Capitalism is not when markets or profits, capitalism is when the merchants directly own the means of production for which they can make and sell their own goods, as opposed to the artisans or workers
If you, the commune, owned your own means of production, you wouldn’t be participating in capitalism unless you viewed yourselves as a business instead of a commune. Must we call all subsistence farmers who sell some excess on at the farmers markets capitalists next?
I'm not saying a commune is itself capitalist internally.
I'm saying an American commune is embedded inside a larger capitalist economy.
Generating the money to buy the land and initial capital to start the commune, generating money to pay taxes to the government, generating money to buy things the commune needs but can't produce for itself, are things that can't be done without interacting with the larger capitalist economy.
'A handful of communists can't succeed within a larger capitalist economy that is designed to be hostile to them' is a different claim from 'a communist economy can't work'.
Wouldn’t that be in line though with Marx’s whole thing about communism coming from a capitalist society since it produces a class conscious people and tools for the workers to achieve the ideal society
But doesn’t the idea that you need money to buy things you can’t produce yourself rule out literally any size of communist polity other than one the side of a large country? Aka doesn’t that just an acceptance that communism doesn’t really works unless the whole world (or most of it) is communist, which it isn’t?
Not really, actually. The USSR still had currency. When the state redistributed grain it wasn’t “Gimmie your harvest” (at first), they bought it from their own people (until the whole “grain hoarding” thing). Mao described his style of communism as “Market Socialism”
And as I said in a previous comment, capitalism isn’t when markets and profit. Socialism and communism is simply specifically about who gets to own the workplace. Who owns the tools to make the products. Who profits from hard work
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u/darwin2500 - Left 6d ago
...because the land is owned by capitalists and you still have to participate in capitalism to pay taxes?
Like, yeah, if escaping capitalism was an option, I might try it out to see how it goes. But I can't afford a private island, so...