Me: Socialism would work only if we had the support of the vast majority of people.
You: Yeah, but if it were ever established, what would happen if you lost the support of the vast majority?
Me: Uh… then, just like I said, it wouldn’t work.
You: Aha! Gotcha!
Me: 
Am I missing something here? You haven’t proved anything that I haven’t already admitted upfront.
My labor, for instance.
And never can be. We established that several times as well.
Regards,
Shodan
The part you’re missing is the part where you will never get 6 billion people (or 10 billion people, or 20 billion people) to all want the same thing. Which is the only way this will ever work.
What would happen? My guess is that a decade or so after this Grand Experiment collapses, there will be new little socialists claiming that “Socialism can work! It’s just never been truly done before! Them? Oh, obviously they weren’t true socialists…if they were, it would never have collapsed!”
There is a saying going around about the Republicans lately, “Conservatism cannot fail. It can only be failed.”
I think you may have more in common with Republicans than you think.
I don’t believe that these societies would qualify as socialist under your conception, because I’ve never heard and have no reason to believe they had no shamans or tribal leadership. Such leadership would decide who ate and when, and thus compelled participation in the hunt.
That is, it’s the “don’t work = don’t eat” = socialism v1.0 = capitialism lite. The best hunters eat first and best. That’s called earning a wage, folks - even if you haven’t firmed things up with fixed prices and such yet.
Working socialism has *never *existed - unless you count all those Scotsman that you don’t want to call true because they repeatedly and graphically demonstrate the weaknesses of a system that demotivates labor and relies on trust to avoid corruption.
And I hold that it will collapse due to demotivating labor resulting in severe degradation of output and therefore quality of life - no utopia indeed!
(This may not happen when we all have fabricators and manual labor robots. Call me back when that happens.)
Okay, so there’s not a colt factory. However, people still know how to make colts. And they can still requisition tools, parts, and machinery, right? Poof: not only do they have a Colt factory, but you don’t. They’ll like that!
The government instituted prohibition: people made stills. If the govermnent won’t supply things, people will make do.
Ah, but you see, it is necessarily the case that people won’t want Colts any more, because we’ll have enacted socialism and everyone will have seen the error of their ways and renounced violence. So your problem is non-existent by definition. Again.
Handy, eh?
I am afraid you haven’t produced a cite. What would be needed is a cite of some society which did not engage in barter, either amongst its members or with other bands.
Great! I and my friends, as mentioned, have decided that we need a whole shitload of automatic weapons. Is there someone to say me Nay? If so, I want that guy’s job. If it is just everybody else, good - I don’t have to care. I have the guns, after all.
Sez who? If I want to produce them, who are you to tell me No?
Regards,
Shodan
Me, I have lesser demands. I just require that I get vastly more stuff than I produce. I want to half-assedly carve one misshapen toothpick in my three-hour workday, and requision a ferrari and some gallons of gas to cruise around in the rest of the day while picking up more food that I can eat to take home and stockpile, replacing the stockpiled stuff that rotted the day before. (When I finish I’ll park my ferrari in the back with the others.)
I also have a lot of friends who are just like me - probably about 80-90% of the population, I’d wager. That’s not a problem, is it?
Guys, guys - this is hopeless. **Psychonaut **believes that all people are fundamentally decent and that if their basic needs are provided for, they’ll be happy. You can’t reason with people like him.
Not to me - I got a whole shitload of automatic weapons.
“Workers of the world, unite - you make a better target that way.”
Regards,
Shodan
Seriously, god bless him…I wish I could have that much faith in humanity.
And there’s “The free market is always right ? That bad stuff over there ? Oh, that’s not a real free market”. Or “Christianity is always moral. Those nasty guys over there ? Oh, they aren’t real Christians !”
It’s a True Believer thing; the venerated ideology or principle NEVER fails. It’s just redefined into being something else. Or claimed to have been sabotaged by the designated enemy.
Well, he’s actually right. For certain definitions of “decent” and “basic needs”. You know, the ones that mean “selfish” and “gluttonous desires”.
The one thing I’ll add is that Mr. Dibble is on to something.
If we have something akin to Star Trek replicators, where you can literally get anything you want out of a box by pushing a button, then all sorts of economic fundamentals that apply today will melt away.
That isn’t to say that the box will be able to supply all human needs, because it won’t be able to make land, and it won’t be able to give the button-pusher social status.
But a society where everyone’s “basic needs” for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and entertainment can be provided so cheaply they are essentially free is one that is going to be very different than what we have today. I wouldn’t call this society “socialism”, because that implies that private ownership of the means of production is forbidden. Instead, private ownership of the means of production is ubiquitous.
There’s no need for controlling it because everyone who wants a replicator can have a replicator, and if they want to make a Ferrari they’re free to dig up some old blueprints and make themselves one. And if they smash their Ferrari people will shrug and sweep up the trash and dump it in the recycling bin.
So the Ferrari will mean nothing. But some things will still mean something. People will still want things–sex with attractive people, social status, new experiences. But how do you put such things in a money economy? What would money be for?
I imagine that some people would do things that are similar to what we call work. Like, take me…I spend probably and hour or two every day writing on the Dope. Writing is a kind of work, and I flatter myself that some people sometimes want to read what I write. If I didn’t have to work for a living, I’d probably stay on the Dope. But even if people like what I write, they wouldn’t PAY for what I write. What would they give me? What would I need? I’d get rewarded for writing (or producing games, or iPhone apps, or movies, or webcomics, or paintings) by people appreciating what I did. Or being annoyed by what I did, if I’m that kind of person.
But calling this sort of thing “socialism” is like calling a tail a leg. All the writing I produce and distribute for free isn’t “the means of production”. There’s no common ownership. It’s just that the basics of life are so cheap that most people don’t have to do any work besides sit on their ass and watch TV/play videogames. And nobody cares about making the lazy bums work, because it’s more work to get them to work than they’re worth. Their work is pretty much worthless, because since everything can come out of a replicator what CAN they do? They aren’t needed to produce widgets, they aren’t needed for anything. Let em starve? Why? It costs almost nothing to provide them with the basics of life, so who cares?
In this future world a minority of people are working hard on projects that seem good to them. Maybe there’s some sort of system of accounting or keeping score, or maybe not. The people who want to get really big projects done still need the work of other talented people, so perhaps there’s still a robust capitalist economy going–but only people who care participate in it. If you want to build a submersible to explore Europa’s oceans, you’re not going to be able to order out of a box–unless someone’s already created the plans for one. But in this world the specifications for the machine are the important part. Getting it built is easy, designing it is hard. But once you’ve designed it, what’s the point of keeping it secret?
There will still be scarce resources, but things we think of today as scarce will be as common as kudzu. There will still be government, because people are still gonna be selfish jerks who get into bar fights over who disrespected who. And somebody’s gotta stop kids from flooding the Mississippi River with ooblek just because they think it would be cool. There would still be trade, because while it might be possible for 100 million people to live in Manhattan if we build tall enough, people are still going to fight over who gets to live on the top floor. But it isn’t going to resemble our current system much.
Lemur866, I’ve actually given a little thought to what you’re describing, -in the context of a sci-fi story of course, 'cause it ain’t gonna happen in reality. (Among other things you have to achieve free power.) I postulated, though, that the society had evolved into a barely-capitalist heavily-socialist society. Which is to say, there’s the Megacorp/government that handles and distributes fabrication specs (which in my regime are time-coded to expire), which they charge for the use of, but they also allow universal free access to a certain set of specs and distribute some discretionary money, the sum of which is sufficient to life comfortably on, if not grandly. Money is pretty cheap as well - as there is literally no actual cost to fabricate anything (not even a power cost), all the specs are very cheap, with the only reason to charge anything for anything being to incentivize labor to a degree. Spec creation is a nice career path, of course, but performance and artistic content creation are lucrative as well. Though of course it doesn’t take much in the way of lucrativity to make you the material equivalent of a multi-billionaire, given that the specs are priced so that the average basically unemployed fellow has a chance of accessing them on his standard discretionary dole.
It may be worth noting that this is unlike pure socialism in that that would disincentivize all labor, beyond the minimum to be allowed to eat. And if there were fabricators that could create food, then that’d deincentivize all work period and there’d be no reason to even bother to create new specs - all you’d see are the occasional hobbyists releasing increasingly more accurate scale models of the Enterprise.
One thing that I hadn’t considered that you mention was “sex with an attractive woman.” I think in a full-fledged fabricator society, prostitution would be essentially dead - there’d be no way to pay for it sufficiently to merit it happening. You couldn’t become a functional multibillionaire out of it like being a rock star would make you, because you couldn’t service that many people, and none of them, (except the rock stars) could afford to pay you enough to be worth your while.
This would have the tragic effect of making us men have to actually woo our dates with soft words and free fabricated beer, rather than taking the direct approach. In this way the socialized-capitalist-fabricator model is inferior to the pure socialism model, because there the prostitutes will gladly work for free, for the good of the people, and everybody can have as many prostitutes as they need. Much better!
I don’t think so; you just need enough power, not unlimited power; combined with an automated economy & infrastructure.
That’s what the replicated sex droids are for . . .
But how does the Megacorp charge for specifications? Or to put it another way, how do average people pay for them, since their labor is worthless?
In a replicator system the specifications are like software today. You can pay for specifications if you want something specific, but there’s bound to be a free alternative available. And as the software ecology matures, there are more and more free alternatives because software doesn’t go away. If you want the latest and greatest and newest game, you’ve got to pay. But you can pick up old games for essentially free, and there are thousands of free games and mods that were designed for fun.
Or if you want someone to spend hundreds of hours creating the exact thing you want, you often have to pay them. Otherwise they’ll spend hundreds of hours creating what they want. But if there are enough people who create for their own purposes, you can get pretty close to what you want without needing to pay anything.
This is the way software is heading. Why pay for Microsoft Office when OpenOffice is free? It makes sense today to pay for an operating system since Linux isn’t ready for prime time, but is that still going to be the case in 10 or 20 years?
I predict that the software industry is going to be changing radically in the next few decades. A mature software industry isn’t going to need the latest operating system, or office suite, or photoshop suite. People will still make a living, but the current cash cows will all be replaced with free versions. Hard to compete against free.
And in a world of replicators, what’s the point of trying to charge people for specifications? After all, most people’s labor is going to be worth almost nothing. Why would a Megacorp produce specifications for consumer products when last year’s consumer product specifications are still perfectly good? And eventually everything moves to the public domain. Hard to compete against free. Especially once replicator specifications get leaked. Set your replicator to make more replicators, and then we’re in uncharted territory.
Not that this requires Star Trek style replicators–just automated manufacturing that’s a few orders of magnitude cheaper than what we have today. A factory that can be given the specification for a Ferrari and the right feedstock, and a few hours later your Ferrari comes off the assembly line, and it doesn’t cost much. At some point the necessities of life become cheap enough to produce that it’s perverse to expect the average person to have to work for them, since the average person can’t produce anything anybody wants anyway.
Orwell’s Animal Farm. Everyone is equal, but some are more equal.
I just want to say that this has been one of the best threads I’ve ever seen. Thoughtful, well written and laugh-out-loud funny in equal measure. (Except those few pots of mine).
Well done all.
Allow me, then, to return the charge of ‘missing something’:
Or you can determine the average amount of labor time actually needed to produce a given commodity and say that an equal amount of productive labor expended on an individual’s part earn him or her the right to claim that commodity in return. No money, no barter, simply a direct exchange between labor and consumption. With the added bonus that increases in productive efficiency consequently reduce the number of work-hours required to claim commodities in return.
I don’t assume much of anything, this especially. Generating a permanent surplus of goods is the goal of socialism, and that takes concrete effort and planning. That effort and planning, however, is the task of the people who make the revolution, and not the people who today argue for its necessity.
Since I don’t argue that there can be any such thing as a socialist country, the assumption you claim here is nothing more than putting words in my mouth.
See above. Monetary value, yes - use value, no. Can’t abolish use value without abolishing commodities completely, which is probably only feasible via the annihilation of the human race - something that capitalism has, unfortunately, made all too possible.
From the blinkered viewpoint that socialism can exist in one country, or alongside capitalism in the same world, probably. From my viewpoint? Nope. A worldwide cooperative system makes a working knowledge of the world’s total production almost a necessity.
Oh no, quite the opposite - there will be problems, and they will need to be solved. But they won’t be seemingly insoluble problems like “How can we feed the world and still make a profit?”
And when did I ever argue that we should tell people they can’t have things? Except, perhaps, in your heavily filtered view of what I’m actually saying.
Saying that Russia or Paris had a socialist revolution is not the same thing as saying a country is socialist. Revolutions are attempts at improving the conditions for establishing socialism, nothing more.