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 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.