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Hytosys | 10 years ago

a) To this end I agree that my simplification is too emotional.

b) I typically regard such actions as means to sustain profit, but I won't deny the exceptions to this rule.

c) I scrutinize the definition of profit here, but I won't disagree with what I believe to be your sentiment.

You go on to describe the feudal and individual capitalist (I think?) modes of production, which helps to define profit, but this is otherwise divergent from (c). In the communist mode of production, "profit" serves the community (ideally global), not the individual. I'm wondering what your profit analysis of the communist mode of production is.

discuss

order

vezzy-fnord|10 years ago

I presume the communist mode of production is one in a stateless, money-less society where factors of production are cooperatively owned by workers and where the production process is based on some definition of "use" rather than "profit". Profit would be the surplus employed by workers to create more use value. Goods would be traded "in kind" as is without a lubricant of exchange like money.

The canonical argument against this is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". There's generally been two ways socialist thinkers have tried to get around this: a) calculation in kind, which essentially reverts us back to unscalable barter where there is no reliable unit of account, and b) the Lange model of a Central Planning Board, which immediately brings all the issues of public choice, bureaucracy and "state capitalism" as you derided it earlier.