Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

Re:Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minut... by quadrangle on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:59PM (#12830822)

I'm not an "advocate of communism". And it's nonsense to say that capitalist farmers produce enough to feed themselves as a response to my point about internal isolation. No capitalist farmer with the same amount of resources and wealth as a kibbutz would be all that productive without utilizing the benefits of the rest of our complex market economy and what that provides to them. In other words, it's the larger context that is the factor, not the internal structure of the farm. The kibbutzen were only communist in an internal way, not living in a communist world.

"having all their property expropriated and being forced to work on collectives" is also not a principle of communism. Forced labor is not a communist value.

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Re:Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minut... by WalterBright on Sunday October 30, 2016 @03:16PM (#12831660)

> nonsense

In simple terms, capitalist farmers produce a surplus, kibbutz farmers produce a deficit. Kibbutzen operate within a market economy and have all the resources of it that are available to the capitalist farmer - they still can't make a go of it.

> not a principle of communism.

Collective ownership of the means of production means confiscating it.

> Forced labor

When the collective decides that certain work must be done, and with no market forces, that means assigning people to the jobs. I.e. forced labor.

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Re:Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minut... by quadrangle on Sunday October 30, 2016 @07:17PM (#12833106)

Anyone who views any of these ideas with a rigid dogma is misguided. The broad scope of varied ideas that fall under the concepts of communism do not exclude the concept of markets. Markets are extremely valuable.

If you wanted to say that there are major fundamental problems with having no markets, I'd agree completely. Communism is not a set of ideas necessarily anti-market.

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

Or, to be pragmatic, if we agreed for this exchange that "communism" meant precisely an economic structure without markets, then I'd agree that's simply unworkable. All of my points in this thread rely on my assumption that the term "communism" refers to a wider scope of ideas and models, some of which have some merit but which nobody ever should dogmatically advocate (nor should they dogmatically reject as being synonymous with Lenin/Stalin/Mao).

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Re:Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minut... by aminok on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @12:56AM (#12852353)

To the best of my understanding, market socialism is just worker coops operating within a traditional market economy. That would mean it's not an actual political ideology.

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