|
Pharohman777 posted:Doesn't that seem like a mixed market economy though? Decentralized socialism where the government controls energy, healthcare, basic food, and everything else is done by businesses . I mean in the sense of commandyness sure, but "market socialist" would be a bit different in that necessarily it would entail all the businesses being cooperatives or something similar. So different from what you nowadays would consider a mixed economy. Especially if you consider other potential political differences if all your businesses are democratically organized. You open up a variety of strategic goals for an economy in that sense that can be distributed in the sense that they are actually democraticaly decided. It would be odd if you had a society full of cooperative workplaces that just didn't ever think about whether they should all get together and think of some long term goals. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Feb 4, 2019 |
#
?
Feb 4, 2019 06:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 12:18 |
|
|
Mantis42 posted:Marx and most Marxists will tell you that Capitalism is an improvement over Feudalism and earlier economic models. It's by far the most dynamic and revolutionary socioeconomic force in human history. Our contention is that it is historically finite process, that it's own internal contradictions will inevitably destroy it even if it is not overthrown by revolutionary leftists. If the falling rate of profit doesn't destroy it, then the automation of most labor (physical and, someday, mental) will. If that doesn't destroy it, we are rapidly seeing that there are limits to growth simply from an ecological perspective. The economy can't not grow, that would be a recession or even a depression. A crisis. Yet it mustn't grow or we will face environmental collapse. Even if we somehow mitigate Climate Change (fat chance) there will always be another crisis over the horizon as the Bourgeois plunder the planet looking for value to extract. This is untenable. Capitalism certainly has issues, but nothing that inherently unsolvable imo. Marxists tend to make proclamations about how the future is going to turn out to justify their opinions about the present and I don't find it to be a very scientific methodology. quote:Large Capitalist firms like Amazon pretty much already do this in miniature. There's no reason why you couldn't have the same commodity production and distribution system except instead of Jeff Bezo sitting at the top collecting the surplus labor value you had, well, no one. Basically the same people who already handle the logistics of our economy except they get paid in labor vouchers and maybe they elect some of their own to a worker's council to oversee the everyday running of the organization. Paul Cockshott's work is a pretty good starting place to look into how a planned economy would work. That's an interesting idea. I can certainly see how somebody tried to use Amazon as a starting point to try and create a better command economy system. I'll look into hat because it sounds interesting if nothing else. I was actually idly thinking about something like that myself at some point, where you have an electronic Amazon-like system. You get a supply of digital tokens as part on your basic income and then you can spend the tokens to vote on what sort of consumer goods you want produced, and if enough people spend token on the same good then it gets produced in proportion to how many people want them. Although it's just shower thoughts on my part.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2019 06:09
|
|
|
Pharohman777 posted:Doesn't that seem like a mixed market economy though? Decentralized socialism where the government controls energy, healthcare, basic food, and everything else is done by businesses . Well, like I said in my initial post I don't think full Communism will be technologically feasible for a while (this is my personal opinion, not necessarily common). Communism emerges when commodity production for profit is just straight up not possible anymore. The internet and information technology are basically already there - like, software and online media are basically post scarcity already, it's only the online economy's intersection with the outside world that requires artificial barriers like copy protection and paywalls to be put up. But in a world where all or most physical and even mental labor is automated and production of goods is radically decentralized by whatever the distant descendants of 3D printers exist then Marx's description of a world built on production for use and the obsoletion of money makes sense. This is sci fi now, but it's precedents can be seen and barring the collapse of industrial society I could see Capitalism naturally inventing itself out of existence this way. Unfortunately, the collapse of industrial society is a very serious threat in the current moment. The job of Socialists in the here and now is to help organize the working class so they can take power precisely so we can navigate the world away from catastrophe that the Bourgeois are leading us to and leading it instead to a place where full Communism can develop. So, yea, an economy dominated by state enterprises and workers coops or whatever would still bear a lot of hallmarks of Capitalism - no epoch of history has been born full formed without some elements of the previous era. Europe remained half aristocratic in it's institutions long after the industrial revolution, for instance. If you want to call that a mixed economy, fine, whatever, the end result is a society where the working class has far more power, power which can be used to leverage society's resources for better goals (for instance: stop putting so many hydrocarbons in the atmosphere) which would be basically impossible under Bourgeois domination.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2019 06:42
|
|
|
Mukip posted:I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I'll add the prefix of 'free' (or at least semi-free) markets and private ownership if that helps. Read Polyani- markets were never big enough to be the main fixture of social life until nation states forced people to participate in them. Private ownership is only as good as the cartel hitmen that don't decide to come for you If you want an example of what a "market" looks like without the heavy footprint of the state everywhere the sex and illegal drug markets are pretty instructive- high amounts of violence due to no binding mechanism for dispute resolution or a monopoly on violence by a third party arbitrator, self limiting size because everyone involved can be a scammer or turncoat, and tainted goods that frequently kill a ton of users.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2019 18:58
|
|
|
I am leaning towards a definition of socialism merely as economic justice, in a 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sense. Liberalism is about freedom, socialism is about justice. The difference between moderate socialism/social democracy and Keynesianism/welfare/embedded liberalism is whether state/direct allocation of resources is the necessary evil to maintain a basic level of social stability and cohesion that laissez-faire destroys, or whether markets are the necessary evil to maintain a satisfactory level of allocative efficiency. Not that markets always or even in general are more efficient than planning, but sometimes they are
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Feb 5, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 03:35
|
|
|
I have a problem with the term 'moderate socialism' since that's effectively (a version of) capitalism, and if we don't agree whether socialism is a version of capitalism or in opposition to capitalism then we have a confusion about language that needs to be solved. The term social democracy is right there for people to use and it's much better (less confusing) than moderate socialism. Plus, I don't think many people on the left or right are going to be satisfied with describing socialism as essentially a type of capitalism. And social democrats and socialists don't necessarily have much in common so it's useful to be able to tell the difference. Socialism is a much misused word in American politics imo (I'm British), with the right calling any and all distributive policies socialism while the left sometimes describes Scandinavia as socialism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 04:15
|
|
|
Liberalism is about the freedom of capital holders to do what they want with their capital, nothing more and nothing less. That's what it started as and that's still what it is. It means freedom from the king, or the government, or your workers telling you what to do with your stuff, and it argues that your stuff is whatever you can lay claim to in law.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 04:32
|
|
|
Mukip posted:I have a problem with the term 'moderate socialism' since that's effectively (a version of) capitalism, and if we don't agree whether socialism is a version of capitalism or in opposition to capitalism then we have a confusion about language that needs to be solved. The term social democracy is right there for people to use and it's much better (less confusing) than moderate socialism. I guess it's a difference between defining socialism as a purely theoretical, utopian end-state or as a political ideology and program. I also don't think there should be much definition difference between (left) social democracy and socialism. After all, Kautsky was a Social Democrat, as was Lenin, etc. The Social Democratic titled parties didn't make peace with market liberalism and NATO until the 1960s, but it doesn't make any sense to say they weren't social democrats for the hundred years before that OwlFancier posted:Liberalism is about the freedom of capital holders to do what they want with their capital, nothing more and nothing less. That's what it started as and that's still what it is. It means freedom from the king, or the government, or your workers telling you what to do with your stuff, and it argues that your stuff is whatever you can lay claim to in law. I agree. I'm not arguing for liberalism icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Feb 5, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 04:42
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:After all, Kautsky was a Social Democrat, as was Lenin, etc. Uhhhhh what
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 05:05
|
|
|
CelestialScribe posted:Uhhhhh what https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social_Democratic_Labour_Party
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 05:56
|
|
|
are you serious ....Revolutionary socialism is not social democracy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 06:18
|
|
|
The social democrats of the previous century tended to want to bring about socialism through incremental change though, not just to be keynesians and keep capitalism alive and well forever. That doesn't seem to even be on the horizon for the modern social democrats. The terms have changed and have a lot of baggage. It's also unfortunate that it's called democratic as opposed to the supposedly undemocratic " just socialism".
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 07:00
|
|
|
I'm not sure you're going to get a satisfying answer. In my experience most (not all) definitions of socialism by people are impossible to apply by a 3rd party. It's usually an "I'll know it when I see it" definition. I consider a lot of things socialism: public firefighters, police, education, CalTrans, and so on. All of these jobs are things that private industry once performed. I honestly don't see any policy-level difference between these and something like universal healthcare. The cynic in me sees a similarity in the definition of socialism as the definition of technology. One quote I've seen is "“Technology is not technology if it already existed when you were born." I feel like many have a similar definition of socialism. A policy is not socialist if its some sort of socialist policy that existed before the person was born. Freakus fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Feb 5, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 07:00
|
|
|
I didn't realize that is was that contravercial. "When the government does something it is socialism The more it does the more socialist it is." So the idea would be: Caitalism:. Private ownership of the means of production. Socialism:. Government ownership of the means of production. Communism: dissolution of the notion of ownership of the means of production and comuninal organization. Is this not the commly accepted framework?
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 12:38
|
|
|
A lot of socialists don't count the USSR and similar countries as socialist. Their reasoning is that you need the workers to own the means of production, and the states of the USSR and similar countries didn't/don't really represent the workers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 12:44
|
|
|
Social democracy isn't even Socialism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 13:23
|
|
|
Reznor posted:I didn't realize that is was that contravercial. If you're gonna get marxy about it the government owning the means of production should be as part of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" which is to say the workers use the apparatus of the government to take control away from the bourgeoisie, and then transition to communism over time. If it isn't the workers doing it and it isn't very transitional it's debatable whether or not you've done a socialism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2019 21:51
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:
I find that pretty weird to say. The drivers of Chinese growth are certainly not centrally planned. In particular, these companies engage competitively in a non-planned, international context, which is very important. We should remind ourselves to what immense degree the initial push was driven by pure exports! But even domestically, these are not traditional state companies. It is very clear that before these private companies, China's growth was a stagnant flat line well until the mid 80's or even longer. At that time, China wasn't even worth a mention as a serious future competitor. After, and coincidental with these "non state companies", China's growth was so large it most certainly eliminated all concerns about historical dependence and inferior supply of productive capital. Things like capital and population matter, hence certain Western countries have an advantage, while countries like China and India have a lot of potential. As such, centrally incentivized or provided investment and strong regulation may be instruments to break through a middle/low efficiency trap in the sense of balancing capital investments with population size. Nevertheless, actual planned organizations do not offer allocative efficiency. And it is not a mystery why, since we literally can not calculate what we need to calculate to solve this problem with our computers in the year of our lord 2019. If you look at China, the things which ARE actually centrally planned, like infrastructure investment, are a far cry from efficient - maybe even dangerous at times. We are even at a stage where China mandates that there'll be no such absolute central planning, and these investments (pouring money into things) have to be achieved with "market instruments", which works so-so (it gets the ball rolling, but is terribly inefficient). You will find that the actual drivers of income growth are intimately related to international competition, market prices, trade and all that. And China's objective to stimulate effective domestic demand just means reducing central planning in domestic allocation. The policies, and the results, for many years, could not be any clearer. And to the degree that China plans to replace export markets with domestic demands, you will see many more domestic market institutions and competition come up. Well as it happens, China is primarily interested in finding new external markets - ideologically understandable - but overall if you visit a shopping center in China now vs. China 30 years ago... you get the point. I mean, you can call that central planning if you like. I just think its somewhat changes the definition, since not the central planning, but the centrally incentivized exploitation of existing markets and institutions, is what makes the success here. CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Read Polyani- markets were never big enough to be the main fixture of social life until nation states forced people to participate in them. Private ownership is only as good as the cartel hitmen that don't decide to come for you I think you should shift your view on social transactions a little bit. There's a lot of systems (aka institutions) that are non-market, but transactional, and seem to have grown organically in a lot of contexts. For example, in many middle eastern countries, women meet and exchange valuables, usually gold, but sometimes even non pecuniary goods, in a roundabout manner. As it turns out, this is actually a sophisticated collective insurance scheme, the terms of which are based on the collective risk and social norms that moderate behavior. Certainly, none of this is based on class differences between these actors, and it predates capitalism and, in the sense that you mean, nation states. It is not a market as such, but it is a sophisticated, non-centrally planned and organically grown transactional "economy". My point is that this dichtonomy - market or planned - is a reduction. Non market interactions are frequently transactional, and market interactions are frequently not only transactional. Therefore, this dichtonomy just can not exist. Assuming that a stable economy can survive purely on market transactions ("laissez faire"), seems to find no support in theory or empirics or really, world history. At the same time, saying that "markets did not exist" or were not important before X, seems to come from a very narrow definition of what a market is. And most importantly, this does not give credence to a planned economy. There is a large gap between central planning and non-market interaction. Like, I know you can say those are your definitions, in the same way as the poster above can say that China is a centrally planned economy. And you may win that argument. But that doesn't really help for getting a sense of what's a workable strategy for socialism, imo. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Feb 6, 2019 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2019 03:24
|
|
|
Grevling posted:The social democrats of the previous century tended to want to bring about socialism through incremental change though, not just to be keynesians and keep capitalism alive and well forever. That doesn't seem to even be on the horizon for the modern social democrats. The terms have changed and have a lot of baggage. My understanding was that there is social democracy, which is Bernie Sanders/Scandinavia market economy with a large welfare system and democratic socialism, which is like the DSA and supports the transition to socialism via a slow incremental process.
|
|
#
?
Apr 2, 2019 04:14
|
|
|
fallenturtle posted:My understanding was that there is social democracy, which is Bernie Sanders/Scandinavia market economy with a large welfare system and democratic socialism, which is like the DSA and supports the transition to socialism via a slow incremental process. Then there is social democracy which means the politics of the parties that started out as part of the old social democratic movements. Then there is social democracy which means the politics of the countries where the social democrats are the centre left parties. Then there are democratic socialists which are social democrats that don't like the social democratic party. And then there is whatever is going on in the US.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2019 23:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 12:18 |
|
|
If we are talking about true socialism there are a few common themes: 1) Permanent international proletarian (not peasant) revolution 2) Vanguardism absent bureaucracy 3) Workers owning the means of production 4) The liberation of scientific thought from capitalist architecture 5) Embracing the necessity of a nuclear or climate catastrophe to defeat capitalism 6) Collaboration with an alien vanguard using advanced UFO technology 4th International Posadism or bust baby!
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2019 05:10
|
|