Books on Communism

Does anyone know of any books that make arguments for a communist society based on the productivity, efficiency and technological advancements of such a society rather than philosophical arguments?

Something that's idealistic but still based upon realistic assumptions about how the world works.

Other urls found in this thread:

amazon.com/gp/product/0190230851?ie=UTF8&tag=marketorder-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0190230851
amazon.com/Labor-Monopoly-Capital-Degradation-Twentieth/dp/0853459401#reader_0853459401
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Read a biography of Sankara.

>but still based upon realistic assumptions about how the world works.

Good luck with that.

>Something that's idealistic but still based upon realistic assumptions about how the world works.
The Holy Bible trumps Marxism every time

Why Jobs are Stupid and Society Should Take Care of Me by S. Snophlake

How I Realized that My Purpose was to Critique Capitalist Society on my Macbook in Starbucks by Winey B. Sadboi

obligatory

amazon.com/gp/product/0190230851?ie=UTF8&tag=marketorder-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=0190230851

only if you interpret it literally and give everything you have to the poor.

I see you've read How to Argue Without an Argument by M.T. Strawman

if you ever reply to me again i will rain heavily biased obtuse infographics on you the likes of which you have never seen.

You want arguments? Okay. What is the communist response to the economic calculation problem? If you're unfamiliar with what that is I have some copypasta for you.

There's a real "knowledge problem" with socialism and it's one of the biggest reasons that "central panning" will always fail. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich Hayek he explained that the kind of knowledge that makes the economic world go round is not just scientific knowledge but the detailed and idiosyncratic "knowledge of popular circumstances of time and place" that the millions of people who make up the world economy possess and utilize to perform their unique jobs and live their lives. No government planner could possibly possess, let alone efficiently utilize, such vast knowledge.

For example, consider something as simple as a slice of pizza. What would it take to make a pizza from scratch? Well, the first ingredient would be dough, which would require a wheat farm to raise the wheat that is turned into flour, which in turn is turned into pizza dough. The wheat farm requires all of the engineering know-how that is used to build all of the tractors and other farm equipment; farm tools, fertilizers, irrigation systems, and what not. Then there is the grain storage business and all that goes into it, along with the trucking industry that is used to transport the grain. The transportation industry requires gasoline or diesel fuel, which means more petroleum industry must become involved, including all of the sophisticated engineering knowledge that is used to extract petroleum from the earth and refine it into gasoline.

1/2

So far, considering just one ingredient of pizza--dough--we learn that it requires the efforts of probably hundreds if not thousands of people from all over the world, all with very specialized "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place" that they use to do their jobs. Now consider the tomato sauces, the cheese, the pepperonis, and so on. The lesson here is that what makes the economic world--or human civilization itself--possible is the international division of labor and knowledge in which we all specialize in something in the marketplace, earn money doing it, and use that money to buy other things from other "specialists." All of this occurs spontaneously without any government planner consciously dictating how to make pizzas, how many to take, or where pizza parlors should be located.

As Adam Smith once explained, what motivates people to put forth all of this effort and cooperate with each other to give us "our meat and our bread" is not their selflessness or their love of their fellow man, but their concern for their own well being. By pursuing their own self-interest, as though led by an "invisible hand," benefit the rest of society as well. As for socialism, it is worth repeating that no government planner or group of planners with the most powerful computers available could conceivably possess and utilize all of the constantly changing information that is needed to produce even the most common and simple consumer goods, let alone sophisticated products like automobiles and computers.

The false notion that government planners under socialism could possess and make better use of all this information than the myriad consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, business managers, and other market participants in thousands of different industries was labeled "the pretense of knowledge" by Hayek in his Nobel prize acceptance speech in 1975. It was, said Hayek, the "fatal conceit" of socialist everywhere.

2/2

Bookchin and Kropotkin.

What about fully automated luxury gay space communism?

Aronowitz and DiFazio - The Jobless Future
Cockshott and Cottrell - Towards A New Socialism
Gerovitch - From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
Kliman - The Failure of Capitalist Production
Mattick - Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism
McNally - Against the Market
Medina - Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
Roberts - The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism
Smith - Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production

Planners wouldn't need to literally calculate every piece of component information involved in production, down to the last individual screw. They would only need to draft a basic plan of goods and services and broadly organize productive capacity for it. The plan's drafting would be regulated by efficiency and feasibility based on productivity and an in-kind account of resource scarcity. These factors would replace the price system. Detailed production/scientific information would be handled by the producers involved with the relevant materials. The plan in practice could be corrected and adjusted as necessary by real-time feedback mechanisms between planners, producers, and consumers -- the realities of factory or extraction conditions according to the workers and inspectors, changes in demand reflected in inventories, etc.. The calculation argument is essentially a strawman.

Anyone here familiar with Ha-Joon Chang?

Any deviation from the current system where prices are adjusted spontaneously and by themselves would reasonably be less efficient because no industry or system is made more efficient by adding bureaucracy. The argument isn't that things can't be made under communism, it's that anything that is made will be done so with less efficiency. This problem can't be ignored by playing at fantasy and imagining a computer that will automatically calculate the prices of goods and what and who they should be given to.

>Any deviation from the current system where prices are adjusted spontaneously and by themselves

Stiglitz won the nobsl prize for proving that this doesnt actually happen (in any market with imperfect information, which is every market)

>Detailed production/scientific information would be handled by the producers involved with the relevant materials

You mean like a market where people exchange goods and services for the prices that they set? That sounds an awful lot like the free market.

>Something that's idealistic but still based upon realistic assumptions about how the world works.

The world doesn't work under communism, kid.

>>>/reddit/

t. brainlet

read some theory, reactionary anti-intellectual

No large-scale economic system can exist without some kind of management. Communist "bureaucracy" (planners) would replace capitalist "bureaucracy" (capitalists, corporate managers, bankers, etc.). The only fantasy here is that the market benevolently and automatically organizes capitalist production without any management or hierarchical relationships involved. Capitalism's motive is profit and its regulator is price (including the price of wage-labor). Communism's motive is direct need and its regulator is scientific efficiency based on in-kind calculation. Communism, or any workable economic planning system, would be more efficient than capitalism firstly because producing for direct need is more efficient than producing for exchange/profit (which only indirectly unstably and satisfies need), and secondly because planning bypasses the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (the capitalist system's central contradiction, which increasingly strangles its capacity for growth and technological development).

>middle school in america lets out
>leftypol arrives itt
really makes your noodle caboodle

Market socialism>*

The problem with it is that it smugles private property and necessary growth inside the postulates, together with its relations, and equalizies capitalism with markets, which is wrong. In other words capitalism is not equal with markets, it is necessary not sufficient. And growth is necessary too, and actually the main problem.

You can very well have a compulsory democratized management of units of capital, some variety of market socialism. And more definitive if you take out growth of the equation capitalism CANNOT sustain itself.

amazon.com/Labor-Monopoly-Capital-Degradation-Twentieth/dp/0853459401#reader_0853459401


user, this book covers a central problem with communism relevant to your point.

Communism is, by definition, supposed to bring about the end of alienated labor. But do we require the division of labor via factory work to maintain our productivity?

Braverman dips into this and explores what, exactly, leads to the experience of alienated labor. He seems to point towards alienation as a requirement for the material wealth we have, and as such, it seems to contradict what you're hoping for: that a communist society would be more productively efficient than a capitalist one.

One final thought - scientific management: lenin fucking loved it, he thought it was great, tried to emulate the west. "Gommunist" Soviet Russia organized its labor along capitalistic principles of division of labor and simplification of work.