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.
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
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.
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:
* '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:
In the worst case, the "materials" could be imported parts or resources produced in unknown conditions.
boo
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.
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.