Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism after slavery builds on the concept of unpaid labor. The capitalist makes his or her money through NOT paying for work during a portion of the work day. The more money the capitalist wants for themselves, the more hours of unpaid labor they have to create/manipulate, organize, etc.

Most people don’t even see this happening in their day to day swim through the capitalist soup. But it happens to all of us, if we work for wages.

Capitalism is theft, and evil.

“Capitalism is, among other things, … the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue.” So Thomas Aquinas was a capitalist? Also (in different respects) Augustine, Aristotle, Socrates?

“That process of individuation creates a schism between inner and outer, in which self-interest, self-cultivation, and personal moral authority drive a wedge between seeming and being. Hence you have the emergence of metaphysicians like Melville, Emerson, and of course Marx, along with others, trying to figure out the relationship between depth and surface.” I can’t help but think about the allegory of the cave in Plato’s “Republic”: depth versus surface, seeming versus being. Plato, too, comes to these questions precisely as part of his discussion of the issues of “self-interest, self-cultivation and personal moral authority.”

So … is the point that the ancient Greeks also had slaves and so this applies to them as well?

If so, what would be an example of a non-capitalist society, in which nobody believed that they had a moral conscience, nor worried about self-cultivation, nor tried to figure out the difference between surface and depth?

Most likely I’m missing the point of all this?

On another note: The last paragraph of the linked discussion: “The fact that the US is the only nation in the world where organized social power mobilizes around the concept of freedom (and against slavery) to demand more austerity, more punishing “reforms,” can only be explained by the specific, central form slavery took in creating the nation.” I read Paul Krugman every day, and it seems to be a central theme of his that European leaders are every bit as in thrall to “austerity” and “punishing reforms” in support of their own capitalist system. So this just seems empirically false. What is the difference between Europe and the US on this question?

>Capitalism is theft, and evil.

that people still say things like this, after seeing the mountains of corpses generated by anti-capitalist movements of both left and right in the 20th century, truly makes me despair for the future of humanity.

Cassander, Matthew 7:5.

Slavery more like feudalism.

“I thought the material about continuities between various forms of free and unfree labour was fancinating, are then any other good sources on this?”

Jennie Jeppesen has done research on convicts as unfree labour in Virginia (like indentured servants who were unfree and often not let free after the set period and also slaves )
“Before the American Revolution there were three unfree labour groups working in Virginia. While slaves have been the focus of a number of studies, and indentured servants the focus of a few, convicts have been largely neglected. ”
http://www.anzlhsejournal.auckland.ac.nz/pdfs_2013/Jeppesen.Colonial%20Virginia%20servant%20laws.pdf

She has also been looking at comparisons between treatment of convicts and their illegitimate children in Virginia America where they were held as chattel and in Victoria Australia where they often said they were treated like slaves but were not chattel. I can only find prezi versions of this comparative research, so she might not have published anything on it as yet…
http://prezi.com/pd4-v5gqjsuu/oah/
http://prezi.com/n-t2pd-5pyr9/utas/

Despite my admiration for Prof Robin’s recent actions, I have to say: the Jacobin article seems to me to make sense only from one rather restricted point of view.

Namely: capitalism is evil and I hate it, and want to see it overthrown. But not enough people agree with me.
Slavery was also evil and hateful, but it has been overthrown; and many people who do not hate capitalism as they ought, do hate slavery.
So if I can get people to agree that capitalism is in essence slavery, there will be more supporters for the glorious anti-capitalist revolution.

So far so good. Unfortunately, making the equation involves ignoring that (as Kent@4 points out) some supposedly defining mental aspects of capitalism well predate capitalism, and that slavery has been common in pre-capitalist societies (and indeed in post- and anti-capitalist societies), and that some capitalist societies have had no perceptible connections with slavery (modern Switzerland, Austria, Italy …).

That being so, additional supporters for the revolution recruited by this sort of article seem to me unlikely to be of high mental competence.

In excellent work on the social, emotional and psychological aspects of slaveowning is Charles Johnson’s “Soul by Soul” about New Orleans slave markets, and “River of Dark Dreams” about slavery in the Mississippi River valley.

If the ways in which people were implicated in slavery led to dissimulation, I would guess that so did their implication in widespread child labor. Slaves were considered to be at best children; children were slaves. Labor was by no means formally free. The question should not be what contribution these unfree forms of labor made to capitalism but the ways in which capital was valorized through unfree labor.
—
People could not see who they had become but rather only a shadow of themselves created by a favorable light? Often we do not think of shadows affecting the ways in which the real selves act; but shadowy representations enter into the core of who people are. The relationship between real self and shadow is not asymmetrical.
—
Superstructure determined by base: concept of freedom at least has to be compatible with the relations of production. Freedom could not be understood as a self-determination in laboring activity but rather primarily as an abstract freedom to alienate private possessions. Otherwise formally free wage laborers would be slaves or at least unfree. Freedom was abstract in the sense of abstraction of the social conditions faced by the respective parties before exchange; freedom was abstract in that it afforded but choice in the marketplace.
Marx’s critique of the superstructure is delivered in the famous last paragraphs of chapter 6, Capital I.
To the extent that freedom became concrete, it did so in contrast to chattel; but this required restrictions on the period of time for which one could sell one’s labor power. The longer the period of the contract, the more it resembled slavery. The struggle to reduce the period of “formally free” labor contracts was fought over the 19th century in the US. It did not require a Civil War; indeed the ability to win the right to exit from labor contracts, i.e. freedom from virtually selling oneself into slavery, may have been facilitated by the needs for the Courts to make meaningful the juridical distinction between wage labor and slavery. The making of the juridical distinction was also the making of whiteness.

The ancient Athenians considered all bankers to be slaves, unworthy of citizenship because they handled money.

LFC@15: I think you may have misunderstood me.

Granted, willingly, that the purpose of the Jacobin article was to “articulate Grandin’s views in rather academic language”. My point was that those views do actually make sense from the perspective of one dedicated to anti-capitalist revolution: an enterprise about which there is some empirical reason to be dubious, to put it mildly, but which those who share such dedication must support. From other points of view, they do not.

Whether Grandin is in fact himself such a dedicated revolutionary, I do not know. It seems entirely probable that he is merely an academic in search of peer esteem, and therefore speaking as if things which are actually so (existence of slavery before and after capitalism, existence of capitalism without slavery, supposedly defining mental aspects of capitalism occurring centuries before actually existing capitalism) may be deemed not to be so if that makes it easier for him to denounce the US.

I wouldn’t say he’s entirely wrong. When he says “The problem is that the US has had a world of its own” he is quite right: except that he exists in that US-centric universe when he speaks of “the idiocy of white supremacy, and its progeny, individual supremacy” – the two are, outside the US, unconnected – and “the paradox that our notions of freedom emerge from and depend on slavery” – not obviously true even for the US.

Probably I should have added Canada – a country of which even USAians may be expected to have heard – to the list of capitalist but non-slaving countries.

philofra,

It’s not a failure to “admit” these things. It’s the realization that alternatives could provide all of those benefits, for everyone, at far less cost to consumers, workers and the planet. It’s really that simple.

There is no benefit due to capitalism that could not be reproduced by alternative economic systems with social justice baked right in. And all of those “positive” benefits you see in capitalism are limited to just those who can afford them — and they all come with great costs. Alternative systems could easily universalize those benefits, sustain them, bring them into harmony with the earth, etc.

Capitalism can’t and still be capitalism.

Douglas Blackmon discussing the “reinvention of slavery” between 1865 and 1941 in the book “Slavery By Another Name” with Bill Moyers in 2008:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html

Following up on Kent #4 and Stephen #14, and given the ubiquity of slavery throughout human history, I would think one could observe the impact of that institution on the “psychic dimensions” of any form of modern society, not just capitalism. So Grandin’s approach seems like capitalism-bashing.

Which, since I’m on the subject, might give me opportunity to inquire of readers of this blog, are there really practicable alternatives to capitalism? It seems like much of what gets called socialism is really capitalism with the harsh edges (which are many, don’t get me wrong) smoothed away: capitalism with a strong safety net, less egregious income inequality, with worker protections, more equal opportunity, and so on. Do people really still want, not to fix capitalism, but to replace it? With what? If the answer is “socialism,” what exactlly does that mean, if not what I’ve suggested?

Stephen @22:
I might (or might not) end up agreeing w some of your criticisms of Grandin’s views (after reading the whole interview, which I haven’t done). It was more the tone (as opposed to strictly the substance) of your earlier comment that bothered me. I’m not acquainted w Grandin’s work at first hand, and my only second-hand acquaintance w it is having read Corey’s favorable review of Grandin’s ‘The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War’ [orig. published in London Rev. of Bks, the review is reprinted as ch.7 of ‘The Reactionary Mind’].

LFC@29
As you will have noticed from my quoting Grandini’s interview, I had in fact read it before criticising it; please do likewise. If the tone of my comments offended you, no offence intended. I’ve not yet read the LRB review, but I can think of other candidates for the last colonial massacre (Chechens, for one).

As for the substance of my criticisms, I would be very happy to attend to your reply.

Luke,

Very true. Also throw in the brief time Spain was a Republic in the 30s before the fascists destroyed them. Or, today, in parts of Spain, with Mondragon, which is like an alternative, far-reaching community, rather than just a co-op.

The ideas of Gar Alperovitz are also very promising, as are Richard D. Wolff’s.

http://www.garalperovitz.com/

http://www.rdwolff.com/

Stephen,

It’s not a “Scottish” matter. Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, etc. etc. never implemented the two most important aspects of socialist theory:

Full democracy, including the economy
The people own the means of production

No democracy was allowed in any of those examples, and dictators or one political party owned the means of production. The most fundamental, essential components of socialism were completely absent.

As in, it’s not just a matter of “purity.” It’s a matter of not being anything at all like the theory in question. Chomsky does a good job in discussing the abuse of the word here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ

And, yes, they did state capitalism. Lenin actually said Russia would need to do this in order to modernize itself, and he, ironically, used many of the same aspects of primitive accumulation used in Britain to jump start the new economic system. Van der Linden talks about State capitalism here:

OTOH I can’t say that “slavery was central to that process,” and might for instance put colonialism as historically prior.

The “central cause” when it isn’t capitalism, has long been a function of volatile bourgeois fashion and opportunism.

One needs to understand that Plume gives equal weight to both empirical facts and the contents of his imagination.

Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue

And since one of the things capitalism is at its essence is an ongoing process to define the arbitrary line that separates “self-interest” from “corruption,”

It seems dubious that this is a language game worth playing at any length. Is there a 60 second version of “how many things can you associate with the term capitalism”?

Also, though it can no doubt be explained away, there is quite the contrast between some of the implications of these statements and the reality of the OP’s recent act of conscience (glad to read that you were unharmed, incidentally).

J Thomas,

Lots of good points.

I think America is a perfect place for a socialist transformation in many ways. Chiefly because it’s the most powerful nation on earth, and no other nation is going to be able to stop us from that transformation, as we once stopped other nations from making those attempts. And recently, of course. We have never stopped trying to prevent leftist populist movements and governments from taking root in this hemisphere, for example.

So, anyway. One of the best ways to transition, IMO, would be for the government to just start providing as many goods and services as possible, all non-profit, all 100% available to everyone, to compete with the private sector. No mandates. All voluntary. And little by little, if it were allowed to do this without the boot of the private sector on its neck, people would begin to see that the government can provide much more for much less. Right off the bat, its overhead will always, always be lower than any private sector corporation. It doesn’t need to make a profit, pay shareholders, pay outrageously large executive compensation, or for ads, marketing, tax avoidance schemes, etc. etc.

So, little by little, we’d go from virtually all private, with a tiny bit of public goods and services, to a bigger percentage of public, and then a majority, and then the vast majority, etc.

The transition could be without violence that way, all democratic, and all voluntary. Simply through “competition,” where the public sector out competes the private and we shift over to the public.

@plume

>we should not talk about the evils of our current economic system because, uh, well, failed alternatives!

discussing the evils is not the same thing as proclaiming the current system evil, and you know that. don’t dissemble.

>Of course, those failed alternatives had zero to do with socialist theory — or anticapitalist theory in general, for that matter.

So your operational theory is that all the problem with socialisms were the result of bad implementation, but that all the evils of capitalism are the result of it being bad in theory? do you realize how absurd that is?

>conveniently forgetting the mountains of corpses caused by capitalism through0ut its roughly two to three centuries of existence.

No, i’m not. as capitalism has spread the world has gotten massively less violent, not more violent. It was the capitalist UK, for example, that first ended the slave trade, not the pre-capitalist regimes that preceded capitalism for millennia.

> because a few power-mad political opportunists hijacked and perverted socialist theory is flat out bizarre.

funny how socialist states seem to produce power mad political opporunists at much greater rates than capitalist systems. talk about an awful run of bad luck!

I’m more interested in the role capitalism plays in slavery today:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/10/supermarket-prawns-thailand-produced-slave-labour

I get stuck trying to think about what it would mean to be pro-free-trade while meaningfully against this sort of thing. Should the WTO or some other global body be in charge of enforcing anti-slavery laws, and given that the Thai government isn’t able to effectively enforce the rules just how large would the international police force have to be to make that happen? That seems unrealistic and I’m not aware of any free trade proponents proposing anything of the sort. Another possibility, and the seemingly implied assumption of the authors of the above article, is that it is the responsibility of first world companies to make sure that every company they do business with and every company the companies they do business with all the way down their supply chain are following some subset of the labor rules we follow in the first world. This is in practice quite difficult to achieve, and free trade proponents don’t seem to favor this sort of thing to end any exploitative practices if they are at all more voluntary than outright slavery.

The other thing I wonder about is if an article like this would have or could have been written in the early 19th century in the north or in Europe? Certainly clothing buyers outside the south would have been the bulk of the market for cotton; slave owning would not have been that lucrative if the only people slave owners could sell to were each other. Yet slavery had to be ended by northern soldiers playing the role of the international police in my thought experiment above. Consumers asking retailers for fair trade clothing didn’t do the trick.

I don’t know that this has much to do with capitalism versus its alternatives as this is a question of the organization of the intersocietal economy rather than the organization of the economy within any particular society, and it’s not clear to me how socialism versus capitalism has anything to do with that, though maybe someone else can explain to me what it would mean for international trade to be socialist.

“That seems unrealistic and I’m not aware of any free trade proponents proposing anything of the sort. ”

We have an anti-slavery billionaire – ‘Twiggy’ Forrest . He is problematic in other areas – John Quiggin’s blog has a recent post on a more problematic area.

“The terrified screams of a traumatised sex-trafficked teenager, witnessed by an Australian billionaire, have led to a history-making alliance between three of the world’s major religions to end slavery.
At the Vatican on Monday, West Australian iron-ore magnate Andrew Forrest launched the Global Freedom Network – an organisation led by the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar in Egypt.
The network aims to free the world’s estimated 30 million slaves, and has set itself specific, ambitious targets to achieve this.”

http://www.smh.com.au/national/billionaire-andrew-twiggy-forrest-fights-to-end-global-slavery-20140317-34y6d.html#ixzz39I1tLdHN

@6&7 Even allowing for my knowledge of Brett Bellmore, I’m kind of stunned that remarks like this can be posted on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War.

Cassander @46,

I’m not dissembling. I said our current system is evil, and it is. We should be able to discuss that, as adults, without it giving certain people the vapors.

And, yes, socialist theory has never been tried. It’s not a failure of implementation of X when X has never been tried, and Y was done instead. And, no, it’s not absurd to say that socialist theory, the real deal, is a great thing, while capitalism, in theory AND practice, is horrific. That is simply stating the truth.

Again, given that socialist theory has never been attempted, one can not reasonably say that socialist states produce more power mad politicians than capitalist states. We do know, however that Fascism and Nazism produced plenty of power-mad dictators and they used capitalism as engines for their far right ideological agendas.

Finally, as J Thomas mentioned, violence in the world has increased dramatically as capitalism has become more dominant. We have wars in which tens of millions of civilians are killed, along with millions of soldiers now. And America itself has gone to war on behalf of capitalist markets — protection and expansion — all too many times. In just Korea and Vietnam alone, our wars on behalf of capitalism caused the deaths of roughly 6 million civilians.

And back to the OP: slavery in America was given its second life because of the rise of capitalism. That rise, especially with the invention of the Cotton Gin, increased profits amongst capitalists here and in Europe exponentially, and drove policy across the south.

Capitalism is theft. Capitalism is evil. Capitalism is a cancer.

I was taught in school that once upon a time the cooperative communist society of hunter-gatherers gave way to a more progressive agricultural socioeconomic system with slavery. And that cooperative communism is certain to make a comeback big time, and stay with us forever. I remember thinking that this twist to the story perhaps betrays a lack of imagination.

From 1600 to 1820, two-thirds of all those westbound across the Atlantic were African slaves. If you were am “Atlanticist” watching from Mars, you wouldn’t see a saga of bold European settlement (plus a sad, shamefaced appendix about slavery). You might well see it as colonists driving twice their number of expendable “shock troops,” rather like the strafbattalione and shtrafbat of the Eastern Front in WWII.

How many more New World colonies would have failed, or taken far longer to succeed and attract more colonists, without slave-based enterprises like Caribbean sugar and rum, Brazilian forest products, and North American tobacco? Not to mention the Native Americans in Latin American silver mines and estancias…

Obviously the mix of capitalism and other imperial/colonial drivers was different in different settings. But any reading of New World history that scants the crucial — perhaps indispensable — role of slavery in making a go of the enterprise as a whole is willfully blind. Perhaps that’s why we USAns prefer our Thanksgiving pageant of Pilgrims and Wampanoag feasting in fellowship, rather than an arguably more representative Tidewater Anglican planter leading his family in prayer: “Let us thank the Lord for an addictive crop and slaves to tend it.”

And, no, it’s not absurd to say that socialist theory, the real deal, is a great thing, while capitalism, in theory AND practice, is horrific.

I’m getting a little concerned here. Capitalism is not just one thing. Capitalist theory is mostly useless — people don’t do what they say they are doing. Capitalist theory does not describe capitalism very well at all, we might as well mostly throw it out.

If socialism doesn’t work on a small scale but has to run the whole system before it works, and it’s never been tried for real, that looks pretty bad. Maybe it would be great if it was tried, but what if there’s something the theory has not thought out?

I’d hate to risk everything on the assumption that it will work as advertised. My computer programs don’t usually work right the first try, with no testing. Usually I make a lot of mistakes that have to be fixed. I do a lot better to write little pieces and test them before I put them together into something big.

So I’d much prefer theory that tells how to start small and build gradually. Much less risky that way. Create socialist structures that can survive and thrive in a capitalist framework, and you can eat the capitalists’ lunch.

Capitalism sets money free to cross all boundaries, no longer tied to local economies, the land or tradition.

That’s globalism. It takes special trust for people to send money around the world and expect it to come back to them with interest. Capitalism used to be tied to local economies, and governments worked out ways to untie it and to create trust. They didn’t have to do that.

The earth is going to make our decision for us down the road if we don’t dump capitalism and replace it with truly sustainable development. And as long as profit is the driver of the system, and private ownership is the mode, there is no incentive to stop polluting, wasting resources, making useless things for mass consumption, etc. etc. There is no structure for smart decision making for the collective we as long as capitalism exists and the collective we work solely for the benefit of a fraction of the population.

There’s a lot of truth to that. But there isn’t just one possible solution. “Capitalism” in practice could be modified to palliate the problem. Like, consider the problems of the passenger pigeon and the buffalo. Passenger pigeons didn’t belong to anybody and they ate farmers’ crops. Since they didn’t belong to anybody, people shot them until they were all gone. The buffalo didn’t belong to anybody and they wandered the plains, knocking down fences and trampling people’s crops. Since they didn’t belong to anybody, people shot them until they were all gone, even when the profit was low. Sometimes people on railroads shot buffalo they passed for target practice.

Now there are a few buffalo left and they all belong to somebody. Their owners try to take care of their property.

The capitalist approach to sustainable development is to give the resources that need to be sustained to somebody in particular, somebody who can afford to sustain them. Similarly, people who can’t take care of themselves could be given to capitalists who would then be responsible for taking care of their property. Depending on how the economy goes, you could be a lot better off as a serf to some capitalist than on your own.

It’s really hard to tell how things will go. We sort of know how to put wires in people’s brains to control them. We can sort of do that with rats. If that technology works out, it might happen that you can’t get a job unless you have wires in your head so your employer can control you — just during working hours, of course. Of course you will get the wires implanted, you don’t want to be unemployable, do you?

And it might turn out that working socialist economies will also want people to have wires in their heads. It will depend on what seems to work better.

Capitalist businesses mostly don’t want drug addicts for employees because they have found that addicts don’t do good work. Except for caffeine junkies. Businesses often have coffee pots available all the time because they like the effect of caffeine on employees. They might find other addictive drugs that have good effects.

If other drugs make for good employees, very likely workable socialist economies will also want to addict workers to them.

We have no need for that edge. That edge generally leads from one crisis to the next, one depression or recession to the next, and each one in recent times seems to be followed by weaker and weaker “recoveries.”

We might prefer a rate of “improvement” that we enjoy more. When there isn’t a lot of competition, people tend to replace old technology with newer technology when the old models wear out. Get your value from the old before you discard it. But when there’s plenty of capital looking for uses, some competitor may get the brand-new stuff and outcompete your stuff before it’s depreciated. You lose. You toss it out while it’s still usable and replace it with something better, or you go out of business. And the new stuff will be discarded early too.

I think one of the things that’s happened in the last 30 years or so is that we’ve evolved businesses that have managed to reduce their competition to the point they can increase profits, and that lets them use their machinery longer. We get capital piling up without good opportunities to invest. At the same time, some foreigners do invest in newer stuff and start to win the competition in the global market, so we’re hurting. And despite the global money transfers, Americans hesitate to invest in China. The place is run by communists after all, who might nationalize everything whenever they feel like they don’t need more US investment. And the regulatory climate in China is weak, when you invest it’s hard to tell whether it’s only a scam. Somehow China doesn’t look after foreign investors as well as the USA does.

I’d be interested in seeing ideas for socialist corporations. Of course, you need investment. If you take out loans you promise a fixed return and as your business grows it’s hard to reduce the loans when you also want to expand. And a banker who can choose not to renew your loan gets considerable control. When you sell stock you are giving away capitalist ownership.

I could sort of imagine a socialist Kickstarter program. People who put money into the new socialist business get a certificate and a lapel pin that says they are a socialist hero, and as long as the business lasts there will be a plaque that commemorates their contribution, etc. And someday if you have enough money you could repay the kickstarter contributions with interest. You might be able to get sufficient startup capital without losing control.

Come to think of it, with a website you could return contributions with an auction. You take whatever money the company can afford to repay, and whichever contributors want it can bid. If I need money now and I’ll accept getting 95% of my money back, while you will accept 90%, you get it. But if it looks like a successful company and none of us *need* our money back yet, I could get it if I settle for 110% return while you’d rather wait than settle for less than 120%.

If you use more-or-less-capitalist methods to start up a socialist business, that’s OK, right? You need some way to get started….

Sorry this got so long. You bring up interesting questions.

Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue.

Echoing Andrew F @ 42, this is less analysis and more a game played with language. Let’s find a term, ‘capitalism’ will do, with which we can associate everything we find wanting with our world. There isn’t necessarily any insight produced by this hobby.

I would agree that ‘ego formation’ is a problem for human beings. But it precedes ‘capitalism’ by a few hundred thousand years. And the intellect, which is what we are employing when we engage with abstract concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘ego,’ is not the best way to address ‘ego formation.’ If you want to understand ego it is rather necessary to sit quietly and pay attention to what is happening in the present moment. My 2 cents anyway.

And, yes, socialist theory has never been tried. It’s not a failure of implementation of X when X has never been tried, and Y was done instead. And, no, it’s not absurd to say that socialist theory, the real deal, is a great thing, while capitalism, in theory AND practice, is horrific. That is simply stating the truth.

I refer to my remarks @ 40.

58: But any reading of New World history that scants the crucial — perhaps indispensable — role of slavery in making a go of the enterprise as a whole is willfully blind.

But the original post and first three blockquoted paragraphs are not about New World history but the development of modernity and modern conciousness.

OP: not so much the social or financial dimensions of capitalism but its psychic and imaginative ones.

Obviously if you want to understand any general or universal dimensions or aspects of modern capitalism you can’t be so Eurocentric or frankly racist as to exclude modernities and political economies such as the ME, China, Japan, India in order to build a totality or narrative unique to the Atlantic slave trade. If you are going to assert that later (questionable) Eastern development was utterly dependent on its Western predecessors you should try to make that case very early in your argument. If you are going to say that slavery built a modernism unique to the West you have to show the ways in which it differs.

Simple exceptionalism. Colonialism provides a more global explanation.

#61 Brett Bellmore

Capitalist theory is mostly useless for a number of reasons. ….

OTOH, Marxist theory is entirely useless, except maybe as an excuse to exercise totalitarian power, so that still leaves capitalist theory superior.

Unfortunately, the major part of Marxist theory is criticism of capitalism. They think if they understand why capitalism has to eventually fail, then they can have faith that it must eventually be replaced by something else. They don’t go into a lot of detail about how a working socialism would work.

So we have capitalist theory which explains why capitalism has to work better than anything else, but the capitalism it describes is not what actually happens.

And we have marxist theory which explains why capitalism cannot work, but the capitalism it describes is also not what actually happens.

I don’t see that either of these is good for anything except to base some sort of weird materialist religion on.

Again, if you want a socialist ‘mode of governmentality’, as Foucault would have it, they are out there. Marx and Engels were keen on the Paris Commune and Classical Athens. But never mind me.

30,000 or so communards were killed in the ‘bloody week of May’ after the army entered Paris. Working class women were supposedly rounded up, stripped, shot, and raped as they died. etc. etc. etc. Does not compute.

Also, is any of this surprising?

Capitalism is based on an autocratic, anti-democratic structure. Top down. Bosses. Sharp hierarchies. Do what you are told or get fired. Huge rewards handed out for work at the top, with dramatic decreases as one moves down the hierarchy. The few ruling the many.

Economic apartheid.

It’s baffling that anyone actually would think this would work in the best interest of society, on the individual business level or in the aggregate. And the incentives are to produce the cheapest crap possible, and pay the lowest wages possible, in order to produce the most profit for ownership. Not only is the system the rule of the few over the many, with the many having zero say in the matter, the system itself encourages poor quality over the good in order to maximize profits.

Again, it’s collectivism, but of the most perverse kind. The collective works on behalf of a tiny group or an individual, not itself. Socialism, OTOH, means the collective works for the collective. What could be more logical?

@ 68

Ironic to cite Ancient Athens as a socialist modality in a thread about capitalism & slavery! Speaking of the cradle of democracy, are you familiar with the melian dialogue?

And a two and a half month track record for the Paris Commune doesn’t establish a whole lot, does it?

Shatterface,

But is that on Marx, who died in 1883? You’re talking 1937 or so, right?

It’s a bit like hanging Jesus for the Inquisition, the witch trials, the religious wars in Europe for centuries, the Crusades, etc..

And, of course, it was not a large group in the case of Spain, but a small percentage. The vast majority of Marxists are critics of capitalism, economists, etc. or they write about literature, psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology using Marxist theories.

As in, most Marxians do work in the Humanities. I think Walter Benjamin, for instance, is more representative than Lenin.

>Its history is so filled with horrors, oppression, exploitation, greed, crash after crash, recession after recession, along with endless waste and pollution, I really find it appalling that any adult would actually defend it.

Because the history of socialism is free of these things? We have a century of history of socialist experiments, and in virtually all of them, these things were worse in socialist world, not the capitalist world. how much empirical evidence do you need?

Cassander,

Again, there has never been a socialist nation. Never. Not close.

The two foundational aspects of socialism are:

1. Real democracy, including the economy
2. The people own the means of production, literally. Not through a proxy, phony or otherwise. They literally own the means of production, directly.

The closest thing to the above would be the Scandinavian countries, and they are far from achieving either tenet.

I’ll repost Chomsky on the abuse of the word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ

Beyond that, even if one grants your premise — which I don’t — you’re talking about a handful of attempts, all in nations which were a century or so behind the developed countries, and were systematically attacked by those countries in order to prevent even the possibility of the two tenets from taking form. One can not draw logical conclusions for possible transitions in the developed world, in 2014, based upon “experiments” occurring in the developing world in the previous centuries.

J Thomas,

Interesting.

I don’t want an all-powerful government, either, and that fear, I think, is one of the major reasons why many people reject even the discussion of socialism all too often. And if they’re right-wingers, they fold Fascism and Nazism in with socialism, seeing it all as “left-wing,” even though Fascism and Nazism are far right ideologies, and both used a capitalist economic engine.

For many, the knee-jerk reaction is that socialism must mean a tyrannical state. This is not so. Again, if real socialism is put in place, it’s far less likely to occur than under any other system, because the real deal means actual democracy, including the economy, and everyone, literally everyone, owns the means of production. In short, socialism means the dispersal of power into 315 million hands, if applied here. It means the end of the ruling class, and if it continues its trajectory, it means the end of the state apparatus itself.

Ironically, it goes much further than any right-libertarian dream of minarchy. Much further.

I favor the eventual end of the state apparatus, too. And I also believe, especially after reading The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin . . . after having read The Invention of Capitalism, by Michael Perelman . . . that as long as we have capitalism in place, we will always need a massive state apparatus. Primarily to bail it out and support it, but also to externalize the costs of its destructiveness onto the taxpayer in the form of social safety nets, etc.

Plume@44: “One of the best ways to transition, IMO, would be for the government to just start providing as many goods and services as possible, all non-profit, all 100% available to everyone, to compete with the private sector … the government can provide much more for much less. Right off the bat, its overhead will always, always be lower than any private sector corporation. It doesn’t need to make a profit, pay shareholders, pay outrageously large executive compensation, or for ads, marketing, tax avoidance schemes, etc. etc.”

One approximation to this approach actually happened: nationalisation of a range of industries and services by Labour governments after 1945.

Didn’t quite work out as you would have hoped. The great nationalised industries did indeed not, on the whole, make a profit, but rather ran at a massive loss (that had to be paid for out of taxes on the more productive parts of the economy). And I doubt if anyone who remembers British Leyland, British Rail, British Telecom, or the more local Municipal Restaurants would agree that they “provided much more for much less”.

But I’m sure that, in an ideal and perfect socialist state, things would have been entirely different. In reality, however …

For many, the knee-jerk reaction is that socialism must mean a tyrannical state. This is not so. Again, if real socialism is put in place, it’s far less likely to occur than under any other system….

So, you have been hit by a concentrated PR attack that says socialism is government coercion.

I don’t think you can recover from this directly. The stories have been told too often for too long.

You might do better to call it by a new name and sneak it into the Libertarian approach.
“We want to have libertarian groups that work together for our businesses, have the companies owned by the employees.”
“Whyever would you want that instead of owners who supply the capital and take the profits? You know, the way God intended.”
“We just want it that way. You wouldn’t stop us, would you?”
“Well I guess not. If it’s voluntary on everybody’s part. As long as you don’t try to enforce it on anybody.”

It’s possible they might welcome you, since that would give them a leftist wing which would seem harmless to them and at the same time make them seem more balanced.

Stephen,

I’d suggest a good, close read of Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land.

First, ask yourself is the government was allowed to offer fully non-profit, 100% public goods and services, without interference from British business interests.

Next, ask yourself if private sector attempts in those industries were successful. Tony Judt talks about “natural monopolies and public good, and uses the railroads as a big example. A private firm can not make a profit, either, if it focuses on the public good instead of the maximization of profits, because it has to make so many stops to service even small towns, etc. This is also the trouble with phone companies and ISPs.

Example: the government would run fiber even into isolated, rural neighborhoods, while no private firm would do that. They could not possibly make a profit, and would lose a great deal of money, in fact.

Same with phone systems. Same with anything that requires large amounts of capital investment. If you do what is right for everyone, you will lose money. If you do what is right for your bottom line, you won’t care about the public overall — just the part of that public that can afford your product and is of sufficiently large size, concentrated, etc.

But is that on Marx, who died in 1883? You’re talking 1937 or so, right?

Marx himself began the expulsion of anarchists from the One True Religion so making comparisons with him and Christ and the Inquisition would only make sense if Jesus had begun persecuting heretics himself.

What the Spanish example proved was that bottom-up socialism worked and that top-down ‘socialism’ can crush it as effectively as fascism.

My point wasn’t that Athens was a socialist utopia, but that Athenian democracy is an example of a functioning, successful political philosophy and mode of governance (or lack therof) that is radically incompatible with standard liberalism and has often been an inspiration to people on the left.

Thanks, Luke. I quite agree that Athenian democracy is an inspiration, although it doesn’t seem especially lefty by todays standards. Certainly, by the standards of its time it was a hugely inspiring shift to the left. But I don’t see how you can justify “radically incompatible with standard liberalism.” Where do you get that?

Note the Rorschach aspect here: two people sit admiringly in front of a bust of Pericles. One sees a hero of democracy and free enterprise, the other sees a pioneer of collective decision making.

Plume @86, agreed. At the same time, when industries can supply goods that can make a profit and that consumers want, they tend to get taken over by capitalists (even in economies nominally socialist). This is demonstrated by Donald Sassoon (himself a socialist) in his “One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century” (New Press, 1998), a very illuminating book, BTW.

In addition, by concentrating exclusively on heavy industry, Soviet communism fell short in supplying consumers with things that would make their day to day lives more pleasant and healthful — washing machines and sanitary napkins (not to say tampons), for example, even conceding that capitalism arguably all too often produces “artificial” wants by manufacturing demand.

There is some truth in the old saw that Socialism and Christianity are two systems that have never been tried. Nevertheless, the Christian Socialism (or mixed economies) of the Scandinavian countries seems to point to a better, if not a perfect, way (I say this as a non-Christian — or at least as someone who rejects the supernatural aspects of religion).

J Thomas,

I’m not saying the government actually should run fiber everywhere. Though — and I work in that field — it sure would radically increase data speeds if we went all fiber. Fiber having, at least in theory, no practical max on speed.

It was really more of an example of how costly it is to do what is right for the public, and how easy it is to say the government “fails” if costs are higher than expected, etc. As in, how easy it is to overlook the details.

Harold,

Lots of good points.

I think the Soviet experiment failed also to deal with work itself, with a worker’s autonomy, with his or her freedom. In this, it was no better than capitalism, and made most of the same mistakes.

One of the chief benefits of dumping capitalism and profit, and moving toward common ownership of the means of production, is the reduction of work hours. Capitalism requires far more hours worked than necessary in order to achieve profits and high compensation packages for ownership. If profit is gone, we can cut our workday by several hours, or cut the work week by several days. And for most people, we are never more “free” than when we are on our own time.

If the Soviets had really followed Marx, they would have shot for some variation of the following:

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

They had this once in a century chance to redefine the meaning of work, to push the economy back into the background, and bring living into the foreground instead. They chose, instead, to try to compete with the west on its own terms, despite roughly a century of ground to make up.

@bob mcmanus

However , there remains an academic industry based on the demand for narratives of oppression, writing books about Nixon, Reagan, slavery and conservatives.

The implication that all bks about these topics are “narratives of oppression” is nonsense. E.g., there’s a new bk out, based on the tapes, about how Nixon’s efforts to cover up his and Kissinger’s interference in the ’68 peace talks via A. Chennault helped lead to Watergate. I don’t see that esp as a “narrative of oppression.”

Your statement that everything good since EP Thompson is about “why do we let them oppress us?” is also wrong. But wd take too long to go into.

#91 Glenn

All wealth accumulated through exchange is accumulated through unequal exchange. In consensual equal exchange, no wealth is accumulated.

You seem to be assuming that value is known.

Let me give an example. A local cartage company moves stuff — refrigerators, washing machines, boxes of printer paper, etc. It charges companies or individuals about half of what it would cost for them to do it themselves.

So when it has two items that go to roughly the same place, it just about breaks even. When it has three or more, it makes a profit on the trip. When there’s only one, it does better to pay some other cartage company to do it, at a loss.

How should this be made more equal? Each customer gets a good deal, they pay half what it would cost them otherwise. The cartage company gets a good deal, and the more business they have the better the deal they get. They make enough to pay for their warehouse space and keep their trucks running etc, plus however much more they happen to get.

I can imagine a system that might be fairer. You set up a website that tracks packages people want to send. They each say what price they’re willing to pay and where they want to send it. When you get enough packages to one general destination to justify the trip, you rent a U-Haul truck, pick up all the packages, collect your fee, and deliver all the packages to their destinations. If there are 15 packages each customer pays for 1/15 of the total price. You get enough to justify your time, driving and loading and unloading. Or maybe you just run the website and pay somebody with a truck to do the physical stuff, somebody you and your customers trust not to just collect the fees and then sell the packages to a receiver of stolen goods….

Anyway, it may not be necessary for everybody to benefit equally provided they all benefit enough that they want to do it and they have reasonable alternatives. It may not be easy to even tell who benefits more. You have to know how much wear-and-tear the truck gets before you know whether you’re paying the right amount for it. (Unless you believe in markets. If the trucker doesn’t charge enough maybe he will go out of business, and if he charges too much maybe he’ll go out of business. You charge the right amount so you’re safe, unless there are lots of newbies who think they can run the business more efficiently so they keep coming in and charging too little and going broke and getting replaced by new ones. It’s horrible to be in an industry where you have an unlimited number of competitors who try to see who can lose his shirt the fastest.)

OK, if all you do is look for chances to buy low and sell high, you probably are not contributing much. Maybe you are contributing information, you know how to find the guys who sell low and the guys who buy high, and they don’t know how to find each other. Sometimes information is worth a lot.

But in general, when two people agree on a deal, the best deal they are ready to find, who am I to decide who got the better deal? I don’t know as much about either of them as they know about themselves.

Plume@87

I don’t think I’m offering false choices at all. It seems to me there are four choices:
1 Declare, as you do, that capitalism is an evil cancer, but decline to do anything much in the real world about it.
2 Declare that capitalism is an evil cancer, and take drastic revolutionary steps against it: with predictably evil results.
3 Accept that capitalism, as it exists, is imperfect, but try to improve it as has been done in the past, and could be again, without revolution.
4. Declare that capitalism’s it exists needs no improvement.

Options 1 and 4 seem to me equally demented, and option 2 catastrophic.

Plume@36

I accept that there is a difference between the No_True_Scotsman fallacy, and your preferred No_True_Socialism argument.

In the first, the Scots chauvinist Hamish McDonald reads of a despicable action by an Englishman, and declares that no Scotsman could do such a thing. On being told of an even worse action by Ian McPherson, he qualifies it: no true Scotsman could do such a thing.

In your version, you describe despicable actions under capitalism, and declare that no socialist system could do such a thing. On being told of even worse actions under socialist systems, you qualify it: no true socialists could do such a thing.

The difference is, Hamish McDonald could no doubt point to large numbers of actual Scotsmen who, quite genuinely, are models of upright and moral behaviour, and would never do such things.

You can only point to imaginary and non-existent socialist systems that would, by unspecified means, achieve perfection.

I am saddened, though not surprised, that you cannot see the difference.

Stephen,

I did no such thing. You’re distorting what I said:

In your version, you describe despicable actions under capitalism, and declare that no socialist system could do such a thing. On being told of even worse actions under socialist systems, you qualify it: no true socialists could do such a thing.

I made no qualifications. I said and still say that no socialist system has ever been implemented on a national level. It’s never been done. Far, far from it. So when you claim that horrible things have happened under socialism, too, I point out that this is impossible, given the absolute absence of socialist systems in the modern world.

Stephen @105,

Do you think it’s actually an effective argument to toss off the names of horrible dictators as some kind of defense of capitalism?

It’s bizarre.

Stephen @107,

Then you’re talking about barter, not capitalism.

Capitalism is M-C-M and exchange value. Capitalism is a system wherein the capitalist purchases labor value to produce commodities in exchange for more money. Labor is a commodity in that equation, too. The capitalist appropriates the surplus value created by his or her workforce and redistributes a portion back to those workers. He or she makes their money through the accumulation of unpaid labor value. The more money they seek for themselves, the more they have to accumulate new unpaid labor hours/value.

Capitalism is also M-M. Money making money.

It is never barter. It is never an equal exchange. If there is an equal exchange, there is no profit. And capitalism is based on profit.

Plume@106: you do realise you are making my point for me? There are, and have been, Scotsmen who live up to Hamish McDonald’s ideal standards; that does not excuse the No True Scotsman fallacy (do go and look it up, please). You are maintaining there never have been True Socialist states, but also that True non-existent Socialist states would meet your ideal standards.

The fallacy remains.

Luke@81:
“I’m aware of Athens’ record. Athenian imperialism actually looks pretty damn good in comparison to its contempararies — the Spartans obliterated a city whose name eludes me simply for remaining neutral in the Pelopennesian war, for example …”

I believe you’ve got this story exactly backwards. It was the Athenians, not the Spartans, who famously destroyed the population of Melos; as Wikipedia’s article on the “Melian dialogues” has it (as previously noted above by mattski@72):

“The Athenians demanded that the Melians surrender their city and pay them tribute or face the destruction of their city. The Melians claimed their right to remain neutral, appealing to the Athenians’ sense of decency and mercy toward a small, peaceful, and defenseless city. The Athenians sternly replied that questions of justice did not arise between unequal powers and proceeded to lay siege to Melos as they had threatened to do, and to starve the resisting inhabitants into surrender, slaughter the men of military age, and enslave the women and children.”

@ 95

In any case, you have to remember that almost the entirety of the European political tradition is vehemently opposed to democracy

Are ‘liberalism’ and ‘almost the entirety of the European political tradition’ interchangeable? Aristotle was dubious about democracy as well. And if you ask me, anyone who can’t see that there are problems with either too little OR too much democracy (see our friend Plume, eg) is lacking a balanced view.

And strictly as a matter of scale it is difficult to extrapolate too many lessons from Ancient Athens to modern nation states. Personally, I like the idea of filling some public positions by lot. But, clearly, there are limits and liabilities associated with such a practice.

And as far as I know there is little or nothing in the Ancient Athenian tradition that stands in opposition to private ownership of business and free enterprise.

@115
Liberalism is an element (the major element, since, what, the 17th or 18th C.?) of the European tradition, and historically fairly hostile to Athenian democracy. Obviously it isn’t interchangable with the entire tradition.

The argument that there is such a thing as ‘too much’ democracy is exactly what I’m referring to. It’s about managing populations versus populations managing themselves. Regardless of their specific laws, the general trend in Classical Athenian politics was toward greater democracy, with isonomia or something like it acting as the generating principle. Society did not collapse into barbarism; quite the opposite.

In liberal regimes, it has always been a matter of directing the population, with political friction taking the form of who gets to decide, how often, and under what conditions the managers manage. The spectre of ‘too much democracy’, or ‘mob rule’, or ‘the madness of crowds’ is symptomatic of a fundamentally hostile attitude to democracy. Liberal democracy exists to restrain both the state and the people; and in doing so, it opens up a space for — capitalism. So, again: Athens versus capitalism.

By the way: Capitalism, in Marxist theory, is distinguished by the wage relation, not just private enterprise. The Athenian economy ran mainly on the labour of slaves, artisans, and small farmers, not employees.

Luke,

I’m not here to defend capitalism from criticism. I am here because I think many people are confused, a result of putting too much importance on concepts and not enough on the fears and desires that motivate them.

Society did not collapse into barbarism; quite the opposite.

Are you addressing this to me? Why?

Liberal democracy exists to restrain both the state and the people; and in doing so, it opens up a space for — capitalism. So, again: Athens versus capitalism.

I think your first statement is fair enough. But what is the evidence that Athenians had some problem with private accumulation of wealth? And would you concede that some people–think Cliven Bundy and his admirers–need to be restrained?

The Athenian economy ran mainly on the labour of slaves, artisans, and small farmers, not employees.

What does this demonstrate? Probably only that there wasn’t a sophisticated monetary system at the time.

***

Plume,

Why don’t you take your own advice? For myself, I’ll direct my comments wherever I please. It’s a free internet, so to speak.

@ 119,Mattsi, it is a historical fact that the Athenians disapproved of the private accumulation of wealth, though not to the extent that the Spartans, who enforced voluntary poverty, did. The Romans did also. Among Augustus’s first reforms was the enactment of sumptuary laws.

Plume,

Capitalism is M-C-M and exchange value.

Do you propose to do away with money?

Bernard @123,

Well, I would, but that’s a different story. I’d go to electronic currency, which we would all own in common. It would be distributed via hours worked and for community, regional and national needs. This would also eliminate the need for taxes, borrowing, debt. But, again, that’s a different issue . . .

The point is that a system (capitalism) wherein someone buys labor, as a commodity, gets labor to create commodities for money, appropriates the surplus labor value created by that workforce, and make its money via unpaid labor, is immoral and incredibly wasteful.

It does not produce to order, and it does not produce for needs or sustenance. It produces to make money for a few on the backs of the many. Period.

OTOH, a system that starts with C-M-C and goes for use-value rather than exchange-value . . . that has a far better chance to work for everyone, to be fair, to provide for societal needs and to not be wasteful.

The difference between the two is basically this:

I build a chair with my own two hands, my sweat and blood, and I sell that chair directly. I receive compensation for my hard work and only my hard work.

A capitalist hires workers to build a lot of chairs. He or she makes money on their labor, their sweat and blood, and they also sell the chairs for him or her. He or she receives compensation for their hard work via not paying them for a portion of their day.

In cases wherein a modern society needs things built beyond the capacities of a single craftsperson or artisan . . . if the workforce itself owns the means of production and shares the surplus value it creates amongst itself, then you can get fair wages, just compensation, create for need, not profit. etc

Glen,

That would be interesting. Capitalism would fall apart rather quickly if we were all just exchanging $5 for $5.

Profit can only be achieved by selling something for more than it cost to make. This requires ripping off someone, or many someones, always. In a business with a workforce, it means ripping off that workforce, and the capitalist can pad his or her profits by also ripping off supply chains and consumers. Supply chains, in turn, want to make a profit too, so they have to rip off their workers and so on down the line. If that means shipping jobs overseas to absorb being ripped off by the Walmarts of this world, they will do so.

David Harvey, a Marxist economist with a background in geography, is fantastic on the idea of shifting the pain/crisis elsewhere to sustain profits. Into the future, overseas, or onto the backs of taxpayers. Sometimes, all the above.

Lee,

Who is doing the mining? Under what conditions? At what costs? And how much are they paid? How much are suppliers paid?

Commercial exchanges in the modern world are incredibly interdependent. There is never a case of just a buyer and seller involved, much less just two people making a trade. The interconnectedness of markets makes a fairy tale version.

Sorry, but a capitalist transaction can’t possibly be win/win. If someone wins, a whole lot of others lose. That’s just math and physics.

The “comparative advantage” most sought after by capital is the means of suppressing labor negotiations with such tactics as killing negotiators acting on behalf of labor.

That is why anti-suicide nets are placed at Foxconn manufacturing facilities of Apple products.

http://www.dailytech.com/Foxconn+Installs+AntiSuicide+Nets+at+Its+Facilities/article18877.htm

And

Workers’ rights ‘flouted’ at Apple iPhone factory in China
New, cheaper device being produced illegally, non-profit organisation China Labor Watch claims.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/05/workers-rights-flouted-apple-iphone-plant

@ Plume #129 — I agree that capitalism is transforming itself into something else, and I think the world will be profoundly socialist (or whatever the next stage is to be called) within a hundred years. But I look at it the other way.

In fact I don’t think it’s a problem that arises in the single capitalist transaction, theoretically speaking. This is how economists get themselves off the hook, or avoid the issue, and insist that we don’t know what we’re talking about — because the “capitalist transaction” is theoretically win-win.

The real problems are quite beside the theory: 1. technology will slowly push labor out of jobs making necessities; 2. there aren’t enough other non-necessary goods and services in the world to make up for that; 3. further, your “wants” really are NOT infinite or even the size of 7 billion inputs, i.e. you wouldn’t have the time to transact with the 7 billion people on the planet anyhow, even though hundreds or thousands of people are combined into single-product supply chains, so they WILL NOT be able to find something else to do, to share in “the system”; and 4. there may be real natural resource constraints involved in bringing everyone up to a good standard of living (although this is less sure; it could be that there is enough for everyone to have a good standard of living).

So saying, “That’s just math and physics” has to be qualified, because the math and physics of capitalist transactions are theoretically win-win. It’s just that in the aggregate real world, other factors disqualify the capitalist theory.

Plume, Well if you are not talking about single transactions, then I agree with you. But then, you are talking instead about capitalism + technological development + labor elimination + plutocracy + changes in biogeochemical cycles + ecological resource depletion.

Because we need a word for the theory of private firms making products in competitive markets, and that is what has been called capitalism, and even Karl Marx called it capitalism, and then it branched out from there to “monopoly capitalism”, “finance capitalism”, and so on.

So I’m not sure why you need to throw it all together, when that could sometimes vitiate your own argument.

How could it vitiate your argument? Well for example, if a non-polluting energy source is developed, then capitalism will speed us AWAY from climate change and overall pollution and waste. Indeed it looks like photovoltaic efficiencies are improving enough to do just that.

But again, that might save the climate system, but I don’t think that it will save capitalism in the end.

Psychology is going to kill it. I think Schumpeter was right, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. He didn’t quite see computers and robotics coming, but they are the death knell. Because technological change, particularly robotics, has a basic pattern of putting people out of work, and capitalism depends on the psychology of being able to buy into the system. But: no work, no money, no buy-into-system. Thus capitalism is going to give way to a more egalitarian system, due to unavoidable mass psychology.

It is even happening on Wall Street. Huge in-house computing systems are already putting day-traders out of business. It looks like there is an increasing choke on the number of crooked numbskulls needed to run the banks.

Lee,

Again, I’m talking about single transactions and the form, function and purpose of individual businesses, and the form, function and purpose of the aggregate of those businesses under capitalism. All of it. And, no, I don’t need to add in those other things you mentioned. Just the basic setup of the capitalist mode of production, its relations, its power formations, its rationale, mechanics and inherent contradictions do the trick.

Its basic setup, its raison d’etre, its mechanics, etc.

It is set up to make a few people very rich off the sweat and blood of the many. From their work. Not from the work of the capitalist. It is set up to derive profit and compensation for business owners from the workforce, from the unpaid labor of that workforce. That, and the rest of the things mentioned, are why it can never, ever, ever be win/win. The interests of ownership are simply in direct opposition to those of their workers. The more ownership wants to make for itself, the less they must pay their workers — or find other links along the chain to screw. Or both.

Fundamentally, and in every which way, it is a system designed to always be completely at odds with the vast majority and with nature. And the only reason we all aren’t working for 70 cents an hour, under Foxconn conditions or worse, is because of outside forces that put some checks on its power. Strip away those outside checks, and capitalism, naked capitalism, is nothing but unbridled economic apartheid. With them, it’s still that, but with minimal restrictions on its power and purpose.

Again, it can’t possibly be win/win and still be capitalism.

The most valuable takeaway from this would seem to be the point that LWA makes in post 17. Btw, do you mind if I quote you on that last sentence, LWA?

Sorry, but a capitalist transaction can’t possibly be win/win. If someone wins, a whole lot of others lose. That’s just math and physics.

If a mutually agreed upon trade is shown to be beneficial to both parties then Plume will claim it wasn’t a capitalist transaction. For him it’s a matter of definition. This is broken record territory.

Harold, how about a cite for this:

it is a historical fact that the Athenians disapproved of the private accumulation of wealth

What are we discussing here? It is often unclear because so many people on the left end of the spectrum have such elaborate ideas about “capitalism.” Does it really need to be so complicated? There were economic strata in ancient Athens. Indeed, the struggle for democracy was a struggle against the rule of aristocracy. Athens had its rich, and also a pretty healthy middle class of artisans and merchants. And of course slaves. But the artisans and merchants were free to “get ahead” if they were inclined to do so. (And who wouldn’t be so inclined at a time when standards of living had so much room for improvement!)

Do you think it is controversial to say that ancient Greeks recognized that people of different degrees of industriousness rightfully earned different levels of wealth?

Athens had its rich, and also a pretty healthy middle class of artisans and merchants. And of course slaves. But the artisans and merchants were free to “get ahead” if they were inclined to do so. (And who wouldn’t be so inclined at a time when standards of living had so much room for improvement!)

I don’t have references handy for the following and any of it might possibly be wrong. See if you agree, or disagree, and decide whether it’s worth it to find out.

Athens was a relatively small place. something like population 30,000 to 50,000. So they didn’t have room for tremendous disparities of wealth. The aristocrats who were so rich tended to have something like 5 times the wealth of the average.

If you were an Athenian who owned a farm, you could expect to work maybe 4 hours a day on it. You might make 5 times as much wealth off a good farm as off a mediocre one, but you were not expected to work twice as hard on bad land to better yourself. It would probably have been possible to do that. Farmers could work on erosion control and spreading fertilizer etc, but they did not think that way.

On the other hand, if you were an artisan you tended to work when people paid you to. Of course used artifacts were not worth as much as new ones. But new ones are not worth as much as ones that someone needs to be made. Like today, the bigger the oversupply of finished goods, the less they were worth. Make too much stuff on spec and buyers will negotiate down the price.

If you were a shipowner you could make a lot depending on trade. You had to already own a ship or it didn’t work. If you were a sailor you made essentially nothing. Like, a census that talked about who inherited what listed children fathered by the oarsmen on the whores, without bothering to sort them out. The difference between what owners earned versus what sailors earned can be explained by risk. The owner was risking a big investment, his ship. And trade varied, there was risk there too, but he had to pay his sailors whether he made any money or not. He took risks. The sailors only risked pirates and shipwreck and things like that.

Anybody have important disagreements here? I consider a disagreement important if it affects the story about the economy.

Interesting that Joseph Inikori’s work gets so little attention; perhaps an example of how slavery still casts a shadow on the present?

J Thomas@100

“You seem to be assuming that value is known.”

Your assumption about my assumption is invalid.

The labor of moving material to a location for pay is an exchange.

If a person is employed by Amazon, for example, the owner of Amazon becomes extremely wealthy through the unequal exchange of labor value and the wage he is paid.

If one is dying of dehydration, the sale and purchase of water will entail the profit of unequal exchange, if in purchasing water you are also purchasing the extension of your life and a higher price is demanded (extortion). See Detroit.

If the free association (“guaranteed” by the First Amendment) of labor is suppressed by the threat of state violence, there is no mechanism to achieve equal exchange. Equal exchange cannot be negotiated without state backed coercion to the detriment of those who must negotiate under duress.

If a trade is not capitalist, then it makes sense to say so.

I have no idea what this means.

I do some work for you, for which you pay me. Presumably you benefitted, since why else would you have paid me to do it.

I take the money and buy something I want. Effectively I have traded my labor for this item. How is this not capitalist? How have you and I not both benefitted?

Or consider the table-making example I gave above. Is that not a capitalist transaction? What is wrong with it?

You are tying yourself in knots arguing for a self-contradictory, non-existent, and likely impossible social and economic arrangement. You say “True socialism has never been tried.” How do you know? We have never observed a socialist system of the type you describe, at least not one that lasted very long. Maybe that’s because it can’t work, and must either disappear or devolve into the sorts of tyrranies that have been mentioned above.

Glen,

I think one way people fool themselves into thinking an exchange is “equal” or “voluntary” is by, at least subconsciously, assuming that the massive difference in compensation is irrelevant. That a nurse, for example, is fine with their pay, that she has a different conception of her value, the value of her time; that the CEO who runs her hospital has yet a different conception of their value, the value of their time, etc. Both supposedly match up with their respective sense of their own value, which means, “equal.”

Of course, that’s absurd.

In reality, we are come into the world with the same “value” for our time. It’s finite and equal. Assuming we aren’t hit by a bus, don’t suffer from a terminal illness, or benefit from greater wealth and less dangerous occupations, our lifespans are pretty much the same, give or take. What changes that is the economic system in place, and no system prior to capitalism has so accelerated the division of labor and the gaps between workers, the supposed value of their time, etc. etc. No system prior to capitalism has caused such an explosion in the range of arbitrarily derived value, or severed it from all rational explanations due to functional importance, use-value or community/societal needs.

In short, capitalism has produced grand fictions on unprecedented scales. The grand fiction that, say, the CEO of McDonald’s time is more precious and valuable than their workers, or more precious and valuable than a nurse’s, a teacher’s, a firefighter’s, a scientist’s, etc. etc.

Bernard @149,

The matter in question was not that the two sides in transaction X might both “benefit.” The matter was the equality of that benefit. If the benefits are distributed in unequal fashion, then it is not a win/win proposition. It is a win/lose proposition.

And I think you’ve misread me on what constitutes a capitalist transaction. The example given was a direct trade of copper for tin. That’s barter, not capitalism. Now, capitalism could be the system used to extract the copper and the tin in the first place. In 2014, it would be. But an actual trade of commodities is not capitalism. There is no “capital” involved in the transaction. Commodities, without capital, are being traded.

As for the chairs or the table-making. Again, the key differentiation for capitalism is the use of capital to purchase labor power, to make commodities, to be exchanged for more money. M-C-M and exchange value.

The capitalist doesn’t make the chairs or the table. He or she buys labor power to do that for him or her. The capitalist then appropriates the surplus value created by those workers, controls that, instead of the workers who actually made the chairs, the tables, etc. The capitalist then redistributes a portion of the earnings back to workers. The largest part of their “alienation” comes from the fact that they do not own what they produce in the capitalist system.

The matter in question was not that the two sides in transaction X might both “benefit.” The matter was the equality of that benefit.

How do you decide equality?

Here is one suggestion. Get somebody who’s really good at running auctions and getting the highest price. Then start with both guys having the same amount of money. Auction off the copper to the one guy, and see how high he’ll go. Auction the tin to the other one and see how high *he* goes. Whichever one paid more, valued that amount of product more. So in a direct trade he would get the better deal.

Here is another suggestion. Assuming that everybody’s time is worth the same, look at how much time was spent mining and extracting and transporting etc the copper, versus how much time was spent doing all that for the tin. The one which took the more time is worth more. Except then you might notice, the copper miners took watermelon breaks every four hours that they counted as work time, but the tin miners only took off the same amount of time to urinate and drink plain water. Should those hours count the same? One of the copper miners died in an accident, so the copper took away all the rest of the hours of his life. One of the tin miners had a leg crushed so he will be a cripple the rest of his life, on the job and off. Which counts more?

The copper miners have an accountant who tracks lots of stuff, and the accountant spent 8 years in college and grad school learning that trade. The tin miners did without all that. How much should the accountant’s time count? How much of the necessary 8 years should count in the hours worked for the copper?

The tin miners have an executive and a sales manager. The sales manager travels around the world checking prices and making deals. The executive thinks about which land they should buy to dig new tin mines in as this one starts to run out, and buys options. How much of their time should count?

Several of the copper miners spend some of their time working for a volunteer fire department which helps their community. The mining headquarters building caught on fire and the firemen saved the accountants’ records. How much of their fire department time counts for the copper?

To extend J Thomas’ example:

John lives near the copper mine and would prefer to work there rather than at the tin mine, which is less conveniently located for him. But there are not enough tin miners (according to some genius plan) so it would be helpful to get John to mine tin anyway. How should that be accomplished?

J Thomas,

If Apple sells you an Ipad, and that Ipad was made on the backs of workers making 70 cents an hour at Foxconn — and it most likely was — and Apple’s executives make tens of millions a year, there is no “win/win” there. They make their compensation and their profit by screwing over their workers, by paying them obscenely low wages in dangerous working conditions, while they sit on their duffs thousands of miles away and collect massive compensation.

You pay far more than that Ipad cost to make, and you pay for a host of things which added zero value to the Ipad itself. Such as those high compensation packages, perks, golden parachutes, etc. for executives; tax avoidance personnel; shareholder dividends; marketing/ad costs; insurance costs; unsold merchandise costs — to name a few. You pay for an enormous bureaucracy which adds nothing to the actual value of that Ipad, and because those executives demand and receive obscenely high compensation for overseeing workers, you pay more and tens of thousands of workers are screwed. Those executives can’t make their own fortunes if they pay fair wages. The math doesn’t work out.

And that, of course, ripples throughout the interconnected system. Those low wages drive down wages elsewhere, creating more hardship, shorter lifespans, more health issues, etc. etc. And then there’s the pollution costs, the waste, the climate change involved and so on.

The only way to see capitalist transactions as “win/win” is to ignore roughly 99% of the process involved in that transaction, its repercussions, etc.

Mattski @158,

It’s not morally suspect at all for you to be compensated for your own work. It becomes immoral when you receive that compensation plus compensation for the production of your workforce.

Your input. Not theirs. That includes embedded costs, your capital expenses, etc. etc. It becomes immoral when you have been compensated for those costs, but you still charge a form of rent to your employees by withholding pay from them. As in, if your costs are X, and you make that back, but you still force additional unpaid labor hours on your workers in order to receive X+ or X++ or X+++.

Plume: I said a capitalist purchases labor power to create surplus value, appropriates that surplus for him or herself, and redistributes a portion of that surplus back to the workforce. The more the capitalist wants for him or herself, the less they send back to the workforce that created that value.

The capitalist creates the surplus value or the workers create the surplus value. Make up your mind.

Plume: If the benefits are distributed in unequal fashion, then it is not a win/win proposition.

That argument requires a form of arithmetic with which I am unfamiliar. If social cooperation creates an incremental surplus of 5, and one party gets 3 and the other party gets 2, over and above the results of not-cooperating, then cooperation benefits both. Benefiting both does not require that both parties benefit equally. I feel there’s something seriously wrong, when this has to be explained.

All cooperation inherently entails conflict. You can’t wish it away, or abolish it with a semantic label.

Hierarchical organization of economic production can be enormously productive, but the vertical relationships — the domination — are problematic. It is no insight to wish the dilemmas away or to deny that they inherently exist.

When one party receives far more

Oooh! I see a shade of gray!

Looks like we need a philosopher king to hash this out. Nominees??

Plume: When one party receives far more — in its capacity as overseer — than the workforce which actually does the work itself, then this is immoral. As in, capitalism.

How much more? You said “equal”, but refuse to defend the claim, switching instead to a plea that 400 to 1 is immoral.

It seems to me, that if a capitalist brings together 20 workers, and, supervising their work, creates surplus value, over and above what the 20 would or could produce either individually or cooperating among themselves without the capitalist-executive-supervisor, there’s nothing inherently immoral about the capitalist claiming the largest share of that incremental surplus value.

Hierarchy, on abundant evidence, can be enormously productive. On technical grounds, I would reject the labor theory of value as unhelpful, and if I were analyzing the role of hierarchies, I’d have some things to say about control and residual returns, the sunk-cost nature of capital investments and economic rents, efficiency wages, principal-agent problems, the differences between allocative and technical efficiency, leverage and the separation of ownership and control, money and the use of financial capital in usury, credit and insurance, and a number of other topics. And, I would confirm that 400 to 1 is pernicious.

What I would not do is claim that “capitalism” is a specific thing, the evils of which stand entirely apart from human nature.

Equality may never come to be measured with an accountant’s precision. But an accountant’s precision is never more than an approximation, and frequently less so, because he ignores externalized costs, and other things never measured, but born by the commons. See Walmart and McDonalds, among others, sending their employees to state offices to supplement their lack of wages with public aid.

Lack of precise equality is not an obstacle to the accounting profession, so why should this lack of precision in measuring equality of exchange be an obstacle to moving toward equality of exchange by eliminating gross variations first?

Should a great variations from equality of exchange be ignored because a tiny variation cannot be measured with any greater precision than modern capitalist accounting allows and finds acceptable?

Lack of precise equality is not an obstacle to the accounting profession, so why should this lack of precision in measuring equality of exchange be an obstacle to moving toward equality of exchange by eliminating gross variations first?

Glenn, I agree we should eliminate gross iniquities.

But if we’re aiming at equality, then we should define what we mean by equality. We don’t necessarily have to measure it precisely, but we should at least mostly know it when we see it.

Should we have a clear distinction between free time and working time, and an hour of one person’s time always counts the same as an hour of somebody else’s time? Or what?

Bruce,

The original claim was that capitalism produces win/win transactions. In order for that to be the case, compensation would have to be equal. The onus of defense of that claim isn’t on me. It’s on the persons who try to paint capitalism as this mutually beneficial and voluntary system where everyone wins.

It seems to me, that if a capitalist brings together 20 workers, and, supervising their work, creates surplus value, over and above what the 20 would or could produce either individually or cooperating among themselves without the capitalist-executive-supervisor, there’s nothing inherently immoral about the capitalist claiming the largest share of that incremental surplus value.

The part in bold is more than questionable. Again, see Mondragon, the writings of Gar Alperovitz, or Richard D. Wolff. A relevant video from Professor Wolff here.

Beyond that, this would seem to really boil down to differing opinions. I feel strongly that capitalism is inherently immoral, and have posted a ton of reasons why that is the case, from massively unequal compensation, to obscene destruction of the environment, to waste, to dislocation, to endless crises, etc. Your response is to basically counter with, “I don’t find it immoral.” But you haven’t really provided support for that claim.

It seems to me, that if a capitalist brings together 20 workers, and, supervising their work, creates surplus value, over and above what the 20 would or could produce either individually or cooperating among themselves without the capitalist-executive-supervisor, there’s nothing inherently immoral about the capitalist claiming the largest share of that incremental surplus value.

It’s complicated. If the “surplus value” wouldn’t have happened without him, then surely he deserves some of it. But imagine he had never been born, and then somebody else comes along and takes his place. If there are more entrepreneurs looking for opportunities than there are opportunities for them to exploit, maybe he wasn’t so special after all. Maybe him squatting on that position is preventing somebody else from doing something even better.

It looks to me like this sort of argument requires that we know what the alternatives are, when we can’t.

But that brings up a possibility. Say you have a big company with a well-paid CEO. He should have a couple of understudies. Each of them is given all the information he has, and they each make decisions for the company in parallel with his decisions. Every year or so the BOD (or somebody they appoint) carefully looks over what each of the three did, and guesses what would have happened. And if they decide that one of the understudies did better than the CEO, they appoint the understudy to be the new CEO.

That would be a complicated thing to do, and there would be some expense. But when you pay a whole lot for a CEO and you don’t do any comparative tests to judge how well he’s doing, how expensive is that?

“Hierarchy, on abundant evidence, can be enormously productive.”

Too bad assholes tend to climb on top of it, and, in the off-chance they don’t, whoever has manged to climb to the top quickly becomes an asshole anyway. Damn.

Reality is made up of shades of gray, and opinions about shades of gray. Anyone who cannot see that every scenario has an upside and a downside is going to gravitate to absolutist positions which are ultimately dangerous.

In all fairness, maybe sometimes we do better with bang-bang control rather than something more proportional.

That is, if you push as hard as you can in the direction you think things should go, you may have an effect. And then when you realize it’s going too far, then you push as hard as you can in the other direction and you may have an effect slowing the over-reach.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes it might be the most effective approach.

Plume: “Capitalism is theft. Capitalism is evil. Capitalism is a cancer”.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill (who would agree with the above) – In comparison to all the other systems, capitalism is the least of all the above.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes it might be the most effective approach.

I’m not sure I’d want to let you drive me down a winding mountain road.

;^)

I guess it depends how far apart the speed bumps are.

@ 183

Well, I guess that answers that.

“Let me start by observing that even the most laissez-faire economy is not truly capitalistic “all the way down”: my wife and I don’t pay one another for the housework we do for one another’s benefit, and we don’t charge room and board to our children.”

See, that’s the thing: Capitalists don’t think there ought to be Capitalism Police going around shutting down any voluntary socialist relationships. Capitalists don’t even object to voluntary socialist relationships. Capitalists, every one of us, grew up inside voluntary socialist relationships. But, families don’t scale. We can’t base all our interactions with everybody on love. We’re not that species. But we can base some of them on love.

Socialists seem to think that there ought to be Socialism Police going around shutting down voluntary capitalist relationships. Seem to think that socialism can’t prevail without forcing people to abandon capitalism. I think that’s why it all turns out so badly when you try to scale socialism up beyond small groups. The repression is unavoidable, because while Capitalism is large enough to encompass Socialism, Socialism isn’t large enough to encompass Capitalism.

I think you are an inhabitant of the USA, this means, like me, you live in a country where the police etc went around taking indigenous people’s land.

Which of course has never happened in any socialist paradise.

That’s why I’m a liberal and not a doctrinaire Leftist. Reality is made up of shades of gray, and opinions about shades of gray. Anyone who cannot see that every scenario has an upside and a downside is going to gravitate to absolutist positions which are ultimately dangerous.

Yes, reality is sometimes made up of shades of gray, and I’ve made a point of being open to them, seeing them when they exist. Philosophically, politically and aesthetically. But your next assertion, that every scenario has an upside and a downside — that is actually a very dangerous belief and obviously doesn’t match up with reality.

So, there is an “upside” to slavery? Rape? Murder of the innocents? 1800 plus Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza in the last month? Three million Vietnamese civilians killed during the Vietnam war? 400 Americans holding as much wealth as the bottom 60% of the country combined? 85 humans holding as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion combined? Massive pollution, waste, species extinctions, global warming? Really? Where is the upside?

There is another kind of “absolutism.” And it is especially pernicious, because the practitioner thinks they are above that sort of thing, unable to see how brainwashed they really are: Adherence to conventional wisdom, to practicalities, to the endless search for nuance for the sake of nuance. That there is never a time to say wrong is wrong is wrong.

Btw, I used to be a liberal too. But I evolved. I moved left when it hit me that the liberal critique of the economy pointed toward the necessity of much stronger medicine than it was willing to endorse. That the logic of that critique meant that repeal and replacement of capitalism was a necessary first step, and that clinging to the dream of reforming it was like someone stuck in a codependent relationship, forever disappointed, forever punked.

(A good example of that critique, from the liberal economist, Robert Reich.)

All too many Liberals have this strange idea that leftists are limited to doctrinaire positions, while they are free from them. In reality, at least for this leftist, I’ve never been freer from the bondage of limited views since I cast off the A to B (liberal to conservative) narrative of American political, social and economic thinking. I’ve never been freer since I stepped out of the mainstream, able to look back objectively, and with a much broader toolkit available to me now.

You should try it sometime.

Lee,

This article by Wolff may be helpful. He talks of WSDEs, or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises, and talks about the difference between capitalist production and socialist production.

http://www.rdwolff.com/content/enterprise-structure-key-shape-post-capitalist-future

An excerpt:

First, most of the “actually existing” socialist experiments to date unraveled in part because they never transformed the organization of their workplaces. They more or less replaced private shareholders and boards of directors with state officials and they more or less substituted planned distributions of inputs and outputs for market exchanges. What they did not do was to radically alter the internal organization of workplaces in a specifically socialist way. Second, by a “specifically socialist way” I mean pretty much what Marx specified in Capital. Marx stressed there that a central dimension of capitalism that he wished to see transformed was “exploitation.” By that he meant the capitalist organization of the workplace. In that organization workers add more value by their labor than the value paid to them (wages, salaries) for that labor. Capitalists appropriate that “more,” or what Marx called “surplus.” To squeeze as much surplus from the workers as possible, capitalists control and make all the key decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses they appropriate from the workers.

A transition to socialism would thus require the transformation of capitalism’s exploitative internal organization of enterprises. In other words, the transition to socialism requires that workers not only produce surpluses, but also themselves appropriate and distribute them. Workplaces stop being conflict-ridden confrontations of two different groups of people – employers and employees – and become instead cooperatives in which the same people who produce the surpluses also – collectively and democratically – appropriate those surpluses. Workplaces are reorganized into workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). In WSDEs, workers (rather than capitalists) decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates.

Perhaps some of the confusion rests here: You seem to be talking about a non-capitalist business in a capitalist environment. Obviously, in that case, they would interact with capitalist businesses. They would purchase some of their tools, etc. etc. — those they didn’t make themselves, at least — from companies engaged in capitalist production. Their existence as a non-capitalist operation wouldn’t negate that.

What I’m suggesting, however, is the total absence of the capitalist system. Not one iota of it would exist. It would be as if it never existed at all. In that case, all connecting links would be to non-capitalist businesses. The system itself would be non-capitalist.

(I wouldn’t use the term anarcho-syndicalist. I would just keep it simple and call it socialism.)

Grandin’s syllogism:
The United States was founded on slavery.
The United States is the pre-emininent capitalist nation.
Thwefore, capitalism is founded on slavery.

What a load of cobblers. The United States was completely unimportant in the early development of capitalist institutions. Flanders and Northern Italy after 1200, the Netherlands in the 17th century, England in the 18th: none had significant slavery. They had class warfare (not shouting, swords) in Flanders in the Middle Ages: between proto-capitalist merchant oligarchs and poor free weavers. The profits from slave-grown sugar fed early British capitalism – but the moral point was that the Caribbean slaves were invisible to London and Liverpool merchants, not that they were visible reminders of their superiority. Dutch capitalism drew on (exploitative) trade with the East – inequality by castes, not slavery. There were slaves in Curacao etc. but the profits of its limited American possessions were hardly essential to the Dutch empire.

The other problem is that slavery is endemic to pre-modern urbanised societies, from Narmer and Hammurabi on. The transatlantic slave trade built on (and greatly expanded) pre-existing African slavery. The economies of ancient Greece and Rome were based on slaves. So suddenly, after 4,000 years, slavery gives rise to a new individualistic mentality?

“THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” — J. J. Rousseau

One of them is run by the employees and everybody gets a share in the profits, if any. The other is run by capitalists and you get a small salary, period. Which do you choose?

Not so simple. What happens when there are losses? What amounts are involved?

In the world as it actually exists people vary in their risk tolerance.

Not to mention that if I’m getting paid based on the company’s results I want to know who the decision-makers are, and how competent they are.

“One of them is run by the employees and everybody gets a share in the profits, if any. The other is run by capitalists and you get a small salary, period. Which do you choose?”

Not so simple. What happens when there are losses? What amounts are involved?

When the losses are too big, the company goes bankrupt, or it gets sold cheap. Either way you lose your job.

Or if the losses are smaller, they downsize and you lose your job.

I don’t know what happens in the worker-owned company. For me it’s kind of hypothetical and we can talk about how it should work. But for the capitalist corporation we’ve seen what happens.

In the world as it actually exists people vary in their risk tolerance.

If you work for a living it doesn’t matter what your risk tolerance is, you get no choice in whether you get fired. You take that risk when you take the job.

Not to mention that if I’m getting paid based on the company’s results I want to know who the decision-makers are, and how competent they are.

Absolutely, yes! If you’re just an employee then you might as well just hope for the best. Whoever the decision-makers are, however competent they are, there’s nothing you can do about it except look for another job. If they’re good (and you’re good) then they’ll make tremendous profits and possibly they might choose to give you a 3% bonus.

If they’re bad then you get fired and you can look for another job. You might look like bad luck to employers, coming from a company that failed. Or if they downsized and fired you, it means you weren’t good enough to keep so you’re probably not good enough to hire. Better to start looking for a new job when you first see that things aren’t going well.

” Capitalism assumes malice and never fails to be proved correct.”

Assuming malice means climate change negotiations will be further doomed. Also other sustainability and bio-diversity problems, as well as poverty, hunger, and slavery. It is grossly unfair to others who bear more costs than yourself to assume malice.

If you work for a living it doesn’t matter what your risk tolerance is, you get no choice in whether you get fired. You take that risk when you take the job.

Risk is more complicated than simple “get fired or stay employed” choices. When you are paid based on the company’s results your compensation will necessarily vary, possibly quite a bit, even if the company never does so badly as to be forced out of business.

In addition, there will always be choices as to how to divide profits between investing in expansion and distributing to claimants – whether workers or shareholders. When you buy into a profit-based compensation system you assume the risk that those decisions will not be to your liking.

Defenders of capitalism often read ownership talking points without realizing it. They parrot the thoughts of the ownership class, the ruling class, thinking they’re being wise even for themselves as middle class folks.

In reality, if you do the math, a business without an ownership or management elite, sucking up the vast majority of the wealth, would leave all workers making much, much more. If workers shared out their own surplus, there is much, much more for each one.

For example: Larry Ellison made a billion a few years ago. A billion. Yes, it was in various forms. But he still made a billion. You could spread that billion out to 10,000 workers and pay them each $100,000, or some combination there of. And there are many other Oracle execs and shareholders who made millions that year. Share it all out. The rank and file would make far, far more under a WSDE set up, and the product would almost certainly be better. After all, Larry Ellison was quite busy trying to crash smaller companies so he could buy them cheap and sell them off again, Gordon Gecko style. Perhaps a company run on democratic principles would worry more about making the best product possible in the shop itself.

Oh, and Apple? In 2012, it made 41 billion in profits, and added that to its war chest of cash which then totaled 161 billion. It’s even bigger now. A non-capitalist business would pay workers enough up front so that 41 billion profit could never materialize. It would pay workers up front enough so there could never be a war chest of 161 billion, sitting there, making stock brokers happy. It would, of course, put enough away for rainy days. But that rainy day fund would be owned by everyone, not just the old style fragment of ownership. Everyone would have a say in that rainy day fund.

Bottom line, contrary to Thatcher’s old quip, a socialist economy would actually share prosperity to the greatest degree the world has ever know. We’d no longer have just 85 people holding as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 BILLION people, or 400 people in America holding as much as the bottom 60% combined. We would no longer have one family, the Waltons, owning more wealth than the bottom 40% combined, etc.

And with everyone having buying power, the economy has far more “customers” than it ever had before.

In short, egalitarianism is good for business. Pyramids are terrible for business.

#208 Bernard Yomtov

Risk is more complicated than simple “get fired or stay employed” choices. When you are paid based on the company’s results your compensation will necessarily vary, possibly quite a bit, even if the company never does so badly as to be forced out of business.

Yes. While if you are a wage-slave you are pretty much guaranteed that your compensation will not go up. Instead of ups and downs it will have only down. But if the company does badly you will quite likely be fired in the resulting down-sizing, and you will have no income until you can find another job.

If there was a collection of employee-owned businesses, and you wanted guaranteed low pay with no share in the good times, you could probably find one that would let you do it that way.

People who support capitalism assume that a few people, who go into business to make themselves very rich, will do what is best with our natural and human resources, and that we should just leave them to it. It assumes that the few making decisions for the many will turn out well for the many.

Socialism assumes that if the collective works on behalf of the collective, instead of for one or two or a small group of bosses, chances are far, far greater that that collective will do what’s best for the collective — as in, we, the vast majority.

I don’t like either assumption.

Try things out, find ways to make them work.

In large groups there will usually be somebody who looks on purpose for ways to break the system. He would prefer to find ways to suck out the profits, but failing that he might easily settle for just breaking it. You need ways to buffer against that.

Don’t depend on assumptions about what will work. Go out and try things and find ways to make them work that still fit your ethics.

The real question (which others asked above) is why there isn’t more anarcho-syndicalism, since there are a few workers’ coops which do stay in business. The question could be turned around to, Why do people who have great new ideas, such as Jobs and Wozniak, find that it is better to develop them in private capitalism than to explain everything to a worker’s commune?

I don’t think it is true that the specter of competition is the only reason, i.e. the danger that another private capitalist would adopt the same product idea and produce it faster, thus cornering your new market.

Something else is there, something which the possibility of being out-competed really points to: new ideas are individual things, and it may often be better to bring them to fruition as an individual who employs others. Thus, awarding oneself a larger part of the surplus is not out of order, nor must it necessarily destroy the world. Because everyone else would be taking part of some other surplus, or gaining in the general increase in the standard of living as workers, which is a form of taking part in the surplus. It is the fact that machines are displacing workers which will kill this system.

This brings us back to a version of “the knowledge problem”, not the part about how market exchange conducts information about supplies and demands, but about how to keep a product idea together in a commune, in the case when others don’t have that idea, or cannot be convinced of its worth prior to its realization, or might find some other form of effort more suitable to their needs. Even intentional living communities have trouble surviving due to personal politics.

The problem which technological advancement presents is distinct from the capitalist process, and that is the thing which is changing the terms of the battle, not capitalism per se. Because the need for employees grows less and less, so people have harder times finding good paying jobs, and therefore, at the same time, financial ownership of the remaining enterprises grows more concentrated.

Now that innovation itself is being robotized (in many ways; but just consider one prospect, that of running algorithms for every possible combination in the periodic chart of the elements to find possible compounds to be tested for new materials, etc. etc.) it seems unlikely that even people like Jobs and Wozniak will be able to break in.

In some ways, computer technology is the end point of what can produced mechanically by humans, because it can produce all other mechanical things beyond that point.* Indeed yesterday Tim Taylor put up some remarkable charts showing that entrepreneurship in the US has been slowing down since 1980 (via Mark Thoma):
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-decline-of-us-entrepreneurship.html

I think opponents of capitalism are right, but are not focusing on the most likely outcome: that the vector of the system becomes evident to almost everybody, that everybody just gets sick of it (Schumpeter’s analysis; a conclusion that was sad to him, because he was a market conservative), and after that, the whole thing flips on a dime. But flips to what?

* Which excludes non-algorithmic, contextual ideas (Gödel). But these may not have market value. On the other hand, they may be the only things of unusual value, and we may enter a market hierarchy of pure artists and trendy fascinators.

@ Trader Joe #217 — What is your answer, if the financing were not an issue?

Lee @ 217,

I appreciate your thoughtful remarks. If I’m not mistaken Kevin Drum has written quite a bit about something similar, what he calls the “singularity.” In my vague understanding this is the idea that technology in the form of computers and robots renders our labor obsolete.

Even intentional living communities have trouble surviving due to personal politics.

Yep.

I have a longer comment in moderation which is bugging me… but what are ya gonna do?

This is my protest
against this moderation bs. It’s topical I think.

Lee Arnold,

Why do people who have great new ideas, such as Jobs and Wozniak, find that it is better to develop them in private capitalism than to explain everything to a worker’s commune?

What is your answer, if the financing were not an issue?

Of course, in reality, financing almost always will be an issue. But leaving that aside, you are asking the workers to bear the risk of the venture. The money to pay them has to come from somewhere. If not investors, then sales. And all those future profits they hope to share in will only appear if the venture succeeds.

Bernard Yomtov #223: “leaving that aside, you are asking the workers to bear the risk of the venture.”

I was getting to the intra-firm version of the knowledge problem. I think the answer is because it would be next to impossible to expect everyone in the commune to come together to formulate the new idea of the “personal computer” so that they would themselves come up with, and coordinate, the activities necessary to produce one, if nobody had ever seen one before. I don’t see how that would happen. Much later in the development of the personal computer industry, certain segments of the industry might do better as syndicates, perhaps. (But even then, Apple went moribund until Jobs came back in and revived it in his second time at the helm.) Innovations usually originate as ideas in single minds, or perhaps in two or three minds, and the amount of Polanyian tacit knowledge involved means it isn’t all spelled out, except in the doing of it.

Mattski #219 — “Singularity” means different things to different people. I think the original use of “singularity” was by Kurzweil and then other futurists, who hypothesized that at some point in the near future, computation will become complex enough that it will consistently outperform humans in creative intellectual discovery, even starting to perform automated scientific discovery, if only by sheer power of mass computation applied to combinatorial algorithms: just trying every possible combination.

From there, I think that the meaning of the “singularity” was extrapolated to the emergence of machine consciousness, like “Skynet” in the “Terminator” movies. I think this is unlikely, but it may get to some point where it is nearly impossible to tell if a machine is really conscious or not. (I tend to believe there will always remain test questions by which you will be able to tell the difference, related to jokes and other contextual jumps.)

Very recently, the meaning of “singularity” has widened to include the possible change in the economic system by far more rudimentary robots than either Kurzweil or the Terminator would require, due to the acceleration of simple labor displacement. Some of the videos of industrial prototypes of bipedal robots may suggest that this “economic singularity” is just around the corner, because it is really hard to imagine what sorts of physical labor these things will NOT be able to perform.

As I think Brad DeLong pointed out, we all know that the mechanization of agriculture pushed almost everyone into the cities to find, or invent, new kinds of work — but it is anybody’s guess where we all get pushed to, once that all kinds of work including intellectual work is mechanized.

Another reason that capitalism’s end may be just around the corner. Of course this has been a staple of science fiction stories for nearly a hundred years, so why be surprised that it is finally coming true?

J Thomas,

Thanks for the advice re moderation & keywords, although that might be a little over my pay grade. But from the looks of it “in moderation” seems to mean “no dice.”

Mattski @219,

We don’t like each other. That’s clear. You think I make “the left” look like loons. I think you’re a run of the mill conservative shill who flatters himself that you’re something a bit more: A dime a dozen liberal. Judging from your posts, it’s clear that you lack any moral compass and have such a limited imagination you can’t think out of the box, any box, and your favorite box is bourgeois and very small.

Plume,
You might have read The Village Against the World already? I just saw it in the local bookshop the other day.

“But few of us have heard of Marinaleda, a small town tucked away in Spain’s Andalusia region.

They are led by their charismatic mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who has held the position since 1979. “I have never belonged to the Communist Party of the hammer and sickle,” Gordillo notes, “but I am a communist.”

The core of Marinaleda’s communist ethic is a 1,200 hectare farm that was won through a decade of occupations and hunger strikes from the Duke of Infantado. The Duke’s property was just one of many instances in Spain of vast estates with arable land fenced off from the area’s surrounding, usually starving, population.”

http://www.critical-theory.com/story-marinaleda-communist-village-world/

Think of Family unit X. Parents of that family unit award points to their children based on chores done. They have come to an agreement with their kids about this. Another family might have totally different awards. But this is Family X’s. Ten points for cleaning up their room, taking out the trash, mowing the lawn. Perhaps higher points for other kinds of work. Award totals are theoretically unlimited. Numbers are infinite. Time, finite time, however, puts its own cap on this.

The kids can keep collecting their points for as long as they want, and the kinds of awards are reflective of higher totals, at least as determined by family X. They can trade their points for any of the approved goods or services, etc. Can can elect to do whatever chores are designated as necessary for the family.

And this works great for Family X, but it would work even better if the entire neighborhood embraced it. So it does. All families in that neighborhood set up their own point systems, and merchants agree to take these points in exchange for goods and services. This works great, too, but would be even better if it were county-wide, then state-wide, nation-wide (a bigger range of goods and services, etc), and people got together, democratically, to agree to standardize the system, democratically. As long as everyone agrees to the point system — as they basically do with our current dollar system (if only by default) — it hums right along.

And if other nations are not on board yet, a router system would be used. A metaphorical router, with real-world application. A router as currency exchange.

America, in this case, would have a closed system of points, no money, no profit, no capitalism, not even a ghost of a ghost of an iota of profit, capitalism or money. Again, it would be as if it never existed within that closed system.

But if other nations wanted to trade with us, the router, and only the router, would be the exchange, conversion and translation point for inside and outside.

Hopefully, the entire world would one day join us so we could ditch the router entirely.

Last comment for the night.

Some say a democratic workplace could never be effective. That you need bosses and others who hop to to the boss’s words, or nothing gets done. The USDE’s Wolff points to, and places like Mondragon prove this is incorrect. History has show a great many successful cooperatives, despite working within an adversarial environment. Imagine what they could do if the environment matched their internal democracy.

And, speaking of things never being black and white. A workplace democracy could be set up with rotating boards of directors, or whatever term one wants to use for day to day decision-makers. In a co-op workplace of, say, 1000, you could designate 10 or so to make the final call on day to day operations for a week, two weeks, a month — whatever period of time was agreed to by all 1000 workers. There would still be weekly and monthly meetings, like good old-fashioned town halls, where action items would be addressed, voted on. The big ticket items would all be up for a vote. But the daily routine would be overseen by a leadership group that was never the same after its time in the fish barrel.

An egalitarian structure, flexible enough to allow temporary, revolving blips on the egalitarian radar.

So, your answer is, you’re not going to do without bosses, you’ll just elect them.

I draw your attention to public choice theory, agency problems, and the double digit rate at which the assets of elected officials grow upon taking office. You give people the power to direct the use of assets, they, almost uniformly, treat them as their own property. Even if they’ve agreed in advance to direct their use to somebody else’s benefit.

In short, you’re not replacing capitalism. You’re just replacing capitalists. With politicians. I venture to doubt this will prove an improvement.

However, I also venture to note that, under capitalism, you’re permitted to try this out. As I said, capitalism is large enough to contain socialism. The reverse is not true.

Just in case it’s necessary for #236:

The family example is a metaphor of sorts for how this could work and expand from the coop form on out. The socialist basis for the economy would still be the public owns the means of production, all of it. Family chores would obviously not be the basis for the economy.

In 238, should have written WSDE, not USDE.

@218 lee
What is your answer, if the financing were not an issue?

Others have already taken a crack at this, but I’ll throw in this – the workability of different models whether socialist, capitalist, or any other ist in my view boils down to a matter of scaling. As Plume points out there are plenty of fine collectives that can scale nicely from a family unit to a small group to even a neighborhood size collective. The difficulty is making the leap from there to industrial size goods and services.

How do you design and build aircraft – what collective of 70,000 people agrees upon, procures and assembles a build list that runs into the millions of parts which in turn involves vendors with their own 1000s of employees. Its remarkable that it even works as well as it does with mass specialization and hirearchy, perhaps my imagination is limited, but I don’t see it happening is worker run/democratic for all context.

Equally, the financing is irrelevant at small scale, at some point depending on the project, it becomes relevant. Its fine to say a government would provide the funding, but then the collective is no longer really running their own shop with their own share in the risk rewards – they are using other peoples money (the governments) and their interest in optimization, economy and agency decline. As before, my imagination may be limited, but there are literally thousands of products I can’t imagine being created let alone produced in mass quantity without some organizing hirearchy to design, procure, quality control etc.

Not all people are cut out for all tasks – at some point roles need to be assigned. Once management starts, as someone up thread noted, it starts to become very hard to assign value. Its nice to suggest that everyone will come to agreement but human nature and experience tells me that as soon as someone is appointed a ‘decider’ there will be those who disagree and that’s where the first crack in the collective begins. Oftentimes very charismatic leaders can save these collectives, but then you’re just trading benevolent dictatorship for capitalist heirarchy.

Trader Joe 244,

It should be kept in mind that those capitalist industrial relations, supply chains, production numbers, etc. etc. all took a great deal of time to build. The infrastructure was built over the course of two centuries and, as this and other articles make clear, slavery had much to do with it.

Second, the public sphere made it possible in the first place. Take the public sphere out of the picture, and we never get to mass production of anything. There are too many factors to be listed without just going to a book, but a few key elements: roads and bridges, airports, the courts, public investment in R and D, treaties between states, treaties between nations, trade pacts; currency support, financial agreements, endless meetings and actions to prevent or contain debt defaults; well over 100 public sector rescues of international capitalism just since 1970; police, fire and rescue, disaster relief; and wars fought to defend or expand capitalist markets . . . .

Oh, and the Internet, computers, GPS, touch-screen tech, and 75% of all new pharma — for starters.

If America made the transition to real socialism, it would actually have more infrastructure already than it needs. One of the key aspects of a Green Socialism is to scale back to the sustainable, to localize as much as possible, to go back to use-value and dump exchange-value entirely. Both as a mission and a side-benefit, the economy itself would begin to recede in importance, while other life-spheres would reemerge: the cultural arts, the enjoyment of healthy, organic, sustainable food and clean water, love, family, friends, community, etc.

@247
A nice idea Plume, but as I’ve shared before, not something I imagine happening in the lives of my great-grandchildren.

I suppose the billions of people employed to make all of the products you find so useless would just paint pictures and compose operas to fill their days. The world barely finds productive use for much of humanity despite the waste and excess. You’re quite right there would be excess infrastructure, because related global GDP would be 1/2 the current level. I’m doubtful most would agree this would lead to higher quality of lives.

How do you design and build aircraft – what collective of 70,000 people agrees upon, procures and assembles a build list that runs into the millions of parts which in turn involves vendors with their own 1000s of employees. Its remarkable that it even works as well as it does with mass specialization and hirearchy, perhaps my imagination is limited, but I don’t see it happening is worker run/democratic for all context.

As automation expands, things change.

Automated systems make things to much tighter tolerances. They do not perform different on Mondays and Fridays. They do not figure out which things they can slack off on that won’t be checked, figuring that if problems show up they won’t be traced back to them.

This is going to make a giant difference in manufacturing. You can take your CAD specs and in theory (maybe in practice) you can go to multiple manufacturers for quotes and get almost exactly the same CAM product from all of them. Some of them might use substandard raw materials….

So anybody could take standard parts — millions of designs — and put them together in new ways. Or design new parts and get bids on having them made. But if you want to sell a new product then the question is whether it really works and what is its failure rate etc. The “improved” product must compete with things that already have track records.

Imagine that each giant corporation was split into many smaller corporations that each bid on jobs. The people who do sweeping and cleaning on the factory floor might be one company, and if they do a bad job or somebody offers to do the work cheaper, they might be offered a price to do part of the work while the other guys get checked out. They can also bid on other jobs.

In an automobile factory, each drop forge might be run by one company that accepts bids for using it, and if that forge doesn’t get enough business the company that maintains the factory building and charges them rent might suggest they take their drop forge elsewhere to make room for a better one.

There would not have to be any top management any more than there is top management in a coral reef. Companies create automobile designs, other companies research what kind of cars customers want, somebody puts together models and tries to sell them and pays everybody else out of what he gets for them. Anybody who has enough capital (maybe not that much) could choose designs from the design companies and advertising from the advertising companies and so on, and try to build his own brand of cars. Any company that does part of the work might choose to work cheap plus a share of future earnings, if they don’t have enough cash work to keep them busy.

Human work tends to be idiosyncratic. When you’re experienced on the job you know what the boss wants without him having to tell you. The new guy can’t keep up. And this is a big part of whatever job security there is. But in an information-rich environment that will be less so. Make well-defined products, and compete easier. To some extent accounting firms will be interchangeable, and so will all the rest of it. All it takes to plug in a new top management is to get new contracts with the various companies that do the work to make the products.

What’s the difference? It’s communications. What makes it easier to get good communications inside a single company with 1000 employees versus ten companies with 100 employees each? Mostly, secrets. You want to believe that your own employees will keep your secrets, and you don’t depend on that from contractors. If the secrets become less important than we can break companies into manageable sizes.

And that’s independent of how capitalist or socialist they are.

The client:contractor or client:professional relationship is not at all the same as the boss:employee relationship.

The rotations would make it impossible to reestablish class systems of dominance.

I’m beginning to remember more about what they said the LDS system was. Something like, you have a circle of 8 or 10 people, and leadership goes around the circle so you not only know who’s at the top now, you know who’ll be there next. It might be predictable which guy will join the next higher circle too. If it was truly random then maybe you couldn’t have that kind of class system.

Any walk down the aisle of the Target, a Walmart or any big grocery store tells us we could live without 99% of the products, and half of them are tossed, unsold, anyway.

I am allergic to lauryl sulfate, probably from lab accidents. If I go to Walmart and look at their shampoos, it looks like they all have lauryl sulfate. They’re all pretty much the same. They change the ingredients a little, change the color, use different bottles, and one factory can make hundreds of “different” shampoos. It’s because it has gotten so cheap to inventory lots of different items. It doesn’t mean anything really.

If you set up a socialist economy and there are two different shampoos instead of 60, would it make much difference? No. But if you sold the various shampoo ingredients separately and let people mix their own if they felt like it, then you’d have almost infinite variety available. I’ve seen the first signs that we’re heading in that direction. Like for example the soft drink machines at some restaurants that let you choose any of a large number of flavors from various companies, and let you mix them at will.

Go to a grocery store, you can get Coke, Pepsi, store brand, and a few other choices like Dr. Pepper and clones, orange soda and clones, a few kinds of root beer, etc. The soda companies spend a whole lot to convince you their flavors are special. Most people can’t tell Coke and Pepsi apart in blind testing, but they’re convinced they like one or the other. When you can mix whatever you want it’s a different world.

If you buy a shirt and there are only two styles available would it matter? Not a whole lot. But if you can choose your design and display your measurements to the automated tailor’s scanner, and then it creates what you want on the spot, that’s better than 30 styles on the shelves.

Niall @249,

I think that’s an inaccurate rationale. Though the real one might be worse. Our shelves are stocked with overwhelming plenty to make us feel wealthy (vicariously, perhaps) just looking at all of that stuff, and to give us the illusion of far more “choices” than we could possibly ever need or use. It’s an aesthetic, marketing rationale, serving no valid or positive function other than to keep shoppers coming in to those stores. But the waste is off the charts. Americans waste at least 50% of all food produced, primarily because we stock in anticipation of future sales and need, not to order. Some stores and restaurants do a pretty good job of saving some of that waste, moving it instead to homeless shelters and hunger pantries. But it’s still 50% lost, even with that. Other items, with seriously dangerous ecological repercussions, like our endless use of plastics, just get chucked.

In another sense, however, the East German’s weren’t that far off. The consumption porn on display would seem to hide the fact that Americans do starve to death, are homeless, do suffer true deprivation, die from the cold, the heat, from unsafe water, from lead in the environment, etc. etc. Our mass consumer/consumption society masks the underbelly of this nation, and distracts us from taking a real, tough look at ourselves and the mass inequality caused by our capitalist system with its natural base of economic apartheid.

And your monetary system is terrible. What keeps me from giving my kid 20 points for washing dishes while someone else pays only ten?

If everybody can make as many points as they want and everybody else is supposed to accept them on some fixed scale, that isn’t going to work. That’s so obviously not going to work that I’m pretty sure that isn’t what he’s saying.

There are lots of ways that could work. I think all of them have certain similarities to money, which after all is a point system similar to what he describes. But in the current system banks get to create money from nothing and lend it. Presumably in his system somebody more responsible would create the points.

IOW,

There is no such thing as “capital.” There is no need for capital formation, either through tax collection or investor collection. Localities vote for what they need, and draw from their own pool of funding, which they all hold in common. Each locality draws its funding from their region. Each region from the entire society. Individuals have accounts. As do localities, regions and the country as a whole.

Labor is what backs the “currency” and gives it value. Not gold. Not real estate. Not the military. Labor. If we can build it, and we vote that we need it, we do, without regard for funding, because funding is, theoretically infinite . . . again, the only real limiting factors are time and labor capacity.

No one goes hungry, lacks education, transportation, health care, etc. All food is grown organically, safely, sustainably. All water is clean, safe. It’s Green Socialism, sometimes called ecosocialism, and sustainability is paramount.

All of this is via a Constitution, with prices and wages set in stone, voted upon by the entire populace. The entire populace works on its own behalf. The collective works for the collective in Green Socialism, unlike in capitalism, wherein the collective works for single owners, or small groups of owners.

Nothing could be more rational or logical or humane than for the collective to work for itself, and without the need to make a few people rich, all work is compensated. And without the need to work for profits, work hours can be radically reduced. No more unpaid labor. That is burned out of the system forever.

So, in your hypothetical socialist society, every other possible way of life is completely illegal, “burned out of the system forever”?

Rather, make sure we do our best to live in harmony, etc. And to make that more likely, we need a system that encourages it, instead of suppressing our natural extincts for cooperation and harmony.

Capitalism suppresses those extincts, and elevates and encourages selfishness, short-sightedness and conflict.

Again, no mas.

J Thomas,

in the current system banks get to create money from nothing and lend it

Well, not exactly.

Plume,

I honestly do not know where to begin.

No need for capital? I wonder if you know what capital is.

A “collective” that works for “itself,” whatever “itself” is? Go join one if you like. I’ll pass.

Purchasing and consumption decisions made by majority vote? I’d prefer to decide for myself what to eat and wear and so on.

No boom and bust? Why?

No money? What about your precious points?

No private ownership? You mean I’m not allowed to go into business for myself, no matter how much I may want to do so? Or will I require the approval of the collective, or what?

Fixed prices and wages, “set in stone?” Are you also going to set in stone what exactly any particular good is?

I think your ideas are ill-considered and uninformed nonsense. Their adoption, even if it could be managed, would be catastrophic – a nightmare.

If you want to address the many flaws of our current arrangements, I encourage you to do so. But you badly need to understand both its flaws and its strengths, not to mention its basic mechanics. I do not think you do.

Brett Bellmore,
“Well, you know…”

…And what have you done?

Has this book been translated from nonsense-speak into English? I thought only impressionable undergraduates wrote stuff like this. Agh, those first two paragraphs… they just hurt.

Bernard @264,

This isn’t about democratic votes for your personal consumption and purchases. This is about democracy in the workplace, with the means of production being held in common. Your own home? That’s your castle. What you do inside your own home? Your business, as long as you don’t hurt others.

The commons are everywhere except for your home, and your personal space. You have personal autonomy wherever you go. You just don’t get to hurt others.

Correct. No boom and bust. Why do we need them? Again, this isn’t capitalism. It’s something totally different. You can’t analyze it using the rules of capitalism, because they don’t apply. That would be like using the rules of chess to analyze a game of Risk.

Think outside the box.

The ideas above mix my own with many other thinkers and traditions. A few of the key sources:

Richard D. Wolff. Read his work on WSDE.
http://www.rdwolff.com/

Gar Alperovitz:
http://www.garalperovitz.com/

Participatory Economics
http://vanparecon.resist.ca/

And Mondragon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Bernard,

Also, if you work for a company right now, you’re in a collective. Every business with a workforce is a collective enterprise. But in capitalism, the collective works to make the boss rich, and does so through a goodly portion of its working day being unpaid.

In real socialism, the collective works for itself. It owns itself. It does not work for a few people. The collective is identical with ownership. The collective owns the collective. And that extends out to the even larger collective of the community, the region, the nation. The nation being the sum total of all collectives, and a collective itself, also identical with ownership. We all own the economy, together. In capitalism, we don’t. A tiny fraction of the society owns it, runs it, controls it, tells us how much our time is valued, sets prices, sets wages, to benefit that tiny fraction, not us.

Real socialism alters that. We the people set prices and wages, to benefit we the people. We the people own the economy, run it, control it, agree democratically regarding how much we value our time.

Nothing could be more rational or logical or humane than that.

I lived in Eastern Europe in the Gorbachev era. When I arrived, I went to buy a winter coat. There was a full rack of them – all the same size, a rather small size. It was like a bad parody of communist claims of equality. Someone there told me that it was a mistake, of course, but the coats were there now, so no new ones would come until they were at least mostly gone. And they were moving very slowly. Nobody was going to get any benefit from sticking their neck out to fix the error, still less from trying to determine its source, and no one had any particular incentive to care whether the store sold coats or not. In fact, if it didn’t, less work. No one would be fired or laid off if sales went down.

The economy was indeed in the background, and this was a problem. An economy on autopilot gets overtaken by entropy pretty quickly. The coat thing was a minor annoyance, but shoddiness and indifference pervaded everything, and the people there were sick of it. The aggregate effect was economic stagnation and gradual decline. They voted for Thatcherism as soon as they had the chance. Big mistake, of course. In their situation, rapidly privatizing and deregulating just dealt them into a game wherein they had a losing hand. They didn’t understand how unemployment is different from people just not working (they had a lot of experience with the latter), and how the threat of unemployment changes the situation of employment in ways that, yes, make products and services more efficient and responsive to needs, but also compel people to deal with a lot of insecurity. But they also decided (with Western encouragement, to be sure, but it was a popular choice at the time) to leap fully into the sea of capitalism, trying to construct a boat before they hit the water. The entire region got chomped by sharks, many foreign, but some local, and after a few years, many people had regrets, but it was too late.

As for Lenin, what he meant by state capitalism was his NEP – a system that involved a lot of old-fashioned for-profit private enterprise, but with the state controlling key sectors and generally guiding the ship. Stalin abolished this, and it stayed abolished, so this description does not apply to the later SU.

In comment #43 J. Thomas wrote:

“I talked to somebody who had worked there. I asked him about that, and he said he hadn’t paid any attention, he just went home every day instead of attending meetings, it was just a job.

It sounded like for awhile employees had worked hard to run the business, but later they decided to pay a competitive wage to proven professional managers, and the professional managers ran it exactly like a normal company with stockholders. Just the stockholders were the employees.”

I think you’re onto something here, but are underinterpreting it – who the hell wants to run the company they work for? I thought it would be cool when I resented a-hole bosses, but when I thought about what it would actually entail – getting involved in all the decisions about changing the product, the marketing strategy, etc., I had no interest in all that stuff. I wanted to leave it at the office when I went home, and, from what I could tell, so did almost everyone else. Do you think everyone working at McDonald’s wants to go home thinking about how to make a better burger? Alienation of labor has its advantages. Decision-making is work, after all. It easily induces exhaustion in ways just now being studied. This socialist dream of getting people involved in every decision that might conceivably effect their lives – no thank you. Half the people don’t even vote for President; you want people to vote on everything?

And suppose they did. This is the problem for Jobs and Woz. It is not funding, per se. That is the symptom. The problem is that no innovation is going to be embraced or understood instantly by the majority of people, so to have innovation individuals and small groups must be able to command resources to act independently. A while back here, people were talking about how the generous British welfare state enabled people to be somewhat comfortably idle and do things like learn music – that’s how we got the Beatles. Maybe so, but the only reason we know about the Beatles is that Capital Records decided they were worth putting resources into recording.

Also, with majoritarian control of all resources, there is no recourse against majority prejudices. Under the current system, if I want to open a mid-eastern restaurant, I have to try to determine if there are enough people who would like it in my town to make it viable. The majority may hate the cuisine and have lots of biases against the culture associated with it, but unless this is taken outside the law to violence, it doesn’t matter. Would gay culture ever have gotten off the ground if every gay business or activity needed majority approval?

In comment #277, Martin Bento writes: The problem is that no innovation is going to be embraced or understood instantly by the majority of people, so to have innovation individuals and small groups must be able to command resources to act independently.

It’s worse than that! Individuals and small groups must be able to act stupidly and champion ideas and innovations that are doomed to fail. Overconfidence, pride, competitiveness, braggadocio – many entrepeneurs and innovators are what the rest of us technically refer to as arseholes.

But once in a while they luck out and their ideas, which look unworkable to everyone else, turn out to be genuinely brilliant and we get real innovation. Most of the time, not, and they fail, wasting resources.

In Plume’s utopia, this would never happen, as no-one would back these crazy jerks. Of course, to Plume’s mind, that’s a feature: innovation isn’t wanted – it’s a steady-state economy, we don’t want any upsets as we trade our stone axes for animal skins.

Martin Bento,
“but when I thought about what it would actually entail – getting involved in all the decisions about changing the product, the marketing strategy, etc., I had no interest in all that stuff. I wanted to leave it at the office when I went home, and, from what I could tell, so did almost everyone else. ”

I think this goes to John Holbo’s post about whether you can have a romance or even a pleasant comedy with incompetent and corrupt main characters that falsely imprison innocent people to keep their jobs (I do not of course mean to suggest you yourself are incompetent or corrupt or have ever falsely imprisoned an innocent person).

You can have a pleasant bucolic tale full of cowherds etc who do not participate in the great politics of the classical days. But these people live very simple lives whiling away all their days and being happy for gifts of quinces and such. when you come to our days in our technologically advanced etc societies it is a great tragic problem – because our day to day lives involve uses of and involvement with such things that cause poverty and hunger and displacement, great cruelty to animals, deforestation, extinctions of animals and birds and plants, too great a use of nature as resources, great amounts of pollution on land and in sea, and dangerous climate change etc.

If people do not involve themselves in making the needed reforms and in ensuring that these reforms are not evil mass murdering reforms – like happened in Russia after the ‘superfluous man’ genre depicted the 19th C Russian gentry generation in the pivotal time after the Crimean war – there is a very terrible avoidable evil tragedy just around the corner like all those 20th C terrible things that should not have ever been done :(

This is another real life solution to a trolley problem (my apologies if you have already seen it)

http://youtu.be/YORxs9E2Ex0

“Brett Bellmore,
“Well, you know…”

…And what have you done?”

Aside from demonstrating the local shortage of Beatles fans, I’ve not advocated a theory which requires ruthlessly “burning out of society” every other possible social arrangement.

Which is more than can be said of Plume.

Plume wrote:

” If the benefits [of a mutually-beneficial trade] are distributed in unequal fashion, then it is not a win/win proposition. It is a win/lose proposition. ”

This is, of course, false and an abuse of language. Bruce Wilder pointed this out:

” If social cooperation creates an incremental surplus of 5, and one party gets 3 and the other party gets 2, over and above the results of not-cooperating, then cooperation benefits both. Benefiting both does not require that both parties benefit equally. I feel there’s something seriously wrong, when this has to be explained.”

So Plume doubled down, and demonstrated that it not only needed to be explained, but would not be grasped when it was:

“The original claim was that capitalism produces win/win transactions. In order for that to be the case, compensation would have to be equal. ”

He then “argues” that he is right because capitalism is evil, evil, evil.

Get this straight, Plume. What you are arguing here is the definition of a win/win transaction, and the evilness or otherwise of capitalism has no bearing on that question. If both parties benefit, however unequally, it is win/win. That is what the phrase means.

That you would define a mutually, but unequally, beneficial situation as a win/lose situation is telling, though. If you gain something in a situation, but regard it as a loss if the other party gained more, then the reverse must also be true. If you lose something in a situation, you will regard it as a gain if the other party loses more. So if you have a small house and your neighbor has a larger house, you commit arson on both. You lost less than he did, so that is a “gain”. And, viola, you’re also more equal. Isn’t that nice?

This is the politics of envy that Romneyite Republicans accuse the left of. It is rare to actually encounter a specimen of it. Putting people who think like this is charge of a country, of course, can only lead to an egalitarian society foraging in the ruins.
“”

“The original claim was that capitalism produces win/win transactions. In order for that to be the case, compensation would have to be equal.”

Before you pipe up, Mr Bento: ritardando! Un poco piu lento! Your theory has lost
opportunity cost! Take this as a timely memento.

Plume,

Correct. No boom and bust. Why do we need them? Again, this isn’t capitalism. It’s something totally different.

Who said we needed them? But as Niall McCauley points out, your system would guarantee them. Similarly, your system of prices and wages set in stone would guarantee the prices would be wrong, leading to all sorts of problems of allocating goods, services, labor, etc. These of course will inevitably be “solved” by the collective, or rather its “managers.” Good luck with that.

As for working for a collective, well, I don’t. And if I did I would at last have some choice about switching employers, or going into business for myself. How would that work in your system. Does “no capital” mean no starting new businesses, because you know, that requires capital in one form or another. Am I allowed to switch jobs, or is that prohibited if the collective wants me to keep doing what I’m doing?

#280

Individuals and small groups must be able to act stupidly and champion ideas and innovations that are doomed to fail. Overconfidence, pride, competitiveness, braggadocio – many entrepeneurs and innovators are what the rest of us technically refer to as arseholes.

But once in a while they luck out and their ideas, which look unworkable to everyone else, turn out to be genuinely brilliant and we get real innovation. Most of the time, not, and they fail, wasting resources.

So, say you’re part of a business which is doing OK. They work together and they make a product, it sells, everybody gets enough and there’s resources to replace things that wear out etc.

You come along with a new idea which requires that they stop what they’re doing and do something different. If it works they might be more productive and get more rewards. If it fails, wasting resources, they get nothing.

Your new way may not fit their skillsets. They must learn new skillsets. It may not fit their abilities. People who were important before get demoted, people who meet your needs become important.

And it’s possible that they make a technically perfect product which does not fit the needs of the market. Like, you might make a word processor which is perfectly suited for the legal profession — except that the judges say that all documents must be WordPerfect.

Why should everybody follow your vision when they have an alternative that works fine?

Maybe the thing to do, is start a new company and hire a bunch of malcontents who didn’t do very well at their previous jobs. Start small. Figure out how to use your workers, test out the market, grow if it works. If it doesn’t work then stop before it costs you too much and try something else.

And you might be able to build that approach into various different sorts of economic systems.

Plume @269

Perhaps I was a bit cliché in describing you. But I am glad you are wanting a better world.

There are alternatives but they will come in the struggle to improve capitalism, not in doing away with it. Capitalism gives us something to work with and the tools to make those improvements.

Civilization is propelled and renewed by engines. Capitalism is one of those engines.

I once worked for a small hi-tech company that — before my time — had tried paying their employees partly in company stock. They figured that would help employee morale and make employees more responsible etc.

But they had a high employee turnover. They did simulations and worked out that the way they were going, in a few decades the company would be owned almost entirely by ex-employees. Worse, the ex-employees might sell the stock and the company could wind up being controlled by — anybody.

It isn’t really fair for the person who first starts a company to own the whole thing and get all the benefits (unless he chooses or is forced to sell some to investors etc). Is it fair for people to get ownership just from working at the company? Somebody spent an hour sweeping the floor 20 years ago, that gives him a share in ownership forever?

It makes a kind of sense that the workers should own it, but the devil is in the details of how they do that.

There are alternatives but they will come in the struggle to improve capitalism, not in doing away with it. Capitalism gives us something to work with and the tools to make those improvements.

Free markets can in theory provide an environment for a sort of evolution. Do things better and you in theory can prosper and gain a bigger share, the more efficient you are the more resources you get to control to improve the economy. If somebody else thinks they can do better, they get to try on a small scale and build up if they’re right.

Capitalism is not free markets. Capitalism is a system for people who gain control of businesses to take all the profit. Not the same thing at all.

To my way of thinking, the government ought to find ways to nurture free markets. When the government sees markets getting less free, it should find ways to make them more free. It should encourage competition based on efficiency etc, and discourage competition based on superior capitalization, advertising, price-fixing, closed markets, access to distribution channels, government corruption, etc. We should look for ways to design markets so they self-regulate and require less government intervention to avoid the problems that make them less free.

Whether capitalism is a good way to decide who gets the benefits, is an open question. If we could design the system so that capitalists could not use their capital to get anti-competitive advantages, if they could not use it to destroy free markets, then we would be in a better position to let various systems of ownership compete and then find out in the real world which is more efficient.

Also, quick addition.

Yes, there will be “innovation.” Even under capitalism, most innovation comes from the public sector, either directly or indirectly. The public sector brought us the Internet, computers, touch-screen tech, GPS, satellite tech, and roughly 75% of our pharma. There is no reason whatsoever that a truly socialist nation couldn’t innovate well beyond anything done via capitalism. Remember, even in the private sector, the vast majority of workers make zero profit. Profit is completely irrelevant to them. They make a paycheck and they bust their butts for their company all the same.

In fact, since we know that one of the biggest sources of anxiety and dissatisfaction with work is the knowledge that bosses or peers make much more, an egalitarian framework would actually reinvigorate the workplace. And, the knowledge that you are also an owner of that enterprise, a direct owner, adds more meaning to the job. There is no one owner. Everyone is an owner, etc. The collective is we the people. We the people are the collective, etc.

And, yes, you can switch jobs. In fact, that’s encouraged. And with all training, schooling, artisanship, craftsmanship being free for everyone, simply for being a citizen, no one is left behind. Money is no barrier to gaining new skills and knowledge. It’s there for the taking for 100% of the population.

The goal would be similar to this, from Marx:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

The EMH should hold in any situation where the noise traders are distributed reasonably symmetrically, that is that the number of excessively pessimistic investors and the number of excessively optimistic investors is close enough to balance that the marginal investor is rational. This condition doesn’t hold during a crash or a bubble, it however appears to hold in more normal market conditions. The inability of most fund managers to match the performance of an index tracker investing on the basis of the collective wisdom of all investors tends to support the EMH holding much of the time.

Martin: “And Niall is correct that the majority of ideas do fail, but that does not stop innovation. Innovation requires acceptance of failure.”

Fine, acceptance of failure it is. Nevertheless, I get the impression that all (or almost all) major innovations come from the public sector anyway, they only get commercialized, brought to the consumer by the private sector. Instead of a bulky cell phone you get a slick one. Which is important, but it’s not really about innovations; this is something else.

Innovation. It’s interesting. Innovation within the already existing system of capitalism is a matter of faith. Building a better mouse-trap within the system of capitalism is expected. But building a better system itself, one that would completely replace capitalism? That meets with scorn and derision. That kind of innovation, apparently, is off limits.

Strange.

So, on the points. The reason it’s much, much better? Because it’s a separate, independent stream of never-ending funding, unlike in capitalism. And unlike in capitalism, it doesn’t take away from some one else’s ability to earn enough. There is no finite pool of funding for payroll. It’s a separate, independent stream of never-ending funding for individual workers, communities, regions and the nation.

In capitalism, the price for a good or service is the stream. It must contain enough to cover business costs, profits and high compensation for executives. Prices under capitalism are set by a tiny fraction of society and for its benefit. Prices in this new society, OTOH, are set for everyone’s benefit, by us, together.

With the innovation (riffing off traditional socialism) I’m suggesting, the price of an item is actually irrelevant, other than as a way of accounting, of making sure that wages are sufficiently matched up with prices to guarantee everyone gets what they need — at least. We all agree to and set prices low enough, and wages high enough, so we can all afford to be comfortable. Our cost of living will never exceed our ability to pay for it, as long as we work and gather those points. And we also agree that at a certain age, 60**, I’m thinking (subject to democratic processes, of course), we can retire. At which time we receive our pension, per year, and the pension is enough to remain comfortable without extra work on the side.

**The funding stream for that pension is another proof of the superiority of this system. Again, it comes from an unlimited pool of numbers. No taxes are necessary. It is not debt. It does not have to be paid back. All that matters is that we all agree that everyone receives said pension when they retire.

The work week would be something like 25 hours for each of us. Since we no longer are working to make profits for others, to make others rich, we can work less and produce what we need, what we decide together we need. If people want to work extra, they can. But we would standardize a certain top end to the work week so people don’t drive themselves into an early grave or create more than a minimal amount of inequality.

Stephen,

Yes, I can argue this consistently. Why? Because in the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and North Korean systems there was no democracy. The people never owned the means of production, even through a proxy. In the system I’m suggesting, there isn’t even a proxy. “The state” doesn’t own the means of production. We do. Literally. There is no middleman between us and the state. There are no political parties, elections, permanent jobs in the bureaucracy.

We all do a four year stint in public service. My suggestion is that the first year is at the community level, then we go to the regional congresses, then the federal level, than back to our communities for our final year. Then we go home. Public service is finished.

Within all the production outlets, there is no permanent leadership, either. We rotate leadership councils, and operate with full democracy in place. No one has a fixed position of leadership within a business, community, region or nationally. All citizens rotate in and out of those positions.

Plume,

So your answer is, “No. People would not be able to start their own businesses.”

You might note that most small businesses do not become Google or Apple. The owners do not become filthy rich, though they often make a comfortable living from running a hardware store or restaurant.

Apparently that offends your sense of morality. For all the complaining about workers being wage slaves you are perfectly happy to enslave them to the whims of your collective. We know where that leads, and I’d prefer we not step in that direction.

You defend that on the grounds that your system will provide lots of whatever is needed for anyone, and we’ll all retire comfortably at 60. Bosh. There is zero reason to believe that, and no one with an ounce of common sense will do so.

The fact is that any economic system must allocate labor. It’s part of the definition of what an economic system does. If you propose to do it in a way that does not respect the wishes of the worker you are a tyrant. And make no mistake, that is exactly what your system implies. Can you really believe that collectively (which means politically) set production goals can be met without telling workers where they have to work, and what their assigned tasks are – even those who would prefer to be poets?

Hard to fathom.

Bernard, you are arguing with Plume as if you think he has a coherent position.

I think his complaints about capitalism have some merit. But when he talks about what to do instead, it looks to me like he mostly strings some words around and believes he has solved the problems. You can’t expect to get very far arguing with him because he has no concept of what an argument in favor of a superficial description of an entirely hypothetical economic system would look like.

If he would write computer programs that would simulate pieces of his economic system, and show how they fit together, and maybe eventually fit them all together into one big system, then it would be easier to understand what he’s saying. Assuming that he in fact has a coherent model in mind.

As it is, he takes a problem with capitalism, asserts it would not happen with his system, writes a little word salad that describes his system working without the problem, and goes on from there. You can’t argue with it because there’s basicly nothing there to argue about.

When you think you have a gotcha that will keep his system from working, you are likely wrong. A system that fits his description could have things that get around whatever problem you describe. It could have something that fills the needs that money fills, better than the way we do it. He hasn’t described how that would work, but it could happen without his description. There could be a way for new businesses to be created, and if they don’t work out to be dissolved. There could be incentives for innovation that still allow an egalitarian economy.

When you describe something you think capitalism does well that you think socialism can not do, you are describing something that a socialist system might need a social innovation to handle. We can’t say that it’s impossible, unless we know about every social innovation that socialist systems are capable of. So it’s hard to prove that it can’t work. But Plume’s descriptions so far shouldn’t give much confidence that he knows how it would work. And that’s potentially OK too. If people try to fit into a socialist system and they make unconscious adaptations, without really noticing what they do and maybe with wrong explanations why it works, they could still have a working system. Lots of capitalist explanations why our system works as well as it does are completely bogus, but the system still mostly works.

If we had to understand the system before it could work, we’d be in a sorry mess! But luckily, all we have to do is fit in and play our parts, and it can work without anybody understanding it.

1″If I work for a company that makes shoes, I am not necessarily going to have any great ideas how to do this in a more environmentally sustainable way.
2 Even if I do, if that hurts the bottom line of the company, and I am part owner of the company, I have an incentive not to do it.
3Larger-scale decisions beyond my own interests belong in the political and social realm.”

1. I don’t work for a shoe company, but off the top of my head I can think of needing harder wearing soles, more professional or backyard cobblers to keep existing shoes in life longer (my grandfather worked for a bank but cobbled his family’s shoes out of work hours to keep them in use longer), recyclable components, and if the components come to the end of their usability and recyclability they should be biodegradable without emitting greenhouse gasses or taking too long to break down. Also people only need a very small number of shoes at any one time in their lives, not all sorts of ones in different colours etc to go with outfits etc – just a small reasonable number of long lasting hard wearing shoes.

2. These reforms are likely to affect the bottom line of your shoe making company – nevertheless because we do not wish and ought not to inflict great climate disasters and extinctions etc shoe making companies should be reformed (some one with expertise is likely to have better more complicated suggestions than my off the top of my head ones – I talked to someone about whether we could recycle metals indefinitely – they said one problem (apart from rust when metal is not cared for appropriately) is the metals do not list their elemental ingredients on the outside and if you mix all sorts of steel for instance you can end up with Pig Iron – that was the nickname of our Prime Minister Menzies – so you need their ingredients listed and to recycle the ones with the same ingredients together for the same type of use as their previous use)

3. The problems are economical as well as social and political – so they need to be addresses in all relevant realms.

4. “This idea of having a vote among many in your company as a way of saving the world: which company do I work for that is going to save the world, and how do I get them to listen to me with my one little vote?”

4. In your sustainable shoe making venture you could have deliberations and a consensus reaching process instead of a vote – then your voice should be heard ? if you do not know shoe engineering yourself as a recently commenced member of the venture you could ask the company’s existing shoe engineers your questions about sustainable shoe engineering. Also your company could go back to the days of guilds and mechanic’s libraries and schools – so you could enter the shoe making company at the very lowest level as a humble apprentice but through your studies at your venture’s mechanic’s library and school you would learn all about sustainable shoe engineering and eventually be a master of it yourself.

I think you would need an economy more community and people based than currently to become sustainable in a way people could be happy/ok with.

Our unsustainable economy means people can try to enter as competitors through using more resources with their own twist/lower cost – but this is allowed because we now allow and encourage a great overproduction of things that is not at all sustainable. If we limit production and consumption to being sustainable as we should – then people would have a much harder time trying to enter as competitors – therefore there would be very little mobility in a sustainable capitalist model and it would likely also be very unequal because the people who held the capital when we put the sustainability limits in place would retain capital and no-one could compete because that would be unsustainable.

It would be like trying to keep playing Monopoly after some one has obviously won and can no longer be beaten, but you gave to go round and round the board just the same ad infinito.

J Thomas:

If people try to fit into a socialist system and they make unconscious adaptations, without really noticing what they do and maybe with wrong explanations why it works, they could still have a working system. Lots of capitalist explanations why our system works as well as it does are completely bogus, but the system still mostly works. . . . If we had to understand the system before it could work, we’d be in a sorry mess! But luckily, all we have to do is fit in and play our parts, and it can work without anybody understanding it.

I don’t know that there’s really this definite “thing” called capitalism, or a definite thing called socialism. Like mattski, I feel it seems like a lot of word salad at times, and simply denial and wishful thinking at others.

Meanwhile, there’s the world at is, and the problems of humans and human political economy, imperfectly understood and imperfectly solved. Overthrowing “capitalism” is offered as a blanket solution, as if we could pull “socialism” off a shelf, and then it would be completely different. And, better.

It is kind of exasperating, though no less exasperating in its way than the complacency of those, who think that we can always just muddle through, somehow. And, I guess we do muddle through, until we don’t, and, then, what does it matter?

We don’t know everything. We don’t know enough to usher in utopian socialism. But, we do know enough to do better.

Some architectural mistakes, once made, can not be overcome. I think Plume is at his best, when he comes close to pointing at some of these fundamental problems in the architecture of political economy.

Incomes for the powerful, which have no limits, no ceiling, are clearly not workable. Not in theory and not in practice. Whether we enact ceilings tied to the base income of the lowest paid employee, or we enact high marginal tax rates for the most highly paid is detail. The important point is that an open-ended, money incentive drives people to do all kinds of socially-destructive, expedient, ruthless behavior. To create positions of power and responsibility, where an executive can make enough to live well for several lifetimes in the course of a couple of good years, is to invite the creation of tournaments for executive promotion that only a psychopath can win, and then to encourage incumbents to behave ruthlessly in getting while the getting is good — to lie, cheat and steal, to get that bonus. It’s crazy to design an economy to revolve around such a principle.

You can argue that that’s capitalism, and we have to overthrow “the whole thing”, or you can argue that we have to reform executive pay, to save capitalism from itself. Regardless, to have a decent society, we have to find ways to guard the guardians. As always. In every political economy, however labeled.

My point is that, though we don’t know everything, and we may depend, dynamically, on improvisation and inventiveness and innovation, and incremental adjustment, there are principles of architecture that ought to matter to us. The post is titled, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery is an architectural principle, which a minimally aware enlightened self-interest ought to reject with an emphatic confidence, moral and pragmatic.

It really shouldn’t require genius to see that we can not allow people in the most powerful leadership positions incomes limited only by their own ruthless greed and expedience. If the president of some corporation can earn a multi-million dollar bonus by cooking the books or dumping toxic waste or breaking a union, she will do it. And, if we set up promotion tournaments for such positions, which only a psychopath can win, we will get psychopaths in the C-suite.

It is when he’s pointing out the absurdity of paying the Chief Executive whatever he can extract, up to and beyond 400x what an ordinary worker earns, that I think Plume is at his strongest. I don’t follow his call to overthrow capitalism, per se, because I don’t see that capitalism is a well-defined thing, distinct and wholly apart from human nature. But, every society has to find ways to constrain its elite, to guard the guardians. And, we ain’t doin’ it.

Some architectural principles just don’t wash. There’s no point in going forward, if you are going to concede them, because they just poison whatever follows. It cannot work. For-profit health insurance is absurd, for example. The Euro is seriously defective. A financial system, where no powerful crook ever goes to jail is not a financial system that will work well, no matter how clever the other, watered-down reforms that change nothing, may be.

mattski complains that the left frequently looks like loons. I don’t disagree. But, the greater weakness on the left is simply weakness. We have formless ideals, where we should have principles and some conviction that some of those principles actually matter.

Bruce, thank you. That was coherent. I agree with you and with Plume about all of it.

I got an idea how to say something from it.

Even though nobody understands the details of how things work now, and probably nobody will understand the details of any future system that works well enough to maintain itself, we can have design principles that we agree should be followed, for moral reasons. First we have the principles, and then we find a system that can work with those principles.

We have agreed that slavery is bad and should not be allowed. There was a time when people thought that the system required slavery. The textile mills had to have a whole lot of cotton, slavery produced the cotton, and there was no way to produce that much cotton without slavery. You couldn’t make people do the kinds of things it took, unless they were slaves.

But when we got rid of slavery, it turned out that other ways worked even better. Sharecropping produced lots of cotton, and sharecroppers were not slaves. They worked themselves as hard as they needed to, with no overseers and no whips. Nobody was legally responsible for them except themselves, nobody told them when to get up in the morning, the mere threat of starvation was all it took.

By eliminating slavery we got a better system with more freedom, that actually worked people harder and with far less overhead.

It may turn out similarly with wage slavery. Wage slavery has gotten encrusted with regulations telling people how they have to treat their wage-slaves. I’ve read that in some cases you need one wage-slave just to track the federal paperwork to handle three others, though in the one example where I actually saw it working, it was one in eight and they took care of payroll and other internal matters too.

If we could get rid of wage-slavery the way we got rid of slavery, make everybody independent contractors, we would get rid of all that regulation, get rid of a whole lot of overhead, and the contractors could take care of a lot of the paperwork themselves. More freedom all round. Do we really need employees at all? If every single person was an independent business owner, we could eliminate one of the class distinctions.

I don’t know that we want to eliminate wage-slavery the way we eliminated slavery. But it’s a moral issue that we can handle on moral grounds, we don’t have to decide ahead of time all the details of an alternate system and prove that it would work. If wage slavery is wrong the way slavery is wrong, then we should get rid of it and shut down any industries that can’t work without it. Chances are, they will all work just fine.

Bruce,

That was very well done. I think you kind of got us all on the same page!

My belief is in transparency & debate. Let’s push for more disclosure as a general principle throughout our economy & society. Let’s encourage debate based on increasingly open information as to who is making what $ and how are they making it. Human beings have strengths and weaknesses. We have selfishness, we have fears, but we also have consciences–an innate sense of fairness–which flourishes best when the facts are visible.

J Thomas @317,

No. I in no way want to “eliminate everything but my alternative.” I keep repeating how this would be full democracy, in reality, not via proxies, with no ruling class, on the way to no classes, period, as the goal. The workplace would be a democracy. Society would be a democracy. In truth, not just rhetorically. My suggestion is just to establish a foundation for that. If my ideas are voted out, so be it. They probably would be.

The thing is, I just don’t see that there is any way around the fact that capitalism is innately anti-democratic and autocratic, from the getgo, that is naturally concentrates wealth and power at the top. So how do you establish true democracy when the economic system in place is against democracy? Doesn’t it make more sense to use an economic engine that is itself “democratic”? Doesn’t it make more sense to use an economic engine that doesn’t require so many checks on its natural tendency toward the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands?

As a metaphor: Capitalism is like cigarettes. Conservatives and propertarians want to smoke those cigarettes straight up, without filters. Liberals want to put filters on those cigarettes to mitigate for some of the most harmful effects.

Those of us who are leftist, anticapitalists think it just makes a lot more sense to get rid of the cigarettes entirely.

Plume writes: Those of us who are leftist, anticapitalists think it just makes a lot more sense to get rid of the cigarettes entirely.

If your utopia ever comes about, we’ll need those cigarettes for currency.

First, what makes you think everyone wants to be an independent contractor and deal with the risk and yes, paperwork, that implies? There are those – plenty of them – who prefer a steady paycheck to all that uncertainty. They are not choosing slavery, simply less risk.

Less perceived risk. If they get fired and find that they must now compete with younger workers for entry-level positions, they will find out about the risks they had conveniently ignored.

Most of the special advantages of employment are legislated. Social security, workplace safety, etc. Imagine that back in the old days we had legislated benefits for slavery. When your slave gets old you have to give him less work and still full housing and food and medical care etc. You can’t just sell him down the river for whatever you can get. Then it might easily turn out that a lot of people prefer slavery to the risks of freedom. But that doesn’t make it right.

Second, how does an independent contractor differ from an employee in your notion?

He would be free and not a wage slave. Duh. Wage slavery is immoral.

Why would such a contractor be able to command higher pay than the employee, and what would be the terms of the contract?

He might not get more pay. Why should he? Very often sharecroppers did not eat as well as slaves had. The details of each contract would depend on the contract. If you are an independent contractor and you see a contract you don’t like, then don’t sign it.

Third, why does that get rid of the regulations? Why should it?

When we got rid of slavery, a whole lot of laws etc just no longer applied. All the laws about what to do with an escaped slave etc, just stopped being enforced. Gone. If there are no more employees then all the laws and regulations that regulate employees will no longer be in force.

Take, for example, worker safety rules. One good justification for such rules is that workers, or contractors, are often unable to determine for themselves whether the workplace is safe.

We certainly don’t want unsafe workplaces. How do we keep that from happening?

It would be a cultural thing. There are various approaches to make sure that workplaces are usually relatively safe. Like, if you have insurance for that, the insurance company has an interest in making sure your building is safe etc. If contractors working in your workplace can sue for injuries, and their relatives can sue for death, that’s an incentive. To the extent that current laws only cover employees we could get new laws. Do whatever works, whatever fits the culture.

I don’t have to work out ahead of time everything about all the alternatives. If wage-slavery is wrong, then we should quit doing it and we will then do whatever else we can find that works.

Q: Second, how does an independent contractor differ from an employee in your notion?

A: He would be free and not a wage slave. Duh. Wage slavery is immoral.

Duh yourself. This is no answer at all. It’s as incoherent as Plume’s comments.

Employees are no less free to resign and seek other employment than a independent contractor is to terminate a contract. If you are utterly committed to the idea that an employee is a slave then I guess we have little to talk about.

I don’t have to work out ahead of time everything about all the alternatives. If wage-slavery is wrong, then we should quit doing it and we will then do whatever else we can find that works.

No. But you should have some practical suggestions.

The fact is that huge numbers of people work as employees of various enterprises large and small. A great many of them are quite content. Now, maybe they are all stupid and blind and need the likes of you and Plume to show them the Truth. But I don’t think so. In fact, some of them, dare I say it, are as bright as you are.

The fact is that huge numbers of people work as employees of various enterprises large and small. A great many of them are quite content.

Not only content. Oftentimes affluent, quite affluent, as well.

J Thomas, I agree with Bernard Yomtov you have a tendency sometimes to lapse into incoherence.

And speaking of slavery, let’s go back to Plume’s wondrous system of paying everyone some amount determined by the collective.

That seems to suggest that if someone wants to pay me more for some task I am not allowed to accept the offer, or am required to work for what the majority party thinks is fair.

That sounds a lot more like slavery to me than the usual employment arrangements in modern societies.

It would be a cultural thing. There are various approaches to make sure that workplaces are usually relatively safe. Like, if you have insurance for that, the insurance company has an interest in making sure your building is safe etc. If contractors working in your workplace can sue for injuries, and their relatives can sue for death, that’s an incentive. To the extent that current laws only cover employees we could get new laws. Do whatever works, whatever fits the culture.

This is extraordinarily dense. Being able to sue after you, for instance, die is not a real substitute for regulation.

Sorry to post twice in a row but soemthing else just occured to me.

As a an employee I was in fact freer than as a contractor.

When I was a contractor I agreed to carry certain projects to completion, and was presumably liable to lawsuits and the like, not to mention not being paid, if I failed to meet that obligation.

When I was an employee – wage slave or not – I was under no such obligation. If I chose to resign and go elsewhere, or pursue a career as a musician or painter, there was nothing to stop me (aside from lack of talent, of course).

This is extraordinarily dense. Being able to sue after you, for instance, die is not a real substitute for regulation.

No, and MAD is not a substitute for getting nuked. But in theory it can help prevent you from getting nuked.

(In practice, nobody has gotten nuked for 70 years whether they had MAD or not. So it’s complicated.)

Nobody wants industrial accidents, not owners or managers or anybody. (Well, insurance scammers maybe.) If we get the word out about how accidents happen then everybody involved will try to avoid them, if they believe it. Problems come when managers simply don’t believe they need to do what the experts think they need to do, or when they don’t get the word. Both problems are palliated by inspection by professionals who know how to avoid accidents, and the first problem is palliated further by laws and arrest ability by inspectors, so that managers have no choice but to obey.

Managers who don’t believe particular sorts of accidents happen, are also swayed by the prospect of lawsuits. When they hear about it happening to somebody else, that affects them.

All part of getting the word out and getting people to pay attention to it.

Depending on the culture, other methods may be more effective.

The issue is not what managers want, but rather their incentives. If the expected costs of an accident are less than the costs of prevention then managers, in the absence of legal requirements, will not take preventive steps.

And also they pay for the accident only if the accident happens, while they pay for the prevention ahead of time, regardless.

So if courts tend to decide that the penalty for an accident is lower than the cost of prevention divided by the assumed reduced probability of the accident, then it is not even rational for managers to pay that expense.

It’s only natural that whenever there’s an accident we figure out something that should have prevented it and require everybody to do it that way. But some of our ideas are not cost-effective and some are even bad. Something that’s supposed to prevent one kind of accident might not work and also occasionally cause another kind.

So it would be better to require a random sample of businesses to try out a new method, and not allow the rest to try it, until we actually find out whether it’s an improvement.

But we don’t do it that way because safety is not actually a high priority.

Well, people from Australua who work in mining and go to the US to work – upon return say that the US safety and environmental regulations for mining are much less extensive and permit more risk and damage than in Australia.

Some years ago I talked with a coal mining safety officer. He was pretty demoralized about his job, because the miners resented him and were not afraid to show it. They refused to wear respirators and they tore down the dividers he was supposed to keep up. They didn’t want to have to put up with things that intefered with doing their work.

They felt like they were special. They did dirty dangerous work for high pay, and they did not mind the idea that they would get black lung and die in pain earlier than necessary.

The iron workers I went caving with had similar ideas. They did not want to use safety equipment. They wanted to walk across girders 50 feet in the air with no safeties, and a few of them died every year, and the danger made them special.

I don’t know that this is relevant, but if the Australian miners are less macho than the American ones, they might want more safety regulation.

That doesn’t explain the environmental stuff at all. There’s probably something about America that affects both of them.

Harold, that makes sense in this context. You can be macho and say you can take it. Or you can be even more macho and say that you’re going to force the mine owners to do things your way.

There might be some other way to look at it which fits even better, though.

I am not very convinced of your personal communication with a safety officer.

ZM, that conversation did happen. It is anecdotal evidence. I got it second hand and when I tell you that makes it third hand.

I think it might point to something real that goes beyond that one person’s experience, but I can’t argue from it just how real that general tendency is.

Yes, his experience was that he was supposed to enforce safety rules and that miners resented him and complained bitterly. There could be various reasons for that. If miners were allowed to get more money by better results, they might object to safety precautions that slowed them down — which his did. I tend to believe that in some times and places the workers themselves object to some safety rules, and maybe one reason for that is that they have bought into the glamor of working a dangerous job. I don’t want to say that’s the only reason for them to do that, or that they are the only reason for reduced safety.

And it will be even less of one if we do away with regulations as you seem to want.

“Seem to want” is the important phrase there.

If we no longer have employers and employees, then all the laws about how employers and employees treat each other are obsolete. But we can make whatever new laws we want about contractors, or communes, or syndicalists, or visitors, or innocent bystanders, or anybody we want to make laws for.

We can have lawsuits if we want to.

The court of public opinion can tell careless people that they are bad, bad, bad and that might have some kind of effect on something.

We can do anything we want, that’s compatible with the culture. But if we collectively decide that just like slavery is evil and must be illegal that wage-slavery is also evil and must be illegal, then that will be one option not available, because it will not be compatible with the culture.

I still await your explanation. I take it at this point that you have none.

Further, if a lot of people are gathered someplace to work the various hazards do not disappear if you call them independent contractors, or employees or anything else.

Bernard, you have not made it at all clear what you need explained.

Of course work hazards do not disappear if you change your business from capitalism to anarchist-syndicalist or socialist or, well anything. If you want to change the hazards you must change the details of the way you perform the work. And in general you don’t find out whether the new approach is less hazardous until you do statistics across a large enough sample.

Oops, accidentally didn’t paste the beginning of my last comment. Meant to start with this:

I wrote:

“who the hell wants to run the company they work for?”

and J. Thomas replied:

“People who choose a king to run their nation for them, find their country is owned by a king.

People who choose elected representatives to replace the king tend to find their representatives act like they own the nation, and even sometimes draft them to fight the leaders’ wars.

The ultimate in this is selling yourself into slavery so you aren’t responsible for managing your own self.”

Think how many decisions large and small Barack Obama or any other President has to make in a week. You want to do all those by direct national referendum? Forget it. People have to get informed. They have to debate and deliberate. All these decisions you are giving them are work, and they will react to it as such. Even if they want to avoid all that work, which they will, they have to make the meta-decision of whether to participate in each case, and if few participate, which few will in most decisions, what is the point of broad participation that doesn’t actually occur?

Yes, selling yourself into slavery to simplify your life is ridiculous. But what is described above is also ridiculous. Sensible human arrangements live between these extremes.

J Thomas,

I am confused.

“If we no longer have employers and employees, then all the laws about how employers and employees treat each other are obsolete.”

But you are suggesting independent contractors. Is your entire population made up of independent contractors – and if so then where do they go to to get the contracts they need?

If they are not all 100% independent contractors – then you still have the split between people who tender for contracts, and people who ask for tenders and award contracts. So there would be a power imbalance and I think you would need regulations – don’t you think?

I would also like to point out you have too simplified a view about kings being chosen all of a sudden and then owning all the land – kings have lots of advisors and councillors and judges and KCs and duties and obligations and people have various channels to go through to get a fair hearing etc. Also – the land is crown land – not the king’s personal property (the Queen might have some personal castles I think (owned by the family rather than the title) but I can’t remember which and maybe I’m wrong?…).

Keep in mind, Plume said no proxies: direct democracy for everything. [….] What’s funny is that he considers this a way to put the economy in the background – by making everyone get involved in every aspect of it.

Well, but he wants a system that changes slowly, that produces the same simple products year after year and only in the quantities people need. That makes the decisions much easier.

Currently that is a luxury which is denied to us. Our existing technology is not sustainable — we have no choice but to change it. We must bet our lives on new technology which may not meet our needs. We must change our institutions around to fit changing new circumstances, and do it before we can test. We must test and rebuild on the fly. We don’t know how to do that well but we have to do it anyway.

Capitalist theorists say that capitalism lets people make tremendously complex organizations where nobody understands the whole thing, and no other system can do that. Nobody understands all the steps to make a pencil. Systems organized by central planning can never work because the planners can’t handle the details, only free markets can do that.

But what makes our system work is that it has slowly evolved, so that when one businessman sees that what he is doing works for him, he can do the same thing a little more. It is bad at dealing with sudden or large changes. There are lots of ways to manage things that change slowly, and so far no good way to handle things that change fast.

When we geared up to produce a tremendous amount of military stuff in WWII, the government used Leontieff input-output matrices to plan the economy. Say they needed an extra thousand tons of steel to build tanks. That required extra coal to run the blast furnaces, it required extra railroad traffic to get both coal and steel to the right places, etc. The extra coal required more miner-hours and maybe more miners. The extra railroad traffic might require new railroad-cars and those would require more steel. They did their best to plan out what they would need and produce it, because if they waited for shortages to tell the economy what to produce more of with no planning, they would have to deal with the shortages and years of delay. Their planning was not at all perfect but it was faster than waiting.

I don’t say that planning is necessarily good, but the attitude that it is morally wrong will probably get in our way.

The faster our feedback loops, the faster they can respond to change. We need that.

Also, we need to reward extra capacity for important raw materials. It costs to be ready to make more of stuff than we expect to need. If you pay to be ready to make too much and that capacity goes unused, you have wasted your money. If you can’t make enough and there is a shortage you get extra money. But if you have excess capacity and so do your competitors, they are likely to bid down the price to get market share, unless you can arrange a deal with them not to.

Facing uncertain times, we would be better off if we could arrange to get extra capacity — just in case — without it being so disruptive. I’m not sure how to do that.

It’s hard to do good planning around complex feedback systems. Easier to just let the people who are already making decisions keep making them — even when the system (accidentally?) gives them perverse incentives. That’s easy, and it is dramatically inefficient and it sometimes gives us very bad results.

Anybody can offer a contract, and anybody can accept one. Why is that confusing?

Why should there be a shortage of one side or the other? Well, right now we have a shortage of jobs.

Anybody can offer a job, and anyone can accept one (subject to being able to do the work, of course).

If we have a shortage of jobs right now why on earth would that be solved by using your contractor system? The demand for labor would not change.

J Thomas,
I thought saying I am confused sounds more polite. I am trying to improve the politeness of my writing in disagreements. This is quite hard because mostly people seem to think it is overall more polite if you agree with them, hopefully I will become more accomplished at this, but you will have to bear with me while I practice I’m afraid.

You say everyone can apply for contracts and everyone can award them in your society. In our society legally most all people can award contracts – but they must have a sum of money to pay independent contractors with. Also in a lot of cases they need to have facilities and maybe mechanical infrastructure and raw materials and so forth.

some people do not have such sums of money and facilities etc so they must tender for contracts and sadly cannot ask for tenders and award contracts as they see fit after all.

In your society how do you separate who can ask for tenders and award tenders from those who must settle for being independent contractors (if it is sums of money and facilities it is much the same as now)? And what regulations will you have governing relations between awarders of contracts and contractors? And how will you govern safety and environmental needs ?

As I said, in our society the liberal party likes to encourage independent contracting – but it is generally thought that this is because their traditional enemies are the unions and ‘red tape’ (they mean regulations but call it red tape metaphorically because people like regulations more than they like real red tape ).

In your Ford Motors equivalent example I think Ford Motors do use contracts – I have read about their bad labour practices in parts of the world (not to mention their green washing about their vehicles’ high level of GHG emissions) – I wager (a very small wager) that they do this by contracting. I notice lots of businesses in the West use contracts with Asian companies so they can aver the bad labour conditions are not their own fault but the fault of the Asian companies. Also I would need at great sum of money to compete with Ford Motors in automobile manufacturing (it is already the case that people can compete with Ford Motors if they have sufficient sums of money). Plus it would be very unsustainable – we already have too many cars – imagine if I had such sums of money that I would like to manufacture automobiles like Ford Motors – we would have an even greater too manyness of cars.

In your Walmart example – I have heard from visitors to America you have a greater preponderance of these sort of shopping centres – you could break the company up and build more nice old fashioned walkable human scale high streets with parks. But you will have to figure out how to contend with the Walton family (are they the current owners?).

I thought saying I am confused sounds more polite. I am trying to improve the politeness of my writing in disagreements. This is quite hard because mostly people seem to think it is overall more polite if you agree with them, hopefully I will become more accomplished at this, but you will have to bear with me while I practice I’m afraid.

Thank you. ;-) Similarly I thought it was better not to joke from your straight line since it does not advance the conversation but only (perhaps) cause hard feelings.

In our society legally most all people can award contracts – but they must have a sum of money to pay independent contractors with. Also in a lot of cases they need to have facilities and maybe mechanical infrastructure and raw materials and so forth.

It depends partly on the size of the contract. If I get many small contracts instead of one big one, I have the advantage that it is less like having a boss. And if something goes wrong, I can lose some small contracts and that’s a warning, while a single big patron may just drop me with no warning.

In your society how do you separate who can ask for tenders and award tenders from those who must settle for being independent contractors (if it is sums of money and facilities it is much the same as now)? And what regulations will you have governing relations between awarders of contracts and contractors? And how will you govern safety and environmental needs ?

I repeat, it is not my job to work out all those details ahead of time. If wage slavery is wrong, then we have an obligation to get rid of wage slavery. We will find alternatives that work better. I suggested contracting as a possible alternative.

In your Ford Motors equivalent example I think Ford Motors do use contracts – I have read about their bad labour practices in parts of the world (not to mention their green washing about their vehicles’ high level of GHG emissions) – I wager (a very small wager) that they do this by contracting.

Yes, they do lots of contracting and have pretty much from the beginning. They also have a lot of employees.

Also I would need at great sum of money to compete with Ford Motors in automobile manufacturing

It depends. If you did it today, you would need to build a factory and hire employees and a lot of things like that.

But if Ford didn’t own their factory but only got to use it through contracts, maybe you could use a lot of existing stuff. You go to the same people Ford contracts with, and ask them to build your cars too. They *might* offer you a good deal, something above their variable cost. They are better off when they have more customers rather than fewer customers. If Ford is their only customer then it’s almost like having a boss. So they give you a good deal while you’re small and getting started, and if you get market share and actually become a competitor that’s good for them. Some things might be hard. If you hire Ford’s engineering people to design and test your new car, it costs about the same to do that well whether you make a thousand of them or ten million, and they probably can’t go down on price a lot. Maybe they can do everything mostly standard except the particular distinctive differences you want. It might not be that expensive.

Plus it would be very unsustainable – we already have too many cars – imagine if I had such sums of money that I would like to manufacture automobiles like Ford Motors – we would have an even greater too manyness of cars.

Cars cost too much. We pay a lot for advertising. Car companies say that customers demand lots of expensive extras — power windows, computerized door locks, etc. They say they could build a fuel-efficient cheap car, but nobody would buy it because that isn’t what customers want. Is it that they are good at telling customers what to want? There are so few competitors that customers don’t really get alternatives?

I think it would be good for people to get more real choices about cars, even if it’s a dying industry that will mostly get phased out.

And if we got a lot of cars that were all basicly the same but just looked different, and people wanted that, I woudn’t complain much unless it drove up prices.

“I repeat, it is not my job to work out all those details ahead of time. If wage slavery is wrong, then we have an obligation to get rid of wage slavery. We will find alternatives that work better. I suggested contracting as a possible alternative.”

I think maybe a refinement of what is wrong might be needed. I think inequity, and great poverty, and over consumption, and causing greenhouse gas emissions, and killing people or exiling them or unfairly imprisoning them are wrong among other things. I think what you call ‘wage slavery’ may be a symptom of the wrong of inequity, and also the economic laws and practices involved in ‘wage slavery’ are implicated in other wrongs eg. great poverty, at the same time as over consumption.

I do think when the abolitionists decided to go to war over slavery, afterwards was the period of reconstruction. But even after slavery was abolished and there was reconstruction African Americans still were not treated rightly – they had to sit at the back of the bus, there were lynchings, and other things. Even after the civil rights movement they still are not treated rightly – they are locked up more for drug crimes, they are underrepresented in professions and government and so forth.

Similarly, I went to a talk a month or so ago by Janet Cherry who was part of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She spoke on the strategy, nationally and internationally. They agreed on core values to focus on – equal political rights. They also wanted a more fair economy – but this ended up being more secondary. They found bringing the struggle to places that had remained unaffected important – eg. In to high end white shopping strips instead of just poor black townships. Also , they found unexpected allies – a lot of young white men actually were not all that happy to be constricted into military service , so going AWOL on purpose against apartheid suited them fine.

So they did win equal political rights and Mandela was freed and other things. But economic reforms were not so forthcoming. So even now social and economic equity needs to be struggled for, and now we are in a period where unsustainability and climate change are worse even than they were in the Me decade. She didn’t talk at the forum on her views on equity and sustainability (lots of the talks were on how to engage elites, so it might have been too disagreeable, and I guess she’s learned to pick her battles), but I found this article afterwards

“There is a lot of truth in the ANC Discussion Document, The Second Transition. There is plenty of food for thought, and it is indeed positive in itself that the document has stimulated such debate. But I would argue that it does not go far enough: in confining itself to the language of race, neo-colonialism, super-exploitation, white monopoly capital, and so on, it restricts the really transformatory possibilities that are needed: a new kind of socialism based on decentralised, localised, participatory economic democracy. This argument can be taken further when related to the threat of climate change linked to the current model of industrial production based on fossil-fuels and a consumer society where economic success is measured by waste.”

who do you think are the radicals that don’t design utopias ? some people have tried to design Utopias , but maybe you don’t count them as radicals? Or their designs as utopian? I think Tarfuri is the person to read on this, but I have only read a few chapters. Also I am not sure who you count as oppressed? If you are relating to the Janet Cherry quote I think a lot of people in the anti-apartheid struggle were oppressed – I am sure they would have talked about planning and laws/policy – but I think the struggle itself was immediate and took precedence. This is understandable I think.

I am sorry, but I can understand each word of the Lyotard – but I can’t comprehend it as it is more of a fragment than anything else and is without context. While this is very likely my own reading deficiency, it would be helpful if you could explain it more plainly?

But in general it’s wrong for people to be put into circumstances where they must do what a boss tells them, with no real choice.

What you are arguing is that organized behavior of any sort is wrong. Whether you submit to the will of your boss or submit to the will of a collective hardly matters. Organized behavior–civilization, if you will–requires your cooperation…

You are also constantly eliding the freedom to quit. The freedom to quit is a real choice.

I don’t see a whole lot of difference between arguing that it is wrong to have to do what a boss tells you to do and arguing that it is wrong that we have no choice but to eat food to survive. Seriously. If you think hard about the word ‘freedom’ you won’t make such an idol of it. One man’s freedom is another man’s humiliation, and worse.

“Your company has a new product. Your job is to develop the new advertising line. After months of effort, you present the plan in front of a lot of important people. The CEO listens to five minutes, says “This is the stupidest thing I ever heard of” and walks out. You are not fired but everybody avoids you because they know you have no future at this company. You have no future anywhere else doing the work you have specialized in.”

A company has a new product. It contracts with you to develop the new advertising line. After months of effort, you present the plan in front of a lot of important people. The CEO listens to five minutes, says “This is the stupidest thing I ever heard of” and walks out. Your contract ends and is not extended. You have no further opportunity to do the work you have specialized in for other companies.

“You get a job in a hardware store. You memorize where to find everything. You do such a good job that the owner lets you run the tools section all by yourself. It’s a giant mess, but you start organizing it and set up so you be efficient. Ever couple of weeks the boss looks at what you’re doing and gives you a little nod like he’s well-satisfied. About the time you have it organized and efficient, the boss fires you and hires his nephew to run the tools section. “

A hardware store owner contracts with you to organize his tools section. When you have finished your contract ends and the boss hires his nephew to run the tools section. Since there are apparently no other hardware stores that need help organizing you must cast about, without an income, looking for something else to do.

“You work at a job you hate. You have a mortgage and if you sell your house for what you can get for it, you will still owe a lot of money. The closest job you can get for comparable income is 300 miles away. You must do whatever the boss wants, and he is not very good at revealing what he wants.”

You have signed a contract with a compnay to do some work you have come to dislike, and the boss is unpleasant and unhelpful, etc.

” But in general it’s wrong for people to be put into circumstances where they must do what a boss tells them, “

Do you prefer a position where you must do what The Collective tells you? You have some choice about your boss, none when in the grasp of The Collective.

In any case what you are describing is normal problems in any organization. And if you imagine that things can get done when all decisions must be made my workers’ votes then you are wrong. Indeed, you are morally wrong, because that will lead to more of the impoverishment and coerced labor than we see today.

An uncle of mine used to maintain that the American ideal of a leader was someone like a benevolent bus driver (as opposed to a dictatorial drill sergeant, or minaret, I guess).

J Thomas, I’m not sure what the problem with paid employment is meant to be. I don’t really understand why that specific type of contract is undesirable. It seems to most people that a voluntary contract of employment is a perfectly satisfactory way to relate to the party paying you.

Due to the lower tax paid by the self employed there is a certain amount of disguised employment, people who claim to be contractors but are actually employees. This means there is a legal definition of employee for the purposes of taxation.

Due to the lower tax paid by the self employed there is a certain amount of disguised employment, people who claim to be contractors but are actually employees.

Sure. People are good at blurring boundaries. Lots of slave-owners found that they did better to give their slaves incentives as well as punishments. Carrots AND sticks. Even though they had no legal obligation to pay slaves anything, it worked better. And various jobs that looked like paid jobs amounted to slavery. Like, at times sailors on commercial ships were not allowed shore leave and not paid. In theory they would get their back pay if they were ever allowed to quit, but if they died first it could be conveniently forgotten.

I am not interested in the kegal fictions so much as the realities.

Due to the lower tax paid by the self employed there is a certain amount of disguised employment, people who claim to be contractors but are actually employees. This means there is a legal definition of employee for the purposes of taxation.

No, more tax is paid by the self-employed, at least in the US. Less tax is paid by companies that buy services from contractors instead of hiring employees. In the US there are equal employee and employer shares of gross wages that go to funding Social Security and Medicare under FICA. If you are an independent contractor you have to pay both the employee and employer portions. And it’s regressive: the FICA tax rate is flat on gross wages up to $117,000, no FICA taxes apply on gross wages over $117,000.

When there are labor shortages the bosses/landowners have a choice of either paying the workers more or enserfing them (as happened in Catherine the Great’s Russia) and of course the post-reconstruction South before the invention of mechanical cotton pickers in the 1940s. Sea captains could legally beat their sailors also, and, I think, even impose capital punishment (not sure about this). Masters could also beat their apprentices — who were usually teenagers. It was a rough life.

Wage labor is a fairly recent phenomenon, as I understand it.

I’m in the UK where the national insurance paid by the self employed is rather less than the combined employers and employees part of national insurance. I had intended to mention that but obviously forgot. The mention of HMRC (Her Majesty ‘s Revenue and Customs) wasn’t enough. It comes up due to the different tax treatment meaning that there is a reason for a legal definition based on substance rather than form.

The basic deal in employment is that the boss gets to tell the employee what to do.

It is reasonable to suppose that this deal, applied to the organization of production work, adds value or economizes, in some way compared to alternative ways to organize production.

And, it is reasonable to suppose that the incentives of the deal between employee and boss generally support the boss having the leverage necessary to tell them employee what to do and get compliance.

And, the general form of the deal is: the boss promises to pay a wage — generally relatively fixed or invariable as to rate — and the boss can fire the employee, and being fired will be costlier to the employee than to the boss.

If being fired was not costly to the employee, then the boss threatening to fire the employee would not be much of an incentive to do what the boss wanted.

If firing the employee was too costly to the boss, then the employee could get away with defying the boss, at least in matters that did not disproportionately affect the value of output.

For lots of jobs, the wage and other terms are set by employers as a take-or-leave-it deal, with collusion among employers, but without unions or other forms of organizing among potential employees. So, wages, generally, will be set too low, and other contract terms will be too onerous.

Can we set social norms, organize politically and enact laws that will offset this tendency for a power relation to result in economic relations that harm the welfare of lots of people?

I don’t think I’d blame the power relation for severe inequality. I’d blame social norms, and politics. The power relation is necessary for getting things done efficiently. Someone has to have the power to say, “Enough talk, let’s do it this way.”

Yes.? And when the time comes to decide who gets the goodies, the one who has the power to say “Enough talk, we’ll do it this way” will definitely not get less than his share.

He gets to decide how much his share is.

And when the time comes to make other decisions, even decisions that he does not officially get to decide, he has some say because he can obstruct other people with the decisions he does get to make.

Doesn’t it make sense that people will be rewarded according to their clout? And people with no clout are not slaves because they have the right to quit. They have the right to be unemployed, or to look for another job where they will have no clout.

Social norms say that it’s normal for people with clout to get the rewards and people without it to get the punishments. Politics is mostly unadulterated clout.

You argue that if everybody had the same amount of power, we could not get things done efficiently. You might easily be right. Certainly it would be impossible to run a slave plantation efficiently without slaves and masters. If nobody forced the slaves to work hard, the slaves would not work hard. It’s almost axiomatic.

And prominent attempts to be fair to everybody have all looked incredibly inefficient. The 1848 Paris thing. Occupy Wall Street. People talk and talk and talk and nothing gets done until some authoritarian force with guns clears them out.

Obviously when one master decides what the goal is, and makes everybody else do whatever best furthers that goal, the result will be more efficient toward that goal than any other system could be. Obviously.

And it’s more efficient for one master to decide what the goal is than to have people yammer about it. All the time that gets wasted deciding what to do when there is no master to decide for you, could be used to efficiently work toward the master’s goal.

When negotiating with an employer, like with any contract, the compensation depends on how easy to replace you are. A shelf stacker at a supermarket isn’t in a strong position as lots of people are willing and able to do the job. People who work in sewers tend to be fairly well paid as not that many are willing to do that work under any circumstances. Other jobs are well paid as they require unusual skills.

I once spoke with a professor who had made a study of cooperative enterprises (the oldest are in Northern Italy, by the way, date from the Middle Ages, and are still going strong). He said that many many have been successful, but that when a profit could be made, invariably they get taken over by for-profits. An examples of a businesses that started out as a coops is (I think) was a well known camping supply company. I think it may have been Eastern Mountain Sports (?). But there are others. Donald Sassoon saw similar trends in industries in both self identified socialist economies and capitalist ones post WWII.

“The argument I don’t like goes like this: When people are free, it’s hard to control them. And that means it’s hard for bosses to efficiently control them to get the result that the bosses want. Without bosses there isn’t even any way to decide what everybody needs to do so they can be forced to do it. Therefore freedom is bad.”

I don’t think that’s an argument anyone is making. Employment essentially consists of
“I give you money so that during work hours you do what I tell you”. There isn’t any force involved there as if dissatisfied you are perfectly at liberty to seek other employment or go into business on your own account. It’s possible that you don’t have valuable skills and cannot find a better offer.

What we are saying is that when people have attempted to create a replacement to the market what they actually create turns out to be a command economy they actually do use force to make people do things. By arguing against the market you are arguing for a system that has ended up involving forced labour. Capitalism involves giving people enough money that someone voluntarily does the thing, while ruling out using coercion. Basically we know that a market economy can operate without force, we don’t know that of any alternatives.

ZM,

Even Bernard Yomtov who rails against The Collective is likely to live in a some sort of a collective I would wager – a town or a city most likely..

Yes. I do live in a city. But I hardly think it qualifies as the sort of collective Plume, for example, seems to want. (It’s not clear to me what J Thomas wants.)

The city does not control what I do for a living, who I work for, whether I can organize a business or hire others, the types of production I and other residents am to engage in(1), my income, the distribution of goods in the city, or prices or wages(2). It does not issue “points” in lieu of money and require that those points be used for alll transactions. In other words it is not remotely the sort of “economic democracy” that Plume fantasizes about.

So no, it’s not merely about mobility.

(1)Of course some activities are generally prohibited within the city, but this is not for economic reasons as much as for health or safety reasons, or to avoid nuisances. I can’t run a pig farm within the city, but the “collective” does not stop me from running one elsewhere and commuting.

(2)Aside from possibly setting a minimum wage.

J Thomas @ 386

Obviously when one master decides what the goal is, and makes everybody else do whatever best furthers that goal, the result will be more efficient toward that goal than any other system could be. Obviously.

And it’s more efficient for one master to decide what the goal is than to have people yammer about it. All the time that gets wasted deciding what to do when there is no master to decide for you, could be used to efficiently work toward the master’s goal.

It’s actually not obvious to me. Maybe, you were being sarcastic, in which case, my apologies for being literal.

I don’t think the economy associated with coordinating a division of labor with command is expedience. I don’t even think expedience, per se, is efficient.

There are definite problems associated with organizing work with a hierarchy and bosses, which you have described eloquently. One of them is deciding what to do. As painful and frustrating as a badly run committee meeting can be, assigning the task of deciding what to do, to a sole tyrant, is not usually a good idea. There are occasions and circumstances when expedience is called for — emergencies, say — but even in those cases, expedience, to be effective and efficient, must have been prepared by prior deliberation. That’s why armies have war plans, tactical plans and training; why corporations do disaster planning and strategic planning and operational planning, why the police and emergency services have elaborate procedures and train, train, train.

The supervisor-subordinate relationship works as an economic relationship for productive activities in relation to a different set of challenges and for a different set of reasons.

The supervisor-subordinate relationship, where the boss owns the output and makes a contingent promise to pay the employee a fixed wage — do as I say, and get paid or get fired — breaks the incentive bound.

The incentive bound is what makes self-discipline so difficult to achieve. If you are your own boss, you bear the costs of carrying out your own instructions and you cannot escape trading those off with the value of output. I really want to quit smoking, but it is so hard — maybe right now I’d rather smoke than quit smoking; I’ll quit tomorrow.

The problems of the incentive bound just multiply with an uncoordinated group cooperating in producing a joint output. At the margin, so to speak the language of economists, each person’s effort may be required to achieve the joint output, but each person only realizes a fraction from the output, and is conscious of their expected reward being at risk for the failure of any other member of the group, failures that might jeopardize the joint output being achieved at all.

Not disagreeing, though, at all about hierarchy being problematic for human welfare and satisfaction.

Wage slavery is a deliberately pejorative way of describing the relationship between an employer and employee. It is inaccurate to the point of being actually deceitful. The actual effect using it seriously has is it makes you look like a far left fanatic (as opposed to using it humorously). The problem with that ideology is that, at best, it produced economic failure and, at worst, pyramids of skulls.

You say that if “wage slavery” is wrong we should stop doing it. You haven’t however given any coherent reason to think that it is wrong. This implies that if “wage slavery” isn’t wrong we should carry on with it.

It doesn’t involve coercion As an employee is free to leave at any time. You might be worse off but that’s why you choose to take the job in the first place.

“As an employee is free to leave at any time. You might be worse off but that’s why you choose to take the job in the first place.”

Guaranteed basic income (a decent amount) could make it true. Otherwise, the alternative is not “worse off”, but homelessness and possibly death of starvation.

“As an employee is free to leave at any time. You might be worse off but that’s why you choose to take the job in the first place.”

Guaranteed basic income (a decent amount) could make it true. Otherwise, the alternative is not “worse off”, but homelessness and possibly death of starvation.

To be fair, if you starve to death that is not your ex-boss’s responsibility. He gave you a job out of the kindness of his heart, and he told you what to do, and you didn’t want to put up with it so you quit. He had no obligation to let you work for him. If he had seen you starving on the street before he hired you, it had nothing to do with him and he didn’t owe you anything at all. Likewise, after you quit he owes you nothing.

The world does not owe you a living. If you apply for a thousand jobs and you don’t get any of them, it’s because you were not the best applicant for any of them. It is entirely your responsibility to be the best. Maybe you are applying for jobs that are too good for you. If you lower your sights — apply for jobs that pay less and have worse working conditions, you might be the best applicant then.

Maybe you aren’t working hard enough at getting a job. Anybody can get one if they work hard enough at it. If you don’t have one, that proves you aren’t working hard enough to get one.

Besides, economic theory says that the economy always creates more jobs. Supply creates its own demand. So if you don’t have a job it means there’s something wrong with you, not that there can be anything wrong with the economy. If you starve to death it’s because you deserve to starve.

If you have a job, and you think it isn’t good enough for you so you quit, and then you can’t find anything better — that was a stupid mistake! It was entirely your fault. You should have known better. Most people know better.

This is entirely different from being a slave and trying to escape and they track you with bloodhounds and bring you back and whip you. Entirely different. If you have one job and you can’t get a better one, and you don’t quit it, that’s entirely your own choice. Nothing like being a slave and not trying to escape. No similarity whatsoever.

@400

Worse off might mean quite a lot worse off. That doesn’t have a lot to do with anything. You could look for a different job before quitting, or not. It doesn’t change that if you decide that you aren’t being paid enough for doing what the employer wants you can quit. What the alternatives are affects your choice, you still have a choice. And it tends to be easier to get a job offer if you are already employed….

@402

Your employer isn’t under any particular obligation to employ you in the first place, you aren’t under an obligation to continue working for your employer. If you want to quit they are not allowed to prevent you, that is what makes it not slavery.

Your employer isn’t under any particular obligation to employ you in the first place, you aren’t under an obligation to continue working for your employer. If you want to quit they are not allowed to prevent you, that is what makes it not slavery.

Yes. But consider the extreme case. There is nothing to say that the system won’t evolve to its ultimate, where one person owns the world except for the wages he pays everybody who works for him — enough wages for them to pay their rent to him, and to buy food at his grocery stores and restaurants etc, not enough to buy a plot of land from him at his prices, or to buy a cash register or a commercial website if they wanted to go into business for themselves.

The owner can choose to employ you or not. And you can choose to work for him or not. If you choose not to work for him, it’s very unlikely anybody else will hire you at a living wage. And if he chooses not to hire you then you’re pretty much out of luck.

If you don’t like the job he chooses for you, maybe he’ll let you try out something else. There’s nothing that says he has to be a *bad* owner of the world. He might very well run things more productively than we do it now. He owns all the weapons so he probably won’t have rebellions as big as the wars we have. Some of the people he hires to put down rebellions might choose to rebel themselves, but he doesn’t have to keep large numbers of people for that. And if the rebels take over a whole city and the city doesn’t get rid of them, he can nuke it. If he’s reasonably careful the rebels won’t manage to steal any of his nukes.

Anyway, people don’t have the moral right to rebel against him. He owns the world. He won the capitalism game, I’m assuming without significant violence. Nobody has any right to interfere with his property unless he says they can. He does not have to rent you an apartment, he does not have to rent you a campsite, he does not have to rent you space under a bridge. He does not even have to let you sleep in his police station. But you are free because whatever work he offers to let you do, you have the legal right to say no.

It’s just like what we have now except with only one owner. Does it seem like there’s some sort of qualitative difference? There isn’t.

Yes. But consider the extreme case.

Actually, that is an excellent way to go astray. Better to consider the world as it is.

And as has been mentioned, you don’t seem to know what it is that you want or advocate. You’re only saying what you don’t want. That calls into question much of what you say.

I don’t see why. Abolitionists mostly did not advise slaveowners how to get rich running cotton slave plantations without slaves. They only said that slavery was wrong and they would not stand for it.

I have no obligation to explain exactly what we should do instead of wage slavery, any more than abolitionists did to say exactly how slave-owners could maintain and expand their wealth without slaves.

I do have some ideas along those lines, but if I presented them you guys would only say — without any actual evidence — that they could not work and therefore we must keep the status quo. But the status quo is morally wrong.

“But consider the extreme case.”

Actually, that is an excellent way to go astray. Better to consider the world as it is.

There is no particular reason to think that either of us understand the world as it is.

And when we consider moral questions, things that are dead wrong don’t get right just because somebody piles some palliatives on them to reduce the worst excesses.

Like, we mostly agree that slavery was wrong. But imagine that the South had passed some laws to make it better. For example, there could be a law that slaves could be beaten only with leather whips and not chains or 2x4s. And the whips must be between 0.25″ and 4″ in width, and never more than 50 lashes a day. Regulations to protect slaves in the workplace would make things better, but would not change the essential nature of the relationship.

Say there was a law that a slave could demand to be sold a the next slave market. Then slaves would have mobility. They could not be forced to serve one master, any time they wanted they could switch to the highest bidder. People talk like this is the essential difference that makes slavery wrong and wage slavery right, but I don’t think that would be enough to make slavery OK.

Palliatives are not enough to change wrong to right.

My single-world-owner is basicly the same as what we have now, apart from things like government palliatives. And further, there is nothintg about capitalism to keep us from getting from here to there. I think if it got too far in that direction some nations would put up trade barriers and maybe eventually fight a world war to prevent it, but that’s nationalism — people defending their nations — not capitalism. Capitalism says that if one owner outcompetes all the other owners then he deserves to own the world.

If there’s anything fundamentally wrong with single-owner capitalism, there’s nothing about capitalism that’s fundamentally different from that. Only that by accident we currently happen to have more than one owner.

Bernard Yomtov,

“The city does not control what I do for a living, who I work for, whether I can organize a business or hire others, the types of production I and other residents am to engage in(1), my income, the distribution of goods in the city, or prices or wages(2). It does not issue “points” in lieu of money and require that those points be used for alll transactions. In other words it is not remotely the sort of “economic democracy” that Plume fantasizes about.”

The city does impact all of these greatly – and also the State and if you live in a Federation then the whole Federation, and assuming you do not live in an isolationist protectionist city/state/federation – then the whole globe impacts upon you as well. The city includes your local city council (you might call it something else where you live) but also includes other businesses, residents, connections with the regional hinterland and other cities in your state/federation, international connections via air and seaports. it is now fashionable to analyse “governance” rather than government, so you can take the wide range of influences into account.

I will imagine Bernard Yomtov that you might have an enormous inheritance and live in a great house and garden in the middle of the city all on your lonesome. Almost like a hermit in the city. You would do all your own gardening for your food and you would have some sheep which you would shear seasonally and spend your evenings whiling away the time spinning yarn and knitting yourself outfits. Even in this scenario of you not having to have much dependency on your city/state/federation/globe you would still be dependent on property and security officers, such as policemen who when the harvest has been bad stop the little orphan children from clambering over your fence to find something to eat in your large ripening orchard to fill their poor empty stomachs.

Except, having provided you with property law and police men to keep out the starving orphans, the city sends you a great bill for unpaid property taxes, and tells you your neighbour to the East has complained the wall between you is falling down and you have 60 days to comply with local laws on wall stability.

Oh dear, you say, I must open up my great safe full of gold bars and give a gold bar to the city. You leave your house for the first time in your life and walk through the busy city, you see some people with fashionable outfits and worry that your handspun outfit does not fit in in the city, you pass homeless beggars, but you keep your gold to yourself and do not tell them to come around to enjoy the spoils from your plentiful orchard.

You reach the city taxation offices and try to pay your bill with your bar of gold – but the officers do not take bars of gold in lieu of money . Money , you say, what is this money? And the officers tell you it is points of value (pictured on metal discs and rectangular paper) in lieu of goods. In the city transactions should use money, not goods such as bars of gold – and they direct you to the nearest bank to exchange your gold bar for money.

You are sourly displeased, so you walk home, vowing not to exchange your gold for money. On the way you pass shops and see they have fashionable outfits, but when you go inside you are told they only accept cash or card – not gold bars. Upon reaching your great wrought iron front gate you see you have a new letter – this is for unpaid taxes for road works and path ways, and maintenance of roads and path ways – and you have also been delivered a shopping catalogue. Hearing a great noise, you turn around to see police officers chasing off starving orphans who had been caught trying to clamber over your fence once again. You hear more noises, the sounds of reformers “improve local laws for the benefit of all orphans”….

As you can tell, even if you had such a great inheritance and grand property, you would still be dependent on the city you live in. If you had a sufficient sum of money and decided to start a business (because unless you begin to generate an income you would lose your property because of the costs of increased taxation to assist orphans and maintenance of your crumbling facilities), you would be dependent on the business laws, property laws, security, suppliers, and buyers etc. If you did not have a sufficient sum of money you would be dependent on finding employment etc., since you wouldn’t have a great property to feed and clothe yourself by in this case, you would be dependent on people supplying you with food and clothes and also a roof and a bed. If you were young you would be dependent on the city’s education institutions and frameworks and teaching and administrative staff.

All in all, you are dependent on such a great number of things in your city it would take me too long to name just a fraction more of all of them.

Mattski: “You don’t think there is intrigue, back-stabbing and deceit within unions? That stuff comes with human nature. You don’t eliminate it through institutional structures. You mitigate it by cultivating ethical norms, spiritual values I would say.

I agree with this and I admire Castiglione and his emphasis on self-cultivation — up to a point. Also, I agree that power struggles are endemic to human relations. Nevertheless I thought we were talking about whether the boss can be made listen to input from underlings or the prince from the governed. This is not guaranteed no matter how smart or nice a person you are because of these very human limitations. Bosses and princes want to be told what they want to hear. But it has been shown that worker input really can have positive results — in the form of better cars (Toyota) and fewer mine accidents and plane crashes.

J. Thomas wrote:

“Every day the President was given a one-page summary of the current crises and the background he needed to understand them. Hundreds of people spent one full day arguing about what should go on that one page. Thousands of people contributed to it. Somebody tries to boil down all the vital info on some important question to a single paragraph. Later his boss and various others go back and forth about how to cut that paragraph down to a single sentence. ”

That’s right. The President gets distilled information containing more intelligence than any single one of his advisors, even the most intelligent of them, could have provided. What makes this work? The President is at the head of a hierarchy.

I wrote a comment here that explored advantages and disadvantages of democracy, hierarchy, and markets as cognitive structures. People here seem to be viewing hierarchies solely in terms of domination and simplified decision-making, but there is more to it than that, and you sometimes have to be willing to view something from more than one angle. Here’s is an excerpt of what I said about hierarchy.

“Hierarchy of hierarchies of hierarchies is the ordinary form of large organizations worldwide. Information flows up and down, though more efficiently down. It flows through nodes, [in this whole analysis, people are nodes and relationships among them connections] each of which processes it. It is filtered and summarized as it moves up the tree, and expounded as it moves down. Every node in the hierarchy has to react to information from above, and should also to information from below, as “below” is the source of your power and a likely source of threats to that power (at a minimum, you must decide whether to ignore a particular piece of information from subordinates). Hence, each item of information is touched by many minds. “

In other words, an advantage of hierarchy is that it forces people to evaluate and respond to information from up or down the hierarchy. Democracy does not do this. Those who disbelieve in global warming can ignore those who believe; so can those who disbelieve in Biblical end-times prophecy. Democracy is better for ensuring that all information gets propagated, because the way to get ideas to prevail is to get broad acceptance. But it does not force people to respond to or incorporate the ideas of others, and therefore has trouble generating intelligence beyond that of its constituent parts; it needs the culture to encourage this, because the structure itself does not. This is why Presidential elections are embarassingly stupid; not because people in general are stupid, but because democracy requires the compression of information without enabling the distillation of intelligence. It requires the compression because to reach the greatest number, it has to orient towards those paying the least attention (yet still willing to vote). It does not distill intelligence because no one need respond to anyone else.

In hierarchy, you cannot ignore what your boss thinks, you can ignore what your subordinates think only selectively, and a lot of your function is to distill information from your subordinates for propagation upwards. OTOH, it is frequently advantageous to individual nodes to sequester information or information sources, so there is an advantage for democracy.

Can one bring some of the processing capacities of hierarchy to democracy? Well, I would say the “spokes council” model common in protest movements – which I believe has roots in Spanish anarchism – is a start. It derives hierarchy democratically. I don’t think that is sufficient to bring the advantages of hierarchy to democracy, but it is probably necessary.

We’re discussing fairness in economic arrangements. I think, actually, that my powers of observation are more or less sufficient for these purposes. Certainly, I have opinions about what is fair, AND I think opinions about fairness are better based on real-life scenarios than imaginary worst case/best case scenarios.

I dunno. If we’re discussing morality, maybe it’s moral principles we should look at. And then maybe imaginary circumstances might illustrate those principles better than our current messy world.

Southerners used to argue that many slaves were materially better off than poor whites — they ate better, were clothed better, etc. (And this was probably true of the large majority of slaves that casual observers saw, house slaves as opposed to field slaves.) They claimed that most slaves were happy as they were and did not want to be free. (I doubt this, but it’s quite possible that most slaves would say so if asked when their masters could hear. And in any even nobody much asked them, certainly nobody asked them before fighting a war about them.) It could be (and was) argued that a slave who had a good master was much better off than a poor free man.

But I’m not at all sure that these claims about the real world should matter in the question whether slavery is OK or not.

So, in the real world there is not one single owner who owns everything. Let’s say that instead it’s a hundred thousand owners worldwide who own almost everything, and there are various crumbs left over for the rest of the world. And you have the right to start a small business, and own your own business. Does that change the fundamentals that decide whether the system is evil or not?

The difference between one owner and a hundred thousand owners is that the multiple owners can compete among themselves, and they will disagree among themselves and fail to achieve a common purpose. When they argue among themselves that leaves some room for freedom — lesser people can hide in the cracks and the boundaries, and do what they want while the big shots fight among themselves instead of stopping it.

Is that competition what we should depend on for our freedom? (If so, as a practical matter how do we make sure there are enough owners and that they compete enough?) But apart from the competition, a hundred thousand different owners is morally no different than one. Unless you can think of another important difference.

Your own small business. There’s a factoid floating around that most small businesses fail within 5 years. But that is probably not accurate. For one thing, a lot of small businesses are basicly tax dodges and not really businesses, and the IRS demands that they show a profit (I think it’s) 3 years out of five or lose their tax advantage. So of course those will fold the 5th year. Also a small business owner told me that when the federal government collects small-business statistics, if a small business changes its address then it is counted as gone. Small businesses aren’t important enough in the world for the government to bother to collect careful statistics about….

I’ve seen the argument that people have the legal right to own their own businesses, therefore wage slavery is not so bad. Since most people choose to be wage slaves instead of business owners, that proves they prefer to be wage slaves. But if the system is set up so that it is very difficult to make a go of a small business even when it has more capital than most individuals can get, way past the point that they will have to declare bankruptcy when their business fails, why would that make wage slavery OK? Most people don’t try to start their own businesses just like most slaves did not try to escape — because the odds of success are long and the penalties for failure are severe.

Is this morally different from a world with one owner, an owner who allows you to start your own business but who will never allow your small business to succeed? Does a slim chance at escape make it OK, while no chance at all makes it wrong?

In a market getting someone to do a necessary but unpleasant, difficult and dangerous job (say clearing fatbergs out of a sewer) consists of offering enough money that sufficient people are willing and able to do the job. If you can get the same income for doing nothing, as you apparently suggest, very few people would be willing to climb into a sewer and hack away at a lump of congealed fat and faeces.

In a market that includes unemployed people desperate for a job, any job, it doesn’t take that much money.

If it did cost a lot to get this job done, it would be a prime candidate for automation. Find ways to build sewers so it doesn’t happen much. Get equipment that can do it without much hands-on human intervention.

But we don’t do that, because human beings are cheap enough.

That’s the beauty of the job market we have. If somebody’s qualified for a job that doesn’t involve walking around in sewers, and he prefers it, then he takes that. but the guy who doesn’t mind spending his day in sewers will take the job cheaper than one who hates the idea, and so we all get sorted out to do the work that’s best suited for us. We can tell which jobs need to be automated by which jobs are hardest to find qualified people — we would automate away MDs and lawyers almost instantly if we knew how. It’s hard to find people who are willing to do that sort of work so the pay has to be very high. But so many people enjoy working in sewers that the cost is low; those jobs can stay.

I visited the sewers of Paris, which has a museum and tourist visits, thank to Victor Hugo, and saw a film about the heroic sewer workers. They do think of themselves as heroes and rightly so.

@ 418 You still haven’t answered the question: What is it that makes employment not OK?

What we disagree is the unjustified assertion that employment is in some way morally equivalent to slavery. The things that made slavery an evil are precisely those characteristics that distinguish it from employment.

The fact is that it isn’t that difficult or expensive to start a business. The amount of capital required to open a chippy or a tea shop is not great.

I suppose it is a pet peeve of mine, but I really hate it when people insist on referring to employment as a market relationship. It may, or may not be the moral equivalent of slavery — that, it seems to me, depends upon the political terms of employment. But, it ceases to be equivalent or analogous to a market relationship, as soon as you take the job. And, the job is not like other market exchange — it is not discrete and impersonal.

A market relationship is selling a product or definite service: a shoemaker sells shoes, a bookseller sells books, a plumber comes to your house and fixes the leak.

Employment is distinctively different from an exchange of goods for money. The employee is paid a wage, which is generally unrelated to product output, and agrees to follow directions. The relations of employees inside the enterprise firm are not market relationships; they are coordinated by supervision and direction — exactly the kind of command-and-control and planning, which is otherwise contrasted with market-coordination in price.

Necessarily, the distinctive “job market” bargain, which takes employment out of a market relation and puts it into a command-and-control relation, is a regular wage combined with “do as the boss says, or you’re fired”. “Do as the boss says, or you’re fired” may be a step up from “do as the boss says, or you will be whipped, or imprisoned, or shot”, but its not difficult to see, historically, that political battles on many fronts had to be fought to take those steps up. They were political battles, not market bargaining. And, the other side of the political battle was fought and continues to be fought, to prevent the employee from taking any action, but quitting and seeking other employment. (One may note that employers may take measures to prevent the employee from fully exercising the option to seek other employment — not an irrelevant detail.) Quitting is certainly not the only “natural” option open to the employee in the strategic contest with the employer over wages, benefits and other terms of employment.

I certainly do not think we are likely to abandon employment or hierarchy in organizing economic production. There are enormous benefits in increasing productivity associated with hierarchy as an economic organizing paradigm. We could recognize, given the pervasiveness of employment and hierarchy, that we don’t live in a “market” economy, and people, who speak as if we do, are fools or liars. Hierarchy and the employment relation are problematic, and the problems are not problems of “the market”, solved by an unthinking dismissal — “you can quit”.

The problems of hierarchy and employment are political problems. In “market’ terms, they are that the employers are fewer in number and able to conspire among themselves, already organized (by the fact of heading hierarchies if nothing else), and having many advantages in influencing the institutions of the state. This was recognized by Adam Smith, but, today, I doubt you would find much in Greg Mankiw, to confirm that the minimum wage could be too low, let alone that wages, generally, might be too low. Economists are famously hostile to labor unions, and some regularly seek to explain unemployment caused by financial malfeasance as a consequence of paltry unemployment compensation benefits. The central bank openly pursues policies that take rising wages as a negative signal, requiring a renewal of recession. Employment in bureaucracy is, as Weber identified it, simply a new species of domination. As such, it shares a political genus with slavery, and we ought to recognize that, even if we are realistic enough to recognize that the world is not soon to arrive at a millennium without domination.

Capitalism does democratise the market, I can choose what I purchase, if I find the price satisfactory, I can choose what I sell and at what price. I don’t need the approval of a collective to buy or sell something.

Capitalism doesn’t democratize the market. How could it? It’s based on the ability to afford a limited set of products, chosen by a tiny fraction of society, who decides for all of us what goes on our shelves, how much those things cost, and what our wages are. The few decide for the many. That’s not democracy.

Yes, if you’re wealthy enough, you can purchase what you like from the array of products offered by that tiny fraction. But you don’t get to choose what isn’t there. You don’t set prices. And if you can’t afford the item, you’re locked out of that “market.”

And, given the fact that the median income in America is roughly 27K (for individuals), most people are locked out of most purchases. Is that “freedom” or “democracy” in your view? And worldwide? Three billion people live off $2.00 or less a day. The richest 20% consumes 85% of our resources. Just 85 people hold as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion combined. In America, the richest 400 Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 60% of the country?

How can you possibly conclude from the above that capitalism “democratizes” the markets?

In reality, with its massive waste, horrifically bad allocation of goods, services and compensation, the horrendous inequality baked into the very mechanics of that system, the words “capitalism” and “democracy” have no linkage whatsoever, other than in opposition to one another.

Bernard,

Not sure why you’re not getting this. In this alternative system, capitalism doesn’t exist. There is no profit. We do not, for once, organize society to benefit the few at the cost of the many. People who own businesses in the capitalist system are the few. A tiny portion of society. This system, for the first time in history, is organized to benefit everyone, rather than the 1% or higher.

While it is true that you could not just start your own business, you could bring up your ideas for the community to hash out. That would be welcomed. If they liked your ideas, the community could start a coop with those ideas in mind. Outside of that, you would receive free college, training, artisanship courses, craftspersons courses, etc. etc. And this society would have thousands of different trades, vocations, etc., etc, to choose from. The dreaded collective wouldn’t make that choice for you. You would make that on your own. And unlike in our current system, you wouldn’t be limited to pursuing only those trades or vocations you were able to afford to learn. There is no entrance fee for that learning. Everyone gets their shot. Everyone.

Plume,

It is not a question of my “not getting it.”

I think I understand your proposals well enough. It is that I think they are disastrously flawed and would lead to economic catastrophe, for many reasons, some of which I cite. They would, I think lead topolitical catastrophe as well. Perhaps the most important is that you cannot divorce production from the allocation of labor. You can go on and on about trades, vocations, professions, and whatnot, but production requires labor. The capitalist who wants to build cars needs workers. The collective that wants to build cars will also require workers. You may not like current employment arrangements. I agree there is room for improvement. But conscription is worse.

Further, I think some of your ideas about how capitalism functions today are wrong. Most business owners are not one-percenters. They operate the restaurants, dry-cleaners, other retail establishments you see everywhere. Some prosper. Some fail. The community, by the way, makes that decision, by patronizing the establishment or not.

As for buying things, I again don’t see why you don’t get it. If it’s not there I can’t buy it. Yes, someone ultimately will deccide what to produce and sell, but I would rather have that be someone who is thinking about what I want, rather than a collective deciding what I need.

As for your money and pricing system, all I can do, since you don’t get it, is repeat that it must lead to catastrophe.

Sole proprietors, technically, aren’t capitalists. That’s the main reason I haven’t discussed them all that much, except with my chair example.

Sole proprietors may have employees. Most do.

Sole proprietors are most definitely capitalists. A part of their income derives from the use of their capital.

If I own a restaurant as a sole proprietor I will have employees. I will also have capital – kitchen equipment, tables and chairs, etc. Clearly a part of my income will come as a return on the money invested in this equipment. I am a capitalist.

Bernard,

Laughable? How so? Society would have a vast array of occupations to choose from. Education, health care, fire and rescue, infrastructure, construction, farming, parks and recreation, cultural arts, technology, transportation, maritime, environmental protection, etc. etc. There would always be plenty to do and no shortage of work that needed to be done, or labor beneficial to the entire society.

You seem to be under the impression that no society can function without capitalism in place, even though they did for thousands of years before its advent. To read you is to wonder how on earth humans even survived their first 250,000 years without it, or how large parts of the globe operated just fine without it well into the 19th century. In America, Native peoples managed for thousands of years without any conception of capitalist arrangements, and avoided them altogether into the early 20th century.

So you would continue to operate factories making things no one wants to buy? Great idea.

And right here is where you miss the beauty of the whole thing, because you can’t break free of the capitalist mindset.

Production would be based on orders for goods and services, not on potential future sales. We make to order. We make what the community wants, what it already asked for, needs, orders for itself. We don’t have to close down factories. Those factories aren’t even built unless the community wants, demands that they’re built in order to supply the wants and needs of that community.

As mentioned already, that would radically reduce waste and pollution. There is no need to produce an overabundance of goods to create the illusion of the cornucopia. There is no need to overstock shelves with goods no one will buy, because the orders for those goods are already placed. We make just what has been ordered, what we know is already booked for “sale,” and no more, except when it comes to things like food and core necessities. In that case, we still produce to order, but we also produce enough for rainy days. We create emergency stock piles for key community needs.

You’re far to wedded to the current system. Think outside the box.

Plume: Honestly, I can’t see how anyone would prefer the ad hoc, hodge podge, patchwork quilt capitalist method . . .

Yes, I think we get that pretty clearly. You’ve repeated yourself enough to make that beyond clear. You can’t see. OK. You’re blind. We get it.

I cannot show anything to the blind. It’s pointless.

Honestly, I can’t see how anyone would prefer the ad hoc, hodge podge, patchwork quilt capitalist method of extreme waste, pollution and duplication, wrapped up in a wish and a prayer.

If you can’t see it you are, as Bruce Wilder says, blind.

I have made as many arguments as I care to, more really. You have found your religion and tolerate no questions or criticism. You merely praise your god, without addressing any objections.

Enjoy yourself.

The problem I have with some of the stuff in the OP is that they seem to posit some unique relationship between capitalism and slavery, as though capitalism (as compared to other forms of hierarchical domination that have existed from time immemorial) has had a special dependency on slavery. This is just historically not true.

It may be that capitalism was uniquely able to exploit slavery, as it was uniquely able to exploit so much else. Not that capitalist required slavery, but that it used it more effectively.

One need not argue that capitalist employment relations are fully free and voluntary to claim that they may in certain ways represent an improvement over previous forms of domination.

Agreed. But just as serfdom was in some ways better than slavery but still not at all OK, couldn’t it be that wage slavery is also better than previous forms of domination but still not OK?

J. Thomas: This is exactly right.

Harold,

But it has been shown that worker input really can have positive results — in the form of better cars (Toyota) and fewer mine accidents and plane crashes.

Yes, I agree.

I’d like it better if you proposed a system that can start small and grow as you work the bugs out. And I’d like it better if people could try out variations on the system and see how well they work over time. That doesn’t solve all our problems, but it solves some of them.

This objection surprises me, as does the one that says I brook no alternatives. In every attempt to explain, I talk about the essential democratic nature of the entire thing, which means I acknowledge that it will grow, evolve, change, change directions, as per the decisions of all people. It will no doubt veer away from the things I’ve suggested. All I’m talking about is setting up a foundation — just as this country had its initial foundation, which has been altered through time as well. A foundation for an egalitarian and democratic system, the first one ever attempted in the modern world.

The talk about praising gods and failing to answer objections is nonsense. The core of the entire thing is Parecon. Participatory Economics, democracy, democracy without proxies. One can not possibly get further from autocratic rule or rule by fiat than that . . . . yet the main objection by Bernard and others seems to be that I, alone, want to call the shots. Sheeesh. The entire point of this thing is to make sure NO one person ever, ever calls the shots. Everyone does this, together.

And, as I’ve mentioned, I know full well I won’t live to see this happen. I won’t live to gain anything from this exercise in alternative theory. I won’t be around if it happens. But it’s about me?

A thought experiment:

Would you trade the ability to start and run and own your own business if this meant that everyone, every single citizen, regardless of their ability to pay, would have free education, womb to tomb, and free health care, womb to tomb?

We can keep it simple in that way. Throw away all the rest of my suggestions. Every single one. No points to deal with. None of the other alternatives I’ve suggested.

Let’s just say you had the choice and the power to implement this:

1. We go to WSDE business relations (Worker self-directed enterprises)

2. People are guaranteed schooling for life in the field of their choice, and free healthcare for life.

There is a 100% metaphysical certainty that the tradeoff of private business ownership would yield #2. And a 100% metaphysical certainty that none of your fears regarding “the collective” would take place beyond this tradeoff.

It’s a simple one to one trade. The ability to own your own businesses in exchange for those two benefits for everyone.

Would you make that sacrifice for society?

J Thomas @ 449

It’s always an unstable balance. It doesn’t matter what the system is, it’s changing.

It’s always an unstable balance. It doesn’t matter what the system is, it’s changing.

That’s true. But if we design a system that has an unstable balance between free employees and slaves, that’s easy to tip over into all masters/slaves and no free employees — I don’t like that.

We tried to get rid of the unstable balance between kings and their subjects by getting rid of kings.

And we tried to get rid of the unstable balance between slaves and wage-slaves by getting rid of slaves.

Maybe some efforts along those lines are worth doing.

OK. Here is a hypothetical for you. There is a society resembling the antebellum South in which there is a class of people who are slaves. The rest of society is “free” but divided into distinct economic classes. There is a “wealthy” class, perhaps 5% of the entire population, there is a “middle” class comprising about 25% of the population and there is a “poor” class comprising about 40% of the population. Slaves make up the remaining 30%. Let’s say that while slaves have no social mobility they also have roughly (x) times the living standard of the free poor. And in practice they work (y) fewer hours than the free poor. We have to assign some value (z) to the social mobility of the free poor. We can tweak x, y & z to whatever values we please… See where this is going?

Yes.

We can agree that slavery is not OK, but that there is a broad range of circumstances under which being a slave is still preferable to being a member of some lower class of free people. So, it is sometimes irrelevant that such-and-such a human condition is “not OK.” Because what matters are the alternatives.

You have assumed a society where some people have no choice but to be slaves, but they can be given arbitrary benefits to offset that. And you suppose that there is some set of benefits that make it worth being a slave, and some set of punishments that make it especially not being worth being free poor, and so on.

And I say, if you get to choose all that, why the hell would you want to have slaves and free poor people who are even worse off materially? If you get to choose the percentages on all this, what possible advantage can there be to having slavery which is evil, and strongly-disadvantaged free people with a defined probability to escape their punishment?

I mean, what the hell?

You want to create a society where some people are treated worse than slaves, and that’s supposed to justify slavery? Or a society where it’s OK to treat a big fraction of the population worse than slaves because they have some chance to get out of it, while the slaves have no chance?

You figure sometimes slavery is OK because you have created a worse alternative? I mean, what the hell?

@451
Ah ha, that’s howWikipedia defines civilization! http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

So – if you define civilization as characterised by hierarchy, what you are saying is tautological.

What I’m saying is that there may have been human societies that were not hierarchical, and that may have survived much longer than hierarchical ones have done so far, or look likely to do.

mattski,

Plume’s system might work great if everyone in his imaginary world were just like him. Except it probably wouldn’t.

Well, I don’t know what Plume is like, but no matter. The system is so unworkable, so inefficient, and yes, so ultimately tyrannical, that it can’t possibly work, at least not in the absence of a totalitarian government and vast amounts of misery.

You figure sometimes slavery is OK because you have created a worse alternative? I mean, what the hell?

My point was more that freedom/slavery is a grayer question than I think you are allowing. If you don’t think my hypothetical is credible–I think it is reasonably credible–then try this concrete thought experiment:

You say having a boss is “wage slavery.” So, most workers in the US are some sort of slave in your view. Now, would you like to be a citizen of Afghanistan instead of the US (sorry to assume!)? Would you like to be a citizen of Iraq? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Russia? China? Are you going to tell me that all things considered being a wage slave in the US in 2014 is NOT OK?

But to repeat myself, there is very little pure slavery in the world today. There is very little pure “freedom” in the world either. We live somewhere in between these ideas. So, yes, we’ll need to tolerate infringements on our freedom to do whatever we damn please. There is no way around that in this world. If pure freedom is your measuring stick you’ll find things difficult indeed.

Free Enterprise

A modest, creative inventor
petitioning the Financial Centre
was left in the lurch,
for her market research
depended on funds they’d not lent her.

Adrenaline, testosterone
and coke fuel the business-school clone.
(They also haves riches
and think we’re their bitches.)
Why should they give her a loan?

Perhaps she was too risk-averse
to pay start-up costs from her purse?
{Outside chance: make a mint;
Probable: end up skint}
or {do nothing} – which prospect’s worse?

The free market makes its own gentry
and everywhere barriers to entry.
The soft Wall Street Wall
is too big to fall,
and banks are its affable sentry.

Well, I don’t know what Plume is like, but no matter. The system is so unworkable, so inefficient, and yes, so ultimately tyrannical, that it can’t possibly work, at least not in the absence of a totalitarian government and vast amounts of misery.

Actually, as I keep demonstrating, it’s far, far more efficient than our current system. Producing to order, producing for need, communities planning this together, in advance, in conjunction with regional and national congresses, is far, far more efficient than a tiny number of private business owners, not working together, often working against each other, working for their own personal wealth accumulation instead. And the proof is in the pudding. You keep ignoring that. You keep avoiding the facts on the ground:

Is it “efficient” that the richest 20% consumes 85% of our resources?

Is it “efficient” that just 85 people hold more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion combined?

Is it “efficient” that we needed more than 100 major bailouts of the capitalist system, just since 1970, to keep it afloat, and that in the most recent crash, the Fed had to pump 16 trillion dollars into the world economy?

Is it “efficient” that we throw away half the food we produce?

Is it “efficient” that the richest 400 people in America hold more wealth than the bottom 60%, or that just one family, the Waltons, holds more than the bottom 40%.

The above also point to the “tyrannical” nature of this system. The one I propose is its antidote. Democracy, the real thing, is the antidote to “tyranny.” Unless by “tyranny” you, like so many of your right-wing peers, mean anything that puts checks on the power and privilege of the richest Americans or business interests in general.

The latter is one of those Orwellian tropes, similar to the “religious liberty” nonsense trotted out so often today. It’s supposedly going against one’s “religious liberty” to prevent the powerful from imposing their beliefs on others, their bigotries, their racism, etc. etc. To you, if you couldn’t start a business and order people around and make money from their sweat and blood, you would call that “tyrannical.”

In reality, capitalism is tyrannical at its core, and theft, and a refinement of slavery, which the OP points to.

OK! So you’ve gone from arguing that wage slavery is just fine because people have the legal right to quit, to arguing that it’s a gray area and there are other things that are worse. This is progress.

You omitted a teeny-weeny detail. I never conceded that wage slavery is a legitimate term. It’s your term. What I believe is that having a boss is not wrong per se. Working for a private company, or a public institution, and answering to someone in a superior position is not “slavery” in my view. Not even close.

And frankly, you didn’t articulate a significant difference between working as a contractor and working as an employee.

And the fact that a vast majority of people in underdeveloped nations would JUMP at the chance to earn a middle class living working for a private business as an employee cuts pretty hard against your argument.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. [end canned wisdom]

But, Plume you’re arguing an extreme case!

mattski @ 462 My point was more that freedom/slavery is a grayer question than I think you are allowing. If you don’t think my hypothetical is credible . . .

Mostly, I tend to lean in your direction in the back and forth, but you completely lost me with the hypothetical world, similar to the antebellum South, where slaves are better off than free persons. I tend to be suspicious of counterfactuals in the best arguments — counterfactuals are not evidence, they just restate theory. And, in the case of your hypothetical, the theory didn’t make consistent sense on its own terms. A slave has a capital value — the master can buy or sell the slave. That’s kind of basic to the definition of slavery. If free labor and slave labor are competing, and we impute a wage to the slave that’s more or less equal to the wage of free labor, then it follows that the slave’s maintenance — his standard of living — will be less, because part of the slave’s imputed wage is being drawn off to fund the slave’s capital value.

One can make a variety of other arguments about how slavery can logically work in an economy, where there’s also free labor, and it always comes back to the same basic proposition: in the main, the slaves will be worse off for being slaves. There will certainly be exceptions in any large population: the trusted, faithful retainer well-rewarded versus the free drunkard wasted and alone, etc. But, slaves, on the whole will be significantly disadvantaged by the severe political and legal handicaps placed on their lives and wills.

There’s an great breadth of circumstances affecting wage labor and hierarchy in economic organization. Let’s leave it at that, and not go fishing in fantasy. Let Plume do that, as he’s determined; maybe, with practice he’ll get better.

@471
Sorry realised I wasn’t going to be able to send those references till Monday (I use Endnote for my literature searches and don’t have that at home), so the key source I’m thinking of is Gerda Lerner. You can google her if you haven’t come across her yet.

Sure, and many people used to believe that having a master was not wrong per se. Nowadays we have a consensus about that, and given time we will get a consensus about the other too.

That’s nice, but independent contracts don’t erase that and authoritarians love them.

It’s going to be interesting seeing a team perform open-heart surgery without conceding that anybody is in control.

@471
Sorry for repeated posts, but do you mean “all societies that have had cities have been hierarchical”? Because that’s a somewhat different claim.

Also by hierarchical, do you refer to hierarchies of power, authority and status, or are you also talking about economic inequalities? Because that’s a key question.

I’ve spent quite a few years studying history, but overwhelmingly modern history, so this is all fairly new and fascinating to me.

It’s just that in my opinion the solution is primarily a matter of education and information flow as opposed to some fantasy of throwing out “the system.”

Primarily a matter of education and information flow, as opposed to the internal contradictions and conflicts of capitalism itself?

There is no escape from this basic fact. An employer, in order to maximize his or her income, must minimize his or her costs. And the biggest portion of those costs, and the portion most easily manipulated, is labor costs. There is always already a direct conflict between what the owner/employer wants and what the employee wants, as far as income and compensation at the very least. He or she derives their compensation and profits from the difference between the value generated by the workforce and what it is paid by the employer. The more the owner wants, the less employees get.

And speaking of “fantasy”:

Education and information flow can separate the lower and middle tiers from one another to a certain degree, but they have zero to do with the essential mechanics and dynamics of capitalist relations. And because the system creates such obvious inequalities, most people can’t afford to pursue higher ed or extended training to improve skills. Most people will never go beyond high school, and a great many will go to very poor K-12 systems in the first place. It’s no more a fantasy to seek to replace the current system than it is to believe that “education” will save us all, especially given the costs and the contexts for millions of families.

In short, your “solution” can only ever work on the margins, and will only ever affect a small portion of society. You either knowingly or unknowingly accept the status quo ante, which is extreme inequality, while believing your ideas would mitigate for some of its ill effects. In reality, as history has shown, it doesn’t even do that. Things are getting worse, not better. And the capitalist system only produced one period where incomes rose steadily for the middle class (1947-1973). Before and since that time, the rank and file was consistently crushed under the weight of the system.

I wish it were as simply as better education and information flow. But it’s not. And it never will be. It’s a fantasy to believe in that messiah.

There is no escape from this basic fact.

You are very confused about the difference between facts and fantasy. And we’ve been over this sufficiently many times that I’m not sure why you’re trying to persuade me.

You seem to me to be suffering from what John Gall called “Hireling’s Hypnosis”. You want to argue that the system is not broken, even though you agree that it is.

I don’t think that’s right. Rather, I’m not thinking in terms of “the system” as though–Bruce Wilder made a similar point–systems can be “swapped out.”

“This system sucks, we need a new system.” OK, how do we get a “new system?” Not by sitting on our keisters and dreaming up utopias. You know what the problem with that approach is? It doesn’t involve other people. That’s the first problem. And it doesn’t even involve the person who is dreaming it up! Because unless it is actually being practiced it has no meaning whatsoever.

I don’t think in terms of the system. I think in terms of how do I behave. Because that is something I have control over. I also think in terms of “why do some people have such opposing views?” For instance, what motivates a typical Republican voter. Or better yet, what motivates a particular Republican voter, i.e., the one who is currently standing in front of me. I want to understand that person a little better so I can speak a language that they will understand. Because it probably wouldn’t do much good to express my visceral response to their views.

Nowadays it still seems superficially reasonable to say that our current system should be judged by its tremendous success, and no other system could succeed at all but must inevitably fail.

I don’t think I ever made this kind of argument. “The system” is going to evolve regardless. In 50 years “the system” will be different, and NOT because people were saying “we need to replace our system.” It will be different because people will behave differently. Norms will change, laws will change, culture will change. Part of the reason we are in such a crappy condition today is that such a large percentage of the population takes so little interest in politics through a combination, I think, of learned helplessness and despair. That is difficult to turn around, but I believe it can be done.

mattski: The system” is going to evolve regardless. In 50 years “the system” will be different, and NOT because people were saying “we need to replace our system.” It will be different because people will behave differently. Norms will change, laws will change, culture will change. Part of the reason we are in such a crappy condition today is that such a large percentage of the population takes so little interest in politics through a combination, I think, of learned helplessness and despair.

Well said.

Bruce @486,

Do you really believe that about systems? Most humans conform to existing systems. They adapt. In many ways, they are made to conform and adapt, or perish. At least struggle mightily. Mattski seems to be arguing that the problem is that people don’t participate in the political system, because they feel despair. But if that system is not changed, then how do they get rid of that despair? They feel despair based upon their observation of the system in place, that it’s rigged, basically. If the system remains in place, what incentive do they have to alter their behavior, views, etc. etc.? Mattski suggests that things will just magically change, all by themselves. No worries.

You seem to agree with him. Where is the cause of that change? Where is cause and effect? If the system remains as it is, why would people change? What would be the impetus? The stars? A messiah? The appearance of a unicorn?

You have accused me of delving into fantasy. The real fantasy is to expect this kind of revolutionary change to cause itself, within the existing system, especially when the owners of that system are becoming more and more aggressive, and more and more emboldened in their defense and expansion of that system.

Fantasy? It’s the belief that nibbling around the edges will ever do anything more than just keep the status quo as is — at best. In reality, given the far more aggressive actions of plutocrats, oligarchs and their shills, it’s far more likely that liberal nibbling along the edges will result in one step forward, and three steps back.

#487 Plume

“You are very confused about the difference between facts and fantasy. And we’ve been over this sufficiently many times that I’m not sure why you’re trying to persuade me.”

And, no, we haven’t been over this at all. You just take your lame, empty pot shots and then scoot, failing to ever stick your neck out and show the courage of your convictions. You seem to think bad snark is a substitute for actual thought.

Plume what are you trying to accomplish? You said that you don’t expect results in your lifetime. Are you trying to convince people to go along with your ideas?

If so, this is a bad method. You got onto a public blog, and you said what you wanted. So far so good. Then inevitably people came along to say that you were completely wrong about everything, and you argued with them. What good does that do?

You can keep doing that forever, the dog is NEVER going to move.

Jack Sparrow

The people who argue with you will tend to take the most extreme opposition argument they can. And if you persuade one or more of them, then others will come along to replace them who will also take that position. It’s like being in a swamp and slapping mosquitoes. You might get some satisfaction from a good slap, but it doesn’t accomplish much.

If you actually want to accomplish something, you need to do it with people who agree with you. People who work together to do things. You might for example set up a website where people discuss what to do, and organize ways to do it. It might for example provide ways that people who agree can find others who agree who are local to them, that they can do practical things with. You could have a an argument clinic and when people argue you move their arguments there, or delete them. Trolls would be sent straight to the argument clinic or deleted. When people argued about methods — is it better to have direct democracy over the internet, or something else? Should we have a margin like 10,000 votes, and whenever a proposal gets more than 10,000 yes votes than no votes then it’s considered passed until more no votes show up? etc — you say that both approaches look promising and how can we test which works best. Concentrate on getting things done and not argue about which ways would work better to get things done.

You have no obligation to argue with trolls. They can set up their own websites and link to yours, for anybody who’s interested. You can even provide links to them, for anybody who’s interested. But you have no obligation to argue with people who disagree.

Did Henry Ford argue with people who said he should not build automobiles, or that he should not do mass production, or that he should not pay his workers so much, etc? No. He just went ahead and did everything he had the legal right to do.

What do you think you gain by spending your time arguing with the people who are most totally dead-set against you? What does it get you?

It’s possible that more people read it than otherwise would, if you can build up some controversy. But probably not after the 200th post. Do you get something else out of it?

Do you possibly enjoy the feeling of knowing that you are right despite being surrounded by fools who can’t see it? I enjoy that feeling too. But while it’s pleasant, that feeling doesn’t get me anything else useful.

Plume @ 488

The system will change; that’s not a claim that the system will improve.

Check out my comment on a later thread; it takes a different tact to suggesting how “the system” is faulty.
https://crookedtimber.org/2014/08/09/whats-left-of-libertarianism/#comment-552928

Bernard #491,

No. I wasn’t going to escalate claims beyond the thought experiment. I honestly wanted to boil it down it down into as few moving parts as possible, and get rid of all the rest, and then leave it at that.

That’s that one for one trade. I was pretty sure you’d say no to it. Because your main objection has always been that you couldn’t start your own business. You. It’s about you, personally. And that mindset represents capitalism to the core. Which is yet one more reason why it’s as if people have been infected with a disease which blinds them. On the one hand, they say they prefer a few bosses telling everyone what to do, because it’s supposedly more “efficient.” On the other, they admit from time to time that the sole rationale for a business is to maximize profits for ownership. But they can’t quite make make the logical connection even from basic variables like these. They refuse to accept the reality that these individual business people, holding all the levers of economic power in the country, is horrible for consumers, the planet and society, if for no other reason than their interest is in their own wealth accumulation, not the betterment of society, the status of workers, consumers or the earth.

They will do what it takes to increase their own take, which means reduce pay, fire workers, ship them overseas, automate jobs out of existence, reduce quality of goods and services, skirt environmental laws, bribe officials to look the other way, etc. etc.

Fantasy indeed. The real fantasy here is the one that says capitalism can work for society beyond the richest percentiles. It’s simply not built that way.

Bruce,

Very good essay on the other thread. I like several sections, this especially:

In the discussion of what Reagan wrought, I couldn’t help but think about how stupid our politics became after 1980. It was not a huge increment of additional stupid; even during the peak smart years of the New Deal and WWII we were never all that smart, and in the Kennedy-Johnson years, we clearly overestimated both our cool and our smarts. But, the U.S. did make a decisive turn away from deliberate collective choice and toward being more of a slime mold.

To handle the challenges of climate change, peak oil, ecological collapse, overpopulation, etc. will require something more intelligent than the short-term seeking after sugar of the slime mold so evident in our fracking, oil sands and bomb-Iraq-perpetually obsessions. We’d have invest in a low-energy infrastructure, while we still had the energy to do so, instead of congratulating ourselves on electing the lesser evil on the way to becoming a third-world country.

So, if I understand you, you see it changing organically, in a sense, because it has to, and because systems do that. And, yes, I believe they do change, organically. So I’d agree. The trouble is, I don’t think capital has been this organized since the age of the Robber Barons, and the sophisticated and technologies at hand dwarf anything from that era, obviously. They also have cultural advantages today that they did not have then. The media have worked for decades now, in subtle ways, or with a hammer, pretty much destroying the left’s place as critic against the death of the individual produces by mass consumer culture — by capitalism itself. The man in the gray flannel suit, etc. etc. Today, young people are fed a steady dose of the individual against the state, and consumer culture is not really seen as something that robs people of their individuality, even though it obviously does.

The focus should be on both public and private sector modes of repression of individuality. We have the last two generations, at least, growing up on right-wing dystopia fiction, overt and covert, that tells them their “freedom and liberty” lie in Prometheus unbound. Prometheus being Capital.

That scares the hell out of me when it comes to likely “organic changes” to the current system.

So Plume, you argue that in your system people will choose how many potatoes to grow pretty much they way they do it now. Except it will be easier because people won’t want or need to keep their data secret.

That sounds perfectly plausible to me.

Something else to notice, is that the way we do it now we often do produce surpluses or shortages. And when we do, we figure out who to blame for it. Like, say there’s a shortage of potatoes and McDonalds has to pay more for french fries, and so customers have to pay more for french fries. It was MacDonalds’s fault for not getting long-term contracts ahead of time. Then they would have their fries no matter how the price of potatoes changed. And they will suffer for it when their customers go to Burger King whose fries aren’t so expensive.

Similarly, if a potato farmer is suffering because too many potatoes have been grown and the price for his crop is down, he should have gotten extra money by selling an option on his potatoes on the futures market. That would bring in some cash. And if he thought there was going to be a shortage after all, and he would lose money on his option? He can get an option to buy and make his profit that way. The money isn’t in producing a crop, it’s in trading. And as we get bigger agribusinesses producing the potatoes, when there’s a surplus they can just leave some of them to rot in the fields and keep the price up. Or maybe sell them overseas. The better you can control supply, the more profit you can expect. It’s businesses that have too much competition that turn unprofitable.

It isn’t so much that we’re good at producing the right amount. It’s that we say the people who produce the wrong amount are the ones who suffer for it, so it’s fair.

J Thomas,

Some good points. But what drives production in the capitalist system? Fulfilling societal needs or making it possible for the capitalist to accrue personal wealth? The latter, of course. And it always comes back to that. The capitalist must make a profit, and that further destabilizes commercial transactions.

Rather than this scenario:

“Joe, my family is a bit short of wheat right now, but we have a surplus of corn. Can we work something out?”

we have:

“Sam, I can make more money selling your kale than your corn right now, so I can’t use the latter. Sorry.”

Just the mere removal of profit from the equation opens up a world of flexibility and takes us back to the original purpose of production: Filling needs. Filling societal needs. Shifting it as we have to “how much can I make for myself on this deal” radically alters and limits our ability to meet societal needs — not only because the incentive and purpose have been redirected, but the allocation now is based upon ability to pay.

Basically, we need to return to the idea of filling needs for everyone. The economy should literally work for everyone, not just a tiny few, and it shouldn’t have all of these additional bureaucratic layers added to sever the connection between production and need, between producer and citizen, between food and fundamentals and the land.

In short, the capitalist is mere overhead, added cost, without adding value. And that capitalist drives up all the costs for everyone, makes our cost of living skyrocket in order to support his or her pursuit of wealth and profit. Take away that individual pursuit for profits and hoarding of wealth, and we instantly make it far, far easier to meet societal needs, at much lower cost and with fewer labor hours needed. Keep wealth and power concentrated in a few hands, and we’ll never get there. There will always be radical inequality and scenarios like we have currently:

Just 15% of available resources left over for the bottom 80% of the world to use. The top 20% consumes/hoards/bottles up 85% of it.

Bernard,

Capitalism requires profit in order to work. It also requires private ownership, or we would call it something else.

The system I’m proposing requires communal ownership and the absence of profit in order to work. It would basically unravel over time if we went to private ownership of the means of production and to profits, and it would defeat the purpose of the change. That purpose is to make sure that everyone has their needs met, that labor is rewarded fairly, that social justice and democracy are baked right into the economy and society, and that inequality is exceedingly mild — again, that 4 to 1 range.

It’s kind of like saying that we can allow beer in a half way house of alcoholics, because beer isn’t the same thing as liquor and won’t hurt anyone. Of course, a bottle of beer is the same as a glass of wine or a shot of whiskey, when it comes to effects, but that’s another story. The main thing is, the half-way house was set up help people fight their addictions, get healthy and stay away from temptation.

In short, it just doesn’t make any sense to have a kinda sorta capitalist society when it’s the root of the problem. And anything of value produced by a capitalist economy can be produced by a democratic one, one owned by the people. There is no kind of production unique to the capitalist system, no good or service that couldn’t be reproduced under WSDE or similar methods, etc. It’s simply not necessary to have capitalist production modes or private ownership in general, and the chances of relapse are too great if we let it worm its way in, etc.

The system I’m proposing requires communal ownership and the absence of profit in order to work. It would basically unravel over time if we went to private ownership of the means of production and to profits

This objection surprises me, as does the one that says I brook no alternatives.

One traditional approach when setting up a new system is to allow the old system to continue, but in a way that it can’t really maintain itself. So it looks like it just can’t compete, because the game is rigged against it.

Like, when they got rid of feudalism, they started by reducing the strength of the private armies. Feudal lords couldn’t fight each other because the winner had to face the king afterward and explain why he fought instead of getting the king to decide who should win.

And then the weakened private armies couldn’t just steal and rape and murder free people who didn’t belong to a lord, or they’d answer to the king’s men. So there wasn’t really much point to having a private army, and then people didn’t have to be scared to live free. And eventually, after nobody really wanted to be a serf any more, they made it illegal. But it was pretty much dead already at that point.

So if your system gives everybody a minimum wage, they don’t have to work for masters unless they want to. If people aren’t scared of bosses they have to get paid enough to actually attract them. Capitalists who sell for gold are competing with businesses that sell for points. They had *better* make products that people value a whole lot more, or they will fail.

And if you don’t want to encourage capitalists, you don’t need to enforce a patent system. If an entrepreneur comes up with a truly superior product that people want, you can copy it and sell it for points. Maybe you will buy his business from him, or just let it fail. If he can repeatedly come up with new products that are worth copying, he is performing a valuable service and is it terrible to let him keep doing it? Each time he’ll know to shut down and try something else when he gets successful.

We didn’t have to make it illegal to be an aristocrat. They were no threat because the environment changed to something that would not support them.

If you can make capitalism unprofitable (and if your system could get established, it could surely do that) then you don’t have to tell people you won’t allow it. You can let people try and fail at capitalism all they want, and then sort-of-smugly point out that capitalism failed because it didn’t work.

Ummm…

Because you also said that in your system everyone would be free to pursue their dreams? But I digress.

That’s not an answer. Do you think that no one dreams of working on a farm? No one chooses to study agronomy, biotech, agriculture, botany, etc. at the college level right now? Do you think that no one would choose to grow produce for the community, voluntarily, or seek better, healthier, more environmentally sound ways of doing so? That there would be zero interest in hydroponics, sustainable farming, ecology, permaculture, free range farming techniques, etc?

I live in farm country. A lot of young people around here choose to go into it. They willingly, voluntarily choose to go into it.

By implication, you’re suggesting that people are forced into it in the capitalist system, that if they were really “free to pursue their dreams” no one would choose to work on a farm.

Yes, hmmm, indeed.

Plume,

You have two speeds. Your first speed is, “everything goes smoothly according to my plan.” Your second speed is, “nothing works according to plan, everything is a disaster, which is another name for ‘capitalism.'” As I already said, the way you debate is by slamming the needle to the extreme.

Maybe you forgot already what Bernard Yomtov’s question was. Maybe you can’t even process his question because it involves nuance.

By implication, you’re suggesting that people are forced into it in the capitalist system, that if they were really “free to pursue their dreams” no one would choose to work on a farm.

No, I didn’t come close to suggesting this. What an idiotic remark.

And, you are acquainted with “actual capitalism” how, exactly?

#510

And, you are acquainted with “actual capitalism” how, exactly?

When I was in high school I read a lot of Readers Digest articles that explained capitalism and why it was the best way.

The summer of my sophomore year in college I took an economics course from the chairman of the business management department. He lectured us for 4 hours a day, and much of it was about capitalism. I remember it vividly. Later I read a lot about capitalism on my own.

Real capitalism would follow capitalist theory, just as real communism would follow communist theory. The USSR had nothing like real communism, and the USA has nothing like real capitalism. Your own excellent comment #213 in the What’s Left of Libertarianism thread shows some of the discrepancies. You didn’t talk about capital, but you described the doctrine of free markets which capitalism depends on.
https://crookedtimber.org/2014/08/09/whats-left-of-libertarianism/#comments

Mattski @508,

As mentioned, yes, I do nuance and grays and shades of this and that very, very well. Always have. Bernard isn’t dealing with nuance. He repeatedly sets up straw men, tries to knock them down, I correct him, and he sets up yet more straw men. And since he disagrees with what he thinks I’m saying, you parrot him, mindlessly. Rinse and repeat. I have yet to see you add one thing of substance, or even one original idea to this thread. You’d rather take silly pot shots at straw men instead. Nuance? You don’t know what the word means.

Communities would be able to plan in advance how much food to produce, match this with need, grow, manage, husband what is needed — for the good of the community instead of the good of Monsanto. It makes zero sense to think communal farms would have a harder time matching labor with production, production with labor than under capitalism, given the far greater compensation and benefits they’d receive for their work under the alternative system . . . and given the radical shift away from profit, private ownership of the means of production and our current “I’ve got mine, go F yourself!” ethos. And, as I’ve said more than twice now, if there are shortages, the community fills the gaps. People pitch in temporarily for the good of the community, then they go back to their chosen vocation. They do this for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the concept of reciprocation. They know that if there is a shortage in their chosen field of endeavor, the community will pitch in to fill that shortfall in turn.

It’s called cooperation. It’s called helping one’s fellow citizen. It’s called doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s called mutually beneficial arrangements, real democracy, real community, living, breathing social justice or . . . just human evolution for short.

Oh, the horror!!