This is an appreciation thread for the baby leftist who is still propagandizing.
Already some great answers on this post, so I thought I'd just add this thread.
People start businesses for independence and usually to do the job they want. And owning the means does not mean people don't get a say in their jobs/businesses. In any case, selfish control freaks will have a very hard time under socialism indeed. Also you should ask them if they totally own the business where they work. If not, then ask them why do they go to work everyday. Ask them why total ownership isn't a condition of their desire or necessity to do labor.
To add onto this, take a look at all the volunteer NGOs and open-source software around us. People like being in control and taking ownership of their labor, and you have a lot more freedom when you work at your discretion.
READ MARX...its literally ch 2 lol https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
Because bank loans and venture capital don't limit the level of ownership and control you have over your own business. And groups of people start their own businesses all the time. Partnerships exist. Co-ops exist. The person you were arguing with is a fucking moron.
It happens to the best of us. I get stumped in “debates” al lithe time just because I can’t properly say what I mean while somebody’s there, watching me blabber. What can ya do
Lol just try to imagine the 10 stupidest takes on communism and debunk them and that will cover 9/10 use cases for any of this theory.
Tell him [them] that in China the government functions as a supermassive startup accelerator.
Chinese entrepreneurs get free office space and seed funding to grow the business and test out the idea in a mixed-market system. Poor people can actually be successful. Rural peasants are the largest class bloc in the Chinese Communist Party. It’s practically a miracle.
Silicon Valley is a joke - idealistic peasants dancing for money in front of feudal barons.
When you run into these people [“Libertarians”], tell them the truth about China: they’re much better at “capitalism” than the West. Imagine having a visionary idea for a tech product, and then getting the backing of state power.
Imagine how quickly your idea could transform from qualities into quantities. Oh, and you can pirate anything you want! Ideas are shared, knowledge is shared.
Yes, of course China isn’t communist enough for Westerners [or the Chinese people]. China isn’t Utopia. We are Communists. We know this. Everybody knows this.
they’re much better at “capitalism” than the West. Imagine having a visionary idea for a tech product, and then getting the backing of state power.
as Mussolini said, the 20th century was totalitarian in nature, what kind of abomination will be exploiting humanity next is undecided but I'd bet on this woke capitalism.
Imagine how quickly your idea could transform from qualities into quantities. Oh, and you can pirate anything you want! Ideas are shared, knowledge is shared.
The technocratic neoliberal dream lol, sorry proles but no class war here just disruption of markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
Yes, of course China isn’t communist enough for Westerners. China isn’t Utopia. We are Communists. We know this. Everybody knows this.
You made a post about China being better at capitalism than imperialists
If you want to purge capitalists and the fascists completely from the Imperial Core, and do it in time to handle climate change, you’re going to need nuclear and biological weapons and a lot of bullets. I don’t want my friends to die just because they were born in a nightmare, so I’d rather not use the nuclear option.
Shutting down global capitalism in this way would be incredibly dangerous.
The system is delicate [fragile]: just-in-time supply networks (think food and petroleum and electricity and internet) are not at all robust. If we don’t resolve contradictions properly, there will be mass global starvation. We have to act, though. Everything is on the table when it comes to saving humanity.
The problem isn’t just having a successful revolution inside the Imperial Core - reaction will remain and class struggle will continue for some time.
This is what happened in the USSR. They changed the economic base and declared it socialism. Because Marx said so and Lenin said so, and they both read a lot of Hegel, so if you’re still not happy, peasant, you must be some kind of kulak in need of a gulag. Yes, blasphemy, I know.
We can only begin to truly remove reaction and corruption in a Cultural Revolution. Minds need to change. The proletariat must be transformed, the petit bourgeois and peasantry too.
Everyone must be proletarianized, which is itself a transformation of the mind, through re-education [mindcleansing]
Honestly if you’re looking for good takes and strong rhetorical skills [TO OWN LIBS AND FASH]... posting here is probably an ideological accelerator. Yes read everything you can, read constantly, Mao is very accessible and concise
You can spend a lifetime reading Capital and still lose arguments to libs, what you really need is sparring practice in struggle sessions to build confidence combined with theoretical study
So in your lib’s mind people would just starve to death rather than grow food, unless there’s a profit motive?
alternative management structures
the contradictions of capitalism imply that there's no difference between these. The groups of haves and the have-nots is always shrinking
They asked me “why would anyone start a business if they can’t totally own it?”
"So you're saying nobody should start a business if they can't fully self-fund it? 1) that's not the way the world works now and 2) that sounds hellish, where only the rich have the chance to make more money."
If they try to explain how funding a startup with borrowed money is 'different actually' then you can go into hierarchies of exploitation. i.e. the business makes money by exploiting the employees (which is the only reason you would want to 'own' a business instead of just working there, according to your opponent - they've already said they don't think people would start businesses except to make money). The business does this by using its existing capital advantage, which is rented from the bank in exchange for some of that exploited money (i.e. profit) flowing back to the bank.
I'll add that the vast majority of businesses under capitalism are dumb and don't need to exist, shouldn't exist, in fact. They only exist to make their owners money and do nothing but harm everyone else. They can continue to exist because they often hold a monopoly on some essential good, or otherwise offer up a product or service that "repairs" the damage done by another business that does.
Payday loans are the most obvious example. If people had more time and money (AKA paid what they were worth and had control over their own schedule), they wouldn't need to go to some dude for a loan, which will then trap them in debt for god knows how long.
Something like a lawn mowing service is obviously better, but still would be wouldn't need to exist nearly as much if people had the time to mow their own yards, and likely couldn't exist if the people actually doing the yard work were paid a fair share of the "value" they were generating, or if gasoline was priced to include the damage that it was doing to the planet. Yards are often mandatory, too, if you live in a neighborhood, which most people do. Got to love that freedom.
Abolish yards, I guess is my point.
Edit: I don't know enough theory to stand by my point. Hopefully someone else can confirm what I'm trying to say. But "starting a business" is capitalist propaganda. Most of the work that needs to be done to keep humanity alive is already taken care of by a handful of people, but the extra value is sucked by the owner class, forcing us to find smaller and smaller niches to sell either other worthless crap. "Why would anyone want to start a YouTube channel where they have to sell merch just to have a decent living?" is the other side of this question. And the answer is because they would die of homelessness.
Barely anyone actually owns their business outright, first of all. Second, why would anyone work for a business if they have to pay the owner to work there? Because they need to be able to eat and want to be able to buy shit they want. People produce because we want and need the outputs of production. People create companies because some (most) things are better made with multiple people rather than one guy by himself. There is no difference between the workers choosing to start a business and sharing in the collective outputs of their labor and a owner buying a a business and finding people desperate enough to exploit themselves for survival, except in the first arrangement, there doesn't have to be the threat of destitution baked into the functioning of the economy. People want the outputs of labor, so they'll do labor to get them. Pretty simple.
Edit: In person, the real response is "So you think that Worker-owned businesses like Bob's Red Mill, New Belgium Brewing (before they sold), Mondragon*, or any of the 400+ co-ops on this list: https://www.usworker.coop/directory/ don't exist?"
lol yea I meant Mondragon, but my brain was struggling when I wrote that lol.
lol...oops. Yes I was. My brain hasn't recovered from the weekend yet.
Why would anyone work at a business if they can't own at least a part of it or have any control over the work they do?
A business takes more than one guy to run. Instead of one guy deciding to start a business, having to raise the capital to do so (which usually means they don't totally own it) and then employing people to control and exploit, all the people who would work there can get together and decide to start it together and own and control it together.
I think the first thing to do is to unwrap the actual question hidden in there: "Why would anyone start a business if they can't profit from it?", because under capitalism ownership is really the mechanism through which you gain rights to the profits of a business.
This exposes the ideological core of the question: "Businesses only exist to generate profit". From this follows that noone would start them unless they can profit, which gives you the original question.
But this is wrong. Businesses do not exist to make profit, they exist to produce things. They generate profit as a side effect of how they operate under capitalism, but that's not their inherent function.
You can remove profitability from a company and it could still produce things, but you can't remove production and have it still be profitable. At least for most kinds of businesses people usually talk about founding in this context.
So with this in hand we have found our answer: People would start businesses because businesses make things, and we would like to have those things.
Tell them workers can collectively start a business and collectively own it (co-op)
