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The Oldest Man posted:A hospital contains a few highly compensated doctors (attending physicians and medical directors), a few more slave-labor doctors typically poo poo money (residents and fellows), a lot of RNs, PAs, nurses, PTs, therapists, pharmacy techs, and other para-doctory type skilled labor who earn less than the top echelon of doctors but frequently more than the residency/fellowship chain gang doctors, and a lot of support staff like receptionists, cafeteria workers, schedulers, orderlies, and so on. Even if you assume that lower-paid workers are always going to outnumber the workers who are currently highly paid (which probably makes sense for every business I can think of), couldn't demand for labour create inequalities that companies (in the worker-owned, democratic sense) are forced into? Let's assume there's a high demand for people with specialized knowledge to create a certain type of widget. Let's also assume that learning how to make these widgets is a pretty complex process that requires a lot of training, and for whatever reason, there's a growing need for these widgets, and so there just aren't enough people to make them. Widget makers in that scenario would have a lot of leverage when deciding which company they wanted to work for. They'd easily be able to say "I'll work for whoever wants to give me an outsized share of the profits of the company (or better wages / less hours / whatever they want). From the perspective of the company, it makes sense to do this - otherwise they can't produce widgets, and their company can't function. Given the choice between accepting inequality, or being completely unable to produce anything of value, they'll begrudgingly accept inequality. I don't think this is a particularly wild edge case - this is probably the situation for certain fields right now - if you're a software developer in San Francisco, this basically describes reality today.
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Nov 5, 2020 13:12
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OwlFancier posted:It creates a significant pressure to find ways to make widgets that doesn't depend on the whims of a few people, which is better for reliable productivity. For sure, but shifts in demand can take years to resolve in some cases, which IMO has a real danger of re-establishing a class system. (again, the software developer example - there's still a shortage that is causing insane labour market effects and ridiculous inequality, despite efforts to resolve the problem for at least the last 10 years). quote:Or alternatively it collapses the widget market if the demands of the widget makers are too onerous for the rest of the labour force to bear, and society has to realign around limited widget availability. The latter being the structural left wing form of environmentalism and workplace safety. I get what you're saying, but I feel like this almost requires the economy to be centrally planned - in any situation where there's some sort of market, it doesn't seem possible, or at least practical, to dictate that demand ceases to exist. Is central planning essential to socialism (or at least the perspective you're arguing from?) I suppose there's a case where society collectively decides that widgets just aren't worth it - which I guess is possible but not particularly realistic in my mind. Maybe this is pessimistic, but I feel that people would be perfectly OK with accepting that a good that they get significant utility / enjoyment from is created by a company who treats their workers unequally - particularly one that they have no part of. enki42 fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 13:21
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I think separating how much of the tech boom is a gold rush type behaviour driven by capital, vs. a genuine growing demand for tech is hard to unravel. I do think there's an increased demand for tech outside of just VC-driven app building, but I can also see how it's not the best example. But I think you could make the same argument for specialized doctors, or technicians with particular, in-demand skills. There's always going to be situations where certain types of labour are in higher demand than other types and those will inevitably create situations where those workers have leverage, and at least some of them will inevitably seek to use it for their own benefit.
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Nov 5, 2020 13:30
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Are there good examples of non-market based economies that have worked out well in practice though (without either being hugely inefficient or without ad-hoc markets being created outside of the official channels)? It all works fine at a theoretical level, where "needs" are an abstract concept where it's easy to say "each person needs 4 units of sustenance" or whatever, but it seems really difficult to determine appropriate "needs" when it comes to entertainment, leisure or luxury, which I would hope would exist in some capacity (hopefully a far more equitably distributed one). I do think there's a place for something like (a well functioning version of) the Cuban system, where basic goods and necessities are more directly managed, but even there there's a thriving market alongside the centrally planned system.
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Nov 5, 2020 17:08
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quote:Once again, capitalism has colonized our minds so thoroughly that it convinces us that the singular evil it imposes on every human interaction is actually a fundamental piece of what it means to be human. This is not the case. I don't think you can pin hoarding and a desire for consumption on capitalism specifically, since it predates it by a long time. For sure you can make the argument that very small primitive societies tend to be communal, but IMO the reason that modern societies tend not to be communal has more to do with our group dynamics breaking down once you have a sizeable amount of people. If you're a greedy rear end in a top hat who hoards things in your society of 50 people, you'll become an outcast pretty quickly. If you're an rear end in a top hat in a city of a million, or a country orders of magnitudes larger, a few people you don't have to interact with pretty much ever think you're an rear end in a top hat.
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Nov 5, 2020 18:56
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Crumbskull posted:Its always seemed very telling to me that most of the arguments people make against socialism effectively boil down to either A) what if the majority of people are bad actors and work in concert to destroy society or B) what if socialism can't work! I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place!
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Nov 5, 2020 21:16
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Slanderer posted:You nailed it buddy, good job Why don't you say what you do mean, then? I think you're trying to say that greed is human nature, because altruism is learned? I don't see how that follows - they can both be learned behaviours. Socialize someone to be greedy, and they'll be greedy, socialize them to be altruistic, and they'll be altrusitic. I do think this has limits - I think it's a tall order to expect people to be altruistic to strangers, particularly when it means they'll lose something, but that doesn't mean there's some natural level of greed that we all have to overcome to override our animal nature or whatever.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:44
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Ferrinus posted:This is also why, if you just trip over a huge gold nugget in your backyard, that gold nugget isn't suddenly worthless because it only took you 0.3 seconds of labor to find it. The average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all humans who are in the process of looking for gold - people assaying land, panning river water, digging mines, all that stuff - is enormous. If you took all the time humans have spent looking for gold and divided it by all the gold ever mined you'd get an enormous number of man-hours per ounce. This is why gold (and diamonds, and whatever) is "valuable" - literally because it's rare and hard to get. Gold's various use-values, which include things like filling cavities, conducting electricity, and looking pretty when you wear it, have nothing to do with gold's value (or, downstream from value, its exchange value, or, further downstream, its price). In a world in which gold was as common as sand, it'd be worth no more than sand was worth, even though it'd remain just as malleable, lustrous, and conductive. Aren't diamonds actually a counter to this theory? Diamonds are largely valuable due to artificial scarcity, due to DeBeers' monopoly and control of the supply, rather than genuine rarity or the effort required to mine them. Or is this theory supposed to be more of a prescriptive theory than a descriptive? (i.e. goods should be valued like this vs. goods are valued like this).
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Nov 7, 2020 18:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:Communist nations are one-party states not out of an egalitarian ideal, but rather because conflicting parties are only ever going to be representative of the interests of certain classes. Given that the Communist party represents the class of the workers and of peasants, and since the goal of a socialist revolution is to establish a proletarian state, there would be no need nor reason to allow for other parties, since that would only ever allow for the seizure of political power by... the bourgeoisie, since they'd be the only class whose interests wouldn't be represented by the worker's party. I have a hard time getting behind this. It seems plainly evident to me that different sorts of workers might have different workplace conditions, concerns, and different political outlooks on how things could be solved (for an example, see the approximately 8 bajillion different flavours of socialism that people support, all of which are wholly concerned with workers first and foremost). I don't want to be uncharitable, but this sounds like "You have democracy. It's just that the party chosen what the correct outcome is ahead of time, and you can vote on that." quote:By democratization within the party. To make a very clumsy analogy, an America that was only ever ruled by a president who is a Democrat, and a Congress composed of Democrats, would not necessarily be a dictatorship, nor would it be a cult of personality, nor would it be undemocratic, in the sense that you'd still have various underlying trends and forces within the party that we see today. Obviously there are problems with this analogy as far as the Democrats being so ideologically varied as a "big tent", but the incompatibility of the politics of Joe Manchin versus that of Bernie Sanders would mean that even under as a "one-party" state, a Democrat-controlled USA would still indeed have diversity of opinion. What would be the mechanism for these differing opinions to effect change, and in particular, for citizens to support those positions? It feels like any solution that would allow for genuinely different approaches to flourish would just re-create an ad-hoc set of parties underneath the "one" party. quote:And given that the Democrats would presumably run primaries in this hypothetical scenario, there would still be democratic input by the people, there would still be elections, and people could still choose whether they'd like to be represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Pete Buttigeig (again, allowing for the stretch in ideological spectrum of a democratic socialist versus a liberal, vis-a-vis the example of Stalin and Trotsky being on the Right-Opposition and Left-Opposition of the SOVNARKOM). Again, this just feels like you're describing a proto-party system, so why not just dispense with the theatrics about one party and let people advocate for what they want? What does this actually achieve in practice?
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Nov 14, 2020 13:27
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Disnesquick posted:I mean, we don't actually need parties at all. They are very much a construct of an incredibly antiquated semi-democratic system designed to support the management of a country by an established elite. In the case of the Anglosphere, these systems were designed somewhere in the 14th century. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest using 14th century technology to solve 21st century problems is pretty dumb. I guess this depends on what you mean by "parties". If you mean a group of people with the same platform sitting in a legislature, sure. In a broader sense though, you're always going to have groups and organizations rally around causes and collectively argue for certain things. I totally agree that democracies shouldn't require parties, but this line of argument is more about the enforcement of a single party. If what you're proposing is more direct democracy, but still freedom to assemble and collectively argue for something without an ossified party system, I don't think we're disagreeing.
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Nov 14, 2020 17:59
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