Why communistic ideals are best served by capitalism

[SteveA]

I'll start off with a couple assumptions:

1) People working together and sharing can gain greater benefits than people working independently.

2) Injustices can be avoid by allowing each person to decide whether a relationship is beneficial or not and having the freedom to leave an association that is felt as harmful.

By extending these, we can say:

Slavery isn't a viable institution by (2) above, if people are free to associate or disassociate with the endeavors of others as they wish, no institution could be powered at the expense of others, because those people who felt they were getting a raw deal would be free to not participate.

If people working together and sharing the benefit see a greater reward, merely assuring people the freedom to join in or stay apart of this endeavor assures those participating feel an overall benefit to the relationship.

So if we look at communist ideals we see the philosophy that workers own the product of their labor, working together people can receive an overall benefit by being able to specialize in things they are best at (communists tend to miss the specialization part but I don't think there's any real argument that can be made against this, either way it's not really important).

So if you're a worker, wishing to benefit from sharing your investment of time with the endeavors of others and not having your labor "stolen" in some form, how would you best assure such a scenario is guaranteed? I think most everyone would agree that having the ability to quit/leave this association if things don't pan out well is probably the fundamentally most important right to have. Typical communistic views see the right of "workers" in the sense of a collective body having this freedom but don't often recognize the basis of this stems from the individual rights of workers. If a worker is expected to work because a collective body of workers doesn't want to strike, there's the danger of enslavement of individuals because they are no longer free to determine this for themselves individually. (I'm not saying this isn't understood but it's often not a focus of communism).

Also, what best determines whether or not a worker feels they are being exploited? Or at what pay rate does a worker see their labor as not being stolen but instead being adequately compensated for? If we again place this decision into the hands of collective body to determine, then we again remove the individual from determining whether or not they are being exploited. If we assume that the benefits of people working together are greater than individuals working alone, then we should see people naturally attracted to such associations because they'd see an incentive to part of them. Which already happens under capitalism through most companies.

The philosophy of redistribution under communism is already present in capitalism. A worker asks for some form of compensation in the redistribution of profits earned by a company and is free to leave if at any point they feel any reason why the arrangement is unsatisfactory.

Communism says workers own their labor and the product of it, yet oftentimes specifically take the products of labor by force to ration it to others. Capitalism protects individual property rights so that a worker is free to retain the value they receive from their labor.

Communism emphasizes the benefit of people working together collectively. Capitalism, though it doesn't require people to do this, also recognizes and supports these institutions through concept of corporations. I can't defend some of the abuses of the concepts of a corporation. There are likely many laws that provide corporations powers beyond what the individuals composing it would have but that's a distortion of capitalism, not the ideal. The ideal is merely that ownership of endeavors can be shared between people in whatever fashion they can agree upon, though this endeavor shouldn't be regarded as more than private agreements between the individuals involved. But anyway, people already see the additional value of working together under capitalism as reflected by the fact that pay and other forms of benefit or convenience are often found working for a company instead of being self employed. Though capitalism still provides the freedom to be self employed as well.
So though communistic ideas might provide some benefit to people, the only way to assure they truely do is to create such under a system that still provides individual protections against abuse, if the "sharing" doesn't work out as intended. Ultimately society is made of of not classes and warfare but of individuals with different desires. Capitalism provides a framework for most all of them to peacefully exist together.

Yes, some people will bag on capitalism by putting up a strawman and claiming it represents an unholy alliance between corporations and government etc., but those aren't truly representative of capitalism, IMO - I could claim capitalism is a system when people with guns shoot others, and then follow up with 20 posts about how shooting people is a bad thing to "prove" that capitalism is bad. I do agree that private property is a concept that can be abused if people aren't careful (as in some of the abuses of the patent and intellectual property systems or some of the large land purchases that have occured in the past), so I prefer thinking of vested interests instead but capitalism is based upon a respect the ideas of individual ownership and free trade. Exactly what "ownership" means and how it's determined is still an important discussion - I think there does need to be more attention paid to people owning a right to use something, even if it doesn't include a right to deny others from using it but individual property including private property is a real and natural phenomenon that communists need to address if they're going to see a system that works peacefully and beneficially for the participants.

Overall I recommend communists take individual ownership and free markets as a basis and see if those two concepts alone can't provide a way to achieve the same benefits, in a peaceful and voluntary manner that doesn't require sacrificing some people for the greater good.

[Morgan_Freeman]

I have a feeling this is going to go straight over some heads, Steve.