Incentives under communism?

[Crezth]

Much like in Japan, where everyone starved to death and is now dead?

 

[Zardnaar]

Much like in Japan, where everyone starved to death and is now dead?

Japan also gas a terrible population pyramids they've been stagnating 30 odd years.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I mean, sure but Soviets didnt tell there workers that they would be dead by the age of 59 and highest cancer rates in Russia
The only upside was the earlier retirement

USSR tend to compensate well for hard work and bad working conditions (far Northern regions, for example). Such that miners, for instance, were often getting paid more than university professors. Some professions were underpaid, such as doctors and teachers.

 

[gay_Aleks]

The point of the CSA example was to note how the right-wing perfected the persecution complex formula, but it's on me to expect historical literacy in this thread.

 

[red_elk]

Life expectancy is not the best parameter to criticize USSR.
The only time in Russian history when it reached highest developed world standards in life expectancy, was 1970-s.

Life expectancy in the USSR in 1975 was 70.4 years (up from 68.4 years in 1960 and 70.0 in 1970). Life expectancy in the US in 1975 was eight months longer than in the Soviet Union. Contrary to Eberstadt, life expectancy in the USSR is not the lowest in Europe, nor is it comparable to those of the less developed capitalist countries in Latin America. In 1975, Soviet life expectancy was higher than that of Finland, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and “half-civilized” Albania. The USSR was further considerably ahead of the major Latin American countries such as Mexico (64.7), Chile (62.6), Brazil (61.4), and Argentina (68.2). It should be noted that the Soviet overall life expectancy is only slightly lower than that of the major advanced capitalist countries such as the United Kingdom (72.4), Japan (72.9), and West Germany (71.3). In 1900, the average newborn Russian could expect to live for about thirty years (seventeen years less than a newborn in the US born at the same time) (Eberstadt, p. 23). In a little more than a single generation, the Soviet system was able to take a population which had been living in medieval conditions and bring it up to roughly Western European standards of nutrition and health care.

The Health Crisis in the USSR: An Exchange | Albert Szymanski

To the Editors: This note is a response to Nick Eberstadt, "The Health Crisis in the USSR" which appeared in The New York Review of Books, February 19,

www.nybooks.com

 

[NinjaCow64]

Life expectancy is not the best parameter to criticize USSR.
The only time in Russian history when it reached highest developed world standards in life expectancy, was 1970-s.

The Health Crisis in the USSR: An Exchange | Albert Szymanski

To the Editors: This note is a response to Nick Eberstadt, "The Health Crisis in the USSR" which appeared in The New York Review of Books, February 19,

www.nybooks.com

Yes and it went down significantly after the collapse, by like ten years.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes and it went down significantly after the collapse, by like ten years.

An yet other countries exceeded it without gulag.

Also people talk down Tsarist Russia to make USSR look better. They weren't medieval peasants but the fastest industrializing country at the time iirc.

It's why Germany went to war in WW1 they were scared of the pace of that industrialization. Soviets slowed that process down by ten-fifteen years.

Very flawed assessment from Germany and the Tsar though in regards to WW1. Tsar was an autocratic idiot along with the Kaiser.

 

[NinjaCow64]

They weren't medieval peasants but the fastest industrializing country at the time iirc.

This is…not true.

Also people talk down Tsarist Russia to make USSR look better.

Tsarist Russia is so bad that they paid a huge Monarchist to go live there and he became a Republican

 

[Zardnaar]

This is…not true.


Tsarist Russia is so bad that they paid a huge Monarchist to go live there and he became a Republican

This is the basic version.

Industrialization in the Russian Empire - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

1887-1913 looks interesting. The screw up was WW1. Soviets tanked those numbers for a decade or more deoend8ng on the number.

Soviet figures are also very questionable (they were often lying to themselves) .

Main point is if you didn't have completely incompetent leadership for 100 odd years you coukd have achieved a similar result without the blood shed.

The Tsar was already gone when Communists launched their revolution and wrecked the country for a decade.

 

[Senethro]

Why do the previous leaders not work with the nice revolutionaries instead of the angry fighty revolutionaries?

Or is there some process by which revolutionaries are made violent?

 

[gay_Aleks]

I think the funniest thing about the three biggest revolutions in history - the French Revolution, the 1905 Revolution & the 1917 Revolution(s) is that both had moments when, if the status quo, for a moment, slowed down and acceded to the moderate demands posed by the factions that were in control earlier on (so, for an example, the Lafayettists in 1790-1, the moderate liberals in 1905 and then in February 1917), all of the regimes would've been likely preserved, instead of being guillotined before an angry crowd or shot in a basement. Perhaps a lesson about compromise that most anti-communists are reticent to embrace, for some reason

 

[Akka]

I realise this is something that never goes down well, but I don't think you understand what Pratchett was getting at. Nobody is saying rich people don't spend money.

The point is to illustrate the cost of being poor vs. the cost of having more money / being rich. Much like renting vs. buying a property. Or renting vs. buying anything. Buying costs more upfront, and costs (often vastly) less in total. Renting is more expensive. My rent is up to double the mortgage of most of my peers (even with the mortgages going pear-shaped recently). And by "peers" I mean "other parents living in exactly the same village living in the same kinds of houses".

I do understand, and I spoke about it already :

Being poor can be more expensive than being just a tad bit above poor, because you're constantly forced to live in urgency, but that's all. That's a very small margin that is completely dwarfed by income differences.

As I point, it's somethning to think about when you consider how poverty pile up on people (and is an important and interesting aspect to discuss when such poverty is the subject), but it's nothing to do with the significant inequalities with wealthy people.

So you wouldn't be. I've already said I would be.

Like, the point isn't "how many people are like you and how many people are like me". The point is that we wouldn't need be churning out stuff just so someone could sell it. That sets a vastly lower requirement for production in the first place. Which means it's far easier and more manageable for people like myself to service that need, in that kind of society.

Don't get me wrong. I'd meet friends more than I currently do. I'd spend more time with my children. I'd play more video games. Because so much of my time is for the job, and not necessarily making the thing. Again, that's a product of the company needing to make money vs. the company needing to make a serviceable, reliable product.

Some people would do work even without incentive, I know. The problems are twofold :

1) How many of people would actually do it ? Because even with reduced production, you'd still need a lot of work hours to keep society working.

2) What would these people willing to work without incentive would actually work on ? As I pointed, I could imagine making software for fun in my spare time (and it would probably not be "useful" software that would help society as a whole ; even if it were, it might not be what is actually needed at the time). But I would certainly not want to spend my time on digging trenches for putting cables/sanitation in, or cleaning bathrooms, or filing administrative data. A common problem with organizations relying on voluntary people, is that they often come to do the glamorous/dreamed of part of the job, but not the dirty, grimmy aspects.

Efficient work require people who are experienced in it, and being organized to put the work where it's needed. It needs people being reliably here, putting in significant efforts into improving and their work not being wasted. That's a much higher bar to reach, and I don't see how a whole society would reach it just through people volunteering to do the dirty work. I'm not even going into the psychological factor of having a number of people doing nothing and living basically on the back of those who work.
To sum it up, relying on people being willing to work just looks like both a pipe dream and a nightmare to organize.

Why are we assuming that there would be no state backing of the value of money? Assuming money is still used, etc.

I mean, people already do favours for one another. So that's one model that already exists. For something more professional, what's to stop two people drawing up a contract and agreeing to it? The problem is the breaking of the contract - who would deal with that? But again we're back to "why would there not exist a body to deal with such things". Why are you assuming that seemingly everything around the concept of buying and selling goods would cease to exist? Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough either, but I think it's more that I'm missing something in your position on the topic.

As I said, I'm rather wondering than assuming. But money relying on law of offer and demand would badly fit a communist society, which is by essence opposed to the market. I don't see how a communist state could back up money while still keeping the communist aspect.

I don't understand. What incentives am I meant to be listing, exactly? Incentives for people to work in said theoretical society, or the incentives that the society itself offers?

I was focusing on the latter, but I obviously got mixed up.

The entire thread has been about incentive for people to work in said theoretical society. It's the very title and the very first sentence in the thread and when it comes to my posts I've also specifically asked about it.
So yes, once again I'm asking what would be the incentive IN such a society, to do the required work (and also, farther down the road, how "required work" would be determined and how it could evolve).

If I am understanding your objection to the thesis is that organising society like roommates organise chores won’t scale and doesn’t account for what other people in this thread call “bastardy”. Is this correct?

I believe that most human bastardy is not inherent to human nature and is merely a consequence of us all growing up under a system that rewards many forms of bastardy and punishes most non-bastard behaviours. I think most people, given a better environment, would not be bastards.

I believe after a dozen or so generations under a less bastardly system we wouldn’t need stringent measures to ensure that things run smoothly because the total sum of human bastardy wouldn’t amount to much.

I understand that "bastardly" is used just because it refers to a fun description in the thread, but while it's an understandable term, it gives a wrong feeling (and lead to wrong conclusion) on what it actually represents.
It's not that humans are "bastards", it's that humans, as social animals produced by evolution, simply have a general balance between selfishness and altruism - the first one ensuring the survival of the being, the second ensuring the survival of the species. What this "bastardly" word represents, is not actual "evil", but simply the nebulous and variable limit of altruism, where individuals aren't endlessly empathetic and ready to self-sacrifice, and prioritize their own well-being over the more distant well-being of "others".
And this limit can vary wildly from people to people, some being actual bona fide "evil" (lacking empathy and without principle, ready to trample people to further their gain), other being downright heroic (helping others and taking great care in the consequence of their actions), but this limit is VERY MUCH inherent to "human nature". Nurture can do a lot and change a lot, but we still are hardwired by what how our brain and hormones work, and it's both extremely childish and extremely dangerous to ignore that in order to imagine people as white sheets of paper that can be molded to fit one's preferred ideology.

 

[gay_Aleks]

The funniest part about the capitalists' assertion of human nature here then is the seeming belief that humanity, from its beginnings about a million years ago (give or take) were all really primed up to exchange dollars at a Taco Bell. Who, I wonder, now is the ideologue

 

[Crezth]

An yet other countries exceeded it without gulag.

Yeah, which ones? This is just whataboutism and I don’t know how many times your Nazi-preferring self is going to have to be reminded that in fact your beloved wealthy democratic capitalist nations put lots of people in “gulags,” they just called them things like latifundia, native reservations, imperial protectorates, sugar plantations, coal mines, et cetera. So for you get all bent out of shape how uniquely bad communists are while you prove totally and completely incapable of qualifying what makes them so unique let alone so bad, well, I guess I’m made to think of the fact you’d rather half your countrymen be killed in concentration camps than share with them so… that’s why there’s gonna be a revolution, really. The contradictions. While you continue to feed from the trough of imperial plunder, the people who are actually feeding you and keeping you in electricity - the working masses of the world, not all white or nearly - will do what is necessary for their own survival.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I think the funniest thing about the three biggest revolutions in history - the French Revolution, the 1905 Revolution & the 1917 Revolution(s)

I suspect that there were "bigger" ones, especially in China. Much hinges on what you mean by "biggest".

 

[gay_Aleks]

Another thing worthy of note: If we take the question backwards in time, say, incentives under slavery? the answer for the most part, I think would be unanimously "the whip", and perhaps, in some situations, comforts in specific types and forms of slavery. But no one, I believe, would then say that "well, this is clearly what humanity was born for, to be worked like a beast for long hours at the whim of his slave-masters"*. Indeed: what we would see here is panegyrics of the humanity of Western civilization and how it wisely abolished slavery, increasing freedom manifold.

But, well, does this not throw something of a wrench in all of your fine theses? If the chains can be broken, if the slaves can be freed, if that freedom is dependent on certain institutions, that introduces a crucial issue. Specifically:

As I have mentioned many, many times thorough this thread, the reason why any society functions at all, its 'incentive', is ultimately survival. However, when you look at it from the point of view of the slave, or the bondsman, we see that this need for existence is quite literally endangering their life and survival. This is when we get into the cycle of class struggle, and while the (unfortunately, still continuing) practice of slavery over the last three thousand years has changed and altered (i.e, for an example, in ancient Rome, the slaves very rarely were part of the 'official' class struggle though very much the crucial wheel and element over which the struggle was waged; in the so-called "New World", that was not the case, with slaves taking up arms to fight their slavers in places like Haiti and the U.S South), there is one very important question. What are the incentives for the slave to work? As I've already said: the whip. But, as you can easily recall, this has become totally broken and even in countries where slavery was integrated within the capitalist circuit, that eventually broke down. To wit, then, how do you think that our capitalistic society will keep going? Do you believe you can just continually throw lower and lower wages at workers to raise the profit rate? Because that sounds quite demonic to me, but more importantly, quite unsustainable!

*This may sound like hyperbole designed to rile one up; however, history demonstrates that such self-excusing frameworks existed; e.g, drapetomania, or the desire for flight of slaves from the plantations, who, for some reason, resist their "human nature" and fled.

I suspect that there were "bigger" ones, especially in China. Much hinges on what you mean by "biggest".

I will confess to an unforgivable Eurocentrism on my part here; my knowledge of the Chinese Revolution(s) is much lesser than the ones I listed out. However, in the cases outlined, I believe that the pattern holds, and I'm not sure you're really engaging with my post beyond a pithy potshot - even if for once accurate.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I will confess to an unforgivable Eurocentrism on my part here; my knowledge of the Chinese Revolution(s) is much lesser than the ones I listed out. However, in the cases outlined, I believe that the pattern holds, and I'm not sure you're really engaging with my post beyond a pithy potshot - even if for once accurate.

You made a bold statement as if it were some kind of truth that I felt needed to be noted as unlikely. You may carry on.

 

[gay_Aleks]

I made what you consider a bold statement, that you refused to engage with and instead of dealing with it, posted some rather unnecessary pedantry.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I did not make any effort to contest or engage in the rest of your post, only the weakness of what you presented as "fact". In addition, I left an open door regarding what "biggest" means to you.

 

[Hygro]

Another thing worthy of note: If we take the question backwards in time, say, incentives under slavery? the answer for the most part, I think would be unanimously "the whip", and perhaps, in some situations, comforts in specific types and forms of slavery. But no one, I believe, would then say that "well, this is clearly what humanity was born for, to be worked like a beast for long hours at the whim of his slave-masters"*. Indeed: what we would see here is panegyrics of the humanity of Western civilization and how it wisely abolished slavery, increasing freedom manifold.

Though it would be a lot to ask of someone back then to answer, conceivably the question could have been “slaves do all this work, how do we have a society without slaves to do all this work”

And someone could say “we could offer a wage for all work, and each worker could offer for each job, and leave if they so choose. We could have the entirety of our labor done this way”

And it would answer the question.