You make so many absurd statements, it is sort of overwhelming to try to deal with them all. So, I thought, let’s try to stick to just this one statement, and see how it holds up.
First, please explain to us all how the Cubans or Sandinistas (I assume that is who you mean when you refer to “left-wing thugs”) even remotely compare to the Death Squad Democracies of El Salvador and Guatemala.
Secondly, with regard to Cambodia, there was actually a very similar atrocity going on at the same time as the Khmer Rouge genocide was taking place, namely the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, all with the total support of the U.S. Furthermore, the U.S. killed between five and ten times more people in Indochina than the Khmer Rouge did.
Anyway, let us see if we can make some headway on this single aburdity of yours, then we can move on to the next.
Slight hijack, but I’m surprised either of you haven’t mentioned the MCC (Mondragon Cooperative Corporation) as an example of how capitalism can function in a much more democratic fashion.
Thanks for the link, eponymous. Yes, this is an excellent example of how a company can run under democratic principles.
Spain actually has quite an anarchist streak. One of the most inspiring events in recent history, in my mind, was the Spanish revolution of 1936, the most successful anarchist/socialist revolution. Unfortunately, the revolution was put down by force, by elements of the right and the left. The revolution and resistance against Franco received no support from the western capitalist states, who implicitely supported the Franco/Hitler alliance. Stalinists and Trotskyites also got in on the action, destroying the leftist alliance.
One of my favorite books is Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, discussing his experience in Spain. I can’t recommend this book too highly. Orwell arrived in Spain in 1937 to cover the war as a journalist, and ended up fighting with the POUM, a Marxist militia group. He was almost killed, being shot in the neck, and after he recovered he became the victim of a Stalinist smear campaign and purge and was forced to flee the country. His description of the initial success of the revolution, and its subsequent demise is a vitally important record.
Anyway, about the Mondragon Co-operative. These types of experiments are extremely valuable in showing how cooperative control of the means of production can work. However, I don’t think the marriage of these ideals with capitalism is viable. A common mistake is to attribute the success of capitalists to their “merit.” It is not, however, the “merit” of capitalists that creates a concentration of wealth, it is a result of the natural workings of the market. Even leaving aside illegalities, just the existence of the market will eventually create concentrated oligopolies of power. These oligopolies will have the ability to crush any newcomer, just with the power their concentrated capital gives them.
Consider other examples of co-operatives in the U.S., such as South End Press. South End Press has succeeded against enormous odds, because of the dedication and vision of its workers. But, South End will never be able to compete with the larger publishing houses. It is not because of the quality of their work. The quality of the books they put out surpasses anything the mainstream houses put out. Yet, they cannot compete because they don’t have the resources. They do not have the distribution networks, the ties into the mainstream media outlets that provide reviews and advertising, and other links that provide a venue for the spread of their books. The system itself prevents these enterprises from competing with the oligopolistic enterprises the dominate the market. In this system, the larger publishing houses will always have more capital to woo talent with the promise of greater monetary award and power.
In any hierarchical system with the existence of concentrated power, one rises in the system to the extent that one serves power. By serving power, one is rewarded with power oneself. Unless the system is severely dysfunctional, which U.S. capitalism is decidedly NOT, any enterprise that is run on principles that violate those of the hierarchical structure will be marginalized.
If a truly free and egalitarian society is to be achieved, the structures that support the capitalist hierarchy will have to be removed. Svinlesha:
I have read with pleasure your comments in this thread, and I agree with 99% of what you are saying. But, I was wondering about your opinion on wage-labour. You say that, “my attitude towards wage-labor is not as negative, provided that the wages are relatively comfortable.” Perhaps you could expand on that.
This could be the subject of an entire thread, or book, but, briefly, my opinion of wage-labor, or wage-slavery, is that it is not that different from chattel slavery in principle. Without the decades of bitter popular struggle from the working class movements, wage slavery would be different only in its details from chattel slavery. The fundamental objection to wage slavery is that if one has to sell one’s labor in order to live, one is not really free. The Enlightenment writer Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his book The Limits of State Action, described his attitude toward those who sell their energy and time: whatever labour “does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness”; when the labourer works under external control, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”
Those who must sell their work in the wage-labor system, which is the bulk of humanity, are not really free. The system which perpetuates the conditions that make it necessary for people to do this thus perpetuates a state of servitude which robs people of their freedom and humanity.
You’ve racked up so many absurdities and not addressed valid criticisms that I feel strangely uncompelled to do a worldwide Right-Wing body count and compare it to a Left-Wing body count and see who wins. If you’re going to count Vietnam (aka Indochina) I suggest you also count USSR and Chinese famines. Besides, no matter what list I came up with, you’d just drag out your ridiculous 100-million figure again.
Among other absurdities being kicked around in this thread are the variants on the claim “Capitalism is bad because it does evil action X”, while not acknowledging that X has been around for a long long time and has been committed by numerous governments, many of whom don’t embrace capitalism.
As for companies like Moondragon… more power to them. A quick read of their principles shows that workers are paid more if their jobs are more important and if their individual performance is high. That sounds perfectly okay to me. Overall, they strike me as a little touchy-feely (as did Ben and Jerry) but I have no problem with their inclusion in the capitalism spectrum. If their model proves successful, I hope other companies emulate them. At the very least, putting a leash on runaway managerial salaries strikes me as perfectly okey-dokey.
The irony, of course, is that a company like this could be established in a capitalist country and be perfectly legal, albeit at the far left. But if you tried to establish an organization along these lines in the USSR, you were guilty of a very serious crime. Salaries based on merit? Dividends? Openness? How very unkulturny!
You’ve racked up so many absurdities and not addressed valid criticisms that I feel strangely uncompelled to do a worldwide Right-Wing body count and compare it to a Left-Wing body count and see who wins. If you’re going to count Vietnam (aka Indochina) I suggest you also count USSR and Chinese famines. Besides, no matter what list I came up with, you’d just drag out your ridiculous 100-million figure again.
Among other absurdities being kicked around in this thread are the variants on the claim “Capitalism is bad because it does evil action X”, while not acknowledging that X has been around for a long long time and has been committed by numerous governments, many of whom don’t embrace capitalism.
As for companies like Moondragon… more power to them. A quick read of their principles shows that workers are paid more if their jobs are more important and if their individual performance is high. That sounds perfectly okay to me. Overall, they strike me as a little touchy-feely (as did Ben and Jerry) but I have no problem with their inclusion in the capitalism spectrum. If their model proves successful, I hope other companies emulate them. At the very least, putting a leash on runaway managerial salaries strikes me as perfectly okey-dokey.
The irony, of course, is that a company like this could be established in a capitalist country and be perfectly legal, albeit at the far left. But if you tried to establish an organization along these lines in the USSR, you were guilty of a very serious crime. Salaries based on merit? Dividends? Openness? How very unkulturny!
I accept your 7.5 cents claim, but, as you will soon see, I have another mission for you.
Try asking one of these WM employees if they share your opinion.
Precisely – the rich and famous.
Yes, well…I’m sure that portfolio required quite a sacrifice.
But all joking aside, let’s investigate this idea a little further. Can we really say that the stock market functions as an effective redistributive mechanism? In the economics text I cited earlier, Samuelson and Nordhaus claim that 50% of all privately owned stocks are held by the wealthiest top 1% of stockholders. That leaves us bottom 99% to parcel out the remaining 50%. They also claim that the amount the amount of stock owned by the ”poor” is ”vanishingly small.” But these figures refer only to privately owned stock: what about publicly owned stock?
If you wish to claim that stocks are an effective method of redistributing wealth to the poor, then you need to provide me with empirical evidence that proves your point – i.e., that there is a tendency for wealth to be redistributed on the stock market such that the poor receive more, and the rich less, as time goes on.
Good luck! eponymous:
Thanks for the great link!
One comment: this isn’t an example of ”how capitalism can function in a much more democratic fashion,” technically speaking. It is an example of an alternative economic system, one which appears based on anarcho-syndicalist principles, at least at first glance.
The reason I hadn’t mentioned it before, by the way, is because this is the first time I’ve heard of it. Chumpsky:
Thanks for the fine compliment. For what it’s worth, I’ve been in awe of your posts since you first arrived here; keep up the good work!
Regarding my attitude towards wage-labor: this is a point we disagree on, but only at
an ideological, rather than a practical, level. Let’s see if I can locate where our views diverge:
I disagree with that statement. There is a principle difference: I can enter or exit a paid position of my own free will. So technically, as I see it, wage labor is more a kind of social contract than a system of indentured servitude, or slavery. Or, to put it another way: I have no problem ”renting out” my skills and abilities to an employer, provided that I make a decent living in doing so, and as long as I am free to leave my job in favor of another, should I choose to. But of course, this is because I’m privileged. Nevertheless, regarding the work I do (as a psychotherapist), the form of my employment is, to be honest, much less important to me than the content. In fact, considering how expensive private therapy is, I would prefer to work for the government (i.e., in a wage-labor position), where I can provide my services to the public at a much more reasonable price, and come home at the end of the month with a comfy, middle-class salary.
I agree with that statement. In fact, in most of the developing world, there is no significant difference, as far as I can tell. But for me, this is a practical manner, rather than one of principle.
Well, we must work to eat, no matter what system we live within. To that extent, none of us are free, really. But if I choose to ”sell my time and energy” in a system that provides me with a good living, rather than going it on my own as a subsistence farmer, free but poor, is that not a result of my own free choice?
Agreed, again. The practical results of a capitalistic economic system appear to be a regime of poorly-paid wage-labor for a large section, arguably the vast majority, of the population. But if someone were to propose a hypothetical system in which everyone was able to make a decent living through wage-labor, I wouldn’t oppose it solely due to my misgivings regarding the principle of wage-labor, if you see what I mean.
flex727
Damn, why does The Onion have to be so good? I thought the article was hilarious. (I am not a Marxist, btw.) Mr. Svinlesha:
Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot, coming from you.
After reading your last post, I think that our disagreement about wage labour might be just one of definitions. Please tell me if I misstate your position in any way.
We seem to agree that the current capitalist system under which the majority must sell its labour in order to live is deplorable. The point of disagreement seems to be over whether wage-labour is OK if the wages paid are high enough to make a decent living. While I would, of course, agree that a higher wage for labourers who sell their time and energy would be a vast improvement over the current state of affairs, I don’t think this is really the primary objection to wage labour.
I think that one of the common misunderstandings of those who criticize wage labour is that such a criticism is directed at the necessity to work in order to live. Far from it! Of course, we must work in order to live. However, the forms of production need not entail a hierarchical system in which one class is forced to rent itself to another, being directed and dictated to by that class. It is the authoritarian nature of wage labour that I object to, in addition to the poverty of the working classes.
In the traditional working class movements which arose independently in the 19th century, it was mostly taken for granted that wage labour was a form of slavery, for it meant a giving up of one’s sovereignty and humanity. The difference between wage slavery and chattel slavery is that the slave owner owned his slaves, whereas the capitalist simply rented them.
The capitalist system creates an authoritarian relationship between the worker and the boss that differs only in its details from chattel slavery. The last prominent defender of slavery in the U.S. was a guy named George Fitzhugh, who put forth his arguments for slavery in an article titled, " The Blessings of Slavery." He argued that slavery was superior to wage slavery since the slave owners own their slaves, instead of just renting them, and thus have more of an incentive to take care of them. He wrote, “But our Southern slavery has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world. How can we contend that white slavery is wrong, whilst all the great body of free laborers are starving; and slaves, white or black, throughout the world, are enjoying comfort?”
This is a very crucial point. Notice that if you assert that wage labour is fine, as long as the wages are comfortable enough to make a decent living, then Fitzhugh’s argument for slavery must follow! That is, if your only argument against wage labour is that most workers who sell their time and energy do not get paid enough, then Fitzhugh’s argument would seem to hold, since it was true that black slaves did have a relatively high standard of living compared to many of their brothers in the north.
In the capitalist system, the workings of the market create a need for a vast number of people to perform rote jobs on command. Adam Smith described, in The Wealth of Nations, the consequences of such a system on the working classes:
This is the inevitable consequence of the capitalist system and of wage labour.
If you believe that people have an instinct for freedom, and a creative need, which I do, then it follows that such a system is fundamentally flawed, for it robs the vast majority of their humanity. Nietzsche once wrote, “The most ignoble relationship between man and man is that between employer and employed.” The nature of wage labour retains all of the authoritarian and autocratic vestiges of feudalism, but without the sense of duty for man to man. It is authoritarianism, but without the soul. In this system, you have no right to live, only to get what you can on the market. The working classes are not participatants in production, but simply the rented slaves of their capitalists masters.
Anyway, I hope that makes sense. I am anxious to read what you think.
Wow, I never thought I’d see a pro-slavery argument here.
Since work is necessary, it seems we have three choices:
[ul][li]Work for a slave-owner[/li][li]Work for an employer[/li][li]Work for the other workers[/li][/ul]
I choose the second, myself, for the simple reason that if I don’t like an employer, I’m free to find another one. I wouldn’t be free to choose another slave-owner and if I was working for the other workers (and the other workers working for me, presumably) there is no incentive for them to work hard, and I have no means of forcing (or even encouraging) them to. As a result, the individual workers work less and less and the system falls apart. Punishments (whippings and whatnot) are the incentive to work hard in option 1, but what is the incentive to work hard in option 3? Some kind of brother-love?
Only the second option uses personal gain as an incentive, and since I can trust that most of the people will work for their own benefit most of the time, the factories and infrastructure won’t collapse anytime soon.
So Bryan, has the capitalism, free-trade or whatever we call it, come to its fulfillment,? Is this the culmination for us humans?
Is there anything You would like to change?
Is there any rights that You feel should be “broaden” for everyone?
(If we now forget China and the other dictatures, which btw. never has been socialistic, just non-democratic, non-functioning “systems”. IMHO)
I’ve stayed out of this for a while because I haven’t had anything meaningful to contribute. But I see something important now, a recurring trend about who should make the decisions…
It might not be pleasant to one’s sensibilities, but it is the authoritarian nature of capitalism that helps produce wealth.
Let us imagine a large, worker-controlled business. Suppose this business has become too large to efficiently produce a product that the public wishes to purchase. Will the workers scale down, that is, will they fire a part of their own, so that the business itself will continue?
Oh, the dreaded downsizing. Awful, I know. And, at times, necessary.
No, they wouldn’t downsize. They wouldn’t fire the excess workers. Each worker would be more interested in their own personal situation than in that of the whole. You can’t blame them for that. But, even so, their actions would, if unchecked, lead to the bankruptcy of the firm, and the loss of every job.
It is the owners who are interested in the survival of the whole. It is in their interest for the whole to be successful (it is, after all, their profits that are at stake). And so it is they who dictate, and it is the workers who must obey.
So the workers have to do what the owners them. And that upsets you? It seems so. But I can’t say I care.
Now it is an entirely different matter about whether the laid-off workers should have some sort of unemployment benefits. Of course they should. And they’ll get it, too (in America at least). Maybe not as much as they should get, but that’s, again, a different matter.
The owners, quite often, want human cogs. It sucks, as Adam Smith pointed out. But what Chumpsky left out was Adam Smith’s solution: education. Oh, sure, old Adam thought the ability to read and to do a bit of basic arithmetic was sufficient. We know better nowadays.
A friend of mine is a civil engineer, and he always has a desperate shortage of good employees, for the simple reason that he ISN’T looking for human-cogs. He’s looking for people with very developed problem-solving abilities, and he can’t find them.
It sucks that the single mother of two can’t find a better job than Wal-Mart. It also sucks that she’s a single mother working at Wal-Mart instead of an engineering student at a university.
The owners aren’t saints. Oftentimes they’re greedy, short-sighted, and stupid, unable to make a single competant decision. But their decisions will be the best decisions more often than the decisions of any other group of people.
You can doubt that, but I believe you would be wrong.
Is it better than everything else that’s been tried? Yes.
If there has ever been a working socialist nation, let us know. Don’t waste time trying to explain how dictatorships like China don’t count. Find a GOOD socialist nation.
Sweden was pretty close, but even they were never so blind that they tried to nationalize all private property.
.
This is very true. I have the very same problem, though in a lesser degree.
I see as a solution governmental up-backing of continuious education, but how to consider, what is really needed for the education of people at work in common and what is just in one firms interest?
Big firms can give education by their own, small firms have serious problems with this.
If a country X in the capitalistic system wants really to help people to upgrade, the country need to give:
free education in computers to everyone (also in the evenings)
a lot of computers in the class of every school (Finland is a quite good example on this)
educational channel on TV in languages. (Finland has quite a lot of this and some special nights they are broadcasting let’s say an English course, ten lectures in a row, (2,5 hours each night, so You do not need to stay awake) so that people can video-tape these courses for free. (I have learned a lot of my English and German through Swedish television, while I was living there).
Btw. education about very many fields can be given through TV.
free education for small business runners (book-keeping, laws, taxes, human relations, “the newest new- in what ever field”, export - import etc.
The question is: We still need workers with no training, or very little training, how to give them also all the chanches to proceed from almost zero. It is not in the interest of a company that their good lorrydriver who has learned all the routines etc., begins one day in a field where the company has no interest in. But the community has always an interest in “up-grading” citizens.
And then when the day comes when a lorrydriver needs to know computers, etc. companies usually takes 20 years old guys to that work, because they know everything and they need “only” to learn the routines. The 50-year old lorrydriver can just go, because it is too expencive to teach him everything from scratch.
That is how capitalism works, if it is “very free”. And the 50-year old lorry driver has not ever been as free as he is after that.
Even if we solve the question in our country X, we still have not even thought about the third world.
The fact is that I can buy an accumulator cheap, because of the workers and children in Bolivia mining lead, because of their salaries and the fact “that a sick or old one can be replaced”.
“Those outside the gates are just happy to get a work”.
If we begin to see to that they also have a chance to “up-grade”, what-ever that can mean in Bolivia, it is not anymore capitalism we are speaking about. Because capitalism is not working that way.
Anyhow, we should think globally when we think of creating a system that should be the best for this world.
We can’t just leave 2/3 of the world outside and then begin to fight them, “when they get some ideas”.
Personally I am sure that we could find a solution for this globe, without socializing, nor nationalizing all privet property.
But the rich part of the globe, does not want to. And that is short-sighted.
Bryan wrote:
Well, Sweden is not, and has never been a socialist system. It is one of the best capitalistic systems on this globe, but also “lives on cheap accumulators”. Just try to face it.
If I put a question like this (to everyone):
If and when I get a child that is disabled, in what country should I live so that I would know that the child would have the best possible future, even when I am gone?
My own answer is: The Nordic countries. Absolutely not a country where that guy who hits hardest, is the winner!!!
Face WHAT? You can’t even give an example of a working socialist country, so what were you planning to replace capitalism with?
If you want to discuss which country has the best social programs, then I agree the Scandinavians do. but private property is still allowed and corporations can still fire and hire workers whenever they want.
Personally, I prefer Canada’s formula, which involves fewer programs but lower taxes.
I meant people in common, but naturally also me and You:
Our wealth is highly dependable on cheap resources. Like in my example, on Bolivian cheap labour. That we have to face.
I do not try to replace capitalism, I just want it to be more human.
And that we can’t create if people feel that this stage of development is enough.
From my point of view, capitalism is not anymore living in a tree, but has hardly left the cave. We are just in the beginning of creating a system that could be called “human”.
And I am not even trying to “give an example of a working socialist country”, for the simple reason I am against socialism.
