/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I think most modern communists are in agreement that being a trader isn't a big deal in and of itself. I'm not sure if he actuality due d it or if its a meme but allegedly Marx himself gambled on the stock market.

Now, when you get into the nitty gritty of actual property ownership I dunno. Then it gets a little more unethical IMO. Like I personally have turned down management positions because I simply refuse to be part of that. Also unions do not allow management in the ranks of The union.

I personally trade stocks myself but I couldn't ever been a boss, or, worse a landlord.

>>455376
communism isn't really a moral system so it really depends on what your morals are regardless of communism, if you're a psycho go ahead and try to outcapital the capitalists.

>>455378
>unions do not allow management in the ranks of The union
Why?

>>455381
Isn't it obvious? Its a conflict of interest.

>>455384
How so?

>>455376
It depends, Friedrich Engels (Karl Marx's best friend) operated a textile factory, Engels was non the less a contributor to the communist cause.

It is hard to put this into theoretical terms. I guess you should avoid helping the imperial bourgeoisie.
The historic purpose of the capitalist class is developing the means of production as a boot-loader for socialism. So go for productive forces that will remain useful in socialism i guess.

Communists have ran out of effective strategies in dealing with the populations of developed capitalist countires. What we need now more than ever is experimentation and innovation. If that includes going into business and devising novel ways of organizing production then so be it.

>>455699
>Communists have ran out of effective strategies in dealing with the populations of developed capitalist countires
Maybe, but it could also be that it's not possible to overthrow the bourgeoisie in the imperial center during the heights of the empire. As long as the imperial bourgeoisie can extract surplus from the workers in the imperial periphery, the workers in the imperial core have less leverage. However all empires fall and the workers in the core of those empires will regain their class power as their rulers are less able to extract surplus from the periphery.
>What we need now more than ever is experimentation and innovation
If you want to overcome the imperial dynamic i laid out, you have to connect the workers in the imperial core and the workers in the periphery and create organization that can engage in international class struggle. That way all the workers that are being exploited for surplus by the imperial bourgeoisie will combine their struggle and their class-power will once again be greater than that of the rulers. You would have to start with something simple, like make a international union that spans across an entire multinational production and distribution chain.

>If that includes going into business and devising novel ways of organizing production then so be it.
Starting a business is pointless, it's a closed system, everything you can do comes with a leash. The big bourgeoisie has too much control over finance and governments, if you do something they don't like even if it's technically not against capitalism ideologically, they will kill off your efforts.
You basically need to have your own separate political and financial power.

Think about it this way if you want to start a business "and devising novel ways of organizing production" you need to create a public facing political side with parties, news media, think tanks (you know the hole shabang). you also need to create your own secret service that represents your non-public facing political side, and you need to have a financial system that is not going to bend to the demands of the big bourgeoisie. You also should be well enough armed that extra-judicial state-terror is not an option for them and legally gray state-harassment becomes really hard for them. And you need to be able to coordinate all this organizational stuff as a form of dual power, you can't use ownership of capital or monetary incentives as a mechanism of control, because they will always own more than you an have more money for bribes. And beware that the big bourgeoisie just kicked Russia with it's huge economy and super-power-level military out of their financial system. If you want to have any degree of freedom to experiment with new ways of production you really need to be the most pointy legobrick they ever tried to step on.

I'm just telling you all this for the sake of engaging with your line of reasoning, but i think that realistically, there is no room to build or create anything new with present structures, so you probably should look into the international union thing and international class struggle.

>>455378
>allegedly Marx himself gambled on the stock market
source?

I mean even from a practical sense it’s good to have your finances in order so that you have a much more solid base and more to contribute. The most important thing however is to keep your class relations proletarian. One side of the spectrum is the leftist tech bro who probably is the boss of multiple people and engages in petite bourg financial exploits. On the other side is retards like haz who will come from rich backgrounds and say stupid shit like
>no bro you don’t get it bro you have to be a jobless neet lumpen and earn money through streaming to benefit the revolution bro
It’s not so much about morals, it’s just not stooping down to reactionary,parasitic, or exploitative behavior

>>455376
Nothing wrong with cooperative ownership and entrepeneurship to start worker owned businesses.

>>463553
>>455699
It's fine and even desirable to go into business… but not as a top-down capitalist business. Instead do it as a worker cooperative. Worker cooperatives have a large number of empirically demonstrated benefits including the simple fact that they fail half as often as other business startups.

>>455376
No. There is no ethical economic engagement under capitalism. This is okay as long as you agitate in favor of the working class. Being a bourgie class traitor is cool as fuck and you should do it if you can.

>>463554
Before you can do worker-coops you need to create 5 things.
1. A Bank that lends money-capital to new cooperatives, cooperatives that pay back loans become partial owners of the bank, so that the bank can't be taken over by a bigger regular capitalist bank and changed into something that no longer funds coops. Using the principle of diffuse ownership to make it impractical to negotiate a buy-out.
2. A financial-transaction service provider that can by-passs potential financial chicanery.
3. A dedicated coop-market regulator whose job it is to tweak special coop-regulations in order to throttle high profits, so that successful coops can't turn into parasitic entities that make profits from rent seeking.
4. A non-money based intra-cooperative economic system that allows the different cooperatives to have economic interactions among each other without using the capitalist system. This is needed to network cooperatives among them self to become resilient enough to survive capitalist crisis.
5. Some kind of backup-law for legal and enforcement services that will enforce intra-cooperative-agreements in case bourgeois legal and executive institutions refuse to offer these services.

The coops have to subordinate them selves to the coop-regulator, the intra-cooperative economic system, and the backup-law, in order to get funding.

It might also be prudent to have some kind of political system for this structure, because disputes are bound to happen and you want a way to mediate without damaging power-struggles. You can do democracy by random lot, basically every worker that works for one of the coops gets entered into a lottery-pot, and might be called up for mediation duty. That's also responsible for managing the backup-law the intra-cooperative-regulations and the intra-cooperative-economic-system.

The intra-cooperative-regulator will also be responsible for enforcing ethical capitalism, like fair trade, repair-friendly and mod-friendly goods-design, environmental standards and so on. You need this because in the long run it will pay off, and the long game is the only game you have.

The capitalist system will try to grow at the expense of this, so you have to design these cooperatives as hyper-agressive entities that will try to eat everything non-cooperative.

>>463567
>Before you can do worker-coops you need to create 5 things.
So, pretty much your own country.

>>455376
>Are there good arguments for why communists should or should not become.. landlords?
landlords are scum
and as a social group - a breeding ground for petty bourgeois mentality
if you're making a living by collecting rents - as a commie you should try to transfer accumulated capital into productive sector

>entrepeneurs
depends what you mean by this

if you mean """investing""" and collecting dividends - then no

but if you mean getting into the thick of corporate governance and direct capital-labor interactions - then again, it depends

it depends if you understand that there is a conflict there, and that you will be forced to take sides

as a commie capitalist, you cannot not work against your own class, ie your board of directors, your shareholders

ideally you want your wagies to unionize but not to individually strike, because you will be couped long before you will have a chance to go out of business
ideally you want your wagies to organize unions at your competitors and then general strike

at which point the state will come in with the army lol

in general if you have talent, luck and capital - try to get the monopoly advantage in an industry and then try to organize your workforce and push for unionization across the whole industry

also, try to undermine big tech companies by investing in free software with copyleft licenses and provide legal support for their enforcement to free software projects

campaign for public cloud hosting infrastructure projects, possibly using your unions as a vehicle of wider political organizing

etc etc

but 99% you will get couped at the first step lol

>>463584
>possibly using your unions as a vehicle of wider political organizing
forgot to add that you need to keep union leadership rotating, because they will sell out and backstab your ass if they get entrenched
ultimately strong militant unions are your only support base against shareholders, or their state

>>455706
>*ussia
Reactionary radioactive shitdump with Zimbabwe-tier resource export characteristics

>hueg economy
Can't even make its own nails due to such total ideological hatred to any kind of industry that even MIC was always under dismantling. Sometimes shitty rushka has to buy band-aid industry from DPRK though but even that is only for acquiring another means for extraction of even more stuff from the mantle.

>super-pooper-level memetary
Literal rapefest. And a means for the generals to always have a ton of cannon meat to send at another Chechnya, head on. And even this was gradually uprooted in favour of gubbermint-issued mercenaries due to their anti-popular sentiment which will guarantee their loyalty in case of any political dissent back at home.

Stop taking this fucktarded colony as a case of some kind of world power already.

>>463815
>when you can't help but shit up every over thread on the site with your meme politics
go back to your containment thread and stay there forever you fucking chimp

you shouldn't go out of your way to be a shitbag but you can start your own thing and sell it why the fuck not just don't forget you're an anti-capitalist

What is the correct position on "self-employed" uyghas

>>467020
They're kind of irrelevant. They do not make up a major portion of the economy (not the actually self employed ones) and they are basically just Petty bourgeois. I think of them as closer to workers though if we think of petty borg like a sliding scale. Ideologically, obviously, they tend to side with the capitalist class, but, it is possible for them to become class aware.

No, not really. That's just playing into the Nazified morality of "work", instead of what work meant to people who actually want to do something. If you imagined a communist society, the producers would be free to associate without being pushed to kill each other for stupid reasons. You'd be more likely to engage in activities because you wanted to do them, or filled a need someone wanted for reasons other than chasing money tokens to pay the tax man. The situation in communism is that society is productive enough that we don't have to suffer basically because others decided we were meant to suffer, and we could do things along those lines right now if there were a will to do so. There isn't a genuine crunch that forces us to suffer this much, which is why so much of the work is bullshit and somehow the things that we wanted to do can never be done, while someone is on the spot to make you miserable if you dare to do anything on your own initiative. So, the idea that you would invest in a portfolio would seem odd, and very likely the right to live would mean you're already invested in the whole society and get a dividend simply for being alive - like a basic income, but without the string attached that you're cast out of society if you dare take it. It would instead be something so basic that to speak of taking it away would be some sort of madness, rather than the situation today where we can obviously have nicer things but the political class does not allow it, even if letting us have those nice things would be obviously better for most of humanity. The people who are there to ensure we suffer reap everything and the honest lose everything, and that's the sad lot we're made to live in.

It should be noted that workers themselves have an investment in their status over the unemployed, and this has been the running battle - the workers against the reserve army of labor, which is to be exterminated. The owners of the world got us eager to kill each other over a lump of horseflesh, because it was too much for people to get over their hatred of that which is ugly to them. When the concept of what is "ugly" is created by a thought leader and ideology to declare that most of humanity is ugly and only the selected classes are life worthy of life, the society destroys itself - at least for most of us. The tendencies in liberal society turn towards absolute destruction and can think of nothing else. In this way, the democratic idea is defeated forever and can never be reborn, and all life dies screaming forever.

There's no good argument for communists not investing or becoming "entrepreneurs" if they have the resources to do so and the integrity to remain communist. Smartly investing, at least smalltime, is unfortunately just good advice for existence under current conditions in general - under the circumstances, labor just isn't nearly as rewarding for the amount of effort you put in, and the price of everything is so inflated (and has been for decades) that you pretty much need some passive income to live decently.

In this society, capital is power. If someone can pursue capital and maintain a socialist POV, then that is a good thing - and it is very rare, but having sympathizers to the workers' movement who have capital is a good thing. The alternative is only having opponents of the workers' movement who have capital - there will still be millionaires and billionaires whether or not any of them remember ever being workers. There used to be some big capitalists who had socialist sympathy in the US - there was a much stronger socialist movement back then, and as a result there were some people with lots of capital who sympathized.

Landlords can get fucked, though. If you can afford to own land, then you should absolutely buy land - you can live on it, you can use it for business, etc. Land, to be clear, is a good, easy investment, but… for fucks' sake, just invest in BTC or microchips or something. If you can help it, don't take the land speculation route, don't hold land vacant, don't hold homes vacant, don't decimate cities, don't own somebody else's home and charge them for it please. Invest in something productive or something stupid that'll make you money anyway, don't be a landlord, it's the worst one.

>What should the few bourgoisie who find themselves sympathetic to communism be directing their efforts towards?

I'm not sure precisely - in my head, helping to fund workers during strikes seems like a good idea, but there may be problems there.
Funding alternate communications infrastructure would also be good. Buying a shit ton of weapons and helping organized militias would also be useful, but you'd have to kind of keep that hush hush (just buying the weapons & stockpiling would probably be your best route, because then you could just appear as a "hobbyist" or "gun nerd" until shtf)…

>What should the few bourgoisie who find themselves sympathetic to communism be directing their efforts towards?
support workers organizations
if you're afraid about the effects on your capital accumulation, ie you don't have better than average means of production or a monopoly position, then support workers in other industries that you don't do business in
or support academic research

other than that there is nothing really you can do as an individual, large corporations take form of the collective ownership