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Economic feudalism and the destruction of community

You're trying way too hard to make the case that communism is inherently authoritarian, leading you to create straw men examples.

Take your five members of a "commune". You're not really describing a commune, in the sense of a communal society; you're only describing a factory, one single-product economic unit within a much larger society. In a communal society there are many jobs to perform, and ideally the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" results in people doing the work they find most satisfying.

And I dispute your dismissal of satisfaction as a motivation for doing good work beyond the coercion of money. I don't know what line of work you're in in the real world, SDAITech1, but in my world of engineers and designers and programmers and writers and artists, people are self-motivated to do good work because they enjoy what they do. In fact, the view that people need a combination of carrot and stick to do good work, leading to carrot-and-stick employee policies, generally has a deleterious effect on quality. Time after time, I've seen talented engineers suborned by stock options and cowed by managers into abandoning their internal value systems and doing just enough to satisfy the organization. Organizations value mediocrity, even if they won't admit it; a recent client defined its engineering standards as "good enough", justified by butchering the old Russian saying "the enemy of good is better", and implying quite clearly that "too much" quality is unwelcome.

Each has an equal voice in the say of their decision. However now 3 wish to sell their produce and 2 wish to sell their labor and experience building houses.

Majority now rule. The first inequality is introduced into the commune.

This sets up dissension and some humans views are "more equal" simply because more people think like them. This dissension will lead to further dissension and the three in agreement will now shape the others future.


Quite the straw man there. Let's see, now: You're against democracy because it produces an unequal outcome? What? It's not supposed to; to expect otherwise is to be a communist.

Notice how your argument for the tyranny of communism depends on a pre-existing tyranny: The two dissenters are unable to leave and instead are chained (by democracy!) to the majority. Entirely circular. I posed a hypothetical condition in which emigration is available to all--specifically that nobody would be a prisoner of the local system and that everybody can vote with their feet.

There you are trying to portray communal systems as inherently coercive, while singing the praises of the inherently coercive nature of freemarket capitalism: People are forced to work by a combination of carrot--"renumerated for it"--and stick--"competition (a threat to their income)". Your fundamental choice in freemarket capitalism is work or die; can you honestly call this a free choice?

Yeah, so, in nature if you don't put out the effort to find food and defend yourself, you die. That's true enough; just don't go putting on airs about how freemarket capitalism is so much more refined than nature red of claw. It's a recreation of the jungle by conscious choice, not necessity. The fruits of civilization mean that we are, or should be, beyond concerns of basic survival. A civilization can be more than a metaphorical jungle.

The view of human society as a jungle is dehumanizing. You see it in consevative economists and politicians who've raised the consolation prize of "creative destruction" into a death cult. They speak so blithely of how people can easily adapt to economic dislocation by moving to follow the jobs or going to school to be retrained. Pretty clueless view of humanity--in real life, people have 30 year mortgages, roots in a community through ties to friends and family, and kids in the local schools. A worker's investment in training and experience gained is just as valuable as a capitalist's investment of money; to say "just go get retrained" is to say that that investment has been wiped out completely. Why is a capitalist's dollar more valuable than a worker's years of experience?

Unrestrained freemarket capitalism has a tendency to destroy communities and dehumanize people into no more than machines that can be moved to another job site. In a system that makes a fetish of "creative destruction", the only way to compete when your job is outsourced to India is to adopt an Indian standard of living. This is progress?

Life can be more than that, Techie. If we're no more than serfs in a modern version of feudalism, it's because we choose to be.

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