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[Havell]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rlbell @ Jun 8 2006, 10:48 PM) [snapback]235347[/snapback]</div>

You are suggesting that we can move our economic dynamics back to our tribal past, without rolling back anything else.[/b]

A switch to Communism is not a move back, but a move forward. Marx wrote extensively on the way societies change from one system to another, and he built up a model of the progression:

Primitivism -> Slave Society (eg, Ancient Rome) -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Communism

While Communism may have much in common with Primitivism, the implementation and practice are very different.
One of the key differences is specialisation, little specialisation can take place in a primitive society due to the very low level of technology and small groups of people. In a Communist society, however, the scale is far, far larger; and there is a high level of technology (this is another thing that Marx suggested, that each of the systems above require a given level of technology, and once that level is reached then the system will coem to pass).

Communism does not advocate a move back to primitive tribal life, there is far more to it than that.

[plix]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tulac @ Jun 8 2006, 11:15 AM) [snapback]235232[/snapback]</div>

No capital is everything that can be produced and is used for production of other products a PC for instance(producing web sites), this doesn't have to do anything with making a living, you can make a living without producing anything, like if you were a waiter...

Money produces nothing, it can be invested in capital goods which will then be used for production of other products, but it can also be spend for consumer goods which only get consumed...

Also human work isn't capital because you can't produce it, neither is land but they are inputs and are also used in production...
[/b]

I'm starting to sound like a broken record here: money is known as financial capital or as liquid capital and is a factor of production. Adam Smith referred to it as "circulating capital" in the Wealth of Nations:

Originally posted by Adam Smith+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Adam Smith)</div>

and reiterated by David Ricardo in his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation:
<!--QuoteBegin-David Ricardo
...on the contrary, a shoemaker, whose capital is chiefly employed in the payment of wages, which are expended on food and clothing, commodities more perishable than buildings and machinery, is said to employ a large proportion of his capital as circulating capital.

To be very clear before someone attempts to note it: the circulating capital employed by the shoemaker is money whereas it is the employees of the shoemaker who convert it to other goods.

Financial capital is used in production insofar as it is converted into or used in the procurement of fixed capital, labor, land, and so-on.

[rlbell]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Havell @ Jun 8 2006, 10:02 PM) [snapback]235349[/snapback]</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rlbell @ Jun 8 2006, 10:48 PM) [snapback]235347[/snapback]

You are suggesting that we can move our economic dynamics back to our tribal past, without rolling back anything else.[/b]

A switch to Communism is not a move back, but a move forward. Marx wrote extensively on the way societies change from one system to another, and he built up a model of the progression:

Primitivism -> Slave Society (eg, Ancient Rome) -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Communism

While Communism may have much in common with Primitivism, the implementation and practice are very different.
One of the key differences is specialisation, little specialisation can take place in a primitive society due to the very low level of technology and small groups of people. In a Communist society, however, the scale is far, far larger; and there is a high level of technology (this is another thing that Marx suggested, that each of the systems above require a given level of technology, and once that level is reached then the system will coem to pass).

Communism does not advocate a move back to primitive tribal life, there is far more to it than that.
[/b][/quote]

It is not communism that is a step (several, really) backwards, but going back to a time before money. Adding and drawing resources from a common pool is simple if you are living in a small, self-sufficient economy, like a tribe of hunter-gatherers or agrarian village. Now, we are no longer entirely self-sufficient, even at the level of the nation-state. Right now a problem is that a lot of goods are contributed to the pool by chinese labourers, but are drawn from the pool by americans. Right now, the task of figuring out how to move the correct amount of goods from China to America is handled by market pressure-- american consumers are willing to pay, so the chinese are willing to ship.

An international pool is unwieldy. It is too difficult for everyone to go to one pool. If we have a multitude of local pools, we now need some system for shipping goods between pools in a way that does not have goods mouldering at the wrong place. While capitalist free market economics is a less than ideal method of distributing the goods, it does have the virtue of being implementable in the face of human frailties, like greed, and it encourages attempts at efficiency.

Centrally planned economics have always failed when the need to claim that it worked became more important than making it work.

[plix]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rlbell @ Jun 9 2006, 02:51 PM) [snapback]235500[/snapback]</div>

Right now a problem is that a lot of goods are contributed to the pool by chinese labourers, but are drawn from the pool by americans. Right now, the task of figuring out how to move the correct amount of goods from China to America is handled by market pressure-- american consumers are willing to pay, so the chinese are willing to ship.[/b]

Currently this is only partially true (as the US economy is unbalanced and becoming more so at an increasing rate) and is rather a distinction in the foundations of the American and Chinese markets. From the international perspective China has primarily an industrial economy (a producer of real goods) while the US has a primarily service-and-technology-oriented economy -- a transition which has been taking place for the past half-century or so. Should the ratio of imports to exports (financially, not physically) in the US become any more unbalanced it's going to eventually face a late-Roman-esq deterioration where increasing debt destabalizes the economy and the dollar. Americans are simply hoping that exported services will make up for decreased production and exportation of real goods.