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Comment by helpPeople | Hacker News Reader

The literal definition of socialism is an impossibility, power always gets concentrated among the few.

"This time will be different" crowd hadn't been compelling. Human nature hadn't changed.

Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.

To the extent that we can agree that democracy works better than autocratic systems, it may be due in part to basing decisions on more input from more people. If we consider a line from consolidated, low-information (CL) decisions to distributed, high-information (DH) decisions, dictatorships' decisions mostly would fall to the CL end, and democracies would be DH-ward of them. Free interactions between individuals in a market, however, are even more DH-ward, and arguing for grocery stores or other price-driven systems to be converted to democratic systems seems like a step backward.

Socialism and the free market (at least the free market of goods, capital markets are a different discussion) are perfectly compatible.

The democracy I'm talking about is inside corporations. Corporations in capitalism are extremely autocratic entities, while in socialism they would be democratically organized. Worker-owned enterprises would still compete on the free market.

Capitalism is also an extension of democracy, the difference is that with capitalism you get to choose how to vote, by giving part of your vote to someone who have created a better product, and get someone elses vote by doing something useful. With socialism you get the same amount of votes whether you do something useful or not, and can spend that vote on the only type of product whether you like it or not.

This is actually rather similar to the form of democracy we have in our governing system, where you get to choose between two bundles of policies you do not like, and i'd say we need to make our governing democracy more similar to our economic democracy instead!

>Capitalism is also an extension of democracy

An extension where the more money you have, the more influence you get.

Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy.

> Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy

Let's say every person has one vote And there are thousands and thousands of elections going on every day. Most of the people are not interested in most of elections, so they ignore elections because it is not possible to follow everything. Which means we end up with 1 person 0 votes most of the time. Now to improve the situation we can agree to collaborate i'll vote the way you want for the issue you care and you'll help me in return. Money is simply a way to make this kind of collaboration easier. Saying that any kind of cooperation should be banned doesn't help anyone, and leads to a stalemate in the case when there are many issues to vote on. In fact if our governments were real democracies where votes could decide real policies instead of picking someone who is going to lie for the next 4 years, we would have a system very similar to money to help us to deal with the large amount of issues to vote on.

Buying is an extremely indirect form of voting. What socialism means is that workers inside a corporation would democratically decide how to run that corporation, instead of being handed down directions from an absolute ruler (the CEO/Board of directors).

That's only the first half of what socialism means, the second half is that if they make poor choices, and their corporation goes bankrupt, the other corporation has to employ them and give the same amount of voting power, as to the old workers who had made better choices, and kept their corporation working.

The first half is pretty much uncontroversial, and would work under capitalism too. The problematic part is the second half which resets the board, giving the same voting power to qualified and unqualified worker, and removing the incentive to work well.

To my understanding, the only obligation would be that, IF you "employed" someone, they should have the same voting power as everyone else, since they should always be empowered to have some say on their own work. But I don't know of any socialist principle that would force any particular company to "employ"/associate with any particular person.

Interesting, i have never seen this definition of socialism where it is simply about the way companies are governed and companies themselves are free to compete with each other. I expected a system that would try to equalise everyone in the whole country instead of simply everyone working for a given company, so it would need some way to redistribute goods instead of simply giving equal voting rights to all employees.

Would the system you describe be the same as capitalism, with the exception that workers are prohibited from selling their voting rights to anyone else?

The oldest idea of socialism is 'worker control of the means of production', which sounds a bit antiquated, but refers exactly to this: that the people doing the work should get to decide what work is being done.

There is one major difference from capitalism though, that would have broad repercussions: workers do not get paid a wage, they directly get the profits of the company (not in equal amounts, but by some democratically voted scheme specific to each company). This would lead to vastly more equality in society. It world probably also have a huge impact on international economic relations.

There are many forms of socialism, but what in describing is one of the oldest, and it is the one preferred by Noam Chomsky, the most influential leftist thinker in the world.

That brings to mind literal antiquity with Roman soldiers beinf required to supply their own gear. It was decentralizing in power but to call it equality is a bit misleading given it effectively created a caste barrier to be a soldier by an added constraint of "fit enough to fight AND afford the kit". The alternative was government supplied gear.

Of course the downside of the alternative was that it allowed for a centralizing of power in generals. Proto-generalismo problems ensue.

Which I believe highlights the irony of "equality" and "accessibility" being in opposition. Effectively the fetishized "means of production tied to labor" means by implication everyone is required to own all of their capital for production. Otherwise they cannot start. There are more barriers to entry and the lowest are even more disenfranchised. That is before the organizational logistical problems of supply chains and industrialization let alone what comes after it. It brings to mind the old form letter joke about "your proposed solution for spam won't work".

I don't oppose trying to find a better system, and laud attempts but that doesn't seem workable.

The factory/IT office still has to exist for the work to be doable. However, that doesn't mean that each worker would bring their own laptop or tools, anymore than companies require that today.

In the kind of socialist society I describe, you would win a livelihood by either finding a co-op which values your skills, or by trying to start your own co-op, probably by borrowing money together with others from some institution similar to a bank. Everyone participating in the co-op you helped start would probably take on not just the profits, but also some amount of liability for the loan.

Now, this change alone would greatly reduce the concentration of wealth, and so, hopefully, may free enough money to avoid the need for everyone to find a place to work or die of starvation. Still, even if that doesn't directly happen, the same mechanisms that apply today would still apply - a state-funded safety net, anti-discrimination laws, state programs encouraging employment of unemployed workers, education programs etc. I don't see why the bar to finding a place to work would be any higher if companies were owned by their workers instead of being owned by capitalists.

Which types of contracts between people would we have to ban to achieve this version of socialism? If someone was allowed to form a company by himself, and sell his work to another company, or to forgo his vote in exchange for a fixed pay, we'd be back to the current state.

That's a good question, and I'm sure socialist theorists have some better thought-out answers than I have.

Thinking about this logically though, the only kind of contract that it might help to ban would be selling your labor for money, similarly to how we don't allow you to sell your person (indenturement/slavery) or sexual favors (prostitution) today. This would probably include such contracts between companies as well, encouraging actual exchange of goods and services instead of direct outsourcing.

Still, even these types of contracts wouldn't have to be necessarily banned, it may be enough in principle to encourage Worker-owned enterprises, and protect them from hostile actions against them by other corporations. Of course, how we would get from where we are today to the state where most corporations are owned by their workers is the most difficult question, and capitalists will not go down without at least a political fight.

The startup i worked on was very similar to what you describe, most of us had comparable amount of shares, and we were happy to forgo our salary for multiple months when things were not going well because we knew that the result depended on the work we were doing, but there were also people who were happy to sell their work for money, and not bet the compensation they get on the work of the rest of the team. I don't think our non-technical workers would have been happy to bet the salary they were getting on the slim chance that the rest of the team would succeed eventually.

> similarly to how we don't allow you to sell your person (indenturement/slavery)

I rather like how libertarianism deals with this kind of contracts, it allows to sign any contract, but doesn't allow the buyer to apply aggressive force, to enforce the contract when seller changes his mind, that way the contract naturally changes from slavery to employment agreement.

> protect them from hostile actions against them by other corporations

Are there any hostile actions from which only some people deserve to be protected?

> capitalists will not go down without at least a political fight

i am not a capitalist, but i will side with them because knowing history of my country i can see that everything good i have is in large part thanks to them, and it's better to work with them to bring everyone up, instead of trying to bring them down.

Regarding the start-up story, that is only one kind of enterprise, one with high risk and a long period of preparation before any chance of creating a product,and they're obviously not for everyone. But not all new enterprises are start-ups - if I were to open a shop, for example, I would expect to start turning a profit from day one (disregarding the loan I need to acquire the physical location and merchandise, of course), so the workers in the shop co-op would immediately have a clear revenue stream.

> that way the contract naturally changes from slavery to employment agreement.

Pure Libertarianism is at least as much an idealistic system as socialism is. I don't think these kinds of clever tricks and relying entirely on markets can produce the desired outcomes, at least not as efficiently as regulations can. Examples in history of the standards many businesses held even for things such as food and medicine before explicit regulations and inspections were mandated would seem to agree with me.

>Are there any hostile actions from which only some people deserve to be protected?

No, and I wasn't suggesting there should be. Worker-owned co-ops would not even have the power to attack capitalist corporations, but the reverse would definitely happen. Big corporations try to destroy any competition they have by default, and they would certainly focus their efforts against a competitor controlled by a lower class.

> and it's better to work with them to bring everyone up, instead of trying to bring them down.

Capitalism by definition seeks to bring investors up, and no more than that. Any raising of the rest of the population is entirely accidental, and sometimes explicitly discouraged (for example, no capitalists would like to see growing prosperity among Chinese factory workers, since it would directly eat into their profits).

Do note that European/US-style capitalism is definitely preferrable to USSR or Chinese style planned, centralized state capitalism, and even that is in turn preferrable to serfdom or slavery-based economies.

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