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[Angle]

How would you decide what is relevant or not, and would it affect how much a worker is paid for it?

Now that is an interesting question. Frankly, I don't have any definite answers. I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure about any of them. I would want things to be decentralized and democratic - no command economies with incompetent unelected officials making decisions. Perhaps having each coop distribute the fruits of their labor to the other coops as they see fit? Under that system, maybe have some coops whose entire purpose is to provide analysis of what coops are the most productive? Or maybe use some other method.

My purpose in posting in this thread was more to argue in favor of the ideals of communism, and less to argue about it's practicalities- I'm still working on those.

[Angle]

Is it time to bring up a parecon again yet as a third or fourth alternative and pretty much untried way?

...That actually sounds more like what I was thinking of then communism does. Though I was thinking of a system with more links between individual enterprises, and between such enterprises and the government.

[Helgoland]

...That actually sounds more like what I was thinking of then communism does.

I hope this won't offend you: How much have you read about communism?
Contary to what many here seem to think, it's actually a pretty clear concept. What you are proposing is interesting - and seems workable, ven, if you include some mechanisms against inefficiency and for innovation -, but it isn't communism. It takes some of its ideas, yes, but your system still has a helluva lot of capitalism in it.
Or, looking at it from a different angle (see what I did there?): How about you start calling it, I dunno, Anglicism (heh), and then run with it?

[Angle]

I was calling it communism because it shares some the core ideals - relative equality, prosperity for everybody, opposition to capitalism, etc.

I probably should call it my own thing though, seeing as it's actually intended to make off with some of the high points of capitalism. Anglicism is kinda already a thing though.

[GreatJustice]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The hypothetical Communist citizen's incentive is...

Having a nicer life. By furthering the common interest, we can further our own self interests.

Also, note: I do support some scaling in terms of payment: more difficult and more unpleasant jobs should have greater rewards. I just want those rewards to actually reflect on how difficult and unpleasant a job is, and I want the scaling to be relatively gentle.

Okay, but that doesn't work in reality, and besides the calculation problem (which I already went over), the problem with incentives is another nail in the Communist coffin.

Imagine you work on a collective farm with 99 other workers picking potatoes. Of these potato pickers, let's assume that each picks an average of 10 bags of potatoes a day for a total of 1000 potato bags, of which some are given to those who make other products and the rest are left for eating. So each worker receives the equivalent value of 10 bags of potatoes each day. So imagine that one day, in a fit of "self interest", you decide to work to become a great potato picker, and manage to increase your picking rate to 12 bags each day, or a 20% increase. Despite increasing your picking speed by 20%, the total pool of potatoes has only increased to 1002, and you now receive the value of... 10.02 bags of potatoes each day. Now imagine you become a god of potato pickers and increase your speed to 30 bags each day. Despite having increased your speed by a colossal 300%, you only receive 10.3 bags each day, meaning you still haven't functionally improved your position. Inversely, if you slack off and only pick 1 bag each day, you receive 9.91 bags each day, despite contributing next to nothing. Unless potato picking fills you with joy, the "optimal" thing for you to do every day is to slack off and let everyone else increase picking on your behalf since your contribution is very nearly irrelevant regardless of how hard working or lazy your coworkers are.

That's an odd example, seeing as most capitalist versions of that institution don't scale pay at all based on how much work you do. If you do enough to avoid getting fired, you get your minimum wage, if you don't, then you get the axe. If I were organizing that potato farm according to my communist ideals, I'd probably have payment be based on how difficult & undesirable the job is, with slight adjustments based on how productive you were. If you were unproductive enough, the rest of the group might vote to dismiss you, leaving you to find another job or get welfare. And of course, most of the incentive would probably come from your coworkers calling you lazy. 

On a societal level, I'd want to put a lot of resources towards things like medical research and therapy, so that people who aren't able to
work for some reason or another can be treated so they can. And of course, I'd definitely automate potato picking. 

Note, my communist ideals vary fairly significantly from the more mainstream ones. I want a decentralized communist economy, and a very thoroughly democratic government.

Ah, well what you're looking for is a neat system called Syndicalism, which is a bit different from mainline Communism and has its own features and drawbacks. The main problem of Syndicalism is that you end up with a bunch of workers being forced to make decisions outside of their field, basically transferring all of the problems of democratic government to industry as well. It also has some more and less market based cousins as well in the form of agorism and anarcho-communism, respectively.

[Angle]

Eh, my ideas are a good bit more complicated than that. They have a lot more connections between the various coops and government, and most of the ones that are really promising rely on a bit of technology that hasn't actually been invented yet, so far as I know. It's really simple, too: It's a forum designed to allow large numbers of people to discuss a topic and get an actual consensus and decision out of it. Basically, posts are arranged in a tree structure, with each post having to follow a very strict format: all terms linked to definitions, arguments separated out into their own individual components, etc. With very heavy moderation for anything that doesn't meet the requirements. If this works the way I want it to, it would allow complex decisions to be considered and made by thousands of people, harnessing the brainpower and knowledge of all those people. It probably wouldn't work, and I don't have the skills to make such a thing anyway, but it's an interesting idea, no?

[SalmonGod]

What gets me the most here is that people are so crazy concerned about lazyness.  So fucking what?  We don't have enough work for everybody as it is.  Yeah, there's a lot of work that isn't getting done and overworked employees, because employers are refusing to hire and such (for entirely capitalist reasons).  But at the same time a huge amount of the work we are doing is superfluous fluff that doesn't accomplish anything meaningful, and there's an ongoing struggle against automation because people are afraid of their jobs being made obsolete.  The greatest challenge faced by capitalism is progress.  It can't handle true prosperity, so it must constantly sabotage itself.

And even if a worker is lazy, as in GreatJustice's potato story, if everyone follows the example of the lazy potato picker, then they quickly learn first-hand how that shit doesn't work and wise up.  If not, then they're only sabotaging themselves.  To say that's wrong is to say it's wrong to place people's fates in their own hands, because they might screw it up.  I shouldn't need to explain what that sounds like.  And when people understand that their work does matter, social pressures will be sufficient to motivate.  A lot of the work I do at my own job, I do because I don't want to drag my team down and provoke their ire.  It sure as fuck doesn't have anything to do with my pay.  Otherwise I do the bare minimum, because my employer is motivated by self-interest to treat me as a little money-making machine instead of a human being, which consequently gives me every reason to avoid being and doing what they want.

I'm really less concerned with a society that is efficient and productive than I am with one that is liberating and just, anyway.  I don't find that with a system that encourages people to betray and exploit each other to succeed.  I don't buy the crap about hard work and innovation for a second.  I see Tesla and Edison as pretty well representative of how those qualities typically work out in a capitalist society.

Eh, my ideas are a good bit more complicated than that. They have a lot more connections between the various coops and government, and most of the ones that are really promising rely on a bit of technology that hasn't actually been invented yet, so far as I know. It's really simple, too: It's a forum designed to allow large numbers of people to discuss a topic and get an actual consensus and decision out of it. Basically, posts are arranged in a tree structure, with each post having to follow a very strict format: all terms linked to definitions, arguments separated out into their own individual components, etc. With very heavy moderation for anything that doesn't meet the requirements. If this works the way I want it to, it would allow complex decisions to be considered and made by thousands of people, harnessing the brainpower and knowledge of all those people. It probably wouldn't work, and I don't have the skills to make such a thing anyway, but it's an interesting idea, no?

Sounds somewhat like what I've been thinking for the last couple years.  I'm not a communist, but an anarchist.  Closest thing I've found to describing me is Social Libertarian.  I think mass communications will enable us to invent completely new broad-scale organizational structures, sort of like you're saying.  Except what I imagine is somewhat less formalized and more grassroots/organically emergent.  Built around helping people form productive social connections that will allow them to organize and provide for the needs of themselves and their communities in a more improvised fashion.  The internet is already doing this for us, but we're only just beginning to create tools designed to do this intentionally and only on limited scales.  We just need to scale that up.  The way I see it, this is the core of what our previous and current political/economic structures have done for us, but with rigid structuralizations making up for the absence of mass communications.

[Vector]

I worry about laziness, but the laziness I worry about is the lack of innovation... and withholding resources from people doesn't fix that.

[Angle]

Eh I'd worry about laziness on a societal level: The idea that work is bad and should be avoided. But then, that's already a problem in capitalism.

[Vector]

Yes, that's what I'm saying.

I'm saying, I worry about whatever would make people want to consume endlessly rather than produce if they had all the time in the world.  Social censure, lack of resources, any of it.

[10ebbor10]

It's important to know which  version of communism you're using.

According to Marxist theory, higher-phase communism is a specific stage of historical development that inevitably emerges from the development of the productive forces that leads to access abundance to final goods, allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals.[5][6] Marxist theory holds that socialism, or lower-phase communism, being the new society established after the overthrow of capitalism, is a transitional stage in human social evolution and will give rise to a fully communist society, in which classes and the state are no longer present. Original communism

Leninism adds to Marxism the notion of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian revolution and to secure all political power after the revolution for the working class, for the development of universal class consciousness and worker participation, in the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.Autocratic communism

Council communists and non-Marxist libertarian communists and anarcho-communists oppose the ideas of a vanguard party and a transition stage, and advocate for the construction of full communism to begin immediately upon the abolition of capitalism. There is a very wide range of theories amongst those particular communists in regards to how to build the types of institutions that would replace the various economic engines (such as food distribution, education, and hospitals) as they exist under capitalist systems—or even whether to do so at all. Some of these communists have specific plans for the types of administrative bodies that would replace the current ones, while always qualifying that these bodies would be decentralised and worker-owned, just as they currently are within the activist movements themselves.I think this is what angle wants.

In the modern lexicon of what many sociologists and political commentators refer to as the "political mainstream", communism is often used to refer to the policies of communist states, i.e., the ones totally controlled by communist parties, regardless of the practical content of the actual economic system they may preside over. Examples of this include the policies of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where the economic system incorporates "doi moi", the People's Republic of China (PRC) where the economic system incorporates "socialist market economy", and the economic system of the Soviet Union which has been described as "state capitalist".     This is what Patriot Saint is attacking. Well, at least parts of it.

The costs of maintaining a computer system controlling the flow of goods would be just as gigantic as maintaining a giant network of paper pushers doing the same thing.

Now this is just silly. Sure, setting it up would be expensive, and there'd be plenty of manpower involved keeping it up to date where it can't be automated, but the costs of the two just wouldn't be comparable. There is a reason automation has taken over practically everything people could put it towards. I would be an order of magnitude cheaper than people.

I meant that the cost of developing and maintaining such a system during the Soviet times (around 1970s - 1980s) would be enormous.

It was an argument to indicate that if we wanted to install a state led economy now, we could do it way more efficiently than before.

Also, it was tried in the seventies. Link It wasn't a full integretation, and only computer assisted rather than computer controlled, but it was mildly succesfull. Sadly, the other economical choices of the government where disastrous, and it was quickly overthrown.

[Helgoland]

SalmonGod: The problem is not people not working, the problem is people not working well. That's a much harder problem to fix.
And when you talk about them screwing themselves over by being lazy individually: You are implicitly assuming some kind of collective will that to some degree manifests itself in social pressure. However, that kind of pressure only works in certain circumstances; otherwise, the tragedy of the commons wouldn't exist.

Could we please move on now? I believe we are getting somewhat repetitive...

[scrdest]

Also @SalmonGod: the potato-picking example is excellent, because there have been real-life examples of precisely just that happening - namely, in sovkhozes (collectivized agricultural enterprises) in USSR and client states thereof - nobody's ire was provoked, because the entirety of workers didn't give a shit about efficency.

They would roughly pick a bunch of potatoes, casually trampling a fair bit in the process. In fact, your idea of social pressure got turned on its head there, since the pressure was to be lazy and not give a shit, since otherwise you'd make the rest look bad in comparison. And call me a misanthrope, but I'm fairly certain that in at least 7 cases out of 10 the social pressure is like that.

I'd also like to hear when Capitalism is forced to sabotage itself, and how it cannot handle true prosperity.

[ChairmanPoo]

I'd also like to hear when Capitalism is forced to sabotage itself, and how it cannot handle true prosperity.

...have you checked the news, like, in the last five years?

I hope this won't offend you: How much have you read about communism?

you know, I'm not going to take the same obvious cheap shot that you took against him and suggest that you haven't read about the subject, because I think you have. I do suspect your reading materials are heavily affected by confirmation bias, though.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'd also like to hear when Capitalism is forced to sabotage itself, and how it cannot handle true prosperity.

On a purely philosophical level, it's because capitalism requires the constant exchange of capital, and thus a constant need for the exchange of that capital. If you begin to reach a level where you can create and propagate technology which obsoletes and disrupts this system, which we are starting to see on the horizon, it is in the rational interests of people who have greatly benefited from capitalism to ensure that this technology is limited and artificially controlled. While you would receive the greatest prosperity from allowing such advancements to run free, it puts the economic system we have aligned our world to in a bad spot. And we all know what lengths politicians will go to in order to protect their economy.

If you'd like some examples, I can give you both situations in which this failed and in which it succeeded (for now...). A good example of a failure is Wikipedia. Free, open-source, community based....absolute hell for traditional encyclopedias, but because it wasn't stopped Wikis are now a staple of the internet, and we have a far superior encyclopedic system. While I grant you that the risk of false information has been raised, the sheer fanaticism towards proper citation from many Wiki writers and Wikipedians in particular keeps this risk from becoming a serious burden to anyone paying attention. Further more, we now have literally hundreds of Wikis concerning such narrow and unnotable subjects that never would have received any attention from traditional encyclopedias.

The best success (and I will note that I think most of these, and as such capitalism as we know it, are ultimately a futile struggle against the inevitable) would be that of copyright law. Businesses want to have a monopoly on "their" ideas (even when ideas are the creation and property of individuals), and as such manipulate the code of law in order to ensure a continued and perpetual stifling of idea spread and publication. The reason for this is nothing but profit. Now, do not get me wrong. Copyright isn't even a bad thing. But we now face a mutant copyright spawned from the rational copyright of previous years. Once, copyright kept an individuals works exclusive for a short period (5-15 years) that would allow them to receive profit and thus incentive to continue creating in our pre-abundant economy. Now, however, copyright is likely more of a drain than a benefit to the economy and definitely to the creative scene as a whole. Now, in the US, copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author. Being dead, they aren't incentiveized to do anything, and the work remains out of public hands even if they stop creating entirely long before their death. The copyright passes onto whatever corporation held their rights (because these days it is almost impossible to get something widely published without such an agreement), and thus these businesses are incentivized to hold onto old stuff for as long as possible, and be as exclusive as possible about it. It is the artificial management of ideas, in order to hammer non-capital into a capitalistic shape.

Now, you may not be particularly alarmed by that. Many are not. But what if it was something a little more vital than creative ideas? Well, fret naught, because we've already got that as well. Can you say, pharmaceutical copyright? Proprietary chemicals? Genetic ownership? So many advances to fields concerning vital substances, kept solely in the hands of the corporations who currently hold the standing rights to them (and don't think this stuff doesn't get traded around, a meritocracy this is not).

And even that might not alarm you yet. But we've got a long way to go, technologically. A lot of good could be done that is not being done already. As long as continue to advance without gaining an appreciation for free information, the disapproval of keeping it locked up will only grow. And you might say that forcing the publication of information like that immediately or within a short timeframe is unfair to the creator, but that would be ignoring that it is not fair to the creator already. It is the larger organization that benefits in this modern age. In a more public system, however, the creator's contributions will be properly recognized instead of downplayed, and as such they will find themselves far more rewarded.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not a communist. Or an anarchist. Or even that anti-capitalist. But it is an old system. A system that is starting to fail in keeping up with the changes that humanity is inflicting upon itself and the world, no matter how well it is managed. I don't even particularly dislike capitalism. But it is doomed. And it will only get more doomed. And we need to be ready when the time comes to evolve from capitalism, as we once evolved from mercantilism, and as we once evolved from barter trade, into something better for mankind.