I feel that in these sort of discussions, there are an overabundance of people with little experience or knowledge of how complex organizations or governments actually work. By definition, socialist governments are buerocratic. The socialists on this board do a lot of handwaving that “the people will decide” but they don’t really go into the details of by what mechanism those decisions will be made and enforced.
A free market requires less beurocracy because people are able to buy and sell products and services at whatever price they can negotiate. The purpose of a buerocracy is to manage whatever infrastructure might be required, enforcment of agreements made and maybe to assess and verify the authenticity and quality of the items being traded. Any information as to the actual value of the items traded is automatically and inherently communicated in the price.
When you shift to a more socialist model where allocation of resources are based on need, the amount of information needing to be processed increases dramatically. What defines “need”? Whose need is greatest? What products and service are needed? Where can we get them? Who decides? How do they decide? How are we sure that their decisions are fair? Some person or organization will ultimately make each of these decisions for each person. People must apply for some good or service and then be evaluated according to some set of criteria. And if the powers that be decide their need is not great enough for whatever reason, they must go without.
Or any good company that seeks to empower and leverage the knowledge and experience of their employees.
Care to elaborate? As msmith has explained as well, a bureaucracy will only expand in a socialist system.
So we will collectively decide what people need. What if I like regular coffee, but we decided we will only make and drink decaf. Too bad? I want to work as a teacher, but we need more janitors, so I get assigned to be a janitor. Too bad? I want to read, but we decide its not worth the time to have someone write them. Guess no more literature. It’s absolutely insane to cede the power to make all decisions to a majority decision. Many, many things should be left as a person’s choice.
For the same reason every system fails at times: people are imperfect. In a free market, we have a multitude of people making decisions about what to buy, sell, create, and so forth. Some will make mistakes and fail, while others will make correct decisions and succeed. Please remind me why this phenomenon is an argument against the free market. It’s a symptom of an economy.
So your system is unworkable unless you subjugate every person in the world, regardless of how they wish to live? This is not convincing me of the worth of socialism.
Because it’s not perfect - no system is. It’s like democracy. The free market is the worst economic system there is, except for all the others we have tried. And considering the standard of living in those places embracing a free market economy, I’d say it works pretty damn well.
Look, the fundamental conceptual flaw in Marxism is that it claims to be “scientific,” but isn’t, and in fact is derived from completely unscientific Hegelian idealism. That does not automatically make Marx’ conclusions wrong, but it does automatically make them suspect.
A secondary flaw is that although Marx’ academic training was in pure philosophy, he completely ignores the philosophical question of ethics. He nowhere makes an actual moral argument for the superior justice of socialism or communism or capitalism, or the right of the proletariat to revolt or expropriate. He seems to have regarded all that as so self-evident as not to merit discussion. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in his History of Western Philosophy, in the 19th-Century intellectual zeitgeist, history was progress and progress equated to justice. To Marx, Communism was demonstrably the Next Stage, therefore a superior stage in all respects including ethical.
A third flaw is that Marx’ general predictive theory of history contains an obvious inherent contradiction: If sociopolitical change in history is driven mainly by material/economic forces, an inescapable corollary is that history is driven by technological change. But, technological change is inherently unpredictable. We can predict it will go on happening, unless and until civilization collapses, but we cannot predict the details. How could Marx have predicted, or taken into account in his theories, the socioeconomic effect of automobiles or the Internet or atomic bombs? In his day, there was no way of knowing, there was no way engineers could know, whether such things ever would be possible. In our day, we have no way of knowing whether any of the world-changing technologies discussed as part of a Technological Singularity – nanotechnology, controlled nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces, genetic engineering on humans – ever will be possible.
Demand is not fixed. It varies and is dependent on price. Blowout sales are not a “failure of the system”. It is a demonstration of the adaptability of the system that sellers can maximize value by gradually reducing prices to react to market conditions.
You are asking a huge leap of faith of the whole world, then, if you want the whole world all at once to try it before it has ever been properly tried anywhere.
Because socialism, especially democratic socialism, is a threat to those around it. When the Diggers began to establish an alternative form of communal living, the established powers and land owners sent troops in to destroy their communities. When the cooperative movement established alternative forms of control of the means of production, the capitalists cooperated to force them out of business. When even the weak, statist revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the Czar, the Capitalist powers sent troops in to attempt to reverse the revolution.
Even in early US history, laws were passed preventing whites from living in Native American villages and communities, and people who chose to live there were often forced back into “regular” society.
State socialism is bureaucratic. However, capitalism is also adept at creating layers of bureaucracy, as anyone who has worked in an American corporation can attest.
Sorry, poorly written sentence on my part. I didn’t mean the only kind of society a bureaucracy can grow in is a socialist society (of course it exists in any kind of society), but that in a socialist society, bureaucracy will only grow - it will not wither away and die.
It’s not that I don’t think they are. Structuring organizations to maximize efficiency is a complex subject and it only gets more complex as the organizations grow in size.
I would say that the way a large modern corporation works is a strong argument against socialism. Internally, corporations are actually very socialist. All employees are more or less given the same services. Resources are allocated according to the decisions of various committees. And employees are always expected to act in the greater good of the company.
You’re assuming the antecedent here. What if you don’t want to maximise efficiency? What if you want to maximise employee satisfaction instead? See, that’s the kind of thing you can do when you remove the profit motive as your main motivation.
Looks like you’re equating socialism with Communist Russia again. I’d say that corporations would be more of an argument against oligarchy and totalitarianism.
The top level decisions are, after all, made by a small clique that doesn’t answer in any way to the people below them. Who in turn delegate power to mid-level executives, who again are not answerable to the employees below them in the hierarchy, and so on. Your luck at getting promotions might depend many other factors than your suitability for the job, etc. And yes, you are always expected to act for the greater good of the company.
The two systems do resemble each other to a sad degree. Luckily, corporations are regulated to limit the worst abuses of power, and people are, in theory, able to walk away from them, should they not like what they’re getting.
Personally, I don’t believe that pure socialism is workable in the real world. Much like anarcho-capitalism. They have very different starting points, but will both ultimately lead to totalitarianism, through simple human greed and lust for power.
I may be a little late to this thread by I figured I’d add another perspective.
I don’t shy away from the word socialist but neither do I often refer to myself as one. I was really glad to see a thread like this one, because with the word socialism being thrown around a lot these days, it’s obvious many people need some terms clarified.
So regarding the definition of socialism, one could ask 5 socialists and get 6 definitions. So I’ll give you my definition and anyone who engages me should use that definition. In other words I have no interest in defending other definitions. I use the more traditional (pre-marxian) meaning of socialism, which is a socio-economic system that involves the social control of the means of production. Seems simple and (purposely) vague enough. To me, more specifically, the social control means direct worker control based on the concept of affected interest. Affected interest is the believe that people should participate in the decisions that affect them. It can also be argued that government control (nationalization) is a form of social control, but I disagree.
On the issue of bureaucrats, I believe that a socialist society has almost everyone being like a bureaucrat (making decisions), which is to say that hardly no one will be. I don’t know if people will understand this, so I’ll spell it out. The people will make decisions or elect people to make those decisions in the realms that affect them. As workers they will run companies cooperatively. In larger companies this may involve “bosses” being elected for set periods of time and being immediately recallable, if they lose favor. There are still bureaucrats for more national tasks, but I see them as being needed less is such a society (a bureaucrat being defined as a paid unelected official that has some power over the lives of others, either through allocating resources or making economic, political, etc. decisions).
This all looks good in theory, but in practice it will be a lot more messy. But I embrace the spirit of experimentation. The role of government is to encourage democracy in the workplace and the expansion of cooperatives.
The reason I don’t consider myself really a socialist (according to the more popular definition) is because I embrace aspects of capitalism, specifically aspects of the free market, which I agree help efficiently to regulate allocation of goods. I’m more of a workplace democrat.
In my case, two intellectual sources stimulated me to take start taking democratic socialism (as distinct from ordinary liberalism) seriously as a cause:
Martin Gardner’s The WHYS of a Philosophical Scrivener 1983, in particular the chapters, “THE STATE: Why I Am Not an Anarchist,” “THE STATE: Why I Am Not a Smithian,” and “LIBERTY: Why I Am Not a Marxist.”
My personal hero George Orwell, who everybody knows as a critic of Stalinism, but who, I was surprised to discover, remained a socialist to the end of his life.
Well, it was a lot easier to believe, in Orwell’s day, that state socialism so defined could “solve the problem of production.” Lately I do not think of socialism as something that is to come after capitalism; rather, I think of a vigorous socialist political movement as something capitalism needs to keep it civilized. And I think this is the general consensus among most self-ID’d “socialists” in Europe and throughout the industrialized democracies today.
Nevertheless, I should note, even the Stalinist model of totalitarian socialism has not been discredited to quite the extent conservatives assert. It does work – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period.
OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)
I also respect socialism as the only truly internationalist political movement of any kind that has had any importance in the past two centuries. I’ve always believed the world and humanity would be better off as a single state. Of course, when self-described Socialists or Communists have actually come to power, they usually turn out to act like nationalists, or even imperialists. So it goes. I wonder if there is any future for internationalism as such (as distinct from neoliberal economic globalism).
Here’s an analysis that puts that in perspective: From “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind, Prospect, 10/25/01:
Now, I have the honor of calling to your attention, Olentzero, that you seem to have fallen prey to the rationalistic fallacy, assuming that you can construct a better society just by rigid reasoning from first principles, and that you share that fallacy exactly with the Objectivists; only the premises are different. But that kind of rationalism is not “scientific.” Science, by definition, begins with the assumption that you don’t have all the answers and you can’t get them by unaided reason, but only by reason combined with a guided process of research and experimentation; and your theories, however well-supported by the data, must never be taken dogmatically as “The Truth,” but always open to revision in light of new data.
In this schema, I would place myself midway between the humanist camp and the socialist wing of the rationalist camp. I don’t necessarily believe in the state taking over the whole economy, nor any particular part of it; I just believe that reason does have very great power and as-yet-unrealized power to improve human society, and that we should move in a direction of greater community and equality-of-outcome very gradually, learning at every step from mistakes and the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The first step is a basic political-electoral reform, to adopt proportional representation, so that some socialist parties can get a chance to run for office on their own terms and win at least minority shares of seats in some legislatures, propose some forms in their general desired direction, get some of those implemented, and, if those work out, maybe get rewarded by the voters with more seats next election. And then, maybe, eventually, socialism or something that can be called that with a straight face. Lenin was being incredibly hubristic when he declared, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order,” assuming that just because his Bolsheviks had the right ideology they knew how to run something as complex as a national economy. Nothing is ever that simple.
If you’re a Libertarian – consider how, if your ideas are valid, the same process described above could work in your favor: We get a PR system. The Libertarians run as Libertarians and get representation in some state legislatures in Congress, get seats on some committees, and are there constantly pushing to decriminalize this or deregulate that or abolish this tax or cut that spending allocation or eliminat this government agency. Sometimes, in the course of logrolling-bargaining for their votes to support a major party’s bill, they’ll get something they want. If it works out in real life as the Libertarians claimed it would, the public gets up and takes notice, and in the next election the Libertarians get more seats. They get some more reforms; maybe theyh don’t work out as intended, but with a little tweaking and tinkering, they turn out to be worthwhile and beneficial in a way that is obvious even to persons who do not accept the Libertarians’ ideology or value system. Eventually, through this process, the Libertarians become a major party, maybe even a majority party. And then we get something much nearer to a workable Libertopia than than what we would get (i.e., an American Somalia) if a Libertarian Revolution overthrew the state all at once.
It is even conceivable that, after a few decades, we can achieve a society at which both Socialists and Libertarians can point and say, “Yes! We won! This is it! This is exactly what we wanted all along!”
Now, maybe “democratic socialist” is not the right word for my position as described here. Maybe “progressive” is a better word. Fine by me, I have often argued on this board that “progressive,” as the word is used nowadays (as opposed to how it was used in Teddy Roosevelt’s day) actually means something well to the right of “socialist” and something well to the left of “liberal.” Certainly most self-identified American progressives, such as those of the Vermont Progressive Party or New York’s Working Families Party, are not demanding anything like class war, immediate expropriation and socialization of the means of production, etc., and do not seem to be influenced at all by Marxist thinking, not even in the attenuated way that the Democratic Socialists of America is.
And you are wrong. Simply put, scientific socialist theory does not proceed from ideas and end up attempting to make the world fit those ideas; it observes the world as it is and tries to see which elements have the potential of pushing social evolution forward. I have done a fair bit of reading in several works by Marx and Engels in preparation for responding to Bertrand Russell’s criticisms, but I feel that the only refutation needed is a quote from the Communist Manifesto, written at the very start of Marx’ political life:
Emphasis mine.
It cannot be made much clearer than in this statement - before Marx analyzed the world economic system in Capital, at the very birth of a political career, that he in no way viewed the advent of socialism as automatic, as the result of the inevitable progress of ideas. Socialism, as all systems before it, would come about as the result of conscious struggle of an organized class - not as a result of ‘progress’ independent of human action. Marx’ inheritance from Hegel was the dialectic - a mode of thought brought down from the ancient Greeks - but he explicitly rejected Hegel’s idealism and (as shown in this brief sentence) stood the motor of social evolution on a firmly material basis. A blind faith in the inevitable progress of ideas could never admit to the possibility of an unacceptable outcome; a firmly scientific materialist outlook must of necessity admit that things could go wrong. Marx realized this from the very start, and his admission as such puts paid permanently to any and all accusations of idealism.
I must stop here as far as this thread is concerned, as an impending personal tragedy will be commanding my attention for the next week or so. Nor do I expect that this is going to go all that far in convincing you, BG, so I’m also going to take this opportunity to make this the last I have to say to you directly on the subject.
You can have a free market without capitalism. That is, you can abolish private ownership of the *means *of production, and retain a free market in the *products *of production in order to tap that (IMO, mystical) efficiency of the Invisible Hand.
This was more or less my point. But many define socialism as the abolishment of the free market, I don’t. My post was more for them and not for people like us. I consider myself a socialist, but then again not wedded to the term. I agree that the Invisible Hand is mystical. Obviously (to me at least) the free market can’t be completely free. There needs to be regulation but that regulatory power needs to placed into as many hands as possible. People will have (more) power as producers and consumers.