I understand communism okay maybe I understand the appeal, a society organized differently than the current capitalist might be at the very least interesting to take a look at, the only thing I don’t understand and I have been lurking here and other leftist spaces for a long time now mind you is why are commodities bad?
Commodities are bad because not everything should be exchanged for resources or money.
For example, i cannot live without water, if water costs money that is wage slavery.
>>2868034>I understand communism>the only thing I don’t understand and I have been lurking here and other leftist spaces for a long time now mind you is why are commodities bad?you don't understand communism
Because the two defining features of a commodity, use value and exchange value, are more often than not contradictory which produces all sorts of social ills, not to mention, through different mechanisms depending on which Marxist economist you ask, recurring crises in the capitalist mode of production.
Consider houses for instance. A house is a basal need, yet most social formations have too few of them, or too few of am acceptable quality. When housing is commodified, as is the case in most of the mature capitalist world, it is not the social need for housing that gets homes built (its use value), but rather the potential profit gained from building it as a speculative asset (its exchange value). If there is no money to be earned the house does not get built, despite most people generally agreeing that everyone has a right to a house, as well as it being very important as the place that the reproduction of society happens in every single day. A capitalist might decide that it is better to simply buy land that lies in the path of an expanding metropolis to sell to the local government for more money later with no intention of actually developing it (no qualitative change to the use value has happened here, but money is earned nonetheless), or buy an existing apartment block, let it go derelict by way of not maintaining it, wait for the tenants to leave, demolish it and build back a new building that more rent can be charged for so that profits increase (a use value has essentially been destroyed for profit here).
Rampant speculation by construction companies and banks might turn the entire market for this use value into a giant international Ponzi-scheme and crash the entire world economy like it did in in 2008. In China right now there is a property slump because they allowed the private sector, who care only for housing as speculative asset rather than a use value, to dominate the housing sector. Meanwhile the rest of the economy that is more dominated by state owned enterprises, to whom social need (as determined, correctly or not, by the Communist Party of China) is more important, is doing just fine.
Individual homeowners, once the use value in question has been acquired, also suffer from this dual character of the commodity. Unlike other commodities like hamburgers or bananas, a house is not consumed immediately, or even in a single lifetime, and is incredibly expensive. Homeowners generally want to ensure that their home at the very least retains the value at which it was bought or, even better, to have it increase. This can be done by regular maintenance for the former and improvements and expansions for the latter. However, maintenance, improvements or the lack thereof to the other homes in the neighborhood can also impact the value of your house. The local government might ruin the view from your front window by building an otherwise very useful and socially beneficial wind farm, leading to a fall in the exchange value of your home even if you personally quite like the new view.
This is just one example as to why commodity production is "bad". Although that is just because we live under generalized commodity production. Peasants, bound to the land in feudal times, would sometimes flee to the cities that only really had political and economic power to resist subjugation by the feudal nobility because of the commodity production and exchange that went on in those cities. The development of capitalism (generalized commodity production) has greatly unleashed the forces of production on earth, producing many horrors like precision bombs falling on a child in Gaza, but also many improvements to our lives, like medicine and medical instruments that one could use to save that child's life. So you could say it's not all "bad", if anything historically it was progressive, but that was all in the past and we are now better off producing for human need, rather than for exchange.
>>2868126dude I understand why housing as a commodity is bad I don’t understand why commodities in of themselves are bad
why are iPhones and gold Rolexes bad assuming they are produced communally and the profits are socialized
>>2868251If they're produced communal amd distributed equally then they arent commodities.
In capitalism, goods are produced for the purpose of being sold to make a profit. That's what makes them commodities.
In communism, goods are produced based on social needs and desires. They are not sold, because there is no private property, no money, no wage labor. They are produced for the direct purpose of being used. They are given away freely.
By liberating goods production from not having to be sold for a profit, we achieve many advantages.
1) We can make things designed to last really long and abolish planned obsolesence.
2) "Line go up" is not needed. The economy doesn't collapse just because we don't constant produce x% more than previous year.
3) We can consciously eliminate harmful and wasteful and redundant production of goods and services.
4) Number of labor hours worker per person can be decreased massively as extracting surplus value is no longer necessary.
>>2868318>In communism, goods are produced based on social needs and desires.This never happened. In every communist country you go to the store and buy goods with money from your job, just like everywhere else. No one even tried to do labor vouchers.
>>2868034>have been lurking here and other leftist spaces for a long time now mind you is why are commodities bad?Commodity production is a major factor to why there were problems with the Soviet planned economy.
[Source for images: "The great Soviet economy" by Alexey Safonov]
>>2868330Yeah I know, I'm not arguing USSR was communist.
>>2868251>dude I understand why housing as a commodity is bad I don’t understand why commodities in of themselves are badHousing was just an example of the contradictory nature of the commodity and how this manifests itself in reality. If you apply the same analysis elsewhere you will find similar problems stemming from this same contradiction.
>why are iPhones and gold Rolexes bad assuming they are produced communally and the profits are socializedIf you produce iPhones and Rolexes on the basis of social need, they cease to be commodities, as the dual character I explained above disappears. If you mean to say produced in a worker owned cooperative where profit is shared but still operating under a market and thus producing for profit, they remain commodities and you run into the same issues already discussed. For iPhones that might be planned obsolescence. For luxury watches it might be that you waste more time convincing people that your watch is luxurious and worth 10k Euros, with unproductive advertising and stores that don't really sell things, than actually making a high quality timekeeping device.
As mentioned by others, socialist social formations have historically also retained commodity production. Unless we achieve world communism, socialist states will have to engage in commodity exchange on the world market. However, in most cases, over time, the commodity producing side of the economy grew compared to the planned, needs based, side. The logic of capitalism was slowly being reintroduced into the Socialist economy. This arguably played a part in the eventual regression back to capitalism during the late 80s and early 90s, and some left-communists and anarchists say none of these countries were socialist to begin with.
I suggest you check out videos, lectures, books, blogposts and articles by Marxist economists like Richard Wolff, Michael Roberts, Paul Cockshott, Anwar Shaikh, David Harvey or Michael Hudson to name a few. Not to mention that of course Marx himself is also important to read. This will give you a better understanding of capitalism and socialism. It will also make you more familiar with the terms people use in leftist spaces.
>>2868587The main problem with producing goods to be exchanged isn't that they will produce individual bad social outcomes (planned obsolescence, wasted time), although these outcome may indeed occure. The main problem of commodity production is that the social form of money-capital is inherent to it.
We don't need "world communism", we need a large enough socialist sphere so that no exchange is necessary with the capitalist sphere.
>>2868034Commodity production are goods produced and distributed through money.
The reason why it's usually considered "bad" for the communist movement is that :
>Commodity production means for-profit production which means exploitation etc>Commodity production in socialist countries can lead to private lenders You should note that communism doesn't immediatly implies the abolition of money. Marx was skeptical of commodity production under communism because he feared that it would lead to private lenders reemerging. Engels is pretty clear in the Anti-Duhring about this. As such he proposed an alternative system where instead of money being accumulable, it disappears after every transaction.
>>2868034Commodities aren't "bad", they are just a result of private (including co-operative) ownership of the means of production, and the theory of communism is that this form of ownership is abolished. This is what Stalin writes, following Engels (1951):
<Engels speaks of mastering "all the means of production," of taking possession of "all means of production." Hence, in this formula Engels has in mind the nationalization not of part, but of all the means of production, that is, the conversion into public property of the means of production not only of industry, but also of agriculture.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch03.htmIn the USSR, many sectors were nationalised, but not all of them, leading to a limited, but robust, domestic exchange economy, as well as the exporting of international commodities from the state.
>>2868251Paul Cockshott himself supports co-operatives to make consumer items, rather than planned economies. I write about the details of the Soviet Economy (1921-8) here:
>>2857646We see a mixed economy during the "State Capitalist" period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had competition between the state, co-ops and private businesses, and this seemed to work quite well.
>>2868126Best explanation of use vs exchange value for normies i've seen in 20 years honestly. Congrats.
There will be commodities for a long time in the transitional stage, or socialism. Only leftcoms and anarchists disagree.
We are ready to jump to full communism when we have gone post-scarcity, which means newest iphones for everyone. Before that is possible, iphones will keep being a commodity.
>>2868034The most important commodification of all is of labor power, which reduces human beings to alienated and replaceable cogs within a system of global production.
>>2869207the nep had alot of problems though, see scissors crisis
I swear to god rightoids are the dumbest people imaginable. The intellectual embodiment of no child left behind.
>>2871809if by rightoids you mean people who believe in "socialist" commodity production I agree
>>2871797>decades of capitalism but red, only then communismwho even falls for this psyop anymore
>>2871797Scarcity isn’t a state of the productive forces but a product of social relationships. Exchanges create scarcity, not the inverse.
>>2868318>In capitalism, goods are produced for the purpose of being sold to make a profitDon't they make a profit because they fulfill the desires and necessities of society?
>>2879110That would be the commodity's use value, its real or imagined qualitative aspect, which is an inherent feature of it. They are produced for profit, but whether that profit is actually realized is not very relevant.
Unique IPs: 23