Laotzu, you chose to omit the most important sentence in my post. I suspect because it is the one you don’t really have an answer to.
I chose to omit because it’s meaningless trolling, and what I found to be the least important part of your post.
The truth of the matter is that all of socialist theory completely disregards the need for coordination.
I’m sure it does. Ya, those central control addicts really don’t care about coordination, right?
Factories do not simply appear in the countryside at regular intervals, to build them we need prices to tell us when it will be feasible to expend which resources to build what factories.
Do we? So what you’re proposing, if we were to postdict history, is that money and price came before any technical progress? Or is this just for factory systems?
And for prices we need private property.
True.
This is evidenced by the fact that any country on earth that did not manage to get secure private property rights going does not have factories that the workers could be exploited in. E.g. most of Africa.
Ya, let us all forget about those factories in China and the USSR… or all the factories and mines in Africa for that matter. Yup, factories are older than capitalist property rights, but require capitalist property rights…
The formation of capital requires coordination.
Yup
That’s why all experiments in history that came close to implementing your “real” socialism pretty quickly led to starvation and some strongmen taking over. At least when the gubment runs things there’s some coordination.
What expirments would that be?
Marx avoided this by starting his analysis in the middle, with capital already in place.
True or false; Marxist economics (as opposed to Marx’s political activism) has anything to do with socialism?
Sure, at that point you can claim that the capitalists are taking something from the workers that they would have had either way. But monopolization is necessary for factories to exist in the first place.
Only elite and intelligent ubermensche could ever think of coming together to build things?
That’s why their monopolization by capitalists is different than the monopolization of land by a nation state. It monopolizes a recourse that humanity could have used anyways.
It meaning property, or statism?
Not quite. Possession and control are certainly inherent to people and other animals, but the concept of what belongs to whom is also inherent to people. Infants seem to think that everything is theirs, but as they grow older they understand that other people have claims to property too.
Exactly; infants think everything belongs to them. So the community (namely in this case, their parents) comes together and stifles his individual rights. Oh the terror! He’s just homesteading things that were abandoned, like other kid’s toys.
People make claims to possession and control (“regular” people just as much as theifs) and the community or state decides who’s claim is legitimate. In feudalism it was basically whoever had the deepest bloodline and/or benefitted the king the most. In capitalism it is basically whoever has the most wealth, or benefits the production of wealth the most. I.E. banks lend money to profitable businesses, not homeless shelters.
I’m not sure they do either, though they certainly have a hierarchy of power
I’m not sure they do.
What’s your point?
That private property is not simply possession and control, as a theif holds the same status, is my point. Private property is a specific type of legal title.
This is incorrect for two reasons. The first, as Wheylous pointed out, is that property can be abandoned, thus making it possible to homestead it. The second is that property can be traded.
Ok. Now show me one small tract of habitable land that can be traced from its original homesteaders to its current owner through abandonement or trade, without any kind of violent appropriation. You can’t. There is no metaphysical justification for property. It basically goes; for thousands of years people just claimed property regardless, and if you had more swords at your hire, your claim was just. Then the merchant and capitalist class gained the economic power to threaten the pre-capitalist (feudal if you will) class dynamic, and became the ruling class. Now we search for any reason we can to justify a concept which basically started with “this is mine now. I’ll hit you with a stick if you disagree.”