Free market communism

so I'm having a hard time understanding why everyone is dedicated to the battle between capitalism and communism. there seems to be some legend floating around that the so called free market is actually a thing and that it is based on a philosophy of rugged individualism and private property or something. allso that communism is based on the idea of free cooperation among communities and would reject market principles and all property.

but if anyone ever stopped to look.

the apparent foundation of capitalism is the corporation. which is a system for organizing collective action and collective ownership of property. it functions within the external market system but contains no internal market organization.

likewise the foundation of every communist economy is the very same corporation. and planned economies are organized based on costs and prices and supply and demand. unions negotiate compensation for labor and everyone buys everything in stores with various tokens of exchange.

so why do so many people waste their time arguing made up nonsense about irrelevant ideological differences?

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The basis of capitalism is private property. I.E. each individual's right to the exclusive control over their own body and posessions. Corporations are a consequence, not a foundation.
Socialism (or communism if you will) is the institutionalised violation of private property rights. The nation state apparatus, and all its branches, is the implementation of socialism.

How about we seize the means of production...and then sell the means of production back at an inflated price and buy a tricked out conversion van!

also privatized socialist projects operate freely in the market system all over the glode. they tend to be religious groups seeking to "leave society" but groups like the hutterites and bruderhof and whatnot are highly profitable in capitalist economies even though they intensively collectivize ownership of property and consumption of goods and productive activities. they provide almost all services internally. and maintain a higher standard of living than supposedly private households in the areas where they live.

how did the mainstream thinking about capitalism and communism get so fucked up and so far from the practical reality of markets and collective action?

oh and some jet-skis

that's exactly what i keep hearing. but you don't buy anything that was actually made by a single person ever. odds are you're not self employed.

and the thing everyone keeps calling capitalism begins with tue rise of the joint stock corporation and if you want to go back to the foundations of that. it begins with the banking houses of Europe. none of which involves any individual acting independently

Ofcourse not acting in a vacuum, but acting based on their own free will.
Specialization, cooperation and trade yield immensely higher productivity than acting alone. So companies are a natural consequence of capitalism. Or people can organize themselves in collectives where everything is shared, that's fine too. As long as it is of their own free will.
The trademark of socialism is coercion.

so is the whole argument a free will thing?

and if it is then isn't the logical conclusion of "capitalism" basically just anarchism?

The definitions I used for capitalism and socialism are taken from the book
A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism by Hans Herman Hoppe.
I highly recommend it. The pdf is available for free.

Yes. Pure capitalism is anarchy, or anarcho-capitalism among friends.

Who is to say that individuals are not allowed to pool their resources together in investments and businesses? The beauty of the free market is that you can be anything from a lone wolf to an investor among millions of others. Fuck, you can even pool your resources together and form a commune if you don't mind sharing the property. You can literally create a communist paradise inside a capitalist system.

>The nation state apparatus, and all its branches, is the implementation of socialism
That's not true. Socialism means that the means of production are seized, not that a state exists.

the problem with defining capitalism or socialism that I've found is that nmo two people seem to really use the same definition.

The only “free market” comprised of mutually voluntary uncoerced exchange, are certain sectors of the black market. And obviously, global commerce today is NOT stratified and regulated by the black market. On the contrary, global commerce is stratified by one or the other version of corporatism and communism/socialism.

well I don't know how lone of a wolf you can really be in capitalism. or in any system for that matter.

but the point is that corporations aren't just possible under capitalism. they appear to be deeply fundamental to capitalism. it's actually pretty difficult to find truly independent producers of just about anything. at some point between acquiring capital and bringing a good to market even independent artisans with be dependent on some interaction with a corporate group. usually it's at multiple points.

so why is anyone arguing that individualism is a defining feature of anything

no socialism means that things are organized socially

>you can create a communist system inside a capitalist economy
The most successful example of this is the US military.

even the black market depends on the regulatory state trying to ban some good or service. and often black markets come into contact with the financial sector. and furthermore you tend to get cartels or mafia or aome sort of illegal firm that dominate one sector or another of black markets.

yeah or any bureaucratic institution i guess

The reason is because communists actually don't care about communism. They just want to take money from the rich... .and they think saying "communism" is a good way to get people to do that for them.

it does seem like a lot of communists are just edgy kids.

but i will say that one thing communism has going for it is iron fisted control of the definition of the word communism by the various communist parties of the world.

there's very little debate if amy about what you mean when you say something is communist

Indeed, which is why I mentioned that “capitalism” can only be found within certain sectors, albeit rare.

if really real capitalism is so narrowly defined that anyone would be hard put to name an actually existing example of it.

then why is everyone always going on about capitalism?

what is the thing that everyone keeps calling capitalism (including self proclaimed free marketeers in the govt and big corporations and stuff)

and why don't the trooo capitalists make alliances with the other radical groups to smash fake capitalism or whatever?

The purpose of Capitalism is for lone wolves to either pioneer a new path that people follow and invest in (creating corporations around entrepreneurs) or to go innawoods or off the grid or literally be a skilled free agent. Absolute freedom.

There are many free agents in America. Not only photographers, but singers and other entertainers; e-celebs; and more. Some transition from free agents into mini companies, but many stay alone.

>what is the thing that everyone keeps calling capitalism
To most people, capitalism means the idea that citizens have the right to own, buy, and sell their property

>There are many free agents in America. Not only photographers, but singers and other entertainers; e-celebs; and more.

I don't know if I agree with that. there are freelancers yeah. and more and more freelancers since the internet.

but the problem is that those people rarely actually bring a product to market themselves. they tend to contract with a corporation which then brings their products to market. record labels and publishing companies and Uber for example.

sometimes you will encounter like a punk band that hand makes their own cd's but you know. they're a group. and often as not even those people will be involved with a small label or something.

the only legitimately lone lone wolf types would be the primitives humped up in the woods in a cabin they built themselves or something.

but even there you run directly into the central problem for market oriented individualists. which is that markets themselves are an example of collective action. markets coordinate the actions of many people and many groups of people.

honestly it's a teeny bit absurd to argue for a market based individualism. because the market directly conflicts with the individualism.

I mean it's equally absurd when self proclaimed socialists argue the same thing. or when they argue that markets somehow inherently conflict with social organization and collective action when markets are literally a perfect example of both

yeah that's true. most people also end up directly contradicting that definition when they start arguing about capitalism too

the old time American anarchists also claimed that those were features of socialism

Yea, I don't know... people say all sorts of things.

I would say the distinguishing factor between capitalism and socialism is that ownership in capitalism is a form of exclusion. The point of owning something is to prevent others from using it.

Whereas on communism, everyone in the society exercises a collective ownership and can't be excluded. There's no longer the "voluntary" aspect that you see in corporations. It's government enforced sharing.

In a free market, nobody would choose Communism. Glorious workers paradise ashit!

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