Well Intended Leftist: I want to do something productive for society.
Tankie: I want to bash you
To be fair, the tankie in this situation said they are bashing because no one wants to plow fields. You can’t serve latte’s if no one is doing the hard work of growing and transporting the coffee.
How about working the oil rig to supply the petroleum needed to ship coffee from South America? You’ll probably lose a finger or two. Any unpaid volunteers?
If you’re talking small commune living then the onus of doing that stuff gets shared by as many people as are able and it’s hard work but it’s shared. If you’re talking greater socialist society it gets done the same way as it’s done now, but the people who do it get paid a much larger share of the value their labor creates and it is incentived to ease the burden where possible because you can’t treat the workers as disposable and cheap.
people who do it get paid a much larger share of the value their labor creates
That’s the tricky part. Without a permanent dictatorship of the proletariat, you have the masses determine value. “The state will wither.” is hand-wavy in the extreme. If the people determine value, that results in Glen Beck being worth hundreds of millions in value while school teachers get minimal just like today.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
Yeah, totalitarianism is idiotic whether it’s communist in nature or not. A healthy representative democracy with well protected labor unions, employee/government owned services and allowment of free pursuit makes much more sense and is not incompatible with communism.
Though note, I’m not really a communist in that particular sense, I tend to be in favor of a mixed economy with strong union protections and with essential and beneficial services being operated for the public good.
To be fair, you’re talking about slave labour.
Typical tankie take.
I’d seriously like to know a solution to how to get people to do the hard work. I just don’t have faith that enough would sign up for the hard/dangerous work. Like most, I wouldn’t balk at serving latte’s for free.
Imo, there needs to be a reward for the harder work. But that introduces recording of the value contributed which leads to capitalism again. It’s like living under feudalism, knowing it’s wrong, but not having a solution.
The idea that capitalism rewards the hardest working is ludacris, and communism being “Everyone gets the same everything” is a massive misconception.
Let people go back to subsistence farming where they either grow it themselves, trade for it or get nothing, if forcing people to do menial work really is that important to you.
Or just have machines do all the work.
just have machines do all the work
Do you know how many fingers are lost letting “machines do all the work”? You can’t just hand-wave that away (lol).
People are behind every product you own. That’s why actual communes are a lot of work.
Yeah, with automation and AI, that’s not going to be the case for much longer, and for menial work, that’s a good thing.
I want to do something productive for society.
Tarot
Yeah
Where is the line here? Art, music or writing fiction? Anything that isn’t needed to keep 20 people alive? Or are we talking a society that is more than just surviving? Want to keep people tired and dirty, that’s a good way make them shut up and submit I guess. I’m making my own commune, with black jack and hookers.
Entertainment can be labor. If someone is explicit and consistent about a tarot reading being just a game of make-believe then I suppose it’s fine, but I doubt most people who would do tarot readings professionally would be about to pull it off with at least winking at their audience.
Entertainment (and the arts) would probably not have a large central component. I imagine many more people would engage with arts than today thanks to shorter work weeks. Set building and performances and the like would probably occur on a more local level.
There’s definitely something cool about seeing a blockbuster movie with special effects, or an artistic film that makes deep points while showcasing actors at peak talent.
However, humans had oral tradition and just like people in robes acting for a long time. Our brains are probably better off with some storytelling that requires a little internal imagination and thought.
I guess what I’m getting at is, on my ideal commune the arts would be hobbies for everyone to enjoy and play a part in as they wish, not a “job” that constitutes pulling one’s fair share.
In a way, modern tabletop gaming has filled that niche for a lot of people
What will be the controls on quality though? More doesn’t always mean good.
That’s the beauty of communes. It’s up to the group to define what’s acceptable.
that sounds like a government but without the extra steps. i’m in
Except that you can’t just grab your stuff and leave your country to go join another country at will.
If there’s a version of communism that works, it’s definitely at the scale of a town or smaller where you can voluntarily leave whenever.
Yeah, I’ve always liked the idea of a town where we mainly just pool resources together. Buy products we can’t make on our own in bulk. Communal resources. Provide services within the commune for some kind of metered access to the resources, or live basically, etc. Still have your regular remote slog, have some sort of income pooling. Definitely seems like some kind of idealist utopia though, and the bigger it gets, the more complicated it gets, and the potential to represent some of the worst parts of society increases, like HOAs, government, insurance, etc.
That’s just… what your average county/municipality/local government already does, except with higher income tax/wealth redistribution.
Well, except that in reality you can’t ignore externalities and that quickly makes the “leftist commune” look a lot less like an idyllic hobbit village. Everybody must pitch in for national rail and highways, even if they aren’t the ones benefiting. Cities generate a LOT more wealth/capita and almost incalculably more wealth/km² than rural areas, are way more resource efficient and don’t contribute as much to the erosion of natural habitats, yet they are utterly dependent on rural areas. How does a hypothetical “small government communist” society deal with this fairly so that urban and rural communes don’t literally go at war with each other?
Here in Belgium the municipalities are, in principle, legally obligated to provide a certain amount of subsidized low-income housing. That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and it’s great! … Well, except for the part where many rich municipalities simply refuse to build any such housing out of NIMBYism and would rather pay the fines. Making government “local” does not, unfortunately, lead to the left-wing utopia that some people think it would. This is not “big guberment” or “capitalism” or corporate lobbying, it’s the mundane evil of your average citizen voting against the interests and wellbeing of their less fortunate (would be) neighbors.
communism works if you take out the human element. otherwise you’re always going to have someone that inherently does “more” work than someone else and complains that they don’t get back what they put in.
Sadly once a society atomizes and a very strong sense of individuality of property rights emerges it is difficult to reassume a communal lifestyle where someone doesn’t try and exploit it for singular gain. It’s also really difficult to try and make it work without the social interconnectivity required because this individualist stance long ago fractured the family from community and a certain it requires work to maintain those social connections… Work that people generally don’t want to do anymore. It also tends to lock people in place as your support doesn’t extend as far to strangers so unless your community is nomadic moving basically breaks the bonds.
People have a really hard time even picturing a society without money and a lot of people believe that it just looks like a barter system ecconomy…which is kind of a capitalist lie. Barter isn’t really true to what we know of communal life from modern study of the few places that capitalism has spared. It’s more like social credit. It’s more like how we behave with our friends. You give because I do and when someone asks you give you do it because when you ask they give. You don’t keep mechanical score but if you feel like they aren’t reciprocating generally you stop being generous. A lot of societies that work/worked on this principle didn’t make it super complicated. Wealth and resource redistribution was more ritualized. Your success and standing as a community was measured by how generous you could be to your society not by how much you individually hoarded.
It’s not so much a utopia as it requires entirely different things from you. We have a hard time working backwards from that because capitalism demands a hierarchy based on numbers and once you’ve been trained to keep exact score people become very bitter about everyone putting in the exact same amount and kind of resource to play properly which makes for weaker social bonds.
I mean also it has to actually work sustainably, or else it’ll just collapse and everyone will diasporate to other communes lol
How does the community decide who gets to make art and how has to work making food and other tasks necessary for survival?
I think I’d like to design the dodgy ad-hoc series of aqueducts that bring water from the nearby river to the commune. It will be like a daily task of building Rube Goldberg machines.
The Political Officer has conscripted you… to also make Rube Goldberg machines that smack Astrolgers and Psychics upside the head. Not a bad gig!
So you’ll be the Bloody Stupid Johnson?
Is it made from bamboo?
If there is bamboo around it will be used. I’m also envisioning a donkey on a treadmill which lifts buckets attached to a rope.
I love it
My dream job is that post I noticed the other day about “white guy doormen in Japan who greet women with hello princess!”
Either that or the “Loud American” position also in Japan that tells the boss they’re doing something stupid. I seem to have recently developed a thing for Japan apparently lol
Either that or the “Loud American” position also in Japan that tells the boss they’re doing something stupid.
Sorry bud, but this one might not be real.
I mean, it’s probably not an actual job. It’s just that “Westerners” are treated differently. So they are allowed to politely say “that doesn’t make any sense” in Japanese society.
You would have to have a real job at the company and you may not become a manager.
I think it is. It’s the same function as court jester.
But that would also require a complete understanding of sociopolitical structures, information gathering, and presenting/performing :(
Image Transcription: Twitter Post and Replies
ascended dr. jade phd😇, @_jad…
whats your job on the leftist commune??
im gonna be leading discussion on theory some days, making clothes from scraps other days, and making lattes whenever needed.
Amtrak-Bidenism🚂🧭, @man_di…
political officer that beats the shit out of all the people who think reading tarot cards is labor
Good human! A Political Officer will not be visiting you anytime soon
We got real alive Ai helping the blind and visually impared
And that AI is not perfect and not avaliable to everyone
Larpers hate it when you ask them to join the shit brigade/bathroom cleaning.
fight tankies, I guess.
Lol we found the cop
Not All Cops Beat Dirty Hippies Without Reason
A broken clock is correct twice a day. Sometimes even a calculator can be a clock.
But it’s the cop of the socialist system. That’s good!
Defending people from tankies who think they have authority to tell others how to live.
It’s pretty clear to me that it’s attempting to destroy the misconception that some newer leftists have about Socialism and Communism, who have just learned about it and think it sounds great, but haven’t actually dug into the structures and realised that while a lot of it is indeed great, it also takes a lot of work still.
Would it be tankie to bash whoever thinks reading tarot is labor, peacefully? Absolutely, but I think it’s more tongue-in-cheek, and I actually think the original person the joke is replying to is also being tongue-in-cheek, to an extent.
At least, that’s my non-tankie interpretation. Dirty jobs would absolutely exist, and while it would be likely that this work would be split amongst the broader workforce, the idea that people can get by without actually contributing what they legitimately can is Utopianism.
Did I read too far into this, for what very well could be a tankie being an absolute piece of shit for no reason? Yes, but I hope I’m right and both are decent people making sarcastic fun.
I Don’t think it’s even that deep. For them, it’s not a political philosophy or any kind of real philosophy. It’s just a personality trait. Or LARPing.
Tankies sure like to joke about this stuff. Except it’s no more a joke than a Republican joking about beating up a minority.
Like I said, I hope I’m right, but can see myself being wrong. Leftists can genuinely struggle initially with putting unobtainable idealism first. Engels wrote about it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
I make excellent bread, but in order to receive it you have to go through a documentation vetting and once you’re in line you’re not allowed to step out or Amtrak-Bidenism will beat you.
Sounds like a poopy commune
Was my joke too soon?
Probably 😅
Reading tarot cards IS labor.
Listening to people talk esoteric bs is labor.
“It’s your fault it does not work, you don’t believe! You are not in the know!”
Kinda true though. The world you witness is filtered through your subconscious to turn raw data into concepts your conscious mind can deal with: book, car, chair, dog, etc. That’s why optical illusions work, your mind gets used to interpreting the raw data a certain way, and that can be cleverly exploited to make your conscious mind see things that weren’t in the raw data. “Belief” is just loading up a new subroutine to your subconscious to filter for something you value. But if you don’t really convince yourself, it won’t stick. You can’t just ask your subconscious nicely to do things, it’s to “dumb” for that. You have to imprint with rituals and such to strengthen associations.
I learned this by doing a lot of acid in high school.
I learned this by reading a great deal of interesting literature, but lots of acid certainly helped to experientially solidify the principle.
Same. I was reading a lot of Wade Davis and “doors of perception” type stuff at the time.
Robert Anton Wilson can claim the largest single portion of the credit for me
I ended up reading a bunch of Philip K Dick and stopped doing hallucinogens. Thinking about it now the timing was probably related lol.
Hey, you want to read tarot cards after helping plow the fields in the commune, go for it.
Pfffffffffffffftttt
