Live data from Hacker News

Libertarian communism

libcom.org

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: Libertarian communism

#81
If you want both Liberty and Community to emerge as the dominant platform, you are going to have to explore other avenues than legislating it or convincing people of it. You are going to have to re-align incentives. It is going to have to emerge through a catallaxy of people pursuing different goals. This can be done by creating a society where:

1. Money spent in and around the community brings more benefit than money spent in a far off place. 2. Success at a higher level of administration is dependent on the success of lower levels of administration(probably also controlled by the the flows of voluntary tax revenue).

Even then, the type of 'communism' that develops won't be a top down variety that we saw fail miserably in the 20th century, but a bottom up version that is highly anti-fragile and able to move very quickly to take advantage of volatility.

Re: Libertarian communism

#82
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link! Do you have a similar great and concise introduction to Nazism or other related extremist totalitarian ideologies?

How is anarchism a "totalitarian" ideology? I have been reading in the press about how the NSA, the CIA, the FBI etc. want an encryption backdoor in everything Americans use, so we can be spied on at will. I don't see why this isn't totalitarian and somehow anarchism is. Anarchism means no state, whereas totalitarianism means total state control, yet you're saying no state control means more state control. It makes n…

I don't think the intention was to link them together, just to ask for introductions to other alternative ideologies.

It's not good to put words into other people's mouth. PlzSnow never said anything about less state control meaning more state control, for example.

Re: Libertarian communism

#83

> "Those of us with nothing to sell but our labour power" This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas ? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match. So, if…

Not a self-professed communist, but is not generating and applying ideas labor? Labor is not simply putting fingers to the keyboard. How would one reconcile ability to be creative with pure labor valuation, in a manner similar to dollars-for-hours exchanges? Why not simply measure the return on those ideas? If your work brings in $5000 a month, for example, that is the value of your work, of your ability to be creative.

Re: Libertarian communism

#84
post #14
post #6

The communist ideology resulted in the torture/execution/starvation of, what, 100 million working-class people? People don't go about saying "I'm a fascist, let's give it another go, maybe it will work this time, sorry about the millions of dead children". So why do people think it's OK to say they're a communist?

The communist ideology resulted in that in the same sense that the capitalist ideology resulted in the genocide of Native Americans, the creation of largest imprisoned population in the world, and centuries of slavery. Or maybe we're misrepresenting things a bit. I've never read a thing about having to kill 100 million working class people in any of the books about communism and anarchism I read. plenty of communist…

They won't write those things in the books on communism, but it's telling that when Stalin and Mao went "off the book", 100 million working class people had to die. And of course, anywhere that descends into anarchy results in a dramatic rise in deaths.

And the only communist states that survived without forgetting to feed their own people were the ones bankrolled by the USSR, for example eastern Europe and Cuba. The two biggest ones that did survive, the USSR and China, did in fact forget to feed their own people for a long time.

Re: Libertarian communism

#85

> The problem is that everything has a price. No, the problem is that everything has a relative value and someone needs to figure out what that value is. In free-market capitalist societies (and I'd argue in the other ones as well), money serves as an important heuristic for value. More concretely, do we, as a society, produce more fuel efficient cars or do we produce electric ones? In a free market, it's clear the o…

It is a strange thing to use cars as an example of a free market. The government just bailed out the auto industry. The government bailed out Chrysler with loans and government contracts in the 1970s as well. The auto industry lobbied for and got massive public subsidies for highway and road construction, while lobbying against mass transit, or just smashing it like GM did with NCL. Not to mention the federal governm…

I wouldn't claim that the car market is especially free either. You could replace car with "widget" if you'd like.

Re: Libertarian communism

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Representative councils which ar democratically elected by ordinary citizens.

How is that not a Democratic state?

It differs in that it supposes having democratic, popular control of industry in addition to politics.

Re: Libertarian communism

#87
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one.

Guatemala prior to the US-sponsored coup that radicalized che guevara and solidified in his mind the conviction that socialism couldn't work democratically when capitalist imperialists had no respect for democracy. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56590 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#Guatemala.2C_.C3.8... : Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democr…

You can spare me the Che Guevara fanboyism. I was born in the Soviet Union and had to read the biography and the history of the Cuban revolution (the soviet version of it, at least). One would think, that having been blessed to be born in a communist country, I'd reap all of its benefits. But surprisingly, it wasn't the capitalist imperialists, who have sent my great grandparents to a prison camp in Siberia never to be seen again just for owning a cow. And surprisingly, it wasn't the dastardly capitalist imperialists, who have murdered 7 million of my compatriots through an induced, and surprisingly very geographically concentrated famine. One would think that grain is transportable, but there you go: apparently not. No, it was the benevolent communists.

But you know what? There's this country called Guatemala, that for 10 years was kind of doing OK, and was a liberal capitalist society. But let's call it communist for the sake of the argument. They tried confiscating (not buying out, but straight out taking away) property from a very powerful player, after which the capitalist imperialist player started arming and training 500 men and telling fibs about the president on the radio. The 500 men failed militarily, but the army decided to surrender anyway. All of that cannot of course be evidence of a deeply embedded social instability and political apathy, but clearly shows that democracy doesn't work. We weren't talking about democracy at all, but there you go. So, yeah, if you disregard all of the above, we super-duper promise that Guatemala could have become a communist utopia. This "could've" of course invalidates all the deaths and misery communism inflicted upon the world in the extremely short period of time it existed, and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it isn't related to the endemic abuse of power and corruption that seems to follow it all the time, and totally works. We promise. Especially when it allows western people, who have never stood in a 3 km long line for toilet paper and have never gone hungry in the 20th century to feel morally superior by accepting 1st-world-guilt, yet being able to absolve oneself from any moral responsibility by shifting the blame to a cabal of disembodied corporations.

/s

Re: Libertarian communism

#88

> "Those of us with nothing to sell but our labour power" This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas ? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match. So, if…

> This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives.…

Haha, I've often had that thought myself. Add to the above the fact that human behavior is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any software system ever designed.

Re: Libertarian communism

#89
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guatemala prior to the US-sponsored coup that radicalized che guevara and solidified in his mind the conviction that socialism couldn't work democratically when capitalist imperialists had no respect for democracy. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56590 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#Guatemala.2C_.C3.8... : Later that month, Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán headed a democr…

You can spare me the Che Guevara fanboyism. I was born in the Soviet Union and had to read the biography and the history of the Cuban revolution (the soviet version of it, at least). One would think, that having been blessed to be born in a communist country, I'd reap all of its benefits. But surprisingly, it wasn't the capitalist imperialists, who have sent my great grandparents to a prison camp in Siberia never to…

I don't give a shit about che guevara. I care about understanding history and context and why things happen and stopping modern-day massacres by capitalism, not communist boogeyman arguments that are older and tireder than me.

Re: Libertarian communism

#90
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spare me the Che Guevara fanboyism. I was born in the Soviet Union and had to read the biography and the history of the Cuban revolution (the soviet version of it, at least). One would think, that having been blessed to be born in a communist country, I'd reap all of its benefits. But surprisingly, it wasn't the capitalist imperialists, who have sent my great grandparents to a prison camp in Siberia never to…

I don't give a shit about che guevara. I care about understanding history and context and why things happen and stopping modern-day massacres by capitalism, not communist boogeyman arguments that are older and tireder than me.

I bet Windows 95 is older than you.

So, you're OK with communist massacres?

Post reply on HN