I see this way too often here on Lemmy, so I want to post this. Starting a commune is legal in most countries. If you believe in communism, you can found a commune and show us all how great it is.
You lack money? Well, that is literally what stock markets and venture capitalists (capitalism) are created to solve. If you are ready for an IPO, you can sell shares to raise funds. If you are not, you can get Venture Capital in exchange for shares until you are ready for an IPO.
Getting rid of capitalism means you need to find a different way to obtain funding for new ventures. And if your system relies on government charity (some government board handing you money) or taking resources violently, than your system sucks.
Edit: I don’t mean that this is a replacement for full communist system. I mean this as a way to get some of the advantages while showing sceptics (like me) it can work and is better. A first step.
You don’t even seem to know what communism is, seeing as you conflate it with socialism in another of your comments
No, I will readily admit I don’t even know what communism would be in practice beyond the vague nonsense people say like “collective ownership”. I have been trying to ask here for a few days now and didn’t really get anywhere.
That is exactly my criticism. From what I have seen, communism is not an implementable plan, it is a “politicians promise” of things being better without the rich with nothing backing that claim up.
Of course, feel free to prove me wrong by providing a link or an explanation. Or even better, by implementing it in reality on a smaller scale as the post challenges the readers to.
“collective ownership” is not vague. the simplest way to transform capitalism into socialism is to make every company a co-op and implement progressive tax policy.
;D Maybe if your understanding of economy does not go beyond people in factories make things :D
I mean, you have no right to act this clueless when the main post gives one of the issues away. Namely: How do you get investment for new companies?
Also, you are mixing communism and socialism. ;D Did you not even read the whole comment chain? How do you manage to do this when I was called out for this in the comment I was replying to? ;D
dude you’re insufferable oml
investments can come from public funding for research which is democratically decided or headed by democratically elected experts
the entire ideology I hold is that people need to be directly involved in economic decision making. that is all. it can’t be held away from the people, because then the decisions won’t benefit them.
can you please not act like such a prick when making your points?
But those are the things you are leaving out. How is this public funding collected, who decides where it goes, how are these people elected?
These are the kind of things you need to figure out for your communist system to work. My belief is you can’t, because it does not work. You will not be able to create a system that works for the greater good while humans follow their selfish interests.
But maybe I am wrong. Prove me wrong. Show me a detailed plan. “Some committee that is somehow elected will distribute some funding” is so vague there is no way to debate over it.
IMO you and so many others use this kind of vagueness to mask the massive issues communism has, that prevent it from being viable in the real world.
The infuriating thing is that so many people are supporting a violent revolution, that could easily result in hundreds of thousands of deaths while seemingly having no real plan of what to do once they win.
okay, why are you imposing that on me though? I’m not a violent revolutionary, I’m just someone who believes we need a far more democratic approach to our economy. I can’t resolve a perfect system for you in perfect detail and I find this kind of argument frustrating. if you want an example of a system, I believe something similar to project cybersyn would be great. unfortunately the US has overthrown or otherwise stunted every socialist project, but we have lots of data to suggest that UBI, co-ops, and social welfare are highly effective at improving quality of life for everybody, as well as productivity.
You are the one who said the description of communism was not vague. And I was careful not to include you with the violent revolutionaries part.
If you don’t want communism, but just social policies in capitalism, then I am on board with that. Of course again, the devil is in the details, but I am generally on board with UBI (or something similar), universal healthcare, etc.
Idk about co-ops, feels like if those worked, we would see a lot of them already. There shouldn’t be anything blocking their creation as to post says. I am all for removing any barriers for their creation if I missed some but I don’t think they should be forced.
co-ops get outcompeted by corporations. this is a capitalist economy we have, and so it’s very geared towards competitive profit seeking. co-ops provide better worker protections, better working conditions, better stability and resilience, and better products. corporations are better at being single-mindedly profit driven, which is what our economic structure rewards.
communism is not a vague concept, but I’m not an expert and it’s not my ideology; I’m a democratic socialist.
it’s important to remember that under capitalism a company is very much motivated to curtail workers’ rights and anything that would threaten the status quo. I find “just start a commune” to be an unhelpful argument because the system is rigged against it, which is why they tend to fail.
capitalism is not markets, nor is it free trade. capitalism is the specific system where there is an owning class that dictates how the economy is run (CEOs / shareholders), thereby holding that power away from the working class, whose lives are dictated by their decisions. I see no reason for the economy to be organized this way, which is why I believe democratic organization (either central planning or a more bottom-up approach) is an improvement.
if you’re genuinely interested in finding a system better than what we have, I don’t think arguing with strangers on the Internet will accomplish what you want. I think Second Thought makes some very good videos on these topics, though he seems to have some authoritarian leanings I don’t agree with.