- 25 Jun 2014 22:46
#14427909
I think you're confused about the version of socialism I'm suggesting. I'm not referring to Marxist socialism which desires to abolish private property and make all productive property owned by society as a whole, but simply to local community ownership of some important resource procuring for that community, hence municipal.
I mean I am partly a distributist, so I consider private property the ground institution of society. People will be able to own humanoid robots in the future, and these are means of production. A 3D printer is a secondary production device, so private ownership of these and their successors is important.
However, as automation progresses, monopoly capital ownership will no longer be able to support itself while automating, so governments should begin to set up local food facilities to serve each community and endeavor to automate these to bring the long term costs down. These can operate without actually removing private facilities, it is just that the private capitalism cannot easily bridge the gap.
The long run result is that what used to require extreme coercion to run, is fulfilled with less and less. If government services like welfare become more and more automated, their cost will fall towards zero (no labor cost = no public wages = no tax collection = no coercion), making government services less coercive. Eventually, they may cease to be considered part of "governance", and simply be socially owned facilities, disconnected from the legal-political apparatus. This isn't socialism as anarcho-capitalists think of it.
One way for capitalism to continue in a new form is for each person to own enough robot labor capacity, that they can send a robot off to be employed for a wage (if they want to do more than just live off essential facilities). I don't imagine that this can happen until we are far advanced enough to have such things, and given that current automative technology is under monopoly capital ownership, sufficient advances in existing automation eventually lead to the employment>income>profit problem that can't allow this form of capitalism to continue. In other words, the existing form of capitalism cannot survive progress, so if some new capitalism emerges it can only be on the back of technological distributism and municipal socialism.
So I imagine a society of municipal socialism (so all can survive) + distributism (so it is possible to survive apart from dependence on central systems if you need to) + techno-capitalism (so there is enterprise and a means of accumulation), but I see the first two as coming first and buttressing society against the limits of human labor based capitalism with monopolized ownership of the means of production.
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
Eran wrote:Full automation will not eliminate the need and desire for private property. Freedom doesn't require (or is even allowed by) socialism. If you do reach nirvana whereby all human wants can be provided by technology, why would you want or need socialism? Why not allow people to own the (abundant) resources made available through technology?
I think you're confused about the version of socialism I'm suggesting. I'm not referring to Marxist socialism which desires to abolish private property and make all productive property owned by society as a whole, but simply to local community ownership of some important resource procuring for that community, hence municipal.
I mean I am partly a distributist, so I consider private property the ground institution of society. People will be able to own humanoid robots in the future, and these are means of production. A 3D printer is a secondary production device, so private ownership of these and their successors is important.
However, as automation progresses, monopoly capital ownership will no longer be able to support itself while automating, so governments should begin to set up local food facilities to serve each community and endeavor to automate these to bring the long term costs down. These can operate without actually removing private facilities, it is just that the private capitalism cannot easily bridge the gap.
The long run result is that what used to require extreme coercion to run, is fulfilled with less and less. If government services like welfare become more and more automated, their cost will fall towards zero (no labor cost = no public wages = no tax collection = no coercion), making government services less coercive. Eventually, they may cease to be considered part of "governance", and simply be socially owned facilities, disconnected from the legal-political apparatus. This isn't socialism as anarcho-capitalists think of it.
One way for capitalism to continue in a new form is for each person to own enough robot labor capacity, that they can send a robot off to be employed for a wage (if they want to do more than just live off essential facilities). I don't imagine that this can happen until we are far advanced enough to have such things, and given that current automative technology is under monopoly capital ownership, sufficient advances in existing automation eventually lead to the employment>income>profit problem that can't allow this form of capitalism to continue. In other words, the existing form of capitalism cannot survive progress, so if some new capitalism emerges it can only be on the back of technological distributism and municipal socialism.
So I imagine a society of municipal socialism (so all can survive) + distributism (so it is possible to survive apart from dependence on central systems if you need to) + techno-capitalism (so there is enterprise and a means of accumulation), but I see the first two as coming first and buttressing society against the limits of human labor based capitalism with monopolized ownership of the means of production.
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.