this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Communism
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Yeah that sucks, but in most communist countries that exist or have existed… don’t people just starve en masse?
Capitalism is morally bankrupt, but it prevents more famine (within its borders) than it causes
I might get banned for saying this, but the problem is that pure communism starves human nature and provides little incentive for labor, while the current, practically unregulated market capitalism, very close to pure capitalism, gluts human nature's worst impulses exclusively: Greed, sociopathy, apathy, hyper-individualism, unhealthy competition, superiority, jealousy, schadenfreude, on and on. In their pure forms, they are opposites and extremes with regards to how they interact with human nature.
Capitalism can if very, very tightly controlled to be a slave to society, be useful in motivating labor. A slave meaning money in politics needs to be felonious with heavy penalty, highly progressive taxation, with a maximum income so no one can accumulate enough to begin capturing institutions and warping society to individual will, a ceo wage tied to to a reasonable multiple of the lowest paid worker, etc.
But that's the problem. Any economy, by definition, is a mere tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of the Citizens of a society humanity has developed thus far. Capitalism conflicts with this. Capitalism left unchecked demands never ending growth/metastasis, and incentivizes hurting other members of a society to benefit oneself. Western capitalism has increasingly become the thing we are willing to sacrifice the well being of society to protect. It's perverse.
The nordic nation's seem to have the best model to maximize the overall happiness of the Citizens of the society. You have incentive to do more for society, but are taxed heavily to provide for the commons and that is understood to be for everyone's benefit. The tail doesnt wag the dog. If you work hard and become a doctor, you pay taxes so others can become doctors without massive debt, creating more doctors for society, and you can afford a larger house than a janitor, not 3 houses and a boat and a timeshare and 7 cars and a quarter million dollar vintage nintendo cartridge and on and on and on while the janitor needs 3 roommates for an apartment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
The problem is, we have legions of victims of unregulated (captured by the oligarchs) capitalism who delude themselves into believing one day they'll be the fuckers living large and kicking the pathetic fuckees, the peope they actually are, so they fight against their own interests of creating meaningful social equity in preparation for a day the winners ensure will never come but convince the peasants will.
+1 political insight
There's a phenomenon in psychology called "crowding out", where extrinsic motivators (e.g money) can destroy intrinsic motivators (e.g passion), because they're more important (you need money to survive, you don't need passion).
The take that communism is bad for incentives and capitalism is good for incentives is far too naive. What capitalism can do effectively is make a large mass of people do a lot of work they don't want to do, and turn work they do want to do into a nightmare, where communism would instead focus on reducing the overall burden of unpleasant work, and find non-market solutions for distributing the unpleasant work.
Automating the bad away then becomes a positive instead of an existential threat to our existence. Many other contradictions of capitalism fall away when we look towards non-capitalists modes of production.
A lot of people frame non-market solutions as "compulsory", and market solutions as "free", even though again that's far too reductive, having the choice between starving and janitorial work isn't really a good faith choice, and yet these are the kinds of choices capitalism uses and calls the epitome of freedom.
Your choice of jobs there is telling. While not every disease is related to sanitation, isn’t it worth considering why prevention deserves less than cure and under what social structures that might be inverted or nullified?
I am of the opinion we should strive for all people to have their needs met.
That said, society needs some things more than others, and some of those things require incentive to have enough of.
If we give the same to a janitor who requires 6 months of training the same outcome as a doctor that requires a decade of training, we'll have all the janitors and almost no doctors. We need both for society to function.
I'm not trying to diminish the human aspect of either vocation, both are needed. Both deserve empathy and help if they need it. Both deserve a good life. Both deserve the chance to have a home and a family. Both deserve the respect of the society they contribute to.
But how do you have enough doctors while providing no tangible incentive? Not ridiculous, unsustainable incentive, but some. How do you convince people to spend 10 years training to do something if it isn't their explicit calling that will do it in spite of the lack of tangible reward?
Look at the US teacher shortage. Our society doesn't see capitalist profit in k-12, so we pay teachers shit and don't have nearly enough. We incentivize people becoming useless MBAs and ~~Hedge fund managers~~ professional rigged-casino gamblers whose vocations are largely self-serving. We incentivize the wrong things and thus lack many necessary professionals in roles vital to society's well being. Any society with any economy will suffer if they don't incentivize citizens to have pro-social vocations and disincentivize antisocial vocations.
You’re assuming we can only allocate work and compensation through the market.
That people will only respond to the lure of compensation.
There are many examples to the contrary and some even show that active sabotage was required to stop their function.
Cuba for example, produces a significant number of doctors without the lofty compensation their Anglo-European counterparts are provided. Cuban doctors are even expected to volunteer abroad as a matter of course.
The ddr didn’t erect a wall out of the deep desire to suppress free movement of people across borders, it did so in opposition to policies to impose brain drain by its rivals.
I didn't say or infer the Market would or should be setting those levels. The market, ie greedy capitalists only out for themselves, are the last people who should be setting those levels. Democratically elected Government should, again with capital interference being subject to the harshest of criminal incarceration for the slightest offense, with an agency that analyzes and using scientific, sociological means, to predict and determine what society needs and will need, and adjusts compensation accordingly, with teachers, doctors, mental health professionals, getting a little more than widget sellers or workplace efficiency experts and the like for doing good for society with their choice of vocation that took extra effort to learn but is vital to society. There really should only be 3 metrics to determine wage: difficulty to aquire the skill, utility/vitality of said skill to society's function and well-being, and predicted scarcity of said skill. If a skill is hard to learn but benefits no one else in society, it shouldnt pay much beyond the minimum, for example.
I'd be curious to see if the average cuban janitor generally has the identical quality of life in terms of creature comforts as an average cuban doctor. I very much doubt you wouldn't be able to discern significant difference.
Again, I am in opposition to the degree of incentive western culture provides and for which professions.
In a vacuum though, Id have to see hard evidence that in a society where a janitor out of primary education makes X or collects X social resources immediately, and a doctor who necessarily trained for 10 high pressure years after primary education makes the very same X will somehow yield enough doctors. Your entire society would have to be made up of people with benevolent Stephen Fry like outlooks, intellect, and nobility.
Edit: I looked it up, and cuban professionals with higher education is significantly higher. The minimum wage is 2100 cup, the average is 4000, and the average for health and higher ed professionals is 6100. See? Incentive. Not crazy bling "I'm worth 10 of you" incentive, but enough to make enough of what society needs.
https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/news/calculating-cost-living-cuba
You identified yourself as an advocate for (regulated) capitalism
Yes there is more to this, welfare capitalism exists where in exceptional circumstances (e.g food, sometimes basic shelter, etc.) goods are distributed outside of the market system, but it's totally fair to infer that a capitalist would advocate that the market is setting the levels of compensation for the vast majority of professions.
Arguing that these levels of compensation should be agreed upon democratically is an entirely socialist position. This is an advocacy for central, democratic planning that flies in direct opposition to capitalism.
It seems like you're probably a capitalist-realistic (you believe no other economic system is viable), but you recognize the faults of capitalism and are trying to reform essentially every aspect of the economy to be socialist while still keeping some extremely small sliver of bourgeoise so you can call yourself a capitalist and feel like your position is a "realistic" one.
The irony is that keeping this however small and crippled parasitic class of capitalists around is always an existential threat to the working class. They're a group of people whose economic interests are in opposition to our own. We don't need people with different relationships to capital just by a happenstance of birth or luck.
That’s great information and I think it would be worthwhile to find out what drives the difference in compensation as opposed to assuming it comes from incentive.
Cubas an interesting example because it’s development of biomedical industry comes from the transition away from an only nominally free agricultural economy.
Without all the people producing cash crops for export (they still were, but with less human labor as the industry mechanized) and the urban service sector out of casino work there was a glut of people and need to put them to work.
Medicine was not just an industry compatible with their international communist politics but also their resources at hand.
So I think even with the difference in compensation there’s an argument to be made that labor training and output can be driven by much, much more than incentives in compensation.
The cias own data on the ddr disproves this.
Oh I mean we can trust the cia, sure.
Lemme see a link :)
the classic
Who knows why they released it. It was averaged across all Soviet citizens, not just the ddr.
I mean this is just for the ssr, which is by far the most successful example of a communist power.
But most current and past communist countries famously have famines.
I’m almost 100% that it was an average but even so. May I see the famines?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930–1933
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period
These are the ones I remember specifically
So two from checks notes 80 years ago in regions that experienced famine every 10 years and never experienced famine again, one literally caused by a us blockade and one caused by a us blockade and a catastrophic flood that hit 30% of the country.
When I get back to the computer we can compare that to the famines experienced by capitalist countries during the same period.
Regardless, the suggestion that communism is somehow fundamentally bound to malnutrition is ahistorical.
Yeah that’s true, but i never said that it’s fundamentally bound. Just that communist countries have a high amount of famines.
The proportion of number of communist countries to famines in those countries is higher than that of capitalist countries to famines in those countries.
Africa alone has enough capitalist countries (imperial holdings) with famines over the same time period to disprove that. then we can start talking about bengal and ireland.
communist countries don't have more famines than capitalist ones.
Links dude. Let’s see em.
okay, you want links to prove that capitalist famines in africa outnumber communist famines in the whole world over the same time period:
Wikipedia article on "famine", section "africa"
i'll just summarize from that one section:
and if those few, i know i'm leaving so much information out, aren't enough it is the explicit policy of the IMF and world bank to make countries dependent on food imports.
and that's just a brief summary from the broadest overview (often minimized with language that suggests these are somehow the fault of the victims) page on shitty ol' wikipedia. imagine what a real survey of the history from primary sources would turn up!
The whole doc is talking about the caloric intake of a Soviet citizen
That’s what made me think it was across the whole Soviet Union. The cia was usually pretty specific about what particular soviet they meant because their data would be used in operations against those particular states.