I see this way too often here on Lemmy, so I want to post this. Starting a commune is legal in most countries. If you believe in communism, you can found a commune and show us all how great it is.

You lack money? Well, that is literally what stock markets and venture capitalists (capitalism) are created to solve. If you are ready for an IPO, you can sell shares to raise funds. If you are not, you can get Venture Capital in exchange for shares until you are ready for an IPO.

Getting rid of capitalism means you need to find a different way to obtain funding for new ventures. And if your system relies on government charity (some government board handing you money) or taking resources violently, than your system sucks.

Edit: I don’t mean that this is a replacement for full communist system. I mean this as a way to get some of the advantages while showing sceptics (like me) it can work and is better. A first step.

  • Maeve
    4•7 months ago

    Go read Karl Marx, beginning with Capital and The Communist Manifesto. Neither are long reads, and I should reread them myself, when I get a breather and my brain isn’t mush.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•7 months ago

      The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.

      I could do a million things more productive with my time than reading whole paragraphs of tautologies. This is literally beyond obvious. Either point me to some concrete plans on how a communist economy would work or don’t, but I am not reading a book worth of this.

      • Maeve
        8•7 months ago

        This isn’t McDonald’s and I’m not your oncall personal spoon feeder.

        • @[email protected]OP
          3•7 months ago

          Then don’t complain about me assuming you are either too dumb or too uneducated to understand why empty words like those and your wishful thinking can’t result in a functional governing/economic system.

          • @[email protected]
            2•7 months ago

            You’re making claims about a subject you are not an expert in, and refusing to read any literature on the subject.

            You shouldn’t be calling others dumb or uneducated.

            But also Capital is written that way to preempt arguments; it’s an academic work. His other works only suffer from 3 page long sentences that require significant contextual and historical knowledge of mid 1800s europe.

            Lenin is an easier place to start.

            • @[email protected]OP
              1•7 months ago

              You’re making claims about a subject you are not an expert in, and refusing to read any literature on the subject.

              I unfortunately don’t have unlimited time, so I am forced to refuse to read books that are unlikely to be relevant.

              But also Capital is written that way to preempt arguments; it’s an academic work. His other works only suffer from 3 page long sentences that require significant contextual and historical knowledge of mid 1800s europe. Lenin is an easier place to start.

              Then maybe can you point to a work that does not assume an 1800s economy? Also, Marxism was tried already by the Bolsheviks. It failed horribly. If there were no improvements made since, what is the point? While I like the scientific method, I am certainly not willing to try the same thing again and see if just as many people die a second time.

              I am not interested in being expert on communist history, I am interested in examining any modern plan to see if I can see issues in it or if it looks like it could work and is worth supporting.

              • @[email protected]
                1•7 months ago

                While I like the scientific method, I am certainly not willing to try the same thing again and see if just as many people die a second time.

                Capitalism kills far more people, by design. While the famine in the USSR was due to wide-spread drought, the famine that would kill millions in Bengal a few years later was entirely man-made.

                I am interested in examining any modern plan to see if I can see issues in it or if it looks like it could work and is worth supporting.

                You cannot understand present society, let alone have a model that can predict future developments with any reliability if you don’t learn history.

                But if you want to understand economics, you’re gonna have to read a book on economics.

                Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is good if you’re more interested in higher-level detail than Marx talking about linen.

                State and Revolution is more history and provides analysis of communist projects.