Civil_Debate wrote:Fuser: Thanks for the two links! I've read the Cox paper and will finish the Buick/Lawrence as soon as I can.
Someone5: Thanks for your input!
I'll post a response and any questions I have once I have finished reading the second paper Fuser recommended.
I can offer you some rhetorical advice on this matter;
A) If possible, don't let your opponent try to define what socialism implies. If the terms have not been agreed upon beforehand, make a proper definition of socialism (roughly defined, socialism is an economic approach where the workers themselves control the means of production--any further specifics would depend on precisely which sort of socialism you intend to argue) in your opening statement. A capitalist will try to define socialism as "government intervention in the economy" and will probably use some indefensible throw-away lines about how government interference is inherently inefficient and such. Don't fall into this trap; not only is that not what socialism is about, it's also fundamentally not true. Trying to directly fight a lie in a debate is pretty pointless--facts are rarely persuasive in this matter. It's better to avoid this pitfall by defining socialism yourself and refusing to let your opponent divert you on a tangent about the efficacy of central economic planning.
If you are actually looking for advice on how to defend central economic planning, asking socialists probably isn't a great way to get that. You're liable to get some responses from anarchists (myself included) that won't help your argument. I will fully admit that the sorts of socialism I advocate have little or nothing to do with central economic planning. If you want advice on that, go read some back issues of the Wall Street Journal or something, because they talk at length about why central planning works. After all,
private corporations engage in central economic planning all the time. The same arguments that suggest that corporations operate best when centrally planned apply just as well to the government, and there's plenty of examples in the WSJ and other business journals about how "strong leadership is essential" and such. Just flip it around, because the arguments have just as much merit for governments as they do private corporations.
B) Don't let your opponent make this about the Soviet Union or "other communist countries"; no matter what you say you will not be able to shake the popular caricature of the Soviet Union that is rather common. Believe it or not, it's not really a very accurate model of what a socialist or communist state would look like. Getting bogged down in trying to argue that the Soviet Union wasn't an example of socialism is a pointless fight from a rhetorical standpoint. You will have to waste time and memorize facts for a dubiously effective line of argument that really can be spent in better ways.
C) Trying to discuss the merits of socialism without talking about the problems of capitalism is quite a difficult task. Socialism is a socio-economic perspective largely developed as part of a critique of capitalism, and it's rather fundamentally intended to be a way to resolve the problems with and inherent contradictions of capitalism. You can't really talk about socialism without also talking about capitalism.
In the current economic climate, demonstrating some of the more obvious failures of capitalism in your own city should be fairly easy. One of the advantages that the socialist side of a debate has is the virtue of being correct; you can draw from actual concrete examples rather than having to talk about abstract models. It's hard for people to relate to abstract models, but it's easy to talk about how structural issues with capitalist systems lead to widespread unemployment.
If you have a strong anthropological bent, you might also consider discussing hunter-gatherer societies and their inherent socialism. After all, that is essentially direct worker control over the means of production; it is a
non-industrial form of socialism, but it's still a form of socialism. It's also kind of hard-wired into human beings from millions of years of evolution; this can be an important line of argument if your opponent trots out a "human nature is fundamentally selfish/corrupt" line of argument. Dangerous, though, people people have sort of a weird view about hunter-gatherer societies that basically follows Hume's assumption that life was nasty, brutish, and short before feudalism. It's not actually true, but that's a hard argument to make in a debate with short time limits. There have been some books lately about "traditional societies" and some advantages of them that might be useful in this line of argument. It is certainly the case that our capitalist economic system has led us to some very unfortunate social habits (like neolocality...).
D) Do remember to criticize government policies
when they serve capitalist interests. This is something that people advocating or representing socialist perspectives often fail to do. Socialism is absolutely not synonymous with government control of the economy; it is important to remind people of that. Government policies can and usually do favor capitalists more than labor. Remind people of that. Don't let them forget that the nation-state system is basically a byproduct of capitalism. Don't let them fail to grasp that government intervention in the economy is a basic and unavoidable consequence of capitalism.
E) It is important also to note that there is a massive body of work relating to socialism that isn't by or about Marx. Socialism predates Marx, and Marx himself had numerous important contemporaries that developed very divergent ideas about what socialism meant. Orthodox Marxist Communism is not the only sort of socialism out there. It's not "the most pure example" or the "most extreme example" of a socialist perspective. It's one among many, no more correct than any of the numerous anarchist forms of socialism. That might be useful to note too; that socialism has both authoritarian and libertarian traditions underneath its rather broad umbrella.
Incidentally, there is also a
Techncoracy section of the forum that could be of use in trying to understand at least one coherent non-market system of economic planning. It requires kind of a paradigm shift to "get" the Techncoratic model, but it does actually make some sense. They present a system of economic planning that rejects scarcity and instead allocates resources according to abundance and an assumption of abundance rather than an assumption of scarcity. It's kind of a strange way of looking at economic problems, and perhaps not something I would suggest actually trying to directly advocate in a debate. But it can provide you with some insight on how a non-market system might go about allocating resources.
F) The specifics of a socialist system cannot be predicted in advance. A socialist society will develop its own precise form of socialism through the process of class conflict. The tensions and conflicts that lead to a transition to socialism would themselves form the precise structure that a socialist system will feature. Trying to predict exactly what a socialist system will look like beforehand is rather akin to expecting that someone living in, say, England in the 16th century ought to be able to derive the precise form and institutions of capitalism that will exist in the United States in the 21st century. It's not really a reasonable expectation to expect someone to be able to step that far outside their own experiences and assumptions that they can precisely predict what a distant society will look like. An actual transition to socialism would involve a paradigm shift of the sort that societies transitioning from feudalism to capitalism underwent. The end result of that revolution was not reasonably predictable by a serf living in a feudal society, just as the end result of a socialist revolution is not precisely definable by a citizen living in a capitalist nation-state.