LOki,
Citizens through the vote can elect people who will make laws that both protect and empower citizens. Now I said they can, not that they always do.
Not everyone thinks of economics as socialism vs free market, but many do and you are absolutely spot on that some in the political sphere want it that way.
I’ll admit I have not read the book and I’m open to a better explanation than I am understanding in the post.
Fair enough. Agreed.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
we can imagine something as efficient and convenient as Walmart or Amazon without CEOs, shareholders or exploited workers, bringing all the bounties of late-stage capitalism without its pathologies.
It is frankly terrifying that even anti-capitalists are looking at the “success” of megacorps as an example to follow. This feels like the reasoning of authoritarian marxists who imagine that if only they were in charge of society, they could fix all the oppression. Only now rather than wishing to be king they wish to be Jeff Bezos.
Any honest critique of capitalism recognizes that the efficiency and convenience of Amazon depends directly and fundamentally on exploitation. That is the only reason it is successful: in a capitalist economy, success is determined by how ruthlessly you can exploit resources to produce profit.
But to continue the corporate metaphor: a corporate economy is run by a dictator (a.k.a. CEO). It can be successful by capitalist standards because the dictator is only accountable for optimizing one metric. The citizens (a.k.a. shareholders) have only one interest, and as long as the dictator delivers on that, everyone is happy. Well, I should say the corporation is happy, because the CEO is benefiting them at the expense of everyone else. But the point is that this governance model works great for the needs of the CEO and the shareholders. We can see evidence of this all around us, in the amazing systems that corporations are able to perfect in service of optimizing profit-generation - and as the result of it.
If we try to use this model to create a non-oppressive society, things break down immediately. A society is not composed of people who all have the same needs and goals. The shareholders of a society-wide corporate dictatorship have many different priorities, often conflicting. One CEO, brilliant at optimizing for one thing, is unable to reconcile the messy demands of a complex society.
Ok, you say, out with the dictator! Lets have the shareholders run the corporation directly. Well, for one thing, you’ve eliminated one of the key strengths of a corporation: singular leadership in pursuit of a singular goal. And for another, you’ve replaced that with an organ which intends to empower the shareholders, but doesn’t do a very good job of it. Because now every shareholder is locked into a bureaucratic conflict around every possible decision that could be made about the operation of the entire corporation. This leads to something that every institution is eventually afflicted by: politics.
There are two ways to deal with these corporate politics: have the shareholders divide into interest groups, who elect shareholder representatives, who are then able to negotiate agreements with each other about how the corporation should be run. In which case, congratulations, you’ve re-invented representative democracy, a.k.a. the mess we already find ourselves in.
The other is to break up the corporation: the shareholders sell their stock and use the capital to start their own companies. Small ones, which are owned directly by groups of ex-shareholders who already have common interests and goals. They don’t benefit from the massive scale of Amazon and its glorious CEO, but they do allow meaningful direct participation in deciding how resources are allocated and business is run. In which case, congratulations, you’ve re-invented anarcho-syndicalism, or libertarian municipalism.
In short, the idea that we could do “Amazon, but without the exploitation” raises so many complications that by the time we’ve resolved them all we would be looking at something fundamentally different.
Pretty much market calculation in absence of profit seeking is just a min-max (optimization) kind of problem. One which mathematicians both in the US and the USSR solved a long time ago. It’s just funny to see how big corporations had to use those solutions to solve their internal economies but refuse to let governments institute similar solutions to healthcare and poverty. And I say this is a former Austrian Econ nerd and currently a Mutualist that market economies can be liberated from profit seeking but it’ll be a hard won path to do this. In many ways, it’s as revolutionary as going directly to some kind of council communism with respect to society. The very idea that we should still perform market transactions but all windfalls should be held in common is a radical idea.
Yep, that’s another thought I have on this matter. Even though we can have luxuries through such a massive command economy, the underlying issue is the matter of removal of all profit seeking in an economy. Replacing the CEO with Stalin isn’t much better. The better option is to turn all business activities into federations of workplaces managed by the workers and all profit removed from the equation (urge to spam syndicalist memes rising).
Real Communism?
We are taking about 1984, written by George Orwell? The same guy who fought in the Spanish Civil War with the international brigades? The same guy who said that he wished he was fighting with the anarcho-syndicalists (a form of anarchist communism) rather than with POUM? The same guy who wrote “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”?
Orwell wasn’t anti-communist, he was anti-totalitarian and anti-Stalinist (at the end of the Spanish Civil War he was labelled a counter-revolutionary by PSUC and sentenced to death in absentia). To understand what he meant in Animal Farm and 1984 you also need to read Homage to Catalonia.
That is the kicker. There are working examples of communism/communalism, but they are small in scale, and insulated against non-like minded individuals rocking the boat.
One could argue China is a working example… but they insulate with an iron fist…
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
I came to say something similar. The USSR didn’t have a problem knowing what people wanted or how much. It had a problem in allocating resources to make them. Walmart and Amazon avoid this by remaining mostly just distributors. They don’t allocate what resources go to what factory to make the products.
In other words, the USSR controlled both inputs and outputs of production, and failed by poorly allocating inputs to get efficient outputs. Walmart/Amazon could be said to influence outputs of production, while staying the hell away from inputs as much as possible.
I wouldn’t say that the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is small in scale.
However, they do focus on bottom up politics based on communities of a few thousand.
Wait, wait, what?! By what standard of measure are any of those examples bigger than the USSR?
The Soviet Union, at its height, had 152 million workers and its command economy provided for the needs of 290 million people, including (miserly and underfunded but nonetheless existent) comprehensive womb-to-grave social welfare.
Granted, Walmart has 2.1 million US employees to whom it provides a USSR-level standard of living, but that’s two orders of magnitude too low to be comparing it to the Soviet Union’s command economy (and Amazon has about 1/4 the employees of Walmart). If you looked at the US from orbit (thus making invisibly tiny all the myriad local small businesses that still exist in the US despite Amazon and Walmart), I guess it’s possible to pretend that Amazon and Walmart sell all the necessities of life to the entire US population… but they don’t provide any disability, pension, or health care benefits to their customers, so again, no way are they anywhere comparable in scale or complexity to the Soviet Union’s command economy.
And the Pentagon? Seriously?! Again, two orders of magnitude fewer employees than the USSR, and while Amazon and Walmart could at least be argued (by someone who never sees anything that is not on the internet) to be providing for the full US population, all the Pentagon really does (other than kill the wrong brown people with drones), is be the primary buyer of defence widgets made by companies who arrange for parts of a new bomber or fighter or whatever to be built in as many congressional districts in as many states as possible, so that no matter how ludicrously overbudget it is, no matter how badly it underperforms, no matter how irrelevant it is to the actual military needs of the US armed forces, in sum, no matter how inefficient the whole process is, said defence widget will always get built and never be cancelled.
Except that Amazon is, quite famously, the prototypical case of a corporation run by a libertarian CEO who has set up its internal infrastructure as dozens or hundreds of tiny, “two pizza” sized teams who sell their atomized product “primitives” to Amazon itself, first, and second to whatever outside customers they can interest in the thing in question. AWS and Amazon’s third party reseller program are just two of the most successful and profitable examples of Amazon’s internal for-profit corporate infrastructure. God knows why Sears couldn’t make the same idea work (probably because they were hampered by vulture capitalists loading them down with excessive levels of leveraged buyout debt).
I don’t doubt that the problems of a command economy are overblown by anticommunist economists and historians. I don’t doubt that if the USSR had had computers and software like we have today, they would have been much more able to run their command economy more efficiently and less wastefully. But Phillips’s argument, as presented here? Does not pass the smell test.
But if you don’t buy it from Amazon, Cory doesn’t get that sweet sweet Amazon affiliate link income.
Look for countries with relatively high wealth and low inequality (Sweden, Norway, etc), and most of them are democracies with a strong tradition of democratic socialism - where the government has carefully fettered capitalism via regulation and taxation so that it serves the needs of the people rather than the whims of the wealthy.
Yes, if all you treasure are the Cheerios and Cheetos, etc.
It’s not unusual to hear about millions of pounds of actual food being dumped because industrialized farming and food prep has caused the latest salmonella outbreak.
The US food supply chain is exceptionally vulnerable, except for the cereal and salty snack crowd.
Not wanting Ludditism, but increased automation will thoroughly increase wealth concentration for the few. At least in the first industrial revolution workers had a job as they were exploited. In the next one, workers will become irrelevant, and cast aside, if you subscribe to Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21th Century.
Would the Bezos etc share of the profits cover a living wage for all the workers at amazon? Someone else can do the math and persuade me otherwise but I suspect that does not work out.
Well… yes. Orwell’s 1984 is not an accurate description of “real communism”, whatever that means. But don’t you see commonalities between, say, Amazon, a company exploiting the lower class for the benefits of the happy few and, say, Stalin’s USSR, a country exploiting the lower class for the benefits of the happy few of the Party?
I’d agree that modeling a nation after Amazon would be monstrous, but the core challenge to the old canard that central planning can never work at large scale is important even if we can’t support the specific application. It means a central pillar of neoliberal thought might have serious structural defects, and the common argument that we are obliged to subject ourselves to the worst excesses of capitalism because all the alternatives are necessarily worse is suspect.
Yes and no. Walmart is big enough (and have killed enough competitors) that they get to create markets. What consumer needs, or even wants, a gallon of pickles all at once? Well, no one really. But by pricing it at a ridiculously low price they created a market, and coincidentally(?) drove a bunch of pickle companies out of business.
Quick and dirty (lots of rounding). $10 billion in profits, just shy of 600,000 employees. $16,000 per employee. Bezos owns 16%, which is $2,600 per employee.
Which both sound good, but if employees were to do a buyout, it would suck. $800 billion invested to earn $10 billion would be a 1.25%/yr return (each employee putting in $1.3 million). Employees could cut back on investment to raise the rate of return. There’s nearly $30 billion there. If you are willing to mortgage the future, then a 5%/yr return is available.
Amazon is not a model profitability. Employee owned would make sense if employees can get ownership at much lower cost.
Keep in mind that in a world of scarce resources, you need some way to prioritize resource allocation.
Markets have an amazing property: They don’t require permission to do stuff. If you have $50,000 and want to do an art project where you build a house out of half a million #2 pencils, you can just do it. With any politics-based alternative, you probably just couldn’t do that at all unless the chair of the resource committee was your cousin or something.
Maybe you want to suppress crazy art projects. In that case, I have another scenario. What about introducing new goods into the system? How do you run CrowdSupply or Kickstarter with when voting for a project costs nothing?
