It's a pretty well written piece. I think people from all perspectives should take careful note of what he is actually advocating: discussing and figuring out the mechanisms of what a modern society should like rather than blindly following an agenda.
That said, this is a 70+ year old article, based on ideas and problems at the time. Capitalism will make people stop working and be less productive? If anything we worry about the opposite problem. College will only be a means to a career? Today academia is powerful and a political force unto itself. And we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects than Einstein was even able to dream about in 1949. In a way, we are living in a world he was advocating for.
If it was written today, I have no doubt Einstein would still care about inequality and education and politics and common "workers" enjoying life. But I also don't think I would see him caring as much about Marxism and the labor theory of value specifically as a mechanism for understanding it anymore.
Well, unemployment is kind of a requirement of capitalism. You can't have the labor force calling the shots, it eats into profits. From the article:
> There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists.
He's being generous here, it's not just that an "army of the unemployed" almost always exists, it's a goal. Captains of industry in the current low-unemployment environment have been saying the quiet part out loud, that we need to increase unemployment. There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.
Says who? The only "requirement of capitalism" is that individuals are allowed to have ownership rights. Outside of a few niche organizations that benefit from economic distress, I think you will find a general S&P 500 consensus that low employment is a good thing for their stock prices.
> There's generally a target of 5% unemployment, which means capitalism has built-in waste.
That's because, in a free society, we have discovered that it's better to get people new and better jobs than be shackled to a milling machine from childhood.
If the labor supply increases, new enterprises will be able to hire and grow. This will shrink the labor supply and increase the price of labor.
The only time there are massive shifts are when some sizeable factor creates a disruption. Sometimes that’s technology advancement.
Other times it’s a policy change due to government intervention. The area where I live used to be the textile capital of the world until a policy change shifted all of it overseas and gutted the entire area.
And now that same area is thriving after years of being destitute. Old mills converted to fancy apartments. Old train tracks used to ship product converted to bike trails. Thriving tech community.
It ebbs and flows. But nobody making centralized decisions would have made the choices that led to it.
People complaining about a problem doesn't mean it is a problem. I want cheaper milk, I complain about the price of milk, but the price is probably correct and that's for me to grumble about.
"Captains of industry" want a pool of unemployed people they can pick from. If the pool is dried then that's fine. It's not a sign that capitalism has failed.
It's a metric taken by sampling the population and asking if they're looking for a job at that moment. It could equally be every worker looking for a job 2.5 weeks out of the year.
It's obviously somewhere in between those extremes but picks up a lot of the latter as seasonal workers shifting to where there's demand.
This is internally conflicting. Profits is the required thing it seems - not unemployment.
If you decide to define "capitalism" as cronyism, yeah, the things cronists demand are requirements.
How else should we prepare people for the various workforces: knowledge work, financial services, skilled trades, etc.?
Universities fear 2 things: bad publicity and losing accreditation. Perhaps accreditation orgs such as ABET (in the US) need to get off their collective, perfunctory rubber-stamping posteriors and ensure financial and fiduciary stewardship are occurring, and that a university doesn't become tantamount to a white-collar human trafficking recruiter demanding the life savings of their victims on the vague promises of a bright future.
It's... Pretty mundane and usual.
If it didn't come from Einstein, nobody would even pay attention. It just states the same gains and problems everybody knows (and did know by decades at that time), and restates the large showstopper without going into how to solve it (what nobody knows how even today).
It's a really good piece of popular communication. He was very good at that. And the situation didn't change much since then (at least the things he describes). So yeah, if you don't know a lot about the subject, the article is for you. Just don't expect to learn anything deep.
Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger
How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
\aside: Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations has a story about men who worked themselves into the ground, because they were paid by-the-piece (not per hour). They needed to be protected from themselves. (The psychological mechanism wasn't speculated, but I suspect maybe competition rather than greed.)
Crisis has been averted multiple times, and the productive forces continue to be unleashed. To prevent total collapse, concessions like welfare have been made.
However, there is a real possibility of potential growth being stifled by self interests of powerful economic actors. This bleeds out now into identity politics as people view the liberal system as incapable of providing the growth and future they thought would be delivered. Either unprivileged groups want to be paid high wages or the privileged groups want to protect their high wages from being cut down. This is a form of class warfare that isn't too different from what Marx observed in his days.
This still is far away from achieving the socialist mode of production where the workers become the planner and rulers of the economy to further unleash the productive forces.
QoL is still in an upward climb. Average lifetime working hours is still marching down. We've peaked out on literacy and child mortality and preventable diseases with available technology.
You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production - but I can almost assure you it will not be from people following Marx's flawed analysis. It will be from people who understand either classical or keynesian economics, or whatever new understanding come from it, and apply them towards actual functional policies.
There are actually planned economies in our system, Einstein would have been shocked by Walmart. I recommend “People’s Republic of Walmart” by Phillips and Rozworski if you want to read about it.
Now I wonder if the idea of a planned economy was just tried too early. Was it missing the quantized world we live in now, with increases in information processing and communication? Is there an AI advancement in our near future that can outperform the free economy?
Only in hindsight looking at the failure of Communism do we frame it as "choice vs equality".
There's a good semi-fictionalized book about how this framing changed called "Red Plenty".
From the article: "A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."
This has been tried, and results in horrible oppression within just a few years of implementation. I can see the appeal, but you have to re-invent humans to make it work.
From 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago there were no capitalists, no kings, no slave owners.
production to the needs of the community, distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
It is not a system of horrible oppression, it is how the few remaining hunter gatherer bands live in the Amazon right now.
Sometime before 1989, a Soviet official asked economist Paul Seabright who was in charge of London’s bread supply. Seabright gave him an answer that is comical but also true: ‘nobody’. The bread we eat turns up on our tables thanks to an incredible team effort (bakers, machinists, electricity suppliers, distributors etc etc). And even more incredibly, there is no-one in charge of that team. It just happens.
Also - please do weigh in on this, its a genuine question - we are used to the idea that markets are efficient in that way - as described above. But that efficiency of the current state, but doesn't seem to take account of the evolution that happened to get to that point. Has anyone measured the work it takes to get the market to that endpoint? Is there even a name for this concept?
That is: For every business that is involved in the supply of bread to london today, there must also be lots of businesses that tried to be involved but failed. Is there an economic term for the work that goes into the failed businesses and initiatives that dont survive long enough to become players in the market? The bankruptcies, the people that had to sell their business off cheap to a competitor, the people who spent a few years trying then gave up and pivoted to something else. Is there a name for that lost effort?
Because it seems that if were comparing against a planned economy thats what we should compare with - the total effort over time to produce whatever X.
I don't know of a term for this in particular, but the keywords to search for are "entry" and "social inefficiency".
The housing market is one of the most regulated “planned” markets. We’ve made it impossible to build in some cites and impossible to build density in almost all suburbs. And so we have a massive housing shortage that’s doubled the fair market price of housing.
If we let the market build enough homes to meet the demand, an apartment would be incredibly affordable. Someone working as a fry cook could afford a two bedroom. That being said, one could argue this planned market is working as intended… renters and first time home buyers are taking 30-50% of their incomes and giving it to property owners… who voted for this system.
AAPL? MSFT? AMZN?
A large corporation is internally a planned economy. Why do they keep outcompeting small businesses?
These are not good examples.
Einstein would tell you that we should be quantizing less, not more! :-)
No, it's not just a matter of quantifying more. The hard part of planning an economy is less "if I gather all the data in the world then planning an economy just becomes an optimization problem" and more "the biggest components in planning an economy is that A) how much individuals "need" of something depends on how painful it is for them to get it, and B) the individuals themselves wouldn't be able to tell you what this relationship is".
The best known way for you to get feedback on how much someone wants something is putting it out there and see how much they'll pay for it.
It really is the optimization and the logistics that was the difficult problem historically.
JT from Second Thought talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuBrGaVhjcI as well as early socialist attempts at doing the same thing with computers (Cybersyn in Chile).
You can only do some hacks here or there, estimate risks, and react. But guess what? That's exactly what our governments do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate
However, a pure free-market systems is always a reaction to information, so there's a lag in whether the price accurately reflects the value of a good or service. At the worst of times, prices can suddenly skyrocket and/or plunge, and if this ripples out, this creates the familiar boom and bust cycles in capitalism.
In the socialist calculation debate, proponents of a planned economy say it should be possible to determine the accurate prices of things faster than the market can. Opponents say that the economy is simply too complicated to ever take in enough information to calculate such things.
This discourse was all occurring well before computers and the Internet were common. The most recent serious attempt at a socialist planned economy was in Chile under Allende, who saw the potential of using technology to gather and organize such information. Chile in the 70s effectively built a proto-Internet to send information from manufacturers to a centralized location, where macro-economic decisions could be made based on the information (google "Project Cybersyn"). It would have been a really interesting test of the idea, but unfortunately the United States could not allow a democratically elected socialist leader to stand, and the CIA backed a coup to overthrow Allende. The US then installed Pinochet in his a place, a brutal dictator :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
I'm of the opinion that with widespread computer and Internet adoption, such calculations are not only possible but happening all the time. However, such "planned economies" exist to serve capitalist corporations such as Wal-Mart and Amazon rather than the economy at-large. A book called "The People's Republic of Wal-Mart" is a good discussion on that topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Some of the world's brightest minds, an entire industry has worked on the problem and can still barely beat the S&P 500. So I dont think we can or have the capability right to do such a thing.
No. A massive majority of the prices of things in the US are distorted by the government or the Federal Reserve. Agriculture is propped up by the government, the prices of healthcare are distorted by capitalist interests, landlords have benefited from lax government oversight, the railway workers strike was made illegal by Biden.
The list goes on and the prices are a reflection of these distortions. To say prices reflect reality is to be delusional to the political situation.
Capitalism tends to edge towards maximality through high margin, high volume. Followed closely by low margin, high volume. And small ventures at low margin, low volume. All can coexist to improve the society.
Often, capitalism is discussed in the context of cronyism.
The inevitable concentration of power should be out in the open, broadly consented to, and held accountable. We could call it "government".
Instead, in the most "anarchic" corners of capitalism we have "shadow governments" where power is tightly concentrated and undemocratic, but it's okay because "if you can't see it, it doesn't exist". Insurance giants, tech giants, finance giants, etc.
Edward Bernays was writing about this exact phenomenon 100 years ago (Propaganda).
There are no actual -isms in the world.* These are utopian fantasies supported as tribal, jingoist footballs not worth arguing about. Governments are varying degrees of:
1. Influence corruption of the rich directing elected (or military junta) officials
2. Proportion of embezzlement-adjacent and actual embezzlement corruption of officials spending money on their own needs and wants
3. Overall functionality and responsiveness of police and justice extending protections or harm balancing individual and collective interests, including positive and negative rights to liberties, property, trade, and taxation
4. Distribution of competency across government departments
The problem in the US specifically is that money concentrates power because elected officials are beholding to campaign financing. As a consequent, primarily celebrities and public figures are the only ones who are "electable" in 2 flavors of corporate-owned, tribal factions. As John McCain discovered, there is absolutely no will to fix it from within the system. As such, it can only be resolved outside of it through applying great, sustained pressure in a nonviolent manner.
* Communism was attempted but never implemented anywhere because it's either a utopian delusion or was sidetracked by totalitarianism and/or inadequate leadership. Capitalism doesn't exist anywhere except in a libertarian's mind. There is no "pure" "socialism" anywhere. Every political jurisdiction implements a special snowflake blend of regulations, corruption, freedoms, autonomy, and force.
Unions are a solution but they also have power concentration problems. IDK whats a good solution but perhaps a state administered sustenance UBI that indexes to inflation & always comes out preferentially (like SS/medicare) from tax revenue. and slowly over time we grow the definition of baseline human necessities as economy advances.
For me, the word means that I can trade what I own to other people who want it and are offering me something I want in return. It means that, if I scrape and save, I'm allowed to turn around and invest those savings in another endeavor of my own and that whatever profits I make from it are mine to keep.
I know it's not a very eloquent definition, but I think it's rather objective, and I think it describes the western world today, more or less. Is this what you mean by it? Do you mean something else?
I don't see how it concentrates power. There are people who do capitalism poorly, and then they whine about how it was unfair to them.
We have so much more, significantly more data and analytical and modeling capability, and no alternative proposals are taken seriously? It's not like they don't exist, they just never make it as part of the conversation.
It's almost religious with which people limit themselves to the most known options and ignore any alternatives.
If you mean why has no one come up with different ideas for _accomplishing_ socialism post-Marx (or Lenin or Mao), well they have. There's all kinds of weird and wild ideas out there. Searchable terms for interesting ideas on organizing society include "participatory economics" and "democratic confederalism".
Or the same group of small people with significantly more restrictions and caps.
> it's one or the other, there's a privileged class or there's not.
There doesn't have to be a privileged class in either system.
"Data" evokes images of objective, agenda-less sensors just sitting there, measuring, and passing on what was measured. But in reality, there is a substantial human element in capturing and recording "data" (e.g. SF crime statistics).
I'm not saying other options can't work. I am saying data is overrated in our current, heavily-divided and politicized, world.
It seems a very US habit to think only two extremes can exist on any issue. There are plenty of examples of other paths when you look at the different countries in Europe. They all strike different balances between socialism and capitalism. Heck, the US is not very "pure" capitalistic either. We have socialized healthcare (for some), welfare (for some), progressive taxes and more.
I would be very curious about totally different approaches.
I don't think it's a US thing at all. I don't deny EU countries have a more hybrid system in some ways, but then so do man US states. That isn't what I'm talking about though. Online arguments/debates for this stuff always revolves around the two extremes, as do political parties, even in EU.
> I would be very curious about totally different approaches.
We all should be! It should be a priority!
This here is the go to book I recommend:
https://www.dieter-suhr.info/files/luxe/Downloads/Suhr_Struc...
Simply produce something better than this dichotomy. But apparently that is too hard.
There are proposals out there, but people dismiss them outright in favor of their adherence to one of the two existing religions.
We live in a mixed economy. The false dichotomy is generally one purported by Socialists as the worldview depends on it. The ranks of "anarcho-Capitalists" are comparatively very few.
That is not the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
> You can have socialism with markers still, which is what is done in syndicalist style socialism.
Co-ops have never operated outside the bounds of a democracy with a State. Notwithstanding, they don't appear to scale very well. The most common use case is related to agriculture, though there's a single mid-scale company in Spain that ancoms like to tout.
No one wants to take on all the risk of starting a business while socializing all the profit, hence, we don't usually see these spring up. But if the model is so good for workers, naturally, you'd expect popularity to rise. They've been around a long time and we're still waiting for that to happen.
> You can have limited social programs as a form of socialism as per social democrats.
That's just mixed economy, part of the fabric of Liberalism. Socialism necessitates the elimination of Capitalism.
The economic engine you speak of today relies on an astonishing amount of centralization, it's an illusion that it is some kind of 'organic' engine.
It has central parts but the main decider in the engine is what consumers choose to buy.
A free economy is full of over and under production also - probably because exact production is an impossible goal. I feel the better difference is in how free and responsive all the actors can be. Free to over-sheep in a bubble. Free to copy-cat when there is demand. Free to try and exploit any perceived imbalance. Responsiveness and freedom from dogma is a more important characteristic?
Not nearly to the same degree, especially if you take into account various distortionary government policies.
However, overproduction is also a problem in capitalism, from a lot of perspectives. The profit motive assures that surpluses are produced, sometimes absurdly bountiful surpluses, and then must be consumed. In the short term, many businesses will fail or be amalgamated if their inputs are too abundant and can no longer support a profit margin. Long term, capitalists will arrange the economy such that surpluses will be consumed by the creation of new desires, rentier capitalism on the necessities of life like housing or healthcare or education, or, failing that, wars.
I'm not saying this is the only factor creating an insatiable loop; humans are pretty good at that by themselves. What's different about capitalism is that there just aren't any brakes you can apply, anywhere.
Are there solutions? Well, we could go back to before capitalism, but that wasn't so great either. When Adam Smith wrote his treatises, the prevailing view among elites was that giving the poor more wealth was a bad thing. It was more important that they be obedient and content with their lot. Smith correctly saw that it mas moral to increase the general wealth, and the wealth of the people was (roll title) the wealth of the nation. So Smith's insight was an important corrective.
I wouldn't want to go back to a system where elites arranged things so that I would be virtuous and poor. By many standards, I live a better life than an elite of the 18th century. But I also am part of a system that has no brakes at all, even as life becomes increasingly frantic and the externalities are piling up all around us.
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's the government's fault since capitalism has pretty much trounced good governance, at least in the countries where I live in. It's not politically possible to do things that reduce the power of capitalists, even if they are widely popular.
One cannot simply drop wealth on poor.
So it should be a process.
Only problem we have now is that rich are getting more rich than poor are getting wealth. Where ideally rich could get more rich as poor get out of being poor but they also should be bound by process and timelines.
I think taxing any wealth that will last longer than one lifetime will be needed. But it has to be real and not that ultra rich hide wealth in bs trust funds.
But it will be super hard to implement.
I believe that this is fundamentally the same opinion that Oppenheimer held, that resulted in the establishment seeing him as an enemy and a threat. I would like to resurrect these two gentlemen, bring them up to date on the history of the United Nations, and ask them if their opinions have altered.
Von Neumann was right about everything and him having personally experienced Soviet brutality didn't have the luxury of being ignorant of reality.
Allied troops didn't reach Hungary until 1944, and the Soviet-backed coup occurred in 1947. von Neumann moved to Germany in 1926, and to the US in 1933.
> Von Neumann was right about everything
He wanted the US to start WWIII with a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
For all of the recent attention Oppenheimer is getting, we all are living in Von Neumann's world.
Considering no such war has materialized, I'd say they would only feel more justified in their opinions.
Yes, it can; it has deployed peacekeeping missions without Security Council signoff (UNEF I), by the UNGA after France and the UK vetoed action in the UNSC, it adopted broad sanctions against South Africa, through the UNGA, after a triple veto by the US, UK. and France.
The UNGA has taken various action, including expelling Russia from the Human Rights Council, in respect to the Russo-Ukrainian war in a process starting with a Russian Security Council veto.
The common underlying factor in all of these is the UNGA “Uniting for Peace” resolution pit forward by the US during the Korean War because, while dodged initially in that situation because of the Soviet boycott of the UN over other issues, the problem with letting the Security Council veto be the end of the story was made very clear in that context.
100% the opposite.
The UN doesn't have any power to do anything that its members don't want to do. Because there's no enforcement mechanism except military action.
And no one is going to use military force to enforce anything against a nuclear power.
Which means that, in order for the UN to function, it needs to keep countries willing to participate. And the security council veto is a pragmatic means to that end.
Fun fact: Abraham Lincoln was essentially a Marxist too [1]:
> Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Of course Americans don't know what socialism is because of this history but the more disturbing part is most Americans don't even know what capitalism is yet defend it anyway.
Capitalism is the exploitation of surplus labor value to the hands of the very few, the capital-owning class. It's not markets. Markets occur in every economic system. It's not "free" (no such thing) markets. It's simply the system of exploitation. We've replaced the monarchs of feudalism with oligarchs. That's all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Organized_Labour/Featur...
"It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation." [0]
[0] https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeche...
Along these same lines, watch at least the opening statements of first JFK-Nixon debate [1].
Nixon sounds like a Biden or Bush, he could be on the debate stage in 2024. He wouldn't win, but he would sure fit in.
JFK sounds like Xi Jinping. He won, but was assassinated 3 years later.
America is remarkably good at reinventing itself and what it means to be "American". Our history is worth studying in depth, without ideological blinders.
[1] - https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/TNC/TNC-172...
> It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-rea...
Voting occurs in every political system too, but who gets to vote and what the votes are about is important.
It's possible for both USSR to be bad and totalitarian reactions to it (Red Scare) to be bad.
Let me try that game. Capitalism is what emerges from trade and money. You can fight it, you can embrace it, but you won't eradicate it. Black markets and barter will emerge, which are forms of capitalism. In the end, all you can do is regulate it (or not). Then I would define socialism as an attempt to regulate it so it doesn't turn into the law of the fittest.
>law of the fittest
Fittest? Capitalism rewards who already has capital. Monopolies inhibit competition, stifles innovation, and effectively nullifies the "fittest" argument. Still, that's the ultimate dream of every capitalist.
This rhetoric is a result of propaganda funded by the very capitalists that need to justify their atrocities.
What really baffles me is that these arguments are, today, almost exclusively made by those that are not capitalists. They defend their overlords with more faith and fervor than most church goers. When in reality most are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy, but still think they might become a billionaire.
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
“Interlocking directorates, revolving doors of personnel and financial stakes and holdings connect the corporate media to the state, the Pentagon, defense and arms manufacturers and the oil industry.” [0]
[0] https://commonreader.wustl.edu/how-a-company-called-blackroc...
People treat the whole world as if they are choosing the right laptop!
Sometimes, the needs of the community are such that the work to fulfill those needs is distasteful to most people. Until such time as such jobs can genuinely be completely roboticized, to whom should janitorial work be distributed? Garbage collection? Plumbing out backed-up toilets? Going out in the freezing cold to plow snow from the roads? Does anyone seriously believe that such work would be happily accepted full-time by anyone over, say, an office job, because why, they'll be socially celebrated for it? Or that it would be politically tenable to draft the wealthy and middle-class to occasionally take shifts for these jobs, as if they were a new kind of jury duty?
This is not a serious suggestion.
Snow removal is very high status and pretty, er, cool because of the big machines involved, and its government work with the pay and benefits you’d expect. Probably only the postmaster is as universally appreciated up there.
I’d happily drive the snowplow if it paid half what a software job pays. The only downside is you can’t really drink in the winter.
Plumbing is very entrepreneurial, especially the emergency “unblock my pipe” kind. That person could easily be making more than you and I.
So while surely there are some jobs that are miserable, many of them connected to factory farming of meat, I don’t think “office job” is automatically enticing to everyone. And there is still plenty of social status in necessary jobs, if done in an actual community.
Get rid of all the jobs that don't directly benefit your community and what people would want to do for their community would change drastically.
I think a culture that teaches the value of community and does a great deal to impart on the youth that we have the nice, comfortable lives (with arguably more freedom) is because we share those burdens and its part of our civic duty... that its patriotic to do so. I could see that working out.
Plus how crazy is it to think that cultures and societies did operate similarly in the past, pre-industrialization? Isn't this the basis for the family unit?
I don't disagree, but you need to be very careful how you define community. A community that is defined by who is included nearly always cannot escape an implicit declaration of who is excluded, and a community which includes everybody is no community at all. When you have an in-group and an out-group, you sow the early seeds of conflict and discord.
> Isn't this the basis for the family unit?
No, this is the basis for the tribe, with similar concerns about intertribal conflict. Modern societies enjoy such peace and improved quality-of-life outcomes precisely because the state largely subsumes these tribes, and where the state is unsuccessful at doing so (e.g. religious affiliation), has at least succeeded in eliminating much of the worst of intertribal conflict within the state's sphere of control.
That assumes that "socialists" are really trying to do this and not simply 1) jealous of those with more and 2) simply trying to replace who's in power - with them at the helm.
Why socialism? 70+ years ago? why not. Today? why not socialism? 100+ years of history of the abject failures on every level of every promise and the hell on earth socialism creates.
For every promise of moving past the "predatory phase of humanity" that socialism makes... it breaks and does so in worse ways than capitalism.
Imperfect capitalism has proven better than imperfect socialism at every level of analysis. IE, from the article:
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands"
Inequality exists with capitalists? Guess what? No socialism structure shows that inequality ends with socialism - the inequality remains.
But... we can watch someone like Bernie talk about how evil capitalism is as he flys between his 3 houses, with all his super cars and buy seats to his shows and all his books. You can read all about it and talk about it on your iPhone at Starbucks drinking a latte.
Edit: Multiple supercars? really?
https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Sen-Bernie-Sanders-car-nea...
And even if I happen to be wrong about the cars... he still has multiple cars, multiple houses and has the balls to talk about inequality.
Never forget that Bernie hated "millionaires" until he became one... then MAGICALLY his tune changed to hate "the rich" even though by every metric he's in the top %'s and has done so by... using capitalism to sell the lies of socialism/communism.
Bernie is the epitome of socialist: Hypocrite that doesn't follow his own religious preaching because he's one the elite who think's he's better than "evil capitalists".
When Bernie voluntarily gives his millions to the IRS to redistribute to the poor? Then we'll move past my mistake about how fancy his car(s) are. because at the end of the day he talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. He's a walking banner of inequality that doesn't follow the rules he preaches.
The mark of the truly religious - both on him for being a hypocrite... and his faithful for ignoring his hypocrisy and "sins".
Trivially evident by answering the question: how does one "try" Communism? You have few choices: State Socialism, or anarchism, by way of vote or revolution. That has definitely been tried, with catastrophic results.
Einstein of all people should understand that “real value” is relative to one’s reference frame.
If the person is tired today and wont work unless you pay him a thousand dollars, then it costs a thousand dollars today. If the person is already fully booked, then you have to pay more than the previous customers plus pay those customers for the inconvenience you cause by taking their spot in that system, to be fair, so now it got very expensive.
How do you avoid this in your system? Do you enslave people and force them to work? Soviet did that, you weren't allowed to not work, you had to work, nobody was free.
Otherwise, in a free market with many buyers and sellers, the economic profit of a given commodity will tend towards zero. And that means that it offers a very close approximation of the minimum possible incentive for people to produce that commodity. And incenting people to undertake the production process is part of the true cost of production, as all other forms of human effort and risk-taking are.
It is silly to attempt to achieve socialism. Better to use it as a gauge. Otherwise, it ceases to be a good measure and critique. Is the current system everything it could be? If not, then how could it be better and at what cost? This is like asking if a Market accounts for all costs. If it does not, that is, if a Market creates externalities, then it is time to consider, argue over, and politically implement alternatives.
That said, I agree. No "socialist" economic system has been able to not have markets. This is exactly my point: trying to implement a "pure" form of "socialism" is a foolish game. Much like trying to implement a "pure" form of "capitalism" is a foolish game.
Much better, to keep torturing metaphors, to allow iron to sharpen iron. The best outcome is achieved, I think, by allowing the debate to endlessly continue.
Until you can't, because gigantic corporations are stronger than states and can purchase even more power through capital.
It amuses me how often I see socialism dismissed as "amusing", only to see naive arguments against it. We live in this world RIGHT NOW. We have proof that the market does not regulate itself. Let me rephrase, they regulate themselves to extract maximum profit at the expense of anything and everything.
And again, as someone else pointed out, markets don't vanish under socialism. What most argue for is a baseline for every human being to exist and the removal of the profit motive.
Meanwhile capitalists gloss over all the inherent contradictions of capitalism like the need for infinite growth. Now that is amusing.
This resonates for me in middle age, after rarely having more than $2000 free and clear despite a lifetime of hard work. I've lived movies like Pursuit of Happyness and In Time, but without the financial epifany. All I do is work.
If capitalism worked, then prices would get lower over time with increased per capita productivity. We got a brief taste of that for the last time in the late 1990s, but most people stopped getting raises after that, and now duopolies provide nearly all name-brand goods and services. As it stands now, it's pretty much over. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that homes, vehicles, food etc will ever decrease in price now.
We can generally agree on the causes being stuff like regulatory capture and not enforcing antitrust laws. But those aren't root causes. The real problem is power imbalance from wealth inequality. To address that directly, we could either provide more wealth to the working class via UBI or redistribute wealth from the owner class via taxation. Note that neither of those have been tried at a national level in anyone under 50's lifetime.
Which means that the national debt was planned. It represents the share of wealth transferred to the owner class, skimmed from the working class as a result of trickle-down economics.
The next 2-3 US elections are going to be really important though. Young people have a chance to democratically vote to substantially raise taxes on corporations and billionaires. This won't be so much anti-capitalist as trans-capitalist.
I say that because socialism and communism require a roughly 6 hour workday to provide enough labor for the system. But the median value of labor will never rise again, because of AI and automation. Meaning that work hours will increase as pay decreases. Which is self-evidently unsustainable. Which means that the traditional alternatives to capitalism will most likely not be viable, but will still be used as straw men against the political left by politicians to lure in low-information voters.
I believe that we passed the tipping point around the time of Bush v. Gore in 2000, when we were set to widely roll out renewable energy and electric cars, but chose not to (see Who Killed the Electric Car). Instead we invaded the Middle East at the behest of the owner class to protect established industries around fossil fuels. We're only achieving some semblance of self-sufficiency 20 years later despite capitalism, not because of it.
Admittedly, I don't have much faith in the political system to correct itself. So I sympathize with the political right's sentiment that government bad. But the government is We the People in the US, so that's like saying people bad. Which is othering and division. As we grapple with the actual truth of our struggle and stop blaming victims for our collective plight, I have faith that we'll solve these problems, perhaps summarily. Until then, I'm manifesting a more independent/off-grid lifestyle in an attempt to provide resources that capitalism has so far failed to provide me beyond a subsistence level.
The proof of everything I'm saying is in the failure of any billionaire to challenge the status quo in a material way. They claim that their money is tied up in stock and they pay themselves a trifle. Yet we watched as Musk made $44 billion liquid to buy Twitter. Their FUD should be a rudder for the rest of us towards real answers and strategy.
Now I go back to my toil, hoping to win the internet lottery but knowing deep down that real work is in service to others. My separation from the real contributions to society that I would have made by following my heart is like being poor twice.
Or alternatively consumer surplus would increase: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
Talking about prices is almost meaningless - since the worth of $1 changes (especially as individuals).
Eventually they give up and try to make a name and legacy.
Helping people is hard. Helping a lot of people is really hard.
I think about gasoline from the evil oil execs. I never had to return their product. It's always affordable compared the associated costs, and it's always available and convenient, and there's no discrimination. California gas would be 20% cheaper if it wasn't taxed 4x before use.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182518 (2010) (66 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315391 (2011) (45 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4653939 (2012) (19 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384600 (2019) (28 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30676628 (2022) (19 comments)
Why Socialism? Albert Einstein (1949) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30676628 - March 2022 (16 comments)
Why Socialism? Albert Einstein (1949) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384600 - Oct 2019 (27 comments)
“Why Socialism?" by Albert Einstein (1949) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21187870 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
Einstein: Why Socialism? (1949) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745873 - Dec 2014 (12 comments)
Einstein: "Why Socialism?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4653939 - Oct 2012 (19 comments)
Albert Einstein: Why Socialism? (1949) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315391 - March 2011 (44 comments)
Albert Einstein: Why Socialism? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182518 - March 2010 (66 comments)
>Here's some important things to think about:
>First, socialism is defined as worker or public control of the means of production and distribution. This has been interpreted in both libertarian and authoritarian ways.
>Second, if socialism is worker control, then it is fully compatible with free markets. Mondragon and Semco are both worker democracies, and operate successfully in the global market.
>If socialism is public control, this does not equal totalitarianism. Social democracy is a form of democratic public control of resources.
>I understand people's reasoning for preferring capitalism (ownership defined by contract) or socialism (ownership defined by use), and I respect that, but I would love to be able to have political discussions about these issues which take into account the complexity and diversity of these two very broad terms.
"democratic public control of resources" is a nebuluos definitiob, and the meaning of regular non-"democratic" socialism or communism can be interpreted as such. Usually the adjective considers more the means and not the ends, (democratic, revolutionary, but sometimes the ends too as in libertarian, authoritarian).
I think the recent rise of anti-capitalism gets it wrong. Capitalism within the context of a nation can be made to work in a way that whilst imperfect has a reasonable balance.
It is specifically global capitalism (globalization) that is the problem. It allows for corporate super structures where workers nor governments have any leverage. Worker's rights cannot be defended so it's a race to the bottom. De-industrialization has hollowed out the middle class. Corporations pay little to no taxes. The triangle of government, business and worker that would ordinarily come to some kind of workable balance is gone. It's a never-ending stretch in one direction only: business.
Similarly, global capitalism allows corporations to hide all their dirty externalities. Dumping toxic trash in other countries, sweatshops, wrecking the environment, you just place that shit out of sight.
You would have considerable more outrage if a company would do that in their home country, close to their customer base.
I'll end with the uncomfortable truth that the above has led to the stagnation of the West and various global problems. At the same time it has significantly uplifted the general wealth of many developing nations.
Go, be a socialist. Africa is waiting. 99.9% of people visiting this website is orders of magnitude more wealthy than average african citizen.
Eat the rich? You people are the rich. Set an example. Lead the way. Be the first communist to actually practice what they preach.
There you have the problem. Things are controlled by 'society itself' and practical decisions such as who to hire to do what for how much have to be made by humans and we end up with iffy corruptish politicians doing that.
Maybe a way forward would be to have an AI make the decisions. At least that could be open source and non corrupt. I'd vote to give that a try providing you could vote it out again if it screws up.
As to socialism, unless it is international to the extent of producing a World Government which controls all military power, it might more easily lead to wars than does capitalism, because it represents a still greater concentration of power.
"the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society."
Half unconsciously: Explains a lot. You've got your Joseph II's and you've got your Suhartos.
Socialists tend to be optimistic and believe that humans have the capacity to care for one another and collectively contribute to societal well-being.
Capitalists may be more skeptical of human nature, leaning on the idea that self-interest drives societal progress. They often argue that individuals are most motivated to contribute when they stand to personally benefit.
The article does shed a good light on humans relationship to the society it leans on and is hopeful of the possibility of a human system that can rely on a army of collective-good workers.
May be some day we will see such a system that doesnt discount the inherent competitiveness and survival bias of a individual.
USA could really use some more socialism tho.
Is because the Human Species naturally groups towards Autocratic Structures. The Human Natural State is Autocratic.
Wealth and Power accumulate to the few, whether in a Socialist Government, or a Corporation.
We can't handle Democracy.
And Free Market Economy is just a myth that is maintained for Corporations to maintain their power and convince people they are free.
Current Socialist programs are supported by the Rich. They are actually providing 'just enough' help to maintain the population above the subsistence level below which they will carry out a violent revolution.