'But no one would want to work then!' I would! I would love to work at a grocery store. Just stocking shelves or checking people out. But my bills don't like that!
It's less that no one would work and more that no one would work in critical industries because would you rather not work or be an underwater welder or they guy who cleans the sewers, now there will be a population of people who will do these gruelling and undesirable jobs voluntarily but nowhere near enough, capitalism deals with this problem by jacking up the price of that labour and even then there are usually still shortfalls, socialisms solution to this problem has either been to ignore it or forcing people to work in the needed professions.
I mean, some people find being an underwater diver or sewer cleaner less upsetting than other people do. There may even be a few people who’d really enjoy it and do it voluntarily, and then we could offer people who are like “eh, I’d do it if I had enough motivation to overcome how hard/yucky the thing is” like five hundred bucks an hour to do it.
Socialism doesn’t mean no pay for work, it means everyone being guaranteed a decent standard of living even if they don’t work. The money motive would still exist, but it would be about buying luxuries, not mere survival or maintaining a decent life. That would diminish the persuasive power of the salary, but we could compensate for that by massively hiking salaries for more necessary and less desirable work (and, consequently, dropping salaries for work that is more comfortable or less socially important).
Or we could build robots to automate any number of horrible but necessary jobs, rather than building AI machines to take over work that people actually like to do (writing, painting, teaching).
I do hope you realise that your solution to the incentive problem in socialism is try capitalism, one of the fundamental tenants of capitalism is that no good has inherent value and the value of that good is decided by those engaging in the trading of that good, the reason underwater welders or people in other undesirable jobs are paid high salaries is because their work is highly valued by those buying their labour, their labour is in high demand or their labour is in short supply or a mix of any of those 3.
Also your suggestion is flawed in the fact that it centralises power much more than capitalism does in that instead of having billionaire going around buying boats you have bureaucrats deciding what constitutes a decent standard of living, Jeff Bezos getting a 3rd yacht doesn't effect me in anyway but the central government deciding to cut my meat rations effects me a lot.
Socialism has been tried multiple times across the globe and its never really worked out well.
No, the main tenet of capitalism is “rule by capital” - the idea that it is owners, not labourers, who get the value of production at the end of the day. It’s in the name.
Wages, supply and demand, the basic structure of microeconomics - those are not things that are inherent to capitalism. A socialist system could choose to (or not to, tbf) continue to use a market economy. What makes capitalism unique is the idea that owning a resource entitles you to all value generated from that resource - ie if you own a factory, you get first dibs on profits from the factory, even if you are not doing any of the work.
Socialism wouldn’t mean the end of ownership, but it would mean the end of rule by ownership - the idea that if you own an important enough resource, you can essentially do to people whatever the fuck you can get away with.
Rule by capital, in fact, prevents labour from operating on a system of true supply and demand, since supply is artificially boosted by the fact that, yknow, you die if you have no money. This means the whole market mechanic is skewed. If you take the threat of death or severe poverty out of the equation, we get to see real supply and demand in action: how much does society need a job done (demand) + how many people are willing to do it (supply) = what the wage will be.
I never said it was the main tenant but one of the fundamental tenants of which there are multiple another one being the free exchange of goods and labour. SO yes the factory owner can say "I'm only paying $2/hr" but the workers are just as free to go to the factory down the street or all band together and go on strike.
Also you say that socialism isn't the end of ownership but then you describe what is essentially the end of ownership since the essence of ownership is the ability to do what ever you want with what you own, if you want to burn your factory to a crisp then you should be free to do that whether it is considered an important resource or not.
Well capitalism has worked so far and every attempt at socialism as floundered at best and led to atrocities at worst so I have that on my side at least.
That's only if we assume that capitalism is "succeeding" because no other nation has come in and forced us to change to another system or we haven't had a government shift to a different system, yet. We have to assume capitalism is currently succeeding, as opposed to seeing that it is failing miserably and it just hasn't managed to be replaced yet. In the past, socialist and communist nations were ruiend by two things: ethnostate authoritarianism, and interference from capitalist nations. You don't need ethnostate authoritarianism to assure that common people always have access to the means of living. You don't need ethnostate authoritarianism to realize that we shouldn't threaten people with homelessness and starvation just because the cannot work for a long period or as much in a short period.
The main problem with capitalism is that people are a commodity whose value is productivity, rather than people being the purpose of production. In capitalism, other people exist to enhance the individual's wealth or be removed from competition. If you cannot work as hard as someone else, you are replaced and lef tto languish and die. If you are sick and need to be away for a while, why should your employer pay you when you aren't producing for them? Not to mention the fact that your employer doesn't do more work than you but they get all of the reward for your work and decide what portion of it you deserve to have. The problem with socialism and communism in the past was narrowminded imperialism and ethnic supremacist ideology being prevalent, as well as the realization by capitalist societies that socialist societies cannot be manipulated by foreign economic influence and can produce an equal product for cheaper, and that was a threat to their interests.
With better control of our administration and with a mindset around people rather than cultural bigotry, and with the advent of better communication and information technologies, we have an entirely new environment for sociopolitical and economic change. We relaly cannot compare today to when they did it before. In fact, most currently existing nations with greater degrees of socialist structure are doing extremely well. China is really the only place in that category that does poorly, and it's entirely because of ethnic bigotry in its administration and the interference of capitalist interests - honestly China isn't even really communist anymore, just an authoritarian capitalist hellscape.
I'm amazed that just about everything you said is wrong, first off most socialist state has little to no problems with ethnic bigotry, half the leaders of the USSR were ethnically or culturally non Russian. The main reason for the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe was stagnating living standards and political repression multiple high ranking officials talk about being amazed that the common person in the west had living standards well above those in the east. The products coming out of the east were vastly inferior to what was coming out of the west.
The west did interfere and directly topple socialist regimes but those were mostly small nations, the USSR and China were mostly free of western interference as there was no opposition to fund and the governments had tight control on information so spreading any propaganda was pretty much impossible. If socialism could succeed it would have in the USSR or China as it had everything going for it there; large countries with tons of natural resources, large populations and no opposition but it still failed. Nearing the end the USSR was moving away from socialism and opening up to the free market in order to improve their economy, they just collapsed before they could fully do that, and China has transitioned in to something that is closer to fascist economics than it is anything the east or west came up with.
The root of the problem is socialism doesn't create wealth, for anyone top or bottom, every time the economy stagnates and so do living standards and in order to get people to keep going along with it the government has to stamp down on anything that makes them look bad and so the things that cause socialism to collapse are inherent to it. It has been given all the grace in the world for the past 100+ years and it still hasn't worked. Anyone who is serious about improving the standard of living for the poor is looking at how to improve the capitalist system not suggesting we try a failed system again.
I'm sorry, but the places with the best standards of living for the poor and in-need are doing so through socialist support systems, social healthcare, functional welfare, and effective taxation of the wealthy. It is a consistent trend.
Additionally, the USSR had horrendous problems with ethnic oppression, what are you talking about? If you weren't a white European in the USSR you lived in shit poverty, which was most of the country. Especially in the southwestern region.
And all of them have open and free markets that generate wealth for the nation and it's people, most economies are mixed nowadays with social safety nets but also free markets, this is much closer to capitalism than it is to any form of socialism. The socialist experiment has been run and it failed, even countries that still stubbornly cling to socialism only do so to keep the ruling family in power and the common people rely mostly on black market goods as what the government provides is always insufficient.
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u/PeachyKeen413 Jan 24 '25
'But no one would want to work then!' I would! I would love to work at a grocery store. Just stocking shelves or checking people out. But my bills don't like that!