i did preface my statement by saying it was merely conjecture m8er. i agree with 100% of what you've posted here.

Like I said, only going off of what he actually said. And yeah Nexus iirc he did mention that communism was/is a failure. Joe as you can tell from my post I kinda disagreed with the second part of your post. I don't think he was taking any sort of hard line as to what should be done. I admit what you said at first seems to be the implication of what he says near the start (regarding the whole anti-charity thing). But he's pretty explicit when he says that he's not an idiot and doesn't think we should just stop charity (and thus isn't under any delusion that some utopia would spring up from doing so). My take on it was that he was pointing out that 'cheap charity' is 'A' barrier as opposed to 'THE' barrier to fixing poverty, albeit he seems to be saying that it is a pretty large one.

I do take your point about him arguing for a planned economy when he says a change in structure is needed since I'm struggling to think how you can change the structure to rid poverty without it being a planning of the economy (which as both you and nexus pointed out has its own issues). Saying that, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen without directly planning the economy and I think he's smart enough to realise this, hence not actually giving an answer when he doesn't know.

pretty sure if he encountered another red october, he'd support it.

either you believe that he doesn't have an idea of how to get to true socialism - in which case he is only criticizing without offering a solution and is therefore a waste of time - or you believe he does have an idea and he just knows it wont go over very well and is trying to gloss over it. i believe most of his ilk fall into the latter category. they think 20th century communism failed for very specific reasons - not a basic failure of the philosophy to understand human behavior such that it will always fail - and so their dreams of future revolutions look very similar to things we've already seen. Maybe they are right, but they should not be given one bit of sympathy until they explain themselves (full disclosure: i don't think they are right, but i also think humans are capable of all kinds of weird shit so I don't really think I understand human behavior well enough to say they are absolutely wrong).

joe idk what you're smoking if you think that communism/socialism is doomed to fail because ~human nature~

that represents a very serious misunderstanding of what a socialist economy is and how it would look in our society. e.g.: we could take our current society and by law convert all corporations into worker owned collectives in which all employees are stakeholders and are paid out depending on the business' success. Businesses like this already exist, for example, in the UK we have the John Lewis partnership which paid out a 17% of salary bonus to all employees at christmas last year.

this would fit the definition of a socialist society (i.e.: the profit accrued through taking capital, applying labour and selling the finished product goes to the workers, not the sole owner or investment class shareholders of the businesses (capitalists))
I wouldn't structure it such like that but this merely serves as an example.

this example wouldn't simply immediately fail and stop working because human nature, indeed, studies have shown that after a certain point, money becomes secondary in motivating someone at their job and other factors like self-actualisation and self-control over workflow become more dominant. to keep up the theme of the thread:


furthermore, it's not even factually true that the soviet communist economic model was a failure. at the end, yes, you had the ridiculous model villages and so on, but these were more an artefact of the totalitarian stalinist regime of fear than any actual flaw in the system itself - if you were second in command at a factory and saw your boss get disappeared by secret police for not reporting "the right numbers", even if he was just telling the truth, would you continue to tell the truth or would you just report "the right numbers"?
put it this way - during WW1, russia was a backwater agricultural nation. in 1917, ten nations either sent arms or actual armies into russia to try and put down the revolution and damage russia as much as possible. again after 1945, the Allies were belligerent towards russia and bombed it and invaded the eastern front (iirc, it's 3am and not 100% sure of the exact facts. churchill certainly talked a big game about killing bolsheviks as i recall). despite these factors, russia went from a shithole farmville country which had just lost the majority of its prime male population in two world wars to end up beating out the USA's economy for several years. it was the first country to put a man into space ffs. that's pretty fucking impressive however you want to spin it, considering the historical circumstances leading up to it.

also stop trying to smear the guy by associating with stalinism. what is this the 50s, congressman mccarthy? you can criticise them but let the man have his political views without shitting on them with some kind of wacky american PINKO COMMIE LIE-BERAL TRAITOR bile being spewed all over your posts jesus

uh lots of flawed logic in that talk


first of all the high reward generating poorer performances is a matter of pressure, if you could have 2 months of salary by just solving a riddle you would start to sperge out and lose your concentration -- the experiment does not suggest anything about people preferring mastery or self direction over monetary gain


on the subject of socialism, I think what those kind of experiments forget is that people look at other people all the time
it is not about getting a bigger reward it is about feeling you are rewarded justly - and when that fails then the whole system collapses, and you get corruption and poor performances


a note about apache linux wikipedia ecc... yes you see people voluntarily taking part in collective projects that require creativity and skill; a little harder would be to see a bunch of people spontaneously harvesting rice or waiting tables or stacking shelves*, ecc... and an economy is not based solely on the creative work of highly talented professionals


*you can also add non-manual activities to this list such as accounting work or whatever boring ass white collar job that requires a degree but nobody would volunteer to do for fun and self realization

agreedo

one big problem can be expressed by a slovenian story:
a witch appears to a farmer who is arguing with his neighbour and offers him two choices - either she will give him one cow and his neighbour two cows or she will take away one of his cows and take away two of his neighbour's cows. obviously he goes for the second choice.

sadly for many people, winning is not enough - someone else has to lose as well. this is a point i can concede on, because i'm not really sure how this reconciles with socialist thought (also i only got 3 hours sleep last night. i'll think about it some more)

as for undesirable activities, the thing about people doing shitty jobs i.e.: picking up the rubbish at ungodly times, cleaning toilets etc - these jobs exist because it is not profitable to a capitalist to automate them or find a way to do them more efficiently; it makes more sense to pay some poor fucker minimum wage to do a shitty job just so he doesn't starve.

in a socialist society, the theory then runs that since the necessity for a profitable return in $x on capital investment $y does not exist, these jobs could be steadily automated away. taking the rubbish man example, another solution off the top of my head could be that we install a compactor or a chute at the end of each road and everyone just takes their rubbish up there whenever. the machine either compacts it and waits for it to be picked up or the chute sends the bags onto to some central processing plant where the rest of the process can be automated. this isn't economical to do at the moment, because there's no profit in it. in a socialist society, this wouldn't be the case.

other people have also put forward the idea that without the implicit threat of becoming homeless/starving unless you take a shitty job, these jobs could be partitioned up and split across society, i.e.: maybe one week every few years each person in a given town would go pick up the rubbish bags so that no one ends up stuck in these shitty jobs forever. the issue i find with this is that it could be said to impinge on someone's liberty but honestly i don't think i would care that much if i had to do a shitty job just one week out every 156 or so.

also re: stuff like waiting tables/tending bar/stacking shelves. in our society at the moment these jobs are seen as low prestige, shitty pay and imply that the person who does them is a nobody. if all shelf stackers were paid a good, living wage and given the opportunities to move on if they wanted to, i don't see the problem with just letting them get on with that shit. i know when i worked as a shelf stacker there were a few lifers who just liked doing that kind of job, very low stress, they can go home and forget about it and they got a lot of flexibility in terms of shifts/time off. maybe it's not actually a problem to have these jobs? if people are happy doing them then who gives a fuck.

Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder
but nobody wants to lift them heavy-ass weights

yeh am not saying those jobs are bad or anything, I am saying you will find a hard time finding people that will do them for free (re: linux, wikipedia ecc...)

Nexus people have a hard enough time using litter bins as it is what makes you think people are going to haul their shit to the local compactor and not just dump it over the fence.

Although it would open up a new private waste management industry to make big dolla.

m8 it is not like we would just get rid of the whole concept of fucking law and order in a socialist society. there would still be u know, police + laws + fines + punishment for fucking fly tipping

also if it's a socialist society the very concept of a private company wouldn't exist

jesus