Successful communist village in Spain

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Exactly.

Also I don't necessarily believe that what the settlement folk are doing is theft, because I don't subscribe to the capitalist morality of the concept of ownership. I believe that in order to own something you must have either worked for it or recieved it as a gift in order to deserve it, and under capitalism work or mutuality between parties as a precondition to ownership is not implied. Most assets acquired by wealthy landlords and capitalists is through usury and co-ercion.

As for science and engineering, don't forget who put the first man and artificial satellite in space. If anything capitalism stifles innovation and originality because it encourages repetition and replication of efforts. Is it not insane that you can walk into a town centre and have umpteen shops selling precisely the same sort of goods or services?

Or industries that are completely counterintuitive? Take for example the tobacco industry. You have companies that spend millions if not billions manufacturing and marketing tobacco, and other companies marketing and manufacturing anti-nicotine addiction products for no other purpose than to reverse the work of the tobacco companies. The cycle of which gives a zero-net social gain except for the individuals at the top. Surely it would be better for all to have people working on things which aren't counter-intuitive to each other.

Unless any such arrangement has lasted at least 50 years, I don't think you can really call it "successful."

"Promising?" Perhaps.

Socialism doesn't work because it ignores human greed and ambition. If everyone initially wants to share the wealth, that's fine, but what about the next generation? Do you force them to embrace the model or let them choose? What happens if they chose otherwise?

This is why communes fall apart over time.

I remember years ago how this coffee shop rag of a local paper was trying to raise $10,000 for a new roof for a local church. This church didn't believe in passing around the offering plate, so they never took a dime from anyone who attended.

Now....learn this wisdom....

God mandates tithing to both support the minister and the ministry. If this church asked people to give and didn't turn away offerings freely given, odds are they would have had that $10,000 saved up when the church building needed a new roof. Instead, they foolishly thought the roof would never wear out, and now they were out asking for donations when they supposedly didn't believe in that sort of thing.

It's one thing if they never had people with money to give (e.g., street ministry to the impoverished), but in this case they didn't believe in even asking. Most organizations that minister to the impoverished will seek funding from others who believe in supporting their work, but they DO ask for money to pay the bills that they know will need to be paid.

Products and services get replicated because there's a demand for them. If we were limited to one shop per town, that shop would be continually having shortages. Unless they expand, but why would you prefer them to have a government-backed monopoly, rather than letting the market take up the slack?

I don't understand this hatred of trade you have, either. If I swap the computer I've built for a car someone else is built, I own the car, regardless of not having worked for it or been given it.

I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and I'm amazed at how many policies the statists were implementing in there that people seriously defend...

But then, you guys think it's acceptable to use violence to get your own way.

communes like this tend to fall apart over time because they are physically isolated, people come and go and fizzle out over time because of immediate environmental factors. In times of yore, it was harder to publicise such projects so people simply didn't know about it.

The internet can turn this tide because it bridges together otherwise isolated self sufficient communities virtually in a way that was never achievable before. Thats the main reason this has a potential to be different.

Socialism per se doesn't ignore individual ambition or need. What societies like this one in particular do is seek to diminish the need for money by providing a shorter working day, free services, food and cheap housing. That way people can concentrate on more important things like acquiring knowledge, being with their families, pursuing hobbies and helping others.

Last edited by thomas81 on 22 Oct 2013, 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sure theres a demand, but why the need for 18 or 20 manufacturers or providers where one will suffice?

Aside from the waste of labour, its an environmental affront seeing a mcdonalds and a burger king together on every street corner.

Trade is fine. The grievance is with co-ercive arrangements that lack reciprocity and mutuality of benefit.

Interesting point. Though I suppose given the size of the community in the case under discussion they can likely continue stealing -- excuse me, "appropriating" -- land and goods from others for some time to come, before something like this would become an issue.

Having said that, it seems like a decent enough place to live, and it seems like it will remain so for some time to come. Can't say I have much interest in harvesting rutabagas personally, but the population of the village has been increasing, and at present there does not seem to be an issue with people trying to free-ride off the effort of others.

How do you know one will suffice?



If people don't support them, they close. Happens all the time. But since you're opposed to coercion, I guess all you're doing here is expressing a preference.

Why would it not suffice? Simply combine the manufacturing capacity of twenty companies into one and save labour by not having to have seperate marketing, packaging and branding teams that do nothing but waste and replicate efforts in the name of competition for competition's sake.



The fallacy here is that the public face of corporate behaviour is determined by demand. Its not, its dictated by spending power which is a very different entity.

I suggest you read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'. In it she illustrates eloquently how spending power is often ill representative of actual public desire.

Who was ordering anyone around here?



The people in this town are the ones trumpeting some sort of relationship to Lenin, Che, et al. Not too great a leap from there to Stalin. Che was certainly a fan of Stalin, I don't see how that is in dispute, at any rate.

If property rights were enforced, and the thieves were dealt with - in other words, if Spain was a non-corrupt country to begin with - this nonsense would never have got off the ground.

As a contrast, I would like to mention the Chinese village of Nanjie, which is in Linying County, Henan province, central China. It was known as the last Maoist village in the whole of the People's Republic.

Nanjie collectivised its agricultural production and industry in the mid 1980s - when the rest of the country was doing the opposite, introducing market reforms put forward by former leader Deng Xiaoping. The experiment failed disastrously and in 2008 it was privatised due to the community suffering massive hidden debts:



Today, it's a tourist attraction:

Some of the people on here still seem to think they live in the 18th century.

You think its a nonsense that ordinary Spanish people have a place where they can have guaranteed work, homes and access to services at point of demand. Ok, gotcha. Just so I know where you stand.

I'll look for it. I've been doing some reading in Behavioral Economics lately, though how much I understand is something of an open question in my mind. I'm presuming this would amount to something similar, though more from a macroeconomic view.

The benefit would be that if you had such companies working in co-operation rather than competition you'd have a product that combines the benefits of all worlds without any of the pitfalls of product proprietory services or non-compatibility with other competing devices. Actually the game industry serves my illustration quite well. Speaking as a gamer, its an incredible source of annoyance to me that i have to spend the guts of £1000 on consoles that are technically speaking, very nearly identical to each other, just so that i can overcome the problem of title exclusivity. It would be far better if I had a single machine that could play Killzone and Halo.


I wasn't necessarilly referring specifically to the Spanish village, more outlining an obstructive faux pas in the current mode of production.




You've sort of lost me at this point, I think we're talking about two entirely different things.


Okay, its a good book, you'll enjoy it.

That seems more than a bit unfair. As much as I personally dislike the references to Lenin and Che, they do seem to have created a bona fide community, the sort of place where an individual would be ashamed to deliberately take advantage of another.

Curiously, what they've put into practice seems much closer to anarcho-syndicalism (ignoring the land seizures by force) than anything I'd consider doctrinaire Communism. After all, the sort of alienation a bourgeois society is supposed to engender seems a pretty rare thing there.