A quick question for communists before bed...

Not sure how accurate this is, but it still shows that people do want worker ownership imo...

More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

Because...

And worker-owned companies make a difference. In Cleveland, for instance, an integrated group of worker-owned companies, supported in part by the purchasing power of large hospitals and universities, has taken the lead in local solar-panel installation, “green” institutional laundry services and a commercial hydroponic greenhouse capable of producing more than three million heads of lettuce a year...

....And while the American public has long supported the capitalist model, that, too, may be changing. In 2009 a Rasmussen poll reported that Americans under 30 years old were “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism.”

And that is from the New York Times.

Worker-Owners of America, Unite!

I don't care what people want to call this, worker ownership is the goal.

Originally posted by mee30
So my question is simple... If communism is such a grand idea why haven't communists got together to run businesses? Have they? Like no-one owns the place of business and everybody is paid the same and there is no hierarchy etc... I would be interested in hearing examples if there are any...

Surely this could be done today quite easily no? Most of OWS are of the communist persuasion, so there are no shortage of people with the same ideology. In fact I know many people that do not profess to be communist but would agree that everyone should get paid the same etc...

Also if there is no hierarchy how would you divvy up the wages? How would you hire and fire? Would you use democracy/mob rule for everything? What if a bunch of people took a disliking to a particular colleague? They could just vote him/her out?

It sounds like an absolute nightmare!

Uh...ever hear of a co-op? There are also some very successful employee-owned companies in the US, although I can't give you their names off hand. At least one is high-tech and another is in the food industry. I also used to work for a successful engineering company, which one became vested in, but management screwed up and bought some unprofitable companies in related fields, which had skeletons in their closets, i.e. big, hidden debts. This caused my former company to then get bought up by a very large engineering/construction conglomerate that provides much poorer benefits.

Can not guarantee these are all strictly worker owned, but even a little is better than nothing eh?

List of employee-owned companies

These types of businesses are not nearly as likely to move overseas or change location because the people who work there actually own it and are making business decisions.

Worker-Owned Cooperatives Offer A Vision Of A Different Kind Of Capitalism

reply to post by mee30


China is proof of comunism working, china is going to be the new leader of the world, oh she allready is heh.

reply to post by mee30


China is proof of comunism working, china is going to be the new leader of the world, oh she allready is heh.

reply to post by Unrealised


Do you have ANY idea what are you talking about? No, don't answer that; let me do it for you: no, you don't.

Did you live in a communist country for one hour, at least?
Did you spend the winter in a cold apartment because the heating system is controlled by the State and they want to spend as little as they could with you, the average Joe?
Did you live nights without power, so you had to make light with candles or car bulbs connected to a car battery?
Did you spend 5-6-7 hours in line for a synthetic food?
Did you happen to give your children water instead of milk because there is no milk at any stores, being considered a luxury product?
Did you see your children crying and dying because of hunger and cold?
Did you watch your parents or children dying of starvation or because of common, treatable diseases, because the State does not allow imports of medicine from the Capitalist West?
Did you wash yourself with ice-cold water, in the morning, during the winter, because the State does not provide you with hot water?
Did you ever have your phone tapped, knowing that every single word you're saying is recorded and can be used against you, when THEY will come to get you at 3 a.m. and imprison you, torturing you, beating and killing you just because you happen not to agree with the current State?

... and I could continue for a long time but, instead, I will tell you this: NO, YOU DIDN'T ANY OF THE ABOVE, MISTER!
I DID, FOR 20 YEARS, LIVING AND WATCHING EVERY SINGLE THING ABOVE.

And by having the nerve to telling that communism is good, you, Sir, prove that you're nothing else than a hypocrite, living in West, enjoying all the capitalist commodities and praising the communism because YOU DON'T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT.

You, Sir, and the others like you, makes me SICK!

reply to post by Unrealised



It would seem that Communism being a collective would be more Borg-like than Capitalism. I think you have your name calling and insults confused.

Frankly calling the want of a comfortable life (house, cars, ect) a sickness and undeserving is disturbing.

On a side note, I had a former co-worker who would proudly proclaim she was a communist and stated her belief that everyone should have the same things and make the same wages. When I told her I didn't believe her, she asked why. I said if she was really a communist she should live like it, if that was her true belief. She made well over minimum wage, I suggested she donate her salary above that amount to people who made less than her. She had a new car, new clothes, ect, I thought she should donate those items as well and take public transportation. Her only response was that other people make more than her so until they give up their luxuries she wasn't going to. I said yes but they aren't communists you are. She walked away and never brought up the subject again with me.

Originally posted by mee30
reply to post by Bone75

 

I just got all mooshy reading that Very well put and the amount of stars you've received so far is very encouraging. There might be hope for us after all. True Marxist Communism eliminates the need for money and all of the horrors that comes with it... In the right hands that is

Very strange indeed, lol... But hey whatever floats your boat.

You may want to have a word with anok though because to him marxism is not even communism at all...

Edit: Sorry one more thing, this is the point of my thread... You want to live without money? Why don't you guys do it? get together and start up a workplace where you can be self sufficient... What is stopping you? Do you have a garden? Do you know anyone who has one? Do you have local allotments etc... Start growing your own food, keep a portion of the food back to get your seeds for the next grow, no more need to buy food... Slowly but surely leave the evil money behind... I doesn't need to be an overnight transition.

edit on 17-11-2012 by mee30 because: (no reason given)

The only way it would work and preserve many of the luxuries we enjoy today, would be on a grand scale.

Originally posted by ANOK

Originally posted by milominderbinder
Read up on Utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham (a contemporary of Adam Smith's).

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." Adam Smith

Spoken like a true socialist. He would have apposed capitalism because capitalists are those who have property and use it to exploit those who have no property. Free-markets is not capitalism. He recognised that the state is only here to protect capitalist interests. Capitalism is NOT free-markets, it is a market controlled and manipulated by private property owners.

BTW the term 'capitalism' has was not in use yet at the time of Adam Smith. It wasn't until 50 years after he died that the term capitalism was coined to mean the system of private ownership of the means of production.

Absolute Socialism requires that individuals sacrifice for the good of the many.
Absolute Capitalism requires that the many sacrifice for the good of the few.

...Utilitarianism thinks you are intelligent enough to be able to use both philosophies responsibly. It's the economics of the MIDDLE classes.

That is not true. Socialism is not about sacrificing anything. Please explain to me what you would have to sacrifice?
Capitalists would have to sacrificed their right to earn from exploiting labour, is that what you mean?

You are right though that capitalism is the many sacrificing for the few, or more correctly the many being exploited by the few. It's only a good system for the few, and it will always be the few, no matter what illusion people have of being one of the few. Capitalism will not and cannot provide for everyone, it always causes the many to be in poverty, because the few take more than they need, will ever need.

We already have the ability to provide for everyone but people still go without. Capitalism is based on artificial scarcity, there are no profits when resources are in abundance.

edit on 11/17/2012 by ANOK because: (no reason given)

Don't get me wrong. If forced to pick between the two options of Socialism or Capitalism...I'll pick socialism every time.

My point is that there is no need to pick EITHER of the these two systems.

Again...read up on Utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham and then tell me if it doesn't make infinitely more sense than all of the of the other economic ideas you have ever read about combined.

I would choose a free market capitalism over any other system.

Originally posted by mee30
Originally posted by mee30
Surely this could be done today quite easily no? Most of OWS are of the communist persuasion, so there are no shortage of people with the same ideology. In fact I know many people that do not profess to be communist but would agree that everyone should get paid the same etc...

That's one of the most ignorant paragraphs I have ever read on all of ATS. ...which is really saying something.

SIGH... Care to elaborate? Otherwise this is just a useless ad-hom attack.

Sure. I thought it was self-evident...but I'll spell it out for you.

1. "Most" of the OWS protestors are not "communists", given that the only two hold-outs for Communism left on planet earth are Cuba and N. Korea. It's a defunct boogeyman. Everybody likes owning stuff, OWS included. In fact...the reason they are protesting is because a privileged class of career criminals have stolen the property that legally belongs to the Middle Class year, after year, after year.

2. Who in this country believes that "everyone should be paid the same"? Certainly no mainstream element of American society that I have observed. Yes...there are MANY who believe that it's categorically discriminatory to pay groups of people less than other groups of people for doing the same work...but again...that just means that these individuals are strong supporters of the Constitution. It doesn't mean that they are "communists".

3. Do you have empirical or scientific data to back up your claims of how "most" people feel about things and that there are "no shortage" of communists...or is this just another wild, Faux News-inspired hyperbolic claim?


Understand now?

Originally posted by mee30
reply to post by milominderbinder

 

Yeah...the "finite amount" part should scare the bejeebies out of you. Sure...it's great for inflation...but it's one ugly mother for financial panics. Why not peg the currency to the mercantile exchange as a WHOLE? Or at the very, VERY, least a BASKET OF METALS? Basing the entire global economic system upon a single commodity is BEYOND insane in the modern world....and allows a handful of uber-rich global bankers to EASILY monopolize and dominate the system in a world where gold is a wee bit harder to come by and requires lots more mining equipment than it was a few hundred or thousand years ago. I agree that currency should be reflective of SOMETHING (besides debt)...but the idea that we can all "just go back to the gold standard" is seriously very, VERY, shortsighted.

I do agree with you here actually and what I advocate is free market. Let people trade with whatever the hell they want to trade with, lol... Super simple really... I mean it already happens today, with the various payment methods you have online and now with wordpress accepting bitcoin I think it could really take off... It is the future all this control is the problem... We need to loosen up lol

I'm more or less with you on this with one exception...I think we STILL need SOME SORT of standardized currency and that currency needs to be backed by TWO things.
#1 - Itself. Every dollar in existence needs to ACTUALLY be printed. No more digi-dollars. As it stands only 3% of the US dollars in circulation are printed. The rest ONLY exist only as abstract strings of 1's and 0's. Basically...it's the same idea as paper ballot. It's just a lot harder to "invent" all that cash when you are required to have a paper (money) trail.

#2 - SOMETHING other than debt. A "dollar" needs to be directly redeemable for SOMETHING of tangible use and value. This is a bit of a double edged sword. If we start pegging the value of currency to something like the commodities market as a whole...you have in a way restricted "free trade" on commodities. However...that's not necessarily such a bad thing. As we speak, it only costs around $34 to produce a barrel of oil...if Clinton hadn't signed off of the bank deregulations at the end of his second-term and we still had the same controls in place that restricted (to a degree) the unfettered speculation on energy commodities we would likely be looking at somewhere around $80/barrel...with the oil companies STILL being able to clock in a sound 130%-ish markup on their product...more than enough to have still have an extremely prosperous private enterprise. What does this tell us? Well...perhaps free markets and unbridled inflationary speculation is OK...but maybe...just MAYBE we shouldn't do it with the fundamental commodities which feed, power, and supply human civilization with what it needs to continue. If investors want to dump money into some goofy internet company that's valued at 300:1...great...go nuts. But that's MUCH DIFFERENT than declaring open season on oil and gas when EVERY OTHER BUSINESS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD depends upon it to function. That's my thoughts, anyways.


Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone magazine has done the best job I've seen thus far explaining how BOTH "regulation" AND "de-regulation" has been used to screw over essentially the entire global human population in the last 20 yrs or so in his book entitled "Griftopia".

Here's the link:

www.amazon.com...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353266574&sr=8-1&keywords=griftopia

reply to post by milominderbinder


printing fake money and making money out of binary code is very shortsided, its set up to collapse.

reply to post by mee30


well anything sounds better than what we have now, maybe there is some sort of hybrid system to still be invented that doesn't have an expiration date.

reply to post by kera1337


In a way you're right. But China is not communist. They're a republic that has a communist party in charge. It's a game of semantics. "Call us a republic, but we will have communists run the republic!"


And really, what has communism done for the world. Take a look at the list of men who have been at the helm of communist countries. Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, Jong-Il and Jong-Un, Castro, Che Guevara, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Gorbachev. Who is willing to call them all "visionaries" or great men? You can't pick a few out of the list and say they're okay. All of these men are one in the same.

Originally posted by Unrealised
Sorry, but you have no idea how real, structured communism works.



Real communism doesn't have any need for money.


The work is done either because it needs to be done, or because one has a passion for it.

You won't find any true communist business in this capitalist filth-pit of a society.



It would be like trying to sell gold to a man who only loves dirt.



The love for a certain career is at the heart of true communism.
No longer would a person become a doctor because their parents pushed them into it, or because it pays well.

No, it would only attract people who have a true passion for it, and this would weed out the weak-skilled.



I won't go on about this, because ATS is famous for bashing communists.
It's happened to me before.




Just enjoy your propaganda, left over from the cold-war.

I have no energy for trying to convert the capitalist Borg.


Capitalism is a world-wide disease, and it's killing the innate human love for life.

I am not in big fan of communist, but I which you keep going. I like to read more of your point of view...

Originally posted by Echo3Foxtrot
reply to post by kera1337

 

In a way you're right. But China is not communist. They're a republic that has a communist party in charge. It's a game of semantics. "Call us a republic, but we will have communists run the republic!"

But their political party is not actually communists either. Communism is not a political system, it is an economic system and unless they have a communism economy they can not be properly called communist.

A state owned economy on behalf of the people is called Nationalism, a state owned economy for the benefit of the party members is called state-capitalism.

And really, what has communism done for the world. Take a look at the list of men who have been at the helm of communist countries. Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, Jong-Il and Jong-Un, Castro, Che Guevara, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Gorbachev. Who is willing to call them all "visionaries" or great men? You can't pick a few out of the list and say they're okay. All of these men are one in the same.

Anyone can call themselves a communist. People in powers of authority can never be real communists. Why would someone who wants authority follow a system that would ultimately strip them of their authority?

None of those people were truly communists, they were simply authoritarians who used Marxist ideology to gain state power, not to implement communism. Communism/socialism was a workers movement that started in Western Europe. It was spreading amongst the working class, so the establishment authorities took steps to ensure the workers did not take the power. Stalin and the Bolsheviks were in reality fascist just like Mussolini and Hitler.

The real left apposed the Bolsheviks...

Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks were a series of rebellions and uprisings against the Bolsheviks led or supported by left wing groups including Socialist Revolutionaries, Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists. Some were in support of the White Movement while some tried to be an independent force. The uprisings started in 1918 and continued through the Russian Civil War and after until 1922. In response the Bolsheviks increasingly abandoned attempts to get these groups to join the government and suppressed them with force.

Left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks

In fact what is a communist? Communism is the workers ownership of the means of production, it was a working class movement, not a political system or party. Politicians simply appropriated left-wing terms to gain support and power. So a 'communist', or socialist, is someone who supports worker ownership, and may or may not follow one of the accepted paths to that goal, such as Marxism.

Of course our his-tory book reflect the lies and manipulation as truth, and the reality is hidden. You have to dig to find the truth.

Originally posted by DocHolidaze
reply to post by milominderbinder

 

printing fake money and making money out of binary code is very shortsided, its set up to collapse.

I know.

...that's what I just said.

reply to post by daskakik

Again you only want to use your definition for terms while you admit that others exist and, in the case of capitalism, that they are in fact what is actually in place, being this the popular definition.

We do not have capitalism at all... It's funny because I hear you people saying that capitalism is darwinism but now you tell me that capitalism is states bailing out companies... The quote you used did not say anything of the sort...

You're too caught up in being right that you miss what is right in front of you.

How can I miss something that I actually addressed?

Well it is what he advocates and what is in that video is an example of that, even if not to a tee.

Even if not to a tee? It is nothing like it! In the video you have a young corporation! Socialism and anok are against making profit!!! That is one of their gripes, that people make things for profit and not because people NEED them... Anok has told me on many occasions that he is against property rights! He thinks he can go steal peoples property because it should be "the peoples", he fails to see that PEOPLE do own these companies... Just as the people in the video own the company! Anok is twisting things as usual...

He has told me that no-one can own the means of production! These people in the video own the means to production!!!

It boggles my mind how you can be so blind...

What anok talks about when he says ALL he means no-one! If we all own say the water, then no-one owns it right? That is what he and socialism/communism is talking about! The people in the video just have a really great place to live and work, but they are looking to improve and expand their business like any good capitalist should. lol...

Worker ownership is the "bare bones ideology" of socialism and you stated that it would be good if all the workers were to have ownership of their workplace so you seem to be agreeing without wanting to be wrong. Odd.

Let me use your quote here...

Capitalism entails the private ownership of the latter two — natural resources and capital goods — by a class of owners called capitalists, either individually, collectively or through a state apparatus that operates to maximize profits or that serves the interests of capital owners.

"Capitalism entails the private ownership of the latter two" So we have private ownership yes? Just like in the video, yes?

"natural resources and capital goods" In the video they grow food and make things in the workshop to sell, so check and check...

"by a class of owners called capitalists, either individually, collectively or through a state apparatus that operates to maximize profits or that serves the interests of capital owners."

Yup, so you or I could own a company, we could get together and own a company, there could be hundreds that own the company. The goal is to maximize profits for ourselves OR to gain something that serves us... The people in the video said they made 4 million in one year, sounds like they like profit a lot... They also live there which obviously benefits them, they grow their food there which benefits them too!

These people are capitalists by your own definition! But if they get together (like many capitalists do) you call them socialists lol...

Another thing... Anok himself has said there are more co-op's in the US than non co-op, right? So what is his beef? He just has to join one of the majority companies and he's all set, right? WRONG... He hates people making PROFIT, like the guys in the video!!!! He hates any individual or GROUP (except if that group is everyone) that owns the means to production!!!!

Are you actually getting any of this? You haven't commented on much of what I say, a bit like anok really...

Originally posted by mee30
We do not have capitalism at all... It's funny because I hear you people saying that capitalism is darwinism but now you tell me that capitalism is states bailing out companies... The quote you used did not say anything of the sort...

Whatever.

How can I miss something that I actually addressed?

Because you addressed it by saying it was missing when in fact it was included. The rest of your post is so twisted that I won't even waste my time pointing out your errors.

Since I don't advocate any system, then I really don't care what you think is better or what you think you have.