“liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.’ Mikhail Bakunin
The bottom text comes originally from the new testament and Lenin was aiming the sentiment at upper class people who had passive incomes. He was saying that everyone would have to contribute meaningfully to society instead of just leeching off it like landlords do. He wasn’t talking about the disabled, children, or elderly
The first one: “Work and starve.”
Capitalists tell you to work and starve
Communists tell you to stop farming and instead produce steel in your backyard, causing tens of millions of your people to starve.
Nah you give what you are able and recieve what you need.
Who decides what a person needs?
On the face, I think the idea “from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability” sounds reasonable. But if you have ever done any logistics work, then you know it is a childishly simplistic fantasy.
There is no way you could possibly keep track of the many resources and services that are needed in a modern, complex society and distribute them usefully before the people who need them die of old age (or starvation). As you try to centralize tracking of everything the administrative problems grow exponentially, and never mind building the actual distribution network. No government-managed system could ever keep up with the needs of a growing, changing society.
Just the highly centralised power structure and the single party consisting entirely of nepotism.
It is widely believed that while the Soviet Union may have produced these benefits, in the end, Soviet public ownership and planning proved to be unworkable. Otherwise, how to account for the country’s demise? Yet, when the Soviet economy was publicly owned and planned, from 1928 to 1989, it reliably expanded from year to year, except during the war years. To be clear, while capitalist economies plunged into a major depression and reliably lapsed into recessions every few years, the Soviet economy just as unfailingly did not, expanding unremittingly and always providing jobs for all
https://gowans.blog/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/
Yeah, but ðere are people who cannot give at all, and ð quote from ð Stalinists makes no allowance for ð mentally or physically incapable of labor.
A society is only as good as how it treats its least able to treat for ðemselves.
The current productive apparatus already produces much more than is necessary to take care of everybody’s needs. Which means we could do degrowth, egalitarianism, and improve standard of living for everybody at a fraction of our current output. The free market is a kind of planning, its an inefficient one that delivers profits to owners and corporations and stockholders. While creating monumental amounts of waste.
The means of production are ripe, maybe beyond ripe, but the class of workers has to seize them for mutual benefit.
To be fair. Everyone who is able to work should do its proportional part of work needed for the sustain and improvement of the society they live in.
Keywords:
Able to: as its truest meaning with the understanding that the vast majority of the population can work, one way or the other.
Proportionality in the work should not mean proportionality on the perceived benefits, but it should feel fair for everyone. Including the option to chose different ways of living that may mean different levels of work/benefits, all within reason.
Improvement of society: notice how society is not spelled “billonaire” or “bussiness” or “investors”.
In other words From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, one of the most basic tenets of communism (and anarchism).
I’d like to add that if someone does something to improve society so everyone can work less, we should respect that. Instead what happens is that people take those labour-hours and instead of refunding it to the worker, ask for more since you’re so much more productive now.
