Would you please not take HN threads further into flamewar and not cross into personal attack? You've done it more than once in this thread, it's completely gratuitous, and we've had to warn you about this (indeed, ban you for this, if I recall correctly) many times before.
If you'd please make your substantive points without any of that, we would be grateful.
I don't remember what I've mentioned before; in any case, it's not the most important thing. The important thing is that we need you to follow the site guidelines from now on, and we ban accounts that won't do that.
>I don't see any indicator that he thinks there are only two
there are only about 10 other isms that would have more accurately described this, and "communism" is used in the 1995 film Hackers for a reason, but it might not be the one you're picking up on.
It is capitalism. The capital necessary to purchase the store, maintain cash flow, and make periodic maintenance and upgrades will come from the ownership. Profit, an important part of capitalism, may be generated by the business to the benefit of the shareholders. In this case, that profit may be cash, discounts, additional goods or services, reinvestment into the business or whatever the town owners/shareholders or their designees decide.
More neighborhood co-op businesses should be formed!
Have you considered that capitalism and communism are economic systems that are in a sense Turing complete, i.e. they can describe the exact same arbitrary economic phenomena
And therefore what you have described is in fact communism but in a language that is subjectively more palatable ?
I have considered that co-op’s, public utilities and mutual aid societies are excellent solutions to problems such as the one presented small towns, like Erie. It is possible to utilize private capital, such as the store purchase, for public benefit (the residents of Erie) and the mechanism by which that is accomplished is secondary. The fact that the city council was involved was a matter of convenience. It could have been accomplished by any means of group cooperation. For example, only half of the town (500 people) could have been involved, rather than the whole town. Palatability is in the details.
Billions of people living in a country called china have an opinion that dwarfs that viewpoint.
Communism is a relevant word and an appropriate one given the amount of people who live under "communism" in china and have not watched the 1995 movie. (There's a large cohort of Chinese users on this site)
What other isms are you thinking about? Socialism? I mean there's not too much of a difference there in terms of meaning or connotation.
People are polarized on the topic of communism vs. capitalism but the reality is these are just two different colors. Two different aspects, similar to solid or liquid.
When you treat it as a sport team you become biased. If you hate capitalism you become blind to how capitalism produces powerful economies like most of the western world. If you hate communism you become blind to how stories like this can benefit a community.
There are plenty of public goods that cannot thrive under pure capitalism. Grocery stores with razer thing margins are an example of this.
No free market economy to ever exist has been a pure capitalism without hints, shades or straight up chunks of communism, socialism and many other flavours of -ism.
>State owned enterprises are feature in every free market economy.
And that is why it is technically true.
>The comment is not true, technically or otherwise.
This makes zero logic, or sense. You literally just stated that every free market economy has elements of communism then denied your statement right after.
I think you're caught by the connotation of the word instead of the definition. Team communism is the enemy to you.
I think you’re projecting a lot here. It’s simply a zero-insight (and factually incorrect) comment to look at one centrally planned initiative and starting saying “communism”. The “not a real free market” and “not real communism” cohorts are equally stupid, and should be dismissed with equal passion.
Surely even the most simplistic definition of communism would include society-wide common ownership of the production and distribution of goods. A local government owning one small commercial enterprise in a capitalist market economy is just not remotely close to even the crudest imaginable definition of communism.
Are you saying that there's no distinction between local society and the entirety of the United States? That there's no concept of society at different levels?
Huh? This definitely has nothing to do to with the No True Scotsman fallacy. It’s closer to the sorites paradox, except that I’m not claiming that there’s a clean line that can be drawn between systems of common ownership broad enough to be called communism and systems of common ownership that are not. There can undoubtedly be grey areas in the middle where reasonable people can disagree. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be systems that clearly are communism and systems that clearly are not, and a small town that buys a grocery store is very clearly not communism by any remotely reasonable definition.
> You're saying this isn't communism because it's not at sufficient scale or depth.
No, communism simply isn’t an attribute that a small store has if it is owned by a local government. If 10,000 small town governments in the US start running their local grocery store that still has nothing to do with communism. Communism is an ideology and movement about establishing a society whose fundamental socioeconomic system is based on common ownership of production and distribution of goods and services.
You keep saying "this is not that, because this is not that" - which is fine and all, but it doesn't make it true.
Please keep telling us what communism is and is not. With how certain you seem to be, these comments will surely end up being cited by a PhD in politics and history
Let me just point out that you think communism is an "attribute" that a shop could have, like OOP is your guiding philosophy for political structure. My gut tells me you aren't splitting hairs between, say, Marxism and positivism when you're spewing this shit from your mouth.
If the workers live in the town - which is highly likely - they can have (substantial, since the town is small) influence in city council.
City council manages the shop.
You could say, then, that the workers can have substantial influence over the management of this shop.
Note that this influence is much more direct than the worker -> shareholder line. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, rather than wealth.
Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the goods that the workers stock aren't produced by them (after all, circles don't exist). Political and economic theory is far from solved. Again, if you think communism is an "attribute", I don't really want to engage in further discussion. Doubly so because of your latent assumption that the most widely used definition is the most correct one.
Take a look at China. The word clearly lives on a gradient when you ask someone from China about it... (aka asking someone that actually lives in a communist country). Communism is therefore not strictly "society wide". Clearly.
The parent prefixed his phrase with "emulated" as in "emulated communism" meaning that, obviously, the parent wasn't strictly reffering to "society wide" communism either.
Communism has a definition and a connotation. The connotation is negative and is twisting YOUR personal definition of the word. To you, communism is evil, so you must twist the definition for it to function at the extreme. To you capitalism is good, so it's not at the extreme... it's more of a moderate concept to you.
The reality is both communism and capitalism are SYMMETRIC concepts standing on opposite sides of a gradient. It's debate-able whether communism refers to extreme society wide ownership OR whether it refers to more moderate society wide ownership.... However, to strictly define communism to be extreme means that, symmetrically, capitalism must be defined in such a way too. If not then you're just being biased, because the consequence of defining things this way means that your in your personal vocabulary.... no word exists for "extreme capitalism," while such a word exists for "extreme communism." So stop being biased, open your mind a little.
> Communism has a definition and a connotation. The connotation is negative and is twisting YOUR personal definition of the word. To you, communism is evil, so you must twist the definition for it to function at the extreme. To you capitalism is good, so it's not at the extreme... it's more of a moderate concept to you.
I’m very confused how you came to that interpretation from my comment.
The interpretation is correct. Maybe the wording is a bit to over the top. Evil and good is not exactly right. Negative is the better word, but if I used it in my comment it would appear repetitive. The sentences wouldn't flow because I used the same word in the previous sentence.
Either way, the overall logic is accurate. This is indeed an accurate depiction of your bias if we discount the the extremities associated with the words good and evil.
The people who work in the shop can exert influence in city council. Since the town is small, they can exert substantial influence.
City council owns the shop.
You could say, then, that the workers can exert substantial influence over the ownership of the shop.
Note that this influence is much more entangled with working the shop than being a shareholder. Note that this influence is given as a matter of citizenship, not wealth.
Is this communism? Maybe not. After all, the people working the shop aren't responsible for producing all the goods (after all, circles don't exist).
Sociopolitical and economic theory is far from solved. You're assuming that there is a correct definition of communism. Speak quickly if you do, leading historians and sociologists all over the world are listening
Probably because it was an unsubstantive and possibly snarky comment on a divisive ideological topic. That's flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
>Probably because it was an unsubstantive and possibly snarky comment on a divisive ideological topic. That's flamebait and therefore against the site guidelines.
You wish this were true. People get voted up or down because others agree or disagree with the topic, unsubstantiated or not. Nobody truly follows the spirit of HN rules. People place their own ideologies first and they don't even realize it. It's blatantly obvious that this is the case just by looking at what comments are voted up/down and who gets "banned."
Sure. It's a minor possibility. But we both know that personal ideology is the overwhelming motivating factor... so much so that it might as well be described as the singular motivating factor.
You don't even need to reference hacker news for evidence of this. Look at other forums, the news, the rest of the world... people operate this way by nature. It is rare for someone to make a genuine attempt to be unbiased; and even rarer for him to succeed in that attempt.
I don't think it's divisive, it's pretty straightforward
Access to goods is managed & provided by a communal government, in this case even in direct opposition to market forces - I'd say that's communistic
It's a sad state of affairs when just mentioning something is considered flamebait. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. I find this idea of using rules that already exist to meet an economic need when market forces would have it otherwise - literally emulating communism, or socialism, feudalism, idrc - to be awesome. To be sure I didn't mean anything substantive, but if people are getting upset over what's supposed to be a nothingburger, that's pretty substantive in itself-
Are we angry that capitalism didn't come in and save the day? Are we so entrenched in market ideology that we are downright offended when it's implied that another could be useful?
Sure, mentioning communism is flamebait, especially if you mention it in a provocative way in a throwaway one liner. There are many such things that people have strong feelings about and are reactive to. Perhaps it's sad but it's the way things are.
I believe you that you weren't trying to be sarcastic but that sort of intent doesn't communicate itself—you have to encode it in your comment somehow, so the rest of us can know that. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
