Thanks for the answers.
Why is economic equality essential to personal freedom? I think they are two different things.
Because then people can really -do- what they want, with many antagonisms removed.
Also, what is wrong with systems in Iceland or Norway for instance? don't they have personal freedom? what are the flaws in their systems?
Besides what can be said for their specificities, they suffer from the same fundamental problems, in the final analysis - look at Iceland, recently. Such models of reformist capitalism have had their achievements - as well as subsequent reversals. The present-day tendencies within developed capitalism don't bode well, although there aren't grounds for total pessimism.
BTW, I believe that you cannot achieve personal freedom without private property
Private property has never given us freedom - always bondage.
What about Catalonia? what are the differences between it and what you're in favor of?
The nature of collectivisation in Catalonia is a subject of much debate in all those movements who seek to replace capitalism.
What happened there was partial, and took place during a civil war. There was no fully constituted system from which we can draw conclusions. Nevertheless, many collectivisations (mostly factories under workers' control) took place on communist lines. Many more didn't. Also, it all happened under what still was a capitalist government. It wasn't actually 'anarchy'. As I said - about islands in a sea of capitalism....
This isn't only about restaurants. This is very important. If instead of private property we have collective ownership, why would anyone establish a business if all those who work in it own it collectively? what is the incentive for anyone to establish a football club? a hotel? a radio talk show? a tattoo parlor? a titty bar (can't stop mentioning them
)? a tanning saloon? a restaurant? a record label company? a pedicure spa? a cinema? or even make a movie?
Who would run them? who would own them?
Let me put it another way, if your goal had been achieved 200 years ago, do you think we would still have had Manchester United, The Four Seasons, or Burger King?
No. And that'd be good thing [I follow Liverpool].
More seriously, the elementary principle seems to have escaped you. Collective ownership means that the means of living are owned collectively. This means that all production is geared toward realising needs. Ergo, there is no place for businesses as there won't be privately owned means of production. When there are needs there can be found a way of fulfilling it. This is the basic idea, the framework within which things will move.
Sports, art and culture, communal activities like feasts, of course they will still exist, now free from commodification. Perhaps there will be much less passive entertainment.
Now if I may I would like to raise two new questions:
1-Surely you don't want wages to be the same or do you?
2-Who gets the bigger house? who gets to live in the nicer neighborhood?
Wages are part of the capitalist system. Waged work based on the use-value of labour that goes into commodities, for which it is exploited, forming the basis of capitalist accumulation, and the motivation for all production, the totality of capitalist social relations etc.. That is the system of production [that which produces
commodities - that is capitalism's essential feature] communism seeks to put an end to.
Wage labour, in fact, is
capital.
The only distinction between
socialism and
communism that is ever made by Marx & Engels (as a rule, they were interchangeable) is between the stage in which there is still some form of remuneration, in the form of labour vouchers, and when that is no longer necessary, when we move from the formula:
from each according to ability, to each according to need. This principle implies free access. That some relationship exists between social labour and access to the fruits of production may, for a time, still be a necessity, but others argue it is outdated, along with other transitional measures Marx & Fred proposed at the time.
Who gets the bigger house? That everyone has adequate housing would be one of the most important tasks facing society after the demise of capitalism, whoever has the 'biggest and nicest' will not be so important. After all, class society has ended, and the first attempts would necessarily be made to redress the effects of long-lasting inequalities. A great effort, but one that the consciousness of socialist man, soaring from the ashes of capitalism can meet.
Something that
might happen is that mansions, and such-like relics, could be converted from private to communal property. But I am speculating, of course.
P.S: I won't be bringing up economic productivity and technological progress as that would most definitely turn the thread into a never-ending debate. There are a lot of Friedman and Stossel videos I can borrow arguments and examples from.
Capitalism has revolutionized the means of production many times over. The tremendous expansion of the forces of production has been a necessity of capitalism since its inception, that has fed into technological progress, and even general intellect. However, technological progress in capitalism is not universally or wholly beneficial. Most of its use is put to the realisation of capital, again. More - it is put to many destructive purposes, such as warfare; alienating and mediating and reifying purposes, serving the reduction of people to atoms in the market place - further reduction of the subject to the Cartesian
cogito. It may give us vast social and liberatory potentials - sometimes realised, or often denied by capitalism ('intellectual property' comes to mind). For the first time in history, the means of alleviating material poverty exist, yet seems further and further from realisation. For the first time in history, overproduction of food takes place, alongside the greatest number at risk of starvation in history. These are some of the fundamental contradictions before us.
More:
"capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development." (Capital, Vol. 3)
History has seen the progression of the accumulation of the technological forces of production (perhaps forms of organisation are also a technology, comparable to 'software'). The time is now approaching to continue this on a higher basis.
Topic: An Autonomous and Free New Year to you All