I was told growing up that I won’t like socialism once I have to start paying taxes. I pay taxes, but would much rather pay way more taxes to have socialism. Including paying for social programs I wouldn’t use like welfare, free tuition etc.
Once I qualified for work pharmacare that was great! But I remember how much it sucked not having any health insurance. Yeah I bootstrapped it, but I’d hope we would grow up as a species and not have to have so much bootstrapping, since there are better ways at this point.
Socialism is the idea that means of production are owned publicly with how and why people work being decided democratically. Creating a social safety net via taxes while the means of production are privately owned is still capitalism.
The fundamental question is what is the purpose of work, and why we work in the first place. Some work is necessary work that makes our society function. This is what we were referring to as essential jobs at the start of the pandemic. These jobs produce direct value such as food production, creation of housing, education, healthcare, and so on. This is known as production of use value.
However, there is a whole other set of jobs which only exist for the purpose of producing capital with any social value being largely incidental. These jobs don’t have any purpose beyond that, and can often be harmful to society. An example of such a job would be a corporate lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. This job is a net negative for our society, and we’d all be better off if these people could just stay home and do nothing at all. There’s a great book called Bullshit Jobs on the subject.
One of core problems with capitalism is that it primarily optimizes for creation of trade value, and use value is largely produced incidentally. The reason most people have to work is not because it’s actually necessary or useful, but because it creates value for the capital owning class. Most of the people end up being treated as nothing more than resources for wealth creation. This is especially clear in US where health coverage is tied to employment. This is basically explicitly saying that human life has no value beyond creating wealth for the business owners.
Companies are also run as totalitarian dictatorships where the company decides when you work, where you work, how you work, what you’re allowed to say, how you dress, and so on. Many companies even monitor everything you do while at work. So, people are spending majority of their waking lives in an Orwellian nightmare.
I highly recommend reading this article explaining the relationship between socialism and communism.
How is that any different than some technocrat in a social country whose job it is to decide how much and when fossil fuels are used? The job’s essentially the same, it’s just been privatized in capitalism.
The socialist country still needs that work done, otherwise they don’t have the expertise to decide if/when these things are used, at what rate, and to what end… and the entire country suffers for it. You can argue that the capitalist version is corrupt (almost certainly true), or comes to the wrong conclusions (must be true at least some of the time), but someone needs to advocate/manage those issues.
This argument of mine is weaker (for when the lobbyist is arguing for truly absurd things), and sometimes stronger (when we’re talking about lobbying for things less controversial than the fossil fuel industry). But in general, it works rather well.
That’s because there is no “use value”. Value changes from moment to moment, even for the same good and the same person who would demand it. It’s not just an abstract number, it’s illusory.
Trade value comes closet to determining how real people in the real world value some good or service. And not only does it come closest, it can update those numbers quite rapidly if the demand changes.
Anything else is some poor deluded fool’s attempt to dictate how reality should work. And then realists must hide while they trade and barter for the bare necessities, for which there are never enough, because the 5 year planner disagreed and dictated that there was indeed enough.
I mean, goddamn. If you’d said that capitalism leaves many in poverty, or treats those people harshly and unfairly. That it was reactionary instead of proactive. I could come up with a dozen stinging criticisms for capitalism, but you’re attacking the one single thing that it’s actually good at.
The difference is what the goal is and what the incentives are. A technocrat in a socialist country doesn’t personally benefit from deciding how much and when fossil fuels are used. A corporate lobbyist does. This is the problem I identify in the original comment.
The goal of a business is to create profit for the owners, everything else is secondary to that. The goal of a socialist economy is to produce useful things for the general public. There’s another big difference where producing things is seen as a cost because it takes resources from the country to do so. Meanwhile, under capitalism production for the sake of production is common because the goal is to sell as much stuff as possible. This is how we end up with stuff like planned obsolescence and new goods being destroyed to keep up market prices.
Lobbying is just legalized bribery. Large corporations bride officials to pass laws that help the corporations at the direct expense of the public. It certainly works well for the 1% of the population who own everything.
You don’t understand the definition of use value.
You need to learn the terms you’re discussing. Use value and trade value have specific meanings. Use value is something that is produced for direct use, while trade value is something that’s produced for the purpose being held as an asset or traded.
Use value refers to things that people need and use directly. A socialist economy is geared towards production to meet the direct needs of the people as opposed to wealth accumulation which is what a capitalist economy is geared towards.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement.
You’re right capitalism is fantastic at creating poverty. In fact, capitalism inherently requires poverty to function. Thanks to the wonder of capitalism roughly 3.5 million people die from lack of clean water, 1.5 million people die from vaccinable diseases, and 9 million people die from hunger each and every year. That’s over a 140 million deaths every decade.
Meanwhile, the only major country where poverty reduction has been happening consistently is China that has a communist party in charge: