Famines aren’t caused because food prices are too high - rather, violence and chaos in a region prevent people from getting food. Reduce those, not capitalism.
But states don’t step back, or at least they never have in the past until forced, so I don’t see how your socialist state agents who have been invited in by the workers will just as glibly leave when the workers tell them too. What if the workers want something the socialist state agents think isn’t right for them, i.e. the heads of the former managers put on pikes? For their own good, the socialist state agents will reason, the means of production cannot be turned over to the workers until the workers have a complete understanding of socialist theory.
Well, good, because this provides you a convenient excuse to never have to put your ideas into practice in one country and explain that country’s failure and/or human rights abuses, as has been the case wherever full-blown socialism was pursued.
I might be swayed when you present something that is a lot more fleshed out. So far, your economic and social theories rely just a bit too heavily on magic.
I recently watched this video presentation about something called the Zeitgeist Movement.
They seem to work towards very similar goals as socialism, though with more focus on technology and science as the solution. They argue for increased automation and building everything to last, be recycleable and sustainable, to reach their resource-based economy without scarcity.
They seem to make many of the same conclusions as have been discussed in this thread regarding for example crime and human behavior, that crime is mostly an aspect of the monetary system and scarcity inherent in the capitalist system.
Reading their FAQ though, they seem to argue that they are not like socialism and that socialism is a failed concept, while in my eyes they have very much in common. Both seem to be international ideas where nations don’t exist, private property is not necessary, and artificial scarcity does not exist.
I found it rather interesting, has anybody else heard about this movement before? What do you socialists, anarchists, and others think about it?
Profit is not a determinant of efficiency (as the bank bailouts ought to prove in spades), nor does it determine how production is organized. Profit is, at base, simply the amount of money left over from total income after all expenses have been paid. Profit levels dropping to zero means that income and outflow match exactly; posting a loss means that outflow exceeds income.
Say, for example, a merchant buys 1000 kilos of potatoes at $1 per kilo with the only $1000 he has to his name. Now he’s broke and got a bunch of potatoes. The only way he would be at all satisfied with making exactly $1000 back (that is, selling the potatoes for the same price he paid) is if he had no other expenses to meet - both business-related (store space, hired help, taxes, etc.) or personal (rent, food, clothing, car payments, etc.) which in no way reflects reality. In order to meet these expenses he is therefore compelled to sell the potatoes at a higher unit price per kilo than he paid for them (“buy cheap, sell dear”).
Here’s where the conflict with meeting human need comes in. There are people in this world whose daily income isn’t even sufficient for a kilo of those potatoes, either at the price the merchant bought them or the price at which he sells them. The merchant (and his supplier) can’t sell them at a price these people could afford because it eats into their profits. Selling enough of the potatoes at a drastically reduced price reduces profit to zero, all without affecting the efficiency of the producer or the merchant.
Apart from whatever Thoreau-like self-sufficiency lifestyles individuals have adopted, this hasn’t been the prevalent mode of production in society since probably the Old Stone Age. Increase in population (and therefore demand) has sparked increases in efficiency, not profits. Increased profits are a side effect of improved efficiency under capitalism, not the other way around.
Base prices aren’t imagined either. The prices for raw materials are far more variable than the prices for finished goods (take, for example, the Potato Council in the UK, which reports on prices for potatoes in various market sectors), which makes the situation for the farmer a lot more precarious than the merchant, but the basic principle is the same - expenses must be covered (and, with luck, exceeded) through selling at an acceptable per unit cost below which profits are threatened or eliminated.
I’m not sure who you mean by “suppliers” when you say suppliers are reducing the cost of goods, but if you mean the supermarkets and retailers who provide potatoes to the consumer public you’re completely mistaken. Sticking with our potato example, here’s a link to a report detailing probably more than you ever wanted to know about the UK potato market. Page 1 shows the average retail price (in GBP) per kilo of fresh potatoes - the ones you buy loose in the bin or pre-bagged. For 2007 the average retail price was £0.62 per kilo, which translates (the reason will become clear in a moment) to £620 per metric ton. Meanwhile, over in a report showing price and production trends for the last almost 50 years, we see on page 2 that the 2007 average price per metric ton of potatoes produced - that is, the price at which the growers sold them to the suppliers - is £142.71 (or £0.14 per kilo). That’s a 300% increase in the price of potatoes per ton between the grower and the supplier. And how, exactly, is the supplier contributing to the efficiency of the farm’s production? Efficiency of shipping and distribution, sure, I can see, but the business operation costs connected with running a chain of supermarkets hardly merit a 300% markup, especially considering those costs are spread across all the goods a supermarket chain sells.
begbert - when workers see the need for a socialist revolution and are, moreover, willing to take that step and make one, they’ll already be convinced of the need to work to build the new society after the revolution. If the revolution were made on their behalf and they had little to no control over it then such a reaction as you describe would hardly be surprising. But if they were the ones running the show, they would react quite differently.
Henrichek, science and technology alone aren’t going to usher in socialism no matter how advanced they are. It’s how the society behind them is organized that will. Capitalism would only allow people to possess the technology if they could afford it, while socialism would make the technology universally available in order to improve the general standard of living.
Do you have evidence to back up this claim, or are you relying on an argument from incredulity?
Making the technology available doesn’t improve the general standard of living unless the costs involved are less than the benefits. Externalising and hiding the costs doesn’t change that.
Apologies if this question has already been asked, but I was pondering this on the way to work, in light of various discussions I’ve been having with friends lately. I have two basic questions:
What sort of standard of living do you envisage for people under the new Socialist government - are all people going to have the same standard, or if it varies, who decides who gets what? Can you compare the expected standard of living to what we have today?
How are you going to deal with problems of raw material supply to fuel your “post-scarcity” economy? Not everything is artificially made expensive through control - some basic raw materials, including many metals, are going to be exhausted within the next 100-200 years, even at current rates of usage. Cite. How will these be supplemented or replaced if, as it seems, demand will actually increase rather than decrease?
Poorly phrased on my part. You could look at the fact, for example, that poor Tesco’s (leader in the retail fresh potato market - Page 3) only made 4.5 pence for every £1 of goods sold in FY 2007-08, which would make one think the board of directors would be stealing food from their own children’s mouths if they didn’t mark the cost up 300%. However, when you look at the overall figures for the year you see the company made 2.1 billion pounds in post-tax profit. Lowering the price of potatoes and other goods would make them affordable to more customers, but why do so when the company would turn less of a profit? It is profit, that income over and above the costs of operation that’s important to the distributors, not the goal of putting food on people’s tables.
Monetary cost is not an intrinsic part of technology; that’s only there because of the way society is organized. It can be completely removed in favor of looking only at the time and effort involved in implementing the technology (and other factors like environmental impact, for instance). Furthermore the time and effort needed can be reduced through improvements in efficiency. In other words, removing the profit motive entirely through removing the use of money and replacing it with the motive of universal social improvement.
Dervorin, not all raw materials are non-renewable, and those that are can be used a lot more wisely and efficiently than they are now (for example, increased recycling overall or expanded and improved transportation systems like light rail and long-distance rail that use less metals, plastics, and fuel instead of millions of cars).
You are contradicting yourself. Or rather, you are simply pretending that some costs don’t exist.
How does implementing socialism eliminate storage costs, or the cost of transportation? If a merchant does not charge enough for his potatoes to cover those costs, how can he possibly continue to stay in the potato business?
Either he charges enough more than $1000 to cover his other, unavoidable costs, like storage and transportation (and the labor of those assisting him in selling the potatoes), in which case those unable to afford to pay more that $1 per kilo are SOL, or he does not, in which case the cost of transportation and so forth has to come from somewhere else.
Politicians can wave their hands and pretend that their theories have no cost. Business people know better. Socialists are politicians.
Which is the same thing as saying, it can’t possibly happen. If it starts in Russia, it can’t work because the rest of Europe isn’t already socialist. If the rest of Europe is socialist, it won’t work because the USA is not socialist already.
In other words, it can’t be successful until it spreads, and it can’t spread until it is successful.
And further - every individual attempt to implement socialist policy will fail. Because of all the other places where socialist policy has not already been implemented.
You are pushing for a goal that, by definition, cannot be achieved.
“Workers of the world - unite! It won’t work, and you will lose everything.”
This question makes no sense. Turning a profit may be the motive for distribution among capitalists, but that by no means makes it the universal, unchanging motive for distribution. And again, price is not an intrinsic quality of goods and services; it is a social construct. In a society organized on privatized production and distribution aimed at turning a profit, prices are vital. In a society organized on collective distribution and production aimed at meeting human needs, prices have no meaning.
You are to be congratulated, I suppose - you keep expressing quite succinctly the inherent contradictions that make socialism unworkable. What you are saying here is that the labor of those involved in distribution is of no value, and should not be recognized or compensated, while simultaneously assuming that it will continue.
The notion that “profit” in that sense is optional is to assert that a bag of potatoes in Idaho is worth exactly what it is worth on a grocery shelf in New York City. Which is an absurdity.
You are making the same mistake that MrDibble did above - confusing what symbols are used to measure supply and demand with the real phenomenon. It never pays to do that.
As George Orwell said in 1984 -
He might have added, when running an economy as well.
You can’t get something for nothing. That applies to all the known universe. Simply saying “let’s work towards a world where you can” doesn’t mean anything.
Oh, absolutely. People cease to have any sense of relative value as soon as you abolish prices. This is why black markets never spring up in command economies, after all.
Then you’ll start to see precisely what I described: the workers will begin to stratify based on their their own personal motivations. Some people will certainly have joined the revolution because it promised “to each according to his need” - people want something for nothing. Lots of people want something for nothing. These people will bail out of the workforce almost immidiately.
I repeat: I assure you that these people exist. And they will be the acid which eats away the underpinnings of your dreamed-of economy.
The second major group of people you’ll lose are the people who are not so much lazy or selfish, as practical. These people will have supported your movement because you convinced them that it offered a better quality of life than their existing system. No more struggling along while the bourgeoisie sit in their ivory towers soaking up all the money. Prosperity for all. That sort of thing. They will join your movement not out of idealism but as a pragmatic move to improve their quality of life.
So, Wally Worker will be working along, doing his job and contributing to the economy just fine, until one day he notices that Danny Drunkard is getting just as much bread and as just many hookers-n-blow vouchers as he is - despite not coming to work. And further, Wally’ll notice that Danny Drunkard is actually having a lot more fun than he is, because Wally’s toiling at the factory while Danny is partying. And the third thing that Wally will notice is that despite Danny’s luxurious welfare-leech lifestyle, the economy is still trucking along just fine!
Given all that, Wally, who got into socialism to improve his quality of life, will depart the workforce for exactly the same reason. Life is better on the dole, and so that’s where he’ll be. Wallys will begin leaving the workforce in droves.
Assuming the departure of the Wally’s isn’t enough to bring the economy to complete collapse on its own, things will continue, with the work unavoidably shifting to the shoulders of those remaining in the workforce. This will leave Oscar Overworked working his ten-hour shift, faced with a slightly different scenario than Wally was. Where Wally say that people being on the dole was causing no problems, Oscar will likely see that the economy is starting to crumble and that he and the rest of the stalwart working minority are the pillars that are staving off total collapse. But he’ll also be faced with the fact that all the people who aren’t working are still getting as much as he is! He works ten hours and gets nothing more for it than Wally and Danny.
The Oscars are going to be becoming increasingly discontented with their lot (justifiably!); the Wallys and Danny’s are similarly going to be getting discontented with the shortages and decreased quality of services that will occur as the workforce shrinks. The discontent will manifest first as Oscars start leaving the workforce having become disgusted with working so hard for no return, which will make the problems worse, until finally everybody becomes sufficiently discontented that they stage themselves another revolution. How that plays out can vary, but it seems likely to me that things won’t pop back all the way to peaceful democracy. Some group’s going to decide to lead the revolution, and they’ll likely end up in power, authoritarian style. And those starry-eyed idealists who proposed the whole ‘socilism’ idea in the first place? First against the wall.
There are only two ways I can see to avoid this: if the Oscars and Idealists are able to support the economy all by their own selves without discernible loss of services, or if there are no Dannys or Wallys in the system. (Even absent Dannys, opportunity costs will eventually make the Wallys realize they’d rather not be working.)
The first solution presumes a spectacular ability to produce with very, very few workers. The fabricator technology may be a step towards this, and if semiautonomous manual labor robots were invented that could be made with the fabricators that would probably seal the deal. But note that if you have these, there’s no reason to institute socialism at all - there problem of shortage would already be solved and when it becomes of negligible cost to make welfare comfortable, there’s (barely) enough altruism in humanity to implement a comfortable dole without bothering to deny content creators whatever small reward they can think of to ask.
Plus it’s not really kosher to argue for a system that can’t be implemented with existing technologies. So let’s put aside solution 1 for a few dozen years.
The second solution, which appears to be what you’re actually proposing, is that when the time comes there will be no Dannys or Wallys. Just Idealists. (Oscars are made, not born. :)) This is, of course, delusional - and not just because human nature essentially requires that lazy and practical exist, but also because socialists aren’t going to wait around to properly ‘convert’ everyone into idealists before implementing the plan. Having crowds of frenzied cheering followers at their meetings will be sufficient for them to feel that they have the mandate, and they will carry on - despite that crowd being mostly Dannys and Wallys. (Heck, they probably won’t even wait for all the Carl Capitalists to convert - history suggests that the revolution is unlikely to be that patient. And thus, it’s unlikely to bloodless.)
So yeah. But anyway let’s play along and suppose you manage to get everyone to be an Idealist, so there are no Dannys or Wallys (or Carls) gumming up the works. (I hestitate to speculate how you’d pull this off.) Regardless, everyone has the stars gleaming in their eyes working together towards peace and prosperity and all that. Everything works perfectly according to plan.
And then people have kids. Kids raised on the dole, many of which notice that they went sixteen years without working; why start now? A whole generation of Dannys and Wallys.
Society collapses in a generation.
Or do you have a plan to avoid this? Mind control, perhaps? Something in the water?
Further illustrating the point that socialism can’t be built in one country. Such a country cannot possibly meet all its citizens’ needs by itself, so those supplies have to come from somewhere, even if it runs afoul of whatever importation restrictions are in place. In a worldwide socialist system with a permanent surplus of freely available goods and without borders and restrictions on movements of said goods, black markets are no longer necessary and prices even less so.
In socialism, the vast majority would be “forcing” a minority of pro-capitalist dissenters into the collective only in the same sense that today a small minority of pro-socialist dissenters are “forced” into living under capitalism. Sorry, but there’s only one Earth, and we’re going to have to decide how to share it and its resources democratically.
And with respect to the second part of your conjunction, we would actually be keeping, not dismantling, the most vital components of government—the state-run schools, hospitals, roads, and other industries and infrastructure. They would no longer be owned and controlled by the state, of course, and there may accordingly be substantial changes into the way they are run. It is the least vital (i.e., oppressive and/or socially unproductive) parts we would be doing away with: the armed forces, the central banks, the mints, the taxation office, the customs and immigration system, etc.
You don’t. However, how you go about acquiring status depends on the social environment you find yourself in. In a society where material possessions have no value, there is no status to be gained by flaunting or hoarding them.
Sure. I go and get another car from the store for my own use. If there aren’t any, that’s a signal that the community may need to place an order for more of them.
I very much doubt that the common store would stock automatic weapons, or that such weapons would even be produced in socialism. I don’t know too much about firearms, so correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t certain types of them (including handguns and automatic weapons) designed solely for killing humans (as opposed to hunting animals)? If that’s true, there wouldn’t be any point in manufacturing them or even keeping existing ones around.
Now, if you and your friends went to the common store, stocked up on some other sort of tools which could be used as weapons against humans (hunting rifles, maybe), and started going on a killing spree, then there’s nothing stopping the rest of us from doing the same and capturing or killing you. So why would you bother, unless you were insane?
Yes, you would spend a lot of your time doing that. So would most of us. Fortunately, without a vast proportion of the available human labour being tied up in socially unproductive, capitalism-specific industries, we’d all have a lot more free time. Of course, as most people who have spent a long period of time unemployed will tell you, eventually you get tired of sitting on your ass all day and do something productive. It’s obviously in our nature to work: if it weren’t, then humans would have all died out long ago.
Now, I don’t know what your job is, but there may be all sorts of reasons preventing you from doing it voluntarily: perhaps the job is interesting, but not when you are forced to do it for 40 hours a week, or in the particular manner prescribed by your employer; perhaps your workplace is too far from your home and commuting is a drag; perhaps you simply aren’t suited for the job and would rather do something else. All of these things would be a lot easier to remedy in socialism then they are in the present socioeconomic system.
Well, that’s the problem. No one is forced to live under capitalism if they don’t want to. Go ahead and set up a socialist society if you want to. The only thing you will not be allowed to do is try to get me to give you things if you don’t pay for them.
But it seems that every time y’all try this, it somehow gets sabotaged because there are people who don’t go along with it. If it is so self-evidently better, why does the presence of unbelievers make the whole thing into the kind of fiasco it always winds up?
It sounds awfully like a seance - the ghosts won’t appear if skeptics are there.
If society runs so much more efficiently with no army and no central bank, why doesn’t it work even if there are still infidels in the world? You keep claiming that there will be an inherent, permanent surplus in everything. Why can’t you show me that this works?
It’s always the Evil Magic Psychic Vibrations coming from outside your perfect socialist country that mess everything up.