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| mikelepore |
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| mikelepore |
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06 Jan 2005 09:30 am Post subject: |
I have begun to make a chart comparing some of the common arguments given for and against the labor time vouchers idea.
http://www.deleonism.org/v2.htm |
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| Social Greenman |
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21 Mar 2005 12:55 pm Post subject: |
Okay Mike, the purpose I am setting forth here in my post is to expand on TLV so that it will be easy reading for the general population and to increase my understanding as well. Since I am no math wiz, and a lot of people aren't, I want to ask is: Will there be some sense of buying and selling with TLV? Will there be national office with regional branches (I avoided the word agency) that will collect those deductions for health insurance or other types of insurance to pay for services for health care, car accidents, natural disasters, etc.? The same question goes for education and old age retirement.
On the other hand, what about personal property like houses and the land it is on? This is very confusing for me considering that aquiring houses and land is much different than buying clothing, food and personal items from a store or parts for a car in our present Capitalist system because it requires a line of credit and making profits off the proceeds with interest. Would the cost of houses, land, and automobiles be outrages as they are now? I ask these questions because I have a hard time imagining a Socialist society when I am so use to the present system. I believe a lot of people would have a harder time than what I am having.
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| davesearles |
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21 Mar 2005 04:03 pm Post subject: |
A big reason for people to buy buy houses becuase they are investments. Hedge against inflation, mortgages and taxes are deductable from insurance: good vehicle to transfer wealth to children. I think that socialism will bring about a decrease in population as believe it or not children are looked at as an investment in cultures with lower incomes. I think that this is true right acrross the board that the higher people's income, the fewer children they have. People as thy grow older hold onto houses when they don't have a need for such large accommodations for economic and personal security. I guess where I am going with this is that I think that the American dream of home ownership will have a lot less of the drives that currently push it. But as to who is going to live where after the revolution, uh oh, here it comes...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Let's have the revolution and then we'll figure it out if necesarry.
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
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21 Mar 2005 04:55 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | Will there be some sense of buying and selling with TLV? Will there be national office with regional branches (I avoided the word agency) that will collect those deductions for health insurance or other types of insurance to pay for services for health care, car accidents, natural disasters, etc.? The same question goes for education and old age retirement. |
The deductions wouldn't first be collected anywhere before being used. Products would move directly from where they are made to where they are used. For example, the social uses for furniture, in a school or hospital, etc., - the staff at the facility which needs these things would, by electronic communications, go directly into the shipping schedule of the facility where the furniture is produced, and add the records that will schedule the shipment of furniture to the school or hospital. Therefore the "deduction" would be an abstraction that occurs in the database software that keeps an inventory of all the production and shipment in the world.
The result is that the deductions for public uses are equivalent to adding a certain number of minutes to the time we have to work for private uses. As an illustration: To buy a certain amount of hobby or luxury equipment that takes three hours to make (ALL previous steps of production), then I may have to redeem vouchers for three hours and twenty minutes. Why the additional twenty minutes added to the labor-price? I think this looks something like a sales tax under capitalism. It's necessary because the only way to distribute some things without charging them to anyone in particular, such as education and medicine, is to add a calculated increment to the work time that everyone performs for the goods that ARE charged to individuals, when individuals redeem labor vouchers at the store.
Since incomes and product prices would both be in units of work time, it doesn't matter whether we find it easier to visualize this deduction as an income tax or a sales tax, and both kinds of tax would be identical. Any way we want to describe it, the individual can't retrieve the "full" equivalent of his or her personal labor at store, because we would get some of this compensation in the form of free goods and services, and the remainder at the store. |
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| mikelepore |
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21 Mar 2005 05:11 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | Will there be some sense of buying and selling with TLV? |
In the method that I would personally prefer, yes for individual uses of products, but no for workplace uses of products.
The words themselves - buying, selling, prices, etc. - carry connotations in popular thought that we need to avoid, but I don't have better vocabulary words to suggest. Yes, as individuals we would go shopping and buy goods at the store, spending our individual earnings.
However, I wouldn't like a system in which workplaces have to buy their raw materials, parts, energy, etc. Instead, the whole society should fully fund every workplace, giving the whole society the claim on distribution of the products.
That will mean that labor vouchers, being only bits in a computer system, would come into existence whenever someone performs work, in any workplace, and these vouchers will cease to exist when they are redeemed at any store. This feature automatically means that the vouchers can't be called "money". Money can only function when the money supply is a nearly-constant quantity, and individual units of it are continuously recirculated. (For more info about this, one can look up "the quantity theory of money" in any college economics book.)
So until a better vocabulary comes along, I'm saying that the system wouldn't have wages or money, but it would have what I'm tentatively calling buying, selling and prices. |
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| mikelepore |
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21 Mar 2005 05:24 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | On the other hand, what about personal property like houses and the land it is on? |
I feel that the subject of residential land is the most underdeveloped part of the concept of socialism. The idea of socialism is best suited for talking about continuously produced goods and services. With something like land, which no one makes, and all that any society can do is reallocate a fixed amount, I have never heard socialists give a good answer.
I don't think it's a problem to make time-payments for the construction aspect of private homes. I would visualize it as interest-free mortgage. But the problem to me is the land that the house is sitting on, and presumably wil remain on, unless the home is a trailer on wheels. If the land is sold, does it stay in the family when the owner dies, and get inherited by the offspring? To say yes would mean that in few generations we would have developed another system in which people are born into fortunate or unfortunate classes, which I feel is unacceptable, but to say no would mean evicting families from their homes, which I also feel is unacceptable.
I must admit -- in all these years thinking about socialism, the subject of private housing is the one area that I can't suggest an answer for. |
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| mikelepore |
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21 Mar 2005 05:58 pm Post subject: |
I'll mention this in case someone has a lot of time to kill, but this would be very time consuming for someone to jump into it ....
In the yahoo forum called 'World in Common'
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/worldincommon/messages
starting around December, or maybe around where the message number field in the individual message URL's was around 4300, we had a debate that went on for months.
The members of the World Socialist Movement http://www.worldsocialism.org maintained that socialism would be workable and best constructed if all work time was entirely voluntary, and all goods at the store were free for the taking. That idea has come to be called the Free Access concept of socialism.
Byron, a member of http://socialismmarxdeleonforarealunion.org , and I were the two people who wrote the most messages arguing in favor of the time voucher concept of socialism.
The two sides in the debate went through a number of subtopics, such as human nature, economic efficiency, and many more.
Some of the points that I asserted were:
-- In Free Access socialism, people would only volunteer for the kinds of work that are ordinarily thought of as hobbies, so we would have a large number of musicians and poets, but too few people volunteering to run factories, mines and mills.
-- If work were voluntary, vacations would tend to get longer until people generally don't return to work at all.
-- Work is ordinarily a personal sacrifice of time, and this, in addition to how strenuous it is, are factors that need to be compensated.
-- If all goods are free, many individuals would take unreasonably large quantities, which neither the industrial throughput nor the natural environment could maintain. |
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| mikelepore |
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21 Mar 2005 06:28 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | Would the cost of houses, land, and automobiles be outrages as they are now? |
In an earlier post, I listed a number of work activities that I called "waste", such as advertising, duplication of effort, etc.
(I even mentioned stockholder dividends as a form of waste, in that it's a drain on the cash flow of a business, like a leak in a bucket. Of course, businesses can't recognize profit as waste, because a business exists to make profits to the absentee owners.)
Marx also occasionally wrote about waste, for example, in Capital, chapter 17, he mentions "a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous."
So what does this mean? When society stops wasting, we will be able to do what is now unthinkable -- our standard of living will go up, and the length of the workweek will go down, at the same time.
So the direct answer to your question is: measured in terms of the amount of work time that must be exchanged at the store for a product, the prices in a socialist system would be much lower than they are today. |
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| Social Greenman |
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22 Mar 2005 12:47 am Post subject: |
Dave, Mike, thank you both for responding. What you both wrote helped me to have a better visualization and understanding on how TLV would work in a real world sense. I hope other readers that come here have the same fortune.
However, I do think that housing and land needs to be addressed some how. No one wants the State to own all the land. Land freely given would result in some staking claim to large areas of land which would exclude others from building houses. We also have to think about land for agriculture and livestock. I know it will take time to come up with solutions because I believe everthing has to be well thought out before anything is implemented. One LAST question on this thread: What about landlords?
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| mikelepore |
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22 Mar 2005 07:28 am Post subject: |
I think an ideal world wouldn't have landlords, since the existence of the landlord role must mean a form of dependence of some people on other people. How to arrive at that ideal world, I'm afraid I don't have a lot of good ideas.
Don't feel obligated to make that your last post. Dave can sleep through it if he's bored, but this is my idea of great fun  ) |
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| Social Greenman |
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22 Mar 2005 10:17 am Post subject: |
It was the last question until I can think of something else. No landlords under SIU. I can see my landlord having a fit when he can longer collect from 24 apartments  |
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| Social Greenman |
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22 Mar 2005 01:12 pm Post subject: |
A commentary: I briefly read off the internet of someone who was advocating SIU but did not think TLV would be fesable because it would require a large bureaucracy to keep up the accounting of labor time and deductions. I did not agree with this. The present Capitalist system keeps track of wage labor including deductions and then keep track of profits and the many other crazy things they do with money. LTV is more simplistic. I am sure there will be administrative duties in keeping track of labor hours and deductions but I don't believe it will take on such a grand endevor because no profits are made or any of those other crazy things that are done with money.
| Quote: | | The result is that the deductions for public uses are equivalent to adding a certain number of minutes to the time we have to work for private uses. As an illustration: To buy a certain amount of hobby or luxury equipment that takes three hours to make (ALL previous steps of production), then I may have to redeem vouchers for three hours and twenty minutes. Why the additional twenty minutes added to the labor-price? I think this looks something like a sales tax under capitalism. It's necessary because the only way to distribute some things without charging them to anyone in particular, such as education and medicine, is to add a calculated increment to the work time that everyone performs for the goods that ARE charged to individuals, when individuals redeem labor vouchers at the store. |
From what I understand, which means I may not fully understand, is that part of the deductions go for a giant health care risk pool. Another part for education and smaller parts for various types of insurances. Added time to labor units would make health care and education appear like a free service which would include the various insurances. I hope I got that right. Perhaps they won't be called insurances but protective measures for loss of life, debilitating accidents and natural disasters. Hey, I think I am starting to think outside the Capitalistic box.
Another thing I can envision is that under SIU you won't have business men and women traveling accross the country and the world to make deals and other such things that are done today. They simply will not exist. This will cut down car travel and the number of flights thus partly reducing consumption of fossil fuels. I am sure enviromental issues will continue under SIU but I believe they will have a better chance of being addressed than they are now presently. I also believe that SIU will help in creating simpler existance of life because no one would be chasing after money. I hope I am not sounding too utopian here because I know that there will still be crime to deal with, racism, drug addictions, rape, etc. I wonder if some people will try to do identity theft to obtain LTV? However, money will not be a factor in crime because it won't exist. People really would not have to steal anything because items for personal use and food for consumption (ha, food and items like toilet paper would be the only things considered as a consumption) would be available. SIU would actually create a true balance in production and no doubt reserves for victims of natural disasters.
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| Social Greenman |
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23 Mar 2005 01:27 pm Post subject: |
What would be the modes of transportation in a SIU economy? I asked this because of finite resources such as oil which are currently under the control of major oil corporations. What positive changes can happen in the way we use electricity and natural gas? I use florescent lighting which has reduced my electrical bill from $80.00 to $35.00 a month. I wish I could change out the furnace to a high effeciency one but I live in a apartment and the lord of the land will not change it out unless it breaks down completely. Of course he would buy the cheapest and less efficient one to install. another thing is that the walls to the outside leak like a sieve though I have tried to recify it somewhat. They actually need more insulation and drywall instead of thin wall panels.
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| Social Greenman |
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25 Mar 2005 01:23 pm Post subject: |
Perhaps I went out on a tangent with some of the questions about "this and that" but people are going to ask those questions. TLV is the first economic model I have seen to date. Anyways, I think it is important that a good picture is painted in people's minds on what a Socialist economy would look like. People will ask how an economy would work and will ask, "What about this or that." we have to remember that most workers are either drop outs, have a high school diploma, have some college education, or were trained in a specific trade. This is the bulk of society we as Socialist have to work with. This site is the first I have come accross with that does not argue about difference of opinions but focuses on goals. If other Socialist are willing to focus on these goals then the working class would benefit being educated and Capitalist propaganda displelled resulting in agitation for Socialism.
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| mikelepore |
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25 Mar 2005 03:36 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | of someone who was advocating SIU but did not think TLV would be fesable because it would require a large bureaucracy to keep up the accounting of labor time and deductions |
There are a certain number of possibilities.
One is to have prices of goods determined in a competitive marketplace, the capitalist method. There is an adversarial system, with bidding up and bidding down. Wages are then a form of price, where the worker's body is the commodity. Even if all workplaces were nonprofit institutions, it would still be capitalism, because capitalist social relationships dominate.
Another is to have prices of goods, and the individual incomes, determined in a rational manner, according to a logically consistent plan. If someone doesn't like my formula, that's okay, but then they should suggest a better one. They need to answer how to calculate each product's price so that it matches its cost of production. They need to answer how to determine incomes so that the total buying power and the the total producing power will exactly converge. It's fine to reject my proposal if they can also suggest an alternative one, as long as they are thinking about it. To reject my proposal but not to have any idea of an alternative would not be a valid criticism.
Another suggestion is to make all goods free, and all labor unpaid. If someone feels that this is workable, I don't think I would be able to persuade them otherwise. I think this suggestion is impossible, due to a large number of people who would not work and/or who would consume large amounts. I don't think such a system could last even for a day -- the electric power would go off, etc., and people would immediately recognize their bad choice of a system.
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As for the issue of "bureaucracy" -- I think computer software could calculate the values of the variables. There wouldn't be some department of "planners" making up numbers out of their imagination.
Also, we need to ask ourselves what a "bureaucracy" is. When is this word ordinarily used? What did we observe, and what caused it? If we do that, this leads to a list of necessary policies that can prevent bureaucracy. Others may make a different list, but I would start by suggesting the direct bottom-up election of all management positions (no top-down appointees). I would further suggest the public openness of all official records -- no administrative secrets -- no private meetings or documents in the offices of elected representatives. We could continue in this way. Asking ourselves what we mean when we say a word like "bureaucracy" will suggest its own solution. |
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| mikelepore |
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25 Mar 2005 04:01 pm Post subject: |
Your questions about energy and transportation ... what socialists propose is policy-making by one-person, one-vote. Some would be direct democracy (resolutions, propositions) and some would be indirect democracy (delegation of matters to to elected representatives), in whatever proportions of the two the people prefer. Of course that includes hearing the advice of the organizations of environmentalists, scientists, product safety inspectors, etc. The reason I can't answer your question precisely is because I would get only one vote just like everyone else. Therefore the rea; question tends to become -- how can we be sure that socialism would be an overall better system of policy-making? Because under capitalism we don't have one-person one-vote in the economic realm; we have the decision-making power concentrated in the same place that private interest in the outcome is concentrated. For example, suppose I owned a half-million shares of an automobile company and also a half-million shares of an oil company? Then I couldn't be open-minded in using my stockholder votes. How could I consider eliminating the use of automobiles or the use of oil, possibly wiping out my own investments, making my own social power obsolete? With that kind of self-interest in control of the situation, the long-term needs of the human race seem distant and abstract. Only a democratic method can get rid of the systematic biases that prevent us from fairly evaluating new ideas. |
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| mikelepore |
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25 Mar 2005 04:16 pm Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | TLV is the first economic model I have seen to date. Anyways, I think it is important that a good picture is painted in people's minds on what a Socialist economy would look like. |
Also see the proposal called Participatory Economics (parecon) what was developed mainly by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. After doing my own theory independently of them, I found a few similarities. They also conclude that personal incomes need to be set to compensate for the personal sacrifice represented by work, which means time as well as difficulty. There are also a number of differences between what they would like and what I woud like, and that makes it more fun when comparing :-)
I think they're at http://www.parecon.org/ |
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| Social Greenman |
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25 Mar 2005 08:48 pm Post subject: |
Thanks Mike. Come to think of it now I have heard of Parecon a few years ago but I had no idea of what it was. I guess I will add it to my list of what to read. However, lets continue with TLV.
| Quote: | | It's my algorithm in the sense that, what Marx and De Leon wrote in plain words, and what I thought they were tyring to say, I translated into algebra statements. Oops - let's try to discuss each topic in the proper "topic." |
So, you came up with a economic system based on the writing of Marx and De Leon. In a sense you have developed a system which should be reconizable to anyone who have a good understanding of Marx. It's wonderful that you took the time to come up with it.
| Quote: | | Another suggestion is to make all goods free, and all labor unpaid. If someone feels that this is workable, I don't think I would be able to persuade them otherwise. I think this suggestion is impossible, due to a large number of people who would not work and/or who would consume large amounts. I don't think such a system could last even for a day -- the electric power would go off, etc., and people would immediately recognize their bad choice of a system. |
I agree that making everything for the taking would result in nothing being done to produce items and such. I would give a week when the shelves are empty. I know people can be get stuck in their ideology of what or how things should be. I hope the TLV economic concept grows and become accepted by Socialist groups as a model. Well, I would write more but the wife is home for the weekend.
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| Social Greenman |
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03 Apr 2005 08:49 am Post subject: |
Okay, to continue: Let say that there are two or more airconditioning and heating orgs.--since business is no longer in the vocabulary. Another is needed due to geographical locations of those who need this service. The other two or more of these orgs have more than enough people working and there are those who work in these orgs that live close to those who need service. To meet the needs, and to cut down on long distant travel, another org is set up in that region.
Here is the queston: since I have already mentioned two or more orgs., who pays for the labor hours since they are a service? Is it the so-called customer or a different method? I ask this for the airconditioning and heating people, plumbers and home electrical repair people. I do see the so called customer pay for the equipment installed since now they are produced at a far lower price since profits are a thing of the past. Now, considering the two or more orgs. Do they help set up the new org to meet those in need of service?
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| mikelepore |
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04 Apr 2005 09:27 am Post subject: |
What's now "applying for a job" would become "joining that association." People interested in working in the field that does heating and air conditioning would join the association of people who do that. I'm just guessing here but I suppose it would be the responsibility of that association to make sure that all geographical areas are covered by that service. Otherwise, a construction industry that's forming in some remote region, already aligned with the necessary crews for masonry, framing, etc., but recognizing that they haven't yet gotten coordinated with the heating and air conditioning crew, would have to contact them to make the arrangements.
It's unpredictable whether society will want this partcular service, or any specific product or service, to be charged to individuals or funded collectively by society. Either way, the creation of a new kind of work, or a new time/place occasion of work, would change the numbers in the incurred labor totals. As in any spreadsheet calculation, changes in a term would ripple through and change the terms that come afterwards. The changes would be picked up in the next planning cycle (week, month, etc.). The same surplus that buffers us against emergencies would cushion any expenditures that take place in the current cycle that don't get picked up until the next cycle. |
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| Social Greenman |
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04 Apr 2005 08:22 pm Post subject: |
That is a good answer. SIU pretty much covers all bases when it comes different services, production, education, health care (most likely any type of health care from doctors office visits, hospitals to nursing homes), and retirement. Someone on the Debs Tendency gave this web address about Ithaca HOURS:
http://www.ithacahours.com/
What would be your opinion on HOURS? I see that China is looking into it.
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| mikelepore |
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04 Apr 2005 11:01 pm Post subject: |
This is the first time I've heard of Ithaca Hours. I hope to learn more about it.
I like the idea of all kinds of experiments, because either they will do good themselves, or else they will spark other new ideas which will do good. Every time we make changes in the way we do things, it raises more questions, people become more inventive.
Same thing with Parecon. Let someone try it. Let's see what we can learn from the experience. There's nothing to lose. The worst possible case would be a return to traditional capitalism as before and we have our notes about a new experience.
Something doesn't have to be "my goal" for me to think it's a good idea. I believe that human history develops through macro-stages and micro-stages, according to very complicated natural laws which we don't yet understand -- although marxists understand more about the laws of sociology and history than the supporters of the "great man" theory of history do. I favor more experiments to see what we might learn from them. In fact, perhaps Marx was too hasty in the way he criticized the utopian commune movements (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, etc.) Marx criticized them because they didn't correspond well enough to his goal. Perhaps he should have limited his criticism to the point that, at worst, an experiment might be a distraction form something else that needs doing, but it brings the positive experience of teaching us new lessons. Marx should have known that, because he criticized the Paris Commune of 1871 while simultaneously outlining the several lessons he learned from it, forcing him to change his views is some important ways. |
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| Social Greenman |
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04 Apr 2005 11:34 pm Post subject: |
No doubt experiments are a good learning experiences that can be documented. I know HOURS is based on labor time and they seem to be doing good so far. One thing I am convinced about is having a new type of economy for socialism and removing capital. I realised something as well: That those who are critics of SIU, TLV or anything else that is not down the beaten path is considered utopian and un-scientific. It's the communist that are saying those things and not anyone else as far as I know.
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| Social Greenman |
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12 Apr 2005 09:33 am Post subject: |
Mike, I came accross this website: http://vanparecon.resist.ca/ Its a parecon experiment located in Vancouver Canada.
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| Social Greenman |
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13 Apr 2005 09:07 am Post subject: |
This is a question presented by a SP-USA womyn:
| Quote: | will we ever incorporate the unpaid labor (because raising kids IS WORK, AS IS CLEANING HOUSE, WHY NO ONE LIKES TO DO IT), and men and corporations (Wallstreet Dads) are making mega bucks exploiting daycare workers...
or will we just continue to take it for granted. I never could figure why when womyn are on welfare, with small kids, they are considered not part of the working class...
but a daycare worker is.
womyn who clean and do laundry and scrub floors and cook are not considered part of the working class,
but tell that to Merry Maids, who make $10.00 to $15.00 a hour, in teams,
wives and mothers have to do all that, alone, usually with little help and for nada, hell we don't even get tax credits, nothing... ? |
Actually, she was asking about HOURS but since HOURS in within the capitalist realm I thought I ask how this would addressed under TLV?
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| mikelepore |
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13 Apr 2005 04:32 pm Post subject: |
I think the system would have to provide for jobs where the hours are estimated and not measured, to handle jobs where the boundary between work and leisure gets blurrred, such as teachers who do lesson planning at home and who take home papers to grade, musicians who practice at home, college students who have erratic switching between study and recreation, etc. If socialist society decides to pay incomes to compensate home and family work, it would probably have to go into that category, because the hours could be estimated but couldn't be exactly measured.
I'm not so sure why the writer considers it necessary. It's a personal choice to have either two children or thirteen children, so additionally labor-hour-taxing the person with two children to give more
to the person with thirteen children would seem unfair to me.
I'm sure you find that any people who call themselves socialist, either by my interpretation of what 'socialist' means or any other, would like to see a diminishing of the traditional social roles of the two sexes. The concept of female and male job that the writer refers to have already started to fade in modern capitalism, and will fade further once socialism reduces the length of the necessary workweek. |
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| Social Greenman |
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15 Apr 2005 11:54 am Post subject: |
Mike, I deleted the post I made here and will be taking it up in the Class Struggle thread. However, here is the response to your post above from an SP-USA member. I encouraged her to respond here since the SP forum is not accessable to non members.
Greetings,
After discussion with several of my companeros (female comrades, most who are older, have children and do work outside the home), here is what was said in reply to the answer below, I will put our comments in quotes.
Teresa, here is the answer Mike gave. Now I hope you have read the link. No doubt work will be arranged quite differently in a socialist society as well as social structures.
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By work being arranged differently, how? Will work be arranged to meet the needs of womyn and families, single mothers, or will it be a continual male dominated structure, where to succeed a woman will play by the rules of the all boys system, as they do now under Capitalism, Socialist Europe (why do you think feminists in Sweden ands saying to the men screw you and forming their own political party, communist and socialist womyn btw?) Or will it be similar to the disaster of experiment in Russia where prostitution tripled (and why Stalin, one good thing he did was slam down on the abandoning of womyn and kids, thousands of kids left homeles and orphaned...and that was with abortion rights, by those very men who said they were feminist, read the FACTS on Zhenotdel). How many womyn have sat on these commisions (and not just single twenty somethings that haven't had the responsibility or knowledge of what it is like to raise a family, work, work in the home in a sexist and patriarchy family yet, and decided these economic policies/applications, or is this majority of men, men who Benefit from the present system of patriarchy who decided upon these, etc?
However, the one must struggle in the present system.
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Really, then obviously there isn't much attention being paid to the millions of complaints by womyn today, the daycare crisis (especially for poor womyn and womyn who've lost daycare assistance), nor is there anyone paying attention to the FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY IN THIS NATION, AS WELL AS THE WORLD, and the fact that the fastest growing segment of underclass poor is WOMYN WITH CHILDREN. If womyn aren't being heard, listened to today, then what makes you think that men, men who have been influenced due to the Priviledge of patriarchy will listen to womyn with a overhaul of work structure within this system? FACT, womyn still are not even Close to being represented in ANY GOVERNMENT by womyn, anywhere in the world. And lets not forget the millions of dollars owed in child support either...is a socialist system going to be able to pay for the care of these children? Which brings us, to the next point, because Mike answered it already....
Quote:
I think the system would have to provide for jobs where the hours are estimated
Quote:
Estimated, estimated, well of course, how much domestic work has he done? This just goes to show you men, excluding a few, have no fucking idea of what womyn do, none...FACT, statistics, from many sources/studies/polls, of womyn who Work outside the home and in the home, do 70 to 90percent of all the child care and domestic work in the home, taking out the trash brothers is NOT CONTRIBUTING HALF. [note: this does not apply to you men who do your half...and just know, you are very very rare]
and not measured, to handle jobs where the boundary between work and leisure
Quote:
(meaning the myth of the mother who sits at home eating bon bons, lol, Right.)
gets blurrred, such as teachers who do lesson planning at home and who take home papers to grade, musicians who practice at home, college students who have erratic switching between study and recreation, etc.
If socialist society decides to pay incomes to compensate home and family work, it would probably have to go into that category, because the hours could be estimated but couldn't be exactly measured.
Quote:
Or better yet, womyn could get smart for once, and just go on strike, and I mean strike, no work at home period...womyn need to take Ownership of their production, and start demanding their rights as every other worker, because until they do, it will not change...and here's the sad, very sad fact...if womyn, lets say were to form solidarity, and go on strike, (and that means no sex either men), real quick you would see the misogynic forces come out, in even the most so called liberal men. I bet though, if womyn did this, that work time could be measured, and real quick
.
I'm not so sure why the writer considers it necessary.
Quote:
It's a personal choice to have either two children or thirteen children, Really, not for all womyn. You have to consider cultures, subcultures including those for example, from other countries who live here, families where domestic violence occurs, etc. And as far as choice goes, lets get real here...WOMYN are the ones, most predominantly that are left to deal with the results of those choices, if men were so reliable in taking part of their responsibility of creating children (because it takes two you know...but as always, sexists, blame the woman), there wouldn't be the masses of child support claims in state offices, now would there? Yes we womyn know about the choice issue, very much so...and thats the same damn excuse and chauvinist reasoning our government today cuts welfare programs...child care assistance, health care programs for low income children...need I go on, that typical sexist chauvinist assertion that, well womyn, you spread your legs so don't expect Us to take care of you and the children, etc. See men can just walk away, while the woman has the burden of worrying about the children, or living with the decision of abortion.
so additionally labor-hour-taxing the person with two children to give more
to the person with thirteen children would seem unfair to me.
Quote:
And this, I have to wonder if in itself isn't a racist implication, who in the hell has 13 children today anyway? And it, again, is the same reasoning used in capitalist system as to why welfare should not exist, etc...(but oh, its ok to donate thousands of dollars to upper middle class womyn who because of the choosing career then wanting kids, at like the age of 40, take fertility drugs and then, have six to seven kids at one go, SUV in the garage, big house, and still, society will say, oh, how sweet and give thousands of dollars in baby goods, diapers (year supply or more), etc...meanwhile, the working poor mom, married or not, is the one busting her ass trying to get food on the table, and if the man walked away, married or not, and she needs help, its just her tough luck right for having children.
I'm sure you find that any people who call themselves socialist, either by my interpretation of what 'socialist' means or any other, would like to see a diminishing of the traditional social roles of the two sexes.
Quote:
We have that today, do we not, and yet, we still have sexism and patriarchial ideas...or the misogyny towards women...I think, what those articles say, is that womyn have earned the right to be men, and still are dealing with glass ceiling, etc...but womyn, have not earned the right to be Themselves, womyn and be treated with dignity for the contributions they make to society. And raising children full time or part time, is making a contribution, unless you plan on living 300 years or so and don't need a future labor force.
The concept of female and male job that the writer refers to have already started to fade in modern capitalism, and will fade further once socialism reduces the length of the necessary workweek.
Quote:
Really, funny how the biggest industry right now, the highest paid for womyn, is PORNOGRAPHY. THAT IS FACT.
Quote:
This just goes to show, why we need a SOCIALIST BODY OF WOMYN, MAKING POLICY DECISIONS FOR WOMYN, BECAUSE MEN, HAVE NOT A CLUE.
This was the consensus reached by the womyn I've discussed this with last night. And if you want to know something, this is alot of the reason womyn, feminists, have rejected traditional Marxists ideas....but you brothers still JUST DON'T GET IT. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
17 Apr 2005 10:30 pm Post subject: |
Mike, would you like me to remove the above post since the person who wrote it may not show up? If she does then she can cut and paste it on her own post.
Social |
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| novelgentry |
| Posted:
23 Apr 2005 05:25 pm Post subject: |
First off, I want to say that I was linked here by Social Greenman from the revolutionaryleft forum. I think it was my opinion about the bureacratic mechanism he was referring to. So I figured I'd come over here and clairfy some things.
I have seen mikelepore's notes, as Social linked me to them on the other forum, which is where some of my initial criticism arose. Really they've given me more questions than I have gotten answers, namely because of how concise it is.
My primary criticism is with this:
| Quote: | | 2.2.2.2. -- that work time credited to all members of society may be enlarged artificially by the optional weighting factors used to provide higher income for strenuous work. |
There is a certain complexity and a position of arbitrary control that I do not exactly agree with here. You account for the renumeration in price for what is renumerated in people's wages by the "factor k, which is arbitrarily defined to be 1 for nominally strenuous work, and greater than 1 for work that is more strenuous."
Why arbitrarily?
| Quote: | | The human labor time incurred in each production step is measured where feasible, and estimated where necessary. |
Where is it not feasible to measure? You agree to using labor time as a means to determine price, and partially (I say partially because of the wage renumeration you have) utilize it for the worker's "pay." So one of my questions to you is, where does this become not feasible? |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 06:54 am Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | Mike, would you like me to remove the above post since the person who wrote it may not show up? If she does then she can cut and paste it on her own post. |
I think it's okay to leave your post as-is, unless she protests.
I think some of the writer's conclusions are particular to what she has seen, and may have been expressed too generally.
In my family, I do the housework and run a small, part-time business. My wife has a full time career and makes about three times the income that I do.
I chose to drop out of my previous profession as a design engineer. I'm far happier now than I have ever been in my life. I often sing with satisfaction when I'm scrubbing the bathroom or something, and I think about how I no longer have to give presentations to corporate managers or do similar degrading tasks.
The writer in the other forum seems to have different life experiences.
I don't believe that social sex roles are as deterministic as she seems to believe they are. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 07:05 am Post subject: |
| novelgentry wrote: | You account for the renumeration in price for what is renumerated in people's wages by the "factor k, which is arbitrarily defined to be 1 for nominally strenuous work, and greater than 1 for work that is more strenuous."
Why arbitrarily? |
"Arbitrarily" in a sense of any choice turning out to be as good as any other. What are called weighting factors indicate relative intensity, but then they disappear in later calculations. So if nominally strenuous work were k=1 and we decided to give firefighters higher compensation at a rate of 2.4, that would be exactly the same as if nominal were 0.2 and firefighters got 0.48, or if nominal were 5 and firefighters got 12. It's only the ratio that matters. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 07:24 am Post subject: |
| novelgentry wrote: | | Quote: | | The human labor time incurred in each production step is measured where feasible, and estimated where necessary. |
Where is it not feasible to measure? You agree to using labor time as a means to determine price, and partially (I say partially because of the wage renumeration you have) utilize it for the worker's "pay." So one of my questions to you is, where does this become not feasible? |
It's would probably be necessary in the early phases of socialist planning to make some assumptions. Say we're figuring out how much effort goes into constructing a building. Maybe we don't yet have an accurate number to use for the nails, because the steel industry is still doing their own projections. So we add another one percent and assume that more than covers it. At a later time we get the real number and now we can put it in.
We also have to guess at some things whenever working on something unpredictable, like planning the amount of equipment we will probably need for medical research or space exploration.
Whenever we have to make a guess, I think we should guess on the high side, meaning that everyone's work day might be a few minutes longer than necessary, and then we find that we have surpluses of certain goods in storage. That's a safer error direction than having shortages. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 08:06 am Post subject: |
Social:
Teresa wrote, "This just goes to show you men, excluding a few, have no fucking idea of what womyn do."
I don't understand her complaint here at all. She said family work should be compensated, so I said okay, in order to do that, the hours would probably have to be estimated. Then she expressed the objection that I copied above. So what method of compensation does she want, if it's such a terrible idea for me to suggest estimating the equivalent hours? Perhaps she would rather punch a clock, which is the only possible alternative to estimating the equivalent work time. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 09:55 am Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
| Quote: | Social:
Teresa wrote, "This just goes to show you men, excluding a few, have no fucking idea of what womyn do."
I don't understand her complaint here at all. She said family work should be compensated, so I said okay, in order to do that, the hours would probably have to be estimated. Then she expressed the objection that I copied above. So what method of compensation does she want, if it's such a terrible idea for me to suggest estimating the equivalent hours? Perhaps she would rather punch a clock, which is the only possible alternative to estimating the equivalent work time. |
<Social shrugs his shoulders.> I am not understanding it either. I am not sure to what exactly she is looking for or wanting. I did explain to her that I had to do quite a lot more at home with domestic chores after my wife had her stroke in 1996 which included medical procedures. It was a post to say that I knew how much work was involved when you have a job on top of that.
My wife is home for good now from the nursing home. She has a portable wound vac machine which has a battery life of 12 hours. The visiting nurse came over Saturday morning to ask 101 questions and sign papers, inspect the machine and tubing, and to take her vital signs. I was told the possibility that I would have to be trained to change her wound dressing due to her insurance caps on nurse home health care visits.
Happy to see you here NoelGentry.
Social |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
24 Apr 2005 11:48 pm Post subject: |
Teresa wrote, "This just goes to show you men, excluding a few, have no fucking idea of what womyn do."
I see see the not too distant future (or I think I can see that far):
Everyone will have enough nutritious food to eat even if they don't do any work. Everybody will get quality medical care even if they don't do any work. Everyone will be provided housing at some level even if they don't work. It will be easier on society to just provide these things than to have people who for whatever reason do not work not get them. They will be our guests.
Also people who do work will be able, with their fellow workers, to knock out all that society really needs a couple of hours a day. I have a part time job that I love doing. If I hit the lottery I would still go because it is good exercise.
However -
Work that you do at home for yourself should not be compensated at all with the exception of providing medical type services to a family member who needs it. If you like a clean floor mop it. If you like clean clothes wash them. If you want to have kids take care of them except for the few hours that you are in work. I would even go so far as to say that if you want kids educate them yourself at least through elementary school (with the exception where there is not a parent who is able and there is no family member or friend who will pinch hit.
I am one man. I will admit that I will never have any fucking idea as to what wimin (except one) do in the house. It is also none of my fucking business (except for one). If anyone doesn't want to do what ever work that they are doing at home they shouldn't do it, they should get out. Move in with someone who will share the work or do all of the work, whatever suits your fancy. It just doesn't matter to me. I don't think that makes me a bad person that's just what I think.
Dave |
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| PowerKord |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 11:17 am Post subject: SOLVING PROBLEMS OF FREE ACCESS |
Greetings,
I think that many of the reservations about free access voiced in the earlier posts in this forum would be preliminarily addressed if the notion of "according to reasonably-demonstrated need" was appended to the label "free access." Perhaps a wholesale redefinition is best: replace the entire notion of free access with the notion of needs-based access.
That is the criterion asserted in the Blancian dictum.
My essential, "big-picture" conceptualization of a cooperative system is one in which goods and services are allocated based on need, and perhaps more secondarily, wants.
Additionally, Mike, you presently include voluntary work as a fixed control element in your matrix.
However, in my view work would most certainly not be voluntary. That would be bad for the individual and the society, both. Work would be mandatory, but because it would be unalienated work, and/or would occur in the context of an unalienated society, its character and people's reaction to doing it would be different, presumably markedly so, relative to under capitalism.
Cheers,
vince  |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 12:47 pm Post subject: |
Vince wrote:
I think that many of the reservations about free access voiced in the earlier posts in this forum would be preliminarily addressed if the notion of "according to reasonably-demonstrated need" was appended to the label "free access." Perhaps a wholesale redefinition is best: replace the entire notion of free access with the notion of needs-based access.
Dave asks:
Since the subject of "free access" hasn't been discussed in at least the last week - for us memory challenged people - do you think that you could give us a date time and author of the post that you are responding to? I had to search each page until I found free access last mentioned on March 25.
Also if it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you list specifically what previously voiced reservations to free access that you think that your concept would address?
Also if it wouldn't be too much trouble would you give us a reference to "Blancian dictum". I did a web search on several engines and came up empty?
Vince wrote:
My essential, "big-picture" conceptualization of a cooperative system is one in which goods and services are allocated based on need, and perhaps more secondarily, wants.
Dave writes:
But of course it isn't what any one person conceptualizes this side of the revolution (Vince is using his own tag "cooperative society", where DeLeonists are advocating a workers' cooperative for the next stage of social development which may or maynot be the same thing that Vince advocates) Social development will not stop with the revolution - so of course there will be stages and stages of development afterward. And no doubt someday within a hundred years as Ken suggests - human labor will be zero or almost zero in the production process. As the means of production evolves so will society - so it's not going to be an all or nothing proposition or even a semi-permanent proposition at to what the next society shall be.
It would be a good thing to concern ourselves with coming up with ideas as to how society might operate concurrent with and just after the revolution. My own fantasies as to what a future society could look like are no doubt much like Vince's. But collective fantasies will little inform the mechanism of actually putting food on the table or to insure that the workers are going to have enough faith in the nuts and bolts of the exchange system that they will want to "buy" into it by showing up and doing the work upon which everthing depends.
"Reasonably-demonstrated need" seems no more instructive than "need." Would we expect that the workers in their determinations of need will necessarily include within the definition "unreasonable" need or "undemonstarted" need unless we defined need to be reasonable and demonstrated? I'll bet that after the revolution the workers could be counted on to make reasonable determinations. If they can't - the difference in wording on this side of the revolution between need and "reasonably-demonstrated need" will not make a bit of difference.
Thank you.
Dave |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 05:04 pm Post subject: |
Vince wrote:
Blancian dictum
Dave writes:
Now I see.
"In his noted Organisation du travail (1840, tr. Organization of Work, 1911), (Louis Blanc) outlined his ideal of a new social order based on the principle “Let each produce according to his aptitudes...let each consume according to his need.” He advocated, as a first stage in the achievement of this goal, a system of national workshops (ateliers sociaux) controlled by workingmen with the support of the state."
http://www.answers.com/topic/louis-blanc
Dave asks -
Your not suggesting a system of national workshops are you?
signed Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 10:14 pm Post subject: Re: SOLVING PROBLEMS OF FREE ACCESS |
| PowerKord wrote: | | replace the entire notion of free access with the notion of needs-based access. |
Actually, I find greater need correlating with inability to hoard, and disposable choice correlating with hoarding tendency. For example, no one hoards food if it's free, and it's something we physically need. People can always hoard more hobby equipment or jewelry, and our need for it is less. Therefore, I would go along with free access to things that are not suitable for hoarding, and that should automatically make it needs-based. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 10:17 pm Post subject: Re: SOLVING PROBLEMS OF FREE ACCESS |
| PowerKord wrote: | | Additionally, Mike, you presently include voluntary work as a fixed control element in your matrix. |
Can you elaborate? What did I include? |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
04 May 2005 10:44 pm Post subject: |
| davesearles wrote: | | "Reasonably-demonstrated need" seems no more instructive than "need." Would we expect that the workers in their determinations of need will necessarily include within the definition "unreasonable" need or "undemonstarted" need unless we defined need to be reasonable and demonstrated? I'll bet that after the revolution the workers could be counted on to make reasonable determinations. If they can't - the difference in wording on this side of the revolution between need and "reasonably-demonstrated need" will not make a bit of difference. |
I'd suggest we first say that some things are by their nature best distributed freely. For example, medical care and education - if people consume it then it was good for all ocncerned that they did so ... transportation - no one can "hoard" an unreasonably large pile of time spent sitting on a train, so I makes sense to me to have usage unlimited.
After dealing with those kinds of things, and getting to the question of who gets "stuff" -- fancy riding lawn mower, kilowatt stereo amplifier, etc. - I'd prefer a straight system of working by the hour for credits that we can spend at the store. Sure, modify according to type of predicament, for example, someone physically paralyzed should be allocated free work time credits, and similar adjustments. But one kind of readjustment i'm NOT susporting is any further distinctions between product types or quantities according to real need, perceived need, demonstrable need, etc. etc. Time vouchers should take care of all that automatically. If someone says that they "need" something that we all know is truly excessive, this can be handled simply by a computer monitor telling them "insufficient credits in your account." Now it's on them to decide to do a reasonbale amount of work and consume in reasonable amounts, or else squander their credits on ridiculous things and also to work day and night to compensate for it.
____________________________________________________
Season's Greetings
May 5 - Karl Marx's Birthday |
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| PowerKord |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 12:13 am Post subject: Not So Fast... |
Hullo,
Hi, Dave - regarding citing exactly who, and what, I'm responding to in my posts, I can't always do that, for time reasons. I already have to steal the time for the little bit of posting I do now. Still, I would probably do it selectively, if really necessary, but in a forum like this one, consisting of just three pages, and considering that I did make a reference to "earlier posts," I didn't really consider it essential. Sorry.
. . . . .
Now:
>>>If someone says that they "need" something that we all know is truly excessive, this can be handled simply by a computer monitor telling them "insufficient credits in your account." Now it's on them to decide to do a reasonbale amount of work and consume in reasonable amounts, or else squander their credits on ridiculous things and also to work day and night to compensate for it.
Nah.
1. I don't think the new personal ethic of good-faith use which we will build-in to our new society (beginning at childhood) will foster individuals requesting excessive allocations. Education beginning at childhood, and peer pressure, will bolster the social norm of judicious allocation requests.
2. Suppose I'm in a really bad place in my life, and an ocean cruise would do me a world of good. But I just don't have the LTVs, nor will I anytime soon, as too many are required. Result: even though there is an available resource (the ships are sitting right there at the dock, waiting for passengers), and even though there is a human need for that resource, I'm not going to get it. I'll simply have to suffer, to do without, because I can't "pay" for it, even though it's available, and I need it.
You know what this sort of distribution scheme smacks of?
Capitalism.
. . . . .
Better perhaps to have needs-based distribution, then have a local "Needs Committee" for the adjudication of apparently excessive or unusual needs. Such a body, at the local level, could consist of a family member, another community member, a planning board member, and a worker from the industry which produces the desired item. If it is a health-related item, say, a physician could also sit on the local committee.
The individual will present their case for the allocation of the item; the board members will make a good-faith decision, rooted in a balance between (1.) Whatever genuine resource limitations exist at that time, and (2.) A real sense of love and fraternity with and for the petitioner, and a consequent desire to accomodate them. Messier than a computerized, abacus-ized allocation schema, true, but it also more pointedly addresses the human resource deprivations at the heart of why we need a new system in the first place.
I actually have some new material on this very question at the new People For A Cooperative Society website (temporary link, below), on the Cooperative vs. De Leonist programs page.
. . . .
Mike, if I recall, your matrix always posits that free access will be paired with voluntary work. I don't recall you having a cell containing the combination of free access with *mandatory* work, which is essentially what the Cooperative program calls for.
Best,
vince |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 12:52 am Post subject: |
Whenever I like to take an ocean cruise the Staten Island Ferry always satifies me to no end - especially if someone is playing an instument for money on it. Sometimes I even get off in Staten Island for a beer. Can life get any better. How many LTVs would that be?
And I have met New Yorkers born and bred who have never been on it.
Probably, if there was a big demand for it - people could go on ocean cruises by working on the ship in some capacity if they didn't have enough tlv s saved up.
Which reminds me of a song -
California is a Garden of Eden
A paradise to live in or see
But believe it or not
You won't find it so hot
If you ain't got
Those TLVs
Oh, if you don't have those TLVs, friend
If you don't have those TLV s
You'd better go back to beautiful Texas
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:06 am Post subject: Re: Not So Fast... |
| PowerKord wrote: | | 1. I don't think the new personal ethic of good-faith use which we will build-in to our new society (beginning at childhood) will foster individuals requesting excessive allocations. Education beginning at childhood, and peer pressure, will bolster the social norm of judicious allocation requests. |
I think you're right for most people, but everything in nature is a bell-shaped distribution. Whenever we can say it's normal to see one thing, there exists someone at the other end. The special thing here is that one tail end of the bell curve, those who would insist on consuming too much and simultaneously working too little, would represent a form of exploitation and abuse of some people by others, a new kind of class of people who live by pocket-picking. Any human behavior which brings along certain kinds of material payoffs, tends to increase in frequency. Our upbringing can never be enough is there's something systemic which makes antisocial behavior rewarded materially, in the sense of the word "reward" as used in psychological conditioning. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:20 am Post subject: Re: Not So Fast... |
| PowerKord wrote: | | 2. Suppose I'm in a really bad place in my life, and an ocean cruise would do me a world of good. But I just don't have the LTVs, nor will I anytime soon, as too many are required. Result: even though there is an available resource (the ships are sitting right there at the dock, waiting for passengers), and even though there is a human need for that resource, I'm not going to get it. I'll simply have to suffer, to do without, because I can't "pay" for it, even though it's available, and I need it. |
With the way socialism will end profit and waste, and fully implement automation, instead of a standard work routine consisting of working forty hours a week for fifty years, it will be more like ten hours a week for twenty years ... the effectively "mandatory" part of it, that is. So there's no reason why that individual could not have easily accumulated enough in work credits to have cruises, unless that person has simply demonstrated the miserable trait of telling others: I'll just lounge around forever while others serve me, like Nero. Organized society as to be set up as to promote individual responsibility. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:29 am Post subject: Re: Not So Fast... |
| PowerKord wrote: | | a local "Needs Committee" for the adjudication of apparently excessive or unusual needs. |
That's okay for special circumstances, like handing out wealth to rebuild after a hurricane, without accidentally throwing the wealth in the wrong direction. But I'm talking about ordinary "stuff" shopping, like buying a camcorder or a canoe or something. It appears to me that material luxury products like these could present a particular problem for socialism, because the human imagination can easily suggest to itself an infinitely growing "need" for them. Then we would "need" to work fewer hours just to have more time to use the "stuff". When our critics say "socialism is against human nature", it's often issues like this that they're challenging us to come with good solutions for. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:34 am Post subject: Re: Not So Fast... |
| PowerKord wrote: | | Mike, if I recall, your matrix always posits that free access will be paired with voluntary work. |
Sorry - I still don't understand what you mean, in reference to what I have called for.
| PowerKord wrote: | | I don't recall you having a cell containing the combination of free access with *mandatory* work, which is essentially what the Cooperative program calls for. |
The only way I know of to make work mandatory is to have refusal associated with a withholding of luxury products. (Unless you want to have a new kind of prison population.) |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:45 am Post subject: Re: Not So Fast... |
| PowerKord wrote: | | You know what this sort of distribution scheme smacks of? Capitalism. |
Compare to:
"Capitalism --- economic system in which (1) private
ownership of property exists; (2) aggregates of
property or capital provide income for the
individuals or firms that accumulated it and own
it; (3) individuals and firms are relatively free
to compete with others for their own economic gain;
(4) the profit motive is basic to economic life."
--- Barron's Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms
Obviously, socialism can't be similar to capitalism regarding the features described in that definition, but I do assert that socialism needs to keep just a few characteristics that would be in common with capitalism; one of these is the practice of being paid by the hour for work and then taking one's earnings to the store to spend them. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 06:53 am Post subject: |
Dave, the five cents Staten Island Ferry was always subsidized by the government. That tends to throw off any feasibility studies we might make. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 12:14 pm Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
"It appears to me that material luxury products like these could present a particular problem for socialism, because the human imagination can easily suggest to itself an infinitely growing "need" for them. Then we would "need" to work fewer hours just to have more time to use the "stuff". When our critics say "socialism is against human nature", it's often issues like this that they're challenging us to come with good solutions for."
Dave offers this really tremendous SOLUTION:
There is a religion, I forget which, that has a perfect idea - that in order to get into heaven a person has to be able to climb on up with all of his or her material possessions strapped to the person's back.
I would do the same under socialism, that on the first day of the new revolutionary year people parade down the street to a new apartment or house with all of their personal possessions strapped to their backs.
#1 this would encourage physical fitness
#2 would serve as an incentive for the production of smaller products containing fewer natural resources
#3 help to curb the dreaded scourge of packratism
Canoes, unless someone wanted to build one themselves, I put into the category of big ticket rentables. This would discourage people from needing larger and larger accommodations to store these things that are such a tremendous idea when acquired but then get stored in the garage with all other forms of exercise equipment.
Matt wrote:
“smacks of capitalism”
Dave writes:
“smacks” is a funny word – it has acquired almost an offensive connotation which is the manner in which Matt apparently used it.
The original meaning of “smacks” usually used in the phrase as Matt used it, smacks of, is “tastes like”. I guess it has to do when smacking your lips to indicate to your host that the tofu burger garnished with sprouts that you just ate really hit the spot.
But getting back to what Matt wrote:
I have no doubt that a whole bunch of things just after the revolution are going to have the taste of the old economic order – because that’s where we came from. It’s no reason to not plod ahead. When and if we do see the other side of the revolution – just like immigrants to a new nation – we’ll be better able to determine which of those things we’ve lugged along on our journey we don’t really need and can lay aside.
Just an immigrant without papers to remain here.
Dave |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 12:26 pm Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
Dave, the five cents Staten Island Ferry was always subsidized by the government. That tends to throw off any feasibility studies we might make.
Dave replies:
Obviously a very enlightend government.
Perhaps when the revolution does come we can abolish the state and all of its agencies EXCEPT for the Staten Island Ferry Authority:-).
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
05 May 2005 05:51 pm Post subject: |
The idea of being allowed to have as many material trinkets as you can carry on your back is an interesting mental exercise for five minutes, but not realistic.
First, socialists need to stop adding to the list of areas where we ask the working class to utterly reverse their present feelings and beliefs. There's already too great a chasm between the way most people feel about things and what socialists propose. People like lot of material stuff, and I suspect that will continue.
Second, I believe that it _should_ continue. Industry is nothing but clever human use of energy to transform large amounts of matter from their oriignal forms as given by nature into different forms as conceived by the imagination. Who is to be the boss, the clumps of matter found in primordial nature, or the human mind? If people want piles of junk, hell, the universe doesn't have any other "purpose" that might conflict with that behavior.
Michael A. Lepore, Karl Marx's Birthday, 2005 |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 02:47 am Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
People like lot of material stuff, and I suspect that will continue.
Dave writes:
In general people like stuff however stuff requires work and people in general don't like work. I'll bet people could be sold on not working just as easily as to sell them on acquiring stuff.
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 06:35 am Post subject: |
See that? Socialism can accommodate both individuals. Work a lot and consume a lot. Work little and consume little. A socialist party should really be called the Individual Freedom Party. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 11:45 am Post subject: |
I would agree completely IFF ALL the social costs associated with the production and proper disposal of a certain item are reflected in the cost associated with its acquisition BUT that it ultimately is up to the workers to say yes or no to the production of anything. Agricultural workers do not have to grow tobacco if they decide not to. As perhaps only I see it, society does not have an obligation to respond positively to every consumer demand. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 04:28 pm Post subject: |
"society does not have an obligation to respond positively to every consumer demand" -- I think tobacco is an example on the borderline. I would prefer an example like DDT as an insecticide -- something where consumer choice has implications affecting all of society. There, a policy to avoid use of that product should override consumer choice. The reason I say tobacco is borderline is because it affects society by way of medical allocation, but it is also an intimately personal decision since it has to do with your control of your own body, and which value is greater may be debated. So if you want to point out that some products may not be available because of their overall negative effects, I would agree with that, provided that we settle on examples that don't sit on the borderline of the principle.
Also, of social industry doesn't provide tobacco, or some other kind of product, but some people want it, then some people would probably produce it themselves, and also overproduce beyond personal use, so they could participate in a barter association, an underground and alternative economic system, with a variation on the system of pricing according to the seesaw of supply and demand. This isn't likely to happen with an industrial resource such as DDT, but probable with a personal consumer item like tobacco. I'd be interested in hearing suggestions for a social response to that. I'm inclined toward the idea of socialism having a hands-off policy. |
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| PowerKord |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 07:12 pm Post subject: WORK A LITTLE, CONSUME A LOT |
Hello,
>>>Socialism can accommodate both individuals. Work a lot and consume a lot. Work little and consume little. A socialist party should really be called the Individual Freedom Party.
Again, you have outlined a capitalistic distribution scheme. Capitalism easily accomodates both the above options. What it does not accomodate at all, which is supposed to be a key difference between it and socialism, is this:
Work a little and consume a lot.
In my view, this must also be a viable option if humankind is to reach its moral apex.
Yours,
vince |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 08:41 pm Post subject: |
Vince, I thought you'd realize that I meant working "a little" or "a lot" relative to the standards of a future society using advanced automation. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
06 May 2005 10:51 pm Post subject: |
Some people could be parking attendants at out of door places where where they can fit no more than 10 cars.
Of course the attendent there would work a little lot.
Dave |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
07 May 2005 01:42 pm Post subject: |
Some people could be parking attendants at out of door places where where they can fit no more than 10 cars.
Of course the attendent there would work a little lot.  
You remind me of my older brother who used that sort of humor many many years ago. I was in my late teens when he passed away but I never forgot about the person he was.
Social |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
07 May 2005 05:06 pm Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
Also, if social industry doesn't provide tobacco, or some other kind of product, but some people want it, then some people would probably produce it themselves, and also overproduce beyond personal use, so they could participate in a barter association, an underground and alternative economic system, with a variation on the system of pricing according to the seesaw of supply and demand.
Dave writes:
As long as they do it organically and there is not a shortage of land - if that's what people want to do - why should anyone care?
But this thiught occurs - Are TLVs going to be so transerfable as to allow people to accumulate them without working? as to allow people with now private TLVs to hire people?
Mike writes:
I'm inclined toward the idea of socialism having a hands-off policy
Dave writes: hands off what though? If labor says we really don't want to get into growing that shit anymore - what is the problem? You can't be suggesting that consumer demand is going to outweigh the workers saying - you can consumer dremand all you want - but we aren't going to do that.
Dave |
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| PowerKord |
| Posted:
07 May 2005 05:48 pm Post subject: GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT COLLECT $200 |
Greetings & Salutations,
Let's be clear here. In a Cooperative Society:
1. After debate and discussion, this or that group of CITIZENS (nationally, internationally; possibly also locally) vote to decide how to allocate the resources of society for a given time period, say a year. For example, transportation upgrade this year, new home appliances the next.
The specific selections of what goods and services are to be produced and provided are not made by the workers in any industry.
2. It is the job of the workers in the relevant industry/ies to:
(a.) Fill an educational and advisory role for the citizens as they make their resource allocation decisions, and then...
(b.) Execute the production mandates so decided.
(Of course, since each worker will, themselves, be voting, they can register their individual production preferences that way).
. . .
What to do in the case of a controversial good or service (tobacco; erotica), regarding workers who hold a moral reservation about producing or providing such items or services, is an interesting theoretical challenge.
Ultimately, the individual holding the reservation will probably have to temporarily relinquish their job during the production period in question. When that production run ends, they can go back to that job. Of course, if one chooses to work, say, in agriculture, then one must expect that they might be called upon to produce tobacco. Long term, they might want to reconsider their job selection.
Now suppose there's a situation where just one particular individual possesses the requisite technical skill to produce a good, and that person has a moral reservation about producing that good, and thus will not provide their knowledge. In withholding such knowledge, they will be blocking production--and precluding the execution of the democratic allocation decision of the people.
Interestingly, we would probably have to declare such an individual a lawbreaker!
In this kind of situation, we may just have our first great legal challenge and debate within socialist/cooperative society. And since so much of the focus of such a society is on production, it may very well be this general kind of problem or situation that forms the core of many legal cases and issues under that system.
Yours,
vince |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 12:16 am Post subject: |
I suppose the real value of these discussions is to "break ground" as needed for people to visualize vividly that the world can be very different someday, that today's institutions aren't permanent. Inquirers want to know, "What will socialism be like? how would this be done? How would that be done?" To give a complete answer, we would have to say something like, "We have discussed a dozen possible ways ths could be done, and a dozen possible ways that could be done." Then we should make the point that, when we support democracy, our support is for democracy itself, not for any particular detail that the people might use that democracy to choose. I feel that this is a useful exercise in the process of eroding the myth of today's god-given institutions. Sometimes when we do this, a few socialists will get upset at our "proposing specific blueprints." They don't get the point. It's not the actual answer, the blueprint. It's the exercise inherent in the activity. The visualization exercise reenforces the fact that the people really can choose if they want to. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 05:55 am Post subject: |
Vince wrote:
"Let's be clear here. In a Cooperative Society:
"1. After debate and discussion, this or that group of CITIZENS (nationally, internationally; possibly also locally) vote to decide how to allocate the resources of society for a given time period, say a year. For example, transportation upgrade this year, new home appliances the next.
"The specific selections of what goods and services are to be produced and provided are not made by the workers in any industry.
"2. It is the job of the workers in the relevant industry/ies to:
"(a.) Fill an educational and advisory role for the citizens as they make their resource allocation decisions, and then...
"(b.) Execute the production mandates so decided.
Dave replies-
The CITIZEN's group says produce so many million cartons of class A cigarettes-
The ag workers say (and are backed up by the all industry council) sorry - if you want to smoke - grow and roll your own, we've got too many orders for soy beans to worry about supplying your disgusting habit by growing and harvesting tobacco. What is the CITIZEN's group going to do about it?
What if the CITIZEN's group says, you know, we'd like to have a little more variety in the cars that are produced - make us a million 2 seat convertibles every year - and the car builders backed up by the all industry council says - no way - convertibles are a waste - we're not going to work any extra hours just to allow people the thrill of being able to drive with the top down approximately 1% of the vehicle drive time. What is the CITIZEN's group going to do about that?
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 04:25 pm Post subject: |
| davesearles wrote: | | too many orders for soy beans to worry about supplying your disgusting habit by growing and harvesting tobacco |
It's your interpretation that workers should get to choose what products they believe in making? I'd go at it from the other direction. Choose which workplace you want to join. Tobacco is grown in that field. People interested in working there can sign up. If you want to grow soy, the place to sign up for that is a mile away. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 04:35 pm Post subject: |
| davesearles wrote: | | and the car builders backed up by the all industry council says - no way - convertibles are a waste |
If goods are priced in units of work hours, then whether or not it's a waste would be no one's concern except for the buyer.
| davesearles wrote: | | we're not going to work any extra hours just to allow people the thrill of being able to drive with the top down |
There wouldn't be any extra hours. What consumers want to consume wouldn't affect the length of the workday for workers in that plant. Instead, it would require some kind of active recruitment program to encourage people to apply their hours where its needed. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 04:45 pm Post subject: |
| davesearles wrote: | | But this thiught occurs - Are TLVs going to be so transerfable as to allow people to accumulate them without working? as to allow people with now private TLVs to hire people? |
People could set it up so that work credits shown in a computer are used only for one thing - to be redeemable at the social store. However, if there's any way to remove them form the system, such as the form of gift certificates with no names on them, then people would probably find ways to exchange them when bartering.
Hiring labor would be unlikely, since no one would be under pressure to go to them to find work. Working for large-scale automated industry would be associated with the highest standard of living. Why would I dig your ditch for the same compensation as if I were to enter socially owned industry and push ten buttons? There could be incidental occasions for hiring -- if I whittled a nice wooden horse and you want to trade me something for it -- but that's not capitalism. Trade is only a problem when it becomes the standard system that engulfs everyone. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 04:50 pm Post subject: |
| PowerKord wrote: | | suppose there's a situation where just one particular individual possesses the requisite technical skill to produce a good, and that person has a moral reservation about producing that good |
The situation becomes simple enough with a system of work vouchers. If I choose any type of activity which society has decided to compensate, then I get compensated for doing any one of them. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
08 May 2005 07:53 pm Post subject: |
Mike quotes dave:
and the car builders say... no way - convertibles are a waste
Mike writes:
If goods are priced in units of work hours, then whether or not it's a waste would be no one's concern except for the buyer.
dave writes:
Now I know that you'lll want to rethink that one. We finally get control of the whole production process and we're not going to care about waste?
Everyone will be concerned about waste. The more efficient we are, the less we have to work. I SAY NO TO RAGTOP BOURGEOIS ROADSTERS!!!
Mike quotes Dave
we're not going to work any extra hours just to allow people the thrill of being able to drive with the top down
Mike writes:
There wouldn't be any extra hours. What consumers want to consume wouldn't affect the length of the workday for workers in that plant. Instead, it would require some kind of active recruitment program to encourage people to apply their hours where its needed.
Dave writes:
If the production needs of the community now require more hours- the workers now needs to work longer and the consumenr needs to work longer. The consumer may well think it's woth an extra hour's work to bring home that truly mavelous faux 60s lava lamp - that doesn't mean that peoples' workplace #17 needs to make the damned things.
dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
09 May 2005 07:17 pm Post subject: |
If a product has a price in units of work time, reflecting the work time needed to produce it, and if it's waste of work time to make convertibles, then the only people who would have to do that extra work would be the people who choose to buy convertibles. Work through the arithmetic and you'll see why.
It could be everyone's concern for other reasons, such as the finity of materials, and environmental contamination, and, in the case of some products, moral or aesthetic objections, but the waste of work time would get put solely on the individuals who consume the product. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
09 May 2005 07:26 pm Post subject: |
Dave -- "that doesn't mean that peoples' workplace #17 needs to make the damned things" -- The people who want the product that's lacking can put out a call for formation of a new group of workers who want to make it. Most likely. there would be some people in the world who are interested in making it. |
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| PowerKord |
| Posted:
09 May 2005 07:49 pm Post subject: AAGGGHHH |
Whoa,
Whether the workers in a given industry or plant are "interested" in producing a certain item cannot be a sole, or even major, consideration, or neither society nor socialism will function!
Industries exist to serve the democratically-decided-upon needs and wants of the people in the society (of which every worker in every industry is a member, by the way).
Socialism does not give people working in a given workplace autocratic control over what they produce! Workers in a given industry or plant would control such things as the technical processes of production used inside their plant. And therein lies, in part, the relief for the alienation they previously experienced as workers, under capitalism.
Under socialism, then, they would control how they produce, but certainly not what they produce. That is obviously the democratic decision of society. And therein lies, in part, the relief for the alienation people previously experienced as consumers of goods, under capitalism.
"The workplaces to the producers," especially as interpreted in a Marxian context, ala' The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, refers broadly to the fact that we are ALL workers and producers, so once the entire economy, which is to say ALL workplaces, are socialized, the net result will be all people will control all workplaces in effect, meaning production and related decisions will come democratically from all people to serve their interests, as opposed to coming from the ruling class, to serve its.
It certainly cannot mean, for example, that the auto workers, generally, or those in a given auto plant, specifically, decide whether and what kinds of cars to produce.
v. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
10 May 2005 02:41 am Post subject: |
Well they'll have to send me to socialist reorientation camp. If I ever work in a car plant after the revolution I'll get the workers there to liberate that plant from the dictates of 'consumerism". We'll make only the cars that we god damned well please. And what are you quoting Marx for? He never drove a car or worked in a factory!!
dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
10 May 2005 07:52 am Post subject: Re: AAGGGHHH |
Vince - "control how they produce, but certainly not what they produce" - I was thinking the same thing -- or a limited sense of "what", like the choice of internal components, which is their specialty. But the suggestion that it should be up to auto workers whether or not to make convertibles is new to me.
Dave - your didn't addressing my tentative answer - don't you think there would be some group of workers, somewhere in the world, who feel good about making convertibles? Billions of people in the world. It doesn't have to be Detroit. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
10 May 2005 11:00 am Post subject: |
A democracy of the workers along industrial lines.
IF that democracy said no rag tops - no rag tops will be produced in the industries. Ditto cigarettes. Ditto anything. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
10 May 2005 06:34 pm Post subject: |
Dave, maybe I'll have to say the same thing over and over, until you acknowledge it :-)
Just because this group of workers don't want to make it, what makes you think that no workers in the world would want ot make it? The cigarette plant in Richmond, Virginia shuts down. Gee, the cigarette plants in Calcutta, India and Tipperary, Ireland and Brisbane, Australia and still operating. What are you gonna do? The consumer rules. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
11 May 2005 10:38 am Post subject: |
I am not assuming that there would not be enough worker cigareete smokes in Richmonfd to turn out sufficient quantities of class A cigarettes -
What I am trying to get at is that it is the workers who will decide what is going to be produced - and that theyare under no obligation to keep every car lot in the world stocked with enough red two seater converatbles for every stud who is willing to plop down the requiste number of labor vouchers to cover the social costs of producing that car. If the all -industry council (as Walter Steinhilbur - I believe- termed it ) said nix then it's nix. I could see that happening with cigarettes. It could be determined that the social cost of cigarettes is just to high to pay - regardless if people are willing to plop down vouchers essentially to kill themselves - to allow industrial production.
dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 08:10 am Post subject: |
Let's take a hint from Prohibition ...... Make tobacco officially unavailable, and then the tobacco addicts will grow it themselves. A black market will be established -- I'll trade you fifteen pounds of of burley tobacco for ten pounds of cavendish tobacco. Or -- they will get it from the next version of Al Capone. War lords, protective of their territories, may be produced. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 09:37 am Post subject: |
Prohibition does not work but I can see how a black market of trade could happen if it was enforced. On the other hand, I can see TLV's elimination of profit motive crime of illegal drugs and such since hard currency would no longer exist. Crime bosses and capitalists (both hand in hand) would fight hard against the formation of TLV's and SIU in general.
Social |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 11:06 am Post subject: |
Me a prohibitionist??
I am shocked! shocked! (what is this from) at the full implications of your remarks!!!
If people without compensation grow tobacco or even the dreaded wacky weed in their backyards or even in fields where they have permission and can organically restore the land to its original fertility - I wouldn't see any big problem with that. It would be my hope that the workers democracy would determine to not produce cigarette paper, filters, etc. If those things could be produced in someone's basement - it would not bother my time.
If people want to barter - that's fine by me - why shouldn't they be free to? My mother is an artist - why shouldn't she be able to trade her paintings for whatever she can get?
Suppose after the revolution I determine to give a series of lectures on my trials and tribulations participating in a DeLeonist internet forum before the revolution - people would really be interested in that so I suppose I could command a full week's worth of labor vouchers from each attendee - why shouldn't or couldn't I?
already practicing my lines
Dave |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 11:15 am Post subject: |
But on the other hand - somehow trading labor vouchers does not sit that well with me. I don't really know why but I would suggest that a "tax" be levied on such transfers, perhaps on a sliding or steeply graduated scale.
A voucher traded would simply loose some percentage of its value in the trade.
proposing one of the two inevitibles
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 05:34 pm Post subject: |
""I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
from the movie Casablanca |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 05:43 pm Post subject: |
This is so cool ... none of us knows what socialism will be like ... what's really hapening is each of us is saying, since each gets one vote, this is how we feel that socialism should be like. That means it's real to our sensiblities. We can almost taste it. When a lot more people can do this, thay's when the great reconstruction will occur. This is the necessary subjective component that reform demands intended to "radicalize" people cannot achieve. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 06:06 pm Post subject: |
This is what I want us to do, a bunch of us people go through many of the subtopics or questions having to do with of socialism - "state", "laws", "money", etc., and take each one apart, look at all the angles. Then try to summmarize what we find, sort of like announcing the conclusion "there seems to be nineteen basic kinds of outstanding disagreements about how a labor voucher system would need to be organized." - "The major pros and cons that have come up in the debate are ...." -- By exercises like this, our group, and many other working class groups, will eventally build up a great pyramid of idea, self-referential, a "cultural context", a "common language." Someday when the socialist reconstruction occurs, people will tap into this common recognition of outstanding issues, and they won't be starting form the beginning. They will already stand on top of a commonality, they will probably say, of "ideas that we have been discussing for many years."
Some socialists are saying that people should even begin to exercise their imagination in these areas until after the revolution. That would be too late. The imagination can atrophy. The imagination needs to be exercised, like a muscle.
I'll show you my favorite plan to create a perfect society if you'll show me yours. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 06:17 pm Post subject: |
"For our part, it is our task to drag the old world into the full light of day and to give positive shape to the new one. The more time history allows thinking mankind to reflect and suffering mankind to collect its strength the more perfect will be the fruit which the present now bears within its womb."
Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, May 1843 |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 06:43 pm Post subject: |
We are doing things now with just the dozen of us that sadly should have happened 40 years ago with hundreds or 80 years ago with thousands. It is too bad that rebirths of societies can't come sooner than later but such is life.
Shocked shocked Casablanca - Claud Raines 5 TLVs to the winner!! |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
12 May 2005 10:55 pm Post subject: |
Imagination is a good tool to place oneself someplace else like in a socialist society. Of course, I can imagine that there would be bad in it as well. Crime, natual disasters, accidents, riots, etc.
I have another question: Since products, food and such would be produced at a far cheaper level than we are accustomed too; are TLV's subdivided into quarter hours or less if one LTV can purchase a lot of goodies? |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
13 May 2005 05:03 am Post subject: |
Absolutely not - that way we can avoid teaching fractions in the schools. Children will be able to graduate years earlier and with less stress. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
13 May 2005 09:15 am Post subject: |
| Social Greenman wrote: | | TLV's subdivided into quarter hours or less |
Yes. Objects which have very little labor materialized in them are common. TLV's (as you have named them :-) cute name :-) could be expressed in any decimal or fraction. That would be necessary in case all you want today is one mug of beer. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
13 May 2005 09:22 am Post subject: |
"Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!"
Guess the name of the movie. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
13 May 2005 07:48 pm Post subject: |
was that a belushi line? |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
14 May 2005 05:11 am Post subject: |
It's from a classic ... a couple decades before the Belushi era ... |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
14 May 2005 02:57 pm Post subject: |
I had to look it up - another Bogart film. For some reason that one doesn't do a thing for me. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
15 May 2005 08:11 am Post subject: |
Here's a issue that was talked to death in the yahoo forum 'world in common' during late 2004-early 2005 ... but I had so much fun that I wouldn't mind doing it some more ... Motivation to go to work in a socialist society. Some socialists believe that motivation will no longer be so private, that we will do things because we recognize that they need to be done ... no need to pay us in order to inspire us. However, I believe that motivation will remain largely, not entirely, private and material. We have to get individually paid for going to work, otherwise people would tend to do only the most fun kinds of work and not show up in the necessary numbers and frequency for the other kinds. This goes to the issue of "free access" to wealth versus "labor vouchers." |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
15 May 2005 08:44 am Post subject: |
I agree Mike that there are types of work people would not do unless there was some sort of motivation. I don't think an "atta boy" would do it. This brings me to a question: The old Soviet Union continued to use the capitalist system for exchange, banking and hard currency for trade with other nations. Is this one of the reasons it collapsed? I do think the "Central Planning" was one of the reason since workers did not have much of a say in what was produced and everyone was basically paid the same. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
15 May 2005 05:38 pm Post subject: |
I've always suspected that the repressive qualities, such as the fake "elections", the censorship, and the religious persecution, were hte real reason that the people of the Soviet Union were so anxious to overthrow it. I don't think the main reason was the miserable economy.
However, why was the economy so miserable? Numerous reason. For one, if a worker reported noticing an inefficient process and took a stand for changing it, this was described by management as an act of disloyalty, inability to cooperate, etc. For example, there were strange things being done with perishable food transportation, where a lot of food rotted before it could be delivered to stores. In any individual noticed this and had ideas for improvements in the methods, what is the person supposed to do? Come out in the open with the new ideas, and go on record as being a trouble maker, guilty of insubordination? Who would bother? |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
15 May 2005 06:57 pm Post subject: |
Behavior modification is always an undertaking in pragmatics.
Enforcers generally are not universal. You want someone not to do something. You can set up a system of punishment. If you do this thing that we don't want you to do - this bad thing is going to happen to you.
The thing is - if the person does the thing that they are not supposed to do and the punishment is then supplied, but the "punishment" does not decrease the behavior - then the punishment is not a punishment.
The selection of punishments with people is highly individualist and changes over time - something might be a punishment for one behavior but not another.
Ditto with "motivations". It is simply not the same for everybody, and it changes for each person over time and frequency.
The only universal rule is flexibility.
Variability would be a great motivator for me. I would be willing to do almost anything for a couple of months at a time - other people like the security or what ever it is that they'll keep a job for decades. I would rather do time in jail than to work like that. But every one is different.
Dave |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
15 May 2005 11:57 pm Post subject: |
In other words workers had no say in what was produced or distributed. Any sort of input was considered disloyalty or insubordination. I read a little about how plant administration in the Soviet Union would want to make changes in production or distribution they had to go through Gosplan first and then Gosplan had to submit the request to the Central Committe of the Communist Party in which they voted yea or nay and then submit that to Gosplan who then informed the plant administrators of the decision. In other words all decision was up to the Communist Party. No wonder the people wanted no more to do with it. Good thing we had De Leon and Debs (perhaps others as well that I am not aware of) who knew that workers already knew their jobs and how to better produce and distribute. If the masses can see that they are being ripped off through profits and that they virtually run everything, then we have something to hope for. Lately I have been pushing the TLV concept since that is another good reason to have socialism. Pushing SIU is a lot harder I am sorry to say but at least I have help now from a few comrades in the SP.
Me |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
16 May 2005 09:54 am Post subject: |
Mike wrote:
I've always suspected that the repressive qualities, such as the fake "elections", the censorship, and the religious persecution, were the real reason that the people of the Soviet Union were so anxious to overthrow it. I don't think the main reason was the miserable economy.
Dave writes:
These things happened because of the miserable economy - the workers were not in control of the industries - the state was. But when Mike wrote about fake elections, censorship and religous persecution I thought he was talking about the US.
Matt wrote:
Lately I have been pushing the TLV concept since that is another good reason to have socialism. Pushing SIU is a lot harder I am sorry to say but at least I have help now from a few comrades in the SP.
Dave writes:
The TLV concept (in my mind) is not a seperate issue than SIU - maybe different approaches to explaining the same general idea.
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
17 May 2005 08:04 pm Post subject: |
When I said the Soviet Union wasn't ended because of the miserable economy, I meant to refer to the economic symptoms or indicators as reported in the popular U.S. media. The stereotype explanation that was presented by the U.S. press, such as Newsweek magazine, goes something like this -- A typical day in the life of a citizen of the Soviet Union, circa 1980: wait in line for hours to buy a block of cheese ... just as you get to the head of the line you are informed that the store has no more cheese ... so now you wait in line for hours to buy a loaf of bread ... just as you get to the head of the line you are informed that the store has no more bread ... as of a result of people living this way, the economy was inherently unstable and therefore it "collapsed." This is the lazy and stupid way in which the U.S. media presented the story. The falsity of that story needs to be disclosed. The fact is: the people of the Soviet Union were oppressed because the system was undemocratic, and the system was inefficient because it was undemocratic. The system most certainly did not crumble to provide as a living example of the capitalist university principle that any system which doesn't make use of entrepeneurial profit must eventually crumble. The reality is: the people of the Soviet Union were so miserable that even the leaders of the system were miserable, and that's taking misery rather far. They had the political power to abolish their system, and so they did. Many people, of both classes, made the error of assuming that individual freedom and prosperity are correlated with capitalism, and therefore, unfortunately, they put their faith in capitalism. The Communist Party upper layer of bosses were now reclassified as wealthy corporate stockholders who personally owned the industries that they used to rule as political appointees. The working class underwent no class change. Now the system was converted into capitalism. That's what happened -- obviously not as Newsweek described it. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
17 May 2005 11:48 pm Post subject: |
Well said - but I'm pretty sure that you weren't over there when the collapse came. So how is it that you write with such certitude on the subject?
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
18 May 2005 05:16 pm Post subject: |
I only give my opinion. It's too cumbersome to begin each sentence with the clause "In my opinion, ....", so I leave that out. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
18 May 2005 07:37 pm Post subject: |
Still, why so definite of an opinion? Why not the meat and potatoes issues?
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
19 May 2005 12:40 pm Post subject: |
There were many ways they could have restructured the Soviet system. People like Yeltsin acted as though there was only one conceivable thing to do: to sell the industries off to the highest bidders among the government officials. They acted as though Gorbachev was their major threat, because he didnt want to privatize everything, and instead he wanted to move in the direction of representative government, both political and economic. I think it's obvious that the CP officials who abolished their own offices were motivated by the idea of becoming capitalists.
You're right that I wasn't there in 1991, but I received the AP, UPI and Reuters dispatches on my home computer. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
19 May 2005 12:57 pm Post subject: |
This needs to be separated from the issue of the so-called Soviet republics becoming independent, which started when Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia declared independence in August of 1991. The "Soviet Union" was an artificial body made of conquered territories which had never lost their own forms of nationalism. I wasn't referring to that breakup. I was referring to the mad rush to adopt capitalism. I'm convinced that, when the Congress of People's Deputies voted to abolish itself (September 1991), they were sitting there and thinking, "Ah! Soon we are going to be wealthy capitalists, like the Americans, Getty and Hughes!" |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
19 May 2005 03:59 pm Post subject: |
It is an interesting topic. What books are out there on this?
Dave |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
20 May 2005 10:01 am Post subject: |
I picked up a copy of Brian Crozier's 1999 Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. I read the first chapter and didn't find evidence of anything approaching an objective or even much of an informed view. For example the one paragrapgh introduction to Trotsky made no mention of his role in 1905.
Lenin is described as the "ultimate fanatic".
Chap one is an intro to "the rise" of the USSR but not one of the end notes from Chap 1 is from any work prior to 1990. It looks pretty much like a right wing hatchet job IMHO.
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I recall an interview with Khruschev's son not too long ago. He was writing another book about his father (which are very well written and interesting tributes from an obviously loving son). He was a rocket scientist. He said in the interview essentially that the whole missle race on the part of the Soviets was a Potemkin Village and that the US was very aware of this - but yet it was a convenient ruse on both sides to pretend that the USSR's missile abilities were far more than they actually were.
I always meant to read that book, I'll have to track it down to see if it ever did come out.
Dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
20 May 2005 01:58 pm Post subject: |
I haven't read books on this subject.
I wonder if there is some objectivity in this one ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/books/chapters/28TAUBMAT.html
review of David E. Hoffman,
The Oligarchs : Wealth and Power in the New Russia.
[Soon I'll be moving all these comments about the end of the Soviet Union to a separate topic.] |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 Jun 2005 05:54 am Post subject: |
Continuation from another topic:
| Social Greenman wrote: | Okay, I am back. I hate having pneumonia. Anyways, I get this message on another forum. I really don't understand where this person gets the idea that it is my system. Here is what he (she?) wrote:
| Quote: | So under your system based on workers councils, workers wages would be determined by how much time they spend on their labour. So effectively, the more productive a worker is, the more he is paid. But paying a worker more for working longer won't ensure that he is more productive because even if he does spend a longer time wouldn't necessarily mean that he is efficient and that what he produces is of good quality.
And there is another concept I don't understand. If under this state apparatus workers have complete democratic control, wouldn't they choose democratically to be paid more than they are supposed to.
And isn't this sort of society where some are paid more than others antithetical to the principles of socialism.
I'M CONFUSED!
Could you please simpilfy this for me.. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 Jun 2005 06:06 am Post subject: |
| Quote: | | But paying a worker more for working longer won't ensure that he is more productive because even if he does spend a longer time wouldn't necessarily mean that he is efficient and that what he produces is of good quality. |
The question writer needs to realize that human society can always adjust its institutions to treat problems as they arise. For example, if society recognizes a problem with people who are paid by the hour performing work of low quality, then the society may adopt the practice that workers don't get credit for any work time which generates a product that a separate quality inspection group marks as not meeting the published specifications. Perhaps the question writer thinks that socialism is supposed to be all worked out in its finest details. Having those kinds of details isn't to be expected. As Marx pointed out, adopting socialism will actually mark the end of our "prehistory", since class rule is a rut that we are stuck in during this childhood phase of human history. The real discovery process is still ahead of us. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 Jun 2005 06:28 am Post subject: |
| Quote: | | wouldn't they choose democratically to be paid more than they are supposed to |
This isn't really a socialism question, but a speculation about what might democratic practices might experience. Suppose ten people are stranded on an island with ten coconuts, and instead of voting to take one each, they vote to take nine each. Obviously, the act of voting can't create substances that aren't really there. As soon as they realize that what they wanted is arithmetically impossible, they either realize that they need to adopt a new policy that will be doable or else, failing to realize that, they fall into chaos. People who believe in democracy also believe that people can be properly educated so that we behave a bit smarter than apes. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
12 Jun 2005 06:29 am Post subject: |
| Quote: | | And isn't this sort of society where some are paid more than others antithetical to the principles of socialism |
I feel that equal burden is placed on everyone if someone says, "I decline to work as many hours as people typically do", but I will compensate for that by being pleased with fewer material things," and another person says, "I want more material things than people typically have, but I will compensate for that by working additional hours." Organizing ourselves into a society requires some kind of plan for spreading out the sacrifices, and I feel that this plan does it while maximizing the amount of personal choice. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
12 Jun 2005 10:28 pm Post subject: |
here! here! |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
18 Jun 2005 12:18 pm Post subject: |
Thanks for the reply Mike. Sorry this is late but I am in the process of buying a house right now. It is a really sweet deal that I got for it and I cannot complain except that mortgage companies know how to tack on added cost just for paper work and such and then determine the interest rate. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
26 Jul 2005 10:39 pm Post subject: |
I was writing about TLV's on RevLeft forum and Hours being a form of it but then again the U.S. government is now taxing it as income. However, this one poster wrote this:
| Quote: | | It no doubt shows a sinkhole in the capitalist system if you can start manufacturing and circulating what is technically counterfeit money on a black market basis!! |
I wrote this reply: That is a very good concept of a black market currency outside capitalist rules and regulations. Perhaps a Industrial State can be created on the back of capitalism. Setting up a frame work of so-called businesses that are employee owned and run that uses the TLV to take orders, produce and deliver to other cooperative businesses in an effort to develop the new economic system nationally that can spread to Canada and Mexico hopefully to catch on internationally. Of course the use of capital will have to be used to begin with unfortunately. If Socialism does indeed develop out of Capitalism then perhaps those who developed Hours and Paragon are hinting that we are to develop a new economic system that will show to workers everywhere that prolatariet and bourgeoisie have nothing in common.
Instead of printing currency a software program could be used instead. However, to get there a lot of brainstorming has to be done to phase in TLVs. If you think of it...employees (the cooperative work force) can order food and products from TLV participating stores that are on the internet. Thanks Indigo for the black market currency concept.
Any thoughts on this? |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
27 Jul 2005 01:04 am Post subject: |
we already have such a system in place. Its called currency. dollas, euros, etc.
It is not because of the currency system that the workers are exploted. They are exploited at the point of production. They are paid, in general just enough to bring the laborer to the line and keep him/her there only as long as needed - whether in hours, weeks, months or years.
The revolution can come and you can keep the dollar currency - really no big difference. 1 dollar = 1 hour labor or what ever you want.
What will be different is that the market system (wgaes system) will be gone. Not that the name of the currency will be changed.
Cashless barter systems already exist - nothing big except that they are usually set up to make it hard for the tax man.
Take Value Price and Profit to bed with you for about 3 or 4 months. Ask ask ask if you have any questions - it will be well worth it.
Take a look at what Marx wrote in it:
Citizen Weston illustrated his theory by telling you that a bowl contains a certain quantity of soup, to be eaten by a certain number of persons, an increase in the broadness of the spoons would produce no increase in the amount of soup. He must allow me to find this illustration rather spoony. It reminded me somewhat of the simile employed by Menenius Agrippa. When the Roman plebeians struck against the Roman patricians, the patrician Agrippa told them that the patrician belly fed the plebeian members of the body politic. Agrippa failed to show that you feed the members of one man by filling the belly of another. Citizen Weston, on his part, has forgotten that the bowl from which the workmen eat is filled with the whole produce of national labour, and that what prevents them fetching more out of it is neither the narrowness of the bowl nor the scantiness of its contents, but only the smallness of their spoons.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch01.htm
Our spoon is the wages system, not the currency that we are paid in.
imho
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
27 Jul 2005 10:11 am Post subject: |
I am not quite understanding this. You are saying that the profit motive can be removed when the wage system is removed. Also, the current monetary system can be kept in place at the same time. This is a bit confusing. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
27 Jul 2005 12:21 pm Post subject: |
Confusion only stops after the funeral.
The wages system - where workers only possess power to labor - that power under the wages sytem is a commodity to be sold by the worker - receiving a wage as the price of that sale.
Change money (a commodity bought and sold like all others) for labor vouchers. Assume that one labor voucher equals in value the value produced by the average worker, working for one hour. There you have labor vouchers.
You are an owner of a business. You live by profits. You hire a group of workers to produce something of value. How much are the workers going to get paid? Are you simply going to pay the workers one labor voucher for every hour worked? How long could you stay in business doing that? Under the wages system, it's a market for labor power. Just like the commodity that your workers put value into and you sell for more or less an equal value to the value that your workers put into it - you will buy labor power more or less at the value that it takes to have that worker keep body and soul together, live somewhere, and get to work. That's the wages system.
Gold is a pretty stable commodity - it requires a certain amount of labor power to extract and process it - an amount of labor that is relatively stable over the years. So gold could be used for labor vouchers. One once of gold for so many labor vouchers. No matter what medium of exchange they are paid in, the amount of the workers' pay is determined by the low scale - how much labor power it takes to produce the labor power from a human worker, as opposed to the high scale - how much value a worker creates. The wages system, no matter what the medium of exchange is - that is what drives capitalism.
In several works when they talked about what needed to be gotten rid of, Marx and Engles would usually wrap the whole thing up and say the "the wages system".
"they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” [Value, Price and Profit]
dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
28 Jul 2005 04:23 am Post subject: |
If you use gold then a lot of production time would be wasted producing gold that doesn't get used as gold itself (as a metal), but gets used as symbolic tokens. Not a good idea. All you need is accounting with abstract numbers, like software. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
28 Jul 2005 11:33 am Post subject: |
Yes and no.
I'm not saying that gold should be used, but that it could be used even under the SIU sytem of socialism. But, if it's only used as a currency, and only ever gets used as a currency, it does seem like a waste to have all that stuff sitting in a vault somewhere.
But gold has been used as a medium of exchange for a heck of a long time and because people will give you something of value for gold and the amount of gold available is generally pretty stable, it works.
But gold is liked as a medium of exchange for other reasons as well.
In our most idyllic moments sunlight is ---------- golden. Gold, especially pure gold has a very pleasant color in all different kinds of light. Because of its physical properties it has always been a wonderful medium for jewelry, tooth fillings, and gold leaf. It can be spread so thin by simple mechanical methods, that a very little bit can cover the whole roof of a building (the Vermont statehouse has a gold covered dome). It can be spread so thin very easily that it is not that rare for window glass to be covered with it in a transparently thin layer to block out certain rays of sunlight. In the 20th century gold really came into its own in electrical applications - even on cable TV connections that you can buy at radio shack. Of all the elements, doesn't gold have the lowest resistance to electric current flow, and is the least likely to corrode?
Amazing stuff that gold. I am sure that we'll be digging it up for a long time. Damned good in exchange value because of its general availability and recognizability, but yet stabile in supply (overall) and damned good in use value, increasing with our imagination of how to use it.
But I agree with you, in practical use, we really shouldn't carry around gold even in coins, if only because they wear down or get lost -
Of interst to note - there is about $575 billion in US dollars in circulation, most is held outside of the US. But forgetting about the fact that over half is held outside of the US - that's only about $2000 per US resident. At the current price of $425 per ounce of gold, that come to the gold equivalent of about 4 ounces per person.
One could set up a cooperative system where labor vouchers would be issued by some trusted, recognized and agreed on authority that would have to be difficult to forge. Just right there, it seems like it would be just as easy to use gold. It's not perfect, the system would have to acquire enough gold in the first place to circulate (perhaps about 4 ouces worth per person to really get the system going, but it easily has the required qualities required in an exchange unit, where labor vouchers, especially in the beginning stages of a small cooperative would be difficult to maintain, if only on the issue of possible fraud, and becuase they will not be recognized outsde of the system. (let alone the fact co-ops in every different form have been tried and fail universally after a relatively short amount of time.)
On a different note, why is it that co-op economies/groups fail?
dave |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
29 Jul 2005 06:06 am Post subject: |
| Quote: | | why is it that co-op economies/groups fail? |
Because they have to buy some of their resources from outside the system. The minimum requirement to see the benefits of a cooperative economic system is to have every kind of industry within the system.
This doesn't even have to be geographical. You could even have a collectively owned economy in the same place as a capitalist economy, overlapping in space but otherwise almost ignoring each other, as long as the collectively owned economy had every kind of industry within it. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
29 Jul 2005 06:31 am Post subject: |
Actually the resistivity of gold is greater than the resistivity of copper. The advantage of gold plating on contacts is that you will continue to have have gold atoms on the surface. With cooper you will very quickly have cupric oxide molecules on the surface.
These days the best way to make thin metal plating, gold or any other metal, is by sputtering, rather than any mechanical process. The metal is vaporized and ionized, by a combinaiton of high temp and high electric field. Then the ions accumulate on the surface gradually, like snowflakes accumulating on the earth. It's such a cheap process that sputtering is used to make those plated glass Christmas tree balls.
Mike Lepore -- MS EE, U. of Vermont, '85
That's one hell of an obsolete college degree! 20 years old! |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
30 Jul 2005 02:15 pm Post subject: |
Okay, I heave read what Dave suggested and Wage, Labor and Capital as well. When wage labor is abolished then so is profits to the capitalist. What Marx wrote was a monied relationship of wage, markets and profits. I can understand why the means of production become common property of the working class. However, how does machines get repaired and replaced with more modern equipment with out some sort of monied deduction in the work hour in a socialist society? We all know the capitalist does this to increase production which increases his/her profits. There has to be some sort of economic framework for a socialist society to grow. I say this because SIU is still a daydream that has yet to be put in the realm of reality. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
30 Jul 2005 02:48 pm Post subject: |
The nice thing about gold is that high tempertures or high or low pressures aren't required. It can all be done by just rolling the gold thinner and thinner.
Some statehouse domes are gold. I don't think ours is gold plated but I wonder just how it was done and what is underneath it. I'm going to find that out.
As to communes, Mike - I hear you as to giving as an expanation that they have to buy outside of the system - but I wonder if there has been an actual study on this. The local Shakers, I believe were economically viable as far as cash flow goes, I believe. They sold all kinds of things, pretty successfully. But cash would certainly be a limiting factor if for instance the commune lost its market for its goods, even for a temporary period - there wouldn't be sufficient reserves to whether the problem economically it would seem. Is it essentially that they are in the same category as all small busines,s subject to evey economiuc storm? Even when they are economically successful, they still come apart - such as the Amana commune. (I think this is what happened. I actually know very little.) Collectively we ought to know more on this subject.
Theoretically it is not an option that we can co-op our way into socialism because the co-op is competing with slave labor - the co-op member/workers getting the entire proceed of their labor, as against wage workers getting on average only the value of their labor power. But factually, is there support for the idea that this is a major factor as to why they fail?
Note: This is an exampe of a discussion that we never could have had in the slp in the olden days. How the slp is now I do not know. An organization that esposes scientific socialism has to promote the challeging and questioning, that must accompany science, to occur.
If Wayne is reading: in the 20th century and now - the failure to value scientific analysis has been the genisis of "sectarianism" not the over-promotion to the working class of revolution. imho
dave
ps I just went to the slp website and also to the website of the only section of the slp that has a webpage, Section Houston - neither site has an online discussion area, that I can see. Not a good sign, to me anyway. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
31 Jul 2005 02:45 am Post subject: |
I can understand the value of gold as a base since it takes quite a bit of labor power to extract and refine; however, the U.S. no longer uses the gold standard. What is used as the base for the value of exchange for commodities these days?
Speaking of communes...perhaps do as the Libertarians are doing with the New Hampshire free state project. An entire state should have all the industries needed to build socialism. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
31 Jul 2005 03:37 am Post subject: |
S.G. you made my day asking that question.
The conversation with Mike in the topic In The News about the space shuttle made me think about this question - I usually hate analogies but I'll use one to illustrate your question instead of using it to answer answer your question.
The sun in the sky, nothing holds it up. It doesn't fall that we can discern becuase there is no great single gravity souce tugging at it in one direction or the other. The planets do pull by gravity, just as the sun pulls on them by gravity. Also the sun is in orbit around the planets just as much as the planets orbit the sun so the centripital forces balance out as well. We think the sun moves as the universe is expanding because of inertia left over from the big bang (back when I was a boy) Oh, boy where am I going with this?
Oh yes, the buck.
I know that the dollar is not redeemable for certain amount of gold, as it used to be. Even in my own day there were still silver certificates in circulation that you could have redeemed in silver. I will accept a dollar or dollars in payment for something because I know that I can take those dollars and use them to buy something else - including gold - not that gold really needs to be in the equation.
What keeps the dollar stable? Balance. You know those guys that can balance spinning plates at the end of a stick? That's about it. Monetary discipline - not printing too much money and not allowing the supply to dwindle that the value of what you can trade a dollar for goes up or down too much..
I'll speak about the NH libertarians tomorrow.
dave
ps This is of course very simplistic. They keep track of several different defintions of currency - printed (and minted) money dollars, government notes, and there are some others - but it all comes down to the same thing if you expect that you can do something of value with the money you'll take it in exchange for something else of value. One of the jobs of the governement is to maintain a viable currency. That's why the secret service frowns on printing fake money - not that they give a flying leap that the convenience store got ripped off $20 by taking in a fake - but that it makes the government's job all the more harder to keep the currency from becoming too worthless. Long term creditors especially get nervous when they have lent out money of a certain value per dollar and then 10 or 15 years later they get money back on the loan at a lower value per dollar. |
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| mikelepore |
| Posted:
31 Jul 2005 06:04 am Post subject: |
Usually when people say that communes "failed" they really mean that people quit the association due to lifestyle considerations, like the rise and fall of a fad based on following a leader who preached about the perfect family or community structure. For example, Fourier insisted that communities composed of exactly 810 men and 810 women were required. When people resign from these groups, this isn't evidence that communal living is untenable. The members quit specific implementations, not general ideas. In many cases the "failure" of a commune was actually the result of a church losing its psychological grip on its congregation. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
31 Jul 2005 11:57 am Post subject: |
The shakers did well enough for a while but they had this singular idea that made their population dwindle - when you became a shaker you could have no sexual realtions of any kind. Well that seemed to put a kabosh on having a new generation of shakers every 20 years or so. And not that that they didn't have sex, but when one of the women became pregnant they expelled her and the guy. So the group was loosing out on both ends, children from members and the members engaging in the procreation of children. |
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| Social Greenman |
| Posted:
02 Aug 2005 10:16 pm Post subject: |
I am still waiting to read about the New Hampshire Libertarians. |
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| davesearles |
| Posted:
03 Aug 2005 01:46 am Post subject: |
Oh sorry - those NH libertarians are going to have to wait - about four big things happened in the last week and I have seemed to misplace New Hampshire entirely.
Nothing wrong with libertarians however - they seem very sincere - and on an odd wave length we have a lot in common because of our mutual abhorance of the state and general resistance to reformism.
They say that we are in the dark about socialism - look at the USSR they say. We feel that they are in the dark - look at the great depression, we say. Historical developments will tell of whether we all should pack up and move to NH or whether the political state, including New Hampshire, will simply disappear.
dave |
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| davesearles |
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03 Aug 2005 12:01 pm Post subject: |
I'll give one example of an experience with a libertarian person - this was a while ago - These baby inafnt formula companies - or at least one of them was pushing there product in a fourth worl country. The stuff had to be mixed with water to be fed to the baby - people here and elsewhere were trying to get some kind of rule that forbade pushing this stuff in these countries where potable water was always a problem - pushing this stuff was simply a waste to the people there and that the children were getting sick from the water intead of their babies being breast fed as they always had been. Even though it could be lookied at as a reform - I don't have any problem whatsoever with legislation like that. If it saves people's lives I'll be damned if I'm going to play god and say that my politics are more important than people's lives. My libertarian friend (and perhaps he was an unrepresentaive libertarian) had this bone in his head that said that "we" had no business dictating to the peole there that they should be able to buy ths stuff - that any problem would be ironed out by the "free market system". But in fairness there are probably libertarians who would have seen no problem with the restriction.
Two ideas - The free market system will cure all curable ills. - The free market system, cures some ills, causes others, and contains the seed of its own destruction.
But this is just me blowing smoke in the midsts of a fog.
dave |
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| davesearles |
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03 Aug 2005 01:09 pm Post subject: |
On this currency thing that we were writing about above - I wrote this:
That's why the secret service frowns on printing fake money - not that they give a flying leap that the convenience store got ripped off $20 by taking in a fake - but that it makes the government's job all the more harder to keep the currency from becoming too worthless. Long term creditors especially get nervous when they have lent out money of a certain value per dollar and then 10 or 15 years later they get money back on the loan at a lower value per dollar.
I wanted to write more but the thoughts wouldn't come out in a way that would go into sentences - this is what I would add now to the above:
Besides, if anyone is going to devalue the currency its going to be the goverment. The goverment doesn't want you on its turf. If anyone's going to profiit in the devaluation process its going to be the governement, or more accuately the friends of the government. Something like a big organized crime scam - they don't want outsiders scimming off the profits.
but again this is just me blowing smoke amidst the fog
dave |
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| mikelepore |
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03 Aug 2005 09:53 pm Post subject: |
I don't think the current government would allow a large system of labor exchange. They would want a dollar equivalent of each labor to be reported so they could tax it.
Consider this absurdity about the income tax. Suppose I say, "I'll mow your grass if you'll paint my porch." No money exchanged. End of transaction. However, if I say, "If you pay me $30 to mow your grass, I'll pay you $30 to paint my porch," the law is involved. No money exchanges hands between you and me, but now each of us is required by law to pay the tax on $30 of income. The tax we're reuired to pay would be about twice as much if I had said, "If you pay me $60 to mow your grass, I'll pay you $60 to paint my porch," even though neither of us physically pays the other. The tax we're required to pay is based on the number that we spoke during our conversation. This is an absurdity, that the tax due depends on how the deal is phrased rather than how much money, if any, changes hands.
I wonder what would happen if a workers' organization tried to avoid getting taxes extracted from their transacitons by saying that no money changes hands in their labor voucher system. I believe that the feds would rule that a dollar equivalent has to be reported to them. |
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| davesearles |
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03 Aug 2005 10:46 pm Post subject: |
See IRS tax topic 420
"Bartering occurs when you exchange goods or services without exchanging money. An example of bartering is a plumber doing repair work for a dentist in exchange for dental services. The fair market value of goods and services exchanged must be included in the income of both parties. |
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| mikelepore |
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04 Aug 2005 05:05 am Post subject: |
The objectivity or subjectivity of "fair market value" is something that the ruling class turns on and off, at will, like a light switch, whenever it's convenient. At one moment the market value is said to be whatever people are willing to accept, and five minutes later it's the number printed in some official book. Let a gift shop buy a trinket for a dime, and put a price tag of a hundred dollars on it -- you accidentally break it, and any court will force you to pay the shop a hundred dollars. So if that's the general rule, how come you can't put a tag of a million dollars on your car, and if someone totals your car, you can't force their insurance company to pay you a million dollars? Because there is no real rule but arbitrariness itself, according to what corresponds to the stability and perpetuity of business interests. Knowing that, we can see that a socialist system couldn't get started in a small or experimental "island" form in a capitalist society. The government would suck its blood out. |
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| davesearles |
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04 Aug 2005 09:36 am Post subject: |
I does seem a little subjective - they want all of the benefits of goverment control over the working class but not over "privte proerty".
How about "tort reform" - they oppose the ability of juries to award punitive damages where products such as cigarettes have been shown by the preponderence of the evidence to kill people - that the tobacco complanies not being satisfied with
make sure that the niccotine levels stay high to make sure that people stay hooked - that is murder - but our libertarian friends do not want private property to be pubished for its wrong doings - but the death penalty for "common" criminals - bring it on. |
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| Social Greenman |
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04 Aug 2005 10:17 am Post subject: |
What gets me is the criminal behavior done in a large corporations--even small. They may get a slap on the back of the hand but the common folk are sent to prision for many years over the same offences in law.
I remember a quote from Ayn Rand that lighting up a cigarette helps capitalism so smoke some more. I did briefly come accross a Libertarian doctor in a booth at a Fair selling lighters with the Libertarian logo on it. My doctor claims that nicotine does not cause addiction. It is a habit therefore the lawsuits against tobacco companies are bogus claims. After being really sick I haven't smoked in two months. However, it took a while to get over the withdrawls. Something my doctor would say was all in my head. I concluded that since he never smoked he is taking political sides with the tobacco industry. |
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| davesearles |
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04 Aug 2005 12:28 pm Post subject: |
Your doctor said that nicotine was not addictive?
"Is nicotine addictive?
"In February 2000, the Royal College of Physicians published a report on nicotine addiction which concluded that 'Cigarettes are highly efficient nicotine delivery devices and are as addictive as drugs such as heroin or cocaine.”'"
http://www.ash.org.uk/html/factsheets/html/fact09.html
Is there something we don't know in the world of science that has happened since then?
Spelling always drives me crazy. We pronounce it nick ah teen, not not nike ah teen, so why is there only one c ? I gave up after the second grade.
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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05 Aug 2005 12:41 am Post subject: |
I just started reading Das Kapital. Marx went the whole length to explain the money relationship of commodities and their use values in the market place which labor power plays a major role. I think I got that right.
Anyways, Mike wrote that a commune or state would in essence be bled dried by the surrounding capitalist system and government even if all industries were present. I am not quite comprehending this. |
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| davesearles |
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05 Aug 2005 02:37 am Post subject: |
You'll get there. Just a suggestion - before delving into Capital I would read Value Price and Profit - it puts the whole thing into a nutshell - then if you have trouble sleeping at night, crack open capital.
dave
I'll write more about the commune question fri or sat. |
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| Social Greenman |
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06 Aug 2005 12:28 am Post subject: |
Actually, I have no problem reading Capital uh ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, snort...Excuse me but was that me? Dave, you wrote that wage labor needed to end. However, labor power is the commodity sold to the capitalist class and to no other unlike other commodities that can be purchased no matter the class except for expensive luxury items. Labor power is what keeps us alive and what makes profit for the capitalist. It is a bit perplexing knowing that the majority of the American workforce are programmed to sell their labor power as competatively as they can.
On the other hand, if I opened a small service business I have no choice but to make a profit. If it expands I have no choice but to buy the labor power of people. If I don't turn a profit on top of the expenses then my small business would go bankrupt. So, the system is geared so that if profits are not made then it would get bled dried through one form or another. I hope I am understanding this correctly. |
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| davesearles |
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06 Aug 2005 02:11 am Post subject: |
Well, workers can afford (but barely) to buy a little labor power now and then, you do when you hire an electrician, mechanic, painter, etc.
"Labor power is what keeps us alive and what makes profit for the capitalist. It is a bit perplexing knowing that the majority of the American workforce are programmed to sell their labor power as competatively as they can."
Well, it's not exactly wired into their DNA - which as Marx will point out in Capital, in the first volume perhaps its the last chapter, where keeping wage workers was always a probelm in the US because of the frontier being open. The workers would leave as soon as they could. And as you give as example - workers trying to escape the wages system by opening their own businesses. Workers do not generally like the wages system but when all they have to sell is their labor power that's what they will do - but definitely not programmed.
More tommorrow.
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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06 Aug 2005 11:39 am Post subject: |
Programmed through propaganda. You know, socialism cannot work because it is in human nature to be greedy. Yeah, workers do sell their labor power when they have to. Some get better educated so that their labor power is of more value. Yes, I do realise that us proles have to cough up money to pay for an electrician's or plumber's labor power. |
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| davesearles |
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06 Aug 2005 05:53 pm Post subject: |
I always like the "it can't work because of greed" thing. But capitalism can work because of greed?
If people were as actually greedy that they are made out to be - then it doesn't stand to reason that they would allow others to exploit them at the point of production, they would want to realize the full value of the product of their own labor. Oh not only are they greedy, they are stupid. OK we'll work on their ignorance of how capiltalism robs them. And maybe instead of calling it greed, we'll call it self survival.
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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07 Aug 2005 01:16 pm Post subject: |
Agreed on the "self survival" and ignorance. Yeah, I can see that greed would cause workers to demand their full value of their labor which includes the surplus. But workers don't. |
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| davesearles |
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07 Aug 2005 08:52 pm Post subject: |
Are you kidding me?
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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07 Aug 2005 10:46 pm Post subject: |
To a point yes and no. These days workers are willing to give concessions in wages and benefits. Once apon a time in the past workers did demand better wages and benefits from the capitalist class through collective bargaining. Looking at the state of unions today collective bargaining is not as wide spread as it once was. Talking to those at work I can hear their ignorance when it comes to demanding better wages and benefits. In other words, they don't think they have any rights to make any demands period. |
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| Social Greenman |
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07 Aug 2005 11:35 pm Post subject: |
Anyways, why would communes or a socialsit state project not work? Lets get back on that subject. I concluded I better read more about wages and profits. On the other hand, good news. The wife will be off the wound therapy vacuum pump soon. She is down to a little over a centimeter in depth. |
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| davesearles |
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08 Aug 2005 03:13 am Post subject: |
A commune would work just as well as any other business starting up might work. A worker owned company is a kind of commune. These are all over the place. Just like any other business - these nothing magical about it. All business ahve to face compatetion, prodicution and efficiency is buiding all of the time meaning less and less need for individual workers. The workers in worker owned complines tend to be a little more loyal that in others, meaning that they are willing to work harder and longer for less. This does provide some help to the workwer owned company to get over soem humps in the road - but eventualy the laws of captialism take their toll - loss of markets due to usually the better financed better connected competition and loss of markets due to your customers going out of business or loosing their jobs.
A live in commune - same problem eventually but now throwing into that the problems of accommodating the diverse needs of the individual members of the commune.
Just like anything under capitalism - they will work for a while. A socialist state project? What is that.
Good news about your wife - unbelievable ordeal.
So did you move upstate yet?
dave |
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| mikelepore |
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08 Aug 2005 04:43 am Post subject: |
To consider Social's question ... I think that some communes and some state projects can have some successes, which is a more reserved way of expressing it than to say whether or not they "work." For example, any operation that's run nonprofit, or has a relatively flat rather than hierarchical management structure, etc. blows away the social myth that such things are incompatible with motivation, quality, etc. Any degree of worker participaiton in management blows away the myth that the workers can never be anythingmore than hired hands, while all the genius is in the "entrepeneur", etc. So there are numerous projects under capitalism that (1) partial test the validity of the socialist argument, and (2) work more efficiently due to the increased application of workers' intelligence, whether they are nonprofit operations or capitalist profit-maximization experiments. So, yes, there are some projects, short of revolution, that "work" in the sense that they provide emperimental evidence that the workers don't need the capitalists at all, or, as De Leon said, the growing of potatoes doesn't require infestation by potato-bugs. Now, what else is needed to say that these operations "work"? How about some decades of sustained operation, that is, competition doesn't crush them. What else? Feel free to add to that. But is the idea of socialism really being tested? And can there be any form of smooth thransition from such a set of projects to a new society that doesn't have capitalist social relationships? |
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| Social Greenman |
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08 Aug 2005 10:04 pm Post subject: |
I got good news today. I have a loan commitment for the house so it won't be long. The deal has yet to be finalized then we can move. Hopefully at the end of this month. |
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| davesearles |
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09 Aug 2005 06:39 pm Post subject: |
Make sure that everything they tell you that you need for the closing that they tell you specifically in writing a full week ahead of time. I had the assholes tell me that they wanted the insurance policy written one way, and then at 5:00 the night before the closing at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, they called and left a message that they wanted a different wording. That only cost me $350. |
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| davesearles |
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09 Aug 2005 06:42 pm Post subject: |
As to Mike's comments - there are not-for-profits but a lot of times they have a monoploy on providing some service and they are mandated to pay the prevailing wage. |
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| Social Greenman |
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09 Aug 2005 09:46 pm Post subject: |
Thanks Dave. I do have a good real estate broker who has been on their asses for the past two months. Sorry this was a short post. |
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| davesearles |
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12 Aug 2005 01:48 pm Post subject: |
More on communes and competition. Unless the commune is adamant about allowing new technologies which the commune can't hope to compete with then its's a pretty sure bet, as Mike suggests that the cash flow is going to keep going in the negative direction. The commune would be hard pressed to compete with an 89 cent pair of socks at walmart.
We would like to think that here is a way to get to socialism through the back door. I am not going to say that it CANNOT happen - that would be foolish- but we are not going to get to socialism WITHOUT the resolution of the class struggle in all of its manifestations. I must be sounding like a broken record on this - but the upcoming change from capitalism to socialism is more than just a change from one social system to another - such as from feudalism to capitalism. We've got to go through the entire change from class divided society (private ownership of the means of production - the state) to a classless society (cooperative production - government of by and for the producers) We are not going to co-op our way through those changes.
I wanted to put an analogy here - but shunning analogous thinking and hating myself for falling for analogous thinking in the past, I will spare everyone and not give it. In science an explaination that contains even an accurate analogy sets a bad example.
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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13 Aug 2005 12:06 am Post subject: |
I do recall reading about the early attempts of communes in the U.S. and admitting they could not compete with the cheap prices of socks though what they made were of a much higher quality. Socialism cannot come about unless everyone in society is in agreement for it to exist which means that it has to dawn on worker's thinking processes that they can do without the capitalist class altogether. It's a bummer that so many don't. |
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| Social Greenman |
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13 Aug 2005 02:22 pm Post subject: |
Shifting to a different construct. I have a booklet on the stock market and investing for retirement. I looked through it and there is no doubt that investments into these capitalist businesses and industries clearly help them stay alive and kicking. I do see how investing ones own money can generate a very good return many years later.
I know that buying property in New York was a good idea since the value will rise. On the other hand, investing does keep the capitalist system functioning and the capitalist class is wanting to abolish the Social Security net so that the general population is forced to invest in the stock market which causes those businesses and industries to grow. Yet at the same time these businesses and industries leave the U.S. leaving workers without employment except for those in the local temporary service, Mc Donalds, etc. How can these people afford to invest? When they reach retirement age will they be forced to live out of garbage dumpsters. I am sure the capitalist class will say that they deserve their fate as they so often say about the homeless these days. |
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| davesearles |
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13 Aug 2005 09:06 pm Post subject: |
What is "investing" ? Not paying a bill, and instead puitting the money into the stock market? Clearly the best thing you can do with your money, as far as money goes, is to pay off your credit card debts. How many can afford even that? |
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| Social Greenman |
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14 Aug 2005 01:26 am Post subject: |
I have no credit card debts. The only thing I will owe is the mortgage until that is paid for and then there is the yearly property tax. I get the idea of not paying a bill to invest. Of course, what I was trying to convey was 401 K plans and IRA's. |
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| davesearles |
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14 Aug 2005 01:52 am Post subject: |
Even paying down a mortgage would be a good "investment" - assuming that you have a 6.5% mortgage. After you pay commissions, and buying your brain into the market - you'd just as well pay down the mortgage. It is the equivilent of putting the money in the bank with the same amount of interest that your mortgage is. You would have a hard time beating 6.5% over time especially when there is absolutely no risk involved. |
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| Social Greenman |
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14 Aug 2005 01:40 pm Post subject: |
I believe it is between 6.3 and 6.5 percent but I have to ask the real estate broker Monday. She was suppose to send me the papers but they have not arrived yet. I can say that paying down the mortgage is not going to be a problem. I believe I can do it within 5 to 7 years.
Someone else has also said that property is a better investment. I can see that because it belongs to you (so long as you keep paying the taxes). After it is paid for the value has increased. If the house is fixed up better than it was originally then the value increases more. I was thinking about something else but I will save that for a later time. |
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| davesearles |
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14 Aug 2005 11:00 pm Post subject: |
See, there's a lesson in socialist economics right here.
If the house sits right there and you don't do a thing to it but maintain it. Generally speaking the use value does not change. It took x number of person hours to build the house. And in general the the use value of houses is decreasing - fewer and fewer person hours are required to build them - but the price of houses goes up. Some of it is inflation. Some of it in particular inflation in the number of dollars available to finance houses. Some of it is the low interest rates as compared to the late 70s early 80s.
(These are all summises off the top of my head with no factual foundation other than what I think is true without bothering to check)
dave |
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| Social Greenman |
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14 Aug 2005 11:46 pm Post subject: |
That is true Dave. The house can sit being maintained and the price increases. The house was built in 1920 but last year vinal (spelling?) siding was put on it which increased the value of the house. Yet a mobile home in a trailor park decreases in value even if it was more than maintained over the years and in better condition. Crazy how both are dwellings but the house get the increase.
The monthly payments I will be making will be far less that what I pay currently for rent. Yet, I will be paying more so as to pay it off a lot sooner. Of course I was warned of the possibility of paying a penalty for early payoff. I hope to avoid that. |
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| davesearles |
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15 Aug 2005 07:04 am Post subject: |
You won't pay a pre payment penalty in the Empire State - not allowed under state law. |
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| mikelepore |
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| mikelepore |
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26 Aug 2005 12:22 am Post subject: |
Getting back to what I believe to be most important, when talking about these vouchers ..... most members of the working class habitually (I mean that literally -- it's a habit) snap at socialists, "Socialism wouldn't work. It would collapse from the lack of incentive to work." I believe that the most effective answer to that objection is the structuralist one -- the point that some forms of socialism would work, and some wouldn't work, so let's identify what features make one workable and what features make another non-workable, and then let's choose a conception of socialism that can be shown to be workable. The vouchers idea of socialism is the form that can be demonstrated logically to be workable. People will have a material reason to return from vacation and do their part in production: their standard of living will depend on it. |
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| davesearles |
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26 Aug 2005 09:48 pm Post subject: |
I hate to come right out and say it, but that is a damned good point.
I have been thinking upon the price of oil. Of course the usual reaction that we had back in the 70s was inflation - because there was inflation big time.
Oil seems high. $2.50 per gallon. 10 times the price of since I was a nipper. (Is this a 10 fold increase?)
But has the value of the dollar decreased to a 10th of what it was back then, when other things besides oil are considered?
A few months back I recall that Bush was going to allow the value of the dollar to decrease against foreign currency. When I heard that I knew that that oil was going to sky rocket.
What did Bush do to decrease the value of the dollar against foreign currency? Does anyone know?
We had a good leter to the editor in the Rutland Herald today by a Ms. Ivy Freeman. Essentially it went:
"I see that Pat Robertson is calling for execution of President Chavez becuase Chavez calls for giving the land of the rich to the poor. I assume that Robertson thinks that the manner of execution should be crucifixion."
dave |
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