Permian Therapsid wrote:Source of the post Even thou I do think that some of the ideas of communism and socialism are very good I myself do not approve all of them. I do think private ownership is okay but the government ownership is also something that should exist in certain things
I think I don't understand the idea behind this very well. Socialism it's not exactly about private property or ownership, It's about the private property of the so called means of production. Let me explain this a little since it's a very common misconception that I myself had before (exacerbated by that cliche/propaganda of the evil communist that wants to rob your television). Your computer, your house, your refrigerator, your car, all are your private property. Socialism respects that property, no serious communist has ever thinked about taking out these kind of properties unless they where used as means of explotation of others. What is a mean of production? Is the set of capital invested, machinery, land property etc... that is used for the production of.... products (obviously). Communists think that this kind of property shouldn't be private at least for the companies that employ vast ammounts of workers. Who should own that then? Either the State or a democratic well organized council formed by the workers of the company (people who know the necessities of the company and the people that work in it since the moment they take part of this decission making and assume by themselves the duties of the entire ensamble). By workers here we don't refer to people that work a lot (I'm sure Warren Buffet workes very hard), the criteria is much more subtle, a worker for a communist is a person that sales his work force for a certain price (the salary) to a firm while not having any factual control over this, let's say "commercial agreement". With this idea we mean that when you go for a job interview you are really seling your time and force in exchange of a salary, but you are not putting the price in this exchange, the costumer (the company as a whole) is deciding for you your salary, so you don't actually commerce with your work fairly. "Well", someone could say, "I can always quit are search for another job", and you are right, but in the end you don't have many chances, you have very intrisic needs, you need to eat, you need a good health, a good sanitation, a right to comunicate why not, all of those needs push you like in a hijack to accept very unfair conditions, and in the end you really have very little options, no control at all of the price of what you are selling (not control of your salary and your labor contidions) since refusing to accept the price of the company means insecurity, means that you could become even homeless or die because of the most ridiculous health problem that could have been solved with a certain ammount of money. To prevent this kind of situations there is the public sector founded by the taxes and guided by the common interest of a society with certain values and priorities, but the public sector in the capitalist economy tends to be weaker and weaker and have less control over those issues. So no, you still have no factual control. "Well the company loses if it makes the salary too low because another company only with better salaries would compete and outrun the other becuase more people would present their job submissions to them, so in the end this "work commercial agreement" is fair, it's subject to offer and demand and it translates to an optimal equilibrium for both parts" someone could think, but in reality this is totally unrealistic since for each job there is an army of people competing with you, obviously that who agrees the most with the conditions has more probabilities of getting a job than you, the one that is prepared to be exploited would always be behind you, so you really don't make the deal optimal for you in a strict sense but optimal for the company that has imposed upon you this mechanisms so they can perfectly change person at wish if you cry out for better condition.
The idea is way more complex and detailed but in a sense it's just that. Communists want this labor agreements without presures induced by monumental entities like the company you are aplying for. And the root of the mechanisms that guarantee that you get stuck in explotation is the property of the means of production. Once the property is common to all the workers (in the factory in the office etc...) or to the entirety of society (when the owner is the state), the workers assume the guide of their own conditions adapted to the real offer and demand of their production. A democratic well organized council of workers in property of their own company would be very interested in making the company succesfull while maximizing their standards and conditions, instead in this society we have workers that only care for their labor conditions (logically) and owners of the company that only care for the sales, both sides competing against the other, and with very different powers (consider also in the extreme that there are companies that are so important for the current economic system that have more income than the GDP of many countries in the world, that can make pressure politically and economically to change the law in their favor even in a continental scale). Socialist unions where created to make at least fairer these discrepancies of interest beetwen both parts, to diminish the power for the company in those negociations, but in the end the goal of a communist is to erase the private property of the means of production and make it for the workers or society, since unions in the end are just a momentary solution for the worker and in the end can make the company go a little worse (and that in the end is bad for the workers and society).
HarbingerDawn wrote:Source of the post I would argue that the willingness to accept a belief and integrate it into your worldview without examining it to see if it makes sense or is supported by facts and empirical evidence is, while not the sole root of the problem, certainly a significant contribution
Very wise words indeed. It reminds me of the
"Ethics of Believe" by William K. Clifford. An amazing scientist and one of the precursos for the theory of relativity. It has been one of the most delightfull and clear readings I have had on the topic of faith. I like when he explains with many examples how faith, believing without evidence it's harmfull for society as a whole even if that faith is expresed in a very personal way. Even if your faith is not harmfull and don't expresses itself in the interactions with other people its a glorification of a thinking method that is randomly dangerous and beneficial.
I always think of Earth as a giant spaceship where we have to make very good decissions or we could be screwed (this reasoning has worked for many centuries for individual states or even cities since they where more isolated systems with their own problems). For those decissions you want a democratic rational-thinking-based debate that should ideally resemble a scientific debate. Faith is an obstacle to that since it makes part of the thinking process dependant on subjective experience, missconceptions and fallacies. Even a religion based on the dogmatic aproach to all the modern scientific knowledge, a religion that accepts the big bang, quantum physics, the standard model, genetics, plate tectonics etc... would still be harmfull since each scientific discovery or change (something usual in science) would creat a scism or a religious contrast. A religion that can adapt rationally to the circumstances of current knowledge is not a religion at all. In the end if our spaceship discovers a new force or a harm it would be science and only science what is going to save us all with the maximum probability. Why? because a jet engine works!
