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Socialism is about attaching yourself to the community (or usually the Politburo's) 5-year dream for production. Doesn't have anything to do with individual fre

Socialism is about attaching yourself to the community (or usually the Politburo's) 5-year dream for production. Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom. In the 21st century, there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally - it's inefficient and causing industries to bumble along, generally. The direction now is to automate production and have universal minimum income that can be used for competitive purchasing of goods and services. Sounds like a market economy to me.

unimpressive 13y ago
>Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom. Generally 20th century enterprises employed millions of factory workers as machines in a giant productive machine, with the benefits going to the founders/owners/etc. Socialist movements were an attempt to capture this value for the people creating it. Which would presumably mean you didn't have to work as much. As a casual reading of history will tell you, it didn't work. >In the 21st century, you there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally I wholly doubt that decentralized manufacturing solutions benefit from economies of scale as well as their centralized kin. (Assuming you're talking about 3D Printing/etc/all.) >Sounds like a market economy to me. I would hope so. Command economies are generally a bad idea.
- skyraider 13y ago
  The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    just work for an employee-owned company. How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?
    - skyraider 13y ago
      Two ways: It's voluntary, and you might get some of the profits if the company goes in the green. In a state socialist economy, you have to go work on the pig farm or whatever. In a market-ish economy, the attachment to a particular community is more voluntary. You can, more often that not, choose which one you want to join.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    >The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Great, that's cleared up. It was ambiguous to me whether you meant in the systems sense or the one you've outlined here. >Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company. I think that this is where the authoritarianism of most far left and right movements comes from. (Like Communism in the Soviet sense or Fascism in the Italian sense.) In a free market economy, the score is kept with money. This necessarily means that everything which makes you make less money is bad. So you have an incentive to use less resources when making a product, and thus creates incentives for certain kinds of R&D. Consumers will obviously pay the same for better, so you also want to have the best product in your price range. Which is your incentive to keep improving your product. Both of these effects will improve products and make them cheaper. It also means that when a finite resource is considered a public commons or otherwise not given its "proper market value", that it will be ruthlessly used up by money maximizing organizations. It also means that a profitable practice that produces some negative social ill will not be factored into the free market optimization process. Generally, these are called externalized costs. And one of the Big Problems (TM) of the 21st century will be figuring out how to deal with them. Global warming is largely an externalized cost, to the extent that it exists. (I can't give a knowledgeable opinion on that topic one way or the other.) Another externalized cost is worker happiness, a money maximizer that can get more money by driving its workers harder will. And in a free market economy it will also prevail against more ethical organizations. This means that you have a few options: Find a model where working workers less is beneficial to money maximizing. Find a model where you can simply force money maximizers to be more ethical. (At least, those are the two I can think of.) Without commenting on the possibility of the first, which of the two seems easier? To me at least, it seems much easier for Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini to decree that factories dumping waste into rivers will stop and start sending the waste to a designated disposal facility, on pain of death or imprisonment. Or in the context of a representative democracy, face huge fines. This is why those ideologies which speak of a bourgeois (Before becoming a Fascist, Benito Mussolini was a Socialist, and took inspiration from left ideologies.[0]) usually employ the most authoritarian states. They exist by the following reasoning. A dictatorship of the proletariat exists to counter act the free market forces which cause the exploitation of the proletariat in the first place. Therefore it must have control of the economy. Of course, an organization that controls the economy controls everything. "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." - Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, but I don't have a reliable source. Moreover, the "exploitation of the proletariat" is a moral issue. If the state is allowed to dictate on this moral issue, then surely it can dictate on all of them. (Partly a constitution in the American sense exists so as to say "You can't dictate on these moral issues.". One of the consequences of this is that some of the most thorny political problems involve changes to the constitution.) As Paul Graham points out in 'Inequality and Risk', a lot of innovation comes out of people trying to make money. And if you're not on top of the innovation heap you may as well be on the bottom. "Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it." - Paul Graham, 'Inequality and Risk' Free market forces aren't a result of any conscious design, they're what you get when you predicate your society on making money. (Which, assuming that in your country making money is correlated positively with making wealth, countries that have free markets will probably have a decent amount of wealth.) To counter act free market forces you must either instill a near universal belief in an ideology which gets people to act against them, or have so much power that you can stop them from arising. Usually both. The problem is that even if you can wield enough power to suspend the free market over a large geographic area, unless you control the world you'll have serious trouble competing in the free market forces on the nation state scale. Which leads to this quote by Mussolini which I currently use as my Litmus test for Fascism, which itself is something of a meta-ideology in its attitude. "From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." [1] So for Authoritarian regimes on the left or right, the only option to enforce their ideology is world domination. By force or by revolution. Again, usually both. [0]: “Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and firet their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the world war began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.” - Mussolini, My Autobiography [1]: One of the ironies of this idea is that in a world where it was universally employed, Mussolini himself would not be able to have done what he did.
- roguecoder 13y ago
  Labor unions worked exceptionally well in the US: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/labor-union-decline-not-computerization-main-cause-of-rising-corporate-profits.html http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/lab... Socialism is not the same as Marxism, and has at this point been widely adopted throughout most of the world.
yk 13y ago
Marxism has a lot to do with freedom. Unfourtunatly the only form of socialism that was ever tried was Leninism, which is a specific form of state socialism. And Leninism is easily corruptable. ( Or perhaps was designed to be easily corruptable.) And your decentrelized economy sounds to me a lot like socialized ownership of capital, the very definition of socialism.
- gyardley 13y ago
  A classic No True Scotsman fallacy. If you really want to dig into this, I recommend Andrzej Walicki's 'Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom'.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    It's really not. yk is not saying: "it's not 'real' Marxism that has failed, but Leninism as 'fake' Marxism, therefore Marxism hasn't 'really' been tested." That would be a No True Scotsman fallacy. yk said that a type of Marxism called Leninism failed, but other types of Marxism may succeed. Declaring statements like that equivalent to NTS is fallacious. Saying: "although a type of Marxism called Leninism didn't work, other types of Marxism might" is about as fallacious as saying "Frisky the horse didn't win the Kentucky Derby this year, but next year Trigger, who was trained by the same trainer, might."
  - yk 13y ago
    Actually I fail to see, why this is a No True Scotsman fallacy, since I specifically acknowledge state socialism as one form of socialism. However, if you are concerned that I am shifting goal posts, see for example Libertarian Marxism [1] as a Marxist school of thought that opposes state socialism and predates Leninism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism
    - gyardley 13y ago
      It's a No True Scotsman fallacy because Marxism has been tried in wildly different cultures under wildly different circumstances using wildly different methodologies, and in each and every case you've lumped them under a single type of 'non-free' Marxism called Leninism, which then allows you to claim that 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom' - despite a large body of contrary evidence collected, like I said, under wildly different circumstances. Yes, it's true that in each and every case, no matter what the initial circumstances, things wound up devolving into totalitarian dystopias, but it's not because they all started off as Leninism. The more obvious conclusion is that since Marxism, despite the intentions and backgrounds of its adherents, always seems to lead to a not-so-good, not-so-free outcome, there is something about Marxism itself that is not compatible with freedom. This is nothing unusual - ideas often have unintended consequences that differ from the motivations of their holders. But it should make you pause before making statements like 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom'.
roguecoder 13y ago
Guaranteed income is the simplest way forward to this future in the age of wide-spread automation. Originally a conservative idea, it's unfortunately been dismissed as "conservative" has come to mean "member of the current elite".

unimpressive 13y ago

>Doesn't have anything to do with individual freedom. Generally 20th century enterprises employed millions of factory workers as machines in a giant productive machine, with the benefits going to the founders/owners/etc. Socialist movements were an attempt to capture this value for the people creating it. Which would presumably mean you didn't have to work as much. As a casual reading of history will tell you, it didn't work. >In the 21st century, you there is little valid reason to coordinate production centrally I wholly doubt that decentralized manufacturing solutions benefit from economies of scale as well as their centralized kin. (Assuming you're talking about 3D Printing/etc/all.) >Sounds like a market economy to me. I would hope so. Command economies are generally a bad idea.

skyraider 13y ago
The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company.
- rhizome 13y ago
  just work for an employee-owned company. How is this different than, "attaching yourself to a community," which you denigrated above?
  - skyraider 13y ago
    Two ways: It's voluntary, and you might get some of the profits if the company goes in the green. In a state socialist economy, you have to go work on the pig farm or whatever. In a market-ish economy, the attachment to a particular community is more voluntary. You can, more often that not, choose which one you want to join.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >The economic concept of centrally-coordinated production has nothing to do with 3D printing (?) or "centralized" / "decentralized" in the computing or distributed systems sense. It has everything to do with economic planning (the Argentinian government at one point literally had a room where they president and staff would sit in command chairs and plan out production across the economy, although I don't think it was ever used). Great, that's cleared up. It was ambiguous to me whether you meant in the systems sense or the one you've outlined here. >Sure, socialism was designed to let the employees capture value. But intellectual freedom is different from who gets to capture the value. Even in America today, there are employee-owned companies. If capturing the value is what you care most about, you don't need socialism - just work for an employee-owned company. I think that this is where the authoritarianism of most far left and right movements comes from. (Like Communism in the Soviet sense or Fascism in the Italian sense.) In a free market economy, the score is kept with money. This necessarily means that everything which makes you make less money is bad. So you have an incentive to use less resources when making a product, and thus creates incentives for certain kinds of R&D. Consumers will obviously pay the same for better, so you also want to have the best product in your price range. Which is your incentive to keep improving your product. Both of these effects will improve products and make them cheaper. It also means that when a finite resource is considered a public commons or otherwise not given its "proper market value", that it will be ruthlessly used up by money maximizing organizations. It also means that a profitable practice that produces some negative social ill will not be factored into the free market optimization process. Generally, these are called externalized costs. And one of the Big Problems (TM) of the 21st century will be figuring out how to deal with them. Global warming is largely an externalized cost, to the extent that it exists. (I can't give a knowledgeable opinion on that topic one way or the other.) Another externalized cost is worker happiness, a money maximizer that can get more money by driving its workers harder will. And in a free market economy it will also prevail against more ethical organizations. This means that you have a few options: Find a model where working workers less is beneficial to money maximizing. Find a model where you can simply force money maximizers to be more ethical. (At least, those are the two I can think of.) Without commenting on the possibility of the first, which of the two seems easier? To me at least, it seems much easier for Vladimir Lenin or Benito Mussolini to decree that factories dumping waste into rivers will stop and start sending the waste to a designated disposal facility, on pain of death or imprisonment. Or in the context of a representative democracy, face huge fines. This is why those ideologies which speak of a bourgeois (Before becoming a Fascist, Benito Mussolini was a Socialist, and took inspiration from left ideologies.[0]) usually employ the most authoritarian states. They exist by the following reasoning. A dictatorship of the proletariat exists to counter act the free market forces which cause the exploitation of the proletariat in the first place. Therefore it must have control of the economy. Of course, an organization that controls the economy controls everything. "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." - Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, but I don't have a reliable source. Moreover, the "exploitation of the proletariat" is a moral issue. If the state is allowed to dictate on this moral issue, then surely it can dictate on all of them. (Partly a constitution in the American sense exists so as to say "You can't dictate on these moral issues.". One of the consequences of this is that some of the most thorny political problems involve changes to the constitution.) As Paul Graham points out in 'Inequality and Risk', a lot of innovation comes out of people trying to make money. And if you're not on top of the innovation heap you may as well be on the bottom. "Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it." - Paul Graham, 'Inequality and Risk' Free market forces aren't a result of any conscious design, they're what you get when you predicate your society on making money. (Which, assuming that in your country making money is correlated positively with making wealth, countries that have free markets will probably have a decent amount of wealth.) To counter act free market forces you must either instill a near universal belief in an ideology which gets people to act against them, or have so much power that you can stop them from arising. Usually both. The problem is that even if you can wield enough power to suspend the free market over a large geographic area, unless you control the world you'll have serious trouble competing in the free market forces on the nation state scale. Which leads to this quote by Mussolini which I currently use as my Litmus test for Fascism, which itself is something of a meta-ideology in its attitude. "From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." [1] So for Authoritarian regimes on the left or right, the only option to enforce their ideology is world domination. By force or by revolution. Again, usually both. [0]: “Therefore I became the public crier of this basic, partisan, warlike conception. The time had come to shake the souls of men and firet their minds to thinking and acting. It was not long before I was proclaimed the mouthpiece of the intransigent revolutionary socialist faction. I was only twenty-nine years old when at Reggio Emilia at the Congress in 1912, two years before the world war began, I was nominated as director of the Avanti. It was the only daily of the socialist cause and was published in Milan.” - Mussolini, My Autobiography [1]: One of the ironies of this idea is that in a world where it was universally employed, Mussolini himself would not be able to have done what he did.
roguecoder 13y ago
Labor unions worked exceptionally well in the US: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/labor-union-decline-not-computerization-main-cause-of-rising-corporate-profits.html http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/05/lab... Socialism is not the same as Marxism, and has at this point been widely adopted throughout most of the world.

yk 13y ago

Marxism has a lot to do with freedom. Unfourtunatly the only form of socialism that was ever tried was Leninism, which is a specific form of state socialism. And Leninism is easily corruptable. ( Or perhaps was designed to be easily corruptable.) And your decentrelized economy sounds to me a lot like socialized ownership of capital, the very definition of socialism.

gyardley 13y ago
A classic No True Scotsman fallacy. If you really want to dig into this, I recommend Andrzej Walicki's 'Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom'.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  It's really not. yk is not saying: "it's not 'real' Marxism that has failed, but Leninism as 'fake' Marxism, therefore Marxism hasn't 'really' been tested." That would be a No True Scotsman fallacy. yk said that a type of Marxism called Leninism failed, but other types of Marxism may succeed. Declaring statements like that equivalent to NTS is fallacious. Saying: "although a type of Marxism called Leninism didn't work, other types of Marxism might" is about as fallacious as saying "Frisky the horse didn't win the Kentucky Derby this year, but next year Trigger, who was trained by the same trainer, might."
- yk 13y ago
  Actually I fail to see, why this is a No True Scotsman fallacy, since I specifically acknowledge state socialism as one form of socialism. However, if you are concerned that I am shifting goal posts, see for example Libertarian Marxism [1] as a Marxist school of thought that opposes state socialism and predates Leninism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism
  - gyardley 13y ago
    It's a No True Scotsman fallacy because Marxism has been tried in wildly different cultures under wildly different circumstances using wildly different methodologies, and in each and every case you've lumped them under a single type of 'non-free' Marxism called Leninism, which then allows you to claim that 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom' - despite a large body of contrary evidence collected, like I said, under wildly different circumstances. Yes, it's true that in each and every case, no matter what the initial circumstances, things wound up devolving into totalitarian dystopias, but it's not because they all started off as Leninism. The more obvious conclusion is that since Marxism, despite the intentions and backgrounds of its adherents, always seems to lead to a not-so-good, not-so-free outcome, there is something about Marxism itself that is not compatible with freedom. This is nothing unusual - ideas often have unintended consequences that differ from the motivations of their holders. But it should make you pause before making statements like 'Marxism has a lot to do with freedom'.

roguecoder 13y ago

Guaranteed income is the simplest way forward to this future in the age of wide-spread automation. Originally a conservative idea, it's unfortunately been dismissed as "conservative" has come to mean "member of the current elite".