Collecivism

[steve_bank]

Jumping over from the derail on a religion thread.


Collective ownership can work on a small scale.

The two major large scale Russian and Chinese experiments in Marxist collectivism/common ownership of means of production failed.

The Farm was successful.

Theer were a nuber of communes started in the 60s 70s.

Successful, long-running communes in the USA include Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, The Farm in Tennessee, and the EcoVillage at Ithaca in New York, all of which emphasize sustainability, community living, and shared resources to achieve longevity. These communities often share values like nonviolence, egalitarianism, and cooperation, creating sustainable lifestyles that have endured for decades.

The Farm (Tennessee) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Farm was established after Stephen Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans, and trucks from San Francisco on a four-month speaking tour across the US. Along the way, they became a community, lacking only land to put down roots. After returning to California, the decision was made to buy land together. Combining all their resources would finance purchase of only about fifty acres in California. Another month on the road brought the group back to Tennessee, where they checked out various places that might be suitable to settle.[7] They decided on property in Lewis County, about seventy miles south of Nashville.[8] After buying 1,064 acres (4.1 km2) for $70 per acre, the group began building its community in the woods alongside the network of crude logging roads that followed its ridgelines. Shortly thereafter, an adjoining 750 acres (3.0 km2) were purchased for $100 per acre.

https://thefarmcommunity.com/

There are employee run businesses.

Israel was founded ion the kibbutz. In the 70s I attended a presentation by an Israeli looking for students to summer on a kibbutz. I forget what it produced. They had a swimming pool, a car pool if you needed to go somewhere, a dining hall, and private residences.

Kibbutz - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country—this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn't be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.[11]

 

[Politesse]

Russian and Chinese experiments in Marxist collectivism/common ownership of means of production failed.

China is one most powerful and wealthy nations on the planet, one of the few entities that the US and Europe answer to, and produces a vast proportion of the world's supply of agricultural goods, all produced on collectively owned farms. How does that constitute a "failure"?

 

[steve_bank]

Russian and Chinese experiments in Marxist collectivism/common ownership of means of production failed.

China is one most powerful and wealthy nations on the planet, one of the few entities that the US and Europe answer to, and produces a vast proportion of the world's supply of agricultural goods, all produced on collectively owned farms. How does that constitute a "failure"?

You can go online and trace the path form Mao to the Gang Of Four to Deng Xiaoping and the opening of China to the west. They were desperate and needed to industrialize. They could not feed the people.

When China opened American business saw dollar signs, a vast market to exploit selling American goods. They turned the table on us.

Granted the Chinese did a great job, It was European and and North American investment that built up modern China. We Americans transferred wholesale manufacturing technology to China in the interest of profit. Federal tax breaks were given to pay for the transfers.

Part of it was American union busting. The idea was we would transfer manufacturing and keep the intellectual business over here.

It turned out the Chinese played us expertly. They openly stole technology and intellectual property.

Chinese communism collapsed. I don't know the best term today, China adap0ted free market capitalism. They call themselves socialistic. Major business is controlled at the top by government as I understand it.

As to power Chin is over rated. From reeporting China has serious problems. A shrinking population and no immigration. They have over extended themselves in loans to foreign countries trying to buy support.

They keep threatening Taiwan but they will never invade. They arbitrarily redrew maritime boundaries declaring the South China Sea as Chinese, and we plus others make a point of ignorant it dispute their angry protests.

As much as I hate to admit it Trump is right, we have been too easy on China and they have been taking advantage.

China has been posturng and dragging its feet, but they are cumming around to negotiation with us.


Theft of intellectual property has long been a sore spot.

Manufacturing in China has been migrating to India and Vietnam. China's belligerence makes them unrelable for stable manufacturing.

 

[Politesse]

Russian and Chinese experiments in Marxist collectivism/common ownership of means of production failed.

China is one most powerful and wealthy nations on the planet, one of the few entities that the US and Europe answer to, and produces a vast proportion of the world's supply of agricultural goods, all produced on collectively owned farms. How does that constitute a "failure"?

You can go online and trace the path form Mao to the Gang Of Four to Deng Xiaoping and the opening of China to the west. They were desperate and needed to industrialize. They could not feed the people.

When China opened American business saw dollar signs, a vast market to exploit selling American goods. They turned the table on us.

Granted the Chinese did a great job, It was European and and North American investment that built up modern China. We Americans transferred wholesale manufacturing technology to China in the interest of profit. Federal tax breaks were given to pay for the transfers.

Part of it was American union busting. The idea was we would transfer manufacturing and keep the intellectual business over here.

It turned out the Chinese played us expertly. They openly stole technology and intellectual property.

Chinese communism collapsed. I don't know the best term today, China adap0ted free market capitalism. They call themselves socialistic. Major business is controlled at the top by government as I understand it.

As to power Chin is over rated. From reeporting China has serious problems. A shrinking population and no immigration. They have over extended themselves in loans to foreign countries trying to buy support.

They keep threatening Taiwan but they will never invade. They arbitrarily redrew maritime boundaries declaring the South China Sea as Chinese, and we plus others make a point of ignorant it dispute their angry protests.

As much as I hate to admit it Trump is right, we have been too easy on China and they have been taking advantage.

China has been posturng and dragging its feet, but they are cumming around to negotiation with us.


Theft of intellectual property has long been a sore spot.

Manufacturing in China has been migrating to India and Vietnam. China's belligerence makes them unrelable for stable manufacturing.

None of that changes the fact that collective ownership of the means of production does not seem to be hurting Chinese agribusiness. They are, in fact, outcompeting us by a margin on many specific products.

 

[steve_bank]

What!! China abandoned large scale collectivism and adapted a form of capitalism. If you by a house you get a mortgagee. China is in a real estate crisis. A crash.

China has a wealthy capitalistic upper class.

China does not allow free access to the country to reporters. But some have seen the huge factory cities where workers live in barracks and order is mainlined by the army.

Microsoft and others have been exposed in the past for electronics made by near slave labor. There is a reason why Chinese manufacturing is cheap. No labor and environmental protection laws as we have.

China is collectivist in that they do not have the the exaggerated sense of the individual and rights as we have. A different cultural history, deference to authority. The group over the individual.

When I say collectivist it is n the economic communist sense not social sense.

China divested from large scale industry controlled by the state, it was inefficient. Europe did the same in the Thatcher era.

One of the first things China did was allow famers to grow crops in excess of the srtate quota and sell at a profit. Agrcultural prduction went up.

The porfit incentive.

If you were an international Chinese athlete the state kept your earnings. You are the state so the state gets your earnings. Athletes were not allowed to hire foreign trainers. At some point they softened the policy and allowed athletes to keep part of the money.

Point is there are consequences to communist collectivism. Common ownership, you are the state and the state is you.

I doubt die hard Marxists grasp the full meaning.

In contrast the USA was founded as a meritocracy in that you keep what you earn. A monarchy does not arbitrarily get the profits of your ineffectual and physical labor and invocation.

As I said China is not collectivist in the communist sense. They ave adapted free market economics.

As to cultural collectivist China is an authoritarian state. The state, the CCP, controls media and imposes a rigid political and cultural conformity. There is personal privacy.

You only have to look at what China did to Hog Kong.

 

[bilby]

Europe did the same in the Thatcher era.

...and now the UK makes almost nothing.

State owned companies may have been inefficient, but at least they existed. They employed workers, and manufactured and extracted strategically important materials and minerals.

Thatcher sold my shares as a citizen in British Gas, British Steel, British Transport Hotels, British Rail Engineering Limited, British Aerospace, British Telecom, etc., etc., without my permission, and without paying me, then offered generously to let me buy some of them (like a guy who steals your TV and then offers to sell you a TV).

Almost all of these companies were sufficiently profitable that shares were highly sought after, oversubscribed at the price, and immediately sold for far more than their issue price. So the guy who stole your telly, offered to sell it back to you, and when you refused, sold it for £10 to someone else, and then boasted that that buyer was then able to sell it on for £100, now expects praise for their economic genius.

The UK economy still hasn't recovered from Thatcherism, and probably never will.

 

[Politesse]

What!! China abandoned large scale collectivism and adapted a form of capitalism. If you by a house you get a mortgagee. China is in a real estate crisis. A crash.

China has a wealthy capitalistic upper class.

China does not allow free access to the country to reporters. But some have seen the huge factory cities where workers live in barracks and order is mainlined by the army.

Microsoft and others have been exposed in the past for electronics made by near slave labor. There is a reason why Chinese manufacturing is cheap. No labor and environmental protection laws as we have.

China is collectivist in that they do not have the the exaggerated sense of the individual and rights as we have. A different cultural history, deference to authority. The group over the individual.

When I say collectivist it is n the economic communist sense not social sense.

China divested from large scale industry controlled by the state, it was inefficient. Europe did the same in the Thatcher era.

One of the first things China did was allow famers to grow crops in excess of the srtate quota and sell at a profit. Agrcultural prduction went up.

The porfit incentive.

If you were an international Chinese athlete the state kept your earnings. You are the state so the state gets your earnings. Athletes were not allowed to hire foreign trainers. At some point they softened the policy and allowed athletes to keep part of the money.

Point is there are consequences to communist collectivism. Common ownership, you are the state and the state is you.

I doubt die hard Marxists grasp the full meaning.

In contrast the USA was founded as a meritocracy in that you keep what you earn. A monarchy does not arbitrarily get the profits of your ineffectual and physical labor and invocation.

As I said China is not collectivist in the communist sense. They ave adapted free market economics.

As to cultural collectivist China is an authoritarian state. The state, the CCP, controls media and imposes a rigid political and cultural conformity. There is personal privacy.

You only have to look at what China did to Hog Kong.

I see you don't actually know much about the situation. No, farms are collectively owned properties in China. Either owned and managed directly by the state, or by rural collective agricultural organizations (commonly composed of a traditional village council) subject to national review. Farmers have usage rights, defined by contract, but no ownership rights. The farmer's use contracts can be leased or traded, but not directly for money. For the most part, the general policy is for the government to stay out of local afffairs as much as possible, trusting in the native wisdom of the farmers and farming communities themselves to deal with problems unless they become regional issues. Indeed, a law was passed last year to give the farmer's considerably more say in the collective committees; essentially, obliging the committees to take farmer petitions seriously and in a timely fashion. You are right that China has a growing middle and upper class, but that should raise doubts about your black-and-white, oversimplified worldview in which only two economic systems seemingly exist? The real situation with China is more complicated than a 60s schoolchild's understanding of a winner-take-all war of communism versus capitalism. Capitalist ideas and practices have indeed been allowed into China, but they are heavily mediated and scrutinised by a very heavy-handed coalition of local collective organizations and intemittently active but staggeringly powerful state agencies. Neither is the American system as straightfowardly capitalist as you seem to think. Both nations exist in a grey maybe between dueling economic philosophies, and both have tried quite a few different versions of this balance over the past many decades.

You can read about the system in more detail here.