Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?

[El_Machinae]

But even under UBI, people would not want to do crap jobs. Using UBI in a capitalist system, the wage for those jobs would go up until people were doing them voluntarily. You'd do them cuz you wanted greater pay and people would pay for them cuz they wanted the service.

 

[Birdjaguar]

No, it's the other way around. People who are talented in something are able to do these things well. And it usually coincides with what they enjoy doing.
Enjoyment motivates people for professional growth.

If you are doing your job just for money, you'll start to hate it very soon.

Whenever a significant group of people is selected for actual work, analysis, study or capability, there is a "bell curve" that can be applied to that group. Socialistic approaches seem to dismiss such curves or ignore them. There are people who are more capable, less capable and average in their abilities to do things. As much as I would like to be a singer song-writer, there is no way I could be one outside of the privacy of my home.

Enjoyment does not motivate folks to improve themselves. It can, for some, but for most (again see a bell curve) they will be satisfied with the everything is just fine attitude. There is an inequality across any population that includes energy, motivation, creativity, skill sets, ability to communicate well, mental issues, etc. etc. that cannot be ignored when you are trying to build a community where people have to work, work together, and improve their lives.

 

[AmazonQueen]

But even under UBI, people would not want to do crap jobs. Using UBI in a capitalist system, the wage for those jobs would go up until people were doing them voluntarily. You'd do them cuz you wanted greater pay and people would pay for them cuz they wanted the service.

Which would be fine by me.
Economic incentive rather than the present economic compulsion of saying the jobless have to live awful lives so that people will do the menial jobs.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Having people work pretty meaningless dead end Jobs with pay so low they Will never able afford stuff like education is inefficent.

A better system is one that encourage people to get education and work in more sophisticated Jobs.

 

[Hrothbern]

A better system is one that encourage people to get education and work in more sophisticated Jobs.

And who is doing the less sophisticated jobs ?

 

[GenMarshall]

A better system is one that encourage people to get education and work in more sophisticated Jobs.

Not to mention incentives for trades schools and programs, and apprenticeships.

 

[Traitorfish]

On the subject of Marxism, my cousin has become a full-blown College Communist, but has no understanding of Marxist theory (or radical left in general) so the arguments I've seen him make on Facebook are somewhat painful to read. Any good articles/short writings by prominent modern Marxists / radical left I can recommend to him? Currently the best I got is some pre-Russian Revolution stuff by LaSalle and Kropotkin.

LibCom's introductory guides are a pretty good starting place. The site's editorial position is nominally anarchist, so they take a more heavily sceptical tone on political parties and electoral politics than other sources, but they do consistently place a lot of value in making these ideas accessible and applicable to day-to-day life, and on writing to convince rather than to instruct, which is I would gently say an under-valued quality in left-wing writing. The site's archives also range far beyond the position of the site's editors, so there are a lot of different perspectives on offer.

Also maybe just tell him to listen to a bunch of ChapoTrapHouse, it won't teach him a lot of theory, but it gives an idea of what unaffected Marxist reading of current affairs looks like. (It might make him kind of an obnoxious know-it-all, but college aged males don't need a lot of help in that.)

 

[El_Machinae]

Having people work pretty meaningless dead end Jobs with pay so low they Will never able afford stuff like education is inefficent.

A better system is one that encourage people to get education and work in more sophisticated Jobs.

There's a mix. You want people doing want other people want to be done. If people want restaurants, then we want restaurant services. After that, though, you need a series of incentives towards 'making things better'. Westerners are quite happy to restaurant themselves into the extinction of the planet, so there needs to be funding for the creation (and rollout) of technologies that improve efficiency, shift demand, resource people better or create alternatives (which is the sum of the first two, I guess).

And you want investment into improvements that can actually increase Quality of Life. This is super-subjective, but there are areas that can get pretty broad consensus.

 

[bernie14]

OG: ....but I want to be a fiction writer!.....

TRIBE: but you are able to pick turnips. Write on your free time.

OG: ....but all I will know is picking turnips.....

TRIBE: so write on it's virtues....we need turnips

 

[red_elk]

Whenever a significant group of people is selected for actual work, analysis, study or capability, there is a "bell curve" that can be applied to that group. Socialistic approaches seem to dismiss such curves or ignore them. There are people who are more capable, less capable and average in their abilities to do things. As much as I would like to be a singer song-writer, there is no way I could be one outside of the privacy of my home.

No, selecting most gifted and competent people to do the job is not ignoring the bell curve, it's precisely the opposite of ignoring it.

Enjoyment does not motivate folks to improve themselves. It can, for some, but for most (again see a bell curve) they will be satisfied with the everything is just fine attitude.

And again, enjoyment is not a criteria for selection. It's a common side effect.
People who are able to do the job well, usually like it and more satisfied with it.
It doesn't mean all people who like the job, are necessarily good at it.

 

[Crezth]

Theres a few people have the instincts to be a chef or manage a restaurant and might still do it because they enjoy it but good luck finding waiters or kitchen porters who will do the job without tangible reward.

The tangible reward is getting paid a good wage. Honestly under socialism we should probably compensate the crap jobs way better than the by-comparison comfortable jobs. I know how horrific and exploitative even small businesses can be. Increasing the wage and giving those workers rights and leverage is a good way to start, and if a kitchen can't pull in workers to do its crap job, good riddance.

So it appears that the socialism answer to innovation and technological progress is that everyone gets to do what they think is fun without regard to whether or not they can do it well or if anyone wants the product or service.

Welcome to post-industrial capitalism, the age of grift, where this happens all the time and billions of dollars are wasted or stolen in the name of "innovation" and "technological progress!"

Who pays for all the start up costs and wages for the first few years and what happens when 10,000 restaurants fail? How would all the many necessary supply chains work? Who is going to design all the new equipment needed as manufacturing needs change? If there is population growth how will you grow the economy to keep up? If the population does not grow, where will the new workers come from as the population ages? How does such an economy trade globally? Passionately made hamburgers are not much of an export.

This is just shooting in the dark. There's no reason to assume this stuff can't be done under socialism. In fact we know for certain that socialist economies can develop proficiencies in, for example as you say, manufacturing and engineering.

Like you say who pays for 10,000 failing restaurants - I ask you, who really does pay for them? Under capitalism, when enough small businesses fail and enough loans default, the markets crash and *millions* lose their jobs and livelihoods. Many restaurants are opened with loans that will never be paid back, with a few greedy individuals making big money off of others' failure. The crashed markets are then bailed out by monopolists who pay themselves for being too big to fail. Under socialism, credit could be far more transparent, far fairer, far less indulging in the disbursement of MASSIVE loans that can never be paid back, and so on. Predatory lending replaced with socialist lending.

The dirty secret of capitalism is that this "growth" that exploitation achieves, growth you are anxious about now occurring under socialism, is mostly a lie. It is not "growth" of the economy, it is profits for a select few. There is a correlation there but that is not the same as saying those profits are necessary for growth. Actual growth is a matter of the physical work that people are doing, the goods and services they produce. When the population grows, and the growing population starts working, of course the economy starts growing as well. Why would people work? Because everyone would work.* Exactly the opposite of capitalism, where some people never need to work and live off of welfare skimmed from the working class.

Who needs exports? Export what you can. Make what you need. Under socialism I expect people would work a lot less and more environmentally conservative services would take up the bigger portion of the economy. Things like going to movies and getting your hair cut, which don't really require any additional input beyond labor. People would have less stress and be better positioned to enjoy the leisures of industrial society. If we're not shoveling some broken kitschy publicity stunt water pumps on African economies, so much the better.

I mean all of these nagging little details are really missing the forest for the trees. The point is there's no reason to expect that a socialist planned economy can't conduct the same basic maintenance of society objectives that capitalism can. Your mobile phone can still be designed and produced, albeit in a far less exploitative fashion and burning far less capital lining the pockets of executives who don't do anything anyway. What is a supply chain? Someone needs something, they order it from a distributor, the distributor distributes it. Why can't that be done with socialist businesses? There is no reason.

* Accounting for disabilities and people with special needs and conditions, of course, because we aren't barbarians and caring for the most vulnerable members of society ought to be a basic objective of human decency.

 

[El_Machinae]

People who are able to do the job well, usually like it and more satisfied with it.

Well, I hope this isn't an accurate summary of the position.
Now, I've worked for the sheer enjoyment of working. You cannot be a research associate without having a burning desire to be there. I would say, though, that only a portion of us were there because we were true believers.

 

[Crezth]

Question to you
To get some feel on what you consider as "fair"

How would you balance wage differences between workers ?
(we have now for example per country crude indicators like the GINI on gross incomes, or the multiple of CEO's to average wage of that company-country, or the multiple between a MP salary and the average salary of a country)

More precise worded:
A * What would be the multiple between the minimum wage and for example the nurse-teacher level, the GPs, the medical specialists.(assuming education cost of students is funded by the government)
B * What would be the multiple between the minimum wage and the salary of a MP (or Congress member) and that multiple for a President or Prime Minister
C * Would that President or Prime Minister salary also be the max salary of civil society and non-profit paid or substantially funded by the Government ? Like Central Bank, non-profit housing associations, etc.
D * How to handle shift allowances ? Say I am production employee and at 55 years old because of age-health regulations go to only day-shifts and lose the for example usual 20% shift allowance and earn less than I always did and less than the bulk of my colleagues.

If I shoot "fair" from the hip for a developed country like the Netherlands and excluding competion on and with labor between countries:
A: 1.25, 1.50, 1.75
B: 1.75 and 2.00
C: yes
D. I would simply compensate when you are forced to stop shifts from health regulations. And I would lower the shift allowance to 10% and compensate with the imo more appropiate earlier pension age. In effect I split up the usual 20% in a 10% social compensation and a 10% higher wear and tear of your body compensation and than decide that that higher wear and tear, shortening life belongs to earlier pension and cannot be bought by an employer by that 10% higher allowance.

I left out how to transform over time to that ABCD and I left out UBI, unemployment and partial disability allowances because we had enough discussions on UBI etc and it only distracts from the beef of the wage discussion: "what is a fair wage for differing jobs".

EDIT Overtime also a separate topic.

I think your shooting from the hip is about right. The actual numbers can be debated but the main objective is to not pay people more than anyone could actually need, but enough to appropriately recognize good contributions people make.

 

[Crezth]

Yes, it was clear. What's the form of 'appropriately recognized for their contribution'? I've asked a few times for the benefit, and smack-dab in the middle of your answer is the word I'm getting hung up on, apparently. Hopefully by asking again, I'll show what I'm not understanding.

Okay, I see what you mean.

Paid for the work they do cooking food for people. The more people they feed the more they earn, with profits split among the workers. If they go under, it happens and they have to go to the back of the line if they want a business loan.

As far as I can tell this is a fairly pure incentive. I’m aware people will do a thing like start a restaurant to make a lot of money and this motivates them, and under socialism we assume there is no path via making lots of money to the top of the ladder.

But there is still the distinction of being a good restauranteur. You can run a good eatery, and acquire recognition. At that point you become a likely candidate for certain high up positions or advancements if that’s what you want. You would become eligible to open more eateries, and thus oversee a bigger enterprise than you did before. You still have a material interest in your work and your physical labor investment, without being the sole owner of a business that has to exploit workers.

I’m offering this as a hypothetical model where a small business is incentivized to perform based on shared profits among the workers. It works the same way if you were looking at a large restaurant institution with people climbing a managerial ladder, or if profits remain privatized but are taxed heavily (this one is a bit more of a complicated caber to toss and I’d argue the most capitalist incentive of all three, but included for completeness’ sake). The point anyway is that fair compensation for work is, frankly, its own reward.

 

[El_Machinae]

And can one be so good at restauranting that the Quality of Life of your kids becoming higher than the average? I assume you can arrange a better retirement than average if you're good at running a good enterprise. But "above average" will necessarily be limited to some multiple. As it stands right now, the Walton heirs are capable of owning a greater portion of the net economy every fiscal quarter. That's obviously not within the desired scale.

But consumer services like trips to the space station, would that be possible with the initial understood framework?

 

[Crezth]

I don’t see why not. A rare luxury like visiting the space station could be distributed by lotto, or queue.

Just shooting from the hip, I don’t see any compensation should ever need to exceed double the base rate. But it’s debatable. Workers would still rank and higher ranked workers obviously would feel entitled to higher compensation. This is easily possible within the socialist framework. Affording a better quality of life would be relative to the baseline which would be... a pretty good quality of life. So I don’t see people complaining.

Back to the topic of selfishness, then, and aside from the money, selfish people are motivated to succeed in socialism, too, because they can achieve a higher social position by distinguishing themselves and climbing the ladders of labor. Making a name for yourself is not limited solely to your compensation.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, there are three ways to visit the space station under socialism, it seems, if one is capable of being excellent.

The first is to be an astronaut, obviously. The 2nd is to be lucky. The 3rd is to move to a society where you can receive better income and then purchase the trip from the socialist economy.

 

[Crezth]

Visiting the space station is one of those interesting luxuries because, as it stands, the only people who can afford to do so are billionaire tycoons whose mountainous fortunes are based on unparalleled heights of exploitation. So moving to a society where you can receive the income to buy that trip is really just finding a place where you can enslave enough people and plunder enough wealth to achieve that.

Unless we're talking about a futuristic society where a mere millionaire can afford the trip, in that case, I'd advise the socialist economy to fleece foreign tourists for dozens of times the cost of the trip and put the proceeds towards its citizens' needs.

 

[El_Machinae]

You're using emotion-laden language, honestly. I'm just describing the realities of the system as I understand them. But yeah, the socialist society should sell its exports at rates that are of net benefit to the society. OR, I guess, not sell them in order to deprive outsiders of the benefit but then forgo its citizenry receiving the benefits of that trade. I think that would be a question of strategy and is impossible to describe without just waving hands at what the various factors under consideration are.

 

[Lexicus]

Whenever a significant group of people is selected for actual work, analysis, study or capability, there is a "bell curve" that can be applied to that group. Socialistic approaches seem to dismiss such curves or ignore them. There are people who are more capable, less capable and average in their abilities to do things. As much as I would like to be a singer song-writer, there is no way I could be one outside of the privacy of my home.

Enjoyment does not motivate folks to improve themselves. It can, for some, but for most (again see a bell curve) they will be satisfied with the everything is just fine attitude. There is an inequality across any population that includes energy, motivation, creativity, skill sets, ability to communicate well, mental issues, etc. etc. that cannot be ignored when you are trying to build a community where people have to work, work together, and improve their lives.

Hmm...markets are desirable/necessary because they reify naturally-existing human hierarchies...where have I heard this idea before....hmmmmmmm....

I mean you even threw out the term "bell curve". Liberal faith in the market is because all the liberal talk about equality and human rights is hypocritical garbage. Liberals believe, just like reactionaries, that we need markets because some people are just better than others and markets reward their superiority while punishing the inferiority of the peasants. You don't even bother to hide it.