10 ms·

Socialist ends by market means: A history

87 points by sirponm 10mo ago

quinndupont 10mo ago
To what degree is marginalism dependent on price as the active force? How can marginal utility be realized without all goods having a market price? What happens when goods are difficult or impossible to price?
- sirponm 10mo ago
  I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.
- sophrosyne42 10mo ago
  Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.
evanjrowley 10mo ago
I tried to bookmark this with Karakeep, but the URL ended up being this; https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/ https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/
civeng 10mo ago
The battle between the modern 'Left' and 'Right' is pure theater. It’s a false choice designed to keep us arguing over who holds the leash while we remain wage slaves. It would be interesting if some of those individuals could have been more convincing 150 years ago
- poly2it 10mo ago
  Yes, it is a false dichotomy, and politics are in fact much more complicated than that.
- slibhb 10mo ago
  The term "wage slave" is a cop-out. People -- all of us -- are stomach-slaves, not wage-slaves.
  - Aloha 10mo ago
    that may be so, but a stack of bills or small bag of coins is sure easier to cart around than things I can eat are.
  - solatic 10mo ago
    Having needs is not the same as slavery. Wage slavery is described as such because of the power imbalance between employer and worker, who has limited agency to find another employer, with whom he would also have a relationship with a power imbalance. A wealthy man who receives a check for dividends and interest most months is not subject to such power imbalances. Wealth makes him free. It's not an argument that socialism would enable people to just live off a public dividend, so to speak. Somebody has to work, and workplaces require discipline. Rather it's an argument for better labor safety controls, and a personal appeal to people to save as much money as they can.
    - WalterBright 10mo ago
      I've been an employer. I didn't have any power over my employees. If there was anything they didn't like, they simply stopped coming to work. How was I supposed to make them show up? One embezzled a large amount of money and spent it on drugs. What was I supposed to do about that? He was broke, he couldn't pay the money back. All I could do was tell him to not come back. I've also been employed at minimum wage jobs, and salaried jobs. I never felt the employer had power over me. At my salaried jobs, my coworkers complained about all the power the company had over them. The company had no power over me, so I would ask them what the power was. After some long conversations, the problem was the coworkers spent every dime of their income. So not having a paycheck for a week was a catastrophe. The company, however, was unaware of these issues. I recommend saving up to 6 months of living expenses, and then the employer will have no leverage over you.
9rx 10mo ago
> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.
- hyperadvanced 10mo ago
  I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.
  - tehjoker 10mo ago
    markets have existed forever. what is new since the dutch invention of capitalism is the cycle of money->commodity->money instead of commodity->money->commodity. That is, production for money instead of simple exchange. This different cycle has massive implications, and changes how investments are made. Instead of people investing in things for themselves, they invest explicitly for production for the market and for other people for things they will never use themselves. In China, the post-Deng consensus is to use markets in service of socialist development. People can be critical of this, but Deng's idea was that: "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat" meaning that markets, even with some capitalist mechanics, if subservient to socialist politics, can still be used to socialist ends. Personally, I am still trying to decide how I feel about that, but it's also hard to argue with (so far) something that looks like success.
    - hyperadvanced 10mo ago
      I agree, and I agree with Deng’s hypothesis, at least insofar in that China’s maintenance of social benefits appears to be successful, and, importantly, it operates strictly without actual political freedom.
WorkerBee28474 10mo ago
I find it interesting, perhaps ironic, how much the cause of social ownership of businesses/'means of production' will be advanced by ... Trump, via the 530A a.k.a. Trump Account. $1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371
- eightysixfour 10mo ago
  Ahh yes, yet another vehicle to move public money to the private markets, continuing to prop them up for the current retirees.
  - sien 10mo ago
    You want to check out Superannuation in Australia. It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia From : https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783# https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783# "At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."
    - defrost 10mo ago
      Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look. Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’. That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.
frankest 10mo ago
I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem. Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies. Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control. Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits. Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.
- fao_ 10mo ago
  > Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body. > Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits. I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all. The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them). To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.
Animats 10mo ago
What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size. Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete! Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard. Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man
- sirponm 10mo ago
  I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho: Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination). Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe
  - DiscourseFan 10mo ago
    But they did have the unintended consequence of keeping food safe.
jmeister 10mo ago
Cosma Shalizi has a great article on these themes, arrives at similar conclusions https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
Workaccount2 10mo ago
The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good. At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.
- sirponm 10mo ago
  I'm not sure if you read more than the title... this isn't socialism. Yet even the title suggests that it isn't socialism. Instead, this uses the selfishness that the free market is built upon and removes the capitalist wealth-extracting layer to provide the rich egalitarian society that socialism and broader anti-capitalist movements aim for.
- WalterBright 10mo ago
  The 38% of Stanford students that claim to be disabled is an ample illustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715
- solatic 10mo ago
  > someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of. The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.
- M95D 10mo ago
  I see 3 flaws here. > The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good 1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that. 2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society. > socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more 3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality". > pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group). College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.
futuraperdita 10mo ago
Came to this post hoping to see C4SS mentioned. "Markets not capitalism" is a fantastic read in general and the PDF is freely available / open access.
regularization 10mo ago
Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars. What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently. So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.
- sirponm 10mo ago
  How is control over production not part of the market?
- frontfor 10mo ago
  State control over production means instead of letting the free market decide what’s worth producing, the central planners believe they know better than the market (and the 2nd, 3rd order effects) what to produce and how to allocate and price resources and production. It very much removes or diminishes the “market”.
  - vlovich123 10mo ago
    I don’t believe central planning is strictly a requirement of communism. It’s just lumped into it because the USSR did both.
- gsf_emergency_6 10mo ago
  Gets a nod though: >“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production. And quoting Proudhon >Property is freedom Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic: to each according to his need, from each according to his ability Interesting to think about how insurance "markets" can _support_ production... (Not just distributing the means thereof, eg how to insure group owned GPUs? Is there a timeline in which GPUs do not depreciate? Do we have to bet on different rates/architectures? There aren't more than a handful)
sophrosyne42 10mo ago
Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms. The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics. The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.
- sirponm 10mo ago
  [dead]
foxglacier 10mo ago
What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.
- sirponm 10mo ago
  [dead]
kkfx 10mo ago
Someone's look to re-describe anarcho-capitalism?
- sirponm 10mo ago
  [dead]
johnea 10mo ago
To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland: The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation Often touted as "the worlds largest coop". Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.
M95D 10mo ago
I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption. Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used. In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries. I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.

87 points by sirponm 10mo ago

To what degree is marginalism dependent on price as the active force? How can marginal utility be realized without all goods having a market price? What happens when goods are difficult or impossible to price?

sirponm 10mo ago
I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.
sophrosyne42 10mo ago
Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.

evanjrowley 10mo ago

I tried to bookmark this with Karakeep, but the URL ended up being this; https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/ https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/

civeng 10mo ago

The battle between the modern 'Left' and 'Right' is pure theater. It’s a false choice designed to keep us arguing over who holds the leash while we remain wage slaves. It would be interesting if some of those individuals could have been more convincing 150 years ago

poly2it 10mo ago
Yes, it is a false dichotomy, and politics are in fact much more complicated than that.
slibhb 10mo ago
The term "wage slave" is a cop-out. People -- all of us -- are stomach-slaves, not wage-slaves.
- Aloha 10mo ago
  that may be so, but a stack of bills or small bag of coins is sure easier to cart around than things I can eat are.
- solatic 10mo ago
  Having needs is not the same as slavery. Wage slavery is described as such because of the power imbalance between employer and worker, who has limited agency to find another employer, with whom he would also have a relationship with a power imbalance. A wealthy man who receives a check for dividends and interest most months is not subject to such power imbalances. Wealth makes him free. It's not an argument that socialism would enable people to just live off a public dividend, so to speak. Somebody has to work, and workplaces require discipline. Rather it's an argument for better labor safety controls, and a personal appeal to people to save as much money as they can.
  - WalterBright 10mo ago
    I've been an employer. I didn't have any power over my employees. If there was anything they didn't like, they simply stopped coming to work. How was I supposed to make them show up? One embezzled a large amount of money and spent it on drugs. What was I supposed to do about that? He was broke, he couldn't pay the money back. All I could do was tell him to not come back. I've also been employed at minimum wage jobs, and salaried jobs. I never felt the employer had power over me. At my salaried jobs, my coworkers complained about all the power the company had over them. The company had no power over me, so I would ask them what the power was. After some long conversations, the problem was the coworkers spent every dime of their income. So not having a paycheck for a week was a catastrophe. The company, however, was unaware of these issues. I recommend saving up to 6 months of living expenses, and then the employer will have no leverage over you.

9rx 10mo ago

> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.

hyperadvanced 10mo ago
I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.
- tehjoker 10mo ago
  markets have existed forever. what is new since the dutch invention of capitalism is the cycle of money->commodity->money instead of commodity->money->commodity. That is, production for money instead of simple exchange. This different cycle has massive implications, and changes how investments are made. Instead of people investing in things for themselves, they invest explicitly for production for the market and for other people for things they will never use themselves. In China, the post-Deng consensus is to use markets in service of socialist development. People can be critical of this, but Deng's idea was that: "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat" meaning that markets, even with some capitalist mechanics, if subservient to socialist politics, can still be used to socialist ends. Personally, I am still trying to decide how I feel about that, but it's also hard to argue with (so far) something that looks like success.
  - hyperadvanced 10mo ago
    I agree, and I agree with Deng’s hypothesis, at least insofar in that China’s maintenance of social benefits appears to be successful, and, importantly, it operates strictly without actual political freedom.

WorkerBee28474 10mo ago

I find it interesting, perhaps ironic, how much the cause of social ownership of businesses/'means of production' will be advanced by ... Trump, via the 530A a.k.a. Trump Account. $1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371

eightysixfour 10mo ago
Ahh yes, yet another vehicle to move public money to the private markets, continuing to prop them up for the current retirees.
- sien 10mo ago
  You want to check out Superannuation in Australia. It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia From : https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783# https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783# "At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."
  - defrost 10mo ago
    Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look. Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’. That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.

frankest 10mo ago

I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem. Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies. Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control. Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits. Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.

fao_ 10mo ago
> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body. > Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits. I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all. The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them). To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.

Animats 10mo ago

What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size. Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete! Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard. Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man

sirponm 10mo ago
I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho: Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination). Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe
- DiscourseFan 10mo ago
  But they did have the unintended consequence of keeping food safe.

jmeister 10mo ago

Cosma Shalizi has a great article on these themes, arrives at similar conclusions https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...

Workaccount2 10mo ago

The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good. At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.

sirponm 10mo ago
I'm not sure if you read more than the title... this isn't socialism. Yet even the title suggests that it isn't socialism. Instead, this uses the selfishness that the free market is built upon and removes the capitalist wealth-extracting layer to provide the rich egalitarian society that socialism and broader anti-capitalist movements aim for.
WalterBright 10mo ago
The 38% of Stanford students that claim to be disabled is an ample illustration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715
solatic 10mo ago
> someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of. The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.
M95D 10mo ago
I see 3 flaws here. > The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good 1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that. 2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society. > socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more 3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality". > pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group). College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.

futuraperdita 10mo ago

Came to this post hoping to see C4SS mentioned. "Markets not capitalism" is a fantastic read in general and the PDF is freely available / open access.

regularization 10mo ago

Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars. What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently. So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.

sirponm 10mo ago
How is control over production not part of the market?
frontfor 10mo ago
State control over production means instead of letting the free market decide what’s worth producing, the central planners believe they know better than the market (and the 2nd, 3rd order effects) what to produce and how to allocate and price resources and production. It very much removes or diminishes the “market”.
- vlovich123 10mo ago
  I don’t believe central planning is strictly a requirement of communism. It’s just lumped into it because the USSR did both.
gsf_emergency_6 10mo ago
Gets a nod though: >“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production. And quoting Proudhon >Property is freedom Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic: to each according to his need, from each according to his ability Interesting to think about how insurance "markets" can _support_ production... (Not just distributing the means thereof, eg how to insure group owned GPUs? Is there a timeline in which GPUs do not depreciate? Do we have to bet on different rates/architectures? There aren't more than a handful)

sophrosyne42 10mo ago

Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms. The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics. The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.

sirponm 10mo ago
[dead]

foxglacier 10mo ago

What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.

sirponm 10mo ago
[dead]

kkfx 10mo ago

Someone's look to re-describe anarcho-capitalism?

sirponm 10mo ago
[dead]

johnea 10mo ago

To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland: The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation Often touted as "the worlds largest coop". Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.

M95D 10mo ago

I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption. Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used. In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries. I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.