Hi all,

Probably few of you actually saw my activity decreased during the last week. I was "camping" at my college in an attempt to get government's attention on its recent "Budget Bachand", which is a step forward leading Quebec to elitism and privatization.
The following collapse box contains various informations that you might consider useless.


During this week, we were also distributing free food to all the students (symbolizing the fact that if the "Budget Bachand" is applied, students will have to choose between studies and vital needs). The ambiance was one of collectivism, and I must admit I never felt so good: once you learn to let go the idea of Property, you feel less stressed. Not having to care about "will [this] or [that] be stolen if I leave it there?" was awesome. Obviously, I haven't applied this to everything since we cannot trust the strangers (including students we didn't know at all). For example, the very first day, a group of students actually decided to steal about 20L of juice and 10kg of apples. What was their point? Not quite sure... everything was free! But this is exactly what makes me so sick about our society.
Anyways, this "give what you want, take what you want" ambiance really felt nice, and I'd love people to try it out, but unfortunately, I already know people are satisfied (-.-') with our current system.
So now, I am left with a society I absolutely hate...

I've heard of Kibbutz, but after doing some research, I'm not quite sure these societies are still very strong and working well. I've even read they had started to give salaries... I really don't understand how a collectivist society can work with money.
Any one have informations as of where I could move to to fucking get rid of all these ideas of property, money and all this bullshit?

Edit: Edit: What is this about, summarily? Anarchy?

Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Oct 11 2010, 2:20 am by Tuxedo-Templar.

Capitalism is the most efficient method to promote wide technological development while preserving high living standards. Communism would greatly slow down technological development; I dislike that. Once we reach a level where it doesn't really matter, it might be ideal; as it is, nope.

Plus, your Kibbutz thing is very unimpressive. Granted, I don't know much, but what you quoted shows that the average kibbutzian works only four hours a week less than the average European worker. And, in exchange, I would expect that he gets less. Sure, food is free, but I strongly doubt ipods or computers, which cannot be made at the kibbutz, are also free.

I'm personally socialist for very different reasons; socialism, while less efficient than capitalism, can be narrowly focused and is very flexible. A socialist world government can rapidly scale down pollution while focusing research into energy/environmentalism. It'll certainly do better than right now, lols.

My $.02.

After 2 hours of reading through different articles on Wikipedia, I guess I'm simply searching for a collectivist society with a direct democracy system.

Next time you want to have an actual discussion about this, stick it in SD. Most posters here are just trying to boost their epeen by oversimplifying what you're saying and laughing at it.

I AM THE EPEEN SHRINKER.

He must be destroyed.

You're only ever sick of capitalism if you suck at it.

What's so wrong about collectivism?
And direct democracy is so far from being unrealistic with our current technology...

fix'd

Look at it this way, at least you're not in the States, who pretty much just sunk themselves back into a recession by basically saying that 60% of people with a mortgage in the US don't have to pay it back.

Lets get started here.

FIrst and most importantly, unequal efforts by the citizens of the collective get distributed equally among the collective. If I wash the dishes every single night in my apartment, my roommates are getting free work done for them, while I'm putting in all the effort. You might say "oh well, they take out the trash and vaccuum the place," but that reveals an extra depth to the situation. Washing dishes, taking out the trash, ect, are all tasks that everyone is capable of. Now say that I am someone as smart as Newton or Einstein, and I build the first television or something. My invention is then taken from me, replicated, and everyone can use it, and I get nothing for it. If I receive compensation for my efforts, then thats starting to sound like capitalism, where everyone can succeed or fail on his or her own merits. So I get nothing except what everyone else gets. Maybe you'll say, "someone as smart as you has built a car, and you get a car," but who builds this car or this television? Who goes into work at a boring job every day to build a car or a television, when they will get their car and television anyway if they stay at home? Maybe they will be thrown in jail if they don't work, but at that point, what kind of society has been created? The premise of collectivism is "work or be punished" (assuming that work needs to be done, of course). The premise of capitalism is "work for your rewards or get nothing." If you are willing to have a society based on punishment, then there is no problem, and as countries like russia have shown, it can "work" in a way.

Secondly, there is the idealistic debate between the individual vs. the society. Does a society have the right to tell an individual how to live? There is a philosophical idea that societies are formed based off of an agreement which mutually benefits all parties involved. Essentially, everyone agrees that "we will follow rules X Y and Z, because that will produce results A B and C which we want and which helps everyone." This is how we get things like the police force. We say "we do not want crime, so we shall each pay a portion of our money to create a force to combat crime." This is the individualistic creation of a society. In it, the prosperity of the individuals comes from an agreement to abide by certain rules. In a collectivist society, the welfare of the collective is the highest order, so rules are not agreed to, but imposed on its members. The society says to its people "this and this and this action will benefit the society, so you must do them." The society says "crime is hurting our society, so we shall take from each of our members a small portion to create a police force" So the question becomes, is it more important for individuals to be independant and autonomous, or is it more important for society to function?

Even in a collective there will be money and property. If there was no money or property, by what means would the collective measure the distribution of its wealth to its citizens? Everything cannot be owned by everyone. Everyone needs a house, food, clothing, ect. Can you imagine if anyone was allowed to walk into your house and take your stuff? Your computer, your clothes, your shoes, your food? Have you ever been on the subway? They're usually nasty because people don't take care of things that aren't theirs.

Capitalism is progressive, stemming from competition. Those who benefit in a capitalist society are those who utilize the best available methods, which is certainly not a bad thing, and is rather a definition of progress.
However in capitalism, the goal is to maintain superiority over competitors, and so it leads to people hiding their concepts and improvements from others. In this manner, many advances that businesses make in technology are often times not shared with the public, hindering the advancement of research.
It can also be used against the public in that many patents can be bought by large businesses so that the product that would out-compete the current ones is not made available.
In general, a society benefits from products and information being shared among the masses, and then competing. Capitalism emphasizes competition to the point that often times products or information are not shared.
One way to fix this is to allow piracy and espionage, to force everything out in the open.
Make piracy legal.

Yeah, rantent. One of my arguments for socialism as opposed to capitalism is that a socialist economy doesn't need to do the same work over - here, you had Sony and Toshiba independently make HDDVD and Blu-ray standards, but only one was adopted. Yes, they pushed each other and probably came up with a slightly better result than a socialist effort, but on the other hand, it required twice the monetary input. Then there's things like corporate espionage, products that try to get the consumer to buy more (addictive, or will-probably-break-in-two-years, etc), etc. Capitalism has its own inefficiencies.

Vrael, I don't see where under the definition of collectivism shared rewards for uneven work distribution is mentioned as a prerequisite.

In a realistic world, people are lazy. Every political device is perfect in theory, but no device is perfect in reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Read this.

I'm already aware people will not work equally, even though everyone receives the same amount of reward for their unequal effort.

Collectivism is based on the self-donation (this word exists in English?): if you do the dishes, well, it's because you wanted to. No one forced you to do the dishes. Now, if your roommates never do their own dishes, you'll just have to talk to them about the importance of doing the dishes, which doesn't guarantee you anything. Now, if one day you decide you will not do the dishes anymore, at some point, they will be obligated to do the dishes... and you'd end up doing only your own dishes, which is fine. For my part, I've done the dishes of 1 thousand students for 5 days consecutively without complaining... the assistance of my friends, the general ambiance, and pretty much everything was satisfying me.
Now, for your Newton/Einstein-ish people, I believe they were doing their job because they liked it. I do think people would be lazy only for the first few generations of the system's change, but after a while, they'll understand -this- and -that- has to be done by someone anyways...

Collectivism is also based on altruism, which I believe is induced by humanity. Right now, everyone is egoist because of the current system.
An other of your point, Vrael, was about people walking freely in your house: yes, they would be allowed to, but since everyone would have a house (in theory), they shouldn't enter yours without a good reason. And as for the subways, I personally clean the ground from papers when I see some... I mean, it's not that hard and I believe people living in a collectivist society would think of doing this kind of little things.
And yes, there would be some fuckers who would abuse the system, but who cares? We're here to compensate, too bad for us that are good people.

EDIT:
@Aristo: No time to read all of this!
Any summary? >_>

No, it didn't require twice the monetary input. It's impossible to say for certain, but if the company was socialist, it probably would've spent twice as much as sony and toshiba combined and come up with half as good a standard. Of course, we're both speculating, but don't try to put forth speculation as fact.

The idea that every individual may rise and fall on his own merits, i.e. that the rewards he reaps comes in proportion to the work he does, is anti-collectivist. The idea that all individuals partake in the fruits of everyone's labor, is collectivist. There's no getting around it. There may be hybrid societies, like the U.S. for example, which are classified as a "capitalist" society but which still have some collectivist policies, ( and collectivist societies with capitalist policies of course) but that doesn't mean the policies themselves aren't collectivist or capitalist anymore. And beyond that, the type of society payne was talking about was the kind where all property is shared, which means everyone owns exactly the same amount of the entire society's wealth, which means there will be shared rewards for uneven work distribution.

Altruism is inherently incompatible with modern microeconomic theory; it is virtually impossible to maintain a society not governed by self-interest. Read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; it'll hopefully clear up some things for you.

EDIT> Yes payne, read all of it. It's probably the most important book written in the entire history of mankind.

Vrael, everyone knows about socialist inefficiencies. I was pointing out capitalist ones. Don't start spouting bullshit. My point was that socialism allows for a single stream of research, while capitalism makes several companies independently develop the same thing. Plus, wtf is a socialist company?

Stop claiming that socialism is... what, four times less efficient than capitalism? Under Stalin, socialist policies led to rapid industrialization (from, I believe, 12th largest economy after the civil war to 3rd prior to WWII). In the same time period, all the magical capitalist economies achieved significantly less. In thirty years under Stalin, the USSR industrialized, electrified, fought off the Nazis, rebuilt a quarter of its infrastructure, and at least kept pace with the US scientifically (Sputnik, nuclear power). After Stalin, things went downhill (not to whitewash his crimes; the great terror was horrible); but during that period, the USSR managed to do what no capitalist country I know of could. If it was so monstrously inefficient as you claim at using its resources, how could the USSR have kept pace with the US for so long (not to mention catching up in the first place)?

You argue against all collectivism, but note that the United States is a hybrid society. Clarify this for me. Do you agree that some collectivism is good, or do you believe that government should be removed (being a collective idea and all)?

I've read this many times in the thread: how comes USA is an hybrid society?
(Sorry for being a foolish Canadian that hasn't interested itself much into USA's economic system )