Just jumping in to say that I have enjoyed following the thread.
Socialism, I think it’s a respectable pursuit and not delusional either as it’s acknowledged that it won’t happen in any near or medium future. Just go back 2000 years and people would call you crazy if you envisioned a future like today. The main problem is people who say that it’s impossible and for that reason fight it. If people would be born and raised with a different mindset than what’s fed by the capitalist society, I think it might work. For that reason I don’t understand the opposition, why not accept that it’s a noble goal and that you’d be “in” on it when time comes?
Communism, the pure communism as envisioned by Karl Marx, is an impossiblity. It assumes a few things that will never happen. it assumes everyone is willing to set aside self interest, to help the common good, forever, and with no hope or pretense of reciprocation ( from each according to his ability, to each according to his need). What happens in the usual collection of people? A few people are busting their asses (according to ability), and get nothing for it, while others ride along doing nothing and reaping the benefits (according to need). It assumes everyone is scrupulously honest, even to their own detriment. Share everything, all property and goods are “common”, and no one owns anything. Again, it won’t work because people want to keep what is theirs, they want to keep what they worked for, other people simply want to take it. In short, the honest ones get screwed (again). Everone is equal, like ummmm what? Ants in a colony? termites in a mound? No, people are not all equal. Each has different skills, different innate abilities, different temperaments, different personal goals. One size does NOT fit all.
Finally, history has shown us, that sooner or later, the “common good” becomes The State. Sooner or later, The Worker becomes in reality, the Serf. The person who is not a leader because we are all equal, becomes The Tyrant.
We get such kindly father figures as Josef Stalin, Chariman Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Sung Il, etc etc etc. The Party becomes The State, headed up by Fearless Leader, and all the “equals” in the "workers paradise are enslaved. If they dare protest, the tanks roll over them (literally).
What is “to each according to his need”, if not reciprocation for effort? I mean, c’mon, I’ve heard all the “human nature” arguments before but this is particularly obtuse.
Which takes us back to my earlier argument that people who are convinced of the need for a social revolution are going to understand the effort needed to build the new post-revolution society. They will therefore a) have no problems with stepping up to the task; and b) convincing others by force of argument and example to do the same.
I think it’s kind of quaint and charming that people still believe in this nonsense. It’s a bit like those people who try to keep the Cornish language alive.
Although it can be difficult to imagine how, for example, a feudal society could *transition * into a democratic/capitalistic one, we can see that either society has a certain amount of inherant stability. If a significant minority of people in the feudal society want to establish a democratic capitalist society, or vice-versa, there are forces built in to each system that will act to stop the change from taking place. In feudalism the lords have all the power and can use force to stop the peasants from revolting. In democratic capitalism there exist police and military forces that can enforce laws, as well as balances of power to guard against revolution from within the system.
The socialist system described in this thread, however, is unstable in that it needs near unanimous agreement on some fundamental principles. Socialism will only be established when the majority agrees they want it. Even if we assume this could happen, the new system does not seem to have any way of defending itself from a small group that arms itself and begins taking over by force. We are told that in the new system no one will want to do this, however.
It reminds me of evolutionary theory pertaining to behaviour. A behaviour will only evolve in a population if it is stable - that is, if any individual deviating from the behaviour is personally disadvantaged. Sometimes there is an optimally efficient behaviour for, say, food harvesting when done by the entire group, but it will not evolve because any individual can gain an evolutionary advantage by not doing the behaviour while still receiving the same rewards as the others. After a few generations these individuals will dominate the population and it will back to square one.
I submit that even if the nature of current humans is as **psychonaut ** says and we are currently capable of cooperating to bring about this utopia, evolution will put a stop to it.
And yet that change did take place. Violently so, in capitalism’s case at the very beginning. How does this basic theory of stability account for the actual occurrence of revolutionary change?
Neglecting some important details: A socialist revolution requires that the workers arm themselves to make it, and consequently arm themselves to defend it. Also that workers who have taken power in a socialist revolution aren’t going to quietly give it back up.
Early on, when the revolution is not completely worldwide and/or the former rulers of society are still around and still want their old power back, there will probably be instances of such attempts. Again, they’ll face armed workers who have power and won’t want to give it back. For historical examples, you could look at any of the three biggest bourgeois revolutions (England, the US, and France - different players but the same dynamic), the Paris Commune, or the Russian Civil War.
If you’re looking at innate behaviors (a very limited subset of behaviors as a whole) then your argument is fairly accurate. On the level of society as a whole, however, we’re looking at learned behaviors. Which is where further examination of the slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to their need” comes in. This is not the operative principle of socialism from Day One. Marx, in a work entitled “Critique of the Social-Democratic Programs”, has this to say:
In other words, that slogan only becomes possible when the surplus of production is large enough to make it possible. Up until that point, the operating principle is “He who does not work does not eat” - something we’re already familiar with today, of course, but the goal today is profit for a tiny minority at the top of society rather than the socialist goal of using the socially-owned means of production to increase productivity and the surplus of goods, and thereby raising the universal standard of living.
This is where the learned behavior I spoke of a moment ago comes in. Reorganizing society and attempting to build a permanent surplus of goods requires effort from everyone, and simply put, the amount of effort you put in will be reflected in the amount of goods you’re entitled to receive as compensation. (This does not take into account people who can’t work, like the severely disabled, or who aren’t required to work, like children and the elderly.) Slackers don’t get a free ride. Again, the goal here is not the enrichment of a few individuals but the general betterment of the whole of society. People who weren’t supportive of the revolution or were, at the most, on the fence about it, are apt to figure out pretty quickly how things are; couple that with the fact that serious resistance brings you up against the armed working class and most of those people will probably grumble, then roll up their sleeves and get to work. Habituation will take care of the rest.
This behavior won’t evolve, it will be learned. The disadvantageous behavior won’t die out passively because of evolution, but because of human control over society and the attending requirements.
As Marx noted in the quote I used earlier, it is only after that kind of effort has been expended, and the surplus of production becomes permanent, that we get to the point where people can take as much as they want and it simply won’t matter because there will be plenty more where that came from. Again, that’s not going to happen the day after the revolution - it’ll take time and effort. Criticizing it as a utopia mistakenly assumes that we can do it now under current conditions, which is something Socialists don’t even assert, much less promise. A quote from Lenin in State and Revolution illustrates the point nicely and, I think, will serve as an adequate conclusion.
Having read your OP, I resent that you use the word socialism for a political belief that is … well, I don’t know what it is, but it isnt socialism as I have always understood it to mean, and with me 99 of the Europeans.
It is like I would start a political party, call myself a Christian Democrat, only to explain "…that most people still think that Christian Democrats are based on mainstream western Christian religious views, and advocate the current system of elections and representation of the people. However, we seem to be perpetually misunderstood, because that is not what we are about at all. We are atheists at heart and, politically, support a plutocrat system much like Saudi Arabia. "
Value is not a real thing. It’s a generally-agreed-upon fiction, like money.
I’m not saying you didn’t create code. I’m saying that, at heart, your code is sustained by a lot of other things that are theft.
Because you want to be. This doesn’t counter my argument that being paid is not necessary for code to exist. Like I said, Open Source and free software gives the lie to that.
Because I like living, and in the capitalist current state, that means working. Doesn’t mean I *want *to. If all my needs were taken care of already, I’d work for free. As it is, I do a lot of coding and development for free, both as charity work and in a few OS projects.
Olentzero, I live in the Netherlands, a country that is, by most accounts generally a well run country, without major problems. Our government policies could rightfully be said to have “socialist” tendencies, According to the general accepted definition: a strong government providing many services for citizens, services that in the USA people mostly have to arrange/buy for themselves.
So, our definition of “Socialist” is the very opposite of the OP’s, who advocates the absence of government as a principle.
What is more, our kind of Dutch socialism has proven to work. What teh OP calls socialism (and it is more like anacho-syndicalism) has not proven to work in any society larger then two hundred people. It has proven to be disastrous anywhere else, and it usually ends in some kind of dictature.
So, the OP takes the name of a political system that is near and dear to me, and abuses its name for a political belief I abhor.
Thanks for the reply, Maastricht. From my position I’d call that “social democratic” rather than out-and-out socialist, but it’s still something fairly palatable in most cases.
well, I voted for the OP, just for fun - he’s no chance of getting in anywhere and I’m fed up of voting for people I know in real life rather than the internet
All right, Shodan. We get it. You don’t like communism. You’ve made that very clear.
Unfortunately, your blind hatred seems to have landed you in a large swamp of hypocrisy. Here are some quotes I’d like you to look at:
Sound familiar? They should; they’re yours from here and here. Implicit in these statements is your understanding that people kill in war, and that people die in war. War, as has been noted so many times, is hell. And yet, when faced with the explanation that an incident in which people killed and died occurred during the course of a war - a war far more vicious than those currently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and during which it has been shown by the use of maps in this very thread that the Bolsheviks didn’t even have complete control of the country, you plug your ears and shout “LA LA LA LA COMMUNISM EQUALS MASS MURDER LA LA LA LA” several times with no additional arguments or assertions.
Your double standard is clearly showing, Shodan, and it’s leading to behavior that I believe borders very closely on the trollish. Not that I think you’re a troll; clearly you wouldn’t have lasted eight years here on the SDMB if you were. In fact when you started out in this thread you brought up something worth discussing and examining in further detail. But your potshots are becoming increasingly annoying and if you really can’t think of anything else to say except “Commies are mass murderers” in response to portions of my posts, for the love of God go find something else to do. Please.
This is like saying that language isn’t real, because the symbols are arbitrarily chosen. Value is very real - it’s a measurement. You can measure something in kilometers or feet, but that doesn’t mean the thing you are measuring doesn’t exist.
Before, there is empty land and heaps of stone and timber and metal ores. After, there is a shoe factory. The shoe factory produces more than the empty land and stones did. That difference is referred to as “value”.
Socialism is predicated on the notion that value exists before it is created.
You are missing the point. My claim of ownership is based on what I did myself - I wrote it, and to that extent I own it (or rather, my company, to whom I assigned my rights upon being hired). The bits that even you would say were stolen rather than created are quite minimal - the software products I use are almost entirely proprietary.
Considering the extent to which software piracy is an issue, I don’t think this is as conclusive as you imagine. I am paid, not because I want to be, but because I have to be. Everyone needs the necessities of life. in order to get them, someone has to work. People will work much harder and more consistently for themselves and their families than they will for strangers - that is a simple fact. It’s human nature, as y’all keep denying.
If people are so doggone altruistic as psychonaut claims, why doesn’t it work already? Why is it that every society that sets itself up as socialist (in your sense) descend in to totalitarianism and slaughter, as did the USSR and China? And what imaginable reason is there to believe that this can be avoided?
Socialists keep saying “once everybody wants it, we can have it”. But that is exactly the problem - there is not going to be a situation where everyone is going to work as hard as they do if they don’t have to. And there will always be people like Stalin and Pol Pot and Lenin and Mao who are not going to be altruistic, and a quick re-scan of the thread does not reveal any new ideas from any of the utopians participating that gives any notion of how this kind of socialist anarchy can handle them.
I will repeat the question - I and a lot of my friends and family decide we can do better if we don’t play along with the altruism game. We grab a bunch of weapons and tell the rest of you that you are slaves. It is a socialist anarchy - what are you going to do about it?
Not quite - I don’t like mass murder, and I am not prepared to excuse it from socialists. That is where we differ.
I am not following your point. If you are asserting that it is just as courageous to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan as it is to shoot and drown striking workers, then I don’t think we have the same definition of “courage”.
Or are you arguing that the torture in Iraq is justified?
The assertion that I have not produced additional arguments is too obviously ridiculous to need refutation.
No, I’m sorry, but pointing out foolishness is not trolling, no matter what you might like to think. So I will continue to post as I please. Feel free to report my posts if you see fit - otherwise you can slink out of the thread with your tail between your legs.
The thing you are measuring is real, but are the kms or feet real in the same sense? I would say no. Same-same with value - it is, at root, arbitrary and subjective. You are attaching it to a thing, but the map is not the terrain. A measurement is not the thing. Case in point:
Personally, I attach more value to empty common land than another factory. The first is certainly increasingly rarer, and it does not have to be more productive in any measurable way for *me *to assign it greater value. Choosing to use “productivity” as *your *measure of value is where the arbitrariness comes in. It ignores externalities and also ignores the true cost of isolating property from the commons.
I would rather phrase this as socialism does not only assign value based on production of capital.
What language are you writing in, and on what systems? Were they always proprietary? I’m not referring to whether they are now). My thesis is that appropriation is at the root of all capital. Would you be able to write what you do if the commons had never existed, is my point. And that includes government software.
Software piracy is an issue for capitalists. For some reason, it’s not a big worry in the OS community.
We’re saying in a decent system (a post-scarcity system), this would not be the case. The only people who would need to work would be those who want to, doing what they want to.
No-one’s denying current general human nature. We’re disputing that it’s as set in stone as y’all think - that people can come around to being altruistic if they can be made to see the benefits.
As **psychonaut **has repeatedly said, no country has yet set itself up as socialist. Any society with leaders is not socialist in the sense meant here.
Hope.
Which is why I think socialism will only arise in a post-scarcity society, where no-one has to work for anything.
I’ll die for my beliefs, is what I’ll do. That leaves you with a pretty useless slave - good luck with that. Of course violent idiots would ruin it for everyone. You can make that same argument for any system of government. The same recourses would exist in a socialist state as in any other - people would band together and act against those not acting within the bounds of the chosen society. You seem to be postulating that the majority who chose socialism in this hypothetical future would idly stand by and let you wreck it. What gives you that idea? Socialist != pacifist.
But I thought the premise was that socialism would be what ended scarcity (since, according to your beliefs, scarcity is artificially imposed by capitalism). How can you have a post-scarcity society if socialism hasn’t arisen yet?
And this banding-together of citizens to defend against invaders…is this before or after you get everyone together to come to a concensus on your tactics and strategy? How long do you think that’ll take? And if that’s not your plan, and you intend to have some sort of general or commander, doesn’t that collapse the socialist waveform? Ranks, orders, some form of military discipline to attempt to prevent desertion or insubordination? How socialist are all of those things?