[SaulOhio]

SaulOhio wrote:

He will be able to produce all sorts of material goods without thinking.

What does this mean? If I am working in a factory, a good little capitalist cog in the machine, I produce widgets and watsits without thinking. In fact the only thing that makes the job bearable is the lack of thought. You can dream your days away on autopilot. Why would a socialist cog have to think more than his capitalist cousin?

You mean that a brainless piece of muscle could do the work just as well? You don't have to look at the object you are working on, direct your hands, coordinating their movements with what you see in order to put the crew in the right place? You don;t have to think in order to figure out what the job is in the first place?

Even the simplest job takes that much thinking, and those jobs are increasingly being replaced by machines. What people now more than ever is skills, the ability to think, to figure out what you need the machine to do.

Did you know that many of the new machines invented to make work easier were thought up by people actually doing the physical work? In capitalism, workers aren't just unthinking cogs. If they are under socialism, then thats an argument against socialism.

What is most important is the coordination of labor, which is what requires individual thinking the most. Finding new ways to do things and dealing with problems of supply. This is exactly what socialism does not allow. Go back and read some of what I posted about production in the Soviet Union. When "everyone" owns everything, nobody has the right to take initiative, to think for himself and decide to take action. Thats what property means, you are allowed to decide what action is to be taken.

Quote:
if egoism is true, the only possible justification for claiming that other people should do X would be that it serves their respective interests to do X; so the only justification for claiming that other people should not interfere with my doing A is that it is in others' interests not to interfere with my doing A.

This much is true. So? Your point? Go read Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. She gives good reasons to respect other people's rights, as well as debunking other fallacious arguments against egoism.

Similarly, the only reason why other people should even allow me to live, is that it is in their interests to allow me to do so, i.e.

Sort of, yes. As long as you are a productive, civilized human being, instead of a danger to everyone you meet, yes.

I have a right to life because my life serves other people

No. Your life is an end in itself, just as their lives are ends in themselves. You are just looking it form one perspective, and treating that perspective as the whole story, the entire absolute reality.

As I said before, get a clue about Objectivist philosophy before criticizing it. The childish objections you have raised have been answered long ago.

[ingliz]

Double post

[ingliz]

Don't talk shit about things of which you have no experience. I have worked in factories for over 35 yrs. Factory jobs are designed to be repetitive and brainless. The more machines are introduced the more repetitive and brainless the job becomes. And no you don't have to look at a screw, or direct your hands and no you don't have to figure out the job beforehand. You can chat, daydream, sleep with maybe 5% of your brain awake and be a productive little worker. The jobs you are talking about are available but they are just as soul destroying except for safety's sake you have to keep one eye open. They are the worst of factory jobs.

No. Your life is an end in itself, just as their lives are ends in themselves.

The fundamental contradiction of Egoism, in terms of the idea that individuals are ends in themselves. Let A be an egoist, and let B be the egoist's next-door neighbor. The egoist regards his own life as an end in itself, and he says B ought to regard B's life as an end in itself. But, insofar as A is concerned only for furthering his own life, A can not, himself, treat B's life as an end in itself. A's sole value is A's life; therefore, A can value B's life, if at all, only as a means (i.e. if B's life furthers A's). Similarly, when A recommends to B that B should be an egoist, he is recommending that B should regard A as being only valuable as a means. This necessarily follows from the supposition that B should regard B's life as the sole end in itself, which is the meaning of egoism. A therefore seems to be caught in a contradiction: A holds that A's own life is an end in itself, but at the same time A thinks that no one else ought to recognize A's life as being an end in itself. In a parallel contradiction, A holds that other people are valuable only as means, but he holds that other people are correct in regarding themselves as valuable not merely as means but as ends in themselves. In other words: Each individual is correct in a belief which directly contradicts what every other individual correctly believes. A is correct to believe P, but B is correct to believe not-P. Is this not, in Moore's words, "an absolute contradiction"?

[SaulOhio]

As I said, even if it is true that many factory jobs do not require thinking, an economy requires other people to think.

I said:

What is most important is the coordination of labor, which is what requires individual thinking the most. Finding new ways to do things and dealing with problems of supply. This is exactly what socialism does not allow. Go back and read some of what I posted about production in the Soviet Union. When "everyone" owns everything, nobody has the right to take initiative, to think for himself and decide to take action. Thats what property means, you are allowed to decide what action is to be taken.

Even if a factory worker doesn't need to think in order to put a screw in place, someone had to decide the screw had to go there.

Go back and read what I posted about the factory manager in Russia who let mining equipment pile up unpainted in his factory, because the pland called for red paint, and all he could get was green. He was afraid to think for himself, because nobody owned the factory. Changing the plans would have meant years in prison for him. Individual thinking, and acting on that thinking, it at best discouraged under socialism, if not supressed entirely.

[ingliz]

It is you who are changing human nature Why would my nature change if I put a red boiler suit on instead of a blue one?
You are not describing socialism but State capitalism as practised in the USSR under Stalin.

Empirical Hypotheses must be falsifiable! "A person can be said to understand an empirical hypothesis only if he knows how to recognize evidence against it. If a person asserts or believes a general statement in such a way that he cannot conceive of any possible experience which he would count as evidence against it, then he cannot be said to be asserting or believing an empirical hypothesis."

-What are psychological egoists willing to count as unselfish behavior? If nothing, then psychological egoism isn't an empirical hypothesis [and this would seem very strange].
The Fallacy of the Suppressed Correlative:
"Good-bad", "large-small", "mental-physical", and "selfish-unselfish." "To know the meaning of one term in the pair, we must know the meaning of the correlative term with which it is contrasted."

Since the ordinary definition of `selfish' allows for unselfish acts, it appears that the psychological egoist is redefining `selfish'. The redefinition seems to leave `selfish' meaning simply "motivated" and then the claim that all our acts are selfish reduces to the tautology that "all motivated acts are motivated").

As a linguistic proposal about the use of `selfish', there might be some utility in so using the word, but we would then need to distinguish two sorts of selfish acts [(a) those motivated by a regard for the interests of others and (b) those motivated by a regard for the interests of ourselves].

edit - It wont post the link so you will have to trust me on this one.

[Potemkin]

You are not describing socialism but State capitalism as practised in the USSR under Stalin.

There was state capitalism under Lenin and under Stalin's successors. Stalin was the only Soviet leader who seriously tried to "build socialism" in the Soviet Union, though the conditions of the time determined that it was state socialism rather than 'proper' socialism. In no sense was the economic system under Stalin 'state capitalism'.

[ingliz]

Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!

I think I should be allowed to categorise State Socialism as State Capitalism.

[Potemkin]

I think I should be allowed to categorise State Socialism as State Capitalism.

Liebknecht was criticising the newly-emerging concept of the 'welfare state' that was emerging in Germany at that time. What went under the name 'state socialism' at that time was actually indistinguishable from what we now call 'the welfare state' today. Tony Blair described himself as a supporter of the 'welfare state'; in Liebknecht's time he would have have supported 'state socialism'. Are you claiming that Blair was actually a socialist?

Stalin's Soviet Union was not a Social Democratic welfare state. Its economic basis, its mode of production, was entirely different.

[SaulOhio]

You are not describing socialism but State capitalism as practised in the USSR under Stalin.

Potemkin himself told me that socialism meant state ownership of property, while communism was communal ownership. The state owned the factories, so it was socialism.

This argument is just a way to avoid the empirical evidence of how socialism actually works in practice. You have your idea of what it should be in theory, but it always turns out the same in practice. Every example I could bring up about how things actually work under socialism can be dismissed because for some reason "thats not socialism". Makes me wonder why nobody can implement socialism, why every time they try, they get something else.

"State capitalism" is a contradiction in terms, because under capitalism, all property belongs to private individuals, NOT the state.

[ingliz]

I still think Stalinism is State capitalism

If Russia were unaffected by the world around it, it could no longer be a society capable of explanation according to the laws of capitalism........ Russia would have become a giant corporation in which the state had become the repository for all the means of production...........
Acting as the agent for the accumulation of capital, the bureaucracy emerged as the "collective capitalist". At the same pace, the Russian economy itself took on the same features as the giant corporations in the nations of the West, against which Russia was competing..........
Since 1928, therefore, not only has consumption been subordinated to accumulation, but in addition we can find the reasons for this in the competitive, coercive structure of world capitalism. This accounts for the vast bulk of Russia's tendency to accumulation for the sake of accumulation. It is not the desires of the bureaucracy. then, which forces them to accumulate, but the logic of world capitalism.....The Russian state capitalist ruling class is therefore constrained by just the same forces as apply in the West..

Today, therefore, the force of attraction, drawing together individual capitals, and the tendency to centralisation are stronger than ever before ... In any given branch of industry centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single capital. In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.

Under those [War Communism] conditions we could build only though the unions … But now, when we are venturing out into the market, we cannot ‘allow’ the unions into management of production … Now we have to learn from him, from Rockefeller

For the defining feature of capitalism is not that individual businessmen produce for their own gain. Rather it is that the owners of 'capital' exploit the workers.

http://www.marxists.de/statecap/binns/statecap.htm

Potemkin - You were right about Liebknecht and the Efurt Program but it was such a nice quote to introduce State socialism as State capitalism , damn it

[SaulOhio]

For the defining feature of capitalism is not that individual businessmen produce for their own gain. Rather it is that the owners of 'capital' exploit the workers.

Do I have to repeat everything I already said, and you in no way refuted, to support the definition of capitalism in terms of private property? You are defining it in terms of what you think is the outcome of capitalism, not its cause, so you are defining it by a non-essential.

I made a list of several definitions of capitalism from different sources on the web, and all but 2 are consistent with mine.

From page 2 of this thread:

What a definition has to do is give a central, unifying characteristic that explains the most possible about the concept being defined, and helps to differentiate between it any everything else.

All of the characteristics of systems that have been called capitalist have certain features: Trade, production, money, employment, and so on. Private property is at the root of all of these. If people do not own things, they cannot exchange anything in trade. Money evolved from that, people bartering for some luxury good that they found was useful for its exchange value, and that luxury good became used as money. Employment is the result of one person owning the means of production and persuading another to work with it in exchange for money. It is private property that makes all of that possible.

Most other systems are defined in contrast to that. Communism is the system where property in the means of production is owned by the government, instead of by private individuals. Socialism is the system where society as a whole, in some form, has ownership of the means of production, instead of private individuals. Fascism is the system where private individuals have legal title to property, but the government excercises actual ownership through regulation, telling people what to do with their property, so it isn't really theirs, but the government's, and the private individuals are in reality only custodians. Feudalism is the system in which only a class of nobility has the right to own land, and the peasants whom they rule work the land. Who owns the property is the pivotal, defining feature.

And:

Also, private property is what Marxists claim causes what they call exploitation, and its the one thing they intend to abolish in order to overthrow capitalism and achieve communism. It is the one thing that separates what they call the burguise (sp?) and the proletariat.

And what is the one, single institution of capitalism that socialists want to overthrow in order to create socialism? Private property.

"Exploitation" is, to a socialist, the consequence of the private ownership of the means of production. So why not define capitalism as the system based on that cause, instead of as the system that has that effect? It can have a vast number of other effects. Why single out that one?

This sounds like more of what I keep complaining about, socialists redefining capitalism in any way that allows them to blame all sorts of problems on it.

[ingliz]

In 1917 the workers had completely smashed the old state apparatus and replaced it with a new one – a genuinely soviet state – which was based on recallable delegates from councils elected by direct workers’ power in the factories and barracks. The new state therefore pre-supposed both the existence of factories and of workers.
The tragedy, of course, was that this basis of the state was itself destroyed by the failure of the international revolution. As a result the workers’ state found itself blockaded and invaded by the armies of 16 imperialist nations. The vanguard of the working class left the factories for the Red Army, and the factories were unable to function because of the blockade. Production declined to one-fifth of its 1913 level and the remaining workers deserted the factories for the villages because they were starving.
Without workers and without production, the new state had lost its social base. For a time the Bolshevik Party substituted itself for the working class, with the perspective of helping the international revolution: for the international working class would then be able to aid the decimated Russian working class. But from 1924 Stalin changed all that. Not only did he seal the fate of the revolution by calling for "socialism in one country", but he also destroyed the working-class basis of the party, swelling its numbers with former Tsarist officers, factory managers and so on, so that the party which had been more than 70 per cent working class in composition in 1923 was by 1927 only 30 per cent working-class – and it was completely bureaucratised too.
The Russian state was thus cut loose from its original social base. Having become heavily bureaucratised, it moved decisively to take upon itself the role of achieving massive capital accumulation in the first Five-Year Plan of 1928-33. It did so because of the increasing pressure from world imperialism. As Stalin put it in 1931: "No comrades ... the pace must not be slackened! ... On the contrary we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities ... To slacken the pace would be to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. .. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us!"

I see you couldn't be bothered to read the link in my last post. Here is more of it.
Stalin desperately tried to save the revolution but in so doing he betrayed it. It was not his fault and to be honest I don't see what else he could have done but it wasn't socialism.

[SaulOhio]

You are blaming the failure of the Soviet Union on a blockade? You blame that for the failure of agriculture and manufacture? Why should that make a difference? Russia is one of the largest countries on the planet, rich in natural resources and people. Why would blockading it hurt its economy THAT badly, if it didn't have serious internal weaknesses?

Don't you think that not being able to enjoy the product of their own labor would be a problem, a cause for the loss of productivity? "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Aren't any of the "anecdotes" I presented about life in the USSR any indication of the cause of its economic failure?

All the things you say about the USSR which make it not socialist are what I and other free market advocates say are the consequences of attempting to create a socialist economy.

If you try to organize it by central planning, it will be as if the central planners own everything, then you will call the system "state capitalism", and the planners are the capitalists.

If you try to abolish private property and create communes, you get the tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem. You will blame the selfishness of human nature.

If you try something in between, you end up putting managers in place, and its the managers that gain a lot of power that can be abused. You will call it corporatism or some such, saying its not socialism, but a kind of capitalism.

No matter what you do, things will go wrong, and you are going to try to blame capitalism for it, and evade the fact that the problems are a consequence of trying to implement socialism. Somehow, you are going to redefine capitalism in some way to fit the situation so you can blame it for the problem.

[ingliz]

Read the fucking link before you post again!

http://www.marxists.de/statecap/binns/statecap.htm

Marx on Malthus

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! "Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates." Therefore, save, save, i.e, reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital!

If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.

[Abood]

Abood I cannot see how your spontaneous anarchic revolution would ever materialise. Lenin was correct there would have to be an organised, 'professional' and above all disciplined vanguard of committed revolutionaries ready to take control of the various government offices. I also think that direct democracy in the midst of the chaos following a revolt would be counter revolutionary.

You still don't get the anarchist perspective of a revolution. We believe that there need to be revolutionary communes and collectives within the capitalist system that develop a federal system parallel to the existing one. And once a revolution takes place, that federal system would take over everything. There'd be no power gap that needs to be filled.

[ingliz]

Sorry its a very pretty theory but I cannot see it working in practice against an organised counter revolution without the State apparatus to help you.
I am right in assuming you would dispense with the State as soon as possible after hostilities had ceased and that is when your non-state would be most vunerable to the forces of reaction.

[Abood]

The federal system would do the job of the state.

[ingliz]

Militia would fight an 'industrial' war?
Don't misunderstand me I am in favour of direct democracy, soviets, communes and collectives but I don't see how you could miss out the socialist state in a world of states. A non-state could not defend itself. It would need an international revolution to be viable.

[SaulOhio]

Ingliz: That link that you INSIST that I read, but assume I haven't, just confirms what I said, that either you have someone take control and manage production, so you have central planning, or you leave things alone and nothing gets done. “We shall be pitiless [to] those lacking in firmness in the factory and the villages and who fail to carry out the plan.” Thats just what the guy with the red and green paint was afraid of.

As far as letting the workers control the factories, why would they want to? A worker just wants to put in his eight hours a day, collect his wages, and go home to spend it. Why would he want to own the factory, or live with some fiction that he supposedly owns it, which would describe the situation better.

Did you read what I wrote about intended product of labor? A worker in an automobile factory doesn't want any of the hundreds or thousands of cars that roll off the assembly line every day. He just wants one for himself, maybe one for his wife. Maybe, he will want one sports car, along with the one he drives to work every day. Why would he want the factory he works in? He can't live in it. Most likely, its just a place he goes to to earn his living, and doesn't want to spend a minute more in than he needs to. As long as it is responsibly managed, and he gets payed well, he doesn't care who owns it.

The plan, as the soviets were supposed to be, most likely fell apart due to apathy. Workers don't really care. They know the outcome is going to be the same no matter how they vote. What are they going to vote on? If they vote on pay increases, they will vote for an increase every time, till there is no money for capital improvements, or maintenance, or even to buy raw materials for production. If one of those workers knows this well enough, that some of the money has to be held back to maintain the factory, he's very likely to be very unpopular. Even to vote on the issue intelligently, every worker would have to be an accountant, to understand where all the money is going and why. That would take hours out of every day, boring hours, at that.

So as the workers default on the responsibility to manage the factories, someone has to step in and take control. Every time this happens, it is your opportunity to blame the failure of socialism on capitalism.

“own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation ... Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ... Therefore, save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus value, or surplus product, into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake ...”

This is a charicature, a straw man. I know of nobody who accumulates wealth just for the sake of accumulating wealth. The only people I know of who do this are fictional characters: Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island, the Firengi from Star Trek, Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. Everyone else I know of that works to get rich in a capitalist system does it to achieve their goals in life, to support families, live in nice homes, save for retirement, promote their careers which give them purpose. They are pursuing other goals besides the money. Money is always the means to the end, not the end in itself.

Nothing in that article gives me any reason to change my definition of capitalism. In fact, your definition in terms of exploitation begs the question on an important issue. That capitalism results in exploitation is one of the important things in contention here. We are arguing, among other things, about wether or not capitalism results in exploitation. If you define capitalism as the system that causes exploitation, and I accept that definition, you win the argument without even presenting any evidence about what actually happens in the real world.

P.S: Thank you for posting that link. Nearly every paragraph gave me a good chuckle. I needed a good laugh.

[Potemkin]

For the defining feature of capitalism is not that individual businessmen produce for their own gain. Rather it is that the owners of 'capital' exploit the workers.

Do I have to repeat everything I already said, and you in no way refuted, to support the definition of capitalism in terms of private property? You are defining it in terms of what you think is the outcome of capitalism, not its cause, so you are defining it by a non-essential.

I hate to say this, ingliz, but I think SaulOhio is right about this. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of the means of production, and production for profit rather than production for need. The exploitation associated with capitalism as a mode of production must be derived from its fundamental mechanism, not posited as part of its definition. Besides, other modes of production besides capitalism create exploitation. Feudalism exploited the peasants. Does this mean that feudalism is 'really' capitalism?