Objections to Socialism

[Agnapostate]

I will reply, simply not as soon as I had hoped.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

Firstly, "anarchist-socialist state" is an oxymoron. No variety of anarchism retains the existence of the state, even the "anarcho"-capitalism of Rothbard, Hans-Herman Hoppe, and the rest of that crowd.

Next, I sense some hostility to my theoretical explanations, so I shall merely say that empirical evidence indicates that your position is not tenable. Examine these images below.

The one on the bottom shows anarchist workers in a collectivized aircraft engine plant in Barcelona. The fact that indicates that an-soc organization is prepared to deal effectively with industrialized society.

No hostility here, honest. We both believe in similar things--a radically decentralized state, government from the bottom up, and letting people decide their own fates on an individual level. The only difference is that we predict different outcomes. If I am wrong, so be it, I don't care as long as people aren't being pushed into their occupations by jack-booted thugs.

About those factories though, I have to wonder--was the plant and equipment purchased by the workers? If so, where did they get the money? Or did they just declare themselves the new owners of an existing plant, or what.

 

[Zoomie1980]

Again, you are living within a textbook, and fail to understand, or at least seem to, that what economists are describing is a model of human behavior, not how human behavior is exactly. You are speaking in absolutes and setting up a straw man that does not exist. The fact that there is no theoretical perfect free market society is irrelevant. What is relevant is that, for the most part, most economists believe that the pricing system is the most efficient allocator of resources in society, most of the time.



Good lord, my man, there are several people on this thread with whom you are arguing whom I have noted flaws to regarding the pricing system. The pricing system is flawed for a variety of reasons. However, it is still the best mechanism by which to allocate resources.



I specifically point out Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela and the older communist countries because they are examples of what happens when you interfere in the pricing system on a massive basis. It does not matter if you pretty up your argument with phrases like "anarchic socialism" and "decentralized, direct democratic form of economic management." That is merely form in terms of economic outcomes, whatever the political benefits you proffer would be best. When you are set the price of anything that is outside the pricing system, you will get either surpluses or shortages if the price is not near the clearing price.

If you say the price of bread should be 2, and the clearing price is 4, demand will be a quantity of 6 and supply will be 2, bringing shortages. This is what is happening in Argentina today with its natural gas industry. Argentina was a net exporter of natural gas until a few years ago. But the government thought it politically expedient to keep the price of natural gas down for its electrical utility. Now the country isn't producing enough gas and has to import gas from Bolivia. In Venezuela, to combat runaway inflation, ol' Hugh put price caps on foodstuffs. Guess what? There were shortages of food in the grocery store. Zimbabwe is an extreme case of economic mismanagement. The old communist countries made as many loaves of bread as they could for their citizens, such that they produced 6 loaves of bread in our graph. However, the amount of resources taken out of the economy and destroyed as measured by the triangle at the point of equilibrium, 2,2 and 6,2. That destroyed capital means less investment elsewhere in the economy and shortages of other goods demanded by citizens. This is why it could take 5 years to get a good apartment or 3 years to get a decent car in the USSR. And this is not due to "state" socialism. This is due to imposing artificial prices on the economy by not allowing prices to clear at their equilibrium level. This is what would happen in an economy based on "anarchic socialism."



Pareto made many significant contributions to economics. However, Pareto efficiency can also be applied to a free market society as well as to a fascist one.



No it does not.

There are all sorts of co-operative organizations that have worked fairly well on a small scale. There are hippy communes today in America. The fact that a factory has operated "for a year and a half" does not prove that such a system gives its citizens the best outcomes. How long did the anarchist organizations exist in Spain? One year? Two? Five? You cited the Paris Communes. Here is what you wrote.



For several months? This is what is offered as "empirical evidence" that anarchic-communism is the best system?

There are many different forms of social organizations which mankind has participated. They all work if by what you mean is that they can operate. The Soviet Union "worked" for seven decades.

But that is not the standard by which I am arguing. I am arguing that the pricing system provides the best sustainable optimum outcome. Any system can work for a while but the pricing system has given mankind its greatest standard of living, ever.

This rise in wealth has been almost entirely in the West, which allocates resources via the pricing system.

Above is the main counter to all those who point to Sweden and Denmark as examples of socialism working. First off, even there, it hasn't worked all that well as Scandanavian economies are frought with shortages, relatively slow growth and high unemployment....but they seem to at least no be impoverishing those countries the way it did elsewhere. The main problem with those examples is those are SMALL, and HOMOGENEOUS states. Scale it up to an ever increasingly diverse nation like Germany, and it has fallen flat on it's face, and is now largely being abandoned there.

A major problem with any state managed economy is that it DOES NOT SCALE

 

[Agnapostate]

I'm sorry for the delay. Here's my newest reply.

A.) I had posted that at the same time just about of your very long reply. In fact, I was reading the thread and had not refreshed the page when I went to reply.

B.) I have read the entire thread.

C.) You talk about how and I quote:

Problem is, incentive may not be a critical component in a economy but it is a component in people and their actions. Many people are naturally greedy, and looking to take every advantage they can get. Others also look for ways to get rich. Others also need a reason to want to make money.

(Example: If a doctor and a janitor make the same amount of money. Then why should the doctor go to school many more years, do a much more difficult job,etc if they are making the same amount?

Unless in your idea of a socialist society, people still make different wages. Then completely scratch what's in the ().)

Just because it's not a critical component in such a society, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that it shouldn't exist.

I never claimed that incentive should not exist, and you seem to have only considered a select portion of my statement. Indeed, incentive problems are only issues for authoritarian socialism. (Which is often equivalent to state capitalism.) Moreover, inasmuch as janitorial duties are considered unpleasant, I don't know whether there would be a far higher degree of individuals interested in such duties as opposed to taking the Hippocratic oath. But it's first necessary to note that the inefficient and time-wasting school system would be largely abolished in a legitimately libertarian society, so doctoral candidates would likely not waste "many more years" in training. It's a fallacious myth that the majority of this wasteful nonsense is necessary for medical competence, or competence in any other field.

Regardless, I have already discussed the prospect of rotating unpleasant tasks in a communist society, and assigning greater shifts of unpleasant and unpopular tasks to those interested in especially popular tasks so that the two balance out. Additionally, I would recommend having a look at Samuel Bowles's research on the nature of incentives, specifically selfish incentives, as opposed to altruism, which can theoretically satisfy some forms of self-interest. "In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late. When after 12 weeks the fine was revoked, their enhanced tardiness persisted unabated...The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase."

There would however be a Elitist, hierarchical government that controls the socialist economy would there not?

I would think not. Such managerial framework is conducive to the principal-agent problems that I hope to outline in greater detail in this post. Decentralized, non-hierarchical direct democratic management is a fundamental necessity for an optimally functioning economy.

You're a anarcho-communist if I read correctly in that last long post?

Interesting, we will have to debate about that tomorrow.

I have a couple objections to that if you care to debate them here.

Do so.

Agnapostate, When I suggested that socialism should be defined as "collective taking of the profits", I meant that many people today would buy that argument. Socialists are all kinds of confused as to what appeals to people. Joe Lunch Box doesn't want to collectively own anything, he just wants to collectively profit from something. By the way, there is no such thing as mixed market capitalism. As far as I know, there are only two places on Earth where real capitalism is practiced, the black market and the Basque region, and even the black market is suspect because the government's actions can heavily influence prices there.

The Basque region? I've traveled through the Basque region when I crossed the France/Spain border. The Basque region is the home of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, one of the largest co-operatives in the world and the largest corporation in the Basque region. As last year's annual report of the year prior noted:

MONDRAGON provided 3.9% of the total employment in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, and 9.1% of industrial employment. At the close of 2007, of the 103,371 people employed by the Mondragón Corporation in its cooperatives and portfolio companies, 38,335 carried out their activity in the Basque Autonomous Community and 4,848 in Navarra.

Workers' self-management is a critical element in the success of the MCC, a fact that they themselves proudly attest to.

It is not easy to explain the reason for the success of our co-operative and business movement in just a few words. However, we can highlight the following key points:

· The vital role played by Arizmendiarrieta, the driving force behind the Experience, with his grand vision of the future and his influence over both students and disciples when putting his ideas into practice.

· The personal nature of the co-operatives, in which people are given priority over capital, an attitude which results in a high level of worker involvement in the company, through direct participation in both the capital and the management. All this contributes to creating a positive atmosphere of consensus and collaboration.

· A decidedly business-like approach to the co-operative phenomenon, in which company profitability and planned, rigorous and demanding management efficiency are seen as basic principles.

· Re-investment of practically all resources generated.

· Ongoing adaptation to the changes taking place in the environment.

· Creation of efficient inter-cooperation instruments: both in the financial field and as regards social welfare, innovation and R&D, co-ordinated job management and situations of crisis.

· Finally, another key element in the success of the Mondragón Experience, both initially and today, is the importance attached to training, both as regards formal education, such as that provided by our University Faculties and Professional Schools, and as regards Lifelong Training linked to professional refresher courses and advanced courses.

Hence, this merely serves to provide more evidence of the pure pragmatism of worker-owned enterprises, which have the capacity to generate large gains in efficiency and productivity.

In other words you do not really favor theoretical SOCIALISM. So noted

I don't know where you got that idea, though I suspect it's because of your apparent belief that socialism is necessarily centrally planned. This doctrine has not been accepted among numerous varieties of socialists, and simply because Marxism has been the dominant form does not grant it an exclusive "socialist" status. Indeed, anarchists are arguably more consistent socialists than Marxists are, given that Bakunin predicted the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism in his Statism and Anarchy.

"And from the heights of the state they begin to look down upon the whole common world of the workers. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who can doubt this know nothing at all about human nature."

Of course, Bakunin's conflict with Marx led to the expulsion of him and his anarchist allies at the Prague Congress of the First International, and a permanent divide between Marxism and anarchism...but the former is certainly not the only variety of socialism that exists, and its more authoritarian varieties (Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism) are state capitalist rather than socialist.

In other words you do not favor theoretical socialism. So noted.

Again, this is the same misguided accusation. I would refer you to individualist anarchist's Benjamin Tucker's observation that "the fact that State Socialism . . . has overshadowed other forms of Socialism gives it no right to a monopoly of the Socialistic idea." Libertarian, decentralized varieties of socialism are as legitimate (and arguably more so) than their centralized counterparts.

You realize, don't you, that nobody is preventing workers from creating their own corporations to create such libertarian collectivist industries right now, don't you?

Nobody is preventing that, EXCEPT for the fact that the workers cannot afford to do that, and even if they could, they don't seem willing to take that risk.

That's essentially my point. Workers don't have access to the capital assets to "purchase" such collective industries, and worker acquisition of the means of production as a whole is obviously not feasible through that outlet, which is why I advocate expropriation if and when possible. Privatization of the means of production is a condition that has resulted in both inefficiency and the coercive establishment of authoritarian hierarchy within workplaces...which itself is a primary cause of inefficiency, to say nothing of other deleterious consequences of tyranny.

Have YOU ever lived in a commune? I have. Hell, laddie, I'm living communially right now.

Are you?

Laddie? Are you a rugby player?

Or are you just another of those armchair socialists who talks talk talks a good communal game, but who doesn't DO ANYTHING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN?

Me? I've organized with Marxist-Leninist parties for several years in light of that being the primary form of urban socialism that seems to exist in major cities, though I'll likely pursue affiliation with the Anarchist Black Cross Federation in the future.

And all you have to do is convince people to do that and it WILL happen.

As I have already done, both professionally AND in my personal life.

I'm glad to hear that you're involved in something constructive.

Sounds good in principle...now make it happen.

What do you think I'm doing now?

I have that now...it's called TOWN MEETINGS. Our town management is still fairly corrupt and highly inefficient, BTW.

Why? The problem is called politics.

A significant portion of the failure of conventional "politics" is the centralized, hierarchical nature of governance and management structures. But there are alternative solutions. For instance, I would recommend having a look at Murray Bookchin's Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview, inasmuch as libertarian municipalism represents one of those possible alternatives.

Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction--I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed--is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo.

Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for electoral office, that offer vacuous programs for "social justice" to attract a nondescript "electorate." Once in office, their programs usually turn into a bouquet of "compromises." In this respect, many Green parties in Europe have been only marginally different from conventional parliamentary parties. Nor have socialist parties, with all their various labels, exhibited any basic differences from their capitalist counterparts. To be sure, the indifference of the Euro-American public--its "apoliticism"--is understandably depressing. Given their low expectations, when people do vote, they normally turn to established parties if only because, as centers of power, they can produce results of sorts in practical matters. If one bothers to vote, most people reason, why waste a vote on a new marginal organization that has all the characteristics of the major ones and that will eventually become corrupted if it succeeds? Witness the German Greens, whose internal and public life increasingly approximates that of other parties in the new Reich...Libertarian municipalism represents a serious, indeed a historically fundamental project, to render politics ethical in character and grassroots in organization. It is structurally and morally different from other grassroots efforts, not merely rhetorically different. It seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism and its mystification of the "party" mechanism as a means for public representation. In these respects, libertarian municipalism is not merely a "political strategy." It is an effort to work from latent or incipient democratic possibilities toward a radically new configuration of society itself--a communitarian society oriented toward meeting human needs, responding to ecological imperatives, and developing a new ethics based on sharing and cooperation. That it involves a consistently independent form of politics is a truism. More important, it involves a redefinition of politics, a return to the word's original Greek meaning as the management of the community or polis by means of direct face-to-face assemblies of the people in the formulation of public policy and based on an ethics of complementarity and solidarity.

Bookchin speaks astutely, in my opinion, and his radical conceptions of alternative political structures ought to be heeded at least in the interest of intellectual honesty and rationality.

Some methodology would be necessary to insure that the managment wasn't entirely SNAFU'ed while management was changing though.

Which specific "methodology" are you referring to?

A yet, despite that ideal system France ended up with Napoleon in charge. Odd isn't it?

Napoleon died 50 years before the existence of the Paris Commune. So yes, I'd have to agree that that's an odd reference.

Grand idea...what are you doing to make it that happen?

Not nearly enough.

What percentage of the goods and services will be set aside for those rainly days, and for future development that is inevitably necessary?

And how does one convince the workers to set aside something for those future changes to the sytems?

It's more likely that workers would have a greater interest in strategic investments if they had a marked interest as owners and managers of an enterprise. Indeed, the fact that less productivity is often in the interests of workers accounts for the prevalence of principal-agent problems within capitalist firms.

Yeah? Then why couldn't they fight off the Bolsheviks?

Because the Red Army had a great consolidation of power, and often brutally crushed dissent, as with their suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.

Efficient democracy? That's amusing. The beauty of democracy is its lack of efficiency.

Your reference to democracy is likely a reference to federal republicanism. My reference is to a different conception of democracy altogether that involves policy creation through community and worker assemblies and the practice of direct democracy there.

So let us assume that I choose not to join and I happen to own most or all of the resouces needed for this commune to function.

What happens next?

That wouldn't be possible in a socialist economy inasmuch as the means of production and significantly productive assets and resources would be collectivized and democratically managed by decentralized collectives and communes. If you refer to the matter of their initial acquisition, I refer you to expropriation. Do you conceptualize this as theft? The original theft came through the subordination of labor under capital and the extraction of surplus value through the utilization of wage labor. The wealth of the few is due to the toil of the masses, to put it in an oversimplified cliche. I'd expect that you are aware of this, but regardless, I'd recommend having a look at Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly's [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Unjust-Deserts-Taking-Common-Inheritance/dp/1595584021/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234347761&sr=1-1"]Unjust Deserts: How The Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back[/ame].

Again, you are living within a textbook, and fail to understand, or at least seem to, that what economists are describing is a model of human behavior, not how human behavior is exactly. You are speaking in absolutes and setting up a straw man that does not exist. The fact that there is no theoretical perfect free market society is irrelevant. What is relevant is that, for the most part, most economists believe that the pricing system is the most efficient allocator of resources in society, most of the time.

I find it inexplicable that you would accuse me of "living in a textbook" when I have repeatedly referenced empirical evidence indicating the increased productivity brought about by worker-owned enterprises, and their ability to remain competitive in the marketplace. Indeed, numerous insights can be made just by examining firms with ESOP's that integrate a viable scheme of meaningful employee participation in decision making. You, on the other hand, have failed to account for the critical principal-agent problems abundant in the typical capitalist firm and rely on a utopian understanding of political economy and market exchange on which to base numerous claims.

Good lord, my man, there are several people on this thread with whom you are arguing whom I have noted flaws to regarding the pricing system. The pricing system is flawed for a variety of reasons. However, it is still the best mechanism by which to allocate resources.

I specifically point out Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela and the older communist countries because they are examples of what happens when you interfere in the pricing system on a massive basis. It does not matter if you pretty up your argument with phrases like "anarchic socialism" and "decentralized, direct democratic form of economic management." That is merely form in terms of economic outcomes, whatever the political benefits you proffer would be best. When you are set the price of anything that is outside the pricing system, you will get either surpluses or shortages if the price is not near the clearing price.

As pointed out so many years ago by Joan Robinson, the price system often fails to effectively measure true social opportunity costs. "In what industry, in what line of business, are the true social costs of the activity registered in its accounts? Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breath and motor cars to drive about in?" As noted by Robin Hahnel's commentary on the costs of market ignorance in regards to trade liberalization, not only does this result in deleterious social opportunity costs, but standard neoliberal inefficiencies as well.

"For instance, what if the social costs of modern agricultural production in the U.S. are far greater than the private costs because environmentally destructive effects such as soil erosion and pesticide run-off go uncounted-as many environmentalist believe? And what if life in traditional Mexican villages has significant advantages vis-a-vis diseases prevention and effective community social sagety nets compared with life in Mexican urban slums-as many social workers testify? In this case it is quite possible that trading Mexican shoes for U.S. grain based on comparative private advantage, which moves Mexican peasants from rural agriculture to shoe factories in Mexico City and transfers productive resources in the U.S. from shoe factories to modern agriculture, may lower, not raise, economic efficiency. In this case, miss-signaling in the price system could generate efficiency losses, not gains, from liberalized trade under NAFTA-even in the absence of unemployment effects." (boldface mine).

That being said, I am curious to see if you'll reference Pigovian taxation and abandon your utopian "free market" stance.

If you say the price of bread should be 2, and the clearing price is 4, demand will be a quantity of 6 and supply will be 2, bringing shortages. This is what is happening in Argentina today with its natural gas industry. Argentina was a net exporter of natural gas until a few years ago. But the government thought it politically expedient to keep the price of natural gas down for its electrical utility. Now the country isn't producing enough gas and has to import gas from Bolivia.

This has no relevance to socialism, and is related to the fallacious belief that government intervention in the economy is necessarily "socialist." In fact, the state functions as a necessary stabilizing agent in capitalist economies, which makes that claim especially ironic and amusing.

In Venezuela, to combat runaway inflation, ol' Hugh put price caps on foodstuffs. Guess what? There were shortages of food in the grocery store.

Actually, examination of Venezuela is illustrative, since the socialist Bolivarian Revolution has endowed Venezuela with an unprecedented level of productivity, primarily because Venezuela does not adhere to the state capitalist Soviet model inappropriately referred to by the anti-socialists in this thread. The most critical element of economic development in Venezuela was the nationalization of the oil company.

As noted in The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators:

The current economic expansion began when the government got control over the national oil company in the first quarter of 2003. Since then, real (inflationadjusted) GDP has nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually.

A visual representation:

Moreover, consider American University economist Robin Hahnel's commentary on the progressive reforms and increased efficiency that Bolivarian socialism has brought in his article Venezuela: Not What You Think.

Like most Latin American economies, the Venezuelan economy deteriorated during the 1980s and most of the 1990s. From 1998 to 2003 real per capita GDP continued to stagnate while the Chavez government survived two general strikes by the largest Venezuelan business association, a military coup, and finally a devastating two month strike by the state owned oil company. However, after Chavez survived the opposition sponsored recall election, annual economic growth was 18.3% in 2004, 10.3% in 2005, and 10.3% in 2006, and the unemployment rate fell from 18.4 % in June 2003 to 8.3% in June 2007. Moreover, most of the growth was in the non-oil sectors of the economy, as the oil sector barely grew during 2005 and 2006. While this impressive growth would not have been possible without the rise in international oil prices, it also would not have been possible had the Chavez government not ignored the warnings of neoliberal critics and pursued aggressive expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.

At the height of the oil strike the poverty rate rose to 55.1% of households and a startling 62.1% of the population. However, by the end of 2006 the poverty rate had declined dramatically to 30.6% of households and 36.3% of the population, which compares favorably with a pre-Chavez rate of poverty in 1997 for households of 55.6% and for individuals of 60.9%. While much of this decrease in poverty was due to strong economic growth, it was also due to a dramatic increase in social spending by the Chavez government. Social spending per person by the central government increased by an average of 19% per year from 1998 to 2007. However, this does not include social spending by the state-owned oil company. If social spending by PDVSA is included, there was an increase of 35% per person per year since 1998. The most dramatic increase in social spending was in the area of health care. In 1998 there were over 14,000 Venezuelans for each primary healthcare physician, and few physicians worked in rural or poor urban areas. By 2007 there was one primary healthcare physician for every 1,300 Venezuelans, and many of the new physicians were working in clinics in rural areas and poor barrios that had never had physicians before.2 There are also now 16,000 stores in poor areas throughout the country selling staples at a 30% discount on average.

It is not possible to overemphasize the critical importance of participatory governance and worker-owned enterprises in this new era of prosperity. Hahnel goes on to note the successful nature of the worker-owned enterprises that were previously discussed in this thread.

New worker-owned cooperatives not only provided much needed jobs producing much needed basic goods and services, they also featured what was soon to become a hallmark of Bolivarian socialism -- popular participation at the grassroots level. When Chavez was first elected President in 1998, there were fewer than 800 legally registered cooperatives in Venezuela with roughly 20,000 members. In mid-2006 the National Superintendence of Cooperatives (SUNACOOP) reported that it had registered over 100,000 co-ops with over 1.5 million members.3 Generous amounts of oil revenues continue to provide start-up loans for thousands of new cooperatives every month, and the Ministry for the Communal Economy continues to spearhead a massive educational program for new cooperative members. However, the ministry provides more than technical assistance regarding technology, accounting, finance, business management, and marketing. It also teaches participants about cooperative principles, economic justice, and social responsibility.

Having considered such empirical evidence, the anti-socialist would be hard pressed to claim that socialism cannot possibly result in productivity gains or progressive reforms. Or rather, the honest and rational anti-socialist would be.

Zimbabwe is an extreme case of economic mismanagement. The old communist countries made as many loaves of bread as they could for their citizens, such that they produced 6 loaves of bread in our graph. However, the amount of resources taken out of the economy and destroyed as measured by the triangle at the point of equilibrium, 2,2 and 6,2. That destroyed capital means less investment elsewhere in the economy and shortages of other goods demanded by citizens. This is why it could take 5 years to get a good apartment or 3 years to get a decent car in the USSR. And this is not due to "state" socialism. This is due to imposing artificial prices on the economy by not allowing prices to clear at their equilibrium level. This is what would happen in an economy based on "anarchic socialism."

There is absolutely no purpose in citing Zimbabwe or the Soviet Union, since both effectively function(ed) as state capitalist regimes, particularly the Soviet Union. (There are far more intricacies involved in Zimbabwe than the label would immediately suggest, but discussion of that belongs elsewhere.) Again, this relies on a distorted conception of political economy, since state capitalism cannot viably be conflated with socialism in a rational debate.

Pareto made many significant contributions to economics. However, Pareto efficiency can also be applied to a free market society as well as to a fascist one.

That wasn't the point of noting the Pareto efficiency of Barone's model. Rather, it was intended to illustrate the inaccuracy of L. Von Mises's claim of socialism being an "impossibility." Really, I'm surprised at you! The skilled anti-socialist would claim that Barone relied on the overextension of shadow pricing.

Regardless, libertarian socialism largely bypasses the socialist calculation debate, as does market socialism. In fact, criticisms of centralized planning are more cogently applied to the hierarchical nature of the capitalist firm, since one of the most critical issues related to principal-agent problems that occur in such a scheme is the prevalence of information asymmetries and the conflicts which arise from it, which is an illustrative insight into the problems that occur when the intentions of centralized, hierarchical planners and average consumers conflict.

I don't believe the economic model that you favor is designed to effectively manage such information asymmetries.

No it does not.

There are all sorts of co-operative organizations that have worked fairly well on a small scale. There are hippy communes today in America. The fact that a factory has operated "for a year and a half" does not prove that such a system gives its citizens the best outcomes. How long did the anarchist organizations exist in Spain? One year? Two? Five?

If you had read the article in question, you would have noted that it is almost six years old, which means that the Argentine autogestion movement has survived for almost seven and a half years. The Spanish anarchist collectives directly or indirectly affected about eight to ten million people over a period of about two to three years, but did not collapse of their own volition. They suffered military defeat at the hands of the Falangists because of severe Leninist sabotage of the anarchist war efforts.

You cited the Paris Communes. Here is what you wrote.

For several months? This is what is offered as "empirical evidence" that anarchic-communism is the best system?

The Paris Commune was not "anarcho-communist" in nature, but was more broadly libertarian socialist, so that wasn't the purpose of my citation in the first place.

There are many different forms of social organizations which mankind has participated. They all work if by what you mean is that they can operate. The Soviet Union "worked" for seven decades.

No, my intention was to point to forms of economic organization that were more efficient and productive than the traditional capitalist firm and wider economic system. Worker-owned enterprises seemed an optimal and ideal model to refer to, due to the efficiency gains that they had generated in a market economy. This productivity could likely be retained in either a socialist market economy (market socialism) or some participatory economic scheme that involved collectivism or communism. Regardless, as before, the primary empirical evidence that I refer to is Logue and Yates's Cooperatives, Worker-Owned Enterprises, Productivity and the International Labor Organization. Consider the abstract:

A survey of empirical research on productivity in worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives finds a substantial literature that largely supports the proposition that worker-owned enterprises equal or exceed the productivity of conventional enterprises when employee involvement is combined with ownership. The weight of a sparser literature on cooperatives tends toward the same pattern. In addition, employee-owned firms create local employment, anchor jobs in their communities and enrich local social capital.

Hence, I would argue that the efficiency gains generated by such models, (which have the capacity to eliminate principal-agent problems altogether if the workers themselves are involved in some meaningful scheme of autogestion and thus do not have conflicting interests with owners), along with the positive social effects promoted, indicate that this model is a basis for wider economic organization.

But that is not the standard by which I am arguing. I am arguing that the pricing system provides the best sustainable optimum outcome. Any system can work for a while but the pricing system has given mankind its greatest standard of living, ever.

This rise in wealth has been almost entirely in the West, which allocates resources via the pricing system.

You're ignoring critical externalities here. The West has greater access to productive assets and resources, and would likely be able to utilize those in a relatively lucrative manner even in an inefficient centralized planning model similar to that of the Soviet Union. A far more accurate summary of actual productivity and economic models that generate efficiency gains can be derived from my citations of worker-owned enterprises and workers' self-management. An economic model in which hierarchy in the workplace was abolished and workers governed through direct democracy and the establishment of workers' councils for certain delegations would generate far greater efficiency gains than a capitalist model polluted with principal-agent problems and social opportunity costs. A societal model in which citizens as a whole governed through direct democracy in decentralized community assemblies and some degree of delegation would likely have similar effects on wider society.

No hostility here, honest. We both believe in similar things--a radically decentralized state, government from the bottom up, and letting people decide their own fates on an individual level. The only difference is that we predict different outcomes. If I am wrong, so be it, I don't care as long as people aren't being pushed into their occupations by jack-booted thugs.

About those factories though, I have to wonder--was the plant and equipment purchased by the workers? If so, where did they get the money? Or did they just declare themselves the new owners of an existing plant, or what.

When it comes to those specific factories and workplaces, they were typically expropriated by their workers, inasmuch as workers rarely have access to productive assets and have little other recourse or means of establishing workplace democracy. Often, the owners had abandoned the workplaces after profiting from state subsidies, and only returned to make ownership claims after the workers established productive enterprises.

Above is the main counter to all those who point to Sweden and Denmark as examples of socialism working. First off, even there, it hasn't worked all that well as Scandanavian economies are frought with shortages, relatively slow growth and high unemployment....but they seem to at least no be impoverishing those countries the way it did elsewhere. The main problem with those examples is those are SMALL, and HOMOGENEOUS states. Scale it up to an ever increasingly diverse nation like Germany, and it has fallen flat on it's face, and is now largely being abandoned there.

Actually, the main counter to all those who point to Sweden and Denmark as examples of socialism working is their apparently weak grasp of political economy, particularly socialist political economy. Though this is an elementary issue, the Scandinavian social democracies are not socialist countries inasmuch as they fail to satisfy the necessary condition of the collective ownership and control of the means of production, and would clearly fall on the "social democratic" side of the social democrat/democratic socialist barrier. That being said, I am inclined to agree with the assessment of the Red Menace on the promotion of social democratic reforms as temporary alternatives to neoliberal expansions.

A regime promoting literacy, modern health care, and economic development is more progressive than one offering nothing except corruption and social decay. Internationally, we support the efforts of nations to gain independence and resist imperialist domination, even though we do not support the regimes of these nations or the programmes of the national liberation movements. In other words, our opposition to all existing regimes and social structures does not mean abstention from all political choices prior to their overthrow. The fact of their sameness does not blind us to their differences.

28. We reject social democracy and social democratic organizations, but we may support reforms of various kinds. However, we never see them as ends in themselves, but always as part of a process leading to revolution.

29. We oppose a parliamentary or reformist strategy for bringing about socialism, but at times it may be tactically correct to participate in elections, or parliaments, as part of an overall strategy.

As such, I am inclined to favor the implementation of social democracy as an immediate alternative to capitalism, though decentralization and collectivization of the means of production are crucial later steps. Regardless, your claims about the inherent failure of social democracy are not supported by viable empirical evidence, as primarily indicated by Heading et al.'s Is There a Trade-Off Between Economic Efficiency and a Generous Welfare State? A Comparison of Best Cases of `The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’ Consider the abstract:

A crucial debate in policy-making as well as academic circles is whether there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and the size/generosity of the welfare state. One way to contribute to this debate is to compare the performance of best cases of different types of state. Arguably, in the decade 1985-94, the US, West Germany and the Netherlands were best cases - best economic performers - in what G. Esping-Andersen calls the three worlds of welfare capitalism. The US is a liberal welfare-capitalist state, West Germany a corporatist state, and the Netherlands is social democratic in its tax-transfer system, although not its labor market policies. These three countries had rates of economic growth per capita as high or higher than other rich countries of their type, and the lowest rates of unemployment. At a normative or ideological level the three types of state have the same goals but prioritise them differently. The liberal state prioritises economic growth and efficiency, avoids work disincentives, and targets welfare benefits only to those in greatest need. The corporatist state aims to give priority to social stability, especially household income stability, and social integration. The social democratic welfare state claims high priority for minimising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Using ten years of panel data for each country, we assess indicators of their short (one year), medium (five year) and longer term (ten year) performance in achieving economic and welfare goals. Overall, in this time period, the Netherlands achieved the best performance on the welfare goals to which it gave priority, and equalled the other two states on most of the goals to which they gave priority. This result supports the view that there is no necessary trade-off between economic efficiency and a generous welfare state.

Hence, though I have long acknowledged that social democracy is incapable of ending the business cycle or certain other deleterious effects of capitalism, it does tend to minimize or neutralize other negative consequences while not sacrificing economic efficiency while doing so.

A major problem with any state managed economy is that it DOES NOT SCALE

That would be an important insight to make if you were engaged in discussion with a person who promoted state management of the economy. I promote the abolition of the state and management of the economy by horizontal federations of decentralized collectives and communes. As such, the centralization criticisms do not apply to my position, and are in fact more accurately applied to capitalism's agency problems.

 

[Agnapostate]

So who's going first?

 

[manu1959]

I'd like to conduct a little experiment here.

State a few.

lack of personal control of ones indiviual situation.....

can you give me an example of a current country that you would model US socialism after.....

 

[Agnapostate]

lack of personal control of ones indiviual situation.....

That's an extremely odd criticism considering that capitalism involves the involuntary subordination of labor under capital due to workers' financial inability to pursue alternatives. Socialism, conversely, is based on voluntary association within collectives and communes.

can you give me an example of a current country that you would model US socialism after.....

I wouldn't base socialism after the structure of any nation state, because I believe that the state should be abolished.

 

[manu1959]

lack of personal control of ones indiviual situation.....

That's an extremely odd criticism considering that capitalism involves the involuntary subordination of labor under capital due to workers' financial inability to pursue alternatives. Socialism, conversely, is based on voluntary association within collectives and communes.

can you give me an example of a current country that you would model US socialism after.....

I wouldn't base socialism after the structure of any nation state, because I believe that the state should be abolished.

does that make it an invalid concern then....

have you been to christania in danmark......collective socialism on a very small community scale.....

yes i picked up that you were not in favour of a "state"......but would not a group of people "name" themselves something....create a group of decission makers.....thus becoming a mini state....and in order to avoid those banding together for whatever reason.....wouldn't need a central group to pass laws to stop that from occuring......

 

[Agnapostate]

does that make it an invalid concern then....

have you been to christania in danmark......collective socialism on a very small community scale.....

yes i picked up that you were not in favour of a "state"......but would not a group of people "name" themselves something....create a group of decission makers.....thus becoming a mini state....and in order to avoid those banding together for whatever reason.....wouldn't need a central group to pass laws to stop that from occuring......

Freetown Christiania is a small libertarian collective, yes, though my references thus far have been to the Spanish Revolution, the autogestion movement in Argentina, Bolivarian Venezuela, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of the Basque region in Spain, and conventional worker-owned enterprises in a market economy.

A state is necessarily a centralized, hierarchical governmental structure. My reference has been to horizontal federations of decentralized collectives and communes governed through direct democracy, and based on libertarian values of voluntary association and equal opportunities, and economic values of worker-owned enterprises in order to produce efficiency gains. This is not equivalent to a state.

 

[manu1959]

does that make it an invalid concern then....

have you been to christania in danmark......collective socialism on a very small community scale.....

yes i picked up that you were not in favour of a "state"......but would not a group of people "name" themselves something....create a group of decission makers.....thus becoming a mini state....and in order to avoid those banding together for whatever reason.....wouldn't need a central group to pass laws to stop that from occuring......

Freetown Christiania is a small libertarian collective, yes, though my references thus far have been to the Spanish Revolution, the autogestion movement in Argentina, Bolivarian Venezuela, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of the Basque region in Spain, and conventional worker-owned enterprises in a market economy.

A state is necessarily a centralized, hierarchical governmental structure. My reference has been to horizontal federations of decentralized collectives and communes governed through direct democracy, and based on libertarian values of voluntary association and equal opportunities, and economic values of worker-owned enterprises in order to produce efficiency gains. This is not equivalent to a state.

been to the basque one as well.....how do you propose the power, water and road system of the US be run and maintained......each "city" esentially controlsto it's boundries and is self sufficient?.......

 

[Agnapostate]

been to the basque one as well.....how do you propose the power, water and road system of the US be run and maintained......each "city" esentially controlsto it's boundries and is self sufficient?.......

My advocacy of anarchism isn't limited to the U.S. Regardless, promotion of isolated collectives or communes isn't my goal. I promote horizontal, non-hierarchical federations at the regional, national, and international levels. In terms of internal coordination, I advocate direct democracy through community assemblies and workers' councils, with the election of instantly recallable delegates to manage specific policy concerns that would result in bureaucracy inflictions if managed through community assemblies and workers' councils.

 

[Agnapostate]

Any other takers?

 

[Peejay]

Thanks for directing me to this read here Agnapostate. I've read over the entire conversation and you certainly are well read on the merits of socialism, anarchism and I'm sure, Marxism. On first reading the thing that strikes me most, as with most socialist and anarchist, is the inability to defend the people of said system from the hoards of armies that would come to take the prosperity if it did arise. One thing that socialist and anarchist societies have never been good at is raising armies to defend their home land. Many will argue that defense expendentures have been the death blow for most all forays into communal type existence. The systems simply don't provide enough prosperty to provide defense from the rest of the technologically advanced armies of the world.

I agree that the ideals are good ones but impractical when staged against the rest of the functioning systems on the planet. Someone will come take your shit and there's nothing the anarchist can do about it. The lack of central planning for defense is a fatal flaw.

 

[Agnapostate]

Don't have a lot of time here, and I'll comment further at home, but for now: Nestor Makhno. Meet Anarchy's Cossack.

 

[Peejay]

A peasant army won't cut it, as evidenced by the mere three years it took to defeat the Black Army. I would assume that you would want the anarchist system to last longer ?

 

[Bern80]

Pure socialism could never work. Societies cannot survive without the poor. If everyone was guaranteed an education, food, and shelter, the result would not be a loss of creative motivation, as some people suggest. It would result in no one willing to collect the trash, clean the hotel rooms, or bus the tables. The vast majority of people would pursue more stimulating work.

Except history has shown that's EXACTLY what happens. Again it is human nature and a fairly fundamental concept. One learns that x amount of effort yields x amount of gain. If increased effort does NOT yield increased gain than one does not put forth extra effort. That IS why socialism will and in FACT has failed.

 

[Ravi]

Pure socialism could never work. Societies cannot survive without the poor. If everyone was guaranteed an education, food, and shelter, the result would not be a loss of creative motivation, as some people suggest. It would result in no one willing to collect the trash, clean the hotel rooms, or bus the tables. The vast majority of people would pursue more stimulating work.

Except history has shown that's EXACTLY what happens. Again it is human nature and a fairly fundamental concept. One learns that x amount of effort yields x amount of gain. If increased effort does NOT yield increased gain than one does not put forth extra effort. That IS why socialism will and in FACT has failed.

I agree that it doesn't work, or hasn't worked, but not for your reasons. You are only taking into consideration that the only valid reward is money.

 

[Peejay]

Pure socialism could never work. Societies cannot survive without the poor. If everyone was guaranteed an education, food, and shelter, the result would not be a loss of creative motivation, as some people suggest. It would result in no one willing to collect the trash, clean the hotel rooms, or bus the tables. The vast majority of people would pursue more stimulating work.

Except history has shown that's EXACTLY what happens. Again it is human nature and a fairly fundamental concept. One learns that x amount of effort yields x amount of gain. If increased effort does NOT yield increased gain than one does not put forth extra effort. That IS why socialism will and in FACT has failed.

I would argue that "X amount yields Y amount" is exactly what socialist are working towards. The X amount of effort yields drastically different results in capitalism. It doesn't take effort to yield gain, only capital. A stone mason puts forth a huge amount of effort to yield $150 a day. An investor makes little to no effort. He simply puts some money out there and ask it to return with 19% of it's friends.

 

[Bern80]

You first sentence makes sense if it was 10,000BC. We have gone beyond that. Personally, I put team and individual efforts on an equal platform depending on the sport.

The irony of the following is really making my head spin. Sports is a great metaphor for this. As a native Minnesotan and thus annointed hockey officianado there is one sports event in history that makes a good case for socialism. That would be the miracle on ice (the '80 gold medal hockey game between the USA and USSR). Unless you know your hockey or saw the movie few people would be able to name a single person on this team that did the impossible. The game is called a miracle because it wasn't just an upset. It wasn't that it was unlikely that the U.S. would win. It wasn't that it would be considered an upset if the U.S. won. It wasn't that the U.S. had only a snowball's chance in hell of winning that game. Before the game the U.S. simply was NOT going to win. The only reason the U.S. won that game was because the team embraced the TEAM concept. That is the irony in my mind. that the U.S. team was certianly not a team of superstars. that may have been one way to do it. Make a team with so much individual talent that it would overcome other teams (and a lack of chemistry). The irony that the U.S., the mighty freedom loving capitalists, had to embrace the concept of group unity to beat the 'evil' communists.

It is also an example of why it socialism fails. If even one member of the group didn't buy into the team concept. If even one member had been more about individual accolades than the group accomplishments they would not have won that game. that is why the other poster was correct when he said socialism works only on small scales. It is pretty hard to get large numbers of people to all give 100%.

 

[Bern80]

Pure socialism could never work. Societies cannot survive without the poor. If everyone was guaranteed an education, food, and shelter, the result would not be a loss of creative motivation, as some people suggest. It would result in no one willing to collect the trash, clean the hotel rooms, or bus the tables. The vast majority of people would pursue more stimulating work.

Except history has shown that's EXACTLY what happens. Again it is human nature and a fairly fundamental concept. One learns that x amount of effort yields x amount of gain. If increased effort does NOT yield increased gain than one does not put forth extra effort. That IS why socialism will and in FACT has failed.

I would argue that "X amount yields Y amount" is exactly what socialist are working towards. The X amount of effort yields drastically different results in capitalism. It doesn't take effort to yield gain, only capital. A stone mason puts forth a huge amount of effort to yield $150 a day. An investor makes little to no effort. He simply puts some money out there and ask it to return with 19% of it's friends.

I think you have to consider how you are defining effort. Yes a stone mason puts forth a lot of physical effort. But how much mental effort?