Very Strongly Endorsed. I See Lots Of Predictions/imaginings Of Socialism That Envision 90% Of People

So from OP's perspective, democracy is perfectly compatible with a class society that enables unelected managers the ability to totally control all (or nearly all) media through ownership in what is more or less a state media system, but democracy is threatened only when those managers start trying to actively and obviously crack down on messages they don't like, rather than passively controlling the narrative by choosing which stories reach publication.

Besides, Bolsanaro has praised Brazil's military dictatorship and spoken highly of torture, and he also has encouraged militia violence against criminals or suspected criminals, but I guess snobby cultural gatekeeping is worse than continuing to rape the Amazon.

i’ve said it before but today i’ve been reflecting on it again.

one huge factor in bolsonaro’s election was the decentralization of media. haddad’s campaign outspent his by an order of magnitude and had way more legally mandated free tv exposure.

bolsonaro’s electorate was formed on twitter, facebook, youtube and whatsapp messenger, while the mainstream media continued to maintain that he was unacceptable.

this suggests to me that whatever ideological homeostasis that existed was maintained by media gatekeepers. and as they become increasingly unable to perform said gatekeeping, we see more and more pressure, particularly coming from the left, for social media platforms to step in and moderate their content.

take a moment, especially if this make you uncomfortable, to reflect on what the meaning of democracy is.

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

Property ownership itself is a system of authority. If you own all the farmland in an area, I have to work on it in order to survive, or I will starve. What gives you the right to control a resource and demand that I subordinate myself to you for my daily bread?

When we abandon cooperation and democracy as a means of conducting economic activity, solving ethical questions, and relating to each other, life becomes nothing more than a nightmarish struggle to death as you have described. Without a system of authority to protect your property rights, who will stop your stronger, smarter neighbor with more friends from taking your property at gunpoint and enslaving your family?

By your own logic, there will always be someone capable of dominating you and willing to do so. You will not survive the world you wish to create.

I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.

Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.

On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)

Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?

Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

But prisons ARE a solution to interpersonal harm. The whole point of prisons is to give victims (and society at large) a choice between "murder" and "do nothing". There are some actually-existing prison systems that maximize the safety and welfare of prisoners while also accomplishing the basic purpose of prison- neutralizing the ability of its inhabitants to inflict suffering on other citizens without recourse. The US does not have one of these systems, sadly, but better prison systems are not just a fantasy. They could be achieved in a short time.

Also, "who decides who is an abuser? What about false accusations?" These questions can be answered by the court system and the rule of law. Again, very few countries (if any) have a truly fair and democratic justice system in practice, but it is possible to minimize false prosecution whilst ensuring that people who commit terrible crimes are disincentivized to do so again.

Prison abolition isn’t a solution to interpersonal harm. It’s meant to be a solution for the violence of prisons.

The US doesn't have much of a welfare state, but its privileged position on the world stage absolutely translates into benefits for its citizens. Government contracts to build ships, tanks, and nuclear weapons provide high-paying jobs to American workers. Arguably, the US welfare state takes the form of our military, which provides soldiers with socialized/subsidized housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. In the private sector, American firms benefit not only from unequal terms of exchange, but from America's actions overseas such as the destruction and looting of Iraq. I agree with your main point; most countries have welfare states and/or universal healthcare and aren't imperialist, but we shouldn't ignore the ways that Americans have genuine incentives (beyond the ideological) to support invasions and aggression.

Thank God the us doesn't have universal Healthcare otherwise we'd be an imperialist power

Communism is when you do a lot of unpaid overtime and are expected to be grateful for the privilege, apparently.

There were many incredibly hardworking peasants and workers in the USSR who achieved astonishing things in service of the revolution, but the fact that they had to make such extraordinary sacrifices is itself a tragedy, and should not be celebrated.

The individual referred to in OP's post was actually named Nikolai Ostrovsky (Pavel Korchagin was the main character of his fictionalized autobiography). He lived a short life full of hardship and sacrifice and died at 32. I think the best way to honor his memory would be to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

wait till i tell "i don't dream of labor" crowd about pavel korchagin who became soviet national role model for basically working himself to multiple disabilities to save town from freezing in the winter during russian civil class war. he wrote autobiographical novel while already blind for which he became famous. and in it there was a scene where anyone who refused to work in those terrible conditions were asked to give up their communist card. because you can't claim to call yourself a communist without being ready to put in as much work as you can. and that wasn't just him ussr was able to withstand these critical first years thanks to selfless underpayed work put by it's people towards rebuilding country's wealth. getting rid of feodal lords and capitalists was enough motivation imagine that! the fact so many people who call themselves communists on here seem to be proud of flaunting their individualism and complete lack of proletarian morals is an insult to all revolutionary workers of the past. go call yourselves libertarians or something.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

I first encountered the idea of "pay politicians more to reduce corruption" in college in the context of economic development in the global south. IIRC, there is evidence that this is true.

The problem is that in a liberal/capitalist economy, what people describe as "bribes" or "corruption" are part and parcel of the system of governance, as much as taxation or lawsuits. We can ban all the symptoms of this relationship that we like (steak dinners, exceptionally unethical agreements, outright fraud/collusion) but it isn't going to change the fact that if you want political power in Texas or Montana, you are going to have to satisfy the largest and most powerful of your constituents- oil/gas and ranchers, respectively.

Anyway now that all that dress drama has faded: members of congress are underpaid, and creating a less corrupt congress means paying them and their employees more (while banning all sources of outside income and making them divest from individual stocks).

As a separate matter, future pay raises beyond the new standard should be indexed to median wage growth- their incomes won’t grow unless their constituents’ income grows