the thread seems still alive, i would like to share some thoughts.

I think the real socialism had the flaw that they took Marx and tried to make a system that is more productive than capitalism, instead of improving the circumstances of the people. The result was military buildup instead of general abundance and so on.

It might be true, that a state is the wrong power structure to get something like socialism working.

Still i dont know how an alternative could look like. The machinery needed to hold up the first world living standard is so big, i cant imagine how it can be done without a state, that means decentralised.

However, the capitalistic state will grant these priviliges less and less people.

I don't think anyone's touched on one of the most egregious flaws of Communism, which is that it runs contrary to human nature to look after things that you don't feel that you own (eg housing).

Although I'm strongly in favour of the state providing low cost rented housing for those unable to afford to buy or rent privately and was myself one such council tenant for about 10 years, not only is this supported by the personal experiences of people living in state owned housing in the West and government owned blocks in the former "Communist" countries of Eastern Europe, but also by it being trivially easy to find examples of near identical housing in the private and public sector to compare how their occupiers have looked after them.

same is true about capitalism, capitalists dont care about ecology because noone owns it.

(Anarcho)-Communism is well suited to human nature, which is suited to living in communities where you know pretty much everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinaleda

You get into big cities and community is close to impossible and it's pretty much everyone for themselves.

Human nature is incentive-driven. That's why "capitalists don't care about ecology" and "communists don't care about housing" they don't own.

"incentive-driven" is pretty much a tautology. It's 100% vague.

This is the main flaw with our current economic system. Most people feel they have no ownership stake or possibility (most don't) and so **** everything, I'll take what I can get, the rest be damned.

GWB saw this flaw and tried to address it:

Ownership Society

Quote:

Ownership society is a slogan for a model of society promoted by former United States president George W. Bush. It takes as lead values personal responsibility, economic liberty, and the owning of property. The ownership society discussed by Bush also extends to certain proposals of specific models of health care and social security.
....
The term appears to have been used originally by President Bush (for example in a speech February 20, 2003 in Kennesaw, Georgia) as a phrase to rally support for his tax-cut proposals (Pittsburgh Post - Gazette, Bush OKs Funding Bill for Fiscal '03, Feb 21, 2003 Scott Lindlaw). From 2004 Bush supporters described the ownership society in much broader and more ambitious terms, including specific policy proposals concerning home ownership, medicine, education and savings.

^ the question wasn't how do we make the world a better place, it was how do we make more money for healthcare corporations etc

Sometimes one has to distinguish between what a man says he is doing and what he does.

My takeaway from that is it pays to be a winner.

Sometimes one has to acknowledge that the leader of the political party they oppose actually implented policy they support.

gearing up for cold war 2.0 leading to ww3
Russian revolution got them out of ww1, if that doesn't convince I don't know what will

I don’t understand what you are saying here. Do you mean the Bolshevik revolution was good because it shortened WWI for the Russians?

Germans had a socialist revolution in 1918 too.

The British otoh went with universal make suffrage.

Yes. 'peace, bread and land'. Delivered on point 1 at least and saved many lives

Communism didn't fail. It hasn't come yet. Communism is a cycle in history, not a political program. Marx predicted it would come only after capitalism matured, and the capital became too centralized to survive the business cycle. The resulting swings of unemployment would lead to communist consciousness and revolution.

Marx missed something called welfare capitalism. This has been a salve for the system but if antitrust laws are not enforced we could still see huge collapses of gigantic businesses. We already have too big to fail. Which should really mean, too big to exist and should be outlawed. When we have huge failures at a level that we had ten years ago in the finance sector, we could easily see an inabliity to solve the problem as happened when democrats and republicans cooperated across administrations which would never happen now. The end is nigh.

Marx/Marxism is great as an anthropologist/sociologist.

Obviously being products of a deterministic economic system its hard to get to an archimedial point from which you can with detachment examine how that system of determinism might have shaped you and your perspectives, Marx/ism is great for this. Marxist theories on alienation and reification etc are the most useful and enlightening especially the latter.

Reification as an phenomenological process, how we see man made social arrangements and constructs as existing independently of ourselves, is a really useful thing to understand in terms of gaining insight into social analysis.

The study of marxism can reveal deep level assumptions in your outlook you had never been aware of. This is what makes study of Marx very rewarding imo.

However Marx makes a mistake that many modernist theorists make, he examines and details a system of power, and then makes the assumption that if the system that engenders power disappears then power also disappears with it. In short, Marx is great at detailing problems, pretty crappy at solutions because his solutions make assumptions about power that are highly naive.

So I scanned over this thread and there wasn't much talk about Marx's critique of the Capitalist structure. The main reason Capitalism is so terrible is because it's a system that takes from the working class and gives to the owner class. It's a game where being an owner is a huge advantage. You don't even have to be a very good owner to win at capitalism but very few workers ever get much out of the system. (I could give stats if necessary.)

All you have to do is look at the structure. The owner puts up capital, then hires workers and takes their surplus value. Its a rigged game where both the owners and workers are taking risks but one is rewarded much more than the other on those risks.

A much better, more egalitarian, economic system would be one where the workers were also the owners and used the democratic process to make business decisions. There are businesses set up this way but there aren't many of them yet. They are called worker self directed enterprises or workers cooperatives.

Or companies with profit-sharing.

This is from an email I got from a group called "Democracy at Work".

I may attend.

Define not many?

Its my bed time, but I typed global turn over cooperative businesses into google and this was near the top:

Top 300 co-operatives have turnover of nearly $2 trillion

https://www.thenew*******/38904/sect...ly-2-trillion/

Sorry cant get link to work because weird censoring so:

YES! Democratize the Enterprise!

I find it funny that for all the talk of democracy in America we sure do spend a lot of time in autocratic workplaces. At least 40 hours a week for most of our adult life. Capitalism has more in common with feudalism and slavery than we'd like to think. Lord/Serf, Master/Slave, Owner/Employee.

There is a big difference between Consumer Co-ops and Worker Co-ops. We have a consumer co-op food store close by and the board of directors are elected by the members but otherwise it's structure is capitalistic. The workers don't own the means of production and are not involved in the decision making process. What to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.