Explain to me basic capitalism and communism

I am as apolitical as you can be, but i find this talk interesting. I will probably forget the topic in a week and keep watching Oneyplays while my life is slowly wasted and die alone.

So far, i understand a huge con in capitalism is the eventual creation of monopolies, which if i understand well is that people eventually stick around with one product and never change, meaning not only must you have a better product than the one that has been around for a decades, but you must risk a lot to have it working or you will die in poverty. Or so i've heard, that may be wrong.

I know very little of communism, as expected, other than no private property and everyone getting healthcare or some shit.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
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Communism is when you are friends.
t. Tiqqun

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Sounds neat.

it is. what it isn't tho is that it ain't easy to accomplish… on larger scales at least. On small groups of homies that trust each other deeply it's very possible to practice communism with ease.

How much truth is there on the "true communism has never been achieved" meme?

Communism is defined as a classless, stateless society where the means of production are commonly owned and products of labour are distributed according to need, so no, communism has never been established.

By distributing labour acording to what people need, does that mean how much they think they need, or according to how much do they actually need?

Oh, i get it. Its for what the community needs, in general. As in there won't be any labour distributed for, say, golden donuts.

Okay, I'm going to go full-heretical.
is ML babble (or possibly leftcom babble). Communism is reasonably PROJECTED to result in about that babble; it is not itself communism.
You know all that ancrap/lolbertarian jibber about "the free market will solve everything, mang?" (after which, they restrict people from buying and selling so only a few elite are deregulated) Yeah. Take that, and apply it to the notion that wealth is something created, is actual stuff, and comes into existence at the moment of creation.
Communism is open-access to the means of production. That's it. It doesn't actually matter HOW it became open-access - whether it's common ownership, or whether some benevolent capitalist or monarch (same) dictated that the means of production be open-access, or whether it's actually completely fucking unowned, or something else entirely. Just that it is, absolutely and totally, completely open-access. Ban one person, and, well, it's not quite communism.
It actually owes a LOT to (actual) liberalism (which was a hell of a lot more insurrectionary than most self-proclaimed socialists; Smith, for instance, suggested reversing the enclosures by direct seizure), and it can be fairly honest to consider Locke the father of communism. His theories on property can basically be summed up as "labor, recycling, and space replicators." The USA is the only communist country to date, believe it or not, because the only constitutional function of the federal government aside from the post office is TO MAKE SURE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A CAR.
Now all we have to do is hook that in to the space replicators.
Stuff that is LIKE communism, but does not involve means of production, is called a "mutual pool." Bunch of toys anyone can use? A mutual pool of toys. In terms of "feeding the people," guerilla gardening is communism, while backyard gardening, donating to the food bank, and then using the food bank as the primary grocery store would be a mutual pool of food and, well, a mutualist endeavour.
Communism is predicted to result in "a lot of awesome things" for basically the exact same reason that lolberts whine about a free market they never seem to back up. More wealth = no real classes or scarcity = the death of just about any fucked-up institution due to no longer being useful to the few. And if anyone can create wealth, well, there is likely to be a hell of a lot of it, especially if all of it is durable goods and no one has to hit the lockean "recycle these baryons" button. Outside your car and house, chances are that MOST of the wealth you own amounts to a tablespoon of, well, sand… just in a different form, mostly consumer electronics. Lockean space-replicator communism in its "conservation of matter mang it all just changes form" naked glory.
Sadly, shitting on intellectual rigor and discarding all the classical and modern economic theories which boil down to "communism is the one true way and this shit passing for capitalism sucks" (the latter of which is the entire work of Ricardo and several economists thereafter) is one of the things very much killing the Left, possibly by design. It's still there. Read Locke sometime, and imagine a world in which EVERYONE has free access to the star-trek replicators' buttons.

Wad de fugg? :^DDDD

Even if that was what muh founders intended (which it's not, they wanted limited not no government) it's clearly not how that is interpreted today. You can't just define communism into existence.

...

Read a book.

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this is some extreme tier idealism
like some of this stuff is actually kind of true but also not put in a rigorous way, but that might just be the schizoposting style
you could condense some legitimate points out of it
and you should read Locke, if only to see on what assumptions liberalism operates on. on account of him not actually supporting absentee ownership (bourgeois right), maybe from an idealist point of view he could be made into a sort of communist

this pic is about comparing the 'not real communism' and 'not real capitalism' claims, but it does a nice job of explaining the basics of both.
the shortest explanation of capitalism from a marxist point of view are the M-C-M' and C-M-C' cycles, where M = money and C = commodity.
the first is money making more money by buying commodities and selling them for profit, that is what the bourgeois class does. note that the most important commodity bought here is labour-time from the workers.
the second (C-M-C') is workers selling their labour(-time) to gain money to buy commodities like food and accommodation to live.

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suddenly I want to sexually imperialize jews. Anne Frank was kind of hot.

This was quite a mess, i'm going to take everything you guys said into account while agreeing that guy kind of gave a very specific definition, but the hell do i know.

I actually managed to understand this one, if it is correct.

I just think she was cute, no lewd.

Oh shit what the fuck is this post, it feels like a schizo poster but I'm not sure if he's serious or not.

lol.

Connect this…
uspto.gov/patents-application-process/search-patents
…to your computer-controlled mill/lathe/3d printer/baryon-assembly space replicator…
…and download a damn car.
Tech to match it is a bit slow. If you can come up with the tech to match it (or just do some manual assembly), you can, in fact, download a car. Aside from the post office, it's the only thing the US fed is legally allowed to promote or do.

Shit, someone better tell that to the world's most expensive standing army, largest number of prisoners in the world, et cetera.


Well you didn't really ask a specific question so it's hard to give you anything. I would encourage you to read Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" for a babby level introduction, then the communist manifesto.

well a lot of truth. it isn't stateless stateless tho. It's a minarchy, technically. But such basic human standards are too mundane to call them "law", "state". Technically it is. Who cares tho.

Gommunism has been practiced by a lot of people, I'm sure some humans somewhere are practicing it rn too. But again on a larger scale society? fuck no. Never. Closest it has got is lower stage communism/socialism with direct democracy as it's system of decision making.

collectivized work force, working for themselves, not a boss of the industry but producing for their families, their own or society itself. with all the social care benefits ofc: dental, healthcare, food, child care for those single mothers who work, etc.

Under capitalism, you sell your labour power to a capitalist, who owns the tools/machinery/factory and so on. He sells what you produce, use the money to pay your wage, pay for the machines you operate, and pocket the rest. Goods and services are produced for a profit and society is divided into two main classes, the capitalists and the workers.
Under socialism/communism, workers organize production themselves, according to needs and desires. The tools/machinery/factory is socially owned. Goods and services are produced for direct use and the society is classless.
Depending on which leftist you interact with they will have different definitions, which would put emphasis on different aspects of those systems, but that's the very basic idea.

Good succinct explanation, but I'd like to note that socialism is rarely if ever defined as classless.

That's the whole point, socialism is classless, communism is classless and stateless.

Wait no it isn't. Where did you get that idea from.

Are we talking about socdem or demsoc?

We're talking about socialism.

Yeah, so, the dictatorship of the proletariat? Classlessness?

Dictatorship of the proletariat isn't socialism though, it's a process to get to communism, socialism itself isn't classless by prerequisite.

Goddamnit, I wish that we could settle on a definition of socialism already.

this and this.

Also, one can talk about socialism/communism from the perspective of surplus value like Richard Wolff does. In socialism the production, appropriation, and distribution of goods would all be accomplished by the same people rather than different classes. In capitalism the workers produce but the capitalists appropriate. And distribution usually takes place by mercantile firms who specialize in selling products rather than producing them.

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Wow, I didn't think I would actually need to post in this thread but apparently there are quite a few anons confused on what capitalism is.

Capital is the self-expansion of value or "value in motion". It's starting with a thing (usually money) and doing something with that thing to end up with more afterwards. This takes basically three forms:

Finance Capital
M -> 'M
Money-lending capitalists provide loans to people or entities with interest and eventually end up with more money than they started off with due to interest payments. Finance capital has been around for millenia, it's older than money and perhaps as old as civilization itself. In fact the first thousand years or so of civilizations throughout the ancient Near East including Egypt and Mesopotamia established a robust tradition of regularly canceling the consumer debts to avoid situations where people become too indebted to creditors that they fell into debt peonage and were unable to serve in armies or perform corvee labor for states. It's where the concept of the Jubilee Year in the Bible comes from. Finance capital is old; it is not the form of capital that defines the economic system of capitalism.

Merchant Capital
M -> C -> M'
A merchant capitalist exchanges money for some sort of commodity and then sells that commodity back to someone else to end up with more money than they started with. Think Wal-Mart. Perhaps not quite as old as money lenders, merchant capitalists have been around for a really long time as well. They existed in the midst of previous economic systems and they too are not what define the economic system of capitalism.

Industrial Capital
M -> materials, tools, land, and worker wages -> C -> M'
Industrial capitalists exchange money for the "means of production"–the essential resources, tools, and space within which to produce something–and also use that money to pay workers a wage. The workers then produce a commodity for the industrial capitalist, and they sell this commodity to someone else to finally end up with more money than they started with. It is this fundamental arrangement of production that differentiates capitalism from the economic systems that came before it. Rather than owning people and forcing them to work as in slavery while being obliged to feed and take care of them, or bonding people to the land and forcing them to work on the lord's land for some % of the year while they feed themselves off communal land for another % of the year, industrial capitalists compel people to work by paying them a wage.

Finally, capitalism is not about the existence or absence of markets. Markets have existed for thousands of years before capitalism; even Plato and Aristotle wrote critically about the markets of their time. The system we know as capitalism which arose out of the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries distinguishes itself from past systems by the manner in which people relate to production.

With all that said, the basic critique of capitalism is that the industrial capitalist arrangement is fundamentally exploitative. Workers are not paid the full value of their labor as long as the industrial capitalist ends up with more money than they started with. Dealing with this and the various other contradictions of capitalism that stem from it are where the historic movements for socialism and communism come from. These words have all meant very different things to a variety of different people at different times. The solution to capitalism's problems must be to provide all the workers access to the means of production so that they can decide for themselves how much labor value to return to themselves and cut out the capitalist middleman. Socialisms and communisms reference ways to go about achieving that. Marx for instance did not make any distinction between socialism and communism, and said that communism was the "movement to change the present state of things". Lenin, on the other hand, tried to define communism is an advanced state of global socialism where states, whose major function in capitalism was to defend the concept of private property that empowers the industrial capitalist arrangement, have withered away and we are left with a moneyless and classless society.

Are you tellin me I wrote all that crap for nothin?

I appreciate you user. have a cute anime girl for your efforts

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damn she cute