Socialism Is Always Doomed to Fail

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I don't 'believe' anything.

I am merely pointing out that your (and Jason's) definition accurately describes, and therefore includes, corporations owned by shareholders.

If the definition you are using is wrong or incomplete, then that's not my belief - it's your mistake.

No, it really doesn't. Collective ownership in the socialist sense has everyone an equal owner. Pooled share ownership is not collective ownership.

Then you need to include that in your definition.

'Collective' means 'of many people'. It doesn't imply homogeneity nor universality.

If your definition relies upon implied information, then it's not really a definition at all - it's just a hint. And you can't blame others if they don't get your hints. When you provide a definition, it's up to you to make it accurate and complete to avoid confusion. That's not something you can leave to your audience to do for you, if you want to be understood.

So I need to define the word "collective" when read the definition of Socialism as "collective ownership of the means of production"?

How far back do I need to go in defining things for you that theoretically you should know?

 

[bilby]

Then you need to include that in your definition.

'Collective' means 'of many people'. It doesn't imply homogeneity nor universality.

If your definition relies upon implied information, then it's not really a definition at all - it's just a hint. And you can't blame others if they don't get your hints. When you provide a definition, it's up to you to make it accurate and complete to avoid confusion. That's not something you can leave to your audience to do for you, if you want to be understood.

So I need to define the word "collective" when read the definition of Socialism as "collective ownership of the means of production"?

How far back do I need to go in defining things for you that theoretically you should know?

You do, if you are using the word in an unusual way - as you just told me you are.

Unless you don't care if people misunderstand you. In which case, why bother to say anything at all?

Is a worker's cooperative a 'collective'; or is it disqualified because it excludes the workers' neighbours, friends, and/of families?

Is 'collective ownership' present ONLY if all citizens are owners? If not, why 'all workers' are a 'collective' but 'all shareholders' are not, is not at all clear.

It seems to me that you have a very specific set of ideas about what collections of people qualify as a 'collective' in this context; and that if you care about being understood, you need to provide that set of ideas to your audience.

 

[arkirk]

This issue is not about who owns things (the means of production for example). Socialism can moderate some of our very worst addictive behaviors. Governance is about regulating behavior, not acquiring money. All the arguments about who owns what are just so much bullshit. People cannot be allowed to seize property by force of market power and destroy the ecosystems on said property. Anti pollution laws must not have the popular capitalist restraint...only in force if I do not have to sacrifice a nickel's profit for them. So many have the idea they can buy a mountain then chemically process the whole fucking thing for some high priced commodity. We must stop degrading our ecosystem for profit. We must stop insulting the 99% for unnecessary profits.

Production needs to be curbed if it degrades the air or the water significantly and affects the livability of the planet. It makes not one jot of difference who owns things. If they are destroyed for profit, all of us are impoverished. Money and land claiming paperwork are not the be all and end all of human existence. If they become that then we are sure to be ending all.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

You do, if you are using the word in an unusual way - as you just told me you are.

Then in this case I don't need to.

 

[bilby]

You do, if you are using the word in an unusual way - as you just told me you are.

Then in this case I don't need to.

So you are in agreement that, by your definition, a shareholder owned corporation is an example of socialism?

Or are you badly wrong about whether or not you need to?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

You do, if you are using the word in an unusual way - as you just told me you are.

Then in this case I don't need to.

So you are in agreement that, by your definition, a shareholder owned corporation is an example of socialism?

No. I'm agreeing that by my definition it isn't and that you need to stop being creative with your definitions.

 

[bilby]

So you are in agreement that, by your definition, a shareholder owned corporation is an example of socialism?

No. I'm agreeing that by my definition it isn't and that you need to stop being creative with your definitions.

I am not being creative with anything - you have presented an overly broad definition, that relies on an unstated limitation on the meaning of the word 'collective'. It's not my fault that you are incapable of accurately defining what you mean.

What part of your definition allows you to determine which collectively owned means of production are socialist, and which are not? How does your definition help me to classify:

a) A company owned and run by the government;
b) A company owned by shareholders, where the government owns 51% or more of the shares;
c) A company owned by shareholders, where the government owns between 1 and 49% of the shares
d) A company owned by a small subset of the employees of the company - eg the board of directors and senior managers
e) A company owned by a large subset of the employees of the company - eg all employees with more than five years service
f) A company owned by every employee of the company, with each person having an equal share
g) A company owned by every employee of the company, with each person having a share proportional to their length of service, or payscale, or both
h) A company owned by shareholders all of whom are private citizens, but some of whom are also employees of the company
i) A company owned by shareholders all of whom are private citizens, and none of whom are also employees of the company
j) A company owned by a single individual who also works at his company
k) A company owned by a single individual who does no work for the company, and outsources decisions and operations to a manager or board who do not own any part of the company

Which of these are socialism; Which are not socialism; And how does your definition allow me to make that determination?

 

[ronburgundy]

You have still not grasped the difference betwee socialism and communism?

Ah, and so the war against nature will continue.

No, your war against reason and knowledge will continue, as with most free-market faithers who are why capitalism is doomed to fail and is in the process of failing it's first ever very brief tenure in any major society.

Another thing kids grasp is a sense of human empathy and fairness that is constantly violated by unregulated free market systems.
Sadly it something they grasp far better than any full grown adult who doesn't grasp the need for regulations and redistributions to correct for these fairness violations that even children and non-human primates grasp. Also, note the "in their territory" qualification throughout what you quoted but don't understand. Once non-mentally challenged adults come to understand how complex systems transcend a specific time and place, they realize that some "territories" can, due to scientific realities, never be specific to an individual, and thus there is inherently such a thing as communal property that can only belong to multiple people across space and time. Denial of this reality and profiteering off of communal property is among the most major sources of fairness violations that regulations and redistributions seek to correct.

 

[arkirk]

So you are in agreement that, by your definition, a shareholder owned corporation is an example of socialism?

No. I'm agreeing that by my definition it isn't and that you need to stop being creative with your definitions.

I am not being creative with anything - you have presented an overly broad definition, that relies on an unstated limitation on the meaning of the word 'collective'. It's not my fault that you are incapable of accurately defining what you mean.

What part of your definition allows you to determine which collectively owned means of production are socialist, and which are not? How does your definition help me to classify:

a) A company owned and run by the government;
b) A company owned by shareholders, where the government owns 51% or more of the shares;
c) A company owned by shareholders, where the government owns between 1 and 49% of the shares
d) A company owned by a small subset of the employees of the company - eg the board of directors and senior managers
e) A company owned by a large subset of the employees of the company - eg all employees with more than five years service
f) A company owned by every employee of the company, with each person having an equal share
g) A company owned by every employee of the company, with each person having a share proportional to their length of service, or payscale, or both
h) A company owned by shareholders all of whom are private citizens, but some of whom are also employees of the company
i) A company owned by shareholders all of whom are private citizens, and none of whom are also employees of the company
j) A company owned by a single individual who also works at his company
k) A company owned by a single individual who does no work for the company, and outsources decisions and operations to a manager or board who do not own any part of the company

Which of these are socialism; Which are not socialism; And how does your definition allow me to make that determination?

Socialism is a system of governance not of ownership. You guys don't seem to understand your making statements about who owns what percentage or the whole thing applies to companies. Companies are not socialism. They are instruments of trade and service. What is needed now is the rule of law and that law has to reflect the needs of the whole society, so companies regardless of who owns them stop destroying our the future of our species on this planet.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The real cause of 2008 wasn't capitalism, but rather the government intervening in the market.

The bankers knew the loans were shit, but so long as the government would keep buying them up they were happy to make and sell them.

Phase 1 was the Community Reinvestment Act. It didn't do what they wanted because it takes a lot of pressure to get the bankers to write crap when they're going to be left holding the bag.

Phase 2 was changing the underwriting standards for the government loan programs. Now they had pressure and little downside, not to mention plenty of profit to be made off the additional business.

Then as we saw things getting farther and farther out of hand Bush didn't try to address the issue because the bankers wouldn't have liked that.

There is so much wrong with your post. Last thing first, W didn’t want to address the bubble as it was the only thing driving the economy.

Secondly, the deregulation of the derivatives market created all sorts of doomed products.

And yes, as long as banks could off bad loans, they would. Of course these loans were divided, twisted, man handled into massively confusing investments, which were stamped AAA by the ratings agencies. Fraud?

The economy that was making big bucks for his supporters. Dealing with the problem would likely have caused a recession and certainly would have exposed how hollow the Bush "growth" was.

The derivatives market made the crash bigger, it didn't cause it. The cause was all the crap that was being sold because the Feds would buy it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"Socialism" is a word like "shit" that we have been trained by our media to use to queer human relations with this silly idea that ownership is somehow real. Socialism may be thought of as whatever we elect to make governance become. The democratic institutions need to be safeguarded from the manufacturers of unconscious and uninformed consent. When you have a system of ownership of nearly all of the means of communication, you have something that stands against socialism and declares it unworkable.

Fundamentally, socialism is separating the control of the assets from the demonstrated ability to control them successfully.

As such, it will never do remotely as well as capitalism.

(Note that extensive safety nets like we see in much of western Europe are not socialism.)

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

Successful as in making them grow.

You're much better off letting the people who are good at it manage them and then take some in tax than taking the assets themselves and running them with political ideas. For an example of how that works look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

 

[arkirk]

The capitalist sees the other as something to potentially profit off.

While the other does not wish to be the tool of some capitalist.

Thus the constant struggle to tame the unwilling slaves by the capitalists wanting to profit off them.

Yeah that pesky thing that humans want food, housing, clothing and entertainment. If you want to get rid of capitalism, create the energy matter converter from StarTrek.

Colorado Atheist: Capitalists are just people with a knack and a penchant for accumulating money and power. When their accumulations get too big, they do not get smarter or more compassionate. No! They get mean and snotty and say the kinds of things you said above. You clearly speak for the "me" generation. Their imagination gets stunted and their impatience with the rest of the human race grows. Capitalism does not have principles. It just has one big speedometer and capitalists think that it measures all human progress. They may think this because they usually imagine themselves superior in every way to most of the human race...sort of like you do.

 

[arkirk]

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

Successful as in making them grow.

You're much better off letting the people who are good at it manage them and then take some in tax than taking the assets themselves and running them with political ideas. For an example of how that works look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Loren: You mean like the biggest most polluting strip mine in the world pushing those pesky Injuns of the land and filling the river valleys with "overburden." I regard capitalists as the OVERBURDEN that keeps society from enacting environmentally sound laws and caring about those the capitalists regularly rob.

 

[coloradoatheist]

The capitalist sees the other as something to potentially profit off.

While the other does not wish to be the tool of some capitalist.

Thus the constant struggle to tame the unwilling slaves by the capitalists wanting to profit off them.

Yeah that pesky thing that humans want food, housing, clothing and entertainment. If you want to get rid of capitalism, create the energy matter converter from StarTrek.

Colorado Atheist: Capitalists are just people with a knack and a penchant for accumulating money and power. When their accumulations get too big, they do not get smarter or more compassionate. No! They get mean and snotty and say the kinds of things you said above. You clearly speak for the "me" generation. Their imagination gets stunted and their impatience with the rest of the human race grows. Capitalism does not have principles. It just has one big speedometer and capitalists think that it measures all human progress. They may think this because they usually imagine themselves superior in every way to most of the human race...sort of like you do.

Except for a capitalist idea to work they have to create situations that are mutually beneficial to all parties, they need to produce things that people want and they need to get people to make them. something that makes everyone win. Other systems don't do that, at the extremes you have the central government telling all people in that choice what they want and how they are going to do it. You become a slave on all sides of the equation. Most people want their their choices.

Your schtick is that you want the environment to be better, but you are using a network that is consuming a lot of the Earth's resources just for you and me to communicate. Shouldn't you have remorse for what you've done to the environment just to allow us to argue on this board?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Not corrupted?



It's all about what you can get away with. Corruption is at pandemic levels. Virtually everyone in their equivalent of Congress is a billionaire--money they got while in office. How else could that be but corruption?

Being rich does not have to mean you are corrupt.

The only people who legitimately get a billion do it by growing a corporation. Not by legislating. (Yes, there might be a source of seed money, but most of the money comes from making something productive.)

Has any leader of China ever taken a bribe to sell out the nations uranium to Russia?

Has any poster on here ever paid attention the actual facts rather than the soundbites?

1) No uranium was sold--this was about the Russian purchase of a company that mined uranium. That's separate from a license to export said uranium to Russia.

2) This involved a few percent of our production capacity. Unimportant in the big picture.

How about starting a fake war to make money on Halliburton?

Russia has started multiple wars. We don't know the details of why.

That is the kind of corruption I mean. A huge difference for the people. The kind of corruption that will get you shot in China. The leaders of China in fact do just the opposite for their people. They kick out Google and Utube just to help their own software industry.

1) We don't know what dirty deeds their legislators did. Given what we see there most likely is a lot of toxic dumping involved. Whether you get shot is far more a matter of how powerful you are, not how dirty you are.

2) They kicked out Google for not going along with their censorship. (You-Tube is part of Google, they kicked out anything Google-related. My Android phone wouldn't even download an update without a VPN because Android is Google.)

3) They block all the major news and file distribution sites (Dropbox and the like)--part of their censorship. They don't like any means of communication that they can't monitor and zap ideas they do not like. I was over there when that plane went down in New York not too long after 9/11. It took me half an hour to find an unblocked source of news about it. (This was before Google was blocked.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think the most amazing thing about the chinese economy is how such grand-scale efficaciousness can be paired with such tremendous waste like we see in China. People think America is wasteful, yet The Chinese government puts tons of resources into building cities nobody even lives in.

Those ghost cities are a big example of the Potemkin economy I was referring to.

But that's not a Potemkin economy. The ghost cities were built after all. It's a waste, but that's a different sort of problem. A Potemkin economy would be a fake one, one that looks like it's growing, developing, etc., but it's not. That does not seem to be the Chinese economy.

How is that not Potemkin? It looks like it's growing only because it's being used to produce useless things.

Now, you're right that there is plenty of corruption. It's also a totalitarian regime, suppresses freedoms, persecutes dissidents even abroad, also is trying to seize territory that isn't theirs (they probably will succeed, at least partially), and as you pointed out, there is a significant debt problem. However, the fact remains that China is becoming increasingly powerful both in absolute and in relative terms. Whatever happens with the debt (but that doesn't seem to be a foregone conclusion), that's not going to make the things that were made - not just ghost cities, but cities with people living in them, nuclear reactors, roads, etc. -, or the knowledge acquired by many Chinese, go away.

Agreed--but they are heading for one hell of an economic crash. I just hope they don't try to use war as a way out of it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Capitalism is one of the best systems devised to manage and reduce risk and works with wisdom of crowds to best predict the future (which is still pretty bad, but far better than any other method: think about the pricing system for futures contracts, for example, a remarkable achievement and a source of risk reduction in production systems for essential commodities like food and energy). Risk can also be offloaded to those who wish to willingly take it on (when a company fails, employees lose a job and not all their wealth on top it in a case where they are allowed to own companies other than just the one they work at, for example).

Sure, reduce risk, make other people pay. Limited liability is the lifeblood of capitalism. When in trouble, welsh on your debts. For the good of all society, of course.

The point of limited liability is that those who simply contribute money to an endeavor are not risking more than they invest. Without that you can't raise funds from a large number of people. You also have nothing like the stock market--which means investment options are severely limited. (Note that this includes pensions.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Given that 7 billion humans are living to the highest average life expectancy ever before achieved in human history, with the highest achieved by the wealthy capitalist countries, I'd say the current environment is the healthiest and fittest environment for humans that has ever been achieved.

Axulus: Have you been paying attention to the news? American life expectancy is decreasing. More than 2 billion people are food insecure. The entire middle east is war torn. There are refugees everywhere. Capitalism is NOT A SYSTEM. Instead, it is a license for exploitation of the unfinancialized parts of the planet. There is starvation in Yemen because the U.S. is cooperating with the Saudis to bomb the country into submission. Capitalism has a lot of bad things about it. One that is rather clear is that it serves warmongers very well.

2 billion food insecure? Used to be worse than that.

Middle east is war torn? The world death rate from war has been declining for a long time now.

Refugees everywhere? Most of them are economic migrants. The real number of refugees has been declining, it's just the world is more aware of them these days. And note that they are fleeing from non-capitalist places to capitalist places. Hardly a condemnation of capitalism.

Yemen? Reality: Iran's puppets have taken over part of the country. Saudi Arabia is bombing those puppets. It's an Iran-started proxy war, why are you blaming Saudi Arabia? And capitalism has nothing to do with what's happening there, it's Sunni-Shia conflict.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

War has been around since pretty much day 1 of human existence, capitalism is getting almost to a point to shed it completely because we trade now instead of fight for resources. Yemen wasn't a paradise and then capitalism came around.

You have to be kidding! You just don't seem able to see past the end of your nose. You never address the problems. You just point to them and say...they're not us. It hurts a bit to even look at the shit our country and our corporations are doing world wide. War mongering is still high on the Capitalist wish list...and extra $160 billion just this year. Our increase is almost double Russia's whole military budget. Capitalism is a system amassing money in private hands. Selling bombs and guns can do this very nicely and we cannot make our government stop...because it is owned by war industries. War does not have to be. And it better slow to a stop pretty soon because we are experiencing environmental feedback from it...even if we are heartless and uncaring about the damage we do elsewhere.

Your problem is you can't tell the difference between the value and the change in the value.

You're listing bad things--almost all of which used to be a lot worse.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Successfully according to who's estimation? What is that estimation exactly?

Successful as in making them grow.

You're much better off letting the people who are good at it manage them and then take some in tax than taking the assets themselves and running them with political ideas. For an example of how that works look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Loren: You mean like the biggest most polluting strip mine in the world pushing those pesky Injuns of the land and filling the river valleys with "overburden." I regard capitalists as the OVERBURDEN that keeps society from enacting environmentally sound laws and caring about those the capitalists regularly rob.

You think there aren't big, polluting strip mines elsewhere? It's just the pollution is hushed up.

Note how China is one of the major producers of rare earths? It's not that they're really that rare, it's that they don't have good ore, the extraction is hard--and very dirty. China produces so much because they sweep that pollution under the rug.