How do investors make money by investing in [the non-profit arm of] OpenAI?
By buying stock at a low price and selling it at a high price.
You can buy stocks in non-profits?
Sorry, OpenAI is a poor example. I just meant any company running at a loss.
There are not supposed to be any external “investors” making a profit.
But in the case in question, note, again, that the Soviet government itself was contributing to screwing up the economy and shafting the workers.
I think it depends on the specific business. If it’s something critical, like say producing food, then it should be subsidized by the government. If it’s a new technology like AI that might be of benefit but hasn’t yet matured to the point that it’s profitable, that’s a little trickier. Overall I still lean towards government support of the industry. If it’s just the typical poorly run business, then it should simply be allowed to go out of business.
The idea that all of humanity can live as though we are all one big loving family runs aground on the rocks of Dunbar’s Number. We can know our personal acquaintances well enough to form judgements of their character and treat them accordingly; it’s roughly the calculation we make when we decide how expensive a Christmas gift to give people we know. Even a parent, child or sibling can be a toxic asshole who has forfeited the loyalty normally conceded to a close relative. We know how well to treat people based on how well they treat us.
For millions of anonymous strangers this calculation is impossible. The best we can do is presume that they’re also (mostly!) members of a law-abiding civil society and give them the benefit of the doubt, but otherwise insist on a transparent quid pro quo. In other words a market economy, with money as the yardstick we use to conclude whether a transaction is ultimately worth it or not.
What the command economies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China did was to erase this bookkeeping and insist that everyone work as hard as possible, for whatever the Party cared to give them in return; which at times didn’t even include enough food to survive. The farmers and workers of those regimes were essentially slaves of the state. Advocates of socialism insist that command economies possess a “global” wisdom that transactional market economies lack; the opposite seems to be true.
Really it’s the same logic as the Red Button vs. Blue Button debate, with collectivism being firmly in the Blue Button camp.
What I’m hypothesizing isn’t a command economy as such. I’m not proposing that we replace our oligarchs with party apparatchiks. I’m considering an alternative market economy where the bulk of the benefits go to those who do the actual work. Maybe this could be in the form of the workers owning the company. Maybe it could be in the form of the government passing legislation that forces companies to distribute profits mostly to the workers rather than stock holders. Maybe even just passing legislation that allows for extremely strong unions, like what professional athletes in the major US sports leagues have. Whatever the mechanism might be, I think it should be those who are doing the actual work who should be reaping the benefits of that work.
I haven’t seen anyone address this important question.
My closely related question would be: did ANY of the USSR top leadership actually believe in the dogma and propaganda that they uttered publicly? Lenin? Stalin I seriously doubt. Trotsky? [getting exiled for for his trouble, of opening his mouth and sticking to his ideals too much?]
I briefly responded to that concern. I would not let anyone starve. There should definitely be a minimum that everyone receives, regardless of their ability to work. But I think it’s also crucial to have the lowest pay / minimum wage for those who do work be higher than this minimum level so that people will still want to do minimum wage work. How much higher? I’d say, just off the top of my head, at least twice whatever the minimum guarantee is. At least high enough so that the people who are doing minimum wage work won’t have a good reason to be resentful of those who are on welfare / on the dole / whatever you want to call it.
One way to achieve that is to give everyone enough to live on and tax all earnings at a flat or graduated rate. That is, don’t have a “cliff benefit” where you lose the benefit if you make not than that.
But the major problem i see with this scheme beyond it’s lack of a safety net is how you actually value a particular person’s labor.
The government could (and does) set up companies, but a company cannot be an efficient creator of wealth if you don’t have coherent price signaling.
Until you run into the too big to fail syndrome. Big corporations in general and The Rich in particular are adamant about being free from government regulations but keen on getting bailed out when they fuck up.
At any rate, my question is moot because the OP clarified that he doesn’t mind capitalists making money from buying and selling stock as long as they don’t get a share of the profits (if any).
I’m firmly of the opinion that being “too big to fail” is a sign that that company ought to be owned by the government, and that any bailout under that premise ought to take the form of a takeover.
The problem this runs into relates to the fact that classic Marxism obsessively focused on control of the means of production without examining a more fundamental question: how are the means of production brought into existence? Industrial plant doesn’t just spring out of the ground like mushrooms after all, and the willingness to work doesn’t lead to anything without the opportunity being there. In both 19th-20th century capitalist countries AND the crash-industrialization of the Soviet Union the focus was on expansion, which meant reinvestment of the profit from production into further development. A tycoon in the 19th century could either pay his workers better or front the money for another railroad or steel mill; as long as the latter was the more productive option wages stayed low. And of course the Soviet Union infamously kept worker compensation nearly at slave level (and AT slave level for the millions sentenced to labor camps) because Stalin wanted more development and wanted it yesterday.
The bulk of the benefits going to those who do the actual work makes sense in a steady-state economy where very little new growth takes place, which hasn’t been the case for some time.
This wasn’t Stalin’s idea or ideal. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” may be found in the bible. Marx quoted the line in 1875, but it didn’t originate with him; it was used by earlier European socialists. Lenin and then Stalin rewrote this as “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work” and it was incorporated thusly in the 1936 Soviet constitution.
An issue with your conceptualization is that capitalism is by definition and historical practice a system that gives control over work–who does it for whom and under what conditions–to a tiny minority, that is to say (wait for it!) the capitalist. Capital lets the capitalist assemble for his own use and direction all the economic factors needed for production. One of those factors is labour, that is, people. The point of producing, for the capitalist, is not to take care of his, or anyone else’s, needs and wants but to increase his capital, that is, to get a profit. So the entire system is based on treating people like things to create profit.
That was also the case in the Soviet Union, with capitalists replaced with state directors. Thus many have called that system “state capitalism.” Given monopoly capitalism and the intertwining of corporate directors and the government in the US and other capitalist countries, by the 1930s many observers, including Orwell in 1984, concluded the two systems resembled each other much more than commonly thought.
Economic production is the ultimate expression of materialism: it can only regard people as workers and consumers. This isn’t a feature of capitalism (or Stalinism), it’s a feature of the blind, deaf amoral physical universe.
Since this is a hypothetical, I’ll just say that the original abilities/needs does not fail, because humans " humans have wants." The model does/did not exist for “wants,” only “needs.” In the utopia envisioned, nobody has “wants” since all their “needs” have been taken care of. I have a hard time seeing this implemented successfully in the real world.
However, I think it’s something to have in mind when creating a social contract for a society. If the country is rich*, it should provide for the weakest. From there we can talk about at what level we must demand that people provide for themselves.
*Insert your value for rich. I’d say all the OECD countries.