Yeah, what? Where in the modern world have prices ever been abolished? Even the Soviet Union continued to have prices, wages, fees, and salaries.
They also had shortages and poor quality of consumer goods, so they had the greedy aspects of capitalism with none of the benefits, i.e. companies competing to get their goods to market efficiently.
My mom and I have a running joke anytime we’re at a supermarket that involves looking around at the tens of thousands of affordable cheerfully-coloured goods and saying “Ah, capitalism”, in contrast to Soviet-era shopping that involved waiting in hours-long lines for a chance of getting some low-quality commodity like tin cookware or Grade-C meats.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, under true socialism, goods will be plentiful. Tell us more wonderful stories of the magical land just around the corner.
Ah right, yes, of course; back to “it’s never been tried.” Goodness me, but this socialism is a fragile beast. Has to be done with the whole world, requires infinite goods and infinite goodwill from all men. It’s all a bit “six impossible things before breakfast,” n’est-ce pas?
The Paris Commune was ruthlessly crushed by the French and Prussian armies, while the Russian Civil War witnessed the invasion of Russia by fourteen countries (including the United States). The numerous examples of US intervention in the Caribbean and Latin America in the twentieth century (Cuba and Nicaragua leap first to mind) are proof enough that capitalism is perfectly happy to let ideologies hostile to its interests go their own way. Again, to remove any uncertainty, I do not hold Cuba or Nicaragua to be socialist, but they were certainly hostile to US imperialist aims in their respective regions.
Which is an argument based on an assumption I do not hold - so this statement is irrelevant at best.
That would be like saying the mere existence of cars causes drunk driving fatalities - clearly there are more factors at work. Black markets arise only under certain conditions, namely when a given commodity is unavailable domestically and restrictions are placed on its import. Nothing capitalism is immune from, for certain! It’s not hard to imagine black markets arising in countries resolutely trying to remain capitalist in a period when socialism is on the rise, if the balance of political power is in socialism’s favor - that is, the economically more powerful countries have undergone workers’ revolutions and are working towards the worldwide project.
Eh? But a country based on free markets wouldn’t need black markets. Because it’s got, y’know … markets. You only get black markets in things whose trade is prohibited.
So when a socialist country sees something produced externally that it would quite like (whisper it: something that its people value), its only solution to protect itself is to subsume the producer? The very knowledge of capitalist-produced goods causes iniquitous valuations to arise in the minds of socialist citizens?
Again, this seems like an awfully fragile system, in which every known good must be controlled and produced in unrealistic abundance in order to stop the people making valuations. What a lot of effort to go to, to prevent the simple human trait of preferring one thing to another.
I grant you that your three facts are presently true, but that does not mean that they are going to be true in socialism (or even in future capitalism). This makes your questions moot. Why is it that people want to enter the United States? For most people it is because the conditions in their countries are not as good. And why are they not as good? Barring personal preferences in climate, it’s not because of anything inherently better about America’s land or geography. Rather, it’s because the system of production is further developed there. There are better opportunities for employment and for access to goods and services. In a socialist society, with free access to goods and services, there would be no reason for mass economic migration.
OK, Badger, firstly you’re confusing two separate concepts of value: monetary value and use value. The two are not the same thing. In fact, sometimes those two concepts are quite opposed: industrial diamonds are worth far less, but are far more practically useful, than jewel-quality diamonds. In capitalism, the monetary value of a commodity has to be realized (i.e. paid for) before its use value can be realized (i.e. put to work). Under socialism, the monetary value is done away with but not the use value. People can still find things useful (and pretty) without contradiction in a socialist society.
Secondly, if a country based on free markets doesn’t need black markets, what exactly would you call the illegal drug economy in the US?
I dunno about badger, but I’m okay with calling the drug trade a “black market”. Trouble is, in places where socialism has been tried, the “black markets” run more to mostly-harmless goods like, y’know, books and shoes and other stuff the government-run factories can’t or won’t produce in quantity or quality.
This is a common argument—that workers remain workers simply because they don’t have the motivation to become successful capitalists. It’s simply spurious. Most workers can’t even afford their own house, let alone an entire factory. Even those that do go into business for themselves are unlikely to be able to free themselves from full-time labour. In Britain alone there are millions of people who are self-employed, but the vast majority aren’t rich and still have to work themselves. Why aren’t they all successful capitalists? They can’t all be lazy or incompetent.
Another argument to consider is that not everyone wants to run a business for a living. Take me; I’m a computational linguist. I love the sort of work I do. Why can’t I be economically satisfied and politically empowered as a computational linguist? Why should I have to switch careers to business administration, a job which holds no interest for me?
Yes, and we’d all still have to work under the same poor conditions as our competitors if we wanted to stay in business.
See, it’s not just about a small number of workers owning and controlling any one particular means of production; it’s about everyone owning all of them. Only then can we collectively decide to run them in our own interests, rather than have them all competing against each other to turn a profit.
You missed something.
Coincidentally, we recently screened this film as part of a public film series at our head office in London. The members and visitors present made many of the same observations. The Zeitgeist folks draw upon much the same research as we do to show that things such as scarcity and religion could be eliminated. Beyond what I’ve seen in their two films, though, I don’t know much about them. Perhaps we should open a dialogue.
Yes, this has been discussed earlier in the thread, but to summarize: A great deal of the labour carried out under capitalism is concerned solely with the administration of the money system and the defence of private ownership of the means of production. This includes jobs in sectors such as banking, insurance, the military, taxation, customs, border control, etc. This labour is socially unproductive in the sense that it doesn’t go towards making the goods and services (food, shelter, and entertainment) that humans need. Were all the people working in these industries freed from these unproductive jobs and able to engage in socially productive pursuits, we would all have to work a much shorter work week in order to maintain the same quality of life.
I didn’t say that capitalism makes things artificially expensive; I said that it makes them artificially scarce. There is a difference. In capitalism, the price of goods depends, generally speaking, by the amount of socially necessary labour needed under average conditions to produce them. (Some manipulation of prices is possible, for example through monopolization and taxation, but I’m speaking about the general case here.) This includes the price of raw materials like metal. It doesn’t matter how rare a particular metal is; the price is going to correspond roughly to how much labour it takes to extract it from the ground, refine it, and ship it to where it’s needed.
If a particular resource were to become naturally scarce, obviously a socialist society would need to deal with that somehow, whether that means finding a way of recycling or reusing the resource, using replacements, or finding some way of synthesizing it. Certainly a great deal of resources in capitalism are wasted or used inefficiently or unproductively, and without the profit motive and private ownership of land and resources, socialism would curb or greatly reduce the amount of such waste. As I mentioned above, much of our economy is tied up in industries which are not socially productive; many of these industries are the worst offenders when it comes to use of resources such as paper, plastic, and metal.
I’m curious, what is it that you have that you think others, in socialism, would want to buy? Do you actually own any factories or locomotives?
This has never been tried. We established this back in post #1.
No I’m not. None of us are. We’re trying to convince you that just because you abolish the former doesn’t mean the latter ceases to exist. As long as people have a preference relation over objects, they will have to communicate this preference relation to others. You can do this monetarily (i.e. with a common means of exchange), or you can do it with a barter system; either way, it’s trade, and it will spring up as long as finite resources are imperfectly allocated.
You handwave this away with the ludicrous assumption that everything produced under socialism will be effectively infinite, and that those goods a socialist country can’t produce will have to be either banned or their producers subsumed. You claim to abolish the very meaning of value, but in effect this requires your citizens to have no knowledge of anything save for what their own country produces, lest they value it more than their present lot. It’s yet another bonkers pre-requisite for a system that seems in essence to rely on the refrain, “under socialism, all problems will be defined not to exist.”
Bryan Ekers and jayjay had no problem in spotting that I would call this a black market, because:
Unlike you, I don’t feel the need to define away the failings of free market countries by claiming that they’re not true Scotsmen; I think the failed suppression of the drug trade is proof positive that you can not, in fact, stop people wanting things you tell them they can’t have.
I would also just quickly like to note the irony inherent in your bemoaning the cruelty of capitalist countries towards socialist ones, when considered in the light of your denial that there has ever been a socialist country.
When I said that nothing would have value, I was speaking of exchange value in a hypothetical socialist society. Value exists only under certain social conditions and relationships, where things (including human labour power) take the form of commodities to be bought and sold on the market. In a socialist society there will be common ownership, and so no commodities, just freely given and taken services and. products. So exchange value will not exist, and the law of value will not hold—leaving only use value. All production will be for use, or for the satisfaction of human need.
However, under the primitive communism practiced by our pre-agrarian, pre-monetary ancestors, value similarly did not exist. So yes, there’s your cite for a society where material posesssions had no value. Amazingly, this value-less society was able to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years. If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t be around today.
Yes, we will all be in charge of defining our needs. Congratulations on grasping this concept. 
Maybe in your dreams; socialism is certainly not utopia. It’s simply a system which we hold will be better than capitalism.
What Colt factory? I posited that pistols are produced to kill people, and therefore, as socially unproductive tools, would not be manufactured in socialism. You haven’t challenged the antecedent.
Higgins represents a left-wing political Party espousing the ideology of Trotsky and Lenin. They stand for a state capitalist society—that is, one where industries are owned and controlled by the state, rather than by private capitalists; such an arrangement does not abolish capitalism but merely turns the government officials into the capitalists. As vanguardists, they claim to be acting for the benefit of the working class, but actually hold it in contempt, believing it to be incapable of achieving its emancipation on its own.
If they are as few in number as we expect, then nothing.
They don’t need to be coerced into participating. If they want to sit around all day doing nothing, while taking what they need from the common store, then I’m sure society will be able to cope. After all, we already live in a society where the owning class can live parasitic lives of leisure, and we’re able to absorb this expense. However, they will probably be ridiculed and denigrated by most everyone else; do not underestimate the power of social pressure to conform.
Well, if it’s so large that a vast majority of the population no longer supports socialism, then obviously we will have a problem. If people wanted to return to capitalism then, we’d have to do so.
1% is tiny compared to the number of people who currently do not need to work in capitalism.
There are no pockets of communism today, except perhaps in isolated hunter-gatherer tribes, so your analogy is spurious. However, I did address the issue of people practicing capitalism within socialism in a previous post. I suppose they would be free to do so, but who would join them? Why would anyone want to subjugate themselves to the interests of an employer, and limit the fulfillment of their needs to what they can afford to buy with their wages, when they could have free access to goods and services elsewhere? The scenario doesn’t make sense.
This would mean that socialism wasn’t working, and that it would have to be abandoned. What did you expect me to say, that we’d round up all these counterrevolutionaries and throw them in a gulag?
Of course not…I expected you to say what you did. Which should show you why your idea will never work, as nice as it would be if it did.
I for one, am still not convinced. Not one bit.
Boy, are you in for a surprise. I’m an atheist, liberal, gay fattie. I swim in social derision pretty much every day. I’m also eminently capable of completely ignoring it until it impacts me directly by government action. Then I get mad.
I seriously doubt I’m the only one.