Socialist ends by market means: A history
lucasvance.github.io
lucasvance.github.io
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.
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.
A lion in the plains of Africa is not entitled to a dinner, the farmer in not entitled to a crop yield. It is super rare that people can't do anything to better themselves and get more for their own skills or execution. Any buisness owner will gladly share a percentage of profit you generate for them if you can show them you're indeed generating such profit.
If you're in DPRK or Cuba then you'd need to check your free-market priviledge of having a market for your skills.
The recent news from Minnesota suggests that the social safety net is a magnet for astonishing levels of theft.
Some social systems like in Israel if you're ablebodied you are given a public service job, like cleaning the park and etc... so you aren't entitled to a check for doing nothing.
South Africa hasn't any meaningful social net and the wealthy people live in special "high security" enclaves with additional guards and fenced perimeters. If you have a lot of hungry people on the street they will be forced to survive somehow and you'd get more crime.
Currently employing 130 wage slaves and unduly profiting from their margins, and not satisfied with the overall system at all.
My point is when all options include wage slavery it's not an actual option. That's it, a false dichotomy.
And that is what the OP is about. It's exploring a fundamentally different system which I understand is scary.
It’s a well-documented economic concept. You can find plenty on it if you're actually curious about the perspective. And understanding it thoroughly is a strong prerequisite to seriously engaging with other people with intent to learn. It's work you need do yourself.
You are just playing at word games. The system is trapping the have-nots into unpleasant, lifelong conditions, and that's what "wage slave" means. As you know.
Everything else is just propaganda.
Neither side actually supports the poor because both are funded by and literally are the wealthy masters. The evidence is in the trends/facts that for almost 50 years the wealth gap has only widened, regardless of who is in charge. At some point, we have to accept that the 'which side is right' argument is false.
Elsewhere there are broader choices in national politics.
eg: the current Prime Minister of Australia grew up with a single mother on a disability pension in council housing. His actions and politics are at least informed by real life experience as one of "the poor".
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
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
But we got past that. Walmart, Amazon, Samsung, McDonalds, Starbucks, Foxconn, and BYD all have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of employees, but don't seem to be hitting scaling limits. There may be an optimal size limit, but it's above planetary scale now. Computers have made this possible.
This leads to monopoly or oligopoly being reached before any natural limit to growth appears.
[1] https://www.jonkolko.com/writing/notes/13
[2] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/economies-...
But more to the point, consider what you're saying. Is the world, viz-a-viz these companies/services that you refer to, worse off than before the internet? Obviously not. In fact, it is substantially better, because higher economies of scale mean mass production for mass consumption. There would be no way you and I could converse this way on our phones without the hyper extensive scaling of production caused by capitalism. This calls into question the concern over scaling. Large scaling and less firms is preferable when they perform a social function.
If co-ops were replaced by big business, this is something everyone should be grateful for. To go back to the industrial revolution example, there were a form of early mutualist co-op that dominated the non-farm market in the pre-capitalist era: the guilds. And the guilds had a stranglehold on handicrafts, apprenticeships, and all manner of specialized production. In order to increase guild profits, the guilds, through their noble patrons, regulated and limited production of all kinds, who was allowed to sell their craft, and all while being worker-owned. And yet these guilds were the true monopoly: they used legal privileges granted through lobbying to the kings to limit production and raise prices. Their products were exclusively for the wealthy and privileged. On the other hand, it was the capitalists that found a loophole in this system that condemned people to poverty and starvation: the mass production with unskilled labor by manufactories. And, through the manufactory system, they smashed the guilds, producing tons of goods for the everyday man, contributing greatly to the prosperity over and above the medieval system that we see today.
1. Regarding transportation, the interstate highway system and the containerization infrastructure (ports, dredging, naval security) were massive state subsidies to long-distance distribution. If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used, their economies of scale would evaporate instantly. The state artificially lowered the cost of long distance shipping below the cost of local production. That isn't efficiency, but the taxpayer subsidizing the inefficiency of moving a toothbrush 3,000 miles. (Carson called these "diseconomies of scale")
2. The Uneeda Biscuit era of mass production created a crisis in that high fixed costs meant factories had to run 24/7 to be profitable, they couldn't wait for orders but had to force product onto the market. This required the state to intervene again via imperialism and arguably the creation of a consumer culture to absorb the surplus in the form of advertising and other means.
3. Computers are the most ironic part; Computers and CNC tools actually destroyed the rationale for the large factory, made it possible for a garage shop to produce with the same precision as a General Motors plant ("Homebrew Industrial Revolution" book by Kevin Carson again which in my mind is not one of his most defensible but it's still interesting).
I would argue that IP was the main reason that small shops didn't take over. As physical capital costs dropped, the state ramped up IP laws (patents/copyrights) to protect corporate hierarchies from the decentralization computers should have caused. I think that Big Tech isn't Big because of hardware efficiency but because of the state-enforced monopoly on information
To me the overall "anti-network effect" for Big Tech looks like the metatheory Krugman proposed to explain enshittification. The initial ramp up can come from proprietary code, hiring power, regulatory capture, branding, anything really, but especially a synthesis of all these
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/api/v1/file/7510035f-d377-4...
There's everyone else who uses the road, too.
Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.
These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.
And yeah the government is consistently incompetent. But there's no incentive for them to be competent in the first place. Either a mostly exempt-from-competiton company does it badly or a fully exempt-from-competition state does it badly in our system.
Anyhow, the most efficient travel for freight is by rail. But due to all the mismanagement by the government, it remains cheaper to ship by truck. You cannot really blame capitalism for that.
Before the government began regulating the railroads, this is exactly what happened (though no air corridors then!).
Power lines also form a grid, and can route around failures. The power to my house got a lot more reliable when the other side of the neighborhood got connected to the grid.
When the power does go down, so does the cable internet, but the internet still works because the cell towers take over the last mile traffic. There's also Starlink.
Practical example: a former customer of mine had a specific route carved out for transporting fruit and vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast. They had exactly one time slot in the day they could take, which brought the travel time down to about 3-5 days. If they missed that time slot, it was up over 10 days. If one of the route segments was out of service, it could have been two weeks or more. Yeah, you could get from point A to point B, but the time made the alternative routes unacceptable.
The power grid is not sufficiently redundant to protect against many forms of damage. Find power substations and count how many 10 kVA lines feed each substation. Then ask yourself, what happens when that substation goes down because a good old boy decided to take potshots at the transformers? When there's a natural disaster like a winter storm here in Boston, there are a lot of power outages, indicating that the grid is not a grid but a lot of branches.
As for the last mile, no, cell towers don't take over for my FiOS fiber when it fails, nor does Starlink. Cell, fiber, cable, and Starlink are not expanding the market for internet access. The cable market, the internet end-user market, is mostly saturated. Users switch but do not duplicate the service.
FWIW, this is another example of you never eliminate single points of failure, you only move them.
Roads go out or are down for maintenance. People use alternate routes. Happens all the time.
And yes, the last time the power went out at my house I connected to the internet via cell phone. Google says that Starlink provides internet access.
P.S. I also have a generator, as do my neighbors, because the power grid here is unreliable. Alternatives exist.
There's a saying in real-time systems out a late answer is the same as a wrong answer. In this situation, a solution that does not satisfy all the constraints is the same as no solution.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
>“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
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.
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.
I mean, I do see it online so I know what you're talking about, but I mean coming from humans. Which is why I ask if it is a product of big city isolation?
I just mean that they technically operate in markets but are not synonymous with the traditional notions of Marxian capitalism.
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.
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.
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.
> It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc.
Mostly inherited wealth I would guess, correlated to the other things for sure. Capital is everything in capitalism. Wealth distro follows a power law instead of Normal for this exact reason.
There is the system of private enterprise governes by capitalist accounting methods which is driven by the action and exchange of people acting to fulill their needs. This is like a functioning organism whose organs act autonomously, and in doing so affirm the life of the organism itself.
There is then the system of hegemony and bureaucracy which is organized by rules, dictates, and orders. It is like an organization, a machine whose parts operate according to a will, and function only so far as the will of the organizer operationalizes them into the pattern that fulfills the organizer's ends.
A natural, organic system can survive only as it functions in the matter of the former. When it functions in the matter of the latter, it dies with the failure of the organizing force which binds the parts. Society is an organism, not an organization. It is as senseless to organize society as it is to tear a plant to bits and make a flower out of the pieces. I should hope that we figure this out sooner rather than later before we smother society and its people with endless bureaucracy and regulation.
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.
$1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371
It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
From :
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."
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.