I've read Marx but I'm still confused by the communist rejection of capitalism. Can someone explain it to me?

I've read Marx but I'm still confused by the communist rejection of capitalism. Can someone explain it to me?

If capitalism (the system of the exchange of goods/services for money and vice versa) is unjust, then one of three things must be true. Either I am not entitled to that which I produce (for example, a meal I've cooked), I am not entitled to exchange what I've produced for what others have produced (for example, giving some of my food to a friend who has helped me fix a window), or it's unjust to represent the value of goods/services in any indirect form (that's all currency is).

If I am entitled to produce and exchange, capitalism MUST be just, because that's all capitalism is. If what I produce has any value worth exchanging for, what is the problem with writing it down on a piece of green paper?

I've read Marx. I disagree with the notion that there is a difference between private and personal property from both a metaphysical and linguistic stance. Don't presume I haven't read Marx. I'm asking about overall communist ideals among modern groups which stand against capitalism. I doubt most of them have picked up Das Capital.

Are you aware that there's a thing called "surplus value"?

Surplus value? You mean labor time?
My father's a plumber. He charges for parts and labor. There is no surplus value.

When there is surplus value, it's not capitalism's fault. It's your fault for misusing capitalism and allowing others to get away with it. You don't have to go to McDonalds and pay $1 for a $0.10 burger. You choose to do that. Stop going and they go out of business or lower their prices, it's as simple as that.

By surplus value I mean the time a worker works without receiving any money for it. As a plumber, your father kind of owns his own mean of production. He have no wage (i.e., he isn't working in "wage slavery").

If your father worked for a company and received a certain wage, things would be different. Let's say he works 8 hours a day. 5 times a week and earns 2k USD per month. The company he works for charges about 50 USD for the client.

To earn 2k USD, your father would have to repair 40 broken stuff. If he repairs 100, 60 is for the company, 40 is for him. 300, 260 for the company, 40 for him.

That system is like opening a grocery store where you charge for time instead of product, like, 10 USD for 10 minutes and the client could take everything he could carry in 10 minutes.

The objection to capitalism by Communists is not that you are to be deprived of what you produce, but that through the centralization of production a handful of individuals will reap the primary economic benefit of those who actually produce the work.

Essentially, Marx's primary issue is a Luddite one- he rejects that because someone owns 'the means of production' which is the factory or machinery used to produce goods, they should also own the primary bulk of profit from the production of that good, as it eventually leads to greed and cost-cutting by the owners that are not actually producing anything themselves. Marx believed that the worker had the right to a greater share of profit- if the owner is not willing to work all his machines, he will make no profit without his workers, and therefore instead of earning a vastly larger amount than his employees he should be 'biting the moral bullet' and paying himself as much or just slightly more than those he employs.

I don't buy into this argument at all, however the idea that capitalism eventually benefits and enforces Oligarchy is in my opinion a valid one. Replacing unethical 'old' money with equally unethical 'new' money changes very little.

But some people are bound to be able to amass more resources than others. It's a good thing that they do, too!

If John Smith has $5 to his name (or $5 of equivalent property) he can't start a hamburger stand. Really, he has no means of sustaining himself. Someone else with more resources helps him. Not only does Mr. Smith not have the means to feed himself due to his lack of resources, he also is unable to put himself in a position where he will be able to.

People who have done the work and have the resources aren't some tyrannical assholes who force people to work for them. People choose who they work for. If you don't like a McDonalds job, you can quit. But you should be happy that whoever owns McDonalds had all of those resources to give to you. Otherwise you would've never had any opportunity to gain any resources yourself.

And human beings will ALWAYS want to amass resources in the form of private property. It's fundamental instinct that goes back to our mating habits as a species.

I would rather have $10 for a $15 job than have no money or goods. The fact that there are limited resources on this planet combined with the human need to amass goods as part of a survival instinct necessitates that must happen. Why fight it?

If it is unjust, then human nature is unjust. If it is our nature to be unjust, then from where does distaste for the unjust originate?

The point is that the plumber don't need the company to "steal" the money he worked for. If he repairs 300 broken stuff, he should receive for 300 broken stuff repaired.

Now instead of a plumber, think about a lab technician. To work, he doesn't need just cheap repairing tools, he needs a whole lab. What would he do? Buy a whole lab alone? He probably can't. In a way or another, the vast majority of the world can't just "choose" where to work - be it for lack of qualification (and opportunities in life), localization, etc.

Private property of the means of production isn't human nature in any form. It's a self-destructive system of production because it leads to accumulation of capital.

If you are going to a "it's good"/"it's not good" approach of things, think about slavery. The slave owner used to provide food, clothing and shelter for the slave, while tooking all the goods produced. And it's bad.

Now, if instead of giving it to the slave, the owner paid him, so he could afford his own clothes, food and shelter (sometimes partially), would it be better?

Of course the worker has a limited freedom of choosing his master and his work, but that is a VERY limited freedom.

Lets see, for example, a firm.
3 captal-owners. 1250 workers. 3 riches and 1250 poors. Hypothetically, give the workers part of the firm ownership, a share (artel), this can do life of all better, but modern market shares can be printed like money, and be owned by alien people. They are not real % of the firm wealth.

>If capitalism (the system of the exchange of goods/services for money and vice versa)
wrong

Capitalist and worker are linked together. If @1 a capitalist pay less, a worker receive less, because workers same as buyers, buyers buy less, this lead to crisis and go to @1.
But if capitalist pay more, their firm get trouble of competition with others firms in market.

You're right.
Marx wasn't against capitalism in the same way he wasn't against trading or barter systems. He just cataloged them as social forces which divided society. What Marx was against was what we'd understand as corporatism, which is when he posited the shift to a laborer's revolution and then utopia would take place. It's not as if thought capitalism was inherently an evil practice done only by evil men, he just saw where it was leading and didn't approve of that end goal, thus he tried to lay out a foundation for when the abuse was too great to resist the "capitalists" really those who were abusing the system to abuse workers.
uhhhh, have you ever worked in private construction?
You can charge for the time you stand in an office waiting for a part or waiting for a simple dossier on the customer.
You tarded, son?
It's capitalistic in nature which is the significant part, there are no more true purely capitalist societies.

>implying labor itself isn't a form of capital

baka

OP hasn't read Marx and doesn't understand that CAPITALism might have something to do with something called CAPITAL and can't just be reduced to long-distance/more connected bartering system with paper and later electronic records. There is no reason getting baited by this thread.

Maybe you should use the Marxist definition of capital.

And what freedom does the worker have under communism that he doesn't have under capitalism?

Seems to me that he's still a wage slave, just instead of working for Rockefeller he's working for the state.

There's no state under communism.

Then how are decisions made?

I don't know, we are not there yet, not even close.

The revolution, then the creation of a workers' state under a socialist (planned democratically by the workers) economy aims for the death of the state.

The "death" of the state is a very different thing than the abolition. The state ceases to existe under communism because after this process there's no reason for a state to exist in any form anymore. This leads to a "natural death" of the state.

Any group of people will have a government though. Whether its codified or not. Cavemen had governments. Society will be structured somehow. Decisions will need to be made.

Even if the entire world is united in one Communist society, so there is no foreign policy to worry about, there will still be internal things to decide. Who enforces traffic laws? Who even writes traffic laws? Who decides the best allocation of resources? Who decides and enforces product standards? Who decides who makes these decisions?

All societies have a state of some kind, because all societies have decisions to make.

I'm not saying decisions will not be made by anybody. I just don't know how they will do it because that would be a very different society than any other we ever had and have today.

For a guy living under french absolutism, an direct democracy experience like the thing happening with the kurds in Rojava would seems like something from other planet.

Same goes for me, a guy living under capitalism. If you ask "Then how are decisions made?", I can only answer something like "Decisions will be made socially". But what would that mean? I'm not sure.

The point is not how decisions are being made, but that they ARE being made. Ergo there is still a state. And certainly, no individual will have much say over those decisions. So from an individual worker's point of view, he's still just a wage slave. It really doesn't make a difference if he's flipping burgers for Ronald McDonald or for the Worker's Party.

Not every form of a "decision being made" is a form of a state. Would a trade union be a form of state? Would a family be a form of state?

>And certainly, no individual will have much say over those decisions

Individuals doesn't have a say in decisions only if you think in representative models. Even the soviets at the early stages of the russian revolution were a form of direct democracy.

The state is an institution that monopolizes the ("legitimate") violence in society. It only exists to assure some kind of dominance. The moment you get rid of dominations, the state ceases to exist.

>I don't know

You've had 130 years asshole! How can nobody know? The transitional boundary between "socialist state" and communist anarchism is so arbitrary and ill-defined I don't understand why nobody's bothered to shine light on this area even in a theoretical sense.

You don't have a say in a direct democracy either. Lets say the Worker's Party wants you to do some shitty job, perhaps mine coal in Antarctica. You vote 'No' of course; your friends and family probably do too. But the other 20 million voters all vote 'Yes', and you're on the boat by tomorrow morning. Did you really have a say?

You can't possibly get rid of all dominations because there will be disagreements in what things society does or how it does them. Surely some people will lose those disagreements.

>I don't know

So then communism is shit, because it's been over a century and there is still is no solid answer on how things would work.

The thing with Marx and Engels is what's called "scientific socialism", and it has a method: the dialectical materialism. With this method, you can make analysis of the present society you are living in, you can make decisions about what to do, you can understand the "what moves history", you can make a lot of things.

What you can't make is tell the future. Marx, Engels, Lenin, they weren't prophets. Capitalism changed, the society Lenin lived weren't the same Marx lived, and none of them lived in the same society Mao lived, for example. You can just go away foretelling what will happen in decades or centuries.

>The point is that the plumber don't need the company to "steal" the money he worked for. If he repairs 300 broken stuff, he should receive for 300 broken stuff repaired.

Well then he can just go start his own company if he doesn't like it.

What's the point of starting a revolution if you don't know what you're fighting for? Are you going to revolt and then go "well jeez i never figured out how we're gonna do things without a state, guess we'll just let people starve"? Why even be a communist if you don't know how it'll work once there's no state?

In a society at least a century ahead of today, why would gathering a whole society to decide where an individual family should work would be a thing? Why would anyone would physically work in a coal mine in Antarctica? Why would humanity would still be using coal?

Technological development isn't exclusive property of capitalism, it would still happen under socialism/communism and it would certainly aim for better living standards of humanity.

>Marx and Engels said so so I can't

that's not a fucking argument that's creative stagnation

theoretical models are useful because we can compare them and adjust them to our current and future situations accordingly not because they are meant to be 100% accurate

it always just boils down to muh marx with you retards, no wonder you haven't given a smidgen of thought toward this subject in a century. Even now, what remains of your brightest minds are just trying to make economic planning work in a modern technological framework. it's sad.

That was just an example of a decision that would have a negative affect on you. It doesn't have to be just you they're sending. It could be thousands of people. The point is that you're on the losing side. How about this; the Worker's Party wants lower the safety standards for whatever job you do, in the hopes of improving productivity. You obviously want to be safe, so you vote 'No'. But the people want more plentiful widgets, and they're ok with a few people getting maimed in the process, so they vote 'Yes'. Your side loses.

There will ALWAYS be disagreements, and some people will lose those disagreements. The losers are clearly being dominated.

I don't know. It doesn't mean nobody in the world has the slightest ideia. I'm not some sorte of "voice of communism".

What if he doesn't have money to? Not everybody can star his own company.

You know the point of "starting a revolution" (nobody "starts" a revolution, it happens when it have to), the point is to overcome capitalism and establish a socialist society. The people participating in this would be dead by the time communism comes.

What the heck you talking about? Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács, Gramsci, Mao, Lefebvre, the catholic people in Latin-America, even Zizek, David Harvey, to name a few. They all added things to the marxist theory during the last years.

And if you don't do what is decided, would you be punished? If so, somebody still has some form of "legitimate" monopoly of violence, therefore, there's a state.

That works if our economy is based on everyone having their own individual trade, its just a liiiittle bit more complicated when you get stuff like...employees