Ask the Socialist candidate for the European Parliament election

Great Debates
401

I kind of figured you were going to include financial jobs as being ‘socially unproductive’. And the military, of course. Lawyers?

Financial people are very productive. They are absolutely necessary to the efficient functioning of an economy. Without a military, you’d be controlled by someone else.

Your ‘peer reviewed’ paper is a Marxist analysis that chooses to consider supervisory labor as ‘non-productive’. In fact, he considers any labor that does not directly result in the creation of a commodity to be ‘non-productive’. In his world, the guy who bashes tin with a hammer to make a fender is highly productive, but the guy who figures out a way to make ten fenders in the same amount of time by making sure workers are working towards the same goal and working on time and on a schedule is non-productive. He also treats people like marketers who connect products with consumers and who determine what people need, to be non-productive.

He invokes the widely discredited Marxist labor theory of value to back up this nonsense. Capitalists, financiers, entrepreneurs, project managers, warehouse managers, lawyers, accountantants… All non-productive. All of them just spread around the wealth created by the working class, taking a whopping cut for themselves.

There’s nothing new here. This is boilerplate Marxist drivel. People who believe that managers and analysts and capitalists add no value to production are not to be taken seriously.

What journal was this published in?

402

It was presented at the (ahem) well known CONGRÈS MARX INTERNATIONAL IV conference in 2004. In this context, I suppose peer reviewed means “at least two people have read it.”

403

That highlights something else I never can understand about socialism. Managers and accountants and so forth are unproductive. So we won’t have any of those under socialism. But somebody is responsible for managing inventory in the magic store to see when all the Lamborghinis are taken, and to decide that I and my friends can’t have the machine tools to make automatic weapons.

Is that kind of work productive?

Does this include teachers? How about entertainers, or sportsmen?

And again, I don’t see how it works. Under socialism, everything is so much more productive that we can all work a lot less, and do non-productive things. Because we are not doing the non-productive things we are doing under socialism.

Regards,
Shodan

404

See, the distinction between capital goods and user goods is simply nonsensical. A pair of shoes isn’t a capital good. But if I put on a pair of shoes and start a courier service, suddenly those shoes become an essential capital good because I couldn’t do my job without them. Suddenly the shoes become a means of production.

We can easily imagine the same with a car, a boat, a computer, a desk, a building, a hammer, a nail, a soldering iron, a knife, a conveyer belt, and so on.

Why is it that if someone uses a hammer from the commons to use for home maintanaince (of a home owned by the commons of course) that’s fine, but if someone uses that same hammer to fix other people’s homes in exchange for goods and services then that’s theft from the commons?

The same person doing the same action with the same tool. In one instance we have usufruct, in the other we have exploitative capitalist running dog appropriation.

The problem is that every good is supposed to satisfy a need. A capital good supply a need just the same as a consumer good, the only difference is the capital good supplies the need to produce a consumer good. Nobody needs a drill, what they need is a hole. The drill is just a way to satisfy that need.

405

The notion that banks, supervisors and others who do not perform direct assembly line labor are unproductive is just so ignorant that whoever believes that really needs to take a step back and learn quite a few things.

This is like a child who opens a computer and says all those parts in there are useless just because he does not understand what they do.

Other people understand how free market capitalism works. Just because you do not understand it does not mean anything is wrong with it. On the contrary, it has proven it is the best system which will satisfy the needs of most people to the highest possible degree.

Communism did not understand this and it failed. Communism was the biggest experiment of the 20th century and the results are conclusive. The collectivization of property was followed by millions of deaths from hunger in the Soviet Union and in China, plus millions more killed in the repressions which resulted from trying to keep that system going against the will of the people. How anyone can now ignore this and defend such a system is just astounding.

406

Thanks for your participation in this thread. You’ve saved me the trouble of addressing a lot of the economic questions myself, and in some cases put the answers in better words than I could have.

407

Well, there are two points to consider here: first, it’s not going to be the Party which brings about the social revolution, but the working class itself. (And again, by “working class”, I mean everyone who needs to work for a living, or is a dependent of someone who does.) Second, any “plans” we have about how to achieve socialism, and how to operate it, must be necessarily vague at this point. As we freely admit, there are only a tiny number of socialists now, and it would be both premature and undemocratic of us to spell out in detail exactly how socialism will be established and administered. As others have said, we do not write recipies for the cookbooks of the future. Exactly how socialism comes about will depend on the conditions at the time. Now, when there are so few of us, we can say only generally that it must come using existing democratic institutions (i.e., universal suffrage and the ballot). When there is a sufficiently large majority that wants socialism, they will vote for it, and we can get to work on implementing it. How we get from today to that point is something that socialists are obviously concerned with, and about which there is considerable debate. We all seem to agree that what we need to focus on at this point is spreading our ideas, which we do in a variety of ways (films, books, pamphlets, meetings, public debates, electoral campaigning, etc). Some of our energies are also directed towards developing models of how a socialist society would work in practice, though again, at this point it would be premature to adopt any of them as anything like an “official” blueprint. If you wish, I can refer you to our own publications which discuss possibilities for practical socialism in varying levels of detail.

408

You can say “It’s magic” just as well as anyone. Would you care to address the whole “inventory control but no accountants/projects but no managers/offices with no documentation” thing?

Regards,
Shodan

409

People will only have free access to the goods and services they need only if people agree to freely produce and distribute them. Much of the incentive, then, will be the expectation of reciprocity; for socialism to work there must be the understanding among the vast majority of people that if no food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment get produced, then no food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment get consumed.

Other incentives have already been discussed elsewhere in this thread, but to summarize a few of them:
[ul]
[li]Most people simply enjoy doing certain kinds of work. Most scientists and artists, for example, enter those professions not because they expect to get rich but because they have a drive to research, to teach, to create art, and/or to entertain people. The same can be said for many or most people in technical and professional jobs, and even for many people in unskilled or semiskilled jobs. Therefore, much of the time no external incentive is necessary.[/li][li]For those jobs people find unpleasant, since there is no profit motive, in socialism we would be free to alter the work conditions and methodology to make them more enjoyable, even if it comes at the expense of some efficiency. For instance, it has been shown that employees who assemble cars are much happier when they can completely build individual cars from scratch in small teams, rather than working in isolation, performing a single repetitive task on an assembly line. In some cases, therefore, we are not creating an external incentive so much as removing a disincentive; the above point may then apply.[/li][li]Most people find any job becomes unpleasant when they are compelled to perform them for long periods. The removal of jobs engaged in socially unproductive labour will free a great proportion of the working population to direct their labours more productively, resulting in a reduction of working hours across the board.[/li][li]Some people may be motivated to perform jobs they wouldn’t otherwise find pleasant or appealing through social rewards, such as prestige, respect, and gratitude. Even in capitalism this form of unpaid labour is fairly common; who hasn’t done some favour for a friend, or agreed to perform some service for a club or other organization to which they belong, simply because they were cajoled into doing it?[/li][/ul]

410

At first I was going to post this as a lighthearted joke, but now I am curious:

Wikipedia lists the SPGB as having perhaps 500 members with roughly 150 actively voting. What is to prevent 500+ people who want you out of their hair from joining your party and then voting to sit back and do nothing at all? Or to actively promote capitalism and big government? They could simply say “This is the way we see as being the best way to reach our stated goals…just go with it.” Are you able to tell the majority that their chosen methods are wrong? Or would the original group just leave and start a new party?

What I don’t get, and I fully support you right to think and act as you wish, is how is a few hundred people telling 6-7 billion people “Trust us, this is for the best, if you just listen to us you will see we are right” different than hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of politicians doing the same thing?

Good Luck anyway.

411

With respect, I think you are missing out on the distinction between “productive” and “socially productive” labour. I don’t recall if I ever explained this distinction, so perhaps this is my fault. Socially productive jobs are ones which result in the creation of new wealth. By “wealth”, I mean some product of human labour, acting upon natural materials, which is capable of satisfying human needs. This identifies wealth with use value (cf. exchange value), which has been discussed by Olentzero and MrDibble elsewhere in this thread. Thus, a farmer is socially productive, because she produces food which people need to eat. However, a minter of coins is not productive because the coins he produces are not capable of satisfying human needs, except when exchanged for other goods. In capitalism, therefore, food has both use value and exchange value, whereas coins have exchange value but no use value.

To call a certain job “unproductive” is not an insult; it’s simply a way of characterizing jobs which do not produce wealth. There are certainly many types of unproductive jobs which are quite useful in any society—doctors and scientists, for example. But there is another whole class of unproductive jobs whose usefulness is strictly bound to the type of society they are performed in. In capitalism, jobs in the financial and military sectors are, as you noted, quite vital to the functioning of society. However, in socialism they would be completely useless.

It was published in a volume of conference proceedings, as I noted in the original post.

412

Perhaps uniquely among political parties, at least in this country, we require people to demonstrate an understanding and acceptance of our object and principles before joining. This takes the form of a written or oral interview. It is not uncommon for candidates to be turned away. This isn’t elitism (since the questions we ask aren’t particularly difficult to answer) but rather a check to ensure that the candidate isn’t making a mistake in joining a political party whose views he doesn’t understand or agree with.

If 500 people really wanted to get together to infiltrate and then dissolve the Party or change its object, I suppose they could, if they were willing to go to the trouble of familiarizing themselves with socialism first. But all this would net them is our financial assets; the original members of the Party would still be socialists and would simply leave to set up another party. Thus it wouldn’t be getting rid of us so much as setting us back financially.

The scenario you describe is actually not so unfathomable. Many political groups (especially Trotskyists) practice a technique known as entryism: that is, infiltrating another political group with the goal of taking it over. Various Trotskyist groups in Britain have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to take over various unions and political parties in Britain, including the Labour Party. The fact that they haven’t been able to do so to the SPGB is good evidence that our membership examination is, so far at least, a sufficient barrier to this type of threat.

On the surface it’s not any different. However, consider two points: First, we are quite open about our organization’s goals and principles, and also about its administration. All of our internal meetings and records, save our membership register, are open to the public. We welcome debate with other political groups, and will give anyone else use of our platform in exchange for a right to reply. We have nothing to hide, and welcome scrutiny of our ideas and organization. Thus, unlike many other parties, we are not simply telling people that we are right, but rather inviting them to weigh for themselves both our and our opponents’ arguments. Second, at this point there are so few of us that we consider it undemocratic to lay out in detail our plans for how a socialist society would operate. We are therefore not proposing to impose a plan on 7 billion people; rather, we are asking them, if they agree with our analysis of capitalism and on the possibility of socialism, to join with us and eventually develop such a plan.

413

You emphasize the word “conference” as if to imply that there’s somehow something wrong with that. Perhaps you’re not familiar with science and academia, but peer-reviewed conference proceedings is the most common venue for publishing academic and scientific articles. In every conference in which I have participated, either as an author or a reviewer, there have been at least three reviewers, and sometimes as many as five. The reviewers are all professionals (e.g., professors, post-docs, or research scientists) selected by the programme committee on the basis of their familiarity with the subject matter. Reviews are usually blind (that is, the authors’ names and institutions are removed from the paper). Conference papers are presented orally to a room full of peers, after which questions and criticism are solicited from the audience.

I don’t know much about the Congrès Marx International, but if it operates anything like the conferences I’ve attended, the paper in question was probably reviewed by a number of academic or professional economists familiar with Marxian value theory, and presented to anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred conference attendees.

414

I think this has been pointed out already, but this is like saying a ruler isn’t worth anything because it can only be used to measure things.

Regards,
Shodan

415

Well, you never know. Every thread has a lot more readers than posters. And anyway, people don’t tend to change their minds about big stuff like the basis of society very quickly. Maybe someone who is reading this thread will, months or years after digesting the arguments presented, eventually come to a new conclusion. That person might even be me.

416

You mean you didn’t see the umpteen times I already answered this question? Socialism has never worked because socialism has never been tried. If you are referring to the socioeconomic system practiced in China, Cuba, and North Korea, and the former USSR and Eastern Bloc, that wasn’t socialism; that was state capitalism imposed by a tiny cadre of violent revolutionaries. Even their hero Lenin openly admitted that. (Or rather, he openly defined the former as the latter. Which is fine, but I’m not talking about Leninism in this thread.) Under their “socialism” they still had authoritarianism, government, money, wages, employment, buying and selling, etc. With such fundamental differences their system resembles in almost no way what I have been advocating in this thread, not even as an intermediate stage.

417

That doesn’t answer the question. If socialism is so congenial to human nature, and we are all naturally altruistic, why has it never been tried?

It has all these obvious advantages, and we all will never have to work once we get rid of all the accountants and managers. And the magic commons store will fill up like the magic porridge pot and we will all be farting thru silk.

But it’s never been tried. Why is that?

Might the reason be that it has been tried, and immediately descends into slaughter and exploitation because human nature is not as sunny and bright as you seem to believe?

Or else because you can’t seem to come up with any answers for how this all is going to work, and do a lot of blather and hand-waving about first we have to build an overwhelming consensus and then we can decide how to make magic happen.

Regards,
Shodan

418

I’m a PhD candidate at a top 3 UK university, and as such am well acquainted with the academic hierarchy, so am well aware that conferences are at the bottom of the pile. They are the most common venue for publishing precisely because they have the lowest barrier to entry, and a conference which is explicitly for Marxist theory is still less likely to reject Marxist content.

Peer review is not a kite mark, it is a process, and it’s right to question who the peers were, and how rigorous the review.

419

It’s not a matter of human nature. Socialism wouldn’t work even if every person on the planet believed in it as fervently as Jimmy Stewart believed in Harvey the Rabbit.

The fact is, socialism fails because it has no mechanism for complex organization, for the capital aggregation required to build expensive factories, or for real information about the needs and desires of the populace to be sorted out and ordered efficiently and be delivered to those who need to know it.

Let’s say I’m a die-hard altruist who wants to do my socialist best for society. What shall I make? How do I know what people need? Oh, I’m sure you could make a ‘needs bank’ online or something and I could go there and find lists of what people are asking for. But how do I know what has priority? How does anyone? If I need a $10 million dollar forming machine to build what I want to build, how do I get one? Yes, I know there’s no money, so let’s say I need a machine that will take 100 of my fellow travelers a year to build. How do I convince them to build it for me? How do they know if my need is greater than the needs of the people they are already building things for?

If they decide to build it for me, how do they find enough raw steel? What if there isn’t any, because others have used it all up? What if there aren’t enough machines needed to mine the raw steel and deliver it? What if there aren’t enough machines because there isn’t enough copper to make the windings for the motors in those machines, because no one has thought to open new copper mines to meet demand?

Until a socialist can give me a credible, detailed explanation for how the means of production will be efficiently allocated and the information regarding the needs of billions of people will be filtered directly to those who need to know (activities which capitalism excels at), I can’t take any of this seriously. And whenever I ask, the response is usually boilerplate Marxist drivel, or dismissal of the question as not being interesting or relevant, or dead silence.

If you want to see what full ‘social production’ looks like without the advantages of capital accumulation and information transfer that capitalism offers, just have a look at any poor country with subsistence agriculture. They must be rich, what with all the amazing socially productive labor going on, and with none of that non-socially productive labor like banking, investment, management, marketing, and business planning. Vietnam in the 1980’s is a perfect model for this kind of society. Paradise!

420

There are equivalent conferences on UFOs, homeopathic medicine, and other crackpot theories. Often there are people there with Ph.D’s - usually in other fields - who are willing to ‘peer review’ papers. It’s really just a way of stamping what looks like the approval of academia on a load of rubbish.