Maybe I'm a slight bit intoxicatred, but are you saying sweatshops alone arethe cause for the increased median income?

Or are you being sarcastic?

So someone is offering an otherwise dying person a job so he can survive.

Where is the exploitation?

socialism: building huge statues of the people you are saying to set free while killing them by the millions



Anyway how do most people understand the true ideal of socialism? As a society where there is no private property and the entire economy is centrally planned? If so, how can you believe in such an ideal when it has failed so miserably in USSR and China?

In my experience most people who support socialism (/socialist policies) do so because they think it's fair: it offers the very strong illusion of social solidairty. They do not see the misery that comes from making so many people dependant on the state for social care. The don't realise that it takes away the incentives for family and peers to take care of each other. A socialist state actually takes away so many incentives for basic human interaction, that I can't see it as anything else than extremely cruel and harsh.

Socialism does not only mean state socialism.

State socialism does not just mean Marxist-Leninism.

Socialism does not necessarily have to mean central planning (in fact the origins of socialism are more about democratically run work-places, not a central planning board.

But I agree with your gloomy outlook on socialism as a whole

Yeah I know that. Socialism / social policies in their current form in where I live (the Netherlands) are actually very mild and even has some benevolent aspects to it (which I think is possible because the community is relatively small with 16 million people). However the underlying mechanism of socialsm and the fallacy of socialism being social is what bothers me most.

Mild?

Any more socialism and we would have negative growth year after year.

Democratically run work-places is not socialist, it's capitalist. Positive rights are either monopolistic or might makes right.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...ectrum-507178/

Ya i tried telling my friends this about trade aid, apparently its not the market, its the intention that makes it socialist.

mild compared to the socialist/communist ideal

Democracy basically is might makes right, so the socialists can still have their democratically run workplaces and remain socialist right?

I'm talking about the theory and how it was talked about. Marxism-Leninism and it's party vanguardism was a significant deviation from it's Marxist routes (and most certainly from other strains of socialism). If you look at the theorizing of early socialists (Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Saint-Simon, Bakunin, Proudhon and others) they all advocated workers control of the means of production. They did not have in mind what it really would become which is Party control (though the anarchist Bakunin did tell Marx that his dictatorship of the proletariat would soon become a dicatatorship of the Party). Marx denied this and it is very likely he would have deplored the what the Bolsheviks did in Russia and what other Communist Parties did all around the world.

There have been a few instances of socialist movements who did achieve or were fighting to achieve democratically run workplaces (the Paris Commune, the CNT and FAI in the Spanish Civil War, the Kronstadt Rebellion, various other anarchist uprisings in Russia).

Trying to paint all socialists as espousing ideas very similar to the USSR or Communist China is completely incorrect. The more democratically-minded socialists are wrong in their own way and those societies would be pretty awful too, but not in the same way as the statist socialists.

Edit: though if you want to argue that libertarian socialist ideas of communal ownership, communal workplaces and participatory democracy is simply a whole bunch of small states, I don't really have a problem with that.

There is a difference between a commune and communism. A company can be a commune. A family is (usually) a commune.

A commune is not might makes right. A commune is not a rejection of property rights. It's an expression of it.


??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com...n_To_Communism


I don't think I've said they all want the same. I've said that the rejection of private property is either in the form of a monopoly or in the form of war of all against all (as per the link). Under anarchic communism, nobody has the right to take control over goods. Not private persons and not the state. This means either people sit down and die (as they don't believe they can appropriate and use anything), or they regard all goods as up for grabs, which leads to a solitary animal existence.

You cannot run a factory without either monopolistic control or a concept of private property.

The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, very early in Marx and Engels careers. Their thinking was very unrefined at this point and in it's early stages. Another thing to bear in mind is that it was a short propaganda pamphlet written in a huge rush in an effort to get it out quickly (the 1848-49 revolutions were going on at the time and Marx and Engels were desperate to influence and guide them in a more socialist direction). As their thinking developed they did take on a more reformist and democratic flavour. Even so, the 10 planks in the Manifesto do not necessarily point to it being incompatible with democratically run workplaces. You might point to the "dictatorship of the proletariat", but this is to mistake the current meaning of the word dictatorship with what it meant then (i.e. a democratically run class dictatorship - not simply a party one).

Also, Marx and Engels do not have a monopoly on what socialism or communism are. Both ideas pre-date Marx and Engels and both have spread in many different and opposing directions since Marx and Engels.

The choice is not a binary one between state monopoly or war against all, unless you are using the word state in a far broader sense of the word than it is usually used. The Spanish anarchists ran them as collectives controlled democratically by the people who worked in them. Would you class that as monopolistic control?

wiki - "Along with the fight against fascism was a profound anarchist revolution throughout Spain.

Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy socialist influence. Factories were run through worker committees, agrarian areas became collectivized and run as libertarian communes. Even places like hotels, barber shops, and restaurants were collectivized and managed by their workers. George Orwell describes a scene in Aragon during this time period, in his book, Homage to Catalonia:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

The anarchist held areas were run according to the basic principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." In some places, money was entirely eliminated, to be replaced with vouchers. Under this system, goods were often up to a quarter of their previous cost.

Despite the critics clamoring for maximum efficiency, anarchic communes often produced more than before the collectivization. The newly liberated zones worked on entirely libertarian principles; decisions were made through councils of ordinary citizens without any sort of bureaucracy. (It should be noted that the CNT-FAI leadership was at this time not nearly as radical as the rank and file members responsible for these sweeping changes.)"

Now, you might say that this would eventually break down into a war of all against all, or become a state (which I would probably agree with for a variety of reasons), but this short experiment does not show that, so to present it is a fact is incorrect imo. You might argue that this is might makes right and I would agree with you, but it is radically different to statist Communism in many ways.

I think we have some terminology differences. Let's try to clear them up so we can have a useful discussion.

* who is doing the exploiting?

* is this exploitation wrong?

i'm saying alandyer is wrong when he implies that hard working chinese aren't getting anywhere in life when they have experienced massive economic growth largely in part to making a lot of the worlds **** cheaper than everyone else. anti-globalization supporters often claim that capitalism exploits the poor when in reality they are incredibly greatful for hte jobs american corporations such as nike bring to the community. perhaps i'm not explaining myself well but to claim that hard working chinese are having trouble 'pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" when they have experienced massive economic growth in the last few years means you must not be paying much attention to what goes on in the world.

"However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...m#preface-1872


Are we looking at the same thing?

"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
4. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
5. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
6. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
9. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com...to#cite_note-7


I'm not denying that there are different forms. I'm taking on your claim that state-communism is somehow a deviation of Marx's writings and intentions.

Ok, I thought we were still talking about your claim that workplace democracy is antithetic to democracy. A strong, centralized state does not make this impossible (though obviously there is a strong correlation there).

As for state-communism in history being different from Marx's writings and intentions, here are a few quotes from Tristram Hunt's biography of Engels

"in his final years he [Engels] remained adamant that the still feudal Tsarist state would have to pass through all the intermediate stages of mass industrialization, working-class immiseration and the bourgeois rule before any prospect of revolution would be in the offing."

This would apply to basically any Communist state through history, since they have all come about in largely backwards, agrarian societies.

"However, Plekhanov always retained an intellectual's purity and never swayed from Engel's conviction that socialism in Russia could not be imposed overnight, but had to follow a period of bourgeois-democratic rule and sustained industrial growth. These were the preconditions and contradictions of capitalist society which would provide the chrysalis for a communist transformation; he was deeply hostile to any kind of Leninist insurrection which would see a canguard elite instigate a top-down socialist revolution from inside the walls of the Kremlin. The result of such a febrile putsch in Russian society, Plekhanov rightly fears, would be a 'political abortion after the manner of the ancient Chinese or Persian empires - a renewal of Tsarist despotism on a communist basis.'"

"In stark contrast to the way in which communist parties seized power in the twentieth century, from 1848 onwards Engels was highly skeptical of vanguard-led, top-down revolutions. He always believed in a workers' party led by the working class itself (rather than intellectuals and professional revolutionaries) and remained adamant that the proletariat would arrive at socialism through the contradictions of the capitalist system ad the development of political self-consciousness rather than having it imposed upon them by a self-selecting communist junta. 'The Social Democratic Federation over here and your German-American Socialists share the distinction of being the only parties that have contrived to reduce Marx's theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy which the working man is not expected to arrive at by virtue of his own class consciousness; rather it is to be promptly and without preparation rammed down his throat as an article of faith,' he complained pointedly to Friedrich Sorge in May 1894.' The emancipation of the masses could never be the product of an external agent, a political deus ex machina, even if it cam in the form of V.I. Lenin. Moreover, as his guidance to the German SPD suggested, Engels was inclined towards the end of his life to advocate the peaceable, democratic road to socialism through the ballot-box rather than the barricade."

disclaimer - I don't necessarily agree with all of this, just thought this thread could do with a little commie devil's advocate and a challenge to the usual socialism = Stalin and gulags memes which are pretty lazy and boring tbh.

1. The boss is exploiting the worker.
2. The worker is exploiting the boss.
3. The customer is exploiting the boss.
4. The boss is exploiting the customer.

Of these, I think #3 is typically the the most lopsided.

Maybe this helps out the market. People work harder to achieve the success that their neighbors have and then people will get innovation and such.

I would love to hear how taking massive risk and providing employment at the competitive market rate is "exploitation" of the worker, if anyone would like to take a stab at it.

Thinking about the boss exploiting the worker case...

In my line of work the difference of value between a median worker and a top 10% worker is at least 10-1. The bottom 20% or so actively subtract value. But, pay only varies about 3-1, and is only loosely correlated with value. There's a lot of forces that contribute to this disconnect between salary and value.

Conclusion: In my line of work, the least valuable employees aren't exploited at all. The most valuable ones are exploited quite a bit.

I'm taking exploitation as a synonym for profit with a negative connotation. What else could it mean?

Yep. It's pretty much impossible to imagine a huge corporation abusing their bargaining power to exploit their workers...


According to one report, in Wal-Mart's cost-benefit analysis, it was cheaper to wash workers's blood from clothing before shipping the clothing overseas for sale than it was to provide gloves.

Under the agreement, Wal-Mart was fined $135,540 for child labor violations occurring between 1998 and 2002.

In November, a federal agency affidavit revealed that Wal-Mart executives were aware of systematic hirings of illegal immigrants by Wal-Mart's cleaning contractors. In 2003, immigration officials conducted a raid on 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states, arresting 245 workers.

Take the top people start a new business and pay them 4-1.

Seems like Walmart is offering people a great deal, as it offers a job to people who are willing to work glove-less. Think of what their situation would be like without those jobs.


Providing people a job. Systematically!