, but merely claime to own, then the only way they can stop you from using it is by force.

GET IT???

which means violence or threat of violence, so basically theft.

Forcibly depriving others, without just and agreed compensation, of what they would otherwise have -- like the liberty to use a natural resource -- is theft.

GET IT???

Communist countries used violence or threat of violence to steal the private property from everyone especially the rich and claim it as everyone's property.

Sure. And capitalist countries used violence and the threat of violence to steal natural resources from everyone, especially the powerless, and claim them as private property.

GET IT??

If you want socialism to work you have to paint most of the world red.

Socialism is even worse than capitalism, and I have explained exactly why.

And if everyone owns all the property publicly who manages it? Some central government authority?

Government administers possession and use of land in any case, because that is what government is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land.

They are prone to corruption and cronyism and tyranny.

That describes private landowning to a T, as proved by every society in the history of the world that has ever had it.

Right now property is managed by individuals and they engage in voluntary transactions,

GARBAGE. The people whose rights to liberty landowners own and buy and sell did not voluntarily surrender them. Voluntary transactions in a free market are impossible under capitalism because a market in which some people's rights to liberty are owned and bought and sold by other people is not a free market. It is a slave market.

and the government is limited to managing the rules (contracts, regulations), some public property, and some redistribution etc.

Government in capitalist countries is a massive engine for the subsidization of the privileged, especially landowners, at the expense of producers and consumers. Only democratic accountability ameliorates that situation and prevents landowners from forcing everyone else into conditions of slave-like oppression, poverty and misery.

Universal public health is rationed because tax dollars have to pay for everything, and there's never enough tax revenue and the politicians don't want to raise taxes because they want to win elections.

Publicly funded health care is rationed because all government spending on desirable public services and infrastructure is a subsidy to landowners. They pocket all its value, and no one else benefits. Google "Henry George Theorem." THAT'S WHY LAND COSTS SO MUCH.

[ckaihatsu]

No. I am identifying the indisputable fact that it is. Raw land often has astronomical exchange value. That is just a fact. You have simply realized that the preservation of your false and evil beliefs requires you to not know that fact, so you refuse to know it.

I'll welcome any *examples*, or references, you may have here.

Note, though, that *historically*, the *government* has provided the initial offering of land to *land speculators*:

For the first decades of its existence, the young US government supported itself not only with tariffs but also by selling western lands. Most of the sales of prime land were not to settlers but to speculators who eventually sold the fertile land to settlers. If the US had cut out the middle man, it could have directed all those sale proceeds into the public treasury. However, most often the employees of the government’s land office were in cahoots with the speculators; everybody knew what was going on (Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land, 1970). Further, the government did not have to sell the land but could have leased it, just as the modern state of Israel does today. Or, if selling, government could tax or otherwise levy land at its annual rental value (functionally, no different from leasing it).

https://www.progress.org/articles/histo ... peculation

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No, that is objectively false. The land was already there. The building, laundromat and AI system had to be provided by someone. You just refuse to know that fact because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

TTP, at *this* point in things all *I* have to say is 'land needs landscaping', and you're plumb out of luck. As soon as *any* rentier capital, like real estate, is built-up / developed, and provides use-value continuously, it's then 'automatic' in providing that service-value endlessly, all without requiring any human-labor inputs.

The *point* of this, of course -- and especially since you're being so evasive -- is that it's automatically a *crisis* for '[exchange] value', because how the hell is anyone supposed to find a per-use 'value' / price for usage when there's no telling how many years the machine or device will be in service.

When *labor* is actively involved there's a *standard* to go by, that of the per-hour *wage* rate. But for a lump-sum *purchase* (building, laundromat, AI) that then parcels-out laborless automatic service over time, how can each portion of 'service' be appropriately *quantified* and commodified on any consistent basis -- ?

How much labor *went into* the asset or resource, and why isn't resulting pricing based on those initial *production costs* (equity capital depreciation plus labor costs), parceled-out into proportionately-priced packets of automatic-service-value, with a proportionate per-portion markup.

So *logistically* it's a *mess*, and is also along the lines of an economic 'market failure' -- supply-and-demand-type pricing *fails* when the 'supply' is unerringly available with negligible additional unit cost (as with providing laundromat machines, and/or digital copying, too).


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show