I think you mean Communist Dictatorship ™
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I "know" this is a metaphor, and I'm being a wet blanket about it, but I'm saying it anyway. There is no super hero to save anyone from anything, much less a society circulating the drain. The only way to make things better is by getting organized with your friends, family, and neighbours.
Be prepared (collectively) when things go to shit, and actively try to make them better. You can do very little alone, but together the choice is no longer between Hitler and Hitler, it's change or stagnation. And neither genocide Joe or Cheetos man will lead to any positive progress.
Okay, no more wet blanket.....
This is disingenuous: the fundamental principle of socialism and Communism is democracy. And, credit where credit is due, capitalism forced us to socialize the production of goods and services (it now takes many people to "produce" anything). Currently, there is no discussion about who gets the profit of socialized labour, it goes to the people who own the workplace, which are rarely the workers.
So, to make your example realistic, you and this other person are part of a community that grows apples (pick any rural community). Together, you all own the fields.
How do you decide what each person gets? You come to a consensus. There are so many variables; is the other person injured?young?sick?old? Or really bad at picking apples? Maybe you are on some apple picking super serum. How do you decide who gets what? The same way people usually do; you decide together.
In your example, having a blanket rule as you suggest would never work, and would be unfair, but it is what happens now in our advanced capitalistic economies. If you pick 1000 apples for a company, how many do you keep? Or more realistically; once the apples are sold, how much of the.profits go to you? You have no choice. You work, get paid, and go home. You work harder and you end up with just about the same amount at the end. The only saving grace is if you work hard enough, one day you might be promoted by the generous owner to a position where you are no longer the poor schmuck who does all the work. But that poor schmuck will always still exist, it's just no longer you.
........I need to write less lol
How much supply is needed to bring the price down then?
While I agree that in general there is a problem with zoning laws making it all but illegal to build anything other than single family homes, markets work in such a way that the price is based on what people are "willing" to pay. Where a home is a fundamental necessity, this is already problematic. Nevermind the huge increase in access to money (the advent of mortgages and all of the policy surrounding them) driving up the demand side of the equation.
So when the options are: Homelessness (kind of illegal) Renting (very expensive) Buying (even more expensive)
Foregoing any participation in the housing market isn't really an option.
As a side note: the simple supply/demand model is from econ 101, and I really think it's unwise to make decisions based on first year university textbooks.
I am genuinely curious, I couldn't find what Communism did to Finland. There was the civil war between socialist and non- socialists, but this can't be blamed on one ideology over the other, the Soviets invaded southern Finland to "liberate" the "reds" in the south, but this also isn't able to be blamed on Communism, as it was the Soviets. And then Finland sided with the axis powers and attacked the Soviets, including the siege of Leningrad leading to mass suffering and starvation of "communists".
I do not come from Finland so it's hard for me to know much about the history outside of what I can read. I just pulled most of these facts from Wikipedia (a liberal western source), so if you are willing I would appreciate some insight.
Though to be fair, DPRK is the way it is at least in part thanks to the Americans obliterating their cities and farm land. But we can ignore history to make a "I used to be in a communist country and it's bad, trust me bro" statement.
And I agree, I prefer to live in a system where prisoners aren't primarily minorities or political prisoners. And where the prison system isn't the most populated in the world, and rife with for-profit forced labour.
I would also be curious to hear which definition of "capitalism" and "Communism" you are using. That is, if you are open to dialogue.
The key missing piece is democratic participation. Anyone involved in the process of the generation of wealth should have a say in what to do with that wealth, so you and the "employee" (who would be a co-owner if we are talking about a worker co-op icecream business).
But then how do you determine how you get paid back for your initial investment?
There are many options, but if we accept that capital doesn't do anything, then the idea of making a profit on your financial investment is moot. How are you paid for your idea then? Well, you have a business which you are in control of (at least in part), and are no longer alienated from your work.
One option would be to pay back everyone's initial investment at some rate agreed upon by the workers, and then decide (democratically) what to do with the rest of the profits. This doesn't mean every cone you sell you vote on, but perhaps once per week, month, quarter, etc., everyone involved in the process decides collectively what to do with the surplus money.
As a side note: every "employee" takes a risk when they join a company. There is no guarantee that the job is permanent, so any changes in their life (moving, giving up other opportunities, etc) are a great risk. And while those are similar for a small business owner, with the additional risk of losing some initial investment, the employee has no say over what happens to the profits or the operation of their workplace,and therefore has to hope the employer is generous and clever enough to keep them on. By running a company collectively, even without even initial investments, the risks are better distributed, and probably lower as well, as it's easy to make a bad decision on your own, it's much harder to do so when others are involved.
These are just some ideas about how a business may operate in this example, it is by no means prescriptive, and I am sure many others can fathom better methods.
Cool, thanks for that. I think it's interesting (academically) to see how the usage of words (e.g. tankie) have evolved.
@rando895
@lemmy.ml