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> Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavemen

> Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured? It's a pretty well written piece. I think people from all perspectives should take careful note of what he is actually advocating: discussing and figuring out the mechanisms of what a modern society should like rather than blindly following an agenda. That said, this is a 70+ year old article, based on ideas and problems at the time. Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. College will only be a means to a career? Today academia is powerful and a political force unto itself. And we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects than Einstein was even able to dream about in 1949. In a way, we are living in a world he was advocating for. If it was written today, I have no doubt Einstein would still care about inequality and education and politics and common "workers" enjoying life. But I also don't think I would see him caring as much about Marxism and the labor theory of value specifically as a mechanism for understanding it anymore.

hattmall 3y ago
College has become mostly just that, a means to a career. It's even begun to wear that out and at higher levels become a means to a career in Academia. That's ultimately the beginnings of a massive ponzi scheme, it is now considerably detached from pure pursuits of knowledge, it's now become cannibalized for pursuits of funding.
- legitster 3y ago
  This is kind of my point. In 1949 when Einstein wrote this, the US state colleges were little more than vocational schools. He was advocating for a world ruled by academic achievement, kind of unaware of the brave new reality it would come with.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  It's less of a Ponzi scheme and more of a gamified, time and treasure expensive hazing ritual whereby the sheepskin "proves" "quality" and some measure of aptitude, intelligence, baseline of problem-solving ability, and ability to finish something. It has been and is also 4-N years of extended adolescence. And in the distant past, when universities were more selective and cheaper, it's where people often met their spouses. How else should we prepare people for the various workforces: knowledge work, financial services, skilled trades, etc.? Universities fear 2 things: bad publicity and losing accreditation. Perhaps accreditation orgs such as ABET (in the US) need to get off their collective, perfunctory rubber-stamping posteriors and ensure financial and fiduciary stewardship are occurring, and that a university doesn't become tantamount to a white-collar human trafficking recruiter demanding the life savings of their victims on the vague promises of a bright future.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    I'd argue that the evidence of "aptitude, intelligence, baseline of problem-solving ability, and ability to finish something" has much less value now. University is more of a vocational college now - there are specializations for most things, and if you didn't choose the right specialization and are trying to break into a field it's much harder to do so given that there are other people with better education. Because the general university education has become so ubiquitous just having a degree has much less power now.
    - 1letterunixname 3y ago
      That's a shame that it's still and increasingly a one-way, expensive, usually water-down, specialization guessing game without trials of what's on the other end. Also, an increasing requirement in some fields of a Master's or PhD is doubling down on the filtering system. That started to be a thing in the 2000's. The irreducible question is: What should be done to fix or replace it? Fixing it with a fundamentally better alternative seems superior than the continued gamification of USN&WR pole positions. Also, college tuition needs upper limits because too many universities are tantamount to international labor human traffickers. I posit there ought to be cheaper undergrad colleges that are more rigorous, more practical, and more of a funnel filter. That is, the prestige isn't derived from acceptance but filtering for excellence like some professional postgraduate degrees. You can go through various paths and retry as many times as you'd like. The point would be specific, strategic preparation of students rather than grade inflation, honor code proctor-less examinations, partying, and endowment and CIP embiggening at the expense of student debt peonage.
CrackerNews 3y ago
I would say that Marx and labor theory of value are still relevant as mechanisms for understanding capitalism. According to Marx, Capitalism is a mode of economics that has unleashed the productive forces, but its internal contradictions give rise to increasing crisises. There is a constant downward pressure on labor costs versus rising costs of living. Crisis has been averted multiple times, and the productive forces continue to be unleashed. To prevent total collapse, concessions like welfare have been made. However, there is a real possibility of potential growth being stifled by self interests of powerful economic actors. This bleeds out now into identity politics as people view the liberal system as incapable of providing the growth and future they thought would be delivered. Either unprivileged groups want to be paid high wages or the privileged groups want to protect their high wages from being cut down. This is a form of class warfare that isn't too different from what Marx observed in his days. This still is far away from achieving the socialist mode of production where the workers become the planner and rulers of the economy to further unleash the productive forces.
- kingstoned 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - soulbadguy 3y ago
    Couldn't the same be said about capitalism and free market theory ?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Capitalism is not a scientific theory, and "free market theory" is not a thing that exists.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    That's not quite right, there are several things Marx offerred that could be tested. Such as, the most capitalist countries would be the first to fall to communism. Except they didn't the only countries that have ever fallen to communism were Monarchies ruled by an absolute divine monarch. Or after a revolution, the institutions of religion and the state would wither away. Which Russia is getting close to going back to a sort of Theocratic-Facism, and the CCP may not be quite yet ready to dissolve. I could bust out my old copy of the communist manifesto to check any more predictions he made, but at the end of the day Marx did offer falsifiable theories, it's just that it turns out anywhere Marxism could be falsified it was. If only he hadn't tied it to something as concrete and objective as economics and instead something more relative and cultural.....
mullingitover 3y ago
> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. From the article: > There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. He's being generous here, it's not just that an "army of the unemployed" almost always exists, it's a goal. Captains of industry in the current low-unemployment environment have been saying the quiet part out loud, that we need to increase unemployment. There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.
- drekipus 3y ago
  It's not waste unless you think of humans as little units of work, like a resource to be mined. People complaining about a problem doesn't mean it is a problem. I want cheaper milk, I complain about the price of milk, but the price is probably correct and that's for me to grumble about. "Captains of industry" want a pool of unemployed people they can pick from. If the pool is dried then that's fine. It's not a sign that capitalism has failed.
  - anyonecancode 3y ago
    I think the implicit argument here is that "capitalism" means "rule by those who own capital." Hence a lack of unemployed people, which would hurt the captains of industry, _would_ be a failure under that definition of "capitalism." If by "capitalism" we merely mean things like a market economy with property rights, then the question would be what to call a system that has this but where workers, rather than captains of industry, have more power? Whatever we want to call _that_ system, it doesn't currently exist, and we've seen that any moves in that direction are very strongly resisted (c.f. return to office policies driven by captains of industry freaking out).
    - esarbe 3y ago
      Property rights and a market economy are not sufficient for capitalism. For capitalism you also need to leverage the work of others for your own profit, i.e. wage labor. Syndicalism, for example, also allows for private property and a market economy. It's not capitalism, though. Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 3y ago
> It's a pretty well written piece. It's... Pretty mundane and usual. If it didn't come from Einstein, nobody would even pay attention. It just states the same gains and problems everybody knows (and did know by decades at that time), and restates the large showstopper without going into how to solve it (what nobody knows how even today). It's a really good piece of popular communication. He was very good at that. And the situation didn't change much since then (at least the things he describes). So yeah, if you don't know a lot about the subject, the article is for you. Just don't expect to learn anything deep.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Most people don't know anything about the subject. People in this thread are likely far more educated than average on the subject, but I'm still seeing a lot of comments from people who don't understand the basics of labour theory.
dmn322 3y ago
> we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger
- kansface 3y ago
  Federal expenditures as a function of GDP were ~12% or so in 1950 (ie, coming down from the war). They are 25% or so now, 20% before covid. I’d imagine the states are about the same.
  - dmn322 3y ago
    And what has that increased expenditure gone to?
- legitster 3y ago
  > Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Transfer_payments_as_a_percent_of_federal_revenue.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
  - dmn322 3y ago
    Is that not mostly from social security? I wouldn't increased costs from paying for the retirement of an aging population to be an indication of welfare program strength. Is medicaid / medicare in there too? If so, then ballooning medical costs wouldn't really be an indication of stronger programs either.
forgetfreeman 3y ago
We may have more programs by volume but the barriers to entry and weird-ass financial requirements to keep benefits often drives the outcomes those programs are notionally intended to address. The social safety net today is significantly less functional than it was 30 years ago.
jtode 3y ago
I think he'd be screaming "read it again" at you right now lol
hyperthesis 3y ago
> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? \aside: Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations has a story about men who worked themselves into the ground, because they were paid by-the-piece (not per hour). They needed to be protected from themselves. (The psychological mechanism wasn't speculated, but I suspect maybe competition rather than greed.)
- jwestbury 3y ago
  So Adam Smith was opposed to the gig economy, then?
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    Yes, because it’s yet another name for piece work without job security. He was also against landlords. He was much closer to what we’d today call a social democrat, not unlike Keynes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
demondemidi 3y ago
Yes, capitalism makes people less productive. Wall Street? The richest of the rich get rich by playing games with paper, not by doing something useful to society. Look at all the stupid skyscrapers in NYC that were simply built to launder wealth, aren’t occupied, and are beyond the means of 99.99% of US citizens, yet the dominate the skyline and shade the public parks. Capitalism is designed to have lazy winners.

hattmall 3y ago

College has become mostly just that, a means to a career. It's even begun to wear that out and at higher levels become a means to a career in Academia. That's ultimately the beginnings of a massive ponzi scheme, it is now considerably detached from pure pursuits of knowledge, it's now become cannibalized for pursuits of funding.

legitster 3y ago
This is kind of my point. In 1949 when Einstein wrote this, the US state colleges were little more than vocational schools. He was advocating for a world ruled by academic achievement, kind of unaware of the brave new reality it would come with.
1letterunixname 3y ago
It's less of a Ponzi scheme and more of a gamified, time and treasure expensive hazing ritual whereby the sheepskin "proves" "quality" and some measure of aptitude, intelligence, baseline of problem-solving ability, and ability to finish something. It has been and is also 4-N years of extended adolescence. And in the distant past, when universities were more selective and cheaper, it's where people often met their spouses. How else should we prepare people for the various workforces: knowledge work, financial services, skilled trades, etc.? Universities fear 2 things: bad publicity and losing accreditation. Perhaps accreditation orgs such as ABET (in the US) need to get off their collective, perfunctory rubber-stamping posteriors and ensure financial and fiduciary stewardship are occurring, and that a university doesn't become tantamount to a white-collar human trafficking recruiter demanding the life savings of their victims on the vague promises of a bright future.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I'd argue that the evidence of "aptitude, intelligence, baseline of problem-solving ability, and ability to finish something" has much less value now. University is more of a vocational college now - there are specializations for most things, and if you didn't choose the right specialization and are trying to break into a field it's much harder to do so given that there are other people with better education. Because the general university education has become so ubiquitous just having a degree has much less power now.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    That's a shame that it's still and increasingly a one-way, expensive, usually water-down, specialization guessing game without trials of what's on the other end. Also, an increasing requirement in some fields of a Master's or PhD is doubling down on the filtering system. That started to be a thing in the 2000's. The irreducible question is: What should be done to fix or replace it? Fixing it with a fundamentally better alternative seems superior than the continued gamification of USN&WR pole positions. Also, college tuition needs upper limits because too many universities are tantamount to international labor human traffickers. I posit there ought to be cheaper undergrad colleges that are more rigorous, more practical, and more of a funnel filter. That is, the prestige isn't derived from acceptance but filtering for excellence like some professional postgraduate degrees. You can go through various paths and retry as many times as you'd like. The point would be specific, strategic preparation of students rather than grade inflation, honor code proctor-less examinations, partying, and endowment and CIP embiggening at the expense of student debt peonage.

CrackerNews 3y ago

I would say that Marx and labor theory of value are still relevant as mechanisms for understanding capitalism. According to Marx, Capitalism is a mode of economics that has unleashed the productive forces, but its internal contradictions give rise to increasing crisises. There is a constant downward pressure on labor costs versus rising costs of living. Crisis has been averted multiple times, and the productive forces continue to be unleashed. To prevent total collapse, concessions like welfare have been made. However, there is a real possibility of potential growth being stifled by self interests of powerful economic actors. This bleeds out now into identity politics as people view the liberal system as incapable of providing the growth and future they thought would be delivered. Either unprivileged groups want to be paid high wages or the privileged groups want to protect their high wages from being cut down. This is a form of class warfare that isn't too different from what Marx observed in his days. This still is far away from achieving the socialist mode of production where the workers become the planner and rulers of the economy to further unleash the productive forces.

kingstoned 3y ago
[flagged]
- soulbadguy 3y ago
  Couldn't the same be said about capitalism and free market theory ?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Capitalism is not a scientific theory, and "free market theory" is not a thing that exists.
- gustavus 3y ago
  That's not quite right, there are several things Marx offerred that could be tested. Such as, the most capitalist countries would be the first to fall to communism. Except they didn't the only countries that have ever fallen to communism were Monarchies ruled by an absolute divine monarch. Or after a revolution, the institutions of religion and the state would wither away. Which Russia is getting close to going back to a sort of Theocratic-Facism, and the CCP may not be quite yet ready to dissolve. I could bust out my old copy of the communist manifesto to check any more predictions he made, but at the end of the day Marx did offer falsifiable theories, it's just that it turns out anywhere Marxism could be falsified it was. If only he hadn't tied it to something as concrete and objective as economics and instead something more relative and cultural.....

mullingitover 3y ago

> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. From the article: > There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. He's being generous here, it's not just that an "army of the unemployed" almost always exists, it's a goal. Captains of industry in the current low-unemployment environment have been saying the quiet part out loud, that we need to increase unemployment. There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.

drekipus 3y ago
It's not waste unless you think of humans as little units of work, like a resource to be mined. People complaining about a problem doesn't mean it is a problem. I want cheaper milk, I complain about the price of milk, but the price is probably correct and that's for me to grumble about. "Captains of industry" want a pool of unemployed people they can pick from. If the pool is dried then that's fine. It's not a sign that capitalism has failed.
- anyonecancode 3y ago
  I think the implicit argument here is that "capitalism" means "rule by those who own capital." Hence a lack of unemployed people, which would hurt the captains of industry, _would_ be a failure under that definition of "capitalism." If by "capitalism" we merely mean things like a market economy with property rights, then the question would be what to call a system that has this but where workers, rather than captains of industry, have more power? Whatever we want to call _that_ system, it doesn't currently exist, and we've seen that any moves in that direction are very strongly resisted (c.f. return to office policies driven by captains of industry freaking out).
  - esarbe 3y ago
    Property rights and a market economy are not sufficient for capitalism. For capitalism you also need to leverage the work of others for your own profit, i.e. wage labor. Syndicalism, for example, also allows for private property and a market economy. It's not capitalism, though. Worker exploitation is a core principle of capitalism.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

marcosdumay 3y ago

> It's a pretty well written piece. It's... Pretty mundane and usual. If it didn't come from Einstein, nobody would even pay attention. It just states the same gains and problems everybody knows (and did know by decades at that time), and restates the large showstopper without going into how to solve it (what nobody knows how even today). It's a really good piece of popular communication. He was very good at that. And the situation didn't change much since then (at least the things he describes). So yeah, if you don't know a lot about the subject, the article is for you. Just don't expect to learn anything deep.

Turskarama 3y ago
Most people don't know anything about the subject. People in this thread are likely far more educated than average on the subject, but I'm still seeing a lot of comments from people who don't understand the basics of labour theory.

dmn322 3y ago

> we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger

kansface 3y ago
Federal expenditures as a function of GDP were ~12% or so in 1950 (ie, coming down from the war). They are 25% or so now, 20% before covid. I’d imagine the states are about the same.
- dmn322 3y ago
  And what has that increased expenditure gone to?
legitster 3y ago
> Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Transfer_payments_as_a_percent_of_federal_revenue.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
- dmn322 3y ago
  Is that not mostly from social security? I wouldn't increased costs from paying for the retirement of an aging population to be an indication of welfare program strength. Is medicaid / medicare in there too? If so, then ballooning medical costs wouldn't really be an indication of stronger programs either.

forgetfreeman 3y ago

We may have more programs by volume but the barriers to entry and weird-ass financial requirements to keep benefits often drives the outcomes those programs are notionally intended to address. The social safety net today is significantly less functional than it was 30 years ago.

jtode 3y ago

I think he'd be screaming "read it again" at you right now lol

hyperthesis 3y ago

> Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? \aside: Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations has a story about men who worked themselves into the ground, because they were paid by-the-piece (not per hour). They needed to be protected from themselves. (The psychological mechanism wasn't speculated, but I suspect maybe competition rather than greed.)

jwestbury 3y ago
So Adam Smith was opposed to the gig economy, then?
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Yes, because it’s yet another name for piece work without job security. He was also against landlords. He was much closer to what we’d today call a social democrat, not unlike Keynes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

demondemidi 3y ago

Yes, capitalism makes people less productive. Wall Street? The richest of the rich get rich by playing games with paper, not by doing something useful to society. Look at all the stupid skyscrapers in NYC that were simply built to launder wealth, aren’t occupied, and are beyond the means of 99.99% of US citizens, yet the dominate the skyline and shade the public parks. Capitalism is designed to have lazy winners.