Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Eating the billionaires and "nationalizing" publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying "you can still possess your car" is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...
Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration. So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.
When socialists say they want to collectivize private property, they use a meaning of private property which equates to "means of production", or "capital". The goal is that there won't be owners of capital earning money simply by employing other people to work the capital and stealing a part of what they produce (surplus value).
In your example, summer cottages and family farms aren't means of production, so there's no reason to redistribute them. Pensions and retirement were guaranteed to everyone even in the USSR, where women retired at 55 and men at 60, so I can guarantee socialists want you to have a pension. Small businesses that employ other employees would have to be collectivized eventually, which could mean that the owner simply becomes one normal worker in the business, working alongside the previous employees instead of above them. Regarding the apartment, you don't need to rent out an apartment if the rent of your apartment costs 3-5% of your income (as was the case in the Soviet Union). Land ownership and inheritance are a bit grey. Obviously nobody wants to collectivize your nana's wedding dress, or your dad's funko pop collection. Obviously we would want to collectivize if you inherit a big factory, or 20 flats that your mom rented out. For things in the middle, it becomes a bit more grey, so there's no easy answer. I bet everyone would agree that uprooting people isn't generally a good thing.
family farms are practically non-existent (i admire romanticism lol). Pensions get paid, land is not owned, homes inheritance is on the right-of-first-refusal of undefined-length lease, small businessman become paid position in agreement with employed workers, rent is asset depreciation no more no less. You can afford asset depreciation on 200 million mansion? 50 people together probably can
It is really funny (read: not funny but sad) that you think our current system is working. This post has such big "I have not thought about this at all and am out of ideas" energy that I can't engage with it seriously.
Do you own a summer cottage right now? What percentage of people do? Will not owning that cottage impact anyone's life in a meaningful way?
But yea, sure, let's have a few hundred people own more wealth and thus influence than the rest of the world as a whole! It's the best way to make sure the people a step or two below those few hundred get to have a summer cottage! This really makes society the best it can be!
What happens to pensions/retirement savings
These are still paid. Socialism is concerned with the means of production, not what amount to bank accounts.
land ownership
If it's a personal residence, it's cool. If it's a business's privately-owned land, it's up for grabs if the local community has a better use for it
inheritance
See the above distinctions. Money is secondary and personal property is fine, private property is liable to be taken.
the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent
Either the cost of your rent is dramatically reduced or your housing is turned into some type of cooperative, so there's no need to exploit someone else to make rent.
I would like to encourage you to read Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific".
It works by encouraging union and co-ops, actually punishing companies that break laws, and providing social safety nets. Basically everything this comic points out.
So by "encouraging", I take that to mean a mixed system? I'm all for the Nordic model. I think a hard-line approach is ultimately too disruptive and unpalatable to a majority of people's current personal situation, and I feel like it's important to communicate that for buy in.
What is unpalatable to the people current personal situation tho? The problem is you are already seeing it from a capitalist point of view where you think most people have something to lose.
First, your second house or small business are not means of production.
Second, most people dont have a summer cottage, most people dont have a family farm, most people dont have land ownership, most people dont inherit shit, most people dont have apartments they are renting, most people dont have small business.
Most people have nothing to lose and everything to gain when we talk about people owning their workplace. If you think otherwise you are overstating what most people own, which is close to nothing. What most people think of is the idea that if they work hard enough they will someday have that apartment to rent, that summer house, that big money their sons will inherit, which for most of earth's population is just bullshit.
I'm all for the Nordic model
The sad thing about the Nordic model is that it relies on wealth and labour extraction from poorer countries as much as the rest of capitalist countries do. Being on the upper side of unequal exchange (I beg you to read on unequal exchange, even if only the Wikipedia article), makes it very nice for some lucky few in Europe / North America, and very hard for the rest who aren't on the upper side.
A mixed system which starts with changing the most socially egregious examples is probably the only politically viable transition; lots of people fear disruption, and it takes time and proving to them that the changes are beneficial.
I'd suggest beginning with something like Corbyn's Labor had proposed; if a capitalist business is sold or fails, the workers are given first right of refusal and a govt loan is given for them to purchase as a worker cooperative.
The problem is that capitalists will not tolerate a system that is made to remove them over time, and they will fight you to the death to keep you from passing reforms like that, as seen by Corbyn's campaign being sabotaged from all angles.
While I do agree these people exist, most people are some mixture of benefiting from, and being harmed by the status quo. To erode support for a mode of production takes both fighting those who are directly against your class interests, and convincing the majority of people that their class interests align with your actions. Often those who feel the most precarity under the current system are it's most ardent defenders, simply because their afraid of loosing what little status they have eked out for themselves.
Corbyn was sabotaged both by people who rightly saw him as a threat, and by those who didn't see the benefit he could bring them.
My point is that convincing people is not enough, because the system at base being plutocratic does not just mean the poorer suffer, but that the levers of power are controlled by the rich, so democratic efforts at revolutionary reform (such as would make the system not plutocratic) are doomed to fail from the outset.
The exact plan is something that would be developed based on the political-economic situation that led to the revolution in the first leave and the needs that arose. There can be no perfect prescription because one cannot predict the exact situation we will inherit.
Immediately following revolution in the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks had to fight a war against invading capitalist forces and domestic capitalist revanchists. They implemented forms of fatm collectivization that were largely restorative of traditional practice but without feudal lords and while also attempting to industrialize. This went less efficiently than needed so they adopted the NEP, then abandoned it for further central planning once its purpose was fulfilled. They ensured housing for all, placed doctors, cafes, and housing at factories, invested heavily in infrastructure and education, promoted women as part of the workforce and larger society against patriarchal attitudes, and prepared for the inevitable further invasion by capitalists, this time the fascists. They built based on their ability to control the means of production by and for those who work and based on the conditions they faced. They faced poverty, landlordism, a poor level of industrialization and infrastructure, joblessness, external military threats, etc. They implemented many policies over time attempting to work around hurdles, most of them imposed by capitalist countries trying to destroy them.
In China, they faced an even greater level of landlordism, of petty landowners that would routinely exercise inordinate control over people's lives and abuse them. China was even poorer than the Russian Empire, being a colonized country forced to subjugate its economy to foreign capitalusts. China had to fight a war against Japanese invaders and developed in the context of not just a liberatory nationalism but a betrayal of the communists by the KMT. They similarly had to industrialize, to deal with poverty, to deal with foreign aggression from capitalists that promptly encircled them and instituted sanctions. They achieved transformatiobs never before seen, of skyrocketing life expectancy, an end to famines, industrialization without stealing through colonialism.
When revolution comes to your country, what state will it be in? Will you have to kill neofascists that started a civil war? Will you need to rebuild a militant labor movement? Will there be an economic underclass most poised to contribute and then make demands of the transition?
Basically, when the working class has a liberatory victory, it can now more directly demand change. What changes will be a product of what is needed for the working class's own interests. In Cuba many villages had no doctor and essential medical care required a group of people to carry the sick for a day or more. So they built hospitals and trained doctors. They now have the best medical system in the world for a country with their size and wealth.
Anyways with that said I'll try to answer your specific questions.
Summer cottage?
lol who cares? A second home in a country full of homeless people!? I cannot be asked to care. Most likely it will be ignored because socialists are far too kind.
Family farm?
If you live in a rich, Western country these no longer exist. Farms are large agribusinesses owned by companies. Pappy had to sell his farm to them in the 70s and 80s.
What happens to pensions/retirement savings
These are numbers on a spreadsheet that are currently held by a bank or government. Their purpose is to guarantee retirement. During any real revolution the banks in question will be seized and repurposed, possibly even abolished depending on conditions, as they are the organ of society most antagonistic to us. There is no guarantee that the accounts will have anything in them nor that the government would have had any legitimacy to guarantee retirement before we won. They will try to take the money and run. They don't care about your pension, lol. It's just capital for them to lend out and make profits from.
Traditionally, socialists have simply guaranteed retirement via the state. An actual guarantee. And because socialists have also traditionally made so much of life available at no or low direct cost to the individual (housing, healthcare, transportation, food), this mostly just means you get to live your life exactly the same but just don't have to work.
land ownership
If the socialists are competent they will make the state the owner of all land and then figure out how to use previously corporate land for the public good and find a reasonable compromise on personal land. But it really depends on the conditions of revolution. Is land reform a revolutionary promise? What land and for what purpose?
inheritance
Should probably be largely abolushed but this also depends on the revolution. Nobody is coming for granny's keepsakes but you don't get to inherit the slave plantation.
small businesses
This is a term used for tax purposes in certain rich Western countries. It's not really meaningful for when to expropriate and plan, for example. Many industries should not even exist, they are parasitic, and this includes many small businesses. Smart socialists will not make decisions based solely on a tax bracket aside from needing to be practical about how to allocate transitions and planning resources. For example, China institutes more control over businesses as they become larger, both via government oversight and worker control.
the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...
If you're doing that you're a financial idiot lol. Much better for the state to allocate your housing and keep you away from such decisions.
Socialists have traditionally guaranteed housing via various mechanisms, starting with building enough of it and ensuring it exists where people should be for economic activity. Connect it to transit, make it available bear industry and retail, etc.
Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration.
Basically everything you mentioned is out of reach for the vast majority of humanity due to the capitalsti system. You're describing things that only the petite bourgeouis in impeeialist countries even think about. This us a very small number of privileged people even in those countries.
So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.
It doesn't stand at all, you are just unfamiliar with two centuries of working class political struggle and geopolitics. This is understandable, as Western educations do their very best to ignore most of it and misinform about the rest. One of the things they teach is the cartoonish impracticality of socialist systems that they describe with fanciful and false stories, basically fairy tales to appease reactionary capitalists that promote such propaganda in the first place and, for example, dictate what textbooks the Texas Board of Education buys and therefore the content in classrooms nationwide.
The untold reality is that socialists are actually very practical and realistic people that build from the needs of the wider working class and have traditionally tracked commodity prices and investments and military funding allocations and run and led worker revolrs and run and led wars of liberation. We are practical to a fault and endeavor to understand the world as it is and what is needed to liberate ourselves from an oppressive system and offer a vision of: what if we built this world for ourselves and not bankers or a noncorporeal profit-generating machine?
Wealth tax and taxing inheritance. You know it works because the capitalists flee the fucking country as soon as you inplement it (or rather before, when they buy information from a corrupt official or legally from a politician).
Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Generally, Leftists believe it can only happen via revolution. The general idea is to organize and build dual power, so that when an inevitable revolution arises, the working class is already organized and can replace the former state.
Eating the billionaires and "nationalizing" publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying "you can still possess your car" is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...
You're working off the mindset of maintaining Capitalism and piece-by-piece Socializing it, which is not what Leftists generally propose.
I suggest reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, if you're genuinely interested.
The small business part of the transition is "easy" (or at least, not any harder than maintaining a capitalist business), people have been and are currently doing this already. They are known as worker-owned cooperatives, and are often extremely liberating to those who make the effort. Depending on the industry (and the government you live under), it's not even that difficult, roughly on the order of forming a freelancing agency. There are also entire organizations dedicated to assisting with corporate transition to cooperative structure.
Here are some good examples of resources in the US to start learning that process:
- https://www.cccd.coop/
- https://www.georgiacoopdc.org/
- https://www.workercoop.nyc/
- https://www.usworker.coop/en/
Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government" (in this case committee; semantics)?
Edit: I truly appreciate everybody who takes the time to write elaborate answers pertaining to my question. I will read and respond once I have the opportunity and in that case, I hope eventual followup questions are welcomed. :)
The key is in one of the words you've said:
ELECTED committee
You don't have to trust that they won't turn authoritarian. If you see authoritarian tendencies and you don't like them, you vote them out.
Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government"
That depends on who you ask. An anarchist will tell you no, a communist will tell you a different answer, etc. I'm a Marxist-Leninist so I'll answer to that as a Marxist-Leninist.
In a Marxist-Leninist state, there is only one party. In the same way that your country only have one justice system, your country only has one socialized system of healthcare (if at all), etc, there would be need only for one party: the party that represents the interests of the workers. This party would have a vanguard of communist intellectuals (liable to being removed from their position by popular vote), who would be in a constant back-and-forth democratic dialogue with the workers and their representation in worker-councils. The needs and demands of the workers would be translated to Marxist ideology, which is flexible depending on the circumstances, the culture, and the society it's applied to, and policy would be drafted, approved and adopted.
A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called "how the workers' parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution", by Pedro Ross. It details the immense level of popular participation in the drafting, approval, implementation and execution of policy in Cuba during the 1990s "periodo especial", a huge economic crisis precipitated by the dissolution of their biggest trading partner, the USSR. Literal millions of people, through their unions and through worker councils, participated democratically in deciding which sectors of the economy they wanted to preserve most, which ones least, which workers are redundant and which aren't, which goods and services should be prioritised in the planned economy, how to organize local organic farms everywhere (including workplaces) in order to minimize food imports... All of this happened in a back-and-forth, multi-year exercise, between the top representatives of the government, the specialists (e.g. economists, hospital directors, transit company directors, etc.), and the direct representatives of the people through the worker's councils. It's truly one of the most explicit and overwhelming examples of democracy that I've ever encountered.
A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called "how the workers' parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution", by Pedro Ross.
That sounds like a fascinating book! I've always been interested in the nitty gritty of how the Cuban democratic process works, and this book seems accessible and is just under 200 pages (not including the appendices/bibliography) so I might actually get through it.
Here's a temporary download if anyone wants to grab it (it's also just on libgen if you prefer to find it yourself)
Rather than a dry, aseptic description of the Cuban institutions and form of government, the book reads as a historical account of the process that took place in the years of the Periodo Especial.
The second half of the book, for some reason, is a recount of the Cuban revolution and its historical causes, which you may or may not skip reading depending on what your purpose is with the book.
Thanks for providing a link!
What do you think about people who claim only having one party is undemocratic? I do believe there should be a certain freedom to form parties of your own and eventually run for election, but this is standard in most western countries and I'm unsure if I'm missing some benefit to only having one party. Genuine question by the way.
I'm not the person you asked and they surely have a better answer, but I thought I'd throw some things out there:
A lot of what are understandably called "one party states" are not technically one party. The DPRK has like three other parties and I'm pretty sure there are countless parties all over the PRC. It's still reasonable to refer to these countries as one party states because they have some kind of constitutional provision preventing any other party from taking power at the highest levels, but they still use multiple parties as a means of representing diverse interests.
Our comrade VI evidently knows way more about Cuba than I, but something I happen to know is that, when you run for office in Cuba, you are not the candidate of any party, you are effectively independent. I think that they conceptualize what a party is in a very different way. In America, the political parties are literally private entities, with all the legal ramifications that entails, and are effectively companies pushing brands in order to get money from donors via held seats (that's a crude generalization, but I think it works well enough). In the "one party states" I know of, the "one party" is considered to be part of the governing apparatus itself, rather than something that exists outside it seeking to influence it. It's all a conjoined project that way.
I personally think that, assuming there is actual democracy in terms of the government needing to enact the popular will, a one party state is probably a more coherent way of having society united in its various projects, even if the proverbial ship needs to change course now and then for whatever reason. That's just my feeling though, and it's mainly informed by the overwhelming sense one gets if they follow American elections that they are engineered at every level to be anti-democratic.
Thanks for being open to discussion, I appreciate it. I'll start talking about the reality of multi-party systems and liberal democracy.
Generally, multi-party systems aren't democratic if we adhere to the definition that "the power of legislation is in the hands of the people", which I think would be a good premise for a parliamentary multi-party system. Ideally, you'd choose a platform in elections, which has a given program, or even create your own platform if you don't feel represented enough. Then, this platform supports its program in a Congress, and votes through representatives to pass legislation according to its program. Sounds good, but let's examine whether the policy that people want to enact is actually passed, and whether policy that people don't want to enact is passed.
We can start with the case of the US. The vast majority of Americans support an extended universal healthcare system of some sort. The technical details are a bit hazy, but the reality is that most people would support such a system as poll after poll shows. Yet, the years pass, and there's basically no progress in this direction, how is this democratic? How come if a majority of people support this, it's not pushed forwards and legislated? It's the same with abortion rights, a vast majority of Americans believe in legal abortion rights for women, yet no legislation is passed in that regard and many states actually go backwards. A majority would support increased taxes on the extra-wealthy and on big companies. Study after study show that public opinion is one of the worst predictors for policy, i.e., there's barely any correlation at all between polls on policy, and actual passing of policy. Can we say that there's an actual democracy in the US, when the interests of the people don't correlate with legislation?
I'll talk about Europe now, since I'm Spanish and it's a closer example to me. Recently we assisted to the outrageous example of Macron unilaterally skipping Congress to increase the retirement age against the desires of basically the entirety of France. Huge protests broke out, he was vilified in social media, and all polls showed that this was an extremely unpopular decision. Yet it passed. The same happened all over the EU during the 2010 Euro crisis. Austerity policy was enforced by the authorities everywhere: lowering expenditure on healthcare, education and public retirement pensions, reducing investment in infrastructure, increasing taxes such as VAT... Again, this was extremely unpopular and against the desires of most people. It's been a decade and a half since then, and these austerity policies are still in place. VAT is still higher than it was, expenditure in healthcare and education hasn't increased to the levels prior to the crisis... Yet another example of blatant anti-democracy. If the policy isn't carried out with the will of the people, the system isn't democratic.
I could go on giving examples of failed cases of policy in multi-party systems, but now I'll do the opposite and bring examples of multi-party systems that actually applied popular policy.
Salvador Allende was a Chilean leftist politician in the previous century, who was elected by a majority of citizens to carry out nationalizations of the mining industry (the heart of the economy of the country at the time), and to improve the welfare state. His term didn't last very long at all, because when popular policy started being actually enacted in a democratic fashion, a fascist coup murdered him and replaced him with a fascist dictator.
In the Spanish Second Republic, a similar thing happened. In the 30s, a very progressive leftist government was elected, and promised to carry out land reform, i.e. expropriation from big landowners and redistribution of land to the farmers in a country which was primarily agrarian. It suffered the same fate: a fascist coup, a bloody civil war, and almost 40 years of fascism.
In Iran, under the administration of Mosaddegh, a leftist secular politician who wanted to make sure that the Iranian oil was profiting the majority of Iranians instead of the Shah and a few British companies, nationalised the oil industry. This was met with economical blockade, with paid actors pretending to be communists destroying private property to agitate people, and fake protests organized by the mafia funded by the MI6 and the CIA ousting him from the government.
Now let's go to a period in which actually progressive policy was passed in Europe in a popular and democratic fashion: the post-WW2 period. Under the looming threat of a socialist revolution, and the high level of labour organization through unions, the governments of Europe were successfully pressured into passing meaningful legislation on the limit of working hours per week, on progressive tax systems, on welfare state (healthcare, education and pensions)...
So it seems to me, that the only way to make governments pass actually progressive and democratic policy that most people agree with, is through the organization of workers and the threat of a communist revolution. That, if people just vote socialists into power without organizing labor, they suffer coups, that if they vote social-democrats they get austerity and antidemocratic policy. What percentage of Europe agreed to increase the military budget after the start of the war in Ukraine? I'm not trying to argue whether that's a good or a bad policy, I'm just saying all polls showed it was an originally unpopular decision, yet it was carried out.
If the only way to enforce governments to enact popular, progressive and democratic policy, is through the organization of labor, then why would I want multi-party systems instead of a system of representation of workers in a single, unified, democratic structure?
I know it's a long answer, but I appreciate it if you made it to the end.
All committees are authoritarian regimes, if they have any power. Making any decisions with power to back it up is authoritarian.
The question is whether you want decisions made by 500 bankers and some military conteactors or by collective deliberative organs that respond to the needs of the people at large, and assuming the latter, how do you make them function robustly?
A smart approach would borrow from the successes of others while allowing a bit of experimentation. Most real-world sociakist systems have implemented both a bottom-up local governance system for some domains and top-diwo national level policies for other domains. There is a real-world practical need for both.
Re: The councils in this cartoon, they are referring to, more or less, workplace democracy. Practically speaking, this requires a similar system: workers deciding how to run their company but also there is a need for national/regional coordination, for capital investment, and to balance against the bourgeois tendencies of what is basically a wirkers' cooperative.
A key promise of socialism is not to immediately establish utopia, but to set the groundwork for how we may develop society for ourselves. There may be a form of workers' councils that you prefer but that I might critique as unworkable in the current world. But it would surely be something made possible by socialist steuggle over time, as the comic explains: we would work to decrease necessary work time, to live our lives more how we want to. Once free if, say, imperiakist wars and expensive dirty energy, perhaps local workers' council politics can adopt a simpler, more fair and autonomous form.
Basically, deconstructing oppressive systems would be an ongoing process that would have to be weighed against what is "more important" (e.g. not getting nuked), not one leap. So the form taken would depend on the context of how we win, what threats we face, borroeing from others' successes, and how our experiments go.
Yes and no. Most Marxists advocate for a form of Whole-Process People's Democracy, or Soviet Democracy. Essentially, the idea is that, rather than just having state, local, and federal elections (as a brief example), there are far more rungs you can directly elect and participate in. This ideally holds people accountable better than western democracies do.
Is a planned economy an inherent part of socialism? That seems like the biggest red flag (lol) in this comic. All sorts of incentive mismatches there.
"Democracy at work, too" is like the biggest pitch for socialism, "government deciding what businesses can exist" is the biggest pitch against. A tightrope to walk, for sure.
Why would a democratically planned economy be a bad thing? How is it more democratic that capitalist owners decide which businesses can exist, rather than the people collectively decide so?
The potential for regulatory capture and corruption, as well as the inherent inefficiency of having a limited number of decision makers. I wouldn't trust the 2028 Trump Administration to thoughtfully determine which businesses are allowed to exist for 4 years.
It's more democratic to let anyone start a business, rather than having a gatekeeper. But more importantly I think it makes more sense to let the capitalists take the losses if their business idea sucks, and then socializing the gains once we know it works.
I'm sad that when you use the word "democracy", the best future people can imagine is the modern American system of "democracy"...
I'd argue that yes, it is, because markets entail private ownership, which goes against the basic notion of socialism
The closest you can get to socialism with the market system is worker's cooperative - but market forces do not stop accumulation of power in the form of land and capital, as well as mergers and acquisitions. At the end of the day, you just reset capitalism for a while if you give businesses a free reign.
Is a planned economy an inherent part of socialism? That seems like the biggest red flag (lol) in this comic. All sorts of incentive mismatches there.
For Marxists, absolutely. Marx heavily critiqued the profit motive and the dangers of producing to fulfil greed instead of need. For Syndicalists, Market Socialists, etc? Perhaps not.
"Democracy at work, too" is like the biggest pitch for socialism, "government deciding what businesses can exist" is the biggest pitch against. A tightrope to walk, for sure.
Workplace democracy is an improvement, but Marxists will argue insufficient alone in combatting class society.
What's your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?
What's your issue with Central Planning, other than vibes?
I'm not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it's inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can't possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn't trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.
I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I'd think if we're theorizing, there's a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there's a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.
Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.
I'm not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it's inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can't possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn't trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.
Advocates of Central Planning advocate for rungs, not just 5 dudes and some excel spreadsheets. There would be factory level planners, local planners, regional planners, state planners, country planners, and international planners. Nobody will know everything, but they will know their own areas inputs and outputs.
I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I'd think if we're theorizing, there's a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there's a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.
Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine? Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths, it's better to have a cohesive whole that is thoroughly regulated and democratically controlled.
Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.
I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital for more information on why the Profit Motive and Capitalist Production itself to be bad.
Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine?
It's more concentrated power. The opportunity for more corruption. Sure, they could be philosopher kings at first but having the control means someone can have the control corruptly.
I don't necessarily believe all small businesses are fine, but their interests compete with each other, and they're small, by definition. And we already have regulations that apply to all businesses, there is democratic control in some sense. So I'm not worried about how the corruption of one small business owner would warp society or national interest.
Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths,
I agree with this premise and then not the conclusion. Inevitably, all behemoths were once small businesses. But is the correct intervention to stop the small businesses from forming in the first place, or to prevent the ones that get big from utilizing that size in an asocial way? You could socialize businesses of a certain size, for example. You could set rules for worker-elected board members, or whatever.
It's more concentrated power. The opportunity for more corruption. Sure, they could be philosopher kings at first but having the control means someone can have the control corruptly.
Why does that mean it cannot be accounted for democratically?
I don't necessarily believe all small businesses are fine, but their interests compete with each other, and they're small, by definition. And we already have regulations that apply to all businesses, there is democratic control in some sense. So I'm not worried about how the corruption of one small business owner would warp society or national interest.
Nothing is static, they will eventually grow into monopoly and corruption.
I agree with this premise and then not the conclusion. Inevitably, all behemoths were once small businesses. But is the correct intervention to stop the small businesses from forming in the first place, or to prevent the ones that get big from utilizing that size in an asocial way? You could socialize businesses of a certain size, for example. You could set rules for worker-elected board members, or whatever.
The correct path is to avoid the problem entirely via Socialism.
Socialism
A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.
