/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Is this bait?

Not bait, just curious.. I realized the same with Anarchism, that in the absence of a State, other factions will try and form to replace it.. For this reason some type of mutual protection pact among the autonomous regions is important.

How does the expression go.. Nature abhors a vacuum.

>>457004
This is misunderstanding the very basic fundemental of not only Marxism but capitalism as an economic system.n"The rich" (aka the capitalist class) will not be replaced with another rich capitalist oligarchy because the economic relations between humans will have fundamentally changed. Society will be run by the working class and production will be based on need and an economic plan

I see.. so then that answers my question.. The system is the focus from the start.

With a new system it will be much more difficult and unlikely for a few people to accumulate wealth through unproductive labor (Speculation - Usury - Exploitation)

>>457021
Well I think it would be outright impossible because surplus is generated through the alienation of commodities during the production process under capitalism.

>Society will be run by the working class and production will be based on need and an economic plan

Except it's nearly impossible for a large group of people to equally 'run an economic system.'

At best, they appoint people who control aspects of an economic system. Once in a position of authority, it's very easy for those people to monopolize knowledge and technical know-how, which then provides them with an even greater structural advantage. After a while, whether you want to call them capitalists or not, you end up a privileged strata of people who de facto have a disportionate amount of power and control, who effectively form a new ruling class.

This has been the history of every single socialist system which has ever come into being.

Therefore, I think the question itself is a bit inadequate. A better question might be, how do you prevent large social/economic chasms from forming to the extent that that impede development and destroy social cohesion. The Chinese answer is of course to simply punish anyone who promotes internal disharmony. This works, I suppose. But you still end up with an unequal society.

>>457042
This shit always makes me want to roll my eyes.
No one said or wants "equality" we want everyone to have the ability to perform labor and make a living. Controlling production would mean democratic self management where the affairs of the work place are allocated and handle by the people that work in them like a coop except not in a society based on profits.

Jesus I'm so sick of talking about old socialist states that don't exist anymore

>>457043
China, Vietnam, northern Korea, and Cuba, along with Venezuela all still exist.

I suppose we can split hairs and say they aren't *really socialism. But they are most definitely what remains after serious attempts to implement socialism.

The whole tilt of Marxism and other leftist ideologies, since the french revolution, is toward greater equality. If you don't want Marxism to be associated with equality, it would be worth outlining, as a Marxist, the utility/role of inequality.

The whole Marxist claim is that capitalism would be outmoded by socialism. That is to say, socialism would out compete and overcome capitalism in a competitive manner. It's hard to see how a sort of market socialism (individual firms democratically organized yet still exchanging with eachother in a market) could do that. Likewise, the track record of centrally planned economies isn't great. It seems most likely that a sort of mixed system of bureaucratic direction over the economy through policy measures (basically what exists both in places like China and the west) is already 'outmoding' laize fare capitalism.

>>457044
No one said they weren't real socialism. China is actually doing extremely well for itself and the others all have unique histories that explain why and how they developed into the state they did today. Socialism in the United States would be fundementally different and no one who doesn't live in 1927 wants or thinks of socialism as it was then par some retarded and religious tankies so let's talk about that

Also Venezuela really isn't socialist at all.

>>457045

I think part of the problem is that socialism was originally ideologically constructed as 'workers power' This was at a time when most workers were exiting agricultural fields and entering industrial ones.

Today, so much of the economy is tertiary. It wouldn't really makes sense to take something like the insurance industry and democratize/socialize it. Rather, a revolutionary socialism of the 21st century would simply abolish the insurance industry.

>>456966
>what is to be done to prevent new Rich from growing in their place right away?

You can use socialist cybernetic planning.
That means instead of using money, you use labor-tokens that represent units of labor-time.
Basically if you worked for 1 hour, you get 1 labor-hour-token or 60 labor-minute tokens.
That way if somebody tried to exploit the workers to become a billionaire they would have to explain when they worked a billion hours. (Average human life is 672'000 hours)

>>457042
>Except it's nearly impossible for a large group of people to equally 'run an economic system.'
Of course it's possible for the masses to coordinate the economy. You just need to have a polling system that polls the masses for their priorities about how society should spend its economic surplus.
It's in fact trivially easy to do this, it's even a natural human tendency to organize into societies. The non-trivial part is to harden the system against people who try to disrupt society from organizing it self.

>At best, they appoint people who control aspects of an economic system. Once in a position of authority, it's very easy for those people to monopolize knowledge and technical know-how,
That is a valid concern.
You use a political system of sortition democracy, that way the political authority can't be captured. No matter how good you are at attaining power, you can't outwit a random-draw mechanism. And it's really easy to make sure you can't tamper with the mechanism, because it's easy to verify whether or not it's been manipulated.
As far as the creation of a technical managerial strata, that is a valid concern as well. But you can fix that problem by having quotas that people have to come from humble origins.
In a cybernetic system you can also make sure that the information that is politically empowering is only known by the workers.
And you can rotate workers around so they have the experience and know how over an entire production chain (basically do the opposite of de-skilling). The capitalists build them self a kind of economic interface for minority control over capital. They put capital into economic boxes and they put economic boxes into other economic boxes, several layers deep. Well it's really easy to analyze that and build the socialist interface without any of the information that would allow anybody to do this box trick. There will be flows of resources that go from work-place to work-place where workers use labor-time to shape matter and energy into goods and services. The kinds of economic abstractions that capitalist use to have power over the economy are not generated by this system.

>>456966
As long as we're going to have rich billionaires, we should have a lottery. Every five years a billionaire family is randomly selected and butchered for the consumption of the nation. Their records are then destroyed and hence they are essentially turned into literal shit and vague memories of a good meal.

>>457077
>You can use socialist cybernetic planning.

I'm not too familiar with the theory, but I'd assume that just means using AI to plan production and consumption of the entire economy.

It's kinda premises on the notion that human planning on that scale doesn't work (it doesn't).

But I'd simply ask if there is a sort of 'minimal viable product' for such an endeavor. For example, are their any firms which rely on AI for their business planning. As far as I know, there isn't.

>Basically if you worked for 1 hour, you get 1 labor-hour-token or 60 labor-minute tokens.

If you did that (giving people a token for 1 hour's work of goods in exchange of 1 hour of work), there would be no surplus to invest into replenishing capital nor developing the means of production.

It also doesn't take into account that and hours worth of labor isn't standardized in the amount of work performed. Using manual labor as an example, some people can simply do more work in a shorter period of time. This becomes more complicated when you consider the education which goes into some people's labor. The labor time of a doctor, for example, doesnt just include the amount of time they spend working, but as the amount of time they spend studying.

>Of course it's possible for the masses to coordinate the economy. You just need to have a polling system that polls the masses for their priorities about how society should spend its economic surplus.

There are a lot of assumptions here. Mainly, it assumes that people would actually make good decisions. When you consider that a large number of people make terrible decisions about their own personal lives, it makes me skeptical that simply polling people on abstract questions which they have little experience about who produce a desirable outcome.

>You use a political system of sortition democracy, that way the political authority can't be captured.

This isn't a terrible idea. I'm kinda surprised a lottery system of political representation isn't practiced more widely. Interestingly, the democracy of ancient Greece was arranged in precisely this way. Granted, it was also sharply criticized by people like Aristotle, who thought it was a bad idea to give political power to people who didn't know what they were doing.

>But you can fix that problem by having quotas that people have to come from humble origins

I'm not sure 'humble origins' really determines political character. There's an old parable about Khrushchev meeting Chou En Lai. Khrushchev made it a point to note that he was from a family of miners while Chou was from a family of nobles. Chou replied that they still had one thing in common: they were both class traitors.

>And you can rotate workers around so they have the experience and know how over an entire production chain (basically do the opposite of de-skilling).

So people wouldn't have domain expertise? Generally, divisions of labor emerge because it's simply more efficient. I like the sentiment of encouraging people to develop practical competency in multiple fields though.

>>457241

Having a yearly poll on who to excommunicate from society would unironically be a great idea. This was another thing that was sudden ancient Greece, but the practice was abolished by the oligarchy.

Sorry for The rushed comments. I'm in between shifts at work