Well, I voted early this morning, and enjoyed seeing the OP’s name on the ballot paper, though I’m afraid I voted Lib Dem.
I assume you were the dude at no. 1? To make this thread-appropriate: what do you think of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party?
Really? Why does German have a different word for “love” than English, then? Which one of us is wrong?
Languages are simply constructs to express a shared abstract concept (meaning). Price is just another such construct, to express a shared concept (value). Pretending that value does not exist is preposterous; if I offer you a lemon drizzle cake or a turd, which will you accept? If you deny the existence of value, surely you would be just as happy to receive the turd. If you prefer one to the other, are you not making a value judgment?
That’s psychonaut’s take, not mine.
I don’t know. I certainly won’t be joining them, so it’s moot in my case. I’m a pacifist, as I intimated to Shodan. But who’s to say the world socialist state wouldn’t have a volunteer militia, for instance?
Military hierarchy is not the same thing as political leadership, any more than having the most experienced person being the shiftboss on a work team. Anarchism/socialism is not about having no structure, ever. That’s just ludicrous. It’s about not having political leaders, a political hierarchy.
Neither. And the difference is evolutionary. That’s not arbitrary.
I disagree, strongly. Languages are not as separate from meaning as you suggest, in fact they’re closely tied to thought, and hence meaning.
My point is that the agreed-upon value of things is not always so…agreed-upon. Values are subjective. Yes, there is a shared social conceit called money, but it is just that - a conceit. Look at Zimbabwe.
You are using two different senses of value here. **Shodan **was clearly meaning the monetary value, not the aesthetic value. Anyway, if I was in the leather tanning business, I might very well want the turd more. That’s what I mean by subjective. I’m not claiming that no such concept as value exists, I’m claiming the subjective nature of it makes appeals to it useless as an excuse for property appropriation.
Monetary value is an imperfect social expression of the shared abstract concept of personal value, just like language is an imperfect social expression of meaning. Of course the expression is arbitrary; it’s the communal acceptance of a shared concept that bestows meaning. “Ich liebe dich” is no more an intrinsic expression of love than “gilgamesh table fruit rastafarian”; that seems pretty arbitrary to me. It’s the underlying concept that isn’t arbitrary, and this is just as true for value as love.
On value: the vast majority of people would prefer the lemon drizzle cake. A very occasional person might prefer the turd for some reason (e.g. tanners) - a shared concept of value doesn’t mean we all have an identical valuation function (hell, this is what makes markets work). But to pretend that no-one has such a valuation function is ludicrous; black markets spring up wherever free trade is prohibited, giving the ultimate lie to any such claim. I see you don’t deny the existence of value, however:
Fine, but then you must surely acknowledge that the vast majority of people value a finished product more highly than the raw materials. How, then, do you account for the increased value once someone has constructed something with raw materials? Was that value appropriated? Is it non-existent? Is work itself valueless?
For you to claim all products are intrinsically appropriated, it seems to me that you have to completely discount the value of work. What use is a cedar tree to a guitarist, until the luthier has performed his despicable approprative acts upon it? What use is shit to most, until the tanner finds a purpose? Should we blame him for “appropriating” something we don’t even want, or should we reward him for finding a use for the unwanted?
Don’t be absurd - of course they are. There is absolutely no reason that d-o-g is any more appropriate to a Great Dane than chien.
There you are merely wrong. People recognize value, for the most part - that is why they are willing to exchange their goods and services for it. And why socialists want to grab it.
You said above that value was not real. Now you are claiming that it is. Which is it?
And you have put your finger on the problem - who gets to decide what to do with something. In socialist systems, it is the collective who decides, and generally chooses to benefit itself more than the individual. In capitalism, the individual who creates it gets to decide, and generally chooses to benefit himself more than the collective. The genius of capitalism is that it uses the self-interest of its participants to benefit everyone. Because they are allowed to benefit from the value they add.
Because I am allowed freely to exchange what I have and produce with other free citizens for what they have or produce that I want more, I can increase my own perceived well-being. It is that perceived difference - I have a widgit, you have a gadget, I want the gadget more than the widget and you want the widget more than the gadget, we exchange and both come out ahead.
My laptop runs Windows, for instance. I am not aware that that was ever free.
How many computer languages do you mean, which are in wide-spread use and no one makes any profit off them, or intended to? Most of the ones I know of intend to make money from upgrades and consulting and things like that.
Well, in my case, that is not true - my software never belonged to everyone. It belongs to me from the instant of its creation.
Then I repeat - why has it never, ever succeeded? All that is necessary is to show people the benefits. And yet, no one has ever succeeded in doing so to the point that it lasts.
Well put - socialism is entirely based on magical thinking. Right now, thugs are tying rocks around your neck and dumping you in the Volga.
But work and pray, live on hay - you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Actually, y’all tend to be atheists, so you won’t even get that. Just the moral satisfaction of having been exploited in pursuit of a dream world that can never be.
Good luck with that.
Regards,
Shodan
Looks to me like the only way for the OP and those like him to possibly realize their dreams is to throw all their effort and promotion behind scientific and technological research, because only when everybody has his own fusion reactor and unlimited replicator-ish tech will we be able to divorce productivity from demand.
Unfortunately, that means they’ll have to get in bed with (shudder) capitalists. Omelets and eggs, people, omelets and eggs.
Not only have we heard of it in America, but we tried it long before the Russian revolution. It failed and it failed miserably because it doesn’t take into consideration human nature. You can research any large commune in the US such as the Oneida commune to understand why socialism doesn’t work.
I wouldn’t be bringing up Zimbabwe if I was you. Zimbabwe’s currency has plummeted because value isn’t a conceit - and cannot be generated by just printing money without real economic growth to back it up. Second, the reason why Zimbabwe went to hell in the first place is because they used a tactic central to coercive socialism - the redistribution of property.
We tried it here in Israel, too. It works moderately well in communities of 200 people or smaller, and the mechanisms that allow it to work (namely, peer pressure and guilt) can’t be applied to any group of people larger than that. And yes, I’m talking from personal experience here - I lived on a kibbutz for 8 months, which means, incidentally, that I have far more experience with applied socialism than the OP does.
What does that even mean, “divorce productivity from demand”? Such a thing is impossible, and socialism doesn’t argue that it can be done. Productivity can be organized so it meets or even exceeds demand (the point of socialism in the first place), but demand always directs productivity.
Oneida and similar communities are the kind of socialism Friedrich Engels termed “utopian”. Behind them were the assumptions that socialism could be the work of individual reformers; the ideas could be handed down from ‘on high’ to working people, who would be the passive recipients of socialist change rather than its active creators; and that capitalism could be gently, slowly reformed into socialism rather than the revolutionary break such change actually required.
Scientific socialism, on the other hand, doesn’t try to create ideal communities out of thin air and then hand them down to the waiting masses. It looks at the world today as well as its history. It studies where change comes from and how change occurs - which has been a lot more revolutionary and violent than usually portrayed. And it looks at society to try to determine who can be the agent of the next wave of revolutionary change. Not in terms of individuals or parties, but in terms of classes. Using those ideas, socialists get involved in the movements of the day to influence people towards pushing for that revolutionary change, making them the creators rather than the recipients.
Grumman, the Zimbabwean economy was in serious trouble long before Mugabe’s land redistribution program. (The program didn’t even collectivize land, just moved it from one private owner to another; even if Mugabe did collectivize any of it that doesn’t make it in and of itself a socialist program.) The land redistribution was a response to the existing crisis brought about by structural adjustment programs that incorporated huge increases in already untenable foreign debt as well as the elimination of a national regulatory apparatus that had been in place for over seventy years (article). Basically this meant that if they felt like keeping track of the money they did have, it was more likely to be used to pay off debts to other countries and the IMF than for reinvestment in the country’s infrastructure.
The drastic reduction in foreign aid hasn’t helped much either. While it’s arguably true that most of this is a response to the “creeping socialism” of land redistribution from one private owner to another, the result has been to turn the lives of ordinary working Zimbabweans - who had no part or say in the program - from intolerable into hellish. The land redistribution program is far outweighed by the preceding structural adjustment programs and the ensuing near-elimination of foreign aid and investment as a factor in Zimbabwe’s economic collapse.
As in Zimbabwe, applied socialism doesn’t entail kicking the previous inhabitants off the land to make room for you.
I mean reach a state where everybody can have everything they want. I’d hazard a guess that it actually is possible, or at least approachable, with some kind of science-fictiony tech one sees in Star Trek or Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
The kind of socialism you describe, I figure, can’t exist without it.
Sure, it can. Why, with a well-designed five-year plan, all demands can be met. Of course the plan also makes provisions for bullets and firing squads, to smooth over any glitches.
I’d be genuinely shocked if after numerous runs at crunching the numbers, the scientific socialists ever concluded that the agents of change should be anyone other than themselves.
Are there any circumstances where the governmental redistribution of land would be a bad thing, in your view?
Right on the money there, although the state you describe is what we call communism, rather than socialism (see my post with the Marx quote discussing “from each according to his ability, etc.” above).
Once more: Stalinism is not socialism. Stalinism is a crime against socialism. It is not a logical outcome of the Russian Revolution, nor did the Russian Revolution make Stalinism a foregone conclusion. I completely reject Stalinism, and when I argue for socialism it is in no way a defense of Stalinism.
Hi. I’m a scientific socialist. I believe the agent of change is the working class, and that my job is to involve myself in working-class movements in order to convince them that they are and can be the agent of change, and that they are completely capable of building a new world themselves. I belong to organizations that think the exact same way.
Surprised yet?
Well yeah, Zimbabwe’s a shining example there. Not only did the land remain in private hands, it went into the hands of people who had far less experience in farming and agriculture, with the attendant collapse of food output.
Land redistribution in and of itself is not socialist, as the Zimbabwe example amply illustrates. What makes it socialist (or not) is a) who does it and b) why it’s being done. Mugabe’s program fails both criteria.
First of all, most kibbuzim, including the one I was on (Kibbutz Metzer) are not on previously-occupied land. Unless you believe that *all of Israel is illegally occupied land, in which case you should live and be well.
Second of all, what the hell does that have to do with the subject at hand? Is that really the best answer you’ve got?
Merely saying that what you believe to be the applied socialist experience is most assuredly not. Kibbutzim that were established, built, and run by collective Palestinian and Jewish labor for the benefit of Palestinians and Jews alike, not exclusively by Jewish labor for the exclusive benefit of Jewish labor, would be somewhat closer to the mark.
Just wanted to add that I did a little Googling on Kibbutz Metzer and have read about the attack in 2002. Wanted to pre-emptively state that my attitudes on Israel and the Palestinians explicitly do not condone such attacks.
They were built by the inhabitants for the inhabitants. They are closed societies, much as the world will be under global socialism.
Must every socialist experiment embrace complete diversity (which means that 1/4 of the inhabitants must be Chinese, I assume) for it to be legitimate in your eyes? Or are you one more engaging in One True Scotsmanism?
Each is situationally appropriate, depending on who you speak to. That’s hardly arbitrary.
People have to do this because it’s the way their society is set up to work, not because of any inherent quality of the perceived value. You admit as much when you say you have to work to live. This is an artifact of history and society - people have gotten on just fine without money in the past. Or with radically different concepts of “value”.
Something can exist without being “a real thing”. Like abstract concepts.
CApitalism doesn’t benefit everyone. And it benefits some people a lot more than others. Yes, socialism values the collective over the individual.
I see nothing wrong with that.
I am glad you admit it is only your perception.
Windows is based on architecture that stretches all the way back to military computers of just post WWII. Follow anything back and eventually you land up in the commons.
But the languages themselves are in the commons. PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, various C flavours - you don’t have to pay for these things.
I am not disputing the originality of your code, only the origin of the system underpinnings.
I doubt anyone’s really tried. Who preaches unadulterated Marx (as opposed to trying to lead people to him)? And as for Proudhon? How many people even know who he is?
It’s not that science fictiony. People in the Open Source community are working on the problem as we speak. Give it ten years and we’ll see where we are.