Richard D. Wolff video: 3 basic types of socialism

[Jarhyn]

One thing that is often absent from the discussion of co-ops in a social democracy is how to get there. The primary issues come in where the capitalists *have* put forward real risk and investment, but wherein that investment is allowed to eclipse the fact that the workers are responsible for all value added. This creates a system where over time, workers are denied the value they create.

I keep pointing out that this is unsustainable.

To remedy this, I think that we need to advance to a system where ownership of the means of production gravitates over time to those who apply said means, to the extent the means are applied. This can be accomplished largely by passing laws that *gradually* transfer ownership of some asset to the person or persons using said assets; and if assets sit unused, to gravitate towards the public trust.

Capital must be expected to make an investment, get some margin of profit in the case of successful investment, and then *move on*.

This could, itself, be accomplished in a variety of ways, though lately my favourite would be to change the way dividends are structures, such that dividends only be paid in the form of selling stock to the company itself plus some fixed profit margin, where that stock would come to be owned by the employees. Thus to extract value is to cede control and ownership of future value.

There's no need to steal people's stuff. You can start an ESOP today in the US. Get a group of like minded partners who share your goals and create an co-op, or esop, or employee company. No problem. I can think of several big very successful ones: Winco, Bob's Red Mills, and etc. One of the problems with socialists is that they think that they have to steal to create their paradise. There's no need...

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

 

[Harry Bosch]

One thing that is often absent from the discussion of co-ops in a social democracy is how to get there. The primary issues come in where the capitalists *have* put forward real risk and investment, but wherein that investment is allowed to eclipse the fact that the workers are responsible for all value added. This creates a system where over time, workers are denied the value they create.

I keep pointing out that this is unsustainable.

To remedy this, I think that we need to advance to a system where ownership of the means of production gravitates over time to those who apply said means, to the extent the means are applied. This can be accomplished largely by passing laws that *gradually* transfer ownership of some asset to the person or persons using said assets; and if assets sit unused, to gravitate towards the public trust.

Capital must be expected to make an investment, get some margin of profit in the case of successful investment, and then *move on*.

This could, itself, be accomplished in a variety of ways, though lately my favourite would be to change the way dividends are structures, such that dividends only be paid in the form of selling stock to the company itself plus some fixed profit margin, where that stock would come to be owned by the employees. Thus to extract value is to cede control and ownership of future value.

There's no need to steal people's stuff. You can start an ESOP today in the US. Get a group of like minded partners who share your goals and create an co-op, or esop, or employee company. No problem. I can think of several big very successful ones: Winco, Bob's Red Mills, and etc. One of the problems with socialists is that they think that they have to steal to create their paradise. There's no need...

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

Says who? I started my own company. My partners and I created the idea. Developed the product. Tested it. created the market. Found the customers. Refined it. Engineered it. Tested it. set the procedures. Hired the right staff. Created the relationship with the customers. The bank loan is secured with my personal guaranty. But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

 

[lpetrich]

Fiske, Alan - The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations - PAEI - Structures of Concern
The Four Types of Relationships · The Dirt Psychology

• Communal Sharing - everybody gives what they can and takes what they need.
• Equality Matching - balancing of favors, tit for tat.
• Market Pricing - exchanges where the participants may not know each other very much, and may try to come out ahead.
• Authority Ranking - obedience to some authority figure.

Of these, CS is  From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs in Karl Marx's well-known statement. That does not scale very well, because it is vulnerable to freeloaders. The closest thing to a large-scale version is freebie online content, like open-source software, because the cost of copying is much lower than with physical media.

EM also does not scale very well, because one has to remember one's scores with all those that one has dealt with.

MP is much like EM, but it scales much better. Likewise, AR scales very well. This is why MP and AR are essentially universal on a large scale. However, both MP and AR have problems of their own, and a partial cure is representative democracy.

 

[Trausti]

One thing that is often absent from the discussion of co-ops in a social democracy is how to get there. The primary issues come in where the capitalists *have* put forward real risk and investment, but wherein that investment is allowed to eclipse the fact that the workers are responsible for all value added. This creates a system where over time, workers are denied the value they create.

I keep pointing out that this is unsustainable.

To remedy this, I think that we need to advance to a system where ownership of the means of production gravitates over time to those who apply said means, to the extent the means are applied. This can be accomplished largely by passing laws that *gradually* transfer ownership of some asset to the person or persons using said assets; and if assets sit unused, to gravitate towards the public trust.

Capital must be expected to make an investment, get some margin of profit in the case of successful investment, and then *move on*.

This could, itself, be accomplished in a variety of ways, though lately my favourite would be to change the way dividends are structures, such that dividends only be paid in the form of selling stock to the company itself plus some fixed profit margin, where that stock would come to be owned by the employees. Thus to extract value is to cede control and ownership of future value.

There's no need to steal people's stuff. You can start an ESOP today in the US. Get a group of like minded partners who share your goals and create an co-op, or esop, or employee company. No problem. I can think of several big very successful ones: Winco, Bob's Red Mills, and etc. One of the problems with socialists is that they think that they have to steal to create their paradise. There's no need...

 

[lpetrich]

Such agreement with Marxism! Agreement that there are maker classes and taker classes, though with different identifications of them.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Every time I argue that socialism means what the dictionary says it means (i.e., the government owns or controls the means of production) some leftist asshat here tells me the dictionary is wrong.

First dictionary definition google turns up :

"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."​

Controlled by the govt might or might not mean controlled by the community as a whole.

Dictionary aside, if people define what they mean, your associating some word with something else becomes irrelevant.

 

[James Brown]

Such agreement with Marxism! Agreement that there are maker classes and taker classes, though with different identifications of them.

Like the old saying: "Communism is where one group of people exploits another for personal gain, whereas Capitalism is the other way around."

 

[Jarhyn]

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

Says who? I started my own company. My partners and I created the idea. Developed the product. Tested it. created the market. Found the customers. Refined it. Engineered it. Tested it. set the procedures. Hired the right staff. Created the relationship with the customers. The bank loan is secured with my personal guaranty. But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

 

[PyramidHead]

Incidentally you forgot that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany made a treaty dividing up Europe between them that started WW2, and that the Soviet Union as a result launched aggressive wars against among others Finland and the Baltic countries, and kept the latter annexed.

So no, the Soviet Union was not a force for good. Yes, they contributed to defeating Nazi Germany, because they had to after the Germans backstabbed them, but their treaty gave the Germans free space to invade and annex plenty of other countries to begin with.

The comment I was replying to was specifically asking about the conditions that would have made success challenging for the Soviet Union. I think it's safe to say that, at the very least, the Soviets were embattled from all sides from the start. Their signing a pact with Germany was a strategy Stalin undertook specifically to postpone war with them. He was a paranoid, obsessed leader who made many rash decisions, but they have to be understood in the context of what RVonse asked about, which was my point that no socialist society has been allowed to exist unperturbed by capitalist aggression.

 

[Tammuz]

Their signing a pact with Germany was a strategy Stalin undertook specifically to postpone war with them.

I'm not sure about "postponing", the Soviets were pretty surprised when the Germans attacked. And part of the pact was dividing up Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the latter certainly tried to lay claim on the countries that the pact had assigned to them, and launched aggressive wars against Finland and the Baltic countries.

I think that Nazi Germany never had any intention of honoring the pact. They went to war in western Europe because the British and the French declared war against them when they, along with the Soviet Union, divided up Poland between them. To the Nazis, it was always eastern Europe that they saw as the primary goal for the settlements of Germans, and the enslavement of the Slavic peoples.

 

[Derec]

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

In a society, ownership implies legal ownership, with organs of state enforcing it. Without that, ownership only applies as long as you can defend your claim.

Let's say whatever entity controls Mars wants to encourage colonization. One way would be to guarantee ownership (for mining for example) of a piece of Martian land. That is what happened in the US West. The US government wanted to encourage settlement and thus offered an ownership stake.
 Homestead Acts

 

[Jarhyn]

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

In a society, ownership implies legal ownership, with organs of state enforcing it. Without that, ownership only applies as long as you can defend your claim.

Let's say whatever entity controls Mars wants to encourage colonization. One way would be to guarantee ownership (for mining for example) of a piece of Martian land. That is what happened in the US West. The US government wanted to encourage settlement and thus offered an ownership stake.
 Homestead Acts

So, then, you agree that it wnership is whatever the government makes of it, which naturally includes the provision that ownership may be transferred under those rules on the basis of use.

Good to know we see eye to eye!

 

[Harry Bosch]

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership. If someone arrives on Mars and claims "this is all mine", does that make it true? Does that mean anyone else who goes to the entire planet is "stealing" it? Ownership is not unilateral, it MUST not be allowed to be unilateral.

Rather ownership is an agreement of stewardship, surrounding the things that were here before us and which will remain after. We have a responsibility to act in a socially responsible way, and part of social responsibility is recognizing that "ownership" is what we make of it.

Says who? I started my own company. My partners and I created the idea. Developed the product. Tested it. created the market. Found the customers. Refined it. Engineered it. Tested it. set the procedures. Hired the right staff. Created the relationship with the customers. The bank loan is secured with my personal guaranty. But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

What is your definition of "active working"?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

To sum up...

1. Socialism in the first sense: the government regulates, intervenes, directs, constrains, shapes the economy toward social ends without changing the institutions of private ownership and market exchange. Examples include the majority of first-world European democracies like Germany, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. This is what Bernie Sanders means when he talks about socialism 90% of the time. This school of thought is also called social democracy by some.

There is a name for that, when the ownership is private but the control is with the government. At the end of that road there is another name for it, not "social democracy". However, using that name makes it very controversial, and people debate whether or not it is socialism, or "right wing socialism", or "the right wing opposite of socialism." A lot of socialists are adamant about how they are anti to this.

2. Socialism in the second sense says: reforming and regulating private enterprise doesn't go far enough, because it will always be vulnerable to pushback from the profiteers who do not want to be constrained. Therefore, the state must take over private ownership entirely, to channel all investment and production toward social ends. Also, the market is a bad way of distributing scarce resources, because those who most need them are always the ones least likely to afford them, so for the basics of human existence we should rationally plan the production and allocation of goods and services. To differentiate themselves from the first group, socialists of this stripe used the word communist to describe themselves. Examples: the Soviet Union, Cuba, communist China, Vietnam for part of its existence, Venezuela in the early 90's, and many European countries in the era leading up to World War I. No politician or major political party advocates communism in the United States.

Yes, this one is socialism. Private ownership of the means of production doesn't exist.

3. The third sense of socialism is Wolff's pet project, and says: neither regulating private enterprise nor taking it over with the government will lead to favorable outcomes if the workplace itself is still controlled in a capitalist way, with employers (state or private) owning everything that is produced by employees, and deciding what to do with the value they create. Wherever production or service provision happens, therefore, the details of what gets done, who does it, how much is done, how fast, where the surplus goes, and where the company is located should be democratically decided by the people who engage in whatever it is the company does. This is often referred to as a worker co-op, but it is important to note that this is a description of an individual enterprise, not a society-wide economic system. Maybe 10% of the time, this is what Bernie seems to advocate.

A distinction without a difference.

 

[Bomb#20]

"Steal" "their" stuff. That's not really what's even being proposed. You have already failed to critically think about the nature of ownership.

"Think critically": (verb) To come to the same conclusion as me

But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

There's a word for buying at a price which it's up to the buyer and not the seller to decide is fair: "steal".

 

[lpetrich]

In a previous post, I'd listed Alan Fiske's three types of social relations, Communal Sharing, Equality Matching, Market Pricing, and Authority Ranking (CS, EM, MP, AM).

Turning to economics, ideal communism, as it might be called, is essentially CS. "Communism" in practice has been Marxist-Leninist state socialism. Not democratic socialism, but socialism run by a single autocratic party.

Capitalism in theory is MP, and that indeed applies to interactions between businesses and other economics participants, but most businesses are not run like the New York Stock Exchange. This is true for everything from egalitarian partnerships and cooperatives to businesses run in elitist, top-down fashion -- from CS to AM.

As to Wolff's various types of socialism, #1 is more-or-less social democracy. Coupled with elitist business management, it makes the elite feel exploited by taxes and oppressed by regulations, even as that same elite's sycophants pooh-pooh exploitation and oppression more generally. In effect, they become Marxists with them as the proletariat, the makers, and everybody else as the bourgeoisie, the takers. Like Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged".

Turning to type #2, that is what Marxist-Leninist regimes have done. It is something like capitalism with the State as the sole capitalist, "USSR, Inc.", as Robert Kaiser had described it in his book on the Soviet Union. But it was only good for military production and heavy industry, and it could not be gotten to work very well. M-L regimes are gone from Europe, with the successors of the ruling Communist Parties being essentially social-democratic ones. The five surviving M-L regimes have become capitalist roaders to varying degree, to use an old Maoist insult, though they are still one-party authoritarian states.

Russian Communists have even become addicts of the Opium of the People: Russian Communists are turning to Christ Russia's Communist Party turns to the Orthodox Church | Russia | Al Jazeera

Social democracy typically involves #2 along with #1, often as a way of filling in what markets often fail to provide efficiently. Many capitalism apologists seem to think that there is no such thing as a market failure, but many others disagree.

The only way to avoid #1 and #2 would be to have governments do nothing -- anarchy. Some libertarians propose a "night-watchman state", only concerned with protection and resolution of disputes. But that involves weak versions of #1 and #2 -- governments providing protection, dispute-resolution, and dispute-resolution-enforcement services.

 

[Jarhyn]

"Think critically": (verb) To come to the same conclusion as me

But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

There's a word for buying at a price which it's up to the buyer and not the seller to decide is fair: "steal".

Ask the employees if they think that they deserve to get paid more for the work they do. If it's up to the seller, and it very much is the worker selling their labor, and they don't think they are being paid fairly, then who is doing the stealing here?

 

[Bomb#20]

"Think critically": (verb) To come to the same conclusion as me

But I'm willing to make my company "not unilateral" just buy me out at a fair price!

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

There's a word for buying at a price which it's up to the buyer and not the seller to decide is fair: "steal".

Ask the employees if they think that they deserve to get paid more for the work they do. If it's up to the seller, and it very much is the worker selling their labor, and they don't think they are being paid fairly, then who is doing the stealing here?

"The" stealing? What stealing? Who says there's any stealing going on? What, you think employees are paid whatever the buyer decides is fair, just like you "buying out" HB's company without his permission for "I say a fair price to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working." or whatever else you declare to be fair? That's not how employment works -- if HB won't pay what the sellers decide is fair, he can't make them sell. This is in sharp contrast to a socialist who decides getting HB's company can be accomplished largely by passing laws that gradually transfer ownership of some asset to whomever he defines to be using said assets.

But I shouldn't need to explain this -- Jimmy Stewart explained it better in Shenandoah...

Tinkham: This here is Mr. Carroll, and a few of his friends. They're federal purchasing agents, buying horses for the cavalry.

Carroll: That's right Mr. Anderson, and although there's a set price we pay, I'm willing to hear how much you think your animals are worth.

A Son: Our horses are not for sale.

Anderson: What my son tells you is the gospel truth, gentlemen, and you can carve his words in stone for posterity, if you're a mind to. The horses are not for sale.

Carroll: That may be, but I think you should know we're authorized to confiscate anything we can't buy.

Another Son: What does "confiscate" mean, Pa?

Anderson: Steal.​

 

[Jarhyn]

"Think critically": (verb) To come to the same conclusion as me

And I say "a fair price" to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working.

There's a word for buying at a price which it's up to the buyer and not the seller to decide is fair: "steal".

Ask the employees if they think that they deserve to get paid more for the work they do. If it's up to the seller, and it very much is the worker selling their labor, and they don't think they are being paid fairly, then who is doing the stealing here?

"The" stealing? What stealing? Who says there's any stealing going on? What, you think employees are paid whatever the buyer decides is fair, just like you "buying out" HB's company without his permission for "I say a fair price to buy you out is the margin you extract from labor once you quit actively working." or whatever else you declare to be fair? That's not how employment works -- if HB won't pay what the sellers decide is fair, he can't make them sell. This is in sharp contrast to a socialist who decides getting HB's company can be accomplished largely by passing laws that gradually transfer ownership of some asset to whomever he defines to be using said assets.

But I shouldn't need to explain this -- Jimmy Stewart explained it better in Shenandoah...

Tinkham: This here is Mr. Carroll, and a few of his friends. They're federal purchasing agents, buying horses for the cavalry.

Carroll: That's right Mr. Anderson, and although there's a set price we pay, I'm willing to hear how much you think your animals are worth.

A Son: Our horses are not for sale.

Anderson: What my son tells you is the gospel truth, gentlemen, and you can carve his words in stone for posterity, if you're a mind to. The horses are not for sale.

Carroll: That may be, but I think you should know we're authorized to confiscate anything we can't buy.

Another Son: What does "confiscate" mean, Pa?

Anderson: Steal.​

Exactly, who says there's any stealing going on? If a condition of doing commercial trade in the country is that what you invest in a company comes to be owned by the workers who work that company as a function of your extraction of value, that is what you consent to in doing trade *as a capitalist*.

See how that works, imposing an asymmetry on an argument and claiming it is ethically justified? I like my version where the persons who control the dialogue are labor.

Cry foul all you like, but you justify your paradigm wherein labor gets shafted over the fact that labor cannot object lest they die in a gutter. But there are more of us, and *we do most of the fucking work*. And we get as much of a right to get together and decide how these paradigms work and what constitutes stealing and what doesn't as much as "capital". What about this don't you understand. You have said "oh, that's *stealing*!" Without justifying the asymmetry in who is deciding on what is "ownership".

 

[Harry Bosch]

Of course. Conservatives use language to influence. They are masters at it. They started calling government programs "socialist" in the 1960's in order to paint democrats as socialists. It's brilliant. Sad that so many have adopted their definition.

I don't mean to single you out for this, but this is one of the sillier comments I've ever seen. The people who are trying to redefine what "socialism" means are the people like AOC and Bernie and their fan base.

Every time I argue that socialism means what the dictionary says it means (i.e., the government owns or controls the means of production) some leftist asshat here tells me the dictionary is wrong.

The right first started re-classifying the word socialism in the 1950's to attack the New Deal. The right are masters of redefining words to suit their propaganda: death panels, pro-life, death-tax, apple pie, bailout, family values, and etc and etc. This was started before AOC's grandmother was born! It's brilliant. It's gone so far that democrats have now adopted the incorrect terminology. So now, anyone on the left who wants to increase the safety net to help people is classified a socialist. So now people on the left who want a better economy and want lower barriers to benefit all are put in the same camp as my friend Jarhyn (who would destroy the economy as we know it).