[AskSocialist]

Ok, I'll nibble here -- I would describe myself as a Socialist, and I'm happy to have an open conversation about the question you've asked. (Unless your question was rhetorical and not intended to be a discussion.)

Can I start by asking you what type of Socialism you are most concerned with?

Socialism is a very broad term with different meanings to different people.

For example, I am a Socialist who is against autocratic rule. I believe the Soviet style communists (the countries you mentioned) weren't much better than other contemporary autocrats and in many cases were far worse. There are other Socialists who believe that any hierarchy is bad and should be removed. It's a very diverse community of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and a wide variety of beliefs, only a small minority of which believe in totalitarian or single party rule.

I support, for example, democratic workers councils, federation of guilds, and other such elective methods of leadership. I just happen to also believe that labor entitles you to a share of the profit of that labor, rather than investment wealth. I'd love to live in a world where every company was a workers-coop, and we reduced our profit motive and increased our work comfort motive.

[g42gregory]

I don't doubt that you are against the autocratic rule. The point is that you won't have a choice. There will be another gentleman (they always appear), who will decide that he should be in charge and will take power, by force. You will complain, he will put you in jail or worse. At that point, you will remember that you had to dismantle democratic checks & balances (how else will you convince people to part with their property!), but it will be too late for you and everybody else.

[AskSocialist]

> how else will you convince people to part with their property!

This is a great question, and a common misunderstanding! First, in case there's some confusion by other readers, I'm against private property controlling and directing labor, but not personal property -- that is to say that no one is going to take your xbox or Ford truck away from you. Those things are personal property, they are yours and should stay yours.

I do think, however, that private property -- the money used to exert control over others ("I'm the chief investor in X, so you must do what I say") -- should be replaced with cooperative ownership. Either through labor ownership, labor-customer ownership, or the state, as appropriate.

But, how do we achieve that? Yes, you could seize all the assets via force. But that's bad. Instead, you structure your incentives so it happens over time. Decrease the costs of running a co-op, reducing taxes or fees for businesses that are collectively owned. Increase taxes and fees proportional to the differences between the compensation of the highest paid individual and the lowest. Increase estate taxes, so no one immediately loses their money, but less capital passes down (obviously with gradients so as not to hurt most people). Expand property taxes to include other property at some nominal rate.

The other thing you could do is make it as easy to do the co-operative thing as it is to do the solo thing. Finding a lender to talk about cohousing is MUCH more difficult than finding one to talk about a mortgage. Finding a lawyer who can incorporate a co-op is much harder than finding out how to start an LLC. We would move significantly towards my ideals over time if the education and resources allocated were even close to parity.

It doesn't have to be a revolution and it doesn't have to be without the rule of law or anti-democratic.

[labster]

While I appreciate the sentiment behind this new account, it’s also feeding a troll. Anyone equating SF to Soviet Russia is not looking for reasoned argument.

[AskSocialist]

There's a part of me that hopes that maybe, just maybe, there will be someone who listens and discusses and introspects a little. It's happened to me before, "Oh, all anarchists are kiddies" types who have never sat down and had a real conversation with an anarchist to understand what that term means. Every once in a blue moon someone listens and learns and says, "Well, I don't agree with you, but at least I understand you".

I'll keep extending that olive branch, quietly but assertively offering to discuss, answering questions. If it fails 99 times but succeeds once, that's one more person in the world who stops thinking in such rigid black and white about in-group vs out-group.

[anigbrowl]

Meantime you've fed up to 99 trolls.

[AskSocialist]

Well, before that it was 100 trolls. One fewer troll.

[proc0]

The problem with Socialism is the requirement for others to forcibly partake in it, otherwise it doesn't work. It's not just about forcing everyone to pay higher taxes, at its core it's about rewarding everyone equally, despite the fact some people choose to work more. The only way to stop this is to force everyone to work the same amount, which cannot be done in a humane way. This means inevitably, some people will always work harder than others, and if they're not rewarded by the market, they'll be rewarded by circumventing the state and being corrupt. This is what happens every single time it is tried. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[AskSocialist]

> at its core it's about rewarding everyone equally, despite the fact some people choose to work more

I hear this frequently, but I do not believe it is axiomatic. I believe we should provide a sense of equal minimum reward, a baseline level of food, shelter, amenities that everyone gets access to. Even if they cannot work or choose to work the minimum amount.

Again, it's important to recall that "Socialism" includes everything from Soviets to Anarchists to Democratic Socialists and many (many) flavors in between.

But it's not fundamentally antithetical to Socialism to recognize the people who choose to work more. The rewards structure might look different, depending on what flavor of Socialism you prefer, but I would expect that someone who goes above and beyond also tends to attract rewards (whether those are luxuries, time, recognition, or other things).

Even my anarchist/socialist friends would recognize that many luxuries are limited -- we cannot all have infinite bottles of aged whiskey -- but if you put in the extra time to really help out at the distillery, or really devote a lot of time to making their barrels, it stands to reason you'd be recognized for that.

I also genuinely believe that when you remove the necessity of "I need to work an excess to ensure I can afford to support my family's basic needs", the desire to work more comes from a passion for the work or for securing 'nice to haves'. There's nothing saying a worker's co-op couldn't decide to, for instance, nominate 10% of their peers each month for extra rewards or something.

[proc0]

> But it's not fundamentally antithetical to Socialism to recognize the people who choose to work more.

Fair point, and I think there are definitely enough resources to support people with disabilities or incapable of working for other extreme reasons. I guess the main discussion would be around where exactly to draw the line such that we're not forcing people to pay for those that choose to not work.

>I also genuinely believe that when you remove the necessity of "I need to work an excess to ensure I can afford to support my family's basic needs"

It depends on how we define "excess work". Unfortunately some people's excess work is another person's daily morning routine. If the productive person is not fairly rewarded, they will stop trying or even worse try something illegal or immoral. I think there are still a number of creative solutions to try, things like facilitating sponsorships for people of all ages to learn new skills, or investing in a public "linkedin" of sorts that is free and uses AI to match people with jobs. There are many creative and cheap things to try, and artificially imposing a certain "living wage" which constantly changes isn't addressing the root of the problem, which is that many people don't understand how to leverage the job market, their skills, etc.

[AskSocialist]

I really appreciated Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread, where he discusses how factories may, if the incentives were different, actually be quite pleasant places to work. If the factory needs to produce product but is open to anyone working at it, some folks will take the time to improve lighting, reduce noise and pollution, step in and take shifts, and generally try to make it nice to be there.

Not everyone will do this, but some folks are just wired to want to help in that way. The thing is that we don't have a financial incentive to do that today -- you must optimize your factory ruthlessly for production efficiency rather than for comfort.

I believe that rewards for excess work are similar -- some of us cannot put the work down, we enjoy doing it. I think those cases will largely fall into one of a few buckets:

1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more. (I tend to fall into this bucket -- my needs are met, I do it because I derive value in the labor)

2) Some folks will divert their excess labor from production to a hobby, art, or other projects (like the factory comfort). It might not mean more widgets, but maybe we have enough widgets. If you make everyone around you happier, rewards will find you.

3) Some folks will want more luxuries, and we'll have to figure out if and how to allocate those things. Not everyone can work excess. If I lost a hand due to a workplace accident, but I'm otherwise eager to work, do I deserve less than someone who is equally eager but able bodied? I believe many Capitalists would say yes, but many Socialists would say no.

4) We'll have to recognize work that isn't considered 'work' today. Parenting, for instance, requires an immense amount of labor. Laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, elder care, etc. Maybe we encourage productive folks to spend their excess time looking for ways to make that work easier.

5) Some folks aren't going to be happy. They are going to feel under-rewarded for their labor. Hopefully this is offset by generally higher wages/standard of living for most. (If we're not paying billions of dollars to CEOs, that's billions in the pockets of individual workers).

6) Some folks work excess today and see no increase in comp -- it's already a problem for salaried workers, even within Capitalism. I can work 40 hours or 60 hours, but my pay is the same either way. I might get a notional bonus of a few grand a year, I might get an earlier promotion. But those things certainly aren't guaranteed.

> we're not forcing people to pay for those that choose to not work.

What is work is a very, very important question. If someone is a stay at home parent, cooking and cleaning, is that work? If someone is a musician, but isn't a particularly great one, is that work? If I sit in the park and tell stories and people enjoy listening to me and I have a regular audience, is that work? If I'm an elder and mostly enjoy spending my remaining years with my loved ones, is that work?

Yes, we must have some level of productivity, obviously, in order to survive. I strongly suspect that if you gave people basic needs, nearly everyone would chip in some labor, but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash".

[MichaelZuo]

Who gets to define what 'basic needs' are?

[proc0]

All of those hypotheticals can be true, yet you'll still need to deal with people who consciously choose not to work or do much less work. Under Socialism these behaviors are encouraged because they are rewarded regardless. Under Capitalism these people pay the price themselves, whether that is fair or not, not only is it more unfair to have others pay for it, but at least it discourages people to a great extent.

> 1) Some folks will just do extra work and not be bothered that they are doing more

I doubt this for most people. This is basically saying that right now a lot of people are ok with a pay cut (same work, less pay = free extra work). I can see a lot of people doing #2, which is equivalent to not working. And as mentioned before, these people are not working yet still somehow rewarded for it.

#5 and #6 are true, and is why if everyone gets a living wage regardless of whether they work or not, the people who currently don't enjoy doing what they do would simply stop doing it. Maybe everyone would become some kind of artist, while machines keep the economy running, but that is a utopia that requires many technological breakthroughs, i.e. advanced AI, unlimited renewable energy, better batteries, etc... and we're not getting there without Capitalism, which is somewhat ironic.

> but we'd also probably need to decide on some mechanism for "who performs sanitation if we do not get enough volunteers?" Today that mechanism is "you gotta eat, so you gotta work wage labor", but we could absolutely replace that with "least popular labor gets bonus luxuries" or "we all take turns, once a year you gotta collect trash".

This is something that the market solves as if it where a large, decentralized computer. Without market incentives there needs to be top-down coordination to incentivize people and this becomes unmanageable and does not scale.

I still feel that there is a problem with markets in how success is exponential for an extreme minority, while seemingly impossible to attain for a large portion at the bottom. I'm not sure what the best approach to solve that is, but we cannot take the wealth markets produce and expect the same output for a system without markets. The wealth we have under markets is not attainable without it, even though some people exponentially get rich from it. While inequality between rich and poor is bad, having everyone be poor because nobody can coordinate their productivity is even worse. Personally, I feel once AI becomes powerful enough, we will be able to do this kinds of complicated coordination that may solve the problem, however that path is a minefield of potential dystopias.

[PaulHoule]

Someone could easily say the problem with capitalism is the requirement for others to forcibly partake in it. Like they send the police and army if you don't.

[proc0]

It's not though. You can grab a group of friends, buy some land and start a commune. It is perfectly compatible with local-level socialism. Nobody forces anyone to be a consumer. Now of course you have to work... but choosing not work and expecting food and shelter, is literally making others work for you (and in the case of welfare using the government to force others to pay for you).