How would communism reward good work and punish bad work? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#15141619
B0ycey wrote:

they build mega cities, they are an exporting economy blah blah blah. All these things are moving the pieces of the chessboard which can only be achieved by government initiative.


You seem to know a lot about China and I am curious. Why are they constantly building large cities that are copies of famous Western cities? Many of these new cities are empty. Why is that? I am genuinely curious. This is not a gotcha question.

34 Unforgettable Photos Of China’s Massive, Uninhabited Ghost Cities

https://allthatsinteresting.com/chinese-ghost-cities#19
#15141621
Julian658 wrote:You seem to know a lot about China and I am curious. Why are they constantly building large cities that are copies of famous Western cities? Many of these new cities are empty. Why is that? I am genuinely curious. This is not a gotcha question.


I can't say I know why China does what it does. I am not in the CCP. What I can tell you is what I know. That is these cities began being built before the financial crash of 2008 and I suspect they were planning ahead in terms of keeping up with infrastructure progress along with growth when we thought the bubble would never burst. I also know China are... or I should say were, trying to keep up with the West as quickly as they could and one of those things was infrastructure. Maybe these cities were a way to move production and populous away from Beijing, Shanghai. But these are only educated guesses.
#15141626
Construction companies only build the shell of the building without any fixtures or fittings so many people won't move in immediately because there will be lots of noise and dust from neighbouring units as they install kitchens and bathrooms. Real estate investments are very popular because interest rates offered by the banks are very low and nobody trusts the stock market. Many projects sell out even if no one is interested in living there. Also, China operates on a much larger scale than other countries so its failures and white elephants are also larger.
#15141630
B0ycey wrote:I can't say I know why China does what it does. I am not in the CCP. What I can tell you is what I know. That is these cities began being built before the financial crash of 2008 and I suspect they were planning ahead in terms of keeping up with infrastructure progress along with growth when we thought the bubble would never burst. I also know China are... or I should say were, trying to keep up with the West as quickly as they could and one of those things was infrastructure. Maybe these cities were a way to move production and populous away from Beijing, Shanghai. But these are only educated guesses.

Many of the cites have French architecture and they even built a replica of the Eiffel Tower. I remember a documentary where the construction was done quickly with no special attention to quality.
Fascinating stuff! I just saw a couple of videos.
#15141646
Unthinking Majority wrote:
And how does this compare to socialism/communism. What is the reward in communism to work beyond the bare minimum to achieve a goal?



Overall, *historically*, I think we can say that the USSR *had* to industrialize, so the internal-economic social motivations were top-down engineered to be around inter-communal 'competition' and, ultimately, nationalism. Beyond that the imposed 'motivation', or 'spirit' was competition with the West, which led into an unfortunate, but in hindsight, understandable, logical conclusion of the space race and then the nuclear missile arms race, which the USSR overspent on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement


Unthinking Majority wrote:
I agree there's some things in socialism that do things better than capitalism. That's why the best governments have government-run sectors like space exploration or the military or some kinds of research and education. And there's a reason why any effective capitalist country has those things run or funded by the state. I'm not for lassez-faire capitalism or neoliberalism.

On the other hand, there's a reason why China privatized most of its economy. It's more effective in most industries. The market is just much more efficient at most things, because you're letting individual consumers and business people make most of the economic decisions and you don't have massive top-down bureaucracies doing guess-work. A person is going to know exactly what food they want to buy based on what they like and the market price, and companies know how much to charge and how much to produce based on this demand/supply. Markets are mostly self-regulating, but obviously I'm in favour of government regulation to fill in the gaps where needed to prevent abuse and instability etc.



---


Wellsy wrote:
This came to mind.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm



Socialist Competition (or Emulation)
The notion of “Socialist Competition” was first raised by Lenin in the earliest days after the Revolution to deal with the problem of the motivation of work in the absence of the profit motive. Lenin's approach was the call to “organise competition” which meant that: “All communes must compete with each other as practical organisers of accounting and control of labour and distribution of products,” emphasising this process in contrast to the imposition from above of uniform approaches and standards. Underlying Lenin’s proposal was the conviction that so long as workers saw the firm as their own property by virtue of their participation in the Soviet government, then workers would be responsive to such a call.
See Lenin’s article How to Organise Competition?, written on December 24 1917, but not published until January 1929.
In his article Emulation and Labour Enthusiasm of the Masses, Stalin made pains to distinguish “socialist emulation” from the notion of “competition” as the aim was one of cooperation with other workers, not their annihilation. This speech coincided with the ultimate failure of the “turn to the peasants” and reliance on the Kulaks, and the beginning of forced collectivization.
The later Stakhanovite campaign was successful in achieving superlative feats of labour on the part of individual workers and in promoting “socialist emulation” to force other workers to aim for these often-impossible work rates. The campaign was less successful, however, in inspiring “practical organisers of accounting and control of labour and distribution of products,” leading more frequently to a habit of misrepresenting production and targets and undermining planning efforts.
Nonetheless, it is worth recognizing that the conception of workers of working “working for themselves” may not always and everywhere be sufficient, and some means of motivating individual performance was and is always necessary to supplement motivation based on a commitment to the communal interest.



*Nationalist* interest, I would say, in the geopolitical context.

I've become fairly recently surprised at the equivalencies between the *corporatist* structure of social organization, and the *Stalinist* structure of social organization -- in the case of the USSR, though, there was the exceptional circumstance of the country needing to catch-up and *industrialize*.

Once past private property and the profit-making economic motivation, I think post-capitalist humanity would no longer be under any *umbrella* duress, or time pressure, to fulfill anything like a 5-year-plan, unless it was entirely voluntary, bottom-up.

Also, from a past post, regarding non-monetary incentives / motivations:


ckaihatsu wrote:
Craft. Social consciousness. Wanting to see the end product. Experimentation. Wanting to provide for others. Escaping boredom. Pushing the envelope. Personal goals. Wanting to be self-sufficient. Social networking. Mixing work with pleasure. Being productive. Being creative. Access to social leadership. Wanting to be a part of collective self-determination. Stewardship over the earth's resources. Wanting consumption of a very specific kind of product. Hobbyism.



viewtopic.php?p=15088612#p15088612
#15141653
Also, regarding the Stalinist political tendency / motivation to *falsify* production reports, to officially meet or beat quotas, there's this:



The 2001 collapse of Enron revealed the dubious practices and outright criminality that increasingly marked the speculative financial bubble. Enron had pioneered new accounting practices in which profit was decided in advance to meet market expectations and then the accounts were manipulated to show the desired result.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/0 ... x-f17.html
#15141657
Rancid wrote:
In this model where you take what you need, and give what you can. Can I need a Lamborghini?



First things first -- we need to *overthrow* the bourgeoisie so that's it's not *only* the bourgeoisie who has access to Lambos.

It just so happens that I did a treatment on this last month, for JR:


ckaihatsu wrote:
Since money, by definition, is *exchange* value, and no exchange value or exchanges would be necessary or existing in a *post-capitalist* context, what people would work for would be *exactly what they want*.

If one is satisfied with what others produce in excess, for the common good, then one would be satisfied with that, and no one would have to be concerned about 'human rights' issues because everyone would be fully empowered to at least *exist*, and even *live*, due to having the basics at no obligation, as a baseline for all.

*But*, if one *wasn't* satisfied with this generic baseline, from collectivized / automated industrial mass production, one would probably be more like the person *you're* referring to, someone who's *motivated* and wants a highly customized lifestyle.

Guess what? *Nothing* would be stopping that kind of person from doing whatever it is they want to do for themselves. Fucking hero-warriors of the communist revolution that overthrew capitalism could be *tugging on their shirtsleeves*, *begging* him or her to just work a set role for the good of the fucking people, and it would have no effect whatsoever on this highly self-motivated protagonist of ours.

Presumably this person wants a *banging* posh tricked-out mega-house, with shitloads of swimming pools, multi-levels up and down, booze fountains everywhere, flying vehicles for the grounds, and whatever else.

Now -- *who* would construct all this stuff? There'd be nothing stopping this person from doing it all themselves, using whatever natural or finished resources and pre-existing equipment they could discover, and we now have the Internet, so they could learn anything and everything necessary on how to build all that, if they didn't know already.

If they're not into construction work maybe they could come to some terms with other people who would be willing to do all that work for them. There's nothing the person could really *give* to others, specially, that would be apart from their *own*, *personal* liberated-labor, perhaps to help the volunteers with some stuff of *their* own, maybe for building sports cars for them or whatever.

And -- get this -- using *my* customization of the communist gift-economy premise, which I call 'labor credits', perhaps this person could put up their planned sprawling fancy house construction as a 'proposal', and publicize it to attract *all kinds* of different liberated-laborers, for the many different work roles involved. Perhaps these volunteer liberated-laborers wouldn't be swapping favors, though, and would ask for some set rate of 'labor credits' per hour of their liberated-labor, like regular, *impersonal* work. This motivated person who wants the fancy house would then have to go outward and use their motivation to do prerequisite work, in like fashion, for *others*, to earn the appropriate number of labor credits from *them*, to bring back, to pay-forward to the incoming liberated laborers for *their* work on the fancy-house. (Note that no infrastructure, natural or finished resources, or materials of any kind are *ever* exchanged for these labor credits, because this is *communism* -- nothing's commodified.)



viewtopic.php?p=15135588#p15135588
#15141717
Rancid wrote:
Let's say all automotive engineer were only interested in working on Lambos. How would we incentivize engineers to work on say a boring family mini van?



There's no 'we' in the sense of an overarching administrative *state*, so if mechanics are only personally interested in working on the cars that they happen to like then that would be it. No workers, no work, no repairs of minivans or *other* un-sexy vehicles.

This would spur the larger society, I think, to find solutions that were not so dependent on (liberated) *labor*, as with regular human maintenance work. Socialists usually point to *mass public transit* options, so maybe cars would become more of a hobbyist specialty over time, if better everyday alternatives were generally available, and preferably *automated*.


This Robotic Kitchen Cooks from Scratch, Even Cleans Up

#15141732
ckaihatsu wrote:

There's no 'we' in the sense of an overarching administrative *state*, so if mechanics are only personally interested in working on the cars that they happen to like then that would be it. No workers, no work, no repairs of minivans or *other* un-sexy vehicles.

This would spur the larger society, I think, to find solutions that were not so dependent on (liberated) *labor*, as with regular human maintenance work. Socialists usually point to *mass public transit* options, so maybe cars would become more of a hobbyist specialty over time, if better everyday alternatives were generally available, and preferably *automated*.


This Robotic Kitchen Cooks from Scratch, Even Cleans Up



So to those that need a mini-van to move the family around, we say fuck you take the bus? What about those that want to go camping?

What if we can't find enough people that care to drive a bus?
#15141734
Julian658 wrote:You seem to know a lot about China and I am curious. Why are they constantly building large cities that are copies of famous Western cities? Many of these new cities are empty. Why is that? I am genuinely curious. This is not a gotcha question.


1. Planning for future population movement. This accounts for direct government investment. The CCP, as a matter of policy, wants to avoid Indian-esque slum towns as rural populations move into cities. They need to build the cities before the people move in. In fact, many of the most prominent ghost cities of the early 2010s, such as the Kangbashi district in Ordos, is home today to nearly a quarter million people.

2. Unfortunate byproduct of other policies. This accounts for private investment. Most of these ghost cities are fully occupied on paper - that is, the developer sells the units and the market is healthy. This is due to a lack of other investment opportunities for the burgeoning Chinese middle class due to the lack of financial power in the Chinese stock exchange and restrictions on capital outflow. As a result, the housing market is seen as a reliable and consistent way to grow one's family income, with many Chinese investing in these projects with the idea of either renting the property or one day selling it for more. We see similar examples of this in areas like Vancouver or Melbourne with high rates of property vacancy, where the property is nonetheless purchased and owned. The consequence is that developers have a financial incentive to build these large communities because the market demand for these spaces is there, even if there isn't demand to actually use the space.

2a. As for why some of these cities look like copies of Western towns? It's exotic. Why are there replica Chinese temples in the West, or a Thai temple in central London? Some developers want to set their community apart from the copy and paste skyscrapers of most Chinese cities, and choose to use Western style to do so. You see plenty of teenagers walking around with English tattoos just like you see Westerns with Chinese tattoos, and so on. It's a product of globalization and marketing.

As to the quality of Chinese infrastructure - it is by and large very good at this point. You don't spend 40 years building megaliths and not learn a thing or two. Chinese construction of 2020 isn't the Chinese construction of 1990 and before.
#15141738
Rancid wrote:
So to those that need a mini-van to move the family around, we say fuck you take the bus? What about those that want to go camping?

What if we can't find enough people that care to drive a bus?



At this point I have to include the disclaimer that this line of reasoning that I'm presenting for a post-capitalist context is *my own*.

I think the more *orthodox* treatment here would be that, during the proletarian revolution and immediately after there would be a global, *top-level* coordination of *all* productive and combative activity through the vanguard / vanguard party.

This would include some *mass scale* approach to mass transportation, which would -- in my thinking -- most likely be about the buildup of *rail*, which would be more *industrial*-centric (as before, too, during initial periods of industrialization), rather than more *individual*-centric, but it would be mainly for the *mass struggle*, to outmaneuver and defeat the counterrevolutionary forces of the bourgeois ruling class.

The *post*-revolutionary period -- humanity's liberation -- would most-likely *follow-on* from that revolutionary, highly centralized period of coordination, over all sectors of production, *but* I think there would also be the post-vanguard, post-revolution *freedom* for humanity to then *self-determine*, instead of *having* to stay with the organizational momentum from the revolution itself.

For the short-term, for your example, perhaps there could simply be a *non-commercial* coordination of all active vehicles, per locality, so that available minivans would be lent-out, like a library book, and any repairs would be up to those mechanics in a city-wide *pool*, over the pool of all active vehicles.

Today we're already seeing limited instances of driverless vehicles on the road, as for deliveries, so I think that vehicle provisioning and all driving will soon be *automated*, anyway.


Our Very First Customers

#15141740
Rancid wrote:
I understand you whole post, but the above is what stood out to me. In that I made an earlier point, that to me, it seems to have a true communist system, it really needs to be international. In fact, no nations.



Correct -- I think people generally tend to miss matters of *scale* in their discussions of political economy.

I tend to like to proffer the following visual aid to address this problem of methodology:


Political Spectrum, Simplified

Spoiler: show
Image
#15141741
Rancid wrote:In this model where you take what you need, and give what you can. Can I need a Lamborghini?


Answering for me:

According to economists demand is infinite - you can always want more. I agree with this. However, I distinguish between usable demand and unusable demand. You can want 100 Wagyu steaks for dinner tonight, but you can't physically eat that much. You can want 6 Lamborghinis, but you can't use more than one at a time.

The solution becomes one of ride sharing. In societies of abundance (let's just assume for the sake of argument), yes, it would be possible for you to use a Lamborghini at any time you want - but it wouldn't be yours. It'd be a ride sharing type thing, where you can use it as long as you are actually using it, and at other times, it becomes available for others to use.

Now, of course, there may not be enough Lambos for everyone to use one at the exact moment they want to use one. At this point, we start implementing basic rationing techniques. Things like wait lists, reservations, limits on how often you can use it, if you recently rented the Ferrari maybe the Lambo isn't available for a while, etc etc and so on. And you add on more restrictions as necessary in order to make access to the Lambo not based on wealth.
#15141742
Fasces wrote:
Answering for me:

According to economists demand is infinite - you can always want more. I agree with this. However, I distinguish between usable demand and unusable demand. You can want 100 Wagyu steaks for dinner tonight, but you can't physically eat that much. You can want 6 Lamborghinis, but you can't use more than one at a time.

The solution becomes one of ride sharing. In societies of abundance (let's just assume for the sake of argument), yes, it would be possible for you to use a Lamborghini at any time you want - but it wouldn't be yours. It'd be a ride sharing type thing, where you can use it as long as you are actually using it, and at other times, it becomes available for others to use.

Now, of course, there may not be enough Lambos for everyone to use one at the exact moment they want to use one. At this point, we start implementing basic rationing techniques. Things like wait lists, reservations, limits on how often you can use it, if you recently rented the Ferrari maybe the Lambo isn't available for a while, etc etc and so on. And you add on more restrictions as necessary in order to make access to the Lambo not based on wealth.


Of course, this is basically a resource sharing and queuing theory type of problem. This is exact the sorts of problems I have to solve... but within a computer chip.

Still, in this model, how do we make sure my local worker council leader or whatever doesn't keep bumping his and his buddies names to the top of the Lambo wait list? In other words, how can we control prevent corruption of such a system?
#15141746
Fasces wrote:
Now, of course, there may not be enough Lambos for everyone to use one at the exact moment they want to use one. At this point, we start implementing basic rationing techniques. Things like wait lists, reservations, limits on how often you can use it, if you recently rented the Ferrari maybe the Lambo isn't available for a while, etc etc and so on. And you add on more restrictions as necessary in order to make access to the Lambo not based on wealth.



I have to point out, though, that the overall 'rationing' approach is actually *historically-backward*, meaning *regressive*. Taken to its logical extents we'd wind up with a society of needlessly restrictive bureaucratic limitations, and a bureaucratic elite (not producing commodities for society) that would be lording over all provisioning.

Yes, a post-capitalist / post-markets social order would have to *administrate*, as over all vehicles, but we can't fall into the trap of assuming that there would be a Stalinist-like *state* for such, especially long-term. And *short-term* it's supposed to be a *workers* state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

More to the point, I'll argue, is that society, given the defeat of the bourgeois ruling class, would, at that point, then need to *expand production*. The factories should run longer, and maybe weekends, so that no one has to *wait* for a Lambo to become available. Hell, if every last person on earth wanted a Lambo of their own, then that's exactly what that communist society would be tasked to providing.
#15141905
Okay, I know what you're thinking -- you want to know who gets Lambos *now*.

Or, rather, how would items like Lambos be 'redistributed' once the bourgeoisie is overthrown and dispossessed?

Again, the following is *my own* approach to the issue, but I think it's a *sound* one -- basically it uses *politicking* (for anyone / everyone) as a replacement for market valuations, for such a redistribution of *anything*, given multiple conflicting claims to it, post-capitalism.



'additive prioritizations'

Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:

[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.

So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.



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