Books on communism

>hey [ideology] here
into the trash it goes

I tried to get my conspiracy theorist friend to watch The Perverts Guide to Ideology once. He was too dumb.

when you debate someone, you don't need to refute their system from every single direction, you can pick one aspect, for instance the labour theory of value, and attack that, the rest falls apart.

Macron is a qt

Read Marx with the knowledge that there is a contradiction between his exchange/use value theory (which is beautiful) and his "labor theory of value" (which is shit but is part of the explanation of lowering rate of profit). The value theory stuff is his contribution to economics which has yet to be recognized by anyone except heterodox economists

you're damn right he is

This.

One important thing that makes Marx's LTV obviously false is that it has no conception of opportunity cost. The function of the capitalist is to forego consumption and engage in the act of saving, and this saving has a very important role to play in the production of commodities. If a worker co-operative were to decide today to pool their collective resources and produce engines (the useful kind, not steam engines), they'd most likely have several problems. The most important problems are that they'd have no income until they sold the first engine, and that they'd have to assume the risk the engines sell. Wage labour isn't theft of surplus value, the wage-earner is getting something for it; they're avoiding the risk the product won't sell (they still get paid for their labour no matter what), and they're being paid now instead of later. If they weren't paid now, they'd have to have saved enough to see them through the production process, and as mainstream economists know, the value of money now is much higher than the value of money later (hence, interest rates). The capitalist isn't stealing surplus value, the labourers are foregoing the surplus value in exchange for mitigating the risk the product won't sell, and to satisfy their time-preference for money.

So according to the meme the left libertarian is the only good one?

>his exchange/use value theory (which is beautiful)

You can't numerically calculate the so-called "use value", you can't establish a mathematical relation between them, you can't apply statistics. It's completely useless.

No, thats the worst one

It's not about what is good, it's about what is right.

We on the right don't believe that man is perfectable if you simply perfect the systems/institutions man lives under. We acknowledge that man is messy and complicated and that good people are capable of great evil and that evil people are capable of great good.

That leads us to believe that the government shouldn't have too much power, because it doesn't matter what the intention was when giving the government such power when someone with bad intentions takes over.

If we are talking about Kapital in a vaccum then this counter-argument is completely legitimate, however, ignoring the body of work on top of Marx's conception of socialism makes your point mute. Oskar Lange provided a theoretical argument for market Socialsim in "On the Economic Theory of Socialsim" that fixed the LVT problems. He used a generalized definition of Opportunity Cost that allowed efficient Walrasian General Equilibrium states to arise. I still don't think efficient states arise in practice even with these constructions, however, theoretically it's kosher.

I still think the best way to argue against communism is via a game theory route. The set of incentives given to the pricing board is a principal agent problem, so if those board members have a modicum of rationality they will go against the publics best interest for their own especially when the pricing board and government have soft budget constraints. So when someone says, "Oh the USSR wasn't real Communism", you say, "you're right, it wasn't real communism because real communism would never arise with government officials that have an ounce of self-interest, which necessarily makes it a bad system"

Right libertarian is the only good one

Suppose I'm just a libertarian period. Suppose I embrace both the right and left forms of it and wish only for the freest society attainable by flawed man.

Then you're dominantly on the right, which I believe most people are, they just don't know it. I believe most people just want to be left alone to their business and don't really care much about what other people do, at least enough to do something about it...

RADICAL CENTRISM is the way

Left Libertarians are just Communists who hope everyone will magically not be capitalists once the state is gone.
Or else they're just regular Communists but they claim its not the state when they do it

I disagree with Lange's view that Marx's LTV is "a static theory of general economic equilibrium”, when applied to capitalism (and not just simple commodity production). If you want to make that case, you might be able to do it with pre-capitalist societies. That isn't what Marx devoted his life to, though.

Using game theory to argue against communism sounds quite interesting, I have to admit. Not sure what I think about it.

Private property is a state institution. Without the state, you might not have some kind of commie approach to property, but whatever property exists will not be private property

Ok, but if what you're saying epitomizes right libertarians and dude weed epitomizes left libertarians then there is some serious cognitive dissonance on the right. (I realize it's just a meme) but prohibition violates the core of any libertarian thought on three levels
>Violates agency of the individual
>Violates the role of the state by making it an active social engineer
>Violates the laws of the free market economics (and proves that the invisible hand of human desires of consumption is more powerful than laws of the state.)
Truly anti prohibition should be an issue all libertarians agree on.

>Truly anti prohibition should be an issue all libertarians agree on.
I think they do. I think the image just means that people on the left, who don't want a massive government, do so simply because of weed. People on the right can either hate or like weed, but what they have in common is the belief that the government shouldn't be able to tell us that we aren't allowed to smoke.

The right path is trying to push forward the XIX and XX C ideologies and/or add more content into them so they can have the "substratum" to face the issues of the XXI C. I think they haven't had a substantial change ever since Reagan's/Tatcher's/Pinochet's Gov'ts. Most other reforms act as very small fixes that I wouldn't call substantial.

Nowadays most national governments are market oriented and this of course isn't sustainable because under every global crisis Governments and citizens have to take part of the losses so the whole system doesn't collapse on itself. Then you have to take into account all the other issues like slavery in 3rd world manufacturing countries, environment, etc... On the other hand, quite a big group of ivory tower intellectual's push for leftist's practices that are doomed to fail due to how inefficient they are when you consider immigration, plus the whole aspect of how easily corruptible bureaucracies are.

I think that we need some sort of grand narrative of what we want humanity to achieve in 100 years or so. If it was for me, I would like everyone to live on small communities and halt technological advancement, but of course that wouldn't work because no one wants to give up their luxuries, so I'd rather side with the most practical ideology (lately I've been more of a centrist). Whatever it is something has to be decided or some sort of consensus between global powers before we blow each-other since ideological tensions are high.

I hope for some intellectual that synthesizes the most practical sides of leftism, fascism and neo-liberalism without creating a monster like Nazbol.

Depends on your definition of private property. In Marxist terms it could absolutely exist without the existence of a state. Provided you have the guns to keep it

>I think that we need some sort of grand narrative of what we want humanity to achieve in 100 years or so
So, basically you're for a centrally planned economy?

You might want to read 'The Black Book of communism' and 'The Gulag Archipelago'.

Lol

>But at a certain point it occurred to me that people are such broken beings in such a rat pile of a world that on a material basis alone we don't even desire the harmony and common welfare that Communism aims for.
yep that's unfortunately true. as nice as the world could be if we were all to just get along, it can't happen. for example Yugoslavia was doing relatively fine compared to other communist countries but it all crashed after Tito died and nationalists started playing their tricks. Greed is an essential part of human beings and it can't be stopped.

The communistic grand narrative is a little too contradictory when put into practice, for example it argues for freeing man, but there has been slavery or mass shootings everywhere it was implemented. Also, empirically speaking, centrally planning an economy is too inefficient for the contemporary world. I would agree just in theory, but as I said it needs to be practical more than ideological.
Enlightenment is a good example of a grand narrative that wasn't so obviously contradictory, it took well into XX C. to notice how destructive it was, and even then it still sort of holds up.

Why do you think the enlightenment is destructive?

because the enlightenment brought up, between many things, colonialism and classic liberal economy, which are itself destructive, both to the humanity of the people that were colonized/had to work in industries and to the environment.
It's a product of it's time whoever and I'm not saying it's bad on itself, but you could hardly apply the same logic nowadays and expect to have good results or a good understanding of the issues of our world. Economy is much more complex now than then, and cultures clash harshly everyday, and yes, you could colonize every country out there that doesn't agree with a determined set of values, but that would be inefficient and probably brings war.

The whole idea of civilizing/enlightening the world under the values of the western world resulted in World War I or at least I think it did. (Conquer/Enlighten the world -> countries amass power -> logically they want to have more -> they clash).

Try Ocalan- Democratic Confederalism. It's like 20 pages and has been the basis for pic related.

If you like the sound of that, you can read Bookchin- The Next Revolution. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism was the basic for democratic confederalism and helps to eliminate a lot of the tankie violence and anarchist apathy from leftism.

Mark Fisher- Capitalist Realism is another readable text. After you read that watch the film Hypernormalisation, which deals with the same subjects.

>Greed is an essential part of human beings and it can't be stopped.
Why?

I disagree with your view on the cause of WW1. those forces made it more destructive but are hardly the cause of Europeans fighting grand wars across their continent. See: hundred years war.

Because greed is a natural reaction to valid or invalid feelings of inadequacy and insecurities. You can't make everyone feel adequate and secure. Therefore there will always be people who desire more than they need to fill the voids they can never fill.

Seems to me you're just making baseless statements, buddy.

How is it baseless? My basis is the human condition of insecurity drives the desire to accumulate wealth to assuage insecurity. Obviously this isn't the only reaction possible to insecurities. Feeling insecure can also trigger introspection and empathy but as long as you have insecurity you will have greed.

>people will put their own interests ahead of others
>durr where are you getting this baeless idea from

is a good summary. If you want to understand why it failed (also Fascism, Nazism, and now Neoliberalism), I think without a shred of irony that the best book is The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. It is an uncompromising look into the impulses that lead people to believe that they will bring a new world into existence in which everything will be different, and why they always fail. It's a notion that's pervasive -- and may be an irrevocable part of -- modern thinking.

I am a Catholic, and this book is HARD on the Church. It sent me into a very bad state for a while, until I realized that the Church is one of the few Western institutions of any import that seems to have internalized the lesson.

Neat. I'm not the user you tagged but I will look into it. This pretty much seems right up my philosophical alley. Also Catholic.

>he departure is less about economics for me and more about the fact I just don't see it as a spiritually tennable tradition.
its actually not untenable, more debased, a mockery of the natural order.

>people will put their own interests ahead of others
Do you have a citation for that always being true? There's many cases where people do the opposite, and let's consider you can put your interests "above" or "below" others, you can also consider them "on the same level". Self-interests also has alot to do with the common good when you think about it, having other people being content around you will make your own life better.

>Do you have a citation for that always being true?

The pleasure principle. Everything else is just spooky bullshit

Holy shit you pseud we are not going to spoon feed you this debate that every political treatise since Plato's republic has examined. Yes there are other outcomes like said BOTH are predictable outcomes but if you can figure out how to engender the exact reaction you want then congratulations you win the billion dollar prize of the centuries. A more reliable solution is to accept greed has part of the human condition since it always has been and then work a system around our flaws instead of hoping or believing we can eradicate them. Also read Brave New World. It's the attempt to remove the source of emotions like greed and envy by making everyone feel adequate in every way they can conceive.

>Norman (((Cohn)))
>Denies the divine mission to bring forth the Kingdom of Heaven

Yeah no thanks buddy

Neoliberal? So you're a kike?

are you seriously looking for scientific studies to confirm that people tend to argue with each other? i don't know what to tell you, i want to live in your utopian dreamland as well

Communism has never been tried because no socialist country ever gets past the "dictatorship of the proletariat" part. Funny how that works lol

Instead of books, buy a rope. You know what to do from there.

are you kidding me planning an economy is the most posible now. specially because now we live in the computer age, where calculating labour contents, and making input output plans can be actually calculated to respond to demand, unlike soviet times, where they just basically said "make a 1000000 of that thing, that'll be enough" which caused shortages

It's essentially what Walmart already does

You still need the free market will. Wal Mart benefits from being able to aggregate enough data on what we choose to buy and what we look at online. That's much different than deciding how much we ought to buy of a thing.

are you stupid honestly?, that can also be done in a planned economy, the goverment can monitor what people are buying and how much of that thing they are buying, and plan the economy accordingly, and if a good right now in this very moment doesn't match demand then its price can be incremented above it's labour content, according to how much people demand it, the difference between the labour content of the good and its sell price is then fed to a larger economic algorithm that minimizes these differences, honestly you should read pic related and stop spouting the same memes all people do

No it can't because you've reversed the incentive. It's absolutely perverted.

how exactly can't it happen?, there is no incentive here because there is no human decision, a machine would record the amount of x product bought in a given geographical zone, it would then run a simulation of demand in the near future and conclude on a given price for the product such that there won't be shortages of it, this price is then used by another machine and is compared with the labour content of the thing, if the price is higher then production at the closest factory would be ramped up, and the machine would let know a higher up how much addtional labour to allocate to that factory, so that they produce enough of the thing, so that its future price will match its labour value, besides the goverment guy that's in charge of allocating more people to produce more, there is no human decision here, there is no incentive to do anything besides let the system continue its course, how can it fail?

Wal Mart isn't a machine it's a collection of shareholders with the business incentive to make a profit. The algorithms and stats they use are tools to serve that end. In a state planned economy those tools would be in the hands of bureaucrats who may or may not have good/correct incentives. The profit incentive is not perfect, but is better than the decision of a government official.

Capital works better only if you're willing to accept huge market failures like industrial pollution, death from preventable disease, permenant war, etc...

You know the U.S. had a planned economy during WW2? We were handing out ration cards, using steel for planes instead of rich man's fancies, centrally directing most factory production - and it went fine! Nothing collapsed! Sure, a few marginal inefficiencies in the (frankly rare) markets that were reasonably competitive - but that doesn't matter because we got the big social good we were pursuing (killing nazis) right.

It's the same today. A socialist state might produce too many newspapers occasionally but it will put humanity on the road to solving climate change, avoiding existential superbugs, dealing with encroaching AI, etc.

The system survives because you think these problems are intractable, but they can be dealt with if the system were reformed.

Also all the arguments in this thread are 10th-grade tier. OP, go talk to some actual socialists on a forum that isn't filled with pseuds who can only parrot what they hear on panel shows.

>all the arguments are 10th-grade tier
doesn't respond to any of those apparently easily refutable arguments
>tells op to go to better forum
doesn't link any forums or resources for op

the absolute state of commies

the purple quadrant’s just a shadow realm. the only ones that i can classify under there are Ancaps, Objectivists, Minarchists, and Libertarians. conspiracy wingnuts like Alex Jones and meaningless cult leaders like Stefan Molyneux are probably outside the realm of the dark purple quadrant.

>implying human nature isn't shaped by the ideological circumstances it lives and grows in
read more Marxist theory

don't forget to add Mein Kampf to that list.

Here's a tip: Don't bother with any of this shit.

Nobody gives a fuck about your online debates or even your IRL debates with freaky little college neckbeards.

Communism is not going to happen and there won't be any appreciable change in the current political system in your lifetime.

You probably don't even vote anyway.

...

>'The Gulag Archipelago

ugh. Go to bed, Jordan. You need to conserve your energy. There is a dragon to slay tomorrow..., well, a blue haired feminist wanting to be called xer..;

>That any attempt to simply arrange society in such a way will be radically undermined and perverted by what would be often called the Freudian death drive.
That's why we must embrace the death drive and build a fascist society.

Only criticism to "Black Book of Communism" is that it's a COUPLE MILLIONS off in some places. As if that matters at all.

Muh combubism dindu nuffin

>go to bed the 1970s Nobel Prize in literature

>I hope for some intellectual that synthesizes the most practical sides of leftism, fascism and neo-liberalism without creating a monster like Nazbol.
As a moderate fascist I am intrigued.

You havent actually responded to any of my arguments, i told you a machanism for a planned economy, challenged you to point the flaws in it and all you can say about it is "it has no profit therefore is wrong", the point of the post in case you didnt noticed is that goverment burocrats dont really need to be involved in a major way in day to day planning, they are there merely with an instrmental, and helpin role, they do not get a say even in the amount of production, or how it would be allocated, their motivation would be to do their job, which would be to solve problems in production facilities, and help people do their job, in the big scale they would have less involment than a liberal goverment, since most planning can be done in elections

For economics, The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek.

If you want to feel fear whenever you see a hammer and sickle, then The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.

>As a moderate fascist

Kek

what are you even doing here you fucking normie, shouldn't you be in some gym doing sports or watching tv at home?

I recommended those books precisely because I think they showcase the dreadfulness of totalitarianism (communism in this case) so I wouldn't recommend that book.

Does Jordan /ourguy/ Peterson trigger you?

Is today machines capable of such a thing? "Running stimulation on possible future demand" is not easy as it sounds. Also machine isn't as flexible as humans, if one problem occurs in the system, which will most likely happens, good fucking luck trying to convince the public to believe in the machine ever again.

>Is today machines capable of such a thing?

Impossible to say. It's a question about how many factors it would need to handle in order to be useful.
Personally I doubt it could ever outperform the capital allocating ability of the stock market

Yeah ration cards were wonderful...
I undermined the premise you built your tower of arguments on. I have thusly proved all of them to be built upon a bad foundation.

youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4

This is the only 3 minute clip you need.

This list starts you off nice and easy before delving into serious theory.

Honestly, whenever I hear communism being shit on because of muh human nature, I fucking cringe. Communism doesn't operate on any kind of model of a superior altruistic human. Modern liberalism in fact has a much more utopian view of human society than Marx did. I think this is a problem of separating the early Marx, who comes from a clearly optimistic enlightenment tradition, from the late Marx who is very different with his sober pragmatism.

To add on to this,
For a mix of economic and political perspectives read From Under the Rubble by Solzhenitsyn.

Just watch this, it's only 3 minutes.

youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4

Haven't read the others but Sowell doesn't understand Marxism at all(most "marxist" doesnt either but that's a different story). If you're dead set on reading a rigth-wing view of socialism I would suggest pic related.

Mises get some things wrong but he atleast understands that a socialist 'economy' involves the absence of prices(which his central to his criticism) and ownership of any kind; worker, state or collective.

Most historians/professors/authors today can agree that what the USSR was definitely not socialism, but it certainly does not vindicate the ideology.
If on a hot summer day I get sunburned from spending an eternity outside, do I turn to the sun to criticize and curse this effect? No, and neither should I of socialism in the USSR, but it doesn't make the burn any less real.

If you want a treatise on economic planning, you should read someone like a computer scientist, not any of these free market ideologues. It's disgusting how fucking Hayek is considered an authority on feasible economic systems, he was so deep into ideology that he believed freedom is by definition a market exchange.

youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

many industries already run demand simulations, and computer planning is fundamentally reduced to linear system solving. whose computational time is proportional to the number of commodities, so its a p problem and therefore can be solved in a resonable time

you are retarded, there are plenty of industries through history that have worked without profit incentive, can you imagine if you applied your brainlet logic to other things
> nhs will never work, since the drive isn't profit from drug prices then no drugs will be avalible at all
>public schools will never work since profit is not the main function of them
so me a favor a go die

Every NHS in the world depends on the advancements made and paid by the u.s.' largely private system and private schools consistently outclass public schools even economically depressed urban settings.

>Reminder that separate but equal education and the college debt crisis were born under public education.

>are you stupid honestly?
Says the moron who thinks it's possible for any government to plan the economy efficiently.

You do realize that putting all your eggs in one basket is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do, yeah?