Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Scoops Novel]

Ukranian ranger, from what I've skimmed you're a fairly standard, understandable case. If you want to be proud of that, i wont stop you, but I'm not going to respect you, or particularly like you. If it wasn't already clear, please don't bring your humor into this. Localizations wahay! If you're not much different, please be honest here, though i can say this much for Bay12, you think globally, not nationally. I'm always skeptical when people claim that they wouldn't put their family's first, thanks to statistics.

I agree, we're not enormously motivated to help others, but we could be. We'll need to be, not least because of the reaction if we don't.

[Eagle_eye]

I understood what amuses me most in Eagle_eye, that he thinks that change of economical system can change people goals and morals to match his own ones he thinks are ideal.

Most people's morals are close enough to mine that I'll settle for that, but only when they're actually confronted the problem. The only reason people are ok with the horrors of capitalism is that most of the suffering is diverted to the third world.

Truth is that capitalism is fully capable to solve existing major problems of humanity, if demand will exist. If only few millions of Americans and Europeans cared about African starvation enough to spend a quarter of their profits to feed starving children of Africa we'd get dozens of companies fighting for that multi-billion business and looking for ways to feed African children in the most effective way.

So.. you're saying that capitalism doesn't prevent people from being good. That's not good enough. These problems need to be solved, and if people won't do it themselves, they need to be forced to do it. You might as well say that France's problems could have been solved without deposing the monarchy, if only the Bourbons would start caring.

Eagle_eye's 99% of people are altruists claim.

I never said that. You're deliberately misrepresenting me.

and that is the reason why market economy can't feed all starving, not it's ineffectiveness.

They're the exact same thing. The fact that markets allow people to offload their problems onto the less advantaged is the reason they can be comfortable with the horrible things they do.

(Nearby Haiti and Dominican republic are net exporters of food, BTW)

Are you seriously claiming that Haiti and the Dominican republic are better than cuba? Let's look at some statistics:

HDI: Cuba- .78 Haiti: .456  Dominican Republic .702
Literacy- Cuba: 99.8% Haiti: 61% Dominican Republic: 87%
Life Expectancy: Cuba: 78 Haiti: 60 Dominican Republic: 73
Deaths per 1000 live births: Cuba: 5(lower than the US) Haiti: 59 Dominican Republic: 25

So, in terms of basic quality of life, Cuba is far, far superior to Haiti, and notably better than the Dominican Republic.

Additionally, I don't see why you keep going on about food imports. Yes, state owned industry is probably a bad idea. I have no problem with independent farmers growing things on their own land. What I object to is when you have someone who owns ten thousand acres and just takes a portion of the crops grown by the people actually doing the work. P

[Gervassen]

Love the hilariously bizarre reference to Revolutionary France as a problem-solving golden age that cured the ills of Bourbon France. It wasn't no damned golden age of problems getting solved. If that wasn't intentional comedy, you need to start making better analogies.

I thought, when you shrugged off the 40 million who died in Maoist famines, that you simply weren't good at Chinese history, but this is getting to be a worrying trend of ignoring really horrible human catastrophes that happen during revolutionary regimes. For the greater good. To ensure the most optimised number of people are happy.

[Eagle_eye]

That's not what I said. Stop intentionally misinterpreting me, and stop being an asshole.

What I said was that it was preferable to the Bourbon monarchy. Not that it was perfect, that it was better.

I thought, when you shrugged off the 40 million who died in Maoist famines

So Mao was an idiot. That has no bearing on socialism. Millions have died in famines under capitalist regimes too. Nobody seems to care about the potato blight, which was greatly exacerbated by laissez-faire policies, or the millions dead in famines under the rule of the British East India Company.

And if you're going to use Mao as an example for socialism, I get to use Pinochet as a model for capitalism. So clearly, capitalism causes the development of repressive dictatorships. See how ridiculous that is?

[Reelya]

So, Eagle_eye says that all factories should be jointly owned workers...

Some questions to you, Eagle_eye...

1) Decision making? Direct democracy or factorysized micro-government?
2) Voting method? Universal suffrage? Weighted?
3) If Universal suffrage, don't you think that less skilled workers will rule here, while 1 skilled worker can be far more important for factory success than 10 unskilled workers
4) If some weighted voting, who will determine ratios?
5) What to do with new hirings? Let's say factory had 100 workers, hired 50 more. Reelections\revoting? Maybe that 50 have no right to be represented till the next scheduled election\voting?
6) What if factory hired 200 new workers and they, using majority, decided to kick out those 100 who built it with their sweet and blood?
7)  How salaries\dividends will be divided? By comparing contribution? How will you compare contribution of different specialties inside the company?
Who will decide?
What to do if workers decides to go away? Take his share? But what if he made half of what factory has? What about all his money he chose to invest in his factory? Just forget about it?
What to do if worker becomes disabled or just too old and can't work anymore?
9) What if worker dies? His children get nothing from his share, right? Because they, obliviously, don't work at the factory

Company is broken into autonomous work groups, each of which elects their own leader on an ad-hoc basis, and each of the elected leaders become part of a company-wide senate which coordinates all policy matters. The bulk of revenue after all wages and expenses are paid are distributed evenly via full profit sharing (based on hours worked). Expenses includes maintaining and gradual expansion of plant, so workers who leave have already been paid their full value - the plant is maintained as common property for those who remain or join later. People cannot be fired without a majority decision, this is especially enforced for older and disabled workers. If you don't get along with your work group, you're free to form your own unit or work by/for yourself. New hiring is decided by the individual work groups via voting, co-workers actually do new staff interviews for their unit, not a manager. People actually set their own personal wages however much they think they are worth, BUT those wages are publically posted, and they come off the total profit-share for everyone, so peer pressure prevents people paying themselves dickish amounts.

Now, this is relevant to the questions at hand because it's not "utopian thinking", no need to speculate "will this work or won't it", because it's a real existing company - SemCo in Brazil.

And it's a very profitable one that outclassed and out-lasted traditional companies in its country. Less-flexible companies that used hierarchical management structures buckled and collapsed during the economic hard times, whereas SemCo's ad hoc structures and distributed decision making allowed it to morph to survive all conditions without suffering strikes, industrial turmoil and sacking workers. There aren't even unions at SemCo - because the workers are the management, they see unions as a pointless waste of time.

Using this model, the company grew from $4 million per year, to $200 million per year in revenue.

[Reelya]

The USSR was as socialist as the congo is democratic.

USSR was partially socialist, I'd rather not see full socialism

USSR was state capitalist. That's the term Lenin used for the system he implemented. And Lenin promised this was a temporary step before socialism (Marx's definition). They never advanced beyond Lenin's model. USSR was Socialist in the sense that the crusades were Christian - i.e. lip service and cherry-picking quotes from their "holy book" (Marx) to justfy whatever the government wanted to do.

Socialism in Marx's definition would require autonomous worker-owned factories. And the defining mantra of Marx's socialism is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contribution

To each - according - to his contribution. This is nothing to do with "everybody gets the same", except the same level of effort should get the same reward. Marx wasn't a moron, he already calculated personal incentive into every stage of his model. The USSR twisted things around to justfy paying every worker the bare pittance needed to survive - which is actually 100% opposed to Marxism, which states the principle that each man should get the full value of his labor.

Since socialism has already factored personal effort (pay is proportional to the value of your contribution) into it's calculations 150 years ago, anyone who says it has not, just doesn't know what they're talking about. Hell, even Lenin held it up as a guiding principle, not "everyone gets the same pay".

Marx's ultimate vision is for no government, no bosses, worker's self-determination. That's fundamentally the opposite of what the USSR implemented. In the same sense that looting and pillaging in the name of Christ is a WTF?

[Reelya]

yeah, but ninjas...

They do actually alert you if you've been ninja'd, giving you a chance to insert the relevant quotes directly from the page it directs you to. Hope that helps!

[Askot Bokbondeler]

yeah, i was in a hurry and thought it would be obvious enough, considering my previous posts in the same thread

[misko27]

Capitalism also is bad when used wrong. In fact all things are bad when used wrong. But on the USSR, I don't think it was ever really Communist or Socialist. To quote Orwell on Fascism

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes...  Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

Sounds like certain supposedly Socialist Dictators.

[XXSockXX]

This Orwell quote equating fascism with capitalism because of private business ownership (which is an important difference to USSR-style socialism) is a line of thinking typical of leftists in the 1930s til 50s. It is this thinking that led the eastern block to think capitalism would soon collapse economically and be torn down by revolutions. When that didn't happen they were quite surprised.

Like Reelya said, we have never seen a socialist/communist state in the sense that Marx had in mind. And we probably never will. Marx was a brilliant analyst of the capitalism of his time and is still regarded as such, while his historical determinism is widely dismissed today. He was not however a great theorist of socialism. He thought industrialisation would eventually lead to a revolution of factory workers, which would lead to the dictatorship of the proletarians, followed by the communist state. He did never elaborate how precisely such a state would look like and how the transformation would work practically.
Lenin (and all revolutionaries that came later) transformed Marx' ideas to fit his own needs and ideas. He had to come up with the whole practical part himself. Russia was not a country where a marxist revolution could possibly take place, it was barely industrialized and the majority of people were farmers, not factory workers. So Lenin included farmers into his concept of the working class. He managed to artificially (not in Marx' sense naturally occuring) initiate a revolution (financed by Germany) and then got stuck in the dictatorship part of the plan.
This happened with all communist revolutions basically, they all had Marx' ideas twisted to fit the ideological needs of their countries and circumstances. This is also why there are so many forms and varieties of socialism/communism, they are all slightly different ideologies. Which is also why the ideological left is so splintered and they all hate each other so much.

[Eagle_eye]

You know, not all socialists, myself included, are Marxists.

[XXSockXX]

You know, not all socialists, myself included, are Marxists.

I'm vaguely aware of that, though most socialists I know about do use Marx as a reference in some way and commit the same error he did: reducing all human problems to economic problems and ignoring that humans, beyond bare survival, are highly driven by irrational impulses.

Though this is often said in discussions (must be a relic from cold war polarization), capitalism is NOT a political system. It's just a means to generate wealth. The political system in western countries is (representative) democracy, with capitalism (we prefer the term market economy here) as the economic system. The thing that Marx couldn't predict was that democratic countries would be able to control the laisez-faire capitalism he was observing in the 19th century, thus creating a relatively high standard of living for everyone and rendering the need for revolutions obsolete.
Market economy is clearly more successful than planned economy, even semi- or non-democratic countries like Russia and China have realized that. In western countries it's just a question of fine-tuning regulations and wealth distribution.

[MonkeyHead]

P T Join In.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

XXSockXX
Thanks for the answer to the OP, really interesting.
I always was intrigued by workers owning means of production stuff as I do think that people shouldn't get money for doing\providing nothing.

Company is broken into autonomous work groups, each of which elects their own leader on an ad-hoc basis, and each of the elected leaders become part of a company-wide senate which coordinates all policy matters.

As I thought, cell structure... Smaller group = much easier to manage via democracy. I think various cells quite compete (workforce, funding) with each other, right ? And they may have very different salary levels, right?

The bulk of revenue after all wages and expenses are paid are distributed evenly via full profit sharing (based on hours worked). Expenses includes maintaining and gradual expansion of plant, so workers who leave have already been paid their full value - the plant is maintained as common property for those who remain or join later.

Sounds quite well. Are worker investments allowed? ( Like "I have some money and want to invest them into the company") If so how they are treated? Also, what relations with banks company has? Is it same as any other company? (important as many(most?) socialists advocate banning banks)

People cannot be fired without a majority decision, this is especially enforced for older and disabled workers. If you don't get along with your work group, you're free to form your own unit or work by/for yourself. New hiring is decided by the individual work groups via voting, co-workers actually do new staff interviews for their unit, not a manager. People actually set their own personal wages however much they think they are worth, BUT those wages are publically posted, and they come off the total profit-share for everyone, so peer pressure prevents people paying themselves dickish amounts. 

Yay! Free market. That's not that nonsense "everyone should get same salary regardless of skill because they are equally important\work equally hard\we don't want to make people overwork themself". Right to say "I deserve more" is present here. If employer decides that your work don't cost as much as you claim either admit that or look for the new job where you'll get what you deserve or become self employer and sell your work directly. Great.

Which is also why the ideological left is so splintered and they all hate each other so much.

Heh, so true. Can say that as a member of a social-national party. We renamed after we got tired of to be called neonazi and fascist... Not that it helped. And everyone keeps calling us "far right-wing".  That's actually very funny because we can't be a neonazi and a right wing in the same time... Nazi are left wing!

[XXSockXX]

XXSockXX
Thanks for the answer to the OP, really interesting.

That was Reelya, not me.

That's actually very funny because we can't be a neonazi and a right wing in the same time... Nazi are left wing!

Despite the misleading name National Socialism is just a variety of fascism and thus clearly far-right wing. They had some socialist elements but dropped them completely after Hitler came to power. They nationalized some industries relevant to the war, but that's it with Nazis and socialism.



This spambot is hilarious. "Free nazi oven" WTF?