Been thinking about this a lot recently, i'll try to explain where I am at the moment, although this will likely come out a bit muddled:
A lot of people look at capitalism and socialism as mutually exclusive, I think this is a false dichotomisation of the two concepts. (I just checked and yes, that's a word).
Capitalism is a risk/reward system of economics. Owners of capital can
invest it (risk) and potentially
profit (reward). Freedom of ideas and opportunities can lead to more successful ventures. A fundamental problem is that people with capital can exact more value from their workers than some would say they are morally entitled to, some have historically left their workers in extreme poverty while living in extreme opulence - a new aristocracy that claims to be a meritocracy because 'I worked hard to get where I am today'.
Socialism is a principle of governance that recognises that a society can be better off when it protects its weak. Workers that are looked after (e.g. fed and housed) when they are not in work will be more productive when they re-enter employment. People entering the labour market can be more innovative and productive if they are healthy and educated. Thus social security, state sponsored healthcare and education are all tools that can actively assist capitalists. Fundamental to the history of socialist ideas is the criticism of capitalism - that it exploits workers - and the notion that workers should have more of the reward, since it is actively produced by their work.
Arguments in this topic tend to include the following:
- Hitler was a socialist
- 'Capitalism won the cold war you idiot, this conversation is over'
- Socialism removes any motivation to work because everyone is paid the same
- Companies are great at everything, the state ruins everything
- Private industry creates wealth, government spending just makes the deficit bigger
- Capitalism requires and leads to freedom, socialism requires and leads to repression
Let's look at these and since it came up on page one of the thread, let's do Fascists and Nazis first:
1. The Fascists did indeed have a fair number of socialist policies, as did the Nazis, but the motivation for them was not to overcome class boundaries and empower the proletariat - It was vicious populist nationalism with a side order of (genocidal) racism, these are all motivations traditionally associated with the political right. They are in fact an embodiment of the horseshoe theory - which states that the far left and far right have much in common, particularly an element of authoritarianism or totalitarianism. It is worth noting that neither the fascists nor the Nazis nationalised much industry and both exerted significantly less ruthless control over their wartime economy than Churchill's coalition in the UK. In my experience no-one serious ever tries to argue that the Nazis were socialists.
2. Let's go over the confounding variables that get in the way of declaring that the USSR lost the cold war purely because socialist economies do not work:
- The USSR's economy was never more than half the size of the USAs. That pretty much kills off any fair analysis instantly
- It is debatable how socialist a totalitarian state run by the secret police is. When the primary goal of government is to tell the populace how great everything is instead of actually making it so then things go sour pretty quickly - especially when the modus operandi established in the initial power grab is to murder critics a million at a time
- Economic growth in the USSR outstripped that of the USA for about fifty to sixty years, initially by a huge margin. Not bad considering all the mistakes that were made and the silly proportion of GDP put into military expenditure by the paranoid leadership. Enlightened state investment and demand can be an extremely powerful economic force
3. Just not true. There is no a priori reason why someone who does more work, or more valuable work, should not be compensated commensurately under a socialist system, indeed one of the basic principles on which the idea of workers ownership and reward is based is that they do not get paid according to the value of their labour, ergo someone who does more labour or labour that is harder/more skilled
should be compensated more under a socialist system. c.f. The perverse incentive of the capitalist system is that the more capital people own the less they have to work.
4. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the US healthcare system versus the NHS. Or you could have the union carbide scandal (and many others) versus state-run vaccination campaigns. Which company would you have tendered out to win World War 2? None? You'd rather leave that to a government? There is simply a false dichotomy in saying that if a company employs people to do something it is inherently better than the government doing exactly the same thing. Problems inevitably come from bad management either way, whether it is the profiteering within the insurance system in US healthcare or the frank idiocy of the 1970's UK car industry. Following 1979 a series of industries in the UK was privatised - this has been such a monumental failure that renationalising almost all of them is now popular with a majority of the electorate. Pretty much everything got worse and more expensive, while a small portion of the populace (the ones who had the most money to start with) rake up lots of everyone else's money.
5. Wealth comes from productive labour. The idea that only private wealth can generate this is just silly. If a rich guy builds a house then a society has gained a house. If a local council builds a house then the society has also gained a house. Where the money comes from is largely irrelevant - and it all came from the government originally anyway.
6. Read Orwell's 'the Road to Wigan Pier'. Contemplate that the conditions described followed about two centuries of the industrial revolution in the UK/GB. One of the central tenets of socialism is that those who start at the bottom overwhelmingly stay there, exploited and impoverished. There are two cases really to consider in this debate and it pays to be mindful of the starting conditions in each: In Europe the industrial revolution made very little impact on living conditions for the poor over a very long time period. This is probably because the capitalist class had all the political and practical power and they used it to cement their positions. R>G, for those who've read Piketty. Only when scared or threatened by the power of organised labour did the capitalist class give ground - and it is telling that during the period that the most socialism was allowed to creep into government (the post-war period) that the biggest advances by far were made in 'raising all boats'. By comparison the US seems to have been less exposed to socialist pressure, likely owing to the sheer amount of land and resources to go around. The 'working class'; in most of the 19th and early 20th century US was probably proportionally smaller and wealthier simply because there was so much to go around (i've been struggling to find data on this by the way so if anyone can give me some sources i'd appreciate it).
Overall I see socialism as a complement to capitalism, not a contradiction, it is often pointed out that the Communist Manifesto begins with a paean to the wonders of capitalism and Marx obviously thought that the one would grow out of the other. Marxist style socialist theories are often revolutionary in nature and this is a problem. Marx wrote the Manifesto during a period when violence, wars and revolutions were commonplace and he was not really in a position to understand that industrialisation was going to make such conflicts deadly to a degree that had not been dreamt of. I suspect if he wrote today that Marx would be much less willing to rite about revolution. Discussions of socialism are often tainted with talk of the mistakes of the past, as though capitalists never starved people to death to make a quick buck and more importantly as though a middle ground is not possible - and a look at the successes of socialism demonstrate how successful and prevalent it is in recent history. Socialist policies are deeply embedded in the fabric of every major economy, education, healthcare, social security, labour representation and so on are present to a large degree even in the US and more so in Europe and other 'Western' economies. The policies not only counter the negative effects of capitalism, they enhance it as an economic force: Innovative companies have more capable workers; workers in general are healthier and more productive; better conditions improve morale and productivity; better pay leads to better motivation - and also enables workers to spend money, which boost demand and increases the velocity of money in the system. The two systems in other words are better off synergising together to produce a more productive economy than competing as mutually exclusive ideologies.
I hope that makes some sense. Rant ends.
