Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I dislike walls of text, but here goes.
Succinctly, yes. It is obviously more complicated than that. But you have correctly identified that social democrats are not socialists, which I consider a huge step forward.
I will address this quote in reverse order.
The so-called invisible hand is simply a fanciful name for the corrective mechanism of market interaction. It does not presuppose capitalist social organization. Smith called it the invisible hand because there was a human agency directing it, it was the interaction of many individuals in the same market which caused the forces of what we would today term "the business cycle." While Smith's terminology and models were certainly applicable for his time, and it is understandable why many people would see it as viable and true, it is important to understand that capitalism has long outgrown the imagined organization which the classical economists described and predicted. Smith, for example, famously observed that, since human greed was the force being harnessed by his "rational self-interest," a large corporation (like the kind which dominate our society today) was impossible, because people would be unable to set aside their personal desires and function for such a "greater good" than themselves. That is evidently untrue. In addition, the "perfect competition" model that Smith and Ricardo describe, whereby no one actor may influence the market, and the interactional behavior of many individual players is the governing body described as the "invisible hand,' is now only true for unaffiliated consumers. With so few producers in nearly every market, their ability, either through cartels or simply by virtue of size, to influence their markets greatly is evident. Further, in the area of industrial goods, not only are the producers few, but so are the consumers, and the time and money necessary to produce many of those goods is great enough that they have themselves developed a de facto planning system through mutual contracts, effectively abolishing those markets entirely. So it seems to me that to use theories and models built upon two hundred year old observations is patently ludicrous, when the society and economics they supposedly describe has far outgrown themselves.
I have heard many theories regarding just how the socialist economy should work. On the one hand, in The Iron Heel Jack London, through the voice of Ernest Everhard, describes the future socialist economy as being like a giant corporation, since that is the trend in economics, and bigger corporations with either horizontal or vertical integration are more efficient than smaller ones, by virtue of economies of scale. This is a principle I discuss at length in this thread about monopolies.
Another type is that imagined by Trotsky, which consists of decentralized power and economics, with communes functioning on a comparative advantage basis in trade with other communes, coming together federatively for purposes of defense and organizing large projects (like, for example, a space program, though Trotsky obviously didn't mention THAT
).
Another type still is the Wobby Theory of Industrial Democracy, which I have a certain liking towards, it being the product of my countrymen. Their great ideologue is probably Big Bill Haywood (also one of the founders of the Communist Party of the United States, and one of two Americans buried in the Kremlin Necropolis), who foresaw the use of general strikes to force an end to capitalism. This would serve the purposes of creating a true mass movement, since a general strike cannot be carried out by a small cadre like a coup d'etat can. Whereas in normal general strikes workers walk out of their jobs en masse in protest, in The Final General Strike, they would not leave their jobs, but occupy them and seize them for themselves. Production would then be managed by industry-wide labor union-like organizations in a sort of massive democratic industrial syndicate.
My personal vision is rather like this last version. Corporations are already run more or less in a socialist manner, just without socialist principles. Long ago did centralized decision making around titular figures disappear, replaced by capable committees of experts, who decide things democratically and with the proximity to production necessary to facilitate reactive and timely corrections. And further, companies are owned by shareholders who vote for the CEO and Board members. The problem is, this is only true of corporate-level decision making. They get profit-sharing and socialist-like decision making, but the factor floor gets old-fashioned capitalism. I would extend that committee structure all the way to the bottom of the company, and remove the "public" ownership of stocks and replace them with employee ownership. Combined with a mandate of maximum divergence of pay within a company, and we would effectively have socialism. Democratic, worker-managed, worker-owned companies.
Well they did get their ideas from real life practices. And by the way, the Royal Academy was not lobbying for socialism in the video, I merely used it to illustrate how some of the concerns you raised were not really such great concerns.
Interesting.
I don't think reading Capital is necessary. It's a great read and all, and certainly rewarding in more than a simply economic or social knowledge manner, but also exhaustive and exhausting. And we don't need to know the ins and outs of worsted production or the different weight capacities of specific London smelting basins.
Not choosing to prioritize productive numbers doesn't signal a backwards slide into pre-modern standards of living. Remember why we overproduce: it's not for the benefit of the consumer, it's for the benefit of the capitalist. Consumer benefit is incident. A post-scarcity society will certainly be necessary for communism, which in many ways we have already achieved or are capable of soon achieving, but we can worry about that problem later. Again, even if communism is unable to produce such a thing, that does not mean that capitalist economic despotism is therefore our only option (the common acronym seen is TINA - There Is No Alternative [to capitalism]).
I make $12/hour, which is about $21,000 a year, before taxes. My boss makes over twice that. His boss makes four times that. His boss makes twelve times that. The CEO of our company makes a cool $1 million a year. Given that we, the lowly associates, far, far outnumber management (there are probably 25 employees to a two-manager store, 6 or 7 stores to a district, and 2 or 3 districts to a region), yes, it's safe to say that such abysmal wealth distribution does exist in large corporations, despite there being a management bureaucracy. It is most certainly competitive, because they buy off good corporate managers with high salaries and minimize their costs elsewhere by paying associates just above minimum wage (the people I am in charge of as a shift leader only make around 25% less than I). To us on the bottom, a dollar more an hour is a nice raise, and makes all the difference between one job and another.
I'm going to address this point here, rather than later, because you dedicate several paragraphs to basically making the same point again.
When I say inevitable, this is what I mean. Marxism is basically an endorsement of power politics. This "determinism" is basically the observation that those who can, do, and because of the way society is bifurcated by capitalism, there's only one class left to seize power: the proletariat. We have superior numbers, so when we are sufficiently motivated, we will use our power and win the day. Because of the social awakening that will be necessary for us to do so, the proletariat will act in such a way as to meet and solve the pertinent source of malaise: property. Just as the liberals addressed their problem of lack of political rights and freedoms by attacking the social principles which blocked their realization: Divine Right and seigniorial titles, and replaced them with ones that served the interests of the classes who fueled the rising - popular sovereignty and the liberal freedoms of life, liberty, and property, so will we destroy private property in favor of public ownership and democracy. It's how humans deal with stuff, we find problems and solve them, creating a more perfect system in the process. It's not a whiggish progression towards political perfection, it's simply power politics, and the secret to capitalism's success - that is has erased all societies which came before it, and divided mankind into two political classes - is what will be its downfall, since it leaves only one class to destroy the other. Well, absorb the other, I should say, since we will all become proletarians when we make our Brotherhood of Man.
We refer to communism as being a sort of "end of history" type of thing, since we can't really imagine another problem happening after this one, believing as we do that political struggles of class versus class are what drive such things, and mankind in negating capitalism will have no choice but to abolish political classes entirely.
I am a student of history, I'm well aware of the problems revolutionary societies have faced. But the United States is titular to Capitalism. If the former falls, the latter's death knell is sounded. As much as I hate what this country has become, it is here in the belly of the beast that the battle must be won, if it is to be won anywhere.
I have no idea what the context he said this in was, and with Marx, context is absolutely essential because of the snarky way he spoke.
No one has said it did. It became unstable for a variety of factors, namely that it was generating insufficient revenue to fund its military because senatorial properties, which were becoming an increasingly large percentage of imperial lands, were tax-exempt, and because the social-economic structure of the military made soldiers loyal to generals and not to Rome, and generals loyal to themselves.
I don't see how any of these questions are relevant. The Roman one wasn't even, I just felt like answering it.
You seem to think that the only truth is that which can be demonstrated via the scientific method. There is more truth than that yielded a posteriori. Perhaps we should test out some of that theory if you want to see it proven. Once again, you're taking an unfalsifiable field of study, faulting a constituent part of it for being unfalsifiable, and then whining because there's no proof for it, as if that were unique amongst schools of thought. There was no proof for liberalism, either. There's no proof for any of philosophy. If you think the only truth in the world is that which can be gathered in a lab, then no amount of arguing will change your nihilist mind. If you studied sociology, then you must believe in some level in some of those unfalsifiable "sciences," so why fault Marxism for being supposedly unique in its unfalsifiability?
So your problem is that because we've never abolished property before, you don't think it can be done?
I said it, didn't I? As I said previously, it does not encompass all of human activity, merely the structure of our societies.
Based on that wording, what doesn't?
I really have no idea what you're talking about here.
It's not. If I had to pick one important thing Lenin gave the world, it was the stagist theory. Socialism is the process of destroying capitalism and creating the foundations for communism. I don't think, if there were a socialist revolution tomorrow, that any of us would live to see communism. I don't even see building communism as our generation's job. Our job is to destroy capitalism and give our children and grandchildren something of a future to work with. That is work enough for a lifetime.
Yeah, well I'm religious, so get over it.
Yes, because as he demonstrates, that's exactly what has happened throughout history. Is capitalism not the direct opposite of mercantilism? Is monarchy not the direct opposite of primitive communism?
That's right, it's a social science. I would never call historical study a science, that doesn't mean conclusions drawn from it about it are irrelevant or guaranteed to be wrong.
This is like asking "why not make God say X instead of Y?" It's not up to us. As I said above, history shows that the underclasses destroy that which impedes their freedom. In capitalism, all malaise stems from private property, so it is private property we shall destroy.
And by the way, slavery and serfdom are different. But then that historical epoch was different from the capitalist-socialist one, much is at work in one that is not in the other, most of all that slavery was not something "done away with" to make way for serfdom. It's a ridiculous comparison. I'm rather amazed you think it makes any sense.
Here's a fun fact, some food for thought before you get so caught up in denouncing Marxist hubris that you eclipse it with your own self-righteousness: your beloved scientific method is the product of philosophy, a school of thought that is internally consistent for providing proof, but which fails when other rigors of knowledge are applied.
And by the way, there are many logical proofs for God, but I doubt you would be interested in such pseudo-knowledge as logic provides. What fails empirical rigor (but obviously not all rationalist methods) are religions.
Succinctly, yes. It is obviously more complicated than that. But you have correctly identified that social democrats are not socialists, which I consider a huge step forward.
I will address this quote in reverse order.
The so-called invisible hand is simply a fanciful name for the corrective mechanism of market interaction. It does not presuppose capitalist social organization. Smith called it the invisible hand because there was a human agency directing it, it was the interaction of many individuals in the same market which caused the forces of what we would today term "the business cycle." While Smith's terminology and models were certainly applicable for his time, and it is understandable why many people would see it as viable and true, it is important to understand that capitalism has long outgrown the imagined organization which the classical economists described and predicted. Smith, for example, famously observed that, since human greed was the force being harnessed by his "rational self-interest," a large corporation (like the kind which dominate our society today) was impossible, because people would be unable to set aside their personal desires and function for such a "greater good" than themselves. That is evidently untrue. In addition, the "perfect competition" model that Smith and Ricardo describe, whereby no one actor may influence the market, and the interactional behavior of many individual players is the governing body described as the "invisible hand,' is now only true for unaffiliated consumers. With so few producers in nearly every market, their ability, either through cartels or simply by virtue of size, to influence their markets greatly is evident. Further, in the area of industrial goods, not only are the producers few, but so are the consumers, and the time and money necessary to produce many of those goods is great enough that they have themselves developed a de facto planning system through mutual contracts, effectively abolishing those markets entirely. So it seems to me that to use theories and models built upon two hundred year old observations is patently ludicrous, when the society and economics they supposedly describe has far outgrown themselves.
I have heard many theories regarding just how the socialist economy should work. On the one hand, in The Iron Heel Jack London, through the voice of Ernest Everhard, describes the future socialist economy as being like a giant corporation, since that is the trend in economics, and bigger corporations with either horizontal or vertical integration are more efficient than smaller ones, by virtue of economies of scale. This is a principle I discuss at length in this thread about monopolies.
Another type is that imagined by Trotsky, which consists of decentralized power and economics, with communes functioning on a comparative advantage basis in trade with other communes, coming together federatively for purposes of defense and organizing large projects (like, for example, a space program, though Trotsky obviously didn't mention THAT
).Another type still is the Wobby Theory of Industrial Democracy, which I have a certain liking towards, it being the product of my countrymen. Their great ideologue is probably Big Bill Haywood (also one of the founders of the Communist Party of the United States, and one of two Americans buried in the Kremlin Necropolis), who foresaw the use of general strikes to force an end to capitalism. This would serve the purposes of creating a true mass movement, since a general strike cannot be carried out by a small cadre like a coup d'etat can. Whereas in normal general strikes workers walk out of their jobs en masse in protest, in The Final General Strike, they would not leave their jobs, but occupy them and seize them for themselves. Production would then be managed by industry-wide labor union-like organizations in a sort of massive democratic industrial syndicate.
My personal vision is rather like this last version. Corporations are already run more or less in a socialist manner, just without socialist principles. Long ago did centralized decision making around titular figures disappear, replaced by capable committees of experts, who decide things democratically and with the proximity to production necessary to facilitate reactive and timely corrections. And further, companies are owned by shareholders who vote for the CEO and Board members. The problem is, this is only true of corporate-level decision making. They get profit-sharing and socialist-like decision making, but the factor floor gets old-fashioned capitalism. I would extend that committee structure all the way to the bottom of the company, and remove the "public" ownership of stocks and replace them with employee ownership. Combined with a mandate of maximum divergence of pay within a company, and we would effectively have socialism. Democratic, worker-managed, worker-owned companies.
Ah I don't know, maybe I did directly dismiss a point, I would have to rewatch it (and don't care to). But as I recall, the video made no direct assumptions about the role of money, but only went like "OMG look what this incredible experiment shows! It's like - Communism" and then went on to talk about soft factors increasing creativity. But well, in context of this video those experiments are IMO not that useful. Think of anxiety. It is established that a medium level of anxiety is best. The need to right now do something you have no routine in for a large amount of money may quit likely call for high anxiety though. Crippling mental capacities.
And after pointing that out, I went on to argue that those soft factors are not necessarily contradictory to capitalism, but just required smart management and that is something the video didn't actually argue against. For instance think of Google. I have heard that it is their management policy to give their employees a free space of working time for creative thinking, for persueing their own projects. Seems to be the exact thing the video talks about, but in a capitalistic frame.
Well they did get their ideas from real life practices. And by the way, the Royal Academy was not lobbying for socialism in the video, I merely used it to illustrate how some of the concerns you raised were not really such great concerns.
Interesting.
I don't think reading Capital is necessary. It's a great read and all, and certainly rewarding in more than a simply economic or social knowledge manner, but also exhaustive and exhausting. And we don't need to know the ins and outs of worsted production or the different weight capacities of specific London smelting basins.
Not choosing to prioritize productive numbers doesn't signal a backwards slide into pre-modern standards of living. Remember why we overproduce: it's not for the benefit of the consumer, it's for the benefit of the capitalist. Consumer benefit is incident. A post-scarcity society will certainly be necessary for communism, which in many ways we have already achieved or are capable of soon achieving, but we can worry about that problem later. Again, even if communism is unable to produce such a thing, that does not mean that capitalist economic despotism is therefore our only option (the common acronym seen is TINA - There Is No Alternative [to capitalism]).
I make $12/hour, which is about $21,000 a year, before taxes. My boss makes over twice that. His boss makes four times that. His boss makes twelve times that. The CEO of our company makes a cool $1 million a year. Given that we, the lowly associates, far, far outnumber management (there are probably 25 employees to a two-manager store, 6 or 7 stores to a district, and 2 or 3 districts to a region), yes, it's safe to say that such abysmal wealth distribution does exist in large corporations, despite there being a management bureaucracy. It is most certainly competitive, because they buy off good corporate managers with high salaries and minimize their costs elsewhere by paying associates just above minimum wage (the people I am in charge of as a shift leader only make around 25% less than I). To us on the bottom, a dollar more an hour is a nice raise, and makes all the difference between one job and another.
I'm going to address this point here, rather than later, because you dedicate several paragraphs to basically making the same point again.
When I say inevitable, this is what I mean. Marxism is basically an endorsement of power politics. This "determinism" is basically the observation that those who can, do, and because of the way society is bifurcated by capitalism, there's only one class left to seize power: the proletariat. We have superior numbers, so when we are sufficiently motivated, we will use our power and win the day. Because of the social awakening that will be necessary for us to do so, the proletariat will act in such a way as to meet and solve the pertinent source of malaise: property. Just as the liberals addressed their problem of lack of political rights and freedoms by attacking the social principles which blocked their realization: Divine Right and seigniorial titles, and replaced them with ones that served the interests of the classes who fueled the rising - popular sovereignty and the liberal freedoms of life, liberty, and property, so will we destroy private property in favor of public ownership and democracy. It's how humans deal with stuff, we find problems and solve them, creating a more perfect system in the process. It's not a whiggish progression towards political perfection, it's simply power politics, and the secret to capitalism's success - that is has erased all societies which came before it, and divided mankind into two political classes - is what will be its downfall, since it leaves only one class to destroy the other. Well, absorb the other, I should say, since we will all become proletarians when we make our Brotherhood of Man.
We refer to communism as being a sort of "end of history" type of thing, since we can't really imagine another problem happening after this one, believing as we do that political struggles of class versus class are what drive such things, and mankind in negating capitalism will have no choice but to abolish political classes entirely.
Just wait what happens when you actually start your revolutionThough nukes will probably help...
I am a student of history, I'm well aware of the problems revolutionary societies have faced. But the United States is titular to Capitalism. If the former falls, the latter's death knell is sounded. As much as I hate what this country has become, it is here in the belly of the beast that the battle must be won, if it is to be won anywhere.
I have no idea what the context he said this in was, and with Marx, context is absolutely essential because of the snarky way he spoke.
No one has said it did. It became unstable for a variety of factors, namely that it was generating insufficient revenue to fund its military because senatorial properties, which were becoming an increasingly large percentage of imperial lands, were tax-exempt, and because the social-economic structure of the military made soldiers loyal to generals and not to Rome, and generals loyal to themselves.
I don't see how any of these questions are relevant. The Roman one wasn't even, I just felt like answering it.
You seem to think that the only truth is that which can be demonstrated via the scientific method. There is more truth than that yielded a posteriori. Perhaps we should test out some of that theory if you want to see it proven. Once again, you're taking an unfalsifiable field of study, faulting a constituent part of it for being unfalsifiable, and then whining because there's no proof for it, as if that were unique amongst schools of thought. There was no proof for liberalism, either. There's no proof for any of philosophy. If you think the only truth in the world is that which can be gathered in a lab, then no amount of arguing will change your nihilist mind. If you studied sociology, then you must believe in some level in some of those unfalsifiable "sciences," so why fault Marxism for being supposedly unique in its unfalsifiability?
So your problem is that because we've never abolished property before, you don't think it can be done?
I said it, didn't I? As I said previously, it does not encompass all of human activity, merely the structure of our societies.
Based on that wording, what doesn't?
I really have no idea what you're talking about here.
It's not. If I had to pick one important thing Lenin gave the world, it was the stagist theory. Socialism is the process of destroying capitalism and creating the foundations for communism. I don't think, if there were a socialist revolution tomorrow, that any of us would live to see communism. I don't even see building communism as our generation's job. Our job is to destroy capitalism and give our children and grandchildren something of a future to work with. That is work enough for a lifetime.
Yeah, well I'm religious, so get over it.
Yes, because as he demonstrates, that's exactly what has happened throughout history. Is capitalism not the direct opposite of mercantilism? Is monarchy not the direct opposite of primitive communism?
That's right, it's a social science. I would never call historical study a science, that doesn't mean conclusions drawn from it about it are irrelevant or guaranteed to be wrong.
This is like asking "why not make God say X instead of Y?" It's not up to us. As I said above, history shows that the underclasses destroy that which impedes their freedom. In capitalism, all malaise stems from private property, so it is private property we shall destroy.
And by the way, slavery and serfdom are different. But then that historical epoch was different from the capitalist-socialist one, much is at work in one that is not in the other, most of all that slavery was not something "done away with" to make way for serfdom. It's a ridiculous comparison. I'm rather amazed you think it makes any sense.
Here's a fun fact, some food for thought before you get so caught up in denouncing Marxist hubris that you eclipse it with your own self-righteousness: your beloved scientific method is the product of philosophy, a school of thought that is internally consistent for providing proof, but which fails when other rigors of knowledge are applied.
And by the way, there are many logical proofs for God, but I doubt you would be interested in such pseudo-knowledge as logic provides. What fails empirical rigor (but obviously not all rationalist methods) are religions.
