iriyan

Reducing public land, that is access by poor people to land, increases their dependency for food to markets. This nearly makes revolutionary tendencies become suicidal. You subject yourself to slavery or die starving.

Are you now for the state that mandates people to starve than violate market stability?

I admit I do not follow China's development much, and I also understand not having time to engage too, so I agree to stop, but I had to bring this little detail into it for other readers to understand my perspective as well. Maybe others would be willing to continue this.

You are absolutely right about inheritance, I was referring (in my mind) on the transition period between capitalism and private ownership to socialism and collective/communal property.

The populist anti-communist propaganda has been built around this sensitive issue where "the evil communists will come and take the little property you have away". This has to be clearer and understood better for the enemy not to have grounds to base their propaganda on.

The recent development world wide has had public land (and water/sea) be rebranded state property, and under this state property label it is easier for the masses to digest that instead of raising taxes the state sells off "its assets" as state property. This is a violation of any constitution in robbing human rights from public land/sea and converting it to "real estate" owned by the state, which in turn flips it over to private interests for exploitation at gift like symbolic cost.

So now we are left with all land and all sea be in a way private. They took desserts and converted them to solar panel lots for the industry, which may eventually fail and be converted to casino centers, who knows. They took hills and mountains and handed them over so windmills/generators can be installed, all private enterprise, the management, roads, water supplies, pylons to carry electricity were all placed in mountain areas, forest was wiped out, and the protection of this infrastructure is now enforced by private interests.

The general left had nothing to say about all this, because simply the autism of public land and state property has not yet been theorized upon, and therefore neither have human rights and access to land and water been theorized upon. So it was all ok, because humans are slaves of either capital or the state.

But the propaganda on taking someone's hard earned and constructed cabin, a little lot with vegies fruit and flowers, is private property that will be banned in communism.

This is ideology at the verge of bankruptcy and should either be re-examined or be sentenced to the slow death new-capitalism has sentenced it to.

Yes I see what you meant now. I too realized that some of the mix of local/national/ethnic traditions and religious tradition was not exactly the religion and the belief in it. I just rejected much of this early on in life.

Protestantism is politically interesting as it is the group of religions that basically evolved to overcome the incompatibilities earlier christianity and catholicism had with capitalism. Simply they modified christianity to fit the lifestyle and practices of capitalists. I didn't grow up with either of those, not that the crap I grew up was any better.

The common scheme of this complex of judeo/X-ian/islamic is that it is very individual centered, it is all about a deity having a personal relation with the believer. I know many African and Asian religions had more collective relations with the metaphysical. Native American belief systems are even more collective in nature. The entire community does rituals for the benefit of the community. On Judeochristian scripts there is an entire city of sinners and this one guy who is not a sinner walks away while the city is destroyed.

Religion may have not had such negative overtone to Marxists if it wasn't for clergy that tends to align with the powerful and the rich, so the three bodies can manipulate, exploit, and control people.

swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

Human connection, sociality (I'd say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The "experience of the divine" is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?

I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the "line" of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.

With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.

The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.

To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn't belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.

Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.

Nice of you to say this, I am very attached to my toothbrush, and my guitar and bicycle. But where is this distincion made, do you know? To what extant do we see limits where personal ends and public property begins?

For example, one can claim his land of 5 generations back is 24 hectares, but he is not using it for production, he takes care of it, uses a patch for growing personal/family food, the rest is for walks, riding a horse or a bike around, Is this personal? A 4 person family globally relates to about 3 hectares of land that can be culrivated, and maybe 6-7 more that is useless for agriculture. If one person has 10 times as much as personal, that would create a deficiency for available land to grow food for everyone else.

With basic hand-tools one person can barely work a land that is half a hectare, no matter what grows in it. Most of us can barely deal with the work needed for 1/10 of a hectare 1000sq,.m

The other extreme would be to have a 400sq.m house that you pretend is personal but at times you could exploit a traveler or a visitor to charge rent.

It is incomprehensible for me how can one be both a communist and have a religious affiliation, or any form of metaphysical thought. I am very respectful usually of people with faith but not as communists at the same time.

Please help me understand, I am too dumb when it comes to this.

I was browsing the boards up and down before reading this, and my first reaction was "haven't you read who Engels was and what he did for a living?", but others had the same response as well.

The reason I was searching and browsing threads was to locate reading material about "private property" and the distinction of it being owenrship of means of production or property you couldn't exploit anyone's labor with.

I am firm and clear about production means not being private, but what if someone creates/builds something for their own use. It can be a cabin,house, or it can be a raw boat, a violin, a bicycle... without any intention of renting them, using them to exploit others. What can be wrong with it? I am thinking more about the amount of resources needed, that they would have to become private to be used, so building a 6 story 1000 sq.m building "for yourself" is an overkill and abuse of resources, but even painting on a piece of canvas also needs privatization of "materials". So there has to be a cut-off.

But banning all private property makes no sense at all, it is nearly inhumane to enforce such policy.

You mean you set idealism to side and used rational thought and advise?

How dare you?

OK, teasing you a bit. One of the reasons I tended to take this seriously is because when I was little my parents gave sheltered to beaten/tortured nearly to a comma older cousins who were constantly "interrogated" due to having a file in national.security.office as members of a communist party. A good thing to have, such parents, relatives, friends.

Unlike other choices in life, some can result in a lot of pain, dignity, pride, and more pain.

If I am not mistaken this party is aligned with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) which in last week's election received 7.8% of the vote and 20 out of 300 seats in parliament. This may mean that the KKE has larger membership than CPUSA, not that this really matters.

The word revolution hasn't been in the vocabulary of this party for decades, not even by mistake. The material conditions must have not reached optimal ripe status.

Isn't the true pyramid the one with a square base? I think this is called a tetrahedron.

Carters' peanuts :)

Nutritious is very relative to industrialized food production. The most nutritious natural products are perceived as wild and are not objects of agriculture. Basically the objects of agriculture were selected on the ease of reproduction, not their nutritious value, or their cost. It just so happened that those that were easy to plant and grow were the leanest in quantity and complexity of nutrients. Many of the most nutritious seeds, fruits, and vegetables are becoming extinct with the elimination of natural forests. Planted forests would take thousands of years to stabilize as ecosystems (if ever) and be concidered sustainable food sources.

Cheap means the industry hasn't been able to monopolize, but labor is very exploitable (see bannana republics, tea and coffee plantations). It also means the quantities produced have saturated the markets and the product is in abundance (wheat, corn, soy,..).

Delicious ... only N.Europeans (and their N.Am. Oceania descendants) would consider eating a single element alone and judge it by taste. The rest of the world eat what they can get, spice it up, mix it, and make taste a final product of a mixture of things with a labor intensive process of preparing it. The dairy industry (waste of nutritients and exponentially waste of land use) and the sugar industry (it should have been banned under substance abuse addictive product that is a health hazzard as well) have blurred what "delicious" really means. Take as an example banana split ice cream, there is little nutritious value, if not harmful as a whole, made of three industrial products that maximize labor exploitation. If it wasn't for capitalism nobody in their right mind would have come up with this one. It only exists because of capitalism.

Nutrition has been a dead end disaster since its early days of being industrialized.