Agnapostate
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I will reply, simply not as soon as I had hoped.
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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.
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.
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.
There would however be a Elitist, hierarchical government that controls the socialist economy would there not?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In other words you do not really favor theoretical SOCIALISM. So noted
In other words you do not favor theoretical socialism. So noted.
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.
Have YOU ever lived in a commune? I have. Hell, laddie, I'm living communially right now.
Are you?
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?
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.
Sounds good in principle...now make it happen.
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.
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.
Some methodology would be necessary to insure that the managment wasn't entirely SNAFU'ed while management was changing though.
A yet, despite that ideal system France ended up with Napoleon in charge. Odd isn't it?
Grand idea...what are you doing to make it that happen?
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?
Yeah? Then why couldn't they fight off the Bolsheviks?
Efficient democracy? That's amusing. The beauty of democracy is its lack of efficiency.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
A major problem with any state managed economy is that it DOES NOT SCALE
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.....
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......
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?.......
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.