Fully Automated Luxury Communism

[portlandatheist]

And while I'm ranting, what the hell is wrong with a mix of capitalism where it works best and community funding where that works best?

Absolutely nothing but I would argue that "community funding" and social spending is not Socialism at all. Many Nordic model countries have both more capitalism and more social spending than the USA. All successful modern economies have both private and public sectors. We can argue about what belongs where but they both must exist and if the public sector is completely funded by the private sector, it seems that we would wish for its success and not condemn it as a force of evil or that these sectors are in conflict with each other when they are interdependent and benefit each other.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Absolutely nothing but I would argue that "community funding" and social spending is not Socialism at all.

You could argue that, but you would be going against popular usage of the word.

Socialism: A short primer

Not one economically advanced society can be described as purely capitalist; every one of them is a mixed economy that includes some elements of socialism. Medicare and Social Security are, in a sense, socialist, and so are our public schools and universities, our community colleges, our water supplies and sewers, and our mass transit systems. Municipally owned and built sports stadiums are forms of socialism...

And from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, conservatives have made it a point to charge their Democratic foes with being socialists, no matter how many speeches they made in praise of the market....Barack Obama’s health care plan, which was a very long way from a single payer system, was regularly denounced as socialist.

 

[Robin]

I keep reading this thread title as "Fully Automated Luxury Communion" and imagining vending machines dispensing artisanal wafers and boutique wines.

 

[dann]

Marx didn't espouse communism, he predicted it.

You seem to have read only Popper's distorted presentation of Marx. This is what Wikipedia says about The Communist Manifesto (1848), which he and Engels wrote when they were still fairly young:

The introduction begins by proclaiming: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre". Pointing out that parties everywhere—including those in government and those in the opposition—have flung the "branding reproach of communism" at each other, the authors infer from this that the powers-that-be acknowledge communism to be a power in itself. Subsequently, the introduction exhorts Communists to openly publish their views and aims, to "meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself".

In this respect, nothing has really changed: Just like Trump, Capitalsm can't exist without lies.

And abolition of the state isn't a goal of Marxist communism, it's a predicted result of the process.

Marx can be blamed for some of his 'optimisms'. He didn't make any serious predictions. When he described the accumulation and concentration of capital in still fewer hands, he was describing a process that was already happening, not making predictions about what would happen some day in the near or far future. He pointed out the directions that capitalism was already going and described how it creates the conditions that will destroy it some day if people decide to do away with it, for instance the necessity of teaching the working classes to read and write, thus enabling them to read not only psalms and hymns but also communist pamphlets. However, it still requires that the working classes use these acquired skills to actually read (and/or or hear) about and understand why capitalism and having to work as laborers is a way to enrich and empower capitalists and impoverish workers (and even more so, the unemployed and the unemployable, of course).
Since the state is meant to keep this way of things going by means of violence, force and power, i.e. by securing the property of capitalists, on the one hand, against the impoverished classes, on the other, i.e. law & order, the abolition of the state is obviously the goal of communism.
However, if you have the naïve idea that the state is nothing but an entity that coordinates the creation of infrastructure etc., it would be absurd to expect something like that to become obsolete in communism. People will still have to deal with things that individuals can't handle on their own (or can't handle efficiently): sewers, energy supply, health care, education, etc.
The state is not your friend if you're an ordinary person, i.e. if you belong to the 90%.

 

[dann]

Absolutely nothing but I would argue that "community funding" and social spending is not Socialism at all. Many Nordic model countries have both more capitalism and more social spending than the USA. All successful modern economies have both private and public sectors. We can argue about what belongs where but they both must exist and if the public sector is completely funded by the private sector, it seems that we would wish for its success and not condemn it as a force of evil or that these sectors are in conflict with each other when they are interdependent and benefit each other.

If you care about people's lives and heath, and one 'sector' couldn't care less (Wikipedia), I don't see why we should "not condemn it as a force of evil".

 

[lomiller]

Just another example of how delusional Marx's thinking was. He assumed the state would wither away.

Any attempt to marginalize democratically elected government running the state is going to produce similar results. Once you create a power vacuums authoritarians have always been there to step into it and freed from the restrictions imposed by democratic governments they generally succeed.

In fact the most repressive and totalitarian states of the last 100 years have all been communist.

You seem to be ignoring the the fascists regimes, like NAZI Germany and the pseudo monarchies like North Korea.

 

[portlandatheist]

If you care about people's lives and heath, and one 'sector' couldn't care less (Wikipedia), I don't see why we should "not condemn it as a force of evil".

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

In mid 2014, the DWSD had acquired significant debt and delinquent accounts, and talks of privatization were occurring. As of January 1, 2016, under the terms of the City of Detroit's municipal bankruptcy the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) was created with a $50 million annual lease agreement to the City of Detroit for 40 years, while the DWSD bifurcated to focus its services specifically on the water and sewer customers within only the city of Detroit.[2]

But privatization didn't happen. what is your point? this fiasco happened in the public sector