So do you believe that the regular 4-9% unemployment rate in the US since the 1990s actually consists of "temporarily" unemployed workers? And that's just U3. U5 ranges from 4.9% to 11%.
No, not at all. But I also wouldn't claim that the US follows orthodox economic theory in any sense. If we did, Paul Krugman wouldn't find something to complain about in NYT each and every week.
Also, yeah, no, unemployed people aren't taken care of. I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to capitalist economics in practice. It's true that in theory, unemployed people can be taken care of, but that's not how capitalist economics has actually manifested in today's capitalist societies, is it?
Yes, it is practiced that way in some countries. But that brings us back to the well-worn discussion about whether the Nordic model is "capitalist" or "socialist."
I'm not entirely on board with the recurring theme of the thread that "welfare" = "socialism."
This was in starkest relief in the last Presidential election when the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to put to rest Bernie Sanders's claims that Denmark is socialist:
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
As I've said multiple times, my position is that mixed economies are best, capitalism requires regulations and redistribution to keep it in check, and the only remaining reasonable questions are about how and what to regulate and redistribute, not whether to do so.
So, yes, I totally agree that capitalist nations must grapple with questions like "How do you prevent the oligarchs from taking over and ruining everything?" But I'd also argue that this is a problem every society needs to grapple with, regardless of their economic system.
I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
Note that this is all also taking place in some context where private ownership of productive means is largely illegal. Even if someone somehow wound up being the last person in the building its not like they'd be allowed to then declare its all theirs personally and everyone they hire gets their wages and no more.
People are going to abuse systems to work around any safeguards against capital accumulation. We can't enumerate all such situations, but they will happen and we can only hope that people recognize what is going on.
This isn't about perfecting a system that will never ever fail. It will sometimes fail because it involves people.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
So do you believe that the regular 4-9% unemployment rate in the US since the 1990s actually consists of "temporarily" unemployed workers? And that's just U3. U5 ranges from 4.9% to 11%.
No, not at all. But I also wouldn't claim that the US follows orthodox economic theory in any sense. If we did, Paul Krugman wouldn't find something to complain about in NYT each and every week.
Also, yeah, no, unemployed people aren't taken care of. I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to capitalist economics in practice. It's true that in theory, unemployed people can be taken care of, but that's not how capitalist economics has actually manifested in today's capitalist societies, is it?
Yes, it is practiced that way in some countries. But that brings us back to the well-worn discussion about whether the Nordic model is "capitalist" or "socialist."
I'm not entirely on board with the recurring theme of the thread that "welfare" = "socialism."
This was in starkest relief in the last Presidential election when the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to put to rest Bernie Sanders's claims that Denmark is socialist:
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
As I've said multiple times, my position is that mixed economies are best, capitalism requires regulations and redistribution to keep it in check, and the only remaining reasonable questions are about how and what to regulate and redistribute, not whether to do so.
So, yes, I totally agree that capitalist nations must grapple with questions like "How do you prevent the oligarchs from taking over and ruining everything?" But I'd also argue that this is a problem every society needs to grapple with, regardless of their economic system.
I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
That's totally fair. This thread moved fast and I wasn't always able to follow the positions different people hold.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules? Or if I can run the factory myself, haven't I inherited the labour of my four other brothers, the labour they put into building the factory? Their labour in building the factory has reaped rewards for me. Again, haven't I accumulated capital? Is the government, at this point, going to step in and forcibly divest me of this capital?
The difficulty here is you're asking for extremely specific answers to specific hypothetical questions when the answer is often it doesn't really matter much/there wouldn't be one possible way/its so specific we can't really say at this point.
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
Additionally, I think your hypothetical strays pretty far from what socialists are trying to do. Our goal here is to prevent individuals and specific families from gathering and holding sole control over all the means of developing wealth.
If you and your brother start a company making lawn gnomes and then your brother leaves and its just you making lawn gnomes in your garage socialists don't really care because your solely owned lawn gnome production company isn't a threat to society as a socialist would understand a threat here.
If your company is capable of granting you serious control over the means of production it realistically requires laborers, who's labor would also grant them a share in the ownership of those means.
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules?
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
Its worth reiterating here that a scenario in which a single individual somehow is the last person left on the factory floor is unlikely as it would require basically every other worker in the company to accept just a buyout on their share instead of the greater profits that would come from shuttering and selling the company assets.
The difficulty here is you're asking for extremely specific answers to specific hypothetical questions when the answer is often it doesn't really matter much/there wouldn't be one possible way/its so specific we can't really say at this point.
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
The question is increasingly specific only because your answers keep giving me the runaround. If you think this is a "gotcha"... I dunno what to say. I'm asking a fairly simple question about how this is supposed to work, communal ownership in a market economy in which no person is allowed to accumulate private capital. I'm expressly asking questions about that last bit there, how are people prevented from accumulating private capital, since it seems fairly obvious to me that if we just leave things to the market economy, private capital is going to accumulate very naturally one way or another, and the answer is just "company charters are just going to be written so that it'll magically be prevented," and... like what?
You've seen my other posts in this thread. Does it really seem from my post history like I'm interested in playing "gotcha" with socialism? And, I dunno, if you can't answer my pretty general question about how this is supposed to work.... it's not like I'm asking you to provide me with the exact text of the legislation that will regulate private ownership here.
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules?
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
So, in your model, the way to prevent accumulation of capital is tax-based?
So in the alternate scenario, where 5 brothers get together to build a highly automated factory, then 4 brothers die and the last brother inherits a factory that's highly productive but only requires one person to run... then what happens is that that brother runs the factory by himself, makes a shitton of money - at least 5 people's worth - and then it's all taxed away by the state, then ... I presume, redistributed somehow?
The difficulty here is you're asking for extremely specific answers to specific hypothetical questions when the answer is often it doesn't really matter much/there wouldn't be one possible way/its so specific we can't really say at this point.
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
The question is increasingly specific only because your answers keep giving me the runaround. If you think this is a "gotcha"... I dunno what to say. I'm asking a fairly simple question about how this is supposed to work, communal ownership in a market economy in which no person is allowed to accumulate private capital. I'm expressly asking questions about that last bit there, how are people prevented from accumulating private capital, and it's just "company charters are just magically going to be written so that it'll be prevented," and... like what?
You've seen my other posts in this thread. Does it really seem from my post history like I'm interested in playing "gotcha" with socialism? And, I dunno, if you can't answer my pretty general question about how this is supposed to work.... it's not like I'm asking you to provide me with the exact text of the legislation that will regulate private ownership here.
I think you're looking for bigger grander answers than there are here. We already have a system like what we'd have in place. We already police ownership and operation structures. Businesses have to have a legal business license to operate. If they don't they have to cease operation, sell off assets, maybe face a fine or other punishment, all depending on the particular circumstances.
Under a socialist worker collective model a legal business license would require collective ownership and the government would enforce that as it would enforce any other operational requirement for businesses.
This of course exists alongside other mechanisms that help keep the accumulation of wealth flat, like heavy estate taxes, but that's outside a narrow discussion of production ownership.
The difficulty here is you're asking for extremely specific answers to specific hypothetical questions when the answer is often it doesn't really matter much/there wouldn't be one possible way/its so specific we can't really say at this point.
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
The question is increasingly specific only because your answers keep giving me the runaround. If you think this is a "gotcha"... I dunno what to say. I'm asking a fairly simple question about how this is supposed to work, communal ownership in a market economy in which no person is allowed to accumulate private capital. I'm expressly asking questions about that last bit there, how are people prevented from accumulating private capital, and it's just "company charters are just magically going to be written so that it'll be prevented," and... like what?
You've seen my other posts in this thread. Does it really seem from my post history like I'm interested in playing "gotcha" with socialism? And, I dunno, if you can't answer my pretty general question about how this is supposed to work.... it's not like I'm asking you to provide me with the exact text of the legislation that will regulate private ownership here.
I think you're looking for bigger grander answers than there are here. We already have a system like what we'd have in place. We already police ownership and operation structures. Businesses have to have a legal business license to operate. If they don't they have to cease operation, sell off assets, maybe face a fine or other punishment, all depending on the particular circumstances.
Under a socialist worker collective model a legal business license would require collective ownership and the government would enforce that as it would enforce any other operational requirement for businesses.
This of course exists alongside other mechanisms that help keep the accumulation of wealth flat, like heavy estate taxes, but that's outside a narrow discussion of production ownership.
I would have just taken, "The government will enforce it."
Let's say you and 4 other people own a construction company. You hire 3 more people but don't give them ownership stake, only wages. They sue or you get noticed by a regulatory board and a court tells you to make restitution and correct your labor practices.
Or we could look at something bigger. Maybe its a chain of retirement facilities across the eastern seaboard. The person at the head of HR is found to be fudging numbers to focus profit sharing rewards to him and a few other people. That's just straight fraud go to prison.
What if I scrape together some cash and start importing factory equipment from Canada and hire people to work in secret producing goods under a business arrangement like we have today? I go to prison and the equipment is seized. What happens to the workers depends on their personal level of culpability.
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules?
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
So, in your model, the way to prevent accumulation of capital is tax-based?
So in the alternate scenario, where 5 brothers get together to build a highly automated factory, then 4 brothers die and the last brother inherits a factory that's highly productive but only requires one person to run... then what happens is that that brother runs the factory by himself, makes a shitton of money - at least 5 people's worth - and then it's all taxed away by the state, then ... I presume, redistributed somehow?
Bingo bango just funding every kind of social program. Thanks for being wildly successful bruh you've recognizably made the world a better place!
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules?
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
So, in your model, the way to prevent accumulation of capital is tax-based?
So in the alternate scenario, where 5 brothers get together to build a highly automated factory, then 4 brothers die and the last brother inherits a factory that's highly productive but only requires one person to run... then what happens is that that brother runs the factory by himself, makes a shitton of money - at least 5 people's worth - and then it's all taxed away by the state, then ... I presume, redistributed somehow?
Bingo bango just funding every kind of social program. Thanks for being wildly successful bruh you've recognizably made the world a better place!
I'm pretty sure we're also on track for this problem under our current capitalist system.
See: every corporation racing to see how many of their jobs they can automate so they they can save money they'd otherwise have to use to, you know, pay a wage or salary.
I don't think there needs to necessarily be one answer for that. Different companies would be free to craft their charter as they like. So maybe an expansion is a simple majority but shuttering the business entirely is a super majority etc.
If 99% of the company wants to sell or leave or whatever then yeah I suppose that could probably suck pretty bad for the 1% but if this is how things go badly we're still looking at a much better system than we have now yes?
I think its important to realize we already have collective ownership and it works fine for the purposes of generating profit. Its just not collective worker ownership.
No no, I mean, I get that, but... like, what happens if a charter is drafted in such a way that ends up with 1 person owning the whole factory? Isn't that not supposed to happen in the socialist system? Or is that simply prohibited in some other manner?
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules?
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
So, in your model, the way to prevent accumulation of capital is tax-based?
So in the alternate scenario, where 5 brothers get together to build a highly automated factory, then 4 brothers die and the last brother inherits a factory that's highly productive but only requires one person to run... then what happens is that that brother runs the factory by himself, makes a shitton of money - at least 5 people's worth - and then it's all taxed away by the state, then ... I presume, redistributed somehow?
Bingo bango just funding every kind of social program. Thanks for being wildly successful bruh you've recognizably made the world a better place!
So in your system, is there any marginal benefit to increased productivity? Like, if the last brother is making 500% the "productivity" as average (or whatever), is he still just taxed back down to 100%, or is there some slight incentive for him to continue running the factory at maximum capacity, like he's taxed back down to 110% or something, so there's a 10% incentive for him to produce 400% more? (Made-up numbers, but I hope you get the gist.)
Or is everybody just always taxed down to the level appropriate to their need?
The difficulty here is you're asking for extremely specific answers to specific hypothetical questions when the answer is often it doesn't really matter much/there wouldn't be one possible way/its so specific we can't really say at this point.
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
The question is increasingly specific only because your answers keep giving me the runaround. If you think this is a "gotcha"... I dunno what to say. I'm asking a fairly simple question about how this is supposed to work, communal ownership in a market economy in which no person is allowed to accumulate private capital. I'm expressly asking questions about that last bit there, how are people prevented from accumulating private capital, since it seems fairly obvious to me that if we just leave things to the market economy, private capital is going to accumulate very naturally one way or another, and the answer is just "company charters are just going to be written so that it'll magically be prevented," and... like what?
You've seen my other posts in this thread. Does it really seem from my post history like I'm interested in playing "gotcha" with socialism? And, I dunno, if you can't answer my pretty general question about how this is supposed to work.... it's not like I'm asking you to provide me with the exact text of the legislation that will regulate private ownership here.
Exactly. The whole point in discussions like this is being able to convince socialism is a superior system to capitalism and the surest way to do that is provide the nearest thing to a framework/evidence of how society would function under that new political alignment. If people are unsure or confused about the proposed new system they have less reason to be invested in it.
It’s not the type of shit you make up entirely by improvisation once the time is right to implement them and hoping it’ll work out. Too many lives are at stake for any failures if it goes wrong.
This is also why it’s good to have solid examples of these types of systems in the real world to point to as a blue print.
Social Democracy: Social Democracy is an ideology that supports economic interventionism to promote social justice whilst retaining a capitalist economy. It is often seen by Socialists as supporting "welfare-state" band-aids to Capitalism.
Welfare State: A state that provides social services on behalf of the well-being of its citizens, while retaining Capitalism. It often refers to Germany, the UK, and the Nordic countries, but can refer to any state with social services.
o hai thar
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Richard Wollf explains how Corbyn may have found a winning idea to campaign on for convincing Americans that socialism may be good in their lives via introducing co-ops, in a manner where people can choose between that or standard capitalist models for organisations so they can slowly become used to buying products or working in them so it gets normalised.
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that's nice and cut down, the only video I'd seen previously was over 2 hours about how you need marx to understand brexit... not that I wouldn't watch tthat but I haven't yet (wolff from the same show)
So do you believe that the regular 4-9% unemployment rate in the US since the 1990s actually consists of "temporarily" unemployed workers? And that's just U3. U5 ranges from 4.9% to 11%.
No, not at all. But I also wouldn't claim that the US follows orthodox economic theory in any sense. If we did, Paul Krugman wouldn't find something to complain about in NYT each and every week.
Also, yeah, no, unemployed people aren't taken care of. I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to capitalist economics in practice. It's true that in theory, unemployed people can be taken care of, but that's not how capitalist economics has actually manifested in today's capitalist societies, is it?
Yes, it is practiced that way in some countries. But that brings us back to the well-worn discussion about whether the Nordic model is "capitalist" or "socialist."
I'm not entirely on board with the recurring theme of the thread that "welfare" = "socialism."
This was in starkest relief in the last Presidential election when the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to put to rest Bernie Sanders's claims that Denmark is socialist:
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
As I've said multiple times, my position is that mixed economies are best, capitalism requires regulations and redistribution to keep it in check, and the only remaining reasonable questions are about how and what to regulate and redistribute, not whether to do so.
So, yes, I totally agree that capitalist nations must grapple with questions like "How do you prevent the oligarchs from taking over and ruining everything?" But I'd also argue that this is a problem every society needs to grapple with, regardless of their economic system.
I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
This seems like a really weird argument to be having. I'm literally a card carrying member of the DSA, and most of the members I've spoken to (with the exception of the Refoundation Caucus, which recently folded because their ideas weren't popular with the larger org) aren't huge fans of planned economies because of how terribly they fall apart when mismanaged. Syndicalism is pretty dope tho. Requires minimum changes to our society to implement (basically just democratization of business via unions) and is very Socialist in nature.
I found another reason socialism is a scary word in that glossary
If you are a Socialist, you are most likely a Communist as well; think of Communism as the “end goal,” and Socialism as the (r)evolutionary stage(s) or pathway that gets us there.
So do you believe that the regular 4-9% unemployment rate in the US since the 1990s actually consists of "temporarily" unemployed workers? And that's just U3. U5 ranges from 4.9% to 11%.
No, not at all. But I also wouldn't claim that the US follows orthodox economic theory in any sense. If we did, Paul Krugman wouldn't find something to complain about in NYT each and every week.
Also, yeah, no, unemployed people aren't taken care of. I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to capitalist economics in practice. It's true that in theory, unemployed people can be taken care of, but that's not how capitalist economics has actually manifested in today's capitalist societies, is it?
Yes, it is practiced that way in some countries. But that brings us back to the well-worn discussion about whether the Nordic model is "capitalist" or "socialist."
I'm not entirely on board with the recurring theme of the thread that "welfare" = "socialism."
This was in starkest relief in the last Presidential election when the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to put to rest Bernie Sanders's claims that Denmark is socialist:
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
As I've said multiple times, my position is that mixed economies are best, capitalism requires regulations and redistribution to keep it in check, and the only remaining reasonable questions are about how and what to regulate and redistribute, not whether to do so.
So, yes, I totally agree that capitalist nations must grapple with questions like "How do you prevent the oligarchs from taking over and ruining everything?" But I'd also argue that this is a problem every society needs to grapple with, regardless of their economic system.
I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
This seems like a really weird argument to be having. I'm literally a card carrying member of the DSA, and most of the members I've spoken to (with the exception of the Refoundation Caucus, which recently folded because their ideas weren't popular with the larger org) aren't huge fans of planned economies because of how terribly they fall apart when mismanaged. Syndicalism is pretty dope tho. Requires minimum changes to our society to implement (basically just democratization of business via unions) and is very Socialist in nature.
I’m a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of DSA, and here’s the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism.
...
A robust welfare state in an economy that’s still organized around capitalists’ profits can mitigate the worst inequalities for a while, but it’s at best a temporary truce between bosses and workers — and one that the former will look to scrap as soon as they can.
...
Medicare-for-all is an instructive example. Winning single-payer health care in the US would be an enormous relief to the millions of Americans who, even with insurance, find themselves stymied by claims denials and crushed by medical debt. Many progressives and an increasing number of centrist liberals — hell, even a few Trump voters — want the private insurance industry to be replaced by a single comprehensive public insurance program, one we all pay into with our taxes to relieve everyone of financial stress in times of illness. We want that too.
But we also know that Medicare-for-all is not socialism. It would only nationalize insurance, not the whole health care system. Doctors would remain private employees, for example, though under some plans they would be required to restructure their businesses into nonprofit entities. Democratic socialists ultimately want something more like the British National Health Service (NHS), in which everyone pays taxes to fund not just insurance but doctors and hospitals and medicine as well.
So why are democratic socialists not demanding an NHS right now? Because we currently don’t have the support to push for and win such an ambitious program. Social democratic reforms like Medicare-for-all are, in the eyes of DSA, part of the long, uneven process of building that support, and eventually overthrowing capitalism.
This doesn't sound like somebody who is suspicious of planned economies and just wants to implement minimum changes to our society.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
That said, there are some nice ideas in Communism: the elimination of class-based stratification, the democratization of labor.
Which again is why there is the critique that Soviet Russia and China were not and are not communist, but state capitalist, because they both utterly failed to achieve those ends. Or, apparently, actually work towards them in any meaningful sense.
Aside from homeopathy for some reason getting okayed for coverage and the Tories and other British Right wingers obsession to privatize is, is there anything actually wrong with the NHS, other than it appears “radical” compared to the ass-backwards nature of the American system?
EDIT: There’s also a difference between calling for the nationalization of a fundamental public necessity like healthcare and the nationalization of things that are not public necessities.
Aside from homeopathy for some reason getting okayed for coverage and the Tories and other British Right wingers obsession to privatize is, is there anything actually wrong with the NHS, other than it appears “radical” compared to the ass-backwards nature of the American system?
LGBT healthcare under the NHS *sucks*, and any aspect where the system doesn't serve your needs well it creates more friction going around the system to get the care you need.
Aside from homeopathy for some reason getting okayed for coverage and the Tories and other British Right wingers obsession to privatize is, is there anything actually wrong with the NHS, other than it appears “radical” compared to the ass-backwards nature of the American system?
EDIT: There’s also a difference between calling for the nationalization of a fundamental public necessity like healthcare and the nationalization of things that are not public necessities.
In comparison to other European countries, it does poorly on some outcome metrics like cancer survival and child mortality. Per-capita spending is among the lowest in the developed world, which is reflected in problems like poor patient-to-bed and patient-to-physician ratios.
I'm not blaming this on it being a fully nationalized system. It's just been starved of funds. My point in that NHS pull quote was not to argue that a nationalized system necessarily sucks, but to show how the DSA member who authored that passage isn't looking to merely pass minor reforms.
That said, fully nationalized systems with no room for private alternatives are rare; most countries have hybrid systems. I do think there are a lot of advantages to that - if you're a physician and you don't personally deal well with NHS bureaucracy, or you're a patient with a rare disease that the NHS doesn't have set guidelines for, you might find a niche among the diversity of institutions that a hybrid system affords.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
That said, there are some nice ideas in Communism: the elimination of class-based stratification, the democratization of labor.
Which again is why there is the critique that Soviet Russia and China were not and are not communist, but state capitalist, because they both utterly failed to achieve those ends. Or, apparently, actually work towards them in any meaningful sense.
Communism does have some nice ideas, but surely there are other methods to get there which don't end up with a dictatorship in the process. I disagree that Communism doesn't have classes, they just pretend they don't. For example, the political class. A class which has a massive grip on resources and the populace which are tighter than modern democracies today have.
Isn't they more examples because pure socialism has never successfully been implemented? Prior discussions in this thread about this and the results were not encouraging. The countries which did try ended up being Communist, which naturally makes people weary of going that path because they don't want their countries to become the next USSR or PRC.
Briefly looking up Communism I agree they don't fall under that heading, but then, why do they flock to it as a term to define themselves? Has there ever been a country which did successfully get rid of classes, money and the state? What does that look like in our world? How does a society function without a government and how would it not get wiped out or conquered by rivals?
That said, there are some nice ideas in Communism: the elimination of class-based stratification, the democratization of labor.
Which again is why there is the critique that Soviet Russia and China were not and are not communist, but state capitalist, because they both utterly failed to achieve those ends. Or, apparently, actually work towards them in any meaningful sense.
Communism does have some nice ideas, but surely there are other methods to get there which don't end up with a dictatorship in the process. I disagree that Communism doesn't have classes, they just pretend they don't. For example, the political class. A class which has a massive grip on resources and the populace which are tighter than modern democracies today have.
Isn't they more examples because pure socialism has never successfully been implemented? Prior discussions in this thread about this and the results were not encouraging. The countries which did try ended up being Communist, which naturally makes people weary of going that path because they don't want their countries to become the next USSR or PRC.
Briefly looking up Communism I agree they don't fall under that heading, but then, why do they flock to it as a term to define themselves? Has there ever been a country which did successfully get rid of classes, money and the state? What does that look like in our world? How does a society function without a government and how would it not get wiped out or conquered by rivals?
This is basically the anti-democratic argument circa 19th century.
That said, there are some nice ideas in Communism: the elimination of class-based stratification, the democratization of labor.
Which again is why there is the critique that Soviet Russia and China were not and are not communist, but state capitalist, because they both utterly failed to achieve those ends. Or, apparently, actually work towards them in any meaningful sense.
Communism does have some nice ideas, but surely there are other methods to get there which don't end up with a dictatorship in the process. I disagree that Communism doesn't have classes, they just pretend they don't. For example, the political class. A class which has a massive grip on resources and the populace which are tighter than modern democracies today have.
Isn't they more examples because pure socialism has never successfully been implemented? Prior discussions in this thread about this and the results were not encouraging. The countries which did try ended up being Communist, which naturally makes people weary of going that path because they don't want their countries to become the next USSR or PRC.
Briefly looking up Communism I agree they don't fall under that heading, but then, why do they flock to it as a term to define themselves? Has there ever been a country which did successfully get rid of classes, money and the state? What does that look like in our world? How does a society function without a government and how would it not get wiped out or conquered by rivals?
Well again like
Two of the core tenets of communism are that labor is democratized in some fashion (the means of production are owned by labor) and that there are no classes. Some would go so far as to say that communism also requires the society to be stateless.
If you aren’t meeting those two requirements, then you aren’t actually communist.
Which again is apoint I and others have tried to make over and over again, but gets ignored in favor of multiple propaganda narratives. It isn’t that Communists don’t “pretend they don’t” have classes, it’s that oppressive state capitalist nations have pretended they were communist, and we went along with it because it ultimately served the ideological needs of capitalists.
For Russia and China, it was a banner that the authoritarian revolutionaries turned statesmen could utilize to obfuscate their abuses behind the promises of a better world and legitimize their power. That’s why they flock to the term, it’s the same way any tyrant falsely promises a better world to secure their own power.
And for the US and other capitalist states, it was a way to demonize a movement meant to empower the exploited by linking it with authoritarianism thanks to the lies of said authoritarians.
Ultimately the answer to your question you’ve repeatedly asked is no, there has not yet been an actual nation fully organized as socialist or communist societies. This does not, however, necessarily reflect that such a society as untenable, merely that it has not yet occurred. in our case, thanks largely to the fact that the wrestling of power from concentrated sources and its redistribution among the populace is long, hard work.
To quote Usula K. Le Guin:
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
Aside from homeopathy for some reason getting okayed for coverage and the Tories and other British Right wingers obsession to privatize is, is there anything actually wrong with the NHS, other than it appears “radical” compared to the ass-backwards nature of the American system?
LGBT healthcare under the NHS *sucks*, and any aspect where the system doesn't serve your needs well it creates more friction going around the system to get the care you need.
But that’s a problem with the US system as well, the only thing that makes it better is that it’s such a hodge podge of different providers and insurers that if you’re lucky maybe you can live someplace where you won’t get screwed by a bigot or can afford to pay for a less shitty insurer who’ll cover your medical needs.
Like, the years of the US medical and psychiatric community gatekeeping access to trans healthcare is a testament to that.
The orthodox leftist view is that international capitalism will not allow any resource to go unowned and unexploited. If it exists, it must be made part of the capitalist system - someone should own it, develop it, and sell its products on the global market.
So there is no room for any society on this planet to exist outside of the capitalist system. As the Amazonian natives are finding out right now as we burn it down for farmland and crop it for lumber. It may be Brazilians doing the chopping, but everyone on the globe is buying.
Jephery on
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
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I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
This isn't about perfecting a system that will never ever fail. It will sometimes fail because it involves people.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Is that one person able to run the whole factory themselves?
If yes... then yeah that's seemingly totally fine. If you can support your whole business yourself and have no investing entities or employees... you're fine to keep doing you, and if that operation isn't paying you enough you can engage social programs to keep you clothed, fed, and sheltered too.
If you need to bring on more employees to keep the factory alive they get a cut of the profits and a share of ownership of the company as laid out in the initial charter
That's totally fair. This thread moved fast and I wasn't always able to follow the positions different people hold.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Again, this presumes the charter is laid out as such.
Like, if the answer is that any charters that result in one person owning the whole factory is illegal, then just tell me that's the solution. As it is, constantly citing "the charter" as the solution doesn't really explain much when there is, as far as I can tell, nothing that prevents the charter from facilitating such situations. Would it be legal, for example, for me and my 4 brothers to start a company and the charter reads, the company shares can only belong to the brothers hippofant, so that even if four brothers die, then the last brother owns the company?
At that point, then, I would either own more capital than I could use, and be required to sell it, or I could run the factory myself. But if I sell, I'm presumably selling it to 5 people who can run the factory together... so what kinda of compensation do I get for that? How does this not lead to me accumulating more and more capital, if the buying and selling of stuff follows market rules? Or if I can run the factory myself, haven't I inherited the labour of my four other brothers, the labour they put into building the factory? Their labour in building the factory has reaped rewards for me. Again, haven't I accumulated capital? Is the government, at this point, going to step in and forcibly divest me of this capital?
Ultimately all this is of course based in a theoretical legal framework, but it almost seems like you view that as some kind of gotcha.
In your hypothetical the sole remaining worker either hires more people and ownership spreads or he dissolves the company and the charter allowing it to run is no longer valid, as a worker collective of 1 isn't a collective, its sole private ownership. I don't see how this differs greatly from how business licences work now in that the entity in question has to maintain certain characteristics.
If you and your brother start a company making lawn gnomes and then your brother leaves and its just you making lawn gnomes in your garage socialists don't really care because your solely owned lawn gnome production company isn't a threat to society as a socialist would understand a threat here.
If your company is capable of granting you serious control over the means of production it realistically requires laborers, who's labor would also grant them a share in the ownership of those means.
If you own all the stuff for a factory you cannot possibly run, and you decide to sell it... yeah you get a dumptruck of money.
The folks buying your equipment and/or site and employing folks to work it are part of a collective and share ownership control and profit amongst their employment and various investors, and you get a dumptruck of money... that we're probably gonna tax the shit out of.
Selling it as a collective is almost better because with more people getting less money the tax burden is lower because of a progressive tax rate.
The question is increasingly specific only because your answers keep giving me the runaround. If you think this is a "gotcha"... I dunno what to say. I'm asking a fairly simple question about how this is supposed to work, communal ownership in a market economy in which no person is allowed to accumulate private capital. I'm expressly asking questions about that last bit there, how are people prevented from accumulating private capital, since it seems fairly obvious to me that if we just leave things to the market economy, private capital is going to accumulate very naturally one way or another, and the answer is just "company charters are just going to be written so that it'll magically be prevented," and... like what?
You've seen my other posts in this thread. Does it really seem from my post history like I'm interested in playing "gotcha" with socialism? And, I dunno, if you can't answer my pretty general question about how this is supposed to work.... it's not like I'm asking you to provide me with the exact text of the legislation that will regulate private ownership here.
So, in your model, the way to prevent accumulation of capital is tax-based?
So in the alternate scenario, where 5 brothers get together to build a highly automated factory, then 4 brothers die and the last brother inherits a factory that's highly productive but only requires one person to run... then what happens is that that brother runs the factory by himself, makes a shitton of money - at least 5 people's worth - and then it's all taxed away by the state, then ... I presume, redistributed somehow?
I think you're looking for bigger grander answers than there are here. We already have a system like what we'd have in place. We already police ownership and operation structures. Businesses have to have a legal business license to operate. If they don't they have to cease operation, sell off assets, maybe face a fine or other punishment, all depending on the particular circumstances.
Under a socialist worker collective model a legal business license would require collective ownership and the government would enforce that as it would enforce any other operational requirement for businesses.
This of course exists alongside other mechanisms that help keep the accumulation of wealth flat, like heavy estate taxes, but that's outside a narrow discussion of production ownership.
I would have just taken, "The government will enforce it."
Let's say you and 4 other people own a construction company. You hire 3 more people but don't give them ownership stake, only wages. They sue or you get noticed by a regulatory board and a court tells you to make restitution and correct your labor practices.
Or we could look at something bigger. Maybe its a chain of retirement facilities across the eastern seaboard. The person at the head of HR is found to be fudging numbers to focus profit sharing rewards to him and a few other people. That's just straight fraud go to prison.
What if I scrape together some cash and start importing factory equipment from Canada and hire people to work in secret producing goods under a business arrangement like we have today? I go to prison and the equipment is seized. What happens to the workers depends on their personal level of culpability.
None of us are arguing for anarcho-communism so yeah ultimately there's a government in charge of laws.
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Bingo bango just funding every kind of social program. Thanks for being wildly successful bruh you've recognizably made the world a better place!
I'm pretty sure we're also on track for this problem under our current capitalist system.
See: every corporation racing to see how many of their jobs they can automate so they they can save money they'd otherwise have to use to, you know, pay a wage or salary.
So in your system, is there any marginal benefit to increased productivity? Like, if the last brother is making 500% the "productivity" as average (or whatever), is he still just taxed back down to 100%, or is there some slight incentive for him to continue running the factory at maximum capacity, like he's taxed back down to 110% or something, so there's a 10% incentive for him to produce 400% more? (Made-up numbers, but I hope you get the gist.)
Or is everybody just always taxed down to the level appropriate to their need?
Work at a factory thats very profitable rewards its workers accordingly and they have more money than the unproductive one down the street.
But if you got that money because it was inherited eat shit and pay up.
A Glossary That May Be Useful
Exactly. The whole point in discussions like this is being able to convince socialism is a superior system to capitalism and the surest way to do that is provide the nearest thing to a framework/evidence of how society would function under that new political alignment. If people are unsure or confused about the proposed new system they have less reason to be invested in it.
It’s not the type of shit you make up entirely by improvisation once the time is right to implement them and hoping it’ll work out. Too many lives are at stake for any failures if it goes wrong.
This is also why it’s good to have solid examples of these types of systems in the real world to point to as a blue print.
o hai thar
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
been hearing enough wild interpretations of it on this particular sub forum, might be good for some folk here to take a look
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10:54
Richard Wollf explains how Corbyn may have found a winning idea to campaign on for convincing Americans that socialism may be good in their lives via introducing co-ops, in a manner where people can choose between that or standard capitalist models for organisations so they can slowly become used to buying products or working in them so it gets normalised.
This seems like a really weird argument to be having. I'm literally a card carrying member of the DSA, and most of the members I've spoken to (with the exception of the Refoundation Caucus, which recently folded because their ideas weren't popular with the larger org) aren't huge fans of planned economies because of how terribly they fall apart when mismanaged. Syndicalism is pretty dope tho. Requires minimum changes to our society to implement (basically just democratization of business via unions) and is very Socialist in nature.
I found another reason socialism is a scary word in that glossary
That seems at odds with the Vox article by DSA member and Jacobin writer Meagan Day I linked upthread: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/1/17637028/bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-cynthia-nixon-democratic-socialism-jacobin-dsa
This doesn't sound like somebody who is suspicious of planned economies and just wants to implement minimum changes to our society.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Humans are bad with thinking that some things must inevitably become other things.
Sort of like how a bunch of folks think that humanity is an end point for evolution instead of just a species that managed to stick around.
Or how Star Trek writers keep thinking the inevitable end point of evolution is “god like energy beings”
Which again is why there is the critique that Soviet Russia and China were not and are not communist, but state capitalist, because they both utterly failed to achieve those ends. Or, apparently, actually work towards them in any meaningful sense.
EDIT: There’s also a difference between calling for the nationalization of a fundamental public necessity like healthcare and the nationalization of things that are not public necessities.
LGBT healthcare under the NHS *sucks*, and any aspect where the system doesn't serve your needs well it creates more friction going around the system to get the care you need.
In comparison to other European countries, it does poorly on some outcome metrics like cancer survival and child mortality. Per-capita spending is among the lowest in the developed world, which is reflected in problems like poor patient-to-bed and patient-to-physician ratios.
I'm not blaming this on it being a fully nationalized system. It's just been starved of funds. My point in that NHS pull quote was not to argue that a nationalized system necessarily sucks, but to show how the DSA member who authored that passage isn't looking to merely pass minor reforms.
That said, fully nationalized systems with no room for private alternatives are rare; most countries have hybrid systems. I do think there are a lot of advantages to that - if you're a physician and you don't personally deal well with NHS bureaucracy, or you're a patient with a rare disease that the NHS doesn't have set guidelines for, you might find a niche among the diversity of institutions that a hybrid system affords.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Communism does have some nice ideas, but surely there are other methods to get there which don't end up with a dictatorship in the process. I disagree that Communism doesn't have classes, they just pretend they don't. For example, the political class. A class which has a massive grip on resources and the populace which are tighter than modern democracies today have.
Isn't they more examples because pure socialism has never successfully been implemented? Prior discussions in this thread about this and the results were not encouraging. The countries which did try ended up being Communist, which naturally makes people weary of going that path because they don't want their countries to become the next USSR or PRC.
Briefly looking up Communism I agree they don't fall under that heading, but then, why do they flock to it as a term to define themselves? Has there ever been a country which did successfully get rid of classes, money and the state? What does that look like in our world? How does a society function without a government and how would it not get wiped out or conquered by rivals?
This is basically the anti-democratic argument circa 19th century.
Well again like
Two of the core tenets of communism are that labor is democratized in some fashion (the means of production are owned by labor) and that there are no classes. Some would go so far as to say that communism also requires the society to be stateless.
If you aren’t meeting those two requirements, then you aren’t actually communist.
Which again is apoint I and others have tried to make over and over again, but gets ignored in favor of multiple propaganda narratives. It isn’t that Communists don’t “pretend they don’t” have classes, it’s that oppressive state capitalist nations have pretended they were communist, and we went along with it because it ultimately served the ideological needs of capitalists.
For Russia and China, it was a banner that the authoritarian revolutionaries turned statesmen could utilize to obfuscate their abuses behind the promises of a better world and legitimize their power. That’s why they flock to the term, it’s the same way any tyrant falsely promises a better world to secure their own power.
And for the US and other capitalist states, it was a way to demonize a movement meant to empower the exploited by linking it with authoritarianism thanks to the lies of said authoritarians.
Ultimately the answer to your question you’ve repeatedly asked is no, there has not yet been an actual nation fully organized as socialist or communist societies. This does not, however, necessarily reflect that such a society as untenable, merely that it has not yet occurred. in our case, thanks largely to the fact that the wrestling of power from concentrated sources and its redistribution among the populace is long, hard work.
To quote Usula K. Le Guin:
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
But that’s a problem with the US system as well, the only thing that makes it better is that it’s such a hodge podge of different providers and insurers that if you’re lucky maybe you can live someplace where you won’t get screwed by a bigot or can afford to pay for a less shitty insurer who’ll cover your medical needs.
Like, the years of the US medical and psychiatric community gatekeeping access to trans healthcare is a testament to that.
So there is no room for any society on this planet to exist outside of the capitalist system. As the Amazonian natives are finding out right now as we burn it down for farmland and crop it for lumber. It may be Brazilians doing the chopping, but everyone on the globe is buying.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".