They provide the materials, the tools and machinery, the designs that are being made (assuming some sort of manufacturing company for this example).
Other workers made the materials, the tools, the machinery, and the designs. If the owner did they occupy a class position as a worker and owner.
They also carry the risk (unless of course they are a corporation, the ridiculous entity created to reap the advantages of personhood while avoiding all its responsibilities and drawbacks).
The risk that they might be a worker if their venture fails.
Regardless, I think we, as a society, should be there with the bread. It shouldn’t be an issue we have to face.
But you don’t think we should use violence to enforce the idea, so how do you enforce the idea in the transition when former small business tyrants chafe at the idea of sharing? What if they don’t submit to nonviolent methods of control?
I consider freedom of the press to just be freedom of speech, which we all have.
The thing is we don’t. There is no such thing as free speech, any speech that meaningfully threatens the government will be cracked down on. See Fred Hampton. Free speech is a legal fiction in our country.
But my point is that the limited bourgeois privileges you get don’t matter if you’re starving on the street. You can’t meaningfully have those privileges without economic security.
As for the homeless chap, it depends on their situation. I’d live in a community that would try to help them. I think we’re ethically obligated to help people in need as best we can, but I’m not comfortable using violence to force you to help them.
So it is more violent to take food from a grocery store because that hurts the owners bottom line than it is to prevent a starving man from taking bread from a grocery store by kicking his ass and throwing him in a box? Is that your perspective on this issue?
Capitalism is an economic system, while democracy is a political system.
Economics is politics. The two are intertwined in every practical regard.
To repeat myself a bit, my argument is that capitalism can’t exist without collective agreements on legislation, enforcement, and adjudication, along with strong protections for an individual’s rights.
This is ahistorical. Colonialism does not require consensus or respect for individual rights and is a central feature of any capitalist system that is successful enough.
If you believe that supposed self-described “socialists”, “communists”, “leftists”, and other “cHaMpIoNs Of tHe PeOpLe” have never been or are incapable of being genocidal maniacs, please promptly fuck your own face with your tankie butt-plug and jump off the nearest cliff.
Oh yeah, socialists have done some horrible things. They pale in scale to the crimes of capitalism. The British empire, the nazi empire, the American empire. Socialism is a less violent system but that doesn’t mean that violence stops.
I will never entertain any authoritarian of whatever economic stripe or their apologists for even a nanosecond.
If you support capitalism you literally support an informal caste system where a small caste owns the collective accumlated fruits of labor of the whole human race stretching back to the start of agriculture, where any attempt to change the state of affairs that has any chance of success gets jakarta methoded. That is much more authoritarian than a red terror.
I’m somewhat confused by your separation of ideology from practical actions. That sounds internally inconsistent.
I am willing to accept a state if it is necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and their toadies, so long as that continues to be necessary. I would prefer we lived in a communist society but we can’t get there overnight and socialism is how you transition to it.
I dont know, let’s ask Chinese feudal lords how their ability to enforce private property went after the CPC stopped enforcing their private property rights for them like the old government did.
Are you talking about China? If so, I’m afraid they’re communist in name only. They realized many years ago that Marxist economic theory doesn’t work and began to integrate capitalist principles into their economy.
You’re kind of incredibly ignorant on China. They’re a mostly publicly controlled economy.
The reasoning for a private sector is to prevent economic and technological siege.
Also marxist economic theory is literally just a structured critique of capitalism. It doesn’t have anything to say about socialism or communism, that is marx’s other works.
De facto, China is a capitalist-fascist state more comparable to WW2 Germany than anything Marx ever came up with.
I would really suggest reading “Economy and class structure of german fascism” and comparing it to the political and economic situation of China. (And actually understand those situations, not just passively absorb ideas from anglophone media) This isn’t meant to be a dig, but this level of political illiteracy is embarrassing.
than anything Marx ever came up with.
Have you literally read any book that Marx wrote? (The manifesto is a manifesto, it doesn’t count, but I’d also be interested in knowing if you’ve read that)
But conversely, if there isn’t a state, what’s to prevent property owners from banding together and protecting their property with violence?
That would literally be a capitalist state in every meaningful sense.
keep in mind that given enough money or gold or whatever, they could also hire mercenaries to prevent workers from rebelling.
Sorta like a police force of some kind?
It really all comes down to who is better at organizing. So it’s possible that in one scenario, workers would seize the means of production successfully, and if they are good enough at keeping it running, they’d operate as a commune, while in another scenario, there’d be a more hierarchical, capitalist structure of organization.
You know what is really fucking organized? A state. It is almost like at the beginning of the country all the large landowners and capitalists got together and made one of those to protect their interests.
You’re simply arguing from a standpoint of “but I like THIS approach better” when it’s a question of “but can you make it WORK?”
Lol. I am literally asking how your hypothetical system would handle class antagonisms, the primary concern of politics. I am very directly asking “but can you make it work”
Capitalism (strictly defined as the private ownership of the means of production) can’t exist without the premise of private property being protected by laws that are collectively agreed upon, enforced, and adjudicated by peers within your community.
This implies that any capitalist society is compatible with democracy, as in, “the will of the masses controls society” and not as in “you get to vote for genocidal liberal who will make us richer, or genocidal fascist who will make us richer”
Communism is a classless stateless society, parents within our society literally own their children as property.
This likely also explains the continued popularity of communism as a political philosophy, especially among young people. Going out into the world, where there is competition and conflict is jarring, and the wish for society to be organized more like a family unit is understandable, although it is far more difficult to organize a large country in this way than a household of no more than, say, a dozen people.
Remind me again, what is the political ideology of the new world superpower? The one with 1.4 billion people? You know, now that the capitalist US empire is in obvious terminal decline.