And yet, android is still not what people mean when they say they’re running Linux.

You’re just not calling it a state.

I love how that was the one moment you weren’t willing to expand your explanation and just left a link. Did you notice yourself accidentally describing a state and decided to not leave the opening?

Whatever diplomatic routine you pull that results in the organization that communists are striving for: that’s the state. An external force with a plan about how people organize. You can call it whatever form of state you want, you can call it a commune, a collective, but whatever method the people use to organize themselves that way is that state.

Think it through: how are decisions made, do we cast a vote? Well contracts, you have a democratic state. Do we use diplomacy? Congrats, you have a diplomatic state. Okay so what if we just want some rules for who does what and we don’t make people make those decisions, congrats you have a constitutional state. Uh oh people aren’t following rules, looks like we need to hire people to enforce those rules… Ever wonder why every communist system ever had an overabundance of police?

The link you posted is completely untrustworthy by the way. I mean, look at this:

If anything, getting paid to do something makes it less enjoyable

Any health brain in the world would throw up alarm bells at this. A classic sophist technique, to prime the conclusions by peppering little lies that make it more palatable. Every study ever performed on paid/unpaid labor has this solved, don’t start pretending it’s true now.

Here’s a hint: unpaid labor is called what exactly? Using unpaid labor to get things done, what’s that called?

Plus, look at how this comment chain started. The original replier made the point that communism fascism and socialism all need a state to exist. Your source, when arguing that you don’t need bosses or state control mentioned a case where 500,000 workers over through a factory and controlled it democratically. He suspiciously doesn’t mention how long it lasted, only that it happened post WW1. He also doesn’t mention that that’s immediately before the fascist takeover of Italy, in which Mussolini cooperated with many of these violent revolutionaries called syndicates, and they were unproductive without right control.

I hold the same sentiment as you in regards to the state, I have a natural distrust towards it I suppose. However, I do not agree that this is at all compatible with an ideology that necessitates maximal cooperation. It’s not any wonder to me at all that the regimes who felt most passionately about how people should cooperate and live together end up the most oppressive

I think you missed the point.

I’m sure that’s part of it. Antifa is definitely not well structured, and anarchists could probably be opposed to any official organization.

Let me put it this way, the post talks about a journalist who investigates antifa, which the op of this comment chain mocked because they’re not an organization. But, this is an argument of semantics, and the post didn’t use that word to begin with. Regardless of what you call antifa, he’s trying to investigate and see what they’re about.

It’s a very dishonest way to deride people. If you don’t mind me asking, if you don’t think the word organization is appropriate, what’s better? I mean I just say group, can’t really be wrong going that general but it also doesn’t say much. Like, when you said “people who participate in Antifa…”, what type of thing are those people participating in?

I find this comment thread horribly ironic, and I hope I can show you why without starting an argument because this is genuinely kind of funny.

Fascism is when a state achieves (or attempts to achieve) totalitarianism through corporatization. All corporations are chartered and controlled through the state, and private industry becomes corporatized.

One of the ways they did this was through legitimizing specific channels of distribution, and labeling all who take a more independent route as illegitimate. Farmers, for example, were coerced into selling their products to state distributors, and pressured out of independent channels. Likewise, farmers who weren’t part of the state organization were often treated with suspicion and derision.

Basically, if you were a _____ and did _____ things, but were not part of the _____ organization, then you weren’t a real ______ no matter how good you are at _____.

Anyway, antifa is a real thing that exists, and that’s the thing people here are talking about. They’re a group that has identifiable goals, and they work together under the label. It’s really funny to me that so many here are appealing to “they’re not even a real org” in the face of dissent, because that’s one of the most fascist mind sets that exist commonplace today.

Why is the only possibility for you to either get on the roads or do nothing? The criticism is that road blocking is an ineffective form of protest, not that protest as a whole is stupid.

I work in IoT by the way, and I’m directly involved in programming small computers that increase fuel efficiency in heaters. In other words, if climate change is your primary concern, you shouldn’t be inconveniencing people indiscriminately, because there’s risk of stopping someone like me who’s actually doing something that addresses the problem in a productive way.

I’m hardly close to the most important job that you’d be inconveniencing, just the most ironic one. These protests are certainly inconveniencing nurses on their way to their patients, lawyers on their way to their clients, families coming home to meet up for the first time since Christmas. Not to mention emergency workers being held up during active emergencies. This has all happened, and it’s happened way more than any goals achieved by the protests.

So no, we’re not all talk. I think most of us here giving pushback are all trying to better the world in our own way, and these protests are a consistent impediment to that, across the board. In fact, I would say anybody who bothers to take the time to say how stupid they think these protests are are doing infinitely more good than road blocking protestors, simply by virtue of maybe getting someone to stop that stupid shit.

The post doesn’t argue the point adequately though, it basically just implies people who think these protests are useless are ignorant. It’s completely pseudo intellectual, there is no argument made here. Stop pretending there’s some great wisdom lost on us when we point out how obvious it is that this is pissing people off and hurting your cause.

We’re not ignorant, we just disagree. On the contrary, it takes quite a bit of ignorance to brush off criticism of how harmful these protests are when it’s happening right in front of you.

I’ve learned to treat comments that start with “what those people don’t understand…” With a little bit more skepticism than others. I find that if your opening move is to imply that not believing your ideas shows ignorance, then chances are really high that you don’t have much confidence in arguing your case by its own merit.

Economic pressure can be a strategic move, sure. But, the road block has been largely indiscriminate, and the goal seems to be to create as much disruption as possible. Where’s the strategy in indiscriminate disruption? In fact, the corporations you advocate against are probably least hurt by shit like this, because it would be such a comparatively small hit than everyone else.

You are far more likely to inconvenience someone just trying to get by, or someone with something person and time sensitive going on than any corporation you’d like to “pressure”. They don’t feel this, they don’t think about this. You’re not disrupting corporate supply chains, you’re inconveniencing regular people.

That doesn’t even get to the fact that road blockages are extremely dangerous in emergency situations, and you’re putting far more lives at risk than your own by going out there.

If you are genuinely interested in taking a structured approach to protests, then I strongly suggest you start thinking of some other methods.

This doesn’t really address what he said.

Instead of berating him for not leaving a robust enough comment for your taste, why don’t you ask for more information? Calling capitalists uninformed or rent seekers is way more unfair than alluding to historical or economic evidence to the contrary. The latter clearly leaves itself more open to good faith discourse, getting nothing out of it has simply been a failure on your part

had a famine in the 30s during the horribly botched collectivization of agriculture

which implies that non-collectivized agriculture was doing a good job considering the significant upswing in the 20s. After the civil war, non-collectivized farms were doing a good job.

All in all, you’re frustratingly bad at arguing anything coherent, and it’s clear you don’t actually care about proper definitions.

This response makes me think you didn’t really read my comment very closely considering I literally explain the etymology of the word “public”. Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and there’s good reason to consider that state ownership given the history of the word and its use over time. I don’t think I’m incoherent, I just think you don’t understand, otherwise you’d actually address my comment instead of restating your position and implying I’m stupid for not agreeing. I honest to god do recommend taking my comment a bit more seriously and rereading it. Really try to look at what I’m telling you, and if you disagree, I’d love to see you actually point out what’s wrong with my comment.

You’re never going to convince me I’m out of line here unless I can tell from your response you actually took in what I was saying, because honestly, you really didn’t have to read much of what I said to generate the response you made.

I wasn’t referring to 30s and 70s as time periods, but the actual life expectancies.

Oh, I must have assumed you meant otherwise because the USSR never reached that high of a life expectancy. They peaked in 1970 at 68 years old, at which point it trended down again. Russians never reached a life expectancy of 70 until 2015. You should also consider how volatile that graph has been in general, it simply isn’t good for a state to have that much influence over the life expectancy of all of its people.

That little bump in 1985-1990 correlates with the reign of Gorbachev. He implemented policy that gave more autonomy to enterprises (less state control), and allowed for foreign trade (opening the market, again less state control). This included giving way more autonomy to the collectivized farms, as well as allowing for private farms for both personal use and for sale on the market - in other words, he de-collectivized. Given that the central authority in the USSR was the state, you could also say the central authority has less control, and thus they decentralized.

Compare this the the US life expectancy of time. It’s much less volatile for one thing, it’s a very steady incline. They also actually did reach a life expectancy of 70 by 1970, they had it by 1965 in fact.

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Honestly, we totally agree on quite a bit here. We obviously both don’t advocate for Stalin himself, and we totally agree decentralization is a good thing. It’s just strange to me that in the case of the USSR you don’t see how the act of decentralization was literally being less strict on collective control and more lenient on private control - in other words, being less strict on socialist policy and being a little more lenient on private ownership.

it’s also important to acknowledge that many parts of the USSR did work

It’s also important to acknowledge which parts worked, it’s also important to acknowledge why they worked. When farmers were given private ownership, they had more freedom of choice in how to manage it, which is really important to have on farms for a myriad of reasons I can get into if you want. But in any case, they were better able to feed themselves as well as bring more product to market. Surplus on food and freedom of distribution means less hunger.

However, this cannot be meaningfully achieved in a top-down system like Capitalism.

Take farming as an example since it’s on topic. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. In 1985-1990 USSR most privately owned farms were small scale and personally managed. What’s more top down, a guy owning a plot of land and doing what he wants with it, or being assigned to work a plot by the regional agriculture authority, who answers to the ministry of agriculture, who answered to the council of ministers, who answered to the Communist Party leadership?

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Private Property Rights require a state while public property does not

Public Property: something owned by the city, town, or state.

I understand that the line is blurry on whether public means “of the state” or “of the people”. For example, the Romans saw the state to be in service of the people, so “public works” were state works for the people. They also saw the republic as a government of the people, so state projects were of the people either way you take it. This is exactly the same in our democracy, public spaces are managed by the state, on behalf of the people, but the democratic state is also a government of the people, so it’s effectively redundant in the modern context.

In any case, I don’t exactly think the distinction matters. As soon as a large group of people (the public) see the need to come together and make decisions and how to manage certain things and/or how to cooperate to get something done, a government is formed. When the Romans did this, they literally didn’t have a distinctive word for it, which is why they basically just called it the “public thing”, the group that handled public decision making. The nature of the Roman “public thing” swayed in and out of meaning of for the people, by the people, in service of the people, in command of the people, and it was never exclusive to one of those things.

Private property demonstrably does not require a state to exist, because that’s not always how property rights are handled. In this early period of Rome, the state could purchase and grant rights, but so could private citizens. If the people of Rome wanted a plot of land to themselves, the legal way to do so would be through a legitimate exchange with a private owner. Property rights are granted by whoever holds the property rights, private or public. Modern nations technically own the land they claim, which is why they grant access.

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The far more important distinction are the things that which the people don’t decide need collective cooperation. That’s what we call “private”. To be privately controlled, you can’t be under the control of the collective or the control of the state, which is precisely why “private” is the antithesis of “public”. In the context of Rome, centralization would be to make it part of the “public thing”. So, if the people and senate of Rome decided to bring the whole market under the control of the people the way they did the army and roads, they would have been both centralizing control of the market and technically socialist, as the means of production would been publicly controlled. The USSR was socialist for exactly that reason.

I didn’t say the workers decided things, I said they had a right to, and then alluded to the diplomatic issues that creates… In fact, I heavily implied they can’t realistically make decisions when I said the group decides things on their behalf.

Central Planned Economy: an economy where decisions on what to produce, how to produce and for whom are taken by the government in a centrally managed bureaucracy.

In socialism, the market is controlled by the state. This fits the definition of central planning perfectly.

In capitalism, the market is not controlled by a centralized bureaucracy.

Okay I see what you mean. You agree attempted, but never achieved, I see that now. I’m sorry for misconstruing your argument, but I still take issue with your assertion that things got drastically better. That’s a big red flag to me and tends to be a sign that someone is having a big misunderstanding.

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The Soviet Union doubled life expectancy from the mid 30s to the mid 70s

While true, it is essentially a lie by omission to leave out other key details. For one thing, if you think about it, what kind of conditions would one have to be in initially to make doubling the life expectancy even possible?

The Russians were in horribly dire straits. Life expectancy fell from 37 to 32 from 1930-1935. The chief cause was forced collectivization of farming by Stalin. Privately owned farms were confiscated by the state, and were horribly mismanaged which resulted in famine. Socialist policy directly caused that famine.

Life expectancy started going up again in 1935 after they relaxed grain procurement quotas, decentralized, and opened up private plots. This is the scaling back of socialist policy, and the implementation of capitalist policy. Capitalism policy is to thank for stopping the famine.

had constant GDP growth until it liberalized and collapsed

The US has had exponential growth, rather than linear, along with many of its allies. Russia also supplies a large percentage of the world’s oil, you’d have to make fucking up an art to make your GDP go down with a supply like that.

guaranteed free Healthcare and education,

Both were an improvement considering I don’t think much was their for either before, so I’ll give ya that.

and had mass housing initiatives

These came in response to a housing crisis caused by inadequate supply of houses when the USSR nationalized it under the Central Board of Architecture. The housing initiatives did help, but the housing problem was never solved, and it was a problem created by them.

It had far lower wealth inequality than before or after its existence

Because he killed the rich people, and no one had anything. Equality is not an intrinsically good quality, especially when it means everybody is equally impoverished.

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I guess this is why I find the observation that communism has never existed pretty naive. Socialism, in its most honest representation, is really the state ownership of the means of production. The way Stalin held ownership in common, was to collectivize it under the state that all citizens are part of. If we are trying to achieve a stateless society, then holding ownership in common is an antithetical goal. Every step the USSR took away from common ownership was a step towards private ownership, and therefor a step towards capitalism.

Socialism means workers collectively own the means of production, and it isn’t synonymous with central planning.

This can only be true if you stop thinking at the end of the sentence, without reading into any of the implications, or any circumstantial cause and effect.

If the workers collectively own everything, then that means that every worker has just as much right as anyone else to make decisions on how the process plays out. This means that the group has to come up with a way to make decisions. Since the group has to make a decision, and everybody has a right to make decisions, the group is effectively making decisions on behalf of those in the group.

If the workers collectively own everything, then that means they have to work together and organize to get things done. This means that the group has to come up with a way to organize. This means that the group will be deciding on behalf of those in the group what work is done by who.

If the workers collectively own everything, that means the workers have to decide what rules or laws to follow, and how to enforce them. So now the group has to decide by what convention it’ll hold its members accountable. If it wants to hold members accountable, it implicitly has the power to do so.

A group with decision making power that enforces law among its members is a central authority.

A central authority with power over the market and all decision making is central planning.

Your description of capitalism legitimately sounds like mental gymnastics. You can call anything centralized if you reduce the context to only itself. That is dishonest, the context here is the market. If a market is centrally planned, then all aspects of the market need to be centrally planned by the same unit. That’s what central planning means. A disunited group of private entities all planning things for themselves is absolutely not an example of central planning.

Heracles

Sure, and capitalism has never existed either, only specific forms of libertarian-constitutionalism 🤷‍♂️

Now, if you can see how silly what I just typed is, you should be able to see how silly it is to claim communism has never been tried. You say yourself that Marxist-Leninism is a communist ideology, so if it’s being attempted, then it’s valid to say a form of communism is being attempted.

Do you consider drastically improving upon previous conditions to be a miserable failure?

All of the citation needed. Don’t make the mistake of including the goals of outcome as part of the definition, that’s just cheating. Op obviously rejects the idea that it makes things better, you can’t just assume it a priori.

I appreciate your comment and defense a lot. You seem like a very kind person and you’re very straightforward with your words, I like that. I’m telling you that not just because I believe it’s true and you deserve to hear it, but also so you don’t take it the wrong way when I tell you that, well, I’m sorry but I found your comment a bit condescending too. And I don’t blame you for it! Truly, I get it. You are referencing the fact that I’m on the hunt for the truth on Google, and it’s fair enough that it paints the picture in your head of a young, maybe naive, person on the hunt for the truth of this nebulous area of private and public ownership. I guess it’s not really far from the truth either lol. But, the context I haven’t shared is that I actually am very educated on this. I studied economics, history, philosophy and political science in post-secondary for two years before graduating (with a different major) and a minor in philosophy. Outside of school I’ve actually read heaps of books pertaining to the general theories the revolve around the distinction between public and private, from anarcho-capitalists to totalitarian-communists and everything in between.

The reason I don’t share this context and why I choose to reference google, is because after all this studying I’ve come to see that most conclusions drawn by these intellectuals can be demonstrated very easily by using commonly accepted definitions. Most misunderstandings can be contradicted by people’s own language or easily accessible sources, so that’s what I try to do. It seems a lot more favorable to do a simple “premise -> premise -> conclusion”. Besides, it just seems like a waste of time to open up a physical copy of some philosopher and manually re type something to quote them, just to come off as as grand standy, or just get told they don’t like who I quoted, or have the comment not even post to begin with because Lemmy has issues with long comments.

I’m sorry, that’s enough about my frustrations for one comment lol. I just wanted you to know I don’t come from a place of naivety or ignorance on the topic before I respond to your insights, because I think the assumption of ignorance has prevented some people in this thread from reading what I’m saying in good faith. I also do think you’re mostly spot on in what you say. The only exception might be that while I am familiar the distinction between public traded and private organization before, I don’t think that distinction applies here. After all, you’re totally right, things do change based on context :) I’ll try and show you what I mean.

My original comment’s purpose was to show the flaw in using capitalism as a catch all term, especially when it comes to medicine. The most commonly used definition of capitalism refers to private ownership. You’re absolutely right that private can refer to not being publicly traded, but private ownership refers to “being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body”.

Regarding the term public, when things are open to the public, they are open to us because we are members of the public. Public places are open to members of the public. We are members of the public, public refers to the state, and we live in a democracy and are thus members of the state. People who are exiled are not free to trade in stocks because they no longer are a member of the state that holds them. Exiled folk are not free in public places because they are no longer a member of their public, and are banned from visitation so they’re sent elsewhere.

Recall the definition of Corporation I provided before, specifically that it’s “chartered by the state”. This means the government and the government alone establishes corporations as legal entities, and sets the parameters by which they can do so. They exist as part of the state, but operate separately from the government, under parameters set by the government. That’s the distinction that’s made when you call Microsoft a private organization, the business isn’t controlled by the state directly, but government and corporations are both part of the state, and they certainly influence each other a lot right now.

This can also be seen in the etymology of the word itself, along with the history of how modern corporations came to be. “Corporation” comes from latin corpus, meaning corpse, or “body”. A body that’s chartered by the state, a body of the state. The reason the etymology took this path can be seen in how corporations evolved with time. The publicani of Rome is sometimes considered the first corporation to exist, which were independent contractors that performed government services. The Dutch East India Company found the first stock exchange, and was a corporation owned and controlled by the Dutch senate as well as others.

Now, considering where corporations evolved from, and the amount of easily identifiable government-corporate collusion today, I think corporations land far closer to being an independent arm of the state, and publicly owned than representing the private ownership represented by capitalism.

Now, just to nip it in the bud, you might infer that this means that corporations are socialist. Well, kinda, but also no. Characteristics of corporations can be seen all over early modern socialist philosophy, including syndicalism and trade unionism. But, if socialism is the public control of the means of production, and corporations are controlled independently, it doesn’t quite fit, right?

The context between these two areas is tricky, and your understanding makes sense without the additional context. Sadly, we’re terrible at naming things.

You and I couldn’t agree more. I guess it would really help if people incorporated (heh) the word corporatism into their vocabulary. We could freely disagree on the nature of corporations and their relationship with public and private ownership and control, while still distinguishing companies like Microsoft from ma and pop shops with clearer language.

At the very least, I wonder if you can agree that there’s enough reason to take issue with blaming all issues on capitalism alone, when there’s so much more to it. Feel free to let me know what you think :) I know it was still a really big comment but, yeah, like I said, there’s a lot to it lol I really appreciate it if you’ve even read this far

I’m well aware it’s popular to believe public corporations are capitalistic, in fact I used to believe it myself as well. Getting educated is why I no longer believe it. Actually, not getting educated is a great way to believe that public corporations, precisely because it’s a popular belief now.

I also happen to know this belief was popularized by early 1900s socialist propaganda, which characterized capitalists as greedy. They created the association between greed, wealth, markets, and capitalism right out the gate. Because this association was so heavily propagandized, people now use it to define capitalism. This is absolutely incorrect, because greed is a human flaw independent of capitalism, and markets can exist without private control of the means of production. In fact, markets and greed existed in every noteworthy socialist state that ever existed. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to hold the opinion that capitalists are greedy, but to use greed as an indicator for whether someone is a capitalist is absolutely wrong.

So, back to Johnson & Johnson. They are publicly owned, they appeal to their shareholders, the shareholders vote democratically on certain decisions, CEOs are appointed by shareholders, and the CEOs - the people with most control over the system - can be ousted by the shareholders. This is not private control, and you admitted public corporations are not public business. I would prefer not to appeal to popular belief to base my decisions, especially when I’m familiar with how that popular opinion was swayed.

You repeatedly take issue with my terminology, but that’s what we’re debating. Please tell me why my terminology is wrong.

If I need to get educated, please do me a favor. By what metric do you define Johnson & Johnson capitalist? That’s all I need. Just that one thing, that’s all you have to do.

Okay so public corporations are not private companies. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. Public corporations are not private, so they’re not capitalist either. I dunno why you had to ask, that was my original point to begin with, it’s silly to see a non-capitalist entity like Johnson & Johnson do something bad and blame capitalism for it.