Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Eating the billionaires and "nationalizing" publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying "you can still possess your car" is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...
Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration. So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.
When socialists say they want to collectivize private property, they use a meaning of private property which equates to "means of production", or "capital". The goal is that there won't be owners of capital earning money simply by employing other people to work the capital and stealing a part of what they produce (surplus value).
In your example, summer cottages and family farms aren't means of production, so there's no reason to redistribute them. Pensions and retirement were guaranteed to everyone even in the USSR, where women retired at 55 and men at 60, so I can guarantee socialists want you to have a pension. Small businesses that employ other employees would have to be collectivized eventually, which could mean that the owner simply becomes one normal worker in the business, working alongside the previous employees instead of above them. Regarding the apartment, you don't need to rent out an apartment if the rent of your apartment costs 3-5% of your income (as was the case in the Soviet Union). Land ownership and inheritance are a bit grey. Obviously nobody wants to collectivize your nana's wedding dress, or your dad's funko pop collection. Obviously we would want to collectivize if you inherit a big factory, or 20 flats that your mom rented out. For things in the middle, it becomes a bit more grey, so there's no easy answer. I bet everyone would agree that uprooting people isn't generally a good thing.
One fairly straightforward plan is the nationalization of housing. If you own and occupy your primary residence, you may stay. If you have a secondary residence, you can keep it as a vacation home. If you own more than that, they're going to go to the state. Pick two. If you're a renter, and you occupy that place, it's now yours. Anytime someone is moving, the government has the right to first refusal, which it will always utilize. Effectively, the governments buys the house back each time, and then sells it again to someone new. If you die your home can go to a family member/designated person. No one may more than 2 homes, no one may sell a home to another individual directly, though the transfer/sale of a home to a specified individual can be arranged through the government. All rents/mortgages are income based, and payments end after 5 years.
Cuba has done this fairly successfully. Yugoslavia had a similar system. No, it's not the best system imaginable, nor is it super popular with the fucking leeches owner class, but it's viable, doable, and simple enough to set up while insuring that all people may be homed.
the transfer/sale of a home to a specified individual can be arranged through the government
And time and time again this has lead to people in the government abusing this power and assuring for themselves and their families a completely different standard of living than the rest of the population. I've lived in a socialist country and the end was not pretty.
It sounds great on paper and has proven great on small scales (with the option to leave the community if you want), but on larger scales human nature always messes things up.
The way I heard it explained that made the most sense is personal vs private property. If it's something a person uses regularly. Personal property. Otherwise public property that can be leased short term for production and business use. But never owned by a large parasitic business/corporation that will horde resources and foul the land with no concern for others.
It works by encouraging union and co-ops, actually punishing companies that break laws, and providing social safety nets. Basically everything this comic points out.
So by "encouraging", I take that to mean a mixed system? I'm all for the Nordic model. I think a hard-line approach is ultimately too disruptive and unpalatable to a majority of people's current personal situation, and I feel like it's important to communicate that for buy in.
I'm not a socialist, but what I advocate for is explicitly postcapitalist.
Some postcapitalist policies include
- All firms are mandated to be worker coops similar to how local governments are mandated to be democratic
- Land and natural resources are collectivized with a 100% land value tax and various sorts of emission taxes etc
- Voluntary democratic collectives that manage collectivized means of production and provide start up funds to worker coops
- UBI
Wealth tax and taxing inheritance. You know it works because the capitalists flee the fucking country as soon as you inplement it (or rather before, when they buy information from a corrupt official or legally from a politician).
The small business part of the transition is "easy" (or at least, not any harder than maintaining a capitalist business), people have been and are currently doing this already. They are known as worker-owned cooperatives, and are often extremely liberating to those who make the effort. Depending on the industry (and the government you live under), it's not even that difficult, roughly on the order of forming a freelancing agency. There are also entire organizations dedicated to assisting with corporate transition to cooperative structure.
Here are some good examples of resources in the US to start learning that process:
Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Generally, Leftists believe it can only happen via revolution. The general idea is to organize and build dual power, so that when an inevitable revolution arises, the working class is already organized and can replace the former state.
Eating the billionaires and "nationalizing" publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying "you can still possess your car" is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...
You're working off the mindset of maintaining Capitalism and piece-by-piece Socializing it, which is not what Leftists generally propose.
Generally, Leftists believe it can only happen via revolution.
I'm an outsider and I don't really know much about Leftist thought. I'm curious what the general belief among Lefists is for why this revolution hasn't happened? (In the capitalist West that is?)
How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Decade by decade, have more things be run by the government rather than for-profit enterprises.
For example, in the 2020s, the US could transition to a Swiss-style healthcare system. In that kind of system, everybody would have insurance provided by a private company, but the most basic plan would be very cheap and offered by every company, and there were subsidies available so nobody in the country was uninsured, no matter what their financial situation. The US could also have a government owned bank that operated out of every post office that provided extremely basic banking services with zero fees. Private banks would still be able to compete with that, but they'd have to compete on extra services that the government bank didn't offer.
In the 2030s you could tackle education and housing. All state-owned universities could offer education with a $0 tuition and all textbooks available digitally for free. Maybe for some majors you'd have to agree to provide some public service to offset the cost of that education. Like, a doctor might have to agree to serve for 5 years in a remote area that typically doesn't have good medical coverage. Or, a lawyer might have to spend 5 years working as a public defender. For housing, the government could buy and own housing. Any citizen could get an apartment and pay a low monthly rent directly to the government. Subsidize that rent so that if someone couldn't afford to pay any rent, they could still live there. Private homes could still exist, and would be more spacious and more luxurious, but everybody would at least be able to start with something decent.
Then you could tackle transportation. Tax private vehicles and use that to fund public transit. As transit got better, fewer and fewer people would feel the need for the luxury of their own vehicle, but those who did could continue to subsidize public transit for the rest (instead of the current situation where cities subsidize drivers).
Then you could look into food. Maybe everyone gets the equivalent of food stamps. Maybe instead of throwing money at private farmers to grow corn, making corn so cheap that it's almost free, resulting in awful things like high fructose corn syrup in everything, the government could be responsible for some basic crops, and allow private farmers to grow specialty things / luxuries.
Media would be easy -- just set up something like the BBC but for the US. Most other countries in the world have something similar.
Bit by bit, just chip away at all the for-profit things and allow the government to either take it over entirely, or to provide a bare-bones version that was available to everybody, while allowing people to keep running their own private for-profit ones that offer a more luxurious experience for people who want to pay more.
I'm not a proponent of socialism due to the whole 'state' aspect, but I'd say universal healthcare and unconditional UBI would be the actual first steps toward the moneyless and stateless goal put forth in this comic.
This is really just a very specific type of socialism, as indicated by Lenin being here; an authoritarian who killed other socialists. This is about ML.
The first and last panels are right, but, for example, according to this post Anarcho-Communists don't exist. They don't believe in "evolving to a point" as the third panel says, they believe in jumping straight to that point. Also, Libertarian Socialists wouldn't really be fond of "elected committees" controlling things, as the second panel talks about; maybe electing people into leadership positions inside of a company/cooperative, or maybe even having unions make those decisions, but nothing above that.
They included a picture of Picard too, should I assume this is ML-utopianism and just shut down listening completely?
Also, I'm an anarchist and don't believe in "jumping to the point." We're not all teenagers with no concept of how societies work. We're opposed to the State and any form of imposed hierarchy. That I'm opposed to the State today doesn't mean I don't vote or that I'm just waiting around for the spirit of Good Anarchism to posses every person on Earth suddenly.
Like any reasonable person with an ideology, I make plans to spread my ideas to more people over time. The capitalist state isnt going to auddenly collapse into anarchy and if it did it woukd be terrible because other parts of the collapsing state are going to form monarchies, fascist authoritarian fortresses, and many other balkanized microstates. It would be the worst possible outcome for anarchists!
No, our goal is to enact socialism. Then to whither away the state apparatus into communism. Then to whither away the global hierarchy in favor of self-determination and negotiation.
In no universe do serious people think: Step 1: destroy all governance. Step 2: ????. Step 3: Anarchist utopia.
Also, I’m an anarchist and don’t believe in “jumping to the point.
[...]
No, our goal is to enact socialism. Then to whither away the state apparatus into communism. Then to whither away the global hierarchy in favor of self-determination and negotiation.
Then, by definition, you're a Marxist, you're literally summarising Marxist theory. Anarchists don't believe in going through that middle step.
In no universe do serious people think: Step 1: destroy all governance. Step 2: ???. Step 3: Anarchist utopia.
If you want to see how an anarchist revolution works, go look up Catalonia and the CNT-FAI, Anarchist Ukraine or the Zapatistas.
Then it sounds like you're not really an anarchist, much less AnComm 🤷
Care to explain what the difference between a communist and an anarcho-communist is, then? Communists, such as ML, are the ones who believe in slowly eroding the state, anarchists believe in side stepping the state and growing from grassroots movements. That's sort of, ya know, the entire difference?
Anarchist groups exist and have existed through history, and they don't typically believe in "destroy all governance", they believe in, like I said, growing from alternative, independent, grassroots movements.
Sounds like you are just a communist, which is fine, but you're not an anarchist.
ML would be about a vanguard party. That kind of elected council with central planning can happen without it. That vanguard party is where ML goes all wrong and tends to devolve into cult-like behavior. Edit: and not just the big one's in Russia/China/N. Korea. Lots of smaller ML groups devolve into cult-like behavior, too.
I do agree, though, that the second panel is still too specific. There are many ways to organize the workers, and that second panel is far too narrow.
It is very clear that it's about Socialism, so leaving AnComms out is fair.
AnComms are socialists, though. As are communists, and all anarchists who are not AnCaps, but those aren't even really anarchists.
Socialism is just about workers controlling the means of production; how you get there, the styles and forms of leadership, and all other things, are where all subgroups differ. The same way that in capitalism you can have Soc-Dems, Liberals, Libertarian Capitalists, Fascists, etc.
The 1% cry about it way less than the 40+% of absolute troglodytes in this country who think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires and love their tacky prophet Donnie the douche
This is a problem of gutted education, not the individual. The ring class removed all class awareness from our education and replaced it with glorifying an oligarchy disguised as a meritocracy.
I think it's more a problem of intelligence, which can be mitigated by education but you'll always have a certain amount of people who can be told any given lie and they'll not care whether it's true or not, even if they know better.
Lenin wasn't a socialist. He was a transparently dishonest fraud who built a cult of personality. The best thing you can say is that he failed because if the results were a success, Lenin was a monster.
While Lenin was a flawed leader, and did some shady shit in the name of revolution, I don't think it's fair or honest to call him a fraud. Man was literally imprisoned because of his beliefs. Not saying we should follow him religiously like some people do, he definitely made mistakes. Now if this was Stalin we were talking about I could understand.
He was imprisoned for what he wrote about. His actions tell me that he was not a socialist, and that's what matters. He held an election, immediately enacted violence to change the outcome, immediately dismantled the socialist power structures that were in place, purged people who didn't agree with him, and acted as an autocrat.
Anyone who thinks Lenin was a socialist is ignorant of history.
Edit: I can't actually see who replied to me because I blocked them 😂 tells me what I need to know about the people arguing with me.
Showing to us all you haven't studied the figure of Lenin in an honest way in your life.
Lenin dedicated most of his life (in exile from the tsarist regime for doing so) to study, write on, and agitate against, the issues of the masses. He was openly against becoming a personality cult, he maintained his democratic ideals until the moment a civil war broke and terrorist attacks started to kill members of the party and attempted to kill him, and if you read any of his writings it's patently obvious that he's obsessed with the well-being of the working class.
Both Napoleon and Hitler wrote had other people write of them that they had the best intentions for true respective populaces. However in practice it turned out they used them as cannon fodder.
That's not how he was described by anyone who was alive at the time except for business men who lost their investments in tsarist Russia, but keep believing in spooky ghost stories.
To the people downvoting this: please ask yourselves whether you've read anything Lenin wrote, or read any non-anticommunist article or book on the Russian Revolution and Lenin
"the workers (aka the proletariat) own their own workplace" That's one way to do it, or you could have that happen indirectly where the workplace is owned by the government and the workers "own" it indirectly. Most firefighters don't work for a for-profit company, but it's also not a firefighter-owned company that goes and sells firefighting services to businesses that don't want to burn down. A worker-owned company might make sense in certain situations, say a clothing store. You wouldn't necessarily want a central government owning all garment manufacturing and sales. A worker-owned collective is probably a better match. You might have a worker-owned sports store that focuses on selling sports gear, and a worker-owned wedding gown store that focuses on that market. Most people are more familiar with the government-owned model, and that's also socialism.
"production is then planned by elected committees"... why? That's the communist way, but that's not necessarily how a socialist system has to operate. And, in many cases, an "elected committee" is absolutely the wrong way. In countries with state-provided healthcare, there's a government minister who is in charge of health, and their ministry hires the experts needed to run the healthcare system. I definitely don't think that system would be improved if an elected committee were in charge of running things. You might still have worker-representation in those setups. For example, the nurses could belong to a union, and a union rep would be part of decision making. But, an elected committee is a weird fit in many situations.
"increases in productivity continuously reduce the work week"... that's just not likely. People who have high paying jobs could sometimes demand a shorter work week, and occasionally they do. But, often they want a more luxurious life in their time off rather than a less luxurious life and lots of time off. I'm not talking about CEOs and other people who are workaholics and own multiple mansions. I'm talking about dentists and engineers who are willing to keep working a standard 40 hour week so that they can take trips around the world, or buy a nice cottage near a lake, or treat their kids to nice presents.
This way of presenting socialism is going to give people the wrong idea.
In countries with state-provided healthcare, there's a government minister who is in charge of health, and their ministry hires the experts needed to run the healthcare system. I definitely don't think that system would be improved if an elected committee were in charge of running things
Maybe not running things, but the input of local committees could be very welcome. Increasing the number of specialists of some kind because of popular desire, putting a clinic in X part of the neighborhood because there are a lot of reduced-mobility people who could benefit from it nearby, transparency meetings where the expenditure is explained to the people...
"increases in productivity continuously reduce the work week"... that's just not likely. People who have high paying jobs could sometimes demand a shorter work week, and occasionally they do. But, often they want a more luxurious life in their time off rather than a less luxurious life and lots of time off
Ideally, each worker would be able to decide what they want, and shift between different working hours on different stages of life. Construction worker who only wants to have the basics and a lot of leisure time? 20h workweek. Scientist crazy for research who wants to spend a lot of time in the lab? 40h workweek. Said scientist decides to have a kid and wants to reduce to 25h workweek? Done.
The idea is that workers would be able to make those decisions themselves instead of relying on the good-will of their corporate overlords, it doesn't mean everybody has to be present in every democratic decision if they don't want to, or that everyone needs to have identical working conditions.
Market socialism also exists, just to remind everyone.
If you Google "define socialism", you'll get a sentence saying socialism is when tve means of production are owned OR regulated by the people.
So you can still have what we have right now, no need for any sort of fundamental change, except proper regulation, meaning actually good labour laws and proper taxation for the wealthy.
Finland and other Nordics are arguably market socialist.
And yes, I know how many will disagree. Here in Finland, less so.
Finland and other Nordics are arguably market socialist.
Absolutely not, they are Social Democracies. They are not progressing towards more worker ownership, but less, Capitalism still drives the system and the bourgeoisie still drives the state.
By any reasonable dictionary (as well as classic definition), capitalism is defined by private property of the means of production. Socialism is defined by common/social ownership of the means of production, not "regulation". What you call "market socialism" is just regulated capitalism.
Nothing wrong with having any position, and we should strive for what's best instead of trying to correspond to certain terms, but what you suggest is not socialism.
And I kinda hate it when we move the goalposts, especially with American politician calling literally any bit of social policy "socialism". No it's not, and classics have outlined it very, very clearly.
Capitalism doesn't have a monopoly on privately owned businesses.
"By any reasonable definition" you seem to mean "this is what I think for some reason I'm not even entirely sure of, and I'm too lazy to even Google what you said".
Now see, which should I believe, the actual consensus of the literature on economics and political philosophy... or some random dude online who's rhetoric of "byaah no no that's just capitalism socialism is communism" I've seen literally thousands of times?
However, the articulation of models of market socialism where factor markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy.
Cooperatives, while not being owned by a single private person, are still held by private people.
You can cry all you want but capitalism isn't synonymous with market economy.
Well regulated capitalism is just socialism. Capitalism strives for the least regulation possible, because it enables maximising profits, which actually is the definition of it as a political ideology. Striving for more capital.
Here's something which will rustle your jimmies even more.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism[1]
Social democracy has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism.[11][12]
In the 21st century, it has become commonplace to define social democracy in reference to Northern and Western European countries,[39] and their model of a welfare state with a corporatist system of collective bargaining.[40] Social democracy has also been used synonymously with the Nordic model.[
Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government" (in this case committee; semantics)?
Edit: I truly appreciate everybody who takes the time to write elaborate answers pertaining to my question. I will read and respond once I have the opportunity and in that case, I hope eventual followup questions are welcomed. :)
You don't have to trust that they won't turn authoritarian. If you see authoritarian tendencies and you don't like them, you vote them out.
Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government"
That depends on who you ask. An anarchist will tell you no, a communist will tell you a different answer, etc. I'm a Marxist-Leninist so I'll answer to that as a Marxist-Leninist.
In a Marxist-Leninist state, there is only one party. In the same way that your country only have one justice system, your country only has one socialized system of healthcare (if at all), etc, there would be need only for one party: the party that represents the interests of the workers. This party would have a vanguard of communist intellectuals (liable to being removed from their position by popular vote), who would be in a constant back-and-forth democratic dialogue with the workers and their representation in worker-councils. The needs and demands of the workers would be translated to Marxist ideology, which is flexible depending on the circumstances, the culture, and the society it's applied to, and policy would be drafted, approved and adopted.
A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called "how the workers' parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution", by Pedro Ross. It details the immense level of popular participation in the drafting, approval, implementation and execution of policy in Cuba during the 1990s "periodo especial", a huge economic crisis precipitated by the dissolution of their biggest trading partner, the USSR. Literal millions of people, through their unions and through worker councils, participated democratically in deciding which sectors of the economy they wanted to preserve most, which ones least, which workers are redundant and which aren't, which goods and services should be prioritised in the planned economy, how to organize local organic farms everywhere (including workplaces) in order to minimize food imports... All of this happened in a back-and-forth, multi-year exercise, between the top representatives of the government, the specialists (e.g. economists, hospital directors, transit company directors, etc.), and the direct representatives of the people through the worker's councils. It's truly one of the most explicit and overwhelming examples of democracy that I've ever encountered.
What do you think about people who claim only having one party is undemocratic? I do believe there should be a certain freedom to form parties of your own and eventually run for election, but this is standard in most western countries and I'm unsure if I'm missing some benefit to only having one party. Genuine question by the way.
I'll jump in with an extra question here if I may:
So say you have two companies, doing more or kess the same thing, company A and company B.
If the workers in those companies detain their respective means of production, why wouldn't they want to do what we see today:
"Hire" the best ones from the other company, grow so they all get more of it, intimidate concurrence etc? I mean it's not just because there are lots of bosses instead of just some, that it will solve those problems?
Also, if company A does well, won't people apply for work there, but ot for company B that (say) does less well? Wouldnt company A try to limit hired if they don't fall in line with what they are thinking/doing etc.?
I just see the same system but with artificial blocks for the most obvious things, blocks people (who want it, I mean those crazy prycopathic bosses will still be around, they're just not a CEO any more) will just work around.
Yes and no. Most Marxists advocate for a form of Whole-Process People's Democracy, or Soviet Democracy. Essentially, the idea is that, rather than just having state, local, and federal elections (as a brief example), there are far more rungs you can directly elect and participate in. This ideally holds people accountable better than western democracies do.
I wonder if some common pitfalls like too much party control over committees, lying about quotas for financial gain, and the vulnerabilities of a society in revolt could be squeezed in, or perhaps covered in a second image.
Orthodox Marxism isn't always enough, and is not beyond revision and improvements (hence the many neo-marxists). Critical Theorists have addressed Marxism as well as Capitalism after all.
That said, the post is good and educational as is, and has my up vote.
This comic makes a ton of logical leaps, by which i mean that it assumes that the reader is already familiar with certain information and leaves it implied. More broadly, it seems to assume that the audience already agrees that communism is the best. I'm particularly annoyed at the second pannel describing a command economy in a very short and unconvincing way, as if the audience already knows and agrees.
I have a rudimentary knowledge of political taxonomy and this is very very confusing.
But you know what, at least it's written in plain language. A mistake that communists often make is using their vocabulary (alienation, ideology, bourgeoisie) as if everyone knows what it means, i'm glad this isn't the case here
I would love to see a policy where there is a variable tax rate on companies based on employees satisfaction.
If a company has a largely unhappy workforce they would be taxed most of their profits.
If a company has a extremely happy workforce then it can reduce the taxation rate below the standard rate. And employees can still vote on this 2 years after termination.
It incentivises companies to invest more in the employees wellbeing, and punishes companies that take practice in unsustainable hiring and mass layoffs later.
If it is unavoidable that a company needs to downsize, they would be incentivised to help employees find new employment.
I'm sure there is a large issue I'm not seeing with this but I'm pretty fond of the idea.
There is a simpler way to do this, and it's a worker cooperative. Workers own the business and they democratically decide what the business does. There is no separation between the leadership and the workforce. Maintaining that separation will always result in conflict because the interests of the owners will never be the same as those of the workers.
It sounds way more complex to logistically set up a system like that. Best case is a lot of regulation needed, worse case is a complete overhaul of the economy.
It infuriates me that our countries are called „democracies“. Why is our economy not democratic than? The economy is mostly ruled like any feudal empire.
Well, it just goes back to the root of the word. Ancient Greece, where the word democracy comes from, was far from what we would call a democracy nowadays.
Not only did they own slaves (who obviously could not vote) but the only people that could vote, as far as I remember, were landed men. If you were not a man, or did not own land, you could not vote.
That's the central question of Reform or Revolution, and why the majority of Leftists believe Reform to be too unlikely to outright impossible, and therefore Revolution the correct path. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about it in Reform or Revolution.
Because the bourgeois were happy to get power when they were excluded from it in the monarchy, but they are very much not happy to leave peasants get any power.
Francr history is very telling of this. The question of how the elections should be made was a hot topic. Representative democracy is something the bourgeoisie wants because it allows it to stay in power. Because the bourgeois are better armed to be elected than the people. Rousseau warned of this even before the first French revolution.
I'm sure the US revolution went the same way. The crazy US voting system looks very much like it was crafted for the bourgeois to stay keep all the power.
Most of them are, to limited degrees. America has the Post Office, interstate roadways, public education for children, public libraries, and many other government services that are fundamentally socialist in nature.
We don't call them that because of propaganda. And many in government (especially on the right) work very hard to destroy those systems because they are socialist and empower workers.
The idea of letting the "free market" manage these things is insane and always leads to bad outcomes, we have tried this before. People who say "economic planning doesn't work" only exist because economic planning allowed them to live freely and be educated enough to form those big words instead of being locked to the land they were born on as peasant workers.
So it's all nice in theory, but I have questions...
the workers own their workplace
Based on previous discussions, I understand the commonly proposed model here would be a workers' collective of some sort. People involved in the collective's production share the proceeds - we made N number of tractors and took them to market and received X value units; we spent Y value units in the production process, so we can distribute (X - Y) value units among the members of the collective. The workers own the equipment and infrastructure used by the collective and share responsibility for production. If a worker moves from workplace A to workplace B for whatever reason, they cease to share in the proceeds and responsibility of workplace A's collective and take on the responsibilities of workplace B's collective and share in its proceeds.
(Aside: What if X is smaller than Y? Should members then add back the difference for the next production cycle, so production materials can be procured?)
Let's look at the (X - Y) part a bit more closely. This defines the benefit that members of the collective derive from the enterprise, so they are collectively incentivised to make the difference as big as possible - to benefit themselves rather than a capital owner. Let's assume that all collectives can procure production materials equally with no supply and demand market forces (unlikely). Let's further assume that the market value for the goods produced is fixed (questionable, but OK). So anyone involved in producing tractors pay the same number of value units for raw materials and components and can only ever sell tractors for the same number of value units as everyone else. This means that an individual collective is heavily incentivised to reduce the raw materials needed per tractor (production efficiency), make better tractors than other collectives (market attractiveness), or increase the number of tractors they take to market in a given time period (increased production). Each collective, and ultimately its members, thus stand to benefit from having the most skilled tractor builders, innovative tractor designers, and an all-round hardworking membership. A more successful collective would draw more workers with such beneficial traits and become even more successful in the process. It would also be in the interest of the collective to either push out members that do not contribute according to their full ability, or reduce their share of the proceeds. The former would result in some workers not being accepted into any collective after a while and thus not contributing to any production, the latter in performance-based remuneration that creates societal inequality.
Congratulations! You just created market forces in the labour market that will have winners and losers.
a.k.a the means of production
Can someone explain to me what this means in today's world, beyond factories making physical goods (such as tractors) using physical machines and manual human labour?
production is then planned by elected committees
There are some details missing here. Who elects these committees - workers, or society in general? What are the requirements for being electable for such a role? How are these committees held accountable for failures? Do they plan production at a society-wide level, each in a specific industry, or down to regions or specific production facilities? Do they serve only a planning role, or are they also responsible for execution?
What checks would be in place to prevent professional popularity contest participants (those we call politicians at the moment) from adopting a facade of ideological purity and getting elected on popularity rather than merit? How would they be insulated from outside influence by those affected by their decision making? Do we really need more tractors, or do they still have friends in Worker's Collective 631 that makes tractors?
Congratulations! You just created a managerial class (at best) or just the usual corrupt cabal that run things to their own benefit.
increases productivity as workers are more happy and committed
That's a big assumption. Anyone have any data from wide sampling across multiple industries to support this as a long-term sustained effect?
work to better ourselves and humanity
If you replace "humanity" with "our close community" this might be realistic. I don't think the "and humanity" has ever happened at a macro level.
Congratulations! You just created market forces in the labour market that will have winners and losers.
Yes. Market Socialism (which would have supply and demand and competing worker-owned firms) doesn't solve everything. I advocate for it because I think it's a good, achievable medium-term goal that would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Something we could see in my lifetime. Once we get things there, workers are in a better position to advocate for further changes, like dumping money altogether.
However, there's plenty of people who think we should jump right past that and into the Anarco-Communist end goal.
One of the ideals of being a cooperative is "cooperation among cooperatives" as dictated by the Rochdale Principles. So by definition worker co-ops shouldn't be competing with each other. Instead consolidation of corporations to force a sort of cooperation to increase profit we'll ideally have worker cooperatives working with producer co-ops for example.
Not entirely sure the implications of supply and demand market forces but I imagine its a step up from our current system. We'll have democratically controlled work places where workers dictact the direction of supply and not necessarily for the sole purpose of increasing profits. In any case what I think we need is a new systematic way of measuring the growth of an economy in conjunction with worker co-ops.
Based on previous discussions, I understand the commonly proposed model here would be a workers' collective of some sort. People involved in the collective's production share the proceeds - we made N number of tractors and took them to market and received X value units; we spent Y value units in the production process, so we can distribute (X - Y) value units among the members of the collective. The workers own the equipment and infrastructure used by the collective and share responsibility for production. If a worker moves from workplace A to workplace B for whatever reason, they cease to share in the proceeds and responsibility of workplace A's collective and take on the responsibilities of workplace B's collective and share in its proceeds.
This is Market Socialism, not Marxism. Marxism is what is depicted in the above graphic. Marxists aim to satisfy the needs of the whole using the production of the whole, not just competing cooperatives.
Can someone explain to me what this means in today's world, beyond factories making physical goods (such as tractors) using physical machines and manual human labour?
All Capital, ie everything used in the commodity production process. If your aim is to get into the weeds about what is considered Capital, edge cases can be decided by committees.
There are some details missing here. Who elects these committees - workers, or society in general? What are the requirements for being electable for such a role? How are these committees held accountable for failures? Do they plan production at a society-wide level, each in a specific industry, or down to regions or specific production facilities? Do they serve only a planning role, or are they also responsible for execution?
The society in general is the workers. Requirements can be decided by the people. These committees are held accountable via election, and a recall election can be held at any time. There are multiple rungs of planning, from society wide to regional to facility levels, with committees for each. They can serve planning and execution, as workers participate.
What checks would be in place to prevent professional popularity contest participants (those we call politicians at the moment) from adopting a facade of ideological purity and getting elected on popularity rather than merit? How would they be insulated from outside influence by those affected by their decision making? Do we really need more tractors, or do they still have friends in Worker's Collective 631 that makes tractors?
Recall elections. Why would producing more tractors in collective 631 benefit that collective if the goal is to satisfy the whole from the whole?
Congratulations! You just created a managerial class (at best) or just the usual corrupt cabal that run things to their own benefit.
Managers are not a class, they are an extension of the workers.
That's a big assumption. Anyone have any data from wide sampling across multiple industries to support this as a long-term sustained effect?
Yes, across numerous studies worker participation in steering companies has resulted in higher satisfaction and stability.
If you replace "humanity" with "our close community" this might be realistic. I don't think the "and humanity" has ever happened at a macro level.
You're arguing against a chimera of random mish-mashed ideas from several different strains of Socialism that argue for different forms as though they are one and the same.
This is Market Socialism, not Marxism. Marxism is what is depicted in the above graphic.
The graphic with the big caption "SOCIALISM". But fair point on me not addressing the specific implementation suggested with the presence of the Marx and Lenin characters.
If your aim is to get into the weeds about what is considered Capital, edge cases can be decided by committees.
Well yea, the devil is in the detail so it can't just be waved away. The "commodity production process" still implies physical goods made from physical resources and that it's the production facilities and resources that should be seized. (Side note: this assumes all the underlying resources are present within the area controlled by the proletariat.) Not seen any ideas proposed beyond that, but perhaps I'm not hanging around in the right places... Hopefully the committees will have people available that can figure it out after the fact?
Requirements can be decided by the people. These committees are held accountable via election, and a recall election can be held at any time. There are multiple rungs of planning, from society wide to regional to facility levels, with committees for each. They can serve planning and execution, as workers participate.
Yea, you've clearly never worked in a "design by committee" or "management by consensus" situation. Nothing ever gets done, and when some decision is finally made on anything it tends to be the shittiest common denominator option that thinly and evenly spreads the collective responsibility. Not the best option, but the one that everyone can kind of agree on and thus be collectively accountable for. The exception might be when a very small number of people that are agreed on an end goal and share the same vision for reaching it work together. But I assure you, that does not scale - even if people are in full agreement on the end goal.
Why would producing more tractors in collective 631 benefit that collective if the goal is to satisfy the whole from the whole?
Because human beings.
Managers are not a class, they are an extension of the workers.
Fair point. I guess I was a bit caught in the popular narrative where managers are the enemy of the workers.
Yes, across numerous studies worker participation in steering companies has resulted in higher satisfaction and stability.
Of course, and I'm a fan. I'm not disputing that places where extensive consultation happens with the people responsible for delivering are nice places to work at. But that consultation process is usually very closely managed and the ideas to take forward are cherry picked to give enough "they listen to me" feel good vibes, while also not interfering too much with the business' priorities. Really taking the inputs of large employee groups seriously on the things that matter cannot happen outside of an adversarial setting, because the interests of the worker and those who benefit most from their labour are fundamentally in conflict. The point I'm rambling towards is that I doubt there are studies that looked at situations where employee inputs in decision making (beyond window dressing) was sustained over very long periods of time at a scale relevant to what you envision. (There are exceptions, but only in small groups of highly-aligned people in a horizontal structure that are deeply vested in the success of the venture.)
You’re arguing against a chimera of random mish-mashed ideas from several different strains of Socialism that argue for different forms as though they are one and the same.
I guess you're right on that, yes. The thing is that I've been thinking about details like these (and many more) for at least 25 years (beyond "edgy teenager" or "social media fad" or "my parents are fascists" stages), since I would prefer that the fruits of my labour (to at least some degree) benefit other people rather than feed a system that heavily incentivises the shittiest parts of human beings and is also inherently cruel. Over the years I've also read pretty widely on this topic - from the purist theoretical ideologies to the practical compromises to the counterpoints to the criticisms. (Hell, I even lived in what was basically a workers' collective for almost a year, but it only worked because it was a small community of ~100 people with close social and familial ties.) So in my mind the lines between specific flavours of socialism are pretty blurry these days, while the common fundamental challenges keep standing out.
What truly frustrates me is the constant arguments about which is the best flavour, while ignoring how to actually realistically practically progress towards something better. Spending the day fighting about which flavour of ice cream to buy instead of figuring out how to get to the ice cream shop on the other side of the city in the first place.
That, and I am yet to see something proposed that doesn't completely ignore predictable human reactions or result in some degree of authoritarianism. (Nordic-flavour (kind of but not really) Market Socialism is perhaps the closest to something that might work, but it also heavily relies on a fairly homogenous society with a culture that sees value in the interests of that society over total individualism.)
You're not liberating literal serfs that never knew personal agency from a literal monarch. You're trying to get people that are exploited by a system while also benefitting from it to willingly abandon that system for something that might be better (if it worked) or might not be - the plans for the "something" are fuzzy at best so who knows. The details matter, and interrogating the details is not reactionary behaviour.
Is a planned economy an inherent part of socialism? That seems like the biggest red flag (lol) in this comic. All sorts of incentive mismatches there.
"Democracy at work, too" is like the biggest pitch for socialism, "government deciding what businesses can exist" is the biggest pitch against. A tightrope to walk, for sure.
I'd argue that yes, it is, because markets entail private ownership, which goes against the basic notion of socialism
The closest you can get to socialism with the market system is worker's cooperative - but market forces do not stop accumulation of power in the form of land and capital, as well as mergers and acquisitions. At the end of the day, you just reset capitalism for a while if you give businesses a free reign.
If you want to maintain a market system under socialism you need to separate it from public production. We would need to democratically decide what is a public good (e.g. housing, food, medicine, etc.) and what is a market good (essentially luxury goods). The private market would also have to be heavily regulated to prevent capital accumulation and associated power concentration. It's a really difficult problem.
One of the reasons the Soviet economy failed is because computers were not advanced enough in the 1950s-80s to automate the kind of consumer goods production that a command economy would require to be able to compete with a market system. I think if we tried this again today we would have an easier time of it, and if you look at a large vertically integrated corporation like Walmart, they've more or less figured it out already.
Why would a democratically planned economy be a bad thing? How is it more democratic that capitalist owners decide which businesses can exist, rather than the people collectively decide so?
The potential for regulatory capture and corruption, as well as the inherent inefficiency of having a limited number of decision makers. I wouldn't trust the 2028 Trump Administration to thoughtfully determine which businesses are allowed to exist for 4 years.
It's more democratic to let anyone start a business, rather than having a gatekeeper. But more importantly I think it makes more sense to let the capitalists take the losses if their business idea sucks, and then socializing the gains once we know it works.
My concern is that I cannot see a democratically planned economy implemented in a way which doesn't sacrifice individualism of people .
Democracy isn't strictly "freedom" on its own, but it is a powerful tool to protect our "individual freedoms" by ensuring our leaders act in our best interests.
But unless everyone has the exact same mind set that means that the majority will always drown out the minority and so the minority voices will be forced to conform to what the majority want.
We are mostly like-minded in things like what should be crimes/punishment/rights/etc(but note this wasn't always the case): but everyone has individual preferences, like colour of shirt, a specific brand of food, video games, etc which means they need an economy where products can be created by individuals rather than decided by the majority.
If 51% of people think wearing a t-shirt with a cute dog on it is a stupid waste of time then that t-shirt doesn't get made, and so the 49% people that did like the shirt lose out.
Also if 99% of people wanted the garbage collected, but no one wanted to work there, what happens then? Is someone forced to work there? That would be extreme, instead maybe there is more incentive to work there with more pay, but then what if lots of people wanted to work there due to this incentive who would decide who works there and therefore who owns the company?
Hyperbolic examples I know but i hope you see the point I'm trying to make.
Capitalism despite all it's flaws can allow a single person the chance seek funding to provide a good or service and if deemed profitable (either through high demand or cheap production) then the product gets made. People can also seek the obscure products they want rather than what's popular.
Is a planned economy an inherent part of socialism? That seems like the biggest red flag (lol) in this comic. All sorts of incentive mismatches there.
For Marxists, absolutely. Marx heavily critiqued the profit motive and the dangers of producing to fulfil greed instead of need. For Syndicalists, Market Socialists, etc? Perhaps not.
"Democracy at work, too" is like the biggest pitch for socialism, "government deciding what businesses can exist" is the biggest pitch against. A tightrope to walk, for sure.
Workplace democracy is an improvement, but Marxists will argue insufficient alone in combatting class society.
What's your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?
What's your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?
I'm not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it's inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can't possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn't trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.
I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I'd think if we're theorizing, there's a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there's a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.
Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.
A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.
Nice idea but it's very telling that there is no mention at all of how to make this come about. The more I learn about Marx, the more he seems like Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project, just a "wouldn't it be nice if" pie-in-the-sky idea.
The more I learn about Marx, the more he seems like Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project, just a "wouldn't it be nice if" pie-in-the-sky idea.
Sorry, your argument is outdated by around 200 years. Engels already did an essay on the difference between scientific socialism and utopian socialism, because it was a common critique back then. It's called, well, "Socialism: scientific and utopian", and explains how Marxism isn't a utopian pipedream but rather a systematic way of analysing the economy and the social relations and historical events, reacting to them, and fighting for the rights of the workers above all else. Among other things, it allowed the Russian Revolution to triumph, and it allowed the Soviets to predict the second world war 10 years before it happened (which allowed the USSR to place most of its heavy industry east of the Urals, and in turn saved the country from losing against the Nazi invasion).
Revolution, which is an inevitability as Capitalism and by extension Imperialism continues to decay and disparity continues to rise. Marxists advocate for building dual-power so that when this revolution does occur, the former state can be replaced with democratic councils and unions that already exist.
Well, people, including political leaders are corrupt, so this would never be practically possible, since people would just abuse the system and hoard resources, as always.
The difference is that, in socialism, hoarding resources is illegal and prosecutable, whereas in capitalism it's legal and encourage. Corruption is only defined when it touches the public institutions. Every behaviour that you'd consider corrupt in the public sector, is obvious common practice and even encouraged in the private one.
In the public sector, hiring an acquaintance or family member based on trust is illegal and punishable. In the private sector I'll hire whoever I want for my company.
In the public sector, having a service done for your company such as a renovation of the office, if you hire based off friendship or trust, you are punished, you're supposed to be efficient and impartial. In the private company it's expected that you'd hire your friend to do the renovation.
In the public sector, lowering the wages of the employees to higher your own, is so obviously corrupt that it barely ever happens at all, and when it happens it's absolute scandal. In the private sector we just call it "labour is paid based on your replaceability".
The list of behaviours that we'd find corrupt and morally reprehensible (and legally punishable) in the public sector, and totally fine in the private sector, is endless. Can't complain about corruption in the private sector when there's not such thing, amirite? At least I'd want a system in which corrupt people are prosecuted and not applauded.
We currently live in a system where the owner class (capitalists) makes several times what you do and horde it, while you can barely afford to live.
I really don't understand how your main criticism of a system where the workers make the decisions and take the profits, is that the workers might also horde the relatively smaller amounts that they produced. It's still several times better than what we have now.