Communism vs Capitalism does anyone actually think we'd be better off in a Communist society?

[Rippounet]

7 hours ago, karaddin said:

I find it amusing that a similar dynamic is at play within the conflict/discussion of ideologies - if you want a more socialist society you have to explain away line by line everything that went wrong in East Germany, the USSR and China but the capitalism that's destroying our planet doesn't even have to answer for the things its currently doing, that's all shifted to be caused by something else. All the good things we have derive solely from that system, all the bad stuff comes from elsewhere!

It's worse than that. You can explain how communist or socialist ideas can improve our lives dramatically, patiently explaining why such ideas have nothing in common with the Soviet Union or North Korea, and people will keep mentioning them anyway.

For some reason, people associate socialism and communism with stronger state power, and have no apparent knowledge of the myriad of small-scale collective organisations or experiments, not to mention the recent evolutions in human collaborative structures.
The words themselves have been irredeemably tainted by decades of propaganda and brainwashing.

So these conversations always end up the same way, because you're not having an actual discussion, but exchanging with soundbites and what Krugman calls "zombie ideas": stuff that is intellectually worthless, but that people have heard so many times that they are convinced this is what they want to believe.

8 hours ago, Alarich II said:

Well, your original point was that we don't need markets to optimize production, because we have all this data we can share and analyze. And I told you why I believe that this is wrong. The goals are fine, but method for game-changing innovation is not going to be the complete analysis of available data, rather something Schumpeter called "unternehmensgeist" or entrepreneurial spirit. I.e. trying something new and taking the risk of failure.

The collective oversight you are envisioning is surely different than the collective oversight we already have, the way I'm reading your posts, its basically everyone deciding everything. And I don't think that you will see the same level of personal risk-taking, if a) you have to get democratic approval for everything new you want to try out and b) the potential gains associated with the risk are collectivized.

This is basically a variation of the myth of the risk-taking entrepreneur, i.e. the idea that innovation comes from a few individual geniuses who will only help the community if we provide them with incentives, i.e. shittons of money.

It's just a myth. A few counter-examples notwithstanding there's no evidence that innovation comes from the people described as "entrepreneurs." Nor is there much evidence that there needs to be much risk-taking or that much gain as incentive. Humans do want recognition for their work, and some measure of financial reward, but the myth's actual goal is to justify what shouldn't be possible to justify: the exploding inequality and the destruction of our environment.

I've already mentioned Stiglitz dealing with this myth, but Mazzucato has spent more time on it. See for instance:
https://marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/US-ES-intro.pdf

2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

You guys keep on talking about "data creation" in order to figure what people want.
But you know what prices do? They present a whole lot of information about what people want and about the ability to supply what they want, in a very compact form.

Tbh I'm skeptical about the ability of the "market" to tell us much.

For starters, there's the evidence right there that "markets" and "prices" don't tell us much about sustainability. You could internalize externalities I guess, but to me that's like applying a bandaid on a broken bone. And externalities are not internalized anyway, because the political will to force the necessary regulations on the private sector is absent.

More generally, humans suck at ascribing value. It's the old diamond & water paradox. Walras's theory may have had the beauty of simplicity, but its necessary assumption is that humans are at least somewhat rational/reasonable. We are absolutely not, as Kahneman eloquently explained. And while the behavioralists seem to have accepted that, I am not certain they are going in quite the right direction...

As to the information provided by prices... Hmmm, yeah. I guess prices tell us how valuable goods and services are believed to be. But again, that belief is generally false. Objectively speaking, water is far more essential to me than my smartphone. Yet water is basically free around here, while smartphones are expensive. That's because prices do not discriminate between what's essential and what's not. Nor do they tell us what production is good for the environment and which is bad - which amounts to the same thing in a way.
Basically, prices may tell us what people want, but not what they need. And if you're trying to literally save humanity from itself, the last thing you want to do is trust in market-based prices. At best you can potentially correct for human irrationality with massive regulation - that would require a very strong state. At worst, you're just blind to the reality that the market is the problem to begin with, precisely because people suck at ascribing value.

Or, ot put it differently, the "market" is at the heart of the consumer society, but everything should not have a price. You can't put a price on clean air or water, nor can you put a price on continuing to produce greenhouse gases. In short, some matters need to be subjected to collective oversight, and that's that.

Obviously you (and others) hate the idea, but there will need to be some form of serious contraints on economic freedoms. Ironically, I personally would rather such oversight didn't come from the state... That's the dangerous shortcut. But the choice is between democratic oversight ("committees") or state regulation.

Either way there's a decent chance that in the long-run this turns into some form of communism...

[OldGimletEye]

38 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

snip

I have been quite clear in many prior post that the price system doesn't work perfectly on many occasions. So let me again re-hash some things I said where it doesn't work perfectly.

1. Informational Asymmetries

2. Monopolies

3. Can under-produce knowledge creation.

4. Prices likely don't clear labor markets, leading to high unemployment

5. Externalities-which should be taxed.

6. Situations in where there may be coordination failures, like say building a road because no single private firm wants to under take the cost, particularly if it will provide benefits to competitors.

7. Missing financial or insurance markets.

So there are a number of areas for the government to be involved and to regulate.

That said, prices do contain a lot of information, that allows decentralized decisions makers to make decisions often quickly. If I need to know whether I should produce one more unit of something, I can compare the price with my marginal cost. If I am determining whether I should invest, knowing the cost of borrowing can help me make that decision.

Why the price system is not perfect, it is clearly important to decentralized decision making. I will submit that decentralized decision making whips the pants off of centralized command economies. And as discussed earlier, there is no reason to think that centralized command economies would do better on environmental issues, particularly if they are inconvenient to the political class.

 

[OldGimletEye]

21 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It's worse than that. You can explain how communist or socialist ideas can improve our lives dramatically, patiently explaining why such ideas have nothing in common with the Soviet Union or North Korea, and people will keep mentioning them anyway.

Which often come off as sounding about as credible as  "Bush didn't do the real conservatism".

[OldGimletEye]

28 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

For some reason, people associate socialism and communism with stronger state power, and have no apparent knowledge of the myriad of small-scale collective organisations or experiments, not to mention the recent evolutions in human collaborative structures.
The words themselves have been irredeemably tainted by decades of propaganda and brainwashing.

If there are serious papers about how this could work for a economy of 300 million people, I would be happy to read them.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

58 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Obviously you (and others) hate the idea, but there will need to be some form of serious contraints on economic freedoms. Ironically, I personally would rather such oversight didn't come from the state... That's the dangerous shortcut. But the choice is between democratic oversight ("committees") or state regulation.

Such as?  And if the “constraints” aren’t coming from the State how do you propose to enforce such constraints?

[Altherion]

41 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It's worse than that. You can explain how communist or socialist ideas can improve our lives dramatically, patiently explaining why such ideas have nothing in common with the Soviet Union or North Korea, and people will keep mentioning them anyway.

For some reason, people associate socialism and communism with stronger state power, and have no apparent knowledge of the myriad of small-scale collective organisations or experiments, not to mention the recent evolutions in human collaborative structures.
The words themselves have been irredeemably tainted by decades of propaganda and brainwashing.

The small scale collective organizations are not new; the oldest that are still around (e.g. the kibbutzim in Israel) are more than a century old now. However, nobody has managed to scale them up to the size of even a large corporation, let alone a nation state. The only organizations that operated at the scale of large nation states that we know are the Soviet Union, East Germany, etc. which is why people keep mentioning them.

Regarding the association with stronger states: how do you expect to do without it? The means of production in Western countries are currently held by a combination of a small number of extremely wealthy individuals and a large number of people who each have a tiny share of ownership through retirement funds, small investments and the like. Almost none of these people will simply give their wealth to the would-be socialists or communists and the extremely wealthy in particular have both the means and motivation to fight and win against almost anything else. How do you plan to wrest control of the means of production away from them if not with a stronger state?

[OldGimletEye]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Obviously you (and others) hate the idea, but there will need to be some form of serious contraints on economic freedoms. 

Having rules, regulations, progressive taxes, public investments, and decent social safety nets is one thing. Having the state or a central committee make every economic decision, right down to how much porn gets produced, is quite another.

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Having the state or a central committee make every economic decision, right down to how much porn gets produced, is quite another.

As long as they observe the axiom "quality not quantity," I'm fine with that.

[OldGimletEye]

28 minutes ago, DMC said:

As long as they observe the axiom "quality not quantity," I'm fine with that.

In the case of porn it is likely the case that "quantity has a quality all of its own".

[sologdin]

if you want a more socialist society you have to explain away line by line everything that went wrong in East Germany, the USSR

while it is important to distinguish one's position from other sets of doctrine, it is nevertheless a strawperson fallacy to continue to insist that leftists need to defend stalinism.  it'd be like every time some bourgeois opens their mouth about whatever policy preference they have, i be like oh yeah but what about chattel slavery? 

Quote

Auschwitz was run by the SS, an organization of the Nazi party and integral part of the Nazi state. It was not a private capitalist enterprise that organized this (although different private enterprises have benefited from forced labour), the death camps were organized by the state bureaucracy and the execution was done by the armed forces of the state; Auschwitz was the states raison d'état.

dunno. i think you need to defend this system of state-assisted capitalist slavery if you want to advocate markets in this thread.  

 

Quote

prices do contain a lot of information, that allows decentralized decisions makers to make decisions often quickly. If I need to know whether I should produce one more unit of something, I can compare the price with my marginal cost. If I am determining whether I should invest, knowing the cost of borrowing can help me make that decision.

y'all are comical with this theology, which only removes the mystery one step--just turtles all the way down, i suppose. 

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

If there are serious papers about how this could work for a economy of 300 million people, I would be happy to read them.

Depends what you call "serious." I would personally think about mixing Bernard Friot with Trebor Scholz. Not sure Friot's been translated, but some Scholz is easy to find:

https://eticasfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Scholz_Platform-Cooperativism.pdf

Of course, Scholz alone doesn't offer any miracle (nor does he claim to). It's when you combine his ideas with the work of others, like Friot or Piketty, that you see the possibilities. And there's lots of scientific articles on such topics, most of which I haven't read - which is why I won't link to them.

10 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Having rules, regulations, progressive taxes, public investments, and decent social safety nets is one thing. Having the state or a central committee make every economic decision, right down to how much porn gets produced, is quite another.

Dude, you're the only one obsessed with porn in this conversation.

You're also the only one talking about controling every economic decision. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[OldGimletEye]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

In the e long-run this turns into some form of communism...

AI technology may require a whole new re-think of things. Chances are I will be dead by the time this happens. But, if your a young leftist, think hard about this problem.

[OldGimletEye]

4 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

You're also the only one talking about controling every economic decision. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I talk about it because this one of the reasons Communist states went down the crapper. Until leftist theorist come up with a plausible way for a decentralized economy to coordinate all economic activity, its hard to take them seriously.

[OldGimletEye]

7 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Dude, you're the only one obsessed with porn in this conversation.

Only because I talk about stuff I know something about.

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

In the case of porn it is likely the case that "quantity has a quality all of its own".

A sticky quality I guess.

[Altherion]

45 minutes ago, sologdin said:

while it is important to distinguish one's position from other sets of doctrine, it is nevertheless a strawperson fallacy to continue to insist that leftists need to defend stalinism.

It's not a question of defending the communist countries of the 20th century, it's a question of what you would do differently to prevent becoming like them. China offers one possibility, but it's hard to find people in Western countries who would advocate for their approach. The historical examples are brought up because people bring up the ideas that led to them and don't have an explanation how the ideas won't lead to the same thing they did last time.

[Jo498]

14 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Having rules, regulations, progressive taxes, public investments, and decent social safety nets is one thing.

Most of Western Europe has had all this to a reasonable extent since the 1950s. Unlike some Americans seem to believe it is neither socialism and killing all entrepreneurship nor is it paradise on earth. In effect it is remarkably similar on the whole and in the long run to the US. Social democracy in a broad sense is not easy to preserve (in most of Western Europe it has been eroding in many respects since the 1980s) and it is obviously not a panacea against very powerful corporations and pollution. I am not sure, but I'd guess that the larger global footprint of the US vs. most European countries is more due to ingrained differences in culture and infrastructure than to polit-economical differences. Or simply climate. Because Canada and Australia are more "leftist" than the US but they are about as bad in carbon etc. footprints. So overall, I'd bet that for the climate/environmental aspect many people here are especially concerned with, the differences between the systems we have experienced in the last 50-100 years, are not that big.

EDIT: Bluntly, US, Canada, Australia would have to cut their footprint (not only carbon, carbon alone is misleading because eg. France has lots of nuclear power) down do one third, the more affluent countries of Western Europe to about one half of its current value. Let's be very generous and assume that on average the reduction in lifestyle/consumerist goods would only be half of that percentage (although it is not clear how the other half could somehow be made up easily by technology etc.). So people would face downsizing (income, living space, luxuries) of 25-33%. Maybe inconvenient but possible for the richer third of the population of the "West" but hardly feasible for the lower 50% without social unrest of a scale noone in the West has witnessed in their lifetimes. So regardless of details and niceties as who controls the means of production this would only be feasible in a totalitarian system anyway.

[felice]

On 10/7/2020 at 6:59 PM, Altherion said:

You didn't actually answer the question: people can apply for any job, but who gets to make the selection and who sets the salaries?

Exactly the same people who make the decisions now? HR departments, managers, etc. Only the shareholders have changed, everything else continues as before. Employers would pay market rates just as they do now. Though I'd put a cap on pay rates where skill shortage is an issue - increasing pay rates to compensate for lack of people willing to do a job makes sense, but getting into bidding wars over a limited number of people able to do a job isn't in the public interest.

[felice]

19 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This in no way justifies or exonerates capitalist pollution and climate damage but do we have any evidence Socialism will do better?

There's no guarantee it will do better, but it has the potential to do better, while capitalism does not (or at the very least will fight regulation and monitoring every step of the way). Socialism is necessary but not sufficient.

[felice]

18 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

You guys keep on talking about "data creation" in order to figure what people want.

That's not what I'm talking about at all; I mean creation of non-physical products that can be replicated as needed at virtually zero cost - anything you can view or install on a computer, phone, TV, or ebook reader - eg porn. Once you've made the original video file of a porn film, it doesn't cost anything extra to let everyone on the planet download a copy, so charging per-copy isn't a sensible funding model.

18 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

But you know what prices do? They present a whole lot of information about what people want and about the ability to supply what they want, in a very compact form.

Yep, prices are very useful. Did you actually read my post?

18 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

If the government  makes decisions on every investment project, the scope of investment decision making would be enormous. It would have to make every decision from investing in research on extremely complicated technical questions, right down to whether the guy at the local pizzeria should buy another oven to make pizzas. The government bureaucracy would have to be enormous and some point you think that diseconomies of scale would start to happen. And then one wonders whether the decisions of this enormous bureaucracy would be truly democratic.

People have to make all those decisions now. Making them all government employees doesn't change the amount of decision-making required! I'd envisage a highly decentralised system, eg give all local authorities a per-capita share of the total investment fund to allocate as they see fit. And the process could be totally transparent - there's no longer any such thing as commercial sensitivity, and applications and decisions could be available online so poor or corrupt decision-making would be easy to see and the elected representatives responsible could be voted out.