Bullshit. You can also let people choose for themselves, rather than using your numerical advantage to force your views on other people. There’s nothing stopping you and your mates cutting yourselves off from capitalism right now, and setting up some socialist commune somewhere. We’d be wishing you luck, if not for your insistence on conducting the biggest robbery in the history of mankind to make your plan work.
Again, psychonaut: Never mind your long-term vision of a global socialist community. You are running for a public office in the European Union, an established political institution with a geographically and constitutionally limited jurisdiction. If elected, what exactly do you intend to do, as a Socialist MEP? That’s what the voters want, or should want, to know.
:dubious: What, individually? Choose the basic socioeconomic circumstances of their lives, individually? No, sir, you can’t. That is not an option. Never was, never will be. The whole of Libertarianism is based on a lie in contradiction of that plain and obvious fact.
No, you wouldn’t.
Yes, I would. Because if a bunch of consenting adults want to pool their resources for the use of the entire group, it doesn’t hurt me one bit. It’s only because Psychonaut wants to force other people into the collective, and dismantle the most vital components of government, that I oppose him.
I’m still only on page two of this thread, but so far I’ve noticed that many of the questions or objections raised have to do with the subject of greed, altruism, and human nature. Some posters are claiming that humans are naturally greedy, aggressive, or otherwise antisocial, or that everyone would have to “become” altruistic in order for socialism to work. There is no denying that people have the capacity to be greedy and violent, but it is equally evident that we have the ability to be kind and altruistic. The question is, are individual humans genetically programmed to show one trait or the other, or are we capable of a range of behaviours which manifest themselves in different social environments? There is a wealth of information showing that not only is the latter the case, but that humans are preferentially pro-social in their behaviour, and that we tend to have an exaggerated notion of the prevalence of anti-social behaviour precisely because, when it does occur, it stands out in such stark contrast to our normal state of being.
One independent researcher who has made an in-depth study of human nature is Alfie Kohn. Obviously I cannot repeat in detail all of his research here, but I will quote some of the things he has observed and the conclusions he has reached:
In his book The Brighter Side of Human Nature, Kohn spends 15 pages tackling the question of whether aggressive behaviour is part of human nature. He concludes that it isn’t. Here are some extracts:
Kohn devotes three chapters to altruism versus individualism, and the motivation for people to work. He addresses that part of the “human nature” argument which states that the world’s work will only get done if people are paid to do it. Kohn observes that “[p]eople do their best work when they find it fun, not when they are in it for the money”. Rewards actually erode intrinsic interest. He found that encouraging pro-social behaviour by the use of incentives or other appeals to self-interest don’t work very well, or only work in the short run.
There are independent sources and studies, besides Kohn’s, which support this point of view, and socialists have long relied upon them when dealing with this “human nature” argument. Unfortunately, a lot of our articles and pamphlets on the topic are not yet online, but the following material is relevant and may be of interest to those who raised this issue:
[ul]
[li]Human-nature[/li][li]But what about human nature?[/li][li]Questions of the Day: Human nature[/li][li]Is socialism against human nature?[/li][li]Some notes on man’s social nature[/li][/ul]
I don’t see where you get the idea that we advocate an “intermediate stage” or a “transitional period”; we’ve always made a point of saying that we don’t. We propose sending delegates to Parliament not because we want to participate in government, but because we need to gauge the electorate’s support for socialism, and to allow these delegates to observe first-hand and report back on the workings of government. Keep in mind that if we are ever going to have socialism, it’s not the socialist MPs who are going to establish it nor the Socialist Party itself, but rather the people themselves.
In an absolute sense, of course, but that doesn’t really enter into it. What we are concerned about is the availability of resource in relation to people’s need for them. Thus, while there are only a finite number of oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, we can still refer to it as a non-scare resource, because there is enough air for everyone to breathe.
I see plenty of scarcity in capitalism. Millions of people have little or no access to food, medicine, shelter, and clean drinking water. While nature and technology have given us the capacity to meed these needs, artificial conditions of scarcity prevent them from being fulfilled.
Are you suggesting that a centralized or planned economy would be necessary to produce or allocate goods? Because that doesn’t happen even in capitalism.
Whoever wants to become a doctor could become one. If there are not enough doctors, society will recognize this need and encourage more people to study medicine. If there are too many doctors, some of them can direct their productive energies to other pursuits some or all of the time. Again, there’s nothing particularly difficult about this. There will be no central planning agency determining who gets to study medicine in socialism, just as there is none under capitalism today.
Ah, finally we come to a good question (well, apart from the “everyone would want to be movie stars” bit, which is just silly). Certainly there will be some jobs which are less pleasant than others. How would we ensure that these get done? There are a number of ways of addressing this. First, under capitalism, work tends to be a chore, and in some cases quite miserable. This is due to (among other things) two reasons: we have to do an awful lot of it, and the manner in which we do it is often unrewarding. As I mentioned in a previous post, a phenomenal proportion of the labour that goes on today is concerned solely with the maintenance of the money supply and other property relations. If the workers in these jobs were freed of this socially unproductive labour, they could then direct their energies to other, more useful jobs. The net result is that everyone would end up having to work fewer days in a week in order for us to maintain the same standard of living. So work—even unpleasant work—might not be such a chore, simply because there wouldn’t be as much of it.
To illustrate my comment about unrewarding production methods, consider assembly-line factory work. This tends to be boring and repetitive. Furthermore assembly line workers, being constrained to a specific task, rarely get to see the fruits of their work. Studies have shown that when workers are taken off assembly lines, and trained instead to build complete products in small groups, job satisfaction shoots up dramatically, with only a small loss in overall efficiency. In capitalism this loss in efficiency is unacceptable given the need to improve profits, but in socialism there’s no reason why some efficiency couldn’t be sacrificed if it meant allowing people to get satisfaction out of previously mundane jobs.
Another way of improving unpleasant jobs is automation. In socialism we could direct more research efforts to automating jobs that people are reluctant to do. Certainly much automation occurs under capitalism, though we tend to focus on automating jobs which are expensive to perform manually rather than those which are unpleasant.
Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that people already perform unpleasant jobs without any monetary or material compensation. We all tend to take out our trash and clean our own toilets because of the unpleasant consequences of not doing so. When living with others, most roommates and families share these chores. In various social groups and organizations, people routinely volunteer to perform less pleasant jobs, because they know they need to get done somehow, and possibly also for the admiration of their peers.
We’re back to specious arguments again, I see. It is not the case that there is only enough food on the planet to give everyone 1000 calories a day. It is not true that everyone wants to live in London.
Of course I can’t show that. There has never been a socialist or communist country in the sense that we have been discussing in this thread.
Of course we will need to track and plan production. What led you to believe that I said we wouldn’t? All I said is that this could be done without money.
Not off the top of my head, but I’ll see if I can dig up a reference for you.
Please don’t exaggerate my words. I said that your example presupposed an extreme specialization of labour that doesn’t exist under capitalism. And it’s self-evident that this is correct. There are no mindless robots whose only useful function in life is to make TVs. Everyone has a variety of skills which, if not applied at their place of work, often manifest themselves in unpaid labour such as hobbies and maintenance of their homes and families. Even the least skilled television assembly-line worker is able to cook, clean, mind children, help out around the house, and do other socially productive work. I’m sure that many of them could indeed fix a car, sew a shirt, or grow potatoes, as you challenged.
It’s the other way around; it’s not that socialism requires a post-scarcity economy, but that socialism will bring such an economy about. The technology developed during capitalism has given us the ability to produce enough to meet the needs of the world’s population; the only problem is that it’s not being applied to do so. Thus any currently existing scarcity is artificial in nature.
Well, you got it almost right. Scarcity will be artificially enforced until such time as we have enough socialistst to implement socialism. Being a truly democratic system without leaders and governments, there would be no one “at the helm”.
If I believed socialism was indeed against human nature (which it isn’t—see my earlier post on the topic), or that some other aspect of the world made it impossible, I would indeed compromise. I haven’t been a socialist forever and I might not be one in ten or twenty years. It depends on what the available evidence tells me, and there’s no shame in revising or changing one’s opinions in the light of new facts. As Bertrand Russel said,
I can’t speak for other people calling themselves “socialist”, but the Socialist Party denounced the Russian Revolution as non-socialist within hours of hearing of it. Russia at the time was, in most respects, a feudal society; there is no way the vast masses of peasants could even have heard of socialism. It was clear that the revolution was carried out by a tiny minority of relatively educated persons, not by the working class as a whole. At least Lenin was honest enough to admit that the best this vanguard could do was establish state capitalism (i.e., government control of a capitalist economy). That remained the USSR’s socio-economic system until its collapse.
Until they learn to create matter out of vacuum, they didn’t “create” anything. It would be far more honest to say they isolated or appropriated the means of production.
On a computer. Made in a capitalist factory. And often using systems that were in the commons, but are now capitalized.
The entire existence of the Open Source movement gives the lie to this line of reasoning.
Unless you are creating your factory from raw chaos-stuff, yes, at some point you or your predecessors are stealing it - from everyone.
Why do people bother with public works and charities?
Thanks, MrDibble. I agree completely with your reply to Shodan, and probably couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself. 
I’ve been following this thread with some interest and frustration, so let me present a real-world problem and ask for a socialist solution. The problem is immigration into the United States (or, substitute “the geographical region occupied by the former United States” in the stateless, socialist future–I will abbreviate by just writing “the United States”):
First, I present three facts:
[ol]
[li]There are currently more people who wish to immigrate into the United States than the government believes is optimal. This is evidenced by the fact that there is at least one person currently residing in the United States illegally.[/li][li]There is at least one person in the United States who believes that more people should be allowed to legally enter the country than are currently allowed, as evidenced by the existence of this editorial.[/li][li]There is at least one person in the United States who believes that fewer people should be allowed to enter the country than currently are, as evidenced by the existence of this political advocacy group.[/li][/ol]
Now, what is the socialist solution to this problem? Specifically, answer:
[ol]
[li]By what method would a socialist world determine the optimal number of people who should immigrate to the United States, or, equivalent, determine the optimal number of people who should reside in the United States? Presumably this will be determined by a vote, but who gets to vote (e.g., only current residents of the United States? Only those who want to immigrate? Both? The entire world?)? If there are more than two options on the ballot (e.g., 250 million, 300 million, 350 million, etc.), what voting method is used (this can make a significant difference in the outcome)?[/li][li](a) Suppose that the optimal population of the United States determined by the algorithm you gave is less than the number of people who wish to reside in the United States. What method will be used to determine which individuals are allowed to reside in the United States? (b) If the situation described in (a) is impossible (the optimal population will always be at least the number who wish to reside there), please provide an argument for why this is the case.[/li][li]For that matter, what if the determined optimal population is greater than the number that wish to reside there? What then?[/li][/ol]
No - actually, they did create something, generally referred to as “value”.
No, “created” is more accurate. You can’t steal something that doesn’t exist - therefore I am not stealing. There was no business, now there is one. I own it, because I created it; you don’t, because you didn’t.
And my own ingenuity and experience, for which I am paid.
A quick question - I assume you work for a living. Why don’t you do it for free?
Regards,
Shodan
I guess you are going further than even Olentzero - socialism (in your sense) has never existed, and will never exist, until everybody on earth decides to do it at once.
IOW, there is no need to worry about air pollution, and I can emit as much as I like - air is a non-scarce resource. Same with fresh water - I can use as much of it as I want, and nonsense about sustainable agriculture is easily ignored. Water falls from the sky - what are you worrying about?
Regards,
Shodan
So much for the “workers paradise”.
It didn’t work, it won’t work, it CAN’T work.
This is turning into a futile exercise, as I knew it would.
Psychonaut: I am fully aware that you have your socialist bible of articles written by fellow socialists (all your cites are non-peer reviewed articles written for a socialist journal). Those articles are so full of straw men and logical fallacies that I don’t even know where to start. And I’m familiar with how this game works - if I go to the trouble of refuting every point line-by-line, you’ll simply dump a few more articles in my lap without comment, and if I don’t respond to them you’ll say “Hah! You don’t have an answer!”. And we’ll repeat ad nauseum. This is the same form of argumentation you get with JFK assassination conspiracy theorists and idiots who believe the moon landings didn’t happen.
Nonetheless, I will pull one item out at random. From this link:
How do you define ‘need’? What if my definition is different from yours? In America, the poverty line is set at about twice the world income. Clearly, Americans have a different definition of ‘need’ than someone in Zimbabwe.
I don’t desire things simply because my neighbor has them. I desire them because once they exist and are shown to be useful, I can see how they could better my own life. Your cites all make the assumption that materialism and ‘acquisitiveness’ is the result of capitalistic competition, and that if capitalism went away, people would feel less need to compete, and therefore they would want fewer things. This is a gross, fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates people.
As long as everything is as abundant as the air. And if no one has to do physical labor to create it. Both conditions only exist in fairy tales.
Here’s a simple question for you: Can I just take a car out of the ‘common store’? If so, please tell me what incentive I have to maintain it? Why not just run it into the ground and then go get another one?
Oh, that’s hilarious. Because throughout history, people have always looked upon those who hoard things with humor and sympathy. Like those Kulaks mentioned at the start of the Russian Revolution. Or the wealthy classes in any ‘people’s revolution’ for that matter.
All of this nonsense flows from your basic assumption that under socialism, there will be no scarcity. Take that assumption away, and your whole model breaks down. And that assumption is frankly nuts.
First fallacy: The weak association made between the draft and human aggressiveness. The fact that some countries draft citizens has nothing to do with whether or not people are aggressive.
Second fallacy: The notion that the problem is ‘natural aggressiveness’ in the first place. People aren’t ‘naturally aggressive’, but they do seek their own self-interest. Populations come into conflict when their needs and desires collide, not because they’re just naturally aggressive. The Native Americans fought with each other all the time, and yet there was no capitalism to make them do so. It wasn’t because they were naturally aggressive, it was because they came into conflict because they wanted what the others had, or feared that the others would take what they had.
In the history of the world, the pattern is clear. When government and the rule of law breaks down, people generally form into tribal units, clans, or other organizations of mutual interest and defense, and then spend a lot of their time fighting off the other tribal units and clans. Eventually, one group becomes larger and stronger than the rest, and begins to dominate at the expense of the others. It’s not like anarchism has never been tried before, you know.
Straw man. No one ever claimed they did. There is plenty of evidence, however, that animals and humans are naturally territorial and will fight with each other if necessary to protect their territory or belongings.
So as a test of this, would you say that people were less aggressive before the era of mass media? Do you have some evidence of that?
Another straw man. Of course people will do something. Hell, even cave men painted pictures on the walls when they had nothing better to do. The question isn’t whether everyone would just lay down and sleep or vegetate if they had nothing to do - the question is whether they would do anything that’s particularly productive in terms of the needs of society.
And do you know what happens when they do that? They gravitate to those activities that derive the most value for other people, because those are the activities that pay the most. If the pay is too low, it means no one values what they offer enough to give up the money that they would rather spend on an activity that represents higher value to them.
It is precisely this aspect of capitalism which directs labor to the most efficient, most highly desired activities. It’s precisely what is lost in your socialist world.
I’d love to spend my time painting and making models and playing pool. But I’m not a good enough painter for anyone to want what I paint, and I’m not a good enough pool player to get people to want to pay to watch me do it. In your socialist world, I would be very industrious, and I’d be busy all day long. But I wouldn’t be creating anything of value that anyone wants. So all that productive effort I do in my job today, which IS quite valuable, would be lost.
All the evidence we have ALSO suggests that without proper incentives, there aren’t enough people who will voluntarily produce the goods and services we need. Because if there were, the capitalist system would die a natural death as for-profit activities were replaced by free goods and services.
Your links are all like this. Hardly a paragraph goes by without asserting a huge fallacy or straw man of some sort. I can’t believe anyone could read this stuff and actually buy it, unless you want to believe it so fervently that you simply turn off any critical thinking and just skim the material looking for sound bites and snippets you can use to justify what you want to believe in the first place. None of this would come even remotely close to passing a peer review of anyone other than fellow travelers.
The point is that under socialism, you have the right to go on strike. providing you don’t mind getting killed for trying it.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, most of the cites I have provided are short articles published on the web or in socialist journals. That’s because they’re polemic in nature and addressed to a general audience, not to academics. (Many of the claims they make, though, are based on and/or are supported by academic research; my references to Kohn’s studies are one example.) If you want to discuss fine-grained economic details with degree-holding socialist economists, that could probably be arranged. You could also read Capital, I suppose, which has probably had thousands upon thousands of articles published about its economic claims and findings in peer-reviewed journals.
I’m sorry you have this prejudice (and it can only be prejudice, because as far as I know, you have never debated with me before on these boards, nor with any of my colleagues). I have done my best to provide arguments to all the points which have been raised here, and have occasionally posted links to further reading, being sure to label them as such. (I’ve never simply written, “The following set of articles is my argument. Go read them and come back.”) Of course, the more detailed this discussion gets, the more we will have to rely on citing outside sources, simply to avoid repeating observations, calculations, and expositions that others before us have done. Otherwise we’d end up reconstructing the entire body of knowledge about economics from first principles, which would take a lifetime.
That said, it’s getting fairly late here, so I’m not going to address the rest of the points in your post now. Given that you think it’s a futile exercise though, do you even want me to? I’m happy to gracefully let you have the last word.
Except that Capital doesn't describe in detail how exactly a socialist economy would work. And of course Marx's economics was thoroughly refuted more than a 100 years ago and the theory of value on which he based his work largely abandoned as well. We aren't talking about state of the art economics here.
And anyway most socialists believe in central planning not an economy without government and money. If you have a cite that explains in detail how such an economy would work I would love to read it. Because frankly your posts on the matter are completely naive.