A huge problem with leftists is that we don't have an actual program for socialism beyond "ethical capitalism now" and "science fiction post scarcity in the vague future".
So I made this post to explain my clear idea of what socialism should look like in the immediate future. I also want to hear your own idea.
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Money is immediately abolished and replaced with labour-vouchers that are destroyed upon use. This eliminates profit, interest and rent, and removes the incentive for private ownership of capital and abolishes commodity production.
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"Wages" (in quotes as its no longer money-wage ) are set based on actual contribution to production. This means income inequality will still exist, e.g. oil-rig workers will make 10 times more than janitors, managers 5 times more than line wokers etc. This is non-negotiable, workers must get exactly what they actually contribute. This is for both moral reasons and also to ensure that the law of value is not violated.
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Incentive to innovate, improve efficiency and increase production comes from the fact that income is directly correlated with labor productivity. Better production machinery or improved managerial practices will directly result in increased income.
- The prices of goods and services are calculated based on direct and indirect labor inputs. The total prices of all goods and services in a given period is equal to the total labour-vouchers generated in that same period.
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A separate account is maintained for foreign trade with capitaist countries, using foreign currency, ideally crypto or digital renminbi. The goods traded in will be stripped of currency value and assigned a labor-value equal to the goods traded out.
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Economic planning is based on direct democracy. For consumer goods, planning is based on consumer choice(the producer has no choice here). New products and services are introduced at emporiums, and the decision to begin their production is based on consumer votes. Production of highly rated existing products and services is increased, while low-rated products are discontinued.
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For producer goods, guiding principles such as overall labor-use reduction, energy-use reduction, material input recycling etc. are used in the formation of plans.
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Flat rate income tax is the only tax that is implemented. Tax is used to fund those activities that do not produce value, e.g healthcare, education, unemployment insurance etc.
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Digital direct democracy(mob-rule) is implemented to the maximum extent possible. The role of legislatures is reduced to a technocratic role of forming laws, while the actual voting is done through mob-rule. Voting on laws, policies and plans is done on a weekly basis, rather than voting every 4 years for leaders. This may seem cumbersome, but with common ownership comes shared responsibility. The alternative is giving responsibility to leaders who may form a self-serving bureaucracy.
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Military power is equally distributed by creating armories housing guns, ammunition, armored vehicles, drones etc. Such armories are placed in every community, with open access. The entire population receives military training.
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A separate standing army that is hierarchically organized and answers directly to the state is also present. Their military power is consciously kept lower than the total military power of the general population. This solves the tankie vs anarkiddy debate. The state is now both effective in fighting domestic and foreign counterrevolution (satisfying tankies) while true power is held by the people(satisfying anarkiddies).
I'd like to hear your critique of my ideas and also want to know your own clear program.
EDIT: It's telling that no one has posted their own idea of socialism, very few leftists actually know what they want and yet think it's reasonable to ask why people don't want "socialism". You need a concrete idea of what socialism actually is.
I think the fact that Leftists don't have a" specific program" for socialism is a good thing. The conditions under which socialism could be achieved are not known ahead of time. In what scenario are you able to make your ideas a reality? I don't think any of this could be implemented without a small group, who has taken control in the wake of a revolution (a vanguard party). However, this group would lack the stability, resources, and support, to make such an involved system overnight.
Also your socialist country includes unemployment insurance? Wat? Try again.
Why do you like the phrase "clear and distinct idea" so much? Are you trying to refer to obsolete 17th century epistemology?
I think the fact that Leftists don’t have a" specific program" for socialism is a good thing.
The lack of a concrete program, or even discussion towards one is why socialism now means anything from Norway to Cuba. It is symptomatic of leftists inability to articulate their criticism of capitalism beyond what capitalists themselves criticize it for. Bill Gates himself warns of climate change, inequality etc.
The conditions under which socialism could be achieved are not known ahead of time
The conditions are already ripe in advanced countries, where the contradictions of capitalism has resulted in stagnating wages for 40 years.
In what scenario are you able to make your ideas a reality? I don’t think any of this could be implemented without a small group, who has taken control in the wake of a revolution (a vanguard party).
The political difficulty of any attempt of socialism is not an argument against the specific content of the idea. What is more important is its feasibility, desirability and rationality. I'm not sure why a "small" party is needed. If these ideas are to implemented through democratic voting, then naturally you need a large party that represents the majority. If you want to implement these ideas by force, then that is no longer an issue of parties, big or small, but an issue of military power.
Also your socialist country includes unemployment insurance?
Some people in society would be unable to work due to physical or mental issues.
Why do you like the phrase “clear and distinct idea” so much? Are you trying to refer to obsolete 17th century epistemology?
I dislike it when I ask leftists what they mean by socialism and they say vague things like "democratic planning" or "FALGSC". In real life, the actual dirty work of implementing socialism requires concrete action based on a very clear and unambiguous idea of what kind of society we actually want. So of course I would vote for M4A and higher wages and subsidized green energy, but if those are the only concrete actions we talk about, then we are not really socialists.
We cannot keep saying that socialism is something implemented far in the future. If we cannot prove logically why socialism is beneficial now itself, there is no reason to believe that we can prove socialism is beneficial in the distant future after we have implemented all the social democratic policies. European countries are clear examples of this. The socialists who allied with socdems won their reforms. And what is happening now? Socialism is as distant as ever, while fascists are gaining power.
im reading your idea and just, wow, is this what people have been smoking here? yikes. imagine thinking distribution of resources should be proportional to "production", ewwww.
If you make the classic populist mistake of "equal wages for all", you will end up breaking the law of value, as well as removing incentives for improving production of goods and services. It would be a utopian socialist policy, not a scientific socialist one.
Marx defined the first stage of socialism as "To each according to their work". A person managing a huge factory, or a person operating a giant mine excavator does not contribute the same as a person working as a janitor or a barber. To equalize their wages is to exploit the high productivity worker and reward a low productivity worker.
This also reduces the incentive to eliminate low-productivity jobs, which is one of the first things a socialist country should do. A society of reasonably equal wages could be achieved in the long term, where the division of labor is broken down to such an extent that everyone's contribution is more or less the same, and where alienation of labor is eliminated. That is not possible in the first stage of socialism. The incentive for society to move in such a direction is precisely the fact that division of labor maintains unequal wages.
im sorry, this just sounds like some capitalist neolib thing tbh. and wdym janitors dont contribute to society!? the only reason they get paid little rn is cos their job isnt particularly skilled and there is no lack of people who can apply for it. in return they make a fucking essential job to avoid everyone's health going to shit, and contribute to society so much and and you're not doing out of a sense of morality?? what? what's next, are you gonna tell me my boss is the source of my productivity as well? guess what, your oil rig isnt gonna work either if you dont have oil rig specific workers, or janitors, so you tell me.
OP posts Labor Theory of Value
im sorry, this just sounds like some capitalist neolib thing tbh.
Wish you were joking. Pretty unconstructive and naive tbh. Economic calculation is necessary for any advanced economy. You can't just take capitalist machines, produce as much as possible, and hope for the best. That's why early utopian socialist schemes didn't work very well. The failures of such led to the development of scientific socialism and the Labor Theory of Value.
It's a fact that some workers are more productive than others. The reason for this can be because they control more machinery, e.g. a tractor operator is more productive than a farmer who plants by hand. It can be due to natural abilities, e.g. some managers can run the same workplace more efficiently than other managers. So workers must be paid according to what they actually contribute. I wouldn't deny that the janitor's job is essential, but the logic of law of value has nothing to do with what subjective considerations of how essential a job is.
This policy is good not just for enabling rational allocation of resources, it also provides a strong incentive for the people to guide their economy in such a way as to eliminate or automate as much low-productivity jobs as possible.
This policy is good not just for enabling rational allocation of resources, it also provides a strong incentive for the people to guide their economy in such a way as to eliminate or automate as much low-productivity jobs as possible.
Allocating less money to low-skill labourers does the opposite of that. If an hour of a manual miner accounts for 0.1 units of the budget (call it dollars, gold coins, hours of SNLT, whatever), and there's a machine that is 5 times faster but an hour of an engineer that maintains such an automatic mining machine accounts for 1 unit of the budget, then the technology will not be adopted even though it requires half as much actual labour time.
Edit: I think this is one of the primary contradictions of capitalism at this time, and the reason productivity and technology have more-or-less stagnated since neoliberalism caught on in the 70s.
Minimizing cost is equivalent to maximizing labour-productivity when costs are calculated based on labor inputs. In your example you haven't included the indirect labor cost. The miner will produce 1 ton of ore/hr and the engineer will produce 5 tons of ore/hr. Lets say the indirect labor cost of the engineer is 5 labour hours per ton while the miner is 1 labour hour per ton. So ore produced by the miner costs 2 (1+1) labor hours/ton, while for the engineer its 1.2 (5+1)/5 labor hours/ton. So it is logical for society to spend on better machinery as it reduced prices. Also, the engineer is earning 6 labor-tokens per hour, while the miner is earning only 2 labor-tokens/hour. It makes sense for the miner to want to improve his technology. Does this make sense or am I making any mistake here?
EDIT: I think in capitalism that contradiction exists because capitalists are interested in profit, not reducing cost for its own sake.
I don't understand, why are you paying the miner or the engineer for the indirect labour? Indirect labour is constant, not variable capital. You've already paid the indirect labour to the workers that made the shovels, or the engine, bits and other parts required to build and maintain the robot, and so on.
I did not include indirect labour in the argument to simplify it, but you can add it like so:
Manual miner Automated miner Overpaid automater miner Time for 1 ton 1 hour 0.2 hours 0.2 hours Cost of materials* / ton 0.1 hours 0.3 hours 0.3 hours Wage / ton 1 hour-token 0.2 hour-tokens 1 hour-tokens Wage / hour 1 hour-token 1 hour-tokens 5 hour-tokens Actual time spent / ton 1.1 hour 0.5 hours 0.5 hours Accounting cost / ton 1.1 hour-tokens 0.5 hour-tokens 1.3 hour-tokens * 'Materials' include education, transportation, construction, maintenance, and so on. It's constant capital in Marx's terms.
If you overpay the engineer to match the "productivity" of the manual miner, the ore from the engineer ends up looking more expensive in the books than that of the manual miner, even though half of the actual labour time is needed.
To prevent inflation and shortages the wages would need to be normalised, meaning the manual miner would need to be paid less than 1 hour-token per hour. I too left this out to simplify the argument, but it still illustrates how by paying according to "productivity" you're reintroducing economic exploitation, and creating a professional class that appropriates the surplus value from the manual workers.
You're right, I shouldn't include constant capital. You mention wage/hour is 5-hour-tokens for Automated Miners, is that a typo? Should be 1-hour token right?
IMO, the cost of actual wages paid shouldnt be counted in the accounting process. The cost of a good is calculated assuming that the cost of variable capital is 1-labour-token/hr as you have mentioned. But since labor-tokens arent money, it's up to us to decide who actually gets how many labor token, rather than just paying workers the accounting cost . Lets say, according to your table, we have manual A and automated B working side by side. The final price is set is by B. Lets say they both work 10 hours, and A produces 10 tons and B produces 50 tons. In total 20 hours of labor-tokens is generated. The cost of the ore produced by A is 11 tokens and by B is 25 tokens. The final wages are paid in the same ratio of 11:25, so A is paid 6 tokens and B is paid 14 tokens.
Would this make sense? Of course, because all labour is social, its very hard to decide what work is "really" worth. The engineer did nothing to "deserve" more wages just by virtue of being able to operate a machine, but we want to set up an incentive where more productive(in real output) work is rewarded higher, without distorting the actual costing of the items.
Yes, that was a typo.
I understand what you're doing now. Your intention is that people working on less-productive industries seek to train and switch to more automated ones. I'm not convinced that's a good way to do it, because it's not always the case that a manual miner is working side by side with a mechanised one because there are not enough engineers. The link in the production chain that's lacking might be in the middle of it, like, for example, there are not enough microprocessors, or drill engines, or whatever.
I'm assuming a rationally planned economy that first exhausts all available sources of automation before assigning more labour-intensive techniques. Such a system can identify the actual source of scarcity and apply a demand bonus to it. I like this way because it's more direct, less 'market-like'.
In the real world is not as easy as with our caricature of the manual vs automated miner to identify where to split the labour tokens. If you always do the split at the last step of the chain, you're reproducing the "GDP problem" where most of the work is done in a Chinese factory but most of the value and "productivity" is realised in an office that imports the almost-finished product and slaps an Apple sticker into it.
Finally, It's not actually a productivity bonus, but a mechanization bonus. Consider an expensive automated miner. It does not actually save labour but it may be picked because of historical or practical circumstances, like for example an excess of engineers:
Manual miner Expensive Automated miner Time for 1 ton 1 hour 0.2 hours Cost of materials / ton 0.1 hours 0.9 hours Wage / ton 1 hour-token 0.2 hour-tokens Actual time spent / ton 1.1 hour 1.1 hours Output / hour 1 ton 5 tons Split ratio 11 55 Wage / 10 hours 3.3 16.7 In the worst case, the "materials" could be imported parts or resources produced in unknown conditions.
it also provides a strong incentive for the people to guide their economy in such a way as to eliminate or automate as much low-productivity jobs as possible.
bruh what do you think this economy does? do those people still exist? yes. shut up please, yikes, what's this law of value you just keep telling me about? you cant just pick a thing and say its a law, cmon.
Law of value : Commodities exchange according to the SNLT needed to produce them. In a socialist society, commodity production is eliminated, but the law of value should still be followed as it is what enables us to accurately judge the true costs of products and services. How exactly the law is implemented is up to us.
what do you think this economy does? do those people still exist?
You are pointing out one of the contradictions of capitalism, eliminating low-wage jobs results in people having no money to buy goods and services and therefoce, reduced profits. In a socialist society, profit is no longer a constraint, meaning there is no limit to how many jobs you can eliminate, and the unemployed can be supported through income tax on the fewer higher productivity workers.
gonna hit this one with a boo, chief. just give everyone in base of need. that's it. no going around discriminating and judging people. what about the disabled? mothers? dunno, guess they aint valuable. artists? who knows how much they are valuable. who gets to decide who is valuable? bet those people are pretty valuable arent they
Good point about the mothers. Under capitalism, women are expected to do a certain amount of uncompensated labor because of their gender. Under this version of "socialism" they would also be. A good hint that u/weshallovercum's system is just capitalism with extra steps.
The labor of raising children will surely be compensated in the system I'm proposing, I never said they wouldn't. The wages of child-raising would be paid from the income tax. The exact amount of this wage would be determined democratically, and since the total tax fund is limited, it would come at the expense of wages paid for education, healthcare etc. So it's a political question, but surely a socialist society will compensate child rearing.
I already mentioned that paying equal wages makes economic calculation impossible. Who or what would decide what "need" is? The wages of maternal care, disabled people, unemployed etc can be payed from the income taxes. Since they are either not doing work or doing unproductive work, their wages can simply be some standard living wage. But it must be remembered that their wages only exist because others are doing productive work. The actual wages of those doing productive work cannot simply be based on subjective factors, but must follow the law of value.
Have you read Towards a New Socialism ? It's a pretty thorough plan for a lower-stage socialist nation takign into account modern computers and geopolitics. It was originally intended as a blueprint for the USSR but it was not finished after the capitalist restoration. The author also advances a concrete algorithm using linear algebra to work as the basis of the planning software and tests it to show that it can run in a modern computer and calculate an entire modern economy in a few minutes.
The programme is quite similar to yours but argued at length and different in key aspects, most importantly your «contribution to production» point. In short, Cockshott argues that training is labour, wage differentials come about because in Capitalism studying is an individual investment, and to conserve the labour voucher balance labour hours should be accounted for including the study time but the vouchers allocated to the workers should be the same for everyone bar a bonus to cover under-supplied or dangerous occupations.
So, for example: an hour of labour by a doctor that's expected to work for 20 years and take 10 years to train is input in the planning software as 1.5 hours, but the doctor is paid 1 hour of labour throughout his training and employment and thus the book is balanced. If there are not enough doctors they may get paid a bonus both for education and practice. While an hour of work from a cashier that requires only a few days of training is accounted for as 1 hour and paid 1 hour.
Yeah, I'm influenced by Cockshott a lot, as well as stuff I've read from people in various forums.
You are getting a lot of hate here but I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I am not a utopian and I don't believe in a post-scarcity society without "money"/labor vouchers in the near future.
I've been interested in a market simulation such as the Lange Model. In such a model, markets and labor vouchers would be used to create economic data and determine preferences without private capital accumulation.
Local states use both democratically defined policy and real economic data to set prices. A worker-managed firm would then meet those prices with operating revenue based on a percentage of the value produced. New firms could get operating capital and revenue from the local government or coop, who use all of the publically available data to do market research. All capital is socially owned and people's economic rights are protected. Id be happy to provide examples or elaborate.
Can you elaborate on the labor vouchers? Would that be digital? And do firms use vouchers for accounting either internal or external with other firms?
Tbh I haven't read much on how labor vouchers are implemented, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Labour vouchers can be either digital or paper, like money today. I think that exchange between firms do not involve labour vouchers, the entire economy operates like a single firm.
1: Get a focus group of chuds
2: Pitch something to them, for example, free healthcare
3: Wait for one of them to start saying something like, "What's next? Free housing? Free food? Free internet!?!?"
4: Do everything that they say during this part
5: Repeat 1-4 for all other issues.
This is the ideal form of government. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.
Money is immediately abolished and replaced with labour-vouchers that are destroyed upon use
You're abolishing money to replace it with... Money with a different name.
You could call it money if you want, but its nature is more important than its name. Labor-vouchers do not circulate back to firms, they are immediately destroyed upon exchange with goods or services. This eliminates the very concept of profit and producing for selling(as opposed to producing for consumption).
They can be used as money in some cases, for example a second hand good is sold for labour vouchers and the person who pockets it keeps it. But this does not result in profit, and is not a capitalist exchange. Ultimately, all vouchers are used to buy new products and services and are destroyed.
The reason for using vouchers instead of money is to ensure that labor is compensated for exactly what it contributes thus eliminating exploitation. This cannot be done with a circulatory money, which reintroduces the concept of commodity production(selling for profit) and slowly but surely, the entire capitalist form of production.
they are immediately destroyed upon exchange with goods or service
What about when they are taken by the government for income taxe instead?
The taxed income flows to all the people involved in government jobs such as healthcare, education, building public infrastructure etc. This income is then destroyed when these people eventually purchase goods and services.
Depends on what you mean by immediate. It's one thing to say that the left has somehow gained power in the US and now must work within the existing structures to get socialism. It's another to say we're throwing everything out and designing a socialist government from a clean slate.
I gotta go to sleep but I might come back later and write something.