Do you think it has a chance of happening in Vietnam or North Korea under communism?

No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind.

You know this, and we know you know this.

Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?

Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.

> Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?

Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

> Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.

> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.

>Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist

But then would it also not be fair to consider the US to also be such a mixed system. Not as equally mixed, but still mixed with behaviors that are post-capitalist?

Yeah, capitalism proper mostly died in the early-mid 20th Century, though there are political factions actively seeking a return to it.

>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom.

How is it possible to own large tracts of land the size of small cities or entire provinces without a state/army to enforce it? AKA before populations got big there was plenty of "common" land that wasn't anyones. Property rights are a cultural invention.

Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair.

That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services. They do, however, need to be coerced into giving up their wealth to some massive state who's self-appointed role is to decide "what's fair" and who does and does not get to receive wealth produced by others.

They may well be instances where the hard edges of capitalism need to be sanded down a bit with redistributive policies, but make no mistake, between socialism and capitalism, socialism requires a lot more force, state-backed violence, and coercion to make work.

Most countries run on fiat to exchange wealth. Fiat already takes a huge leap of faith in the state issuing it. To think that the current economy is anything like barter is bogus. There is too much blind trust that the current economy is more fair than not, which leads to "fiat wealth" = "human worth" thinking, while money leaks like a sieve to entrenched interests.

If you're saying that there isn't a "pure capitalist" system in existence today, that's true. I think we mostly agree in our points, even if we're coming at it a bit differently. Crony capitalism, as practiced in most developed countries today, shares a lot of the same bad outcomes seen in socialist systems. Namely, you have a large state with a monopoly on violence, using its considerable power to pick winners and losers, often in a way that is not based on the value created by groups or individuals, but rather the political power and influence of those groups or individuals.

The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".

Barter is "natural", but so is tribalism/centralized governance, and monopolistic practices. Yes, it does have to be "we'll do it better/smarter this time" for both governance and the market-based economy(not "free market"). Thinking that dismantling it all and allowing "free" organic growth won't lead right back entrenched interests and gatekeepers within the government and market is naive.

I rather think that feudalism is the default system. Power begets power, so in the absence of some sort of check on runaway power accumulation i.e. a government, "free markets" are quickly replaced by "do what I say or I'll have my minions kill you".

This is like a whole giant blob of assumptions and cultural bias. The only thing thats natural is law of the jungle, and the wish of the strongest. Otherwise known as the monarchy.

No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.

The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society? The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?

Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.

Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.

Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.

Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.

I don't think I ever claimed that the U.S. in it's current form is a pure capitalist system (or even close to it) and I think you're deliberately taking the first sentence of my comment out of context.

That being said, I don't think we're disagreeing here or at least not entirely. I'm saying that the state can't be trusted to manage the economy and distribution of wealth because it is prone to corruption and favoritism leading to bad outcomes. You seem to be arguing a similar point.

As long as people have to do things with land and resources there has to be a way to enforce use.

It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly.

Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.

Kulas are not quite the same thing.

Common land used to be a thing, you could graze your animals there, etc. https://www.gov.uk/common-land-village-greens

Today, air and seawater are common resources that are being taken willi nilly and polluted

We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution.

It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c.

By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.

No country in modern Europe is Socialist. It's all Liberal Welfare State Capitalism.

And the Welfare State was created to avoid Socialism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist enemies.

European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe.

The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.

Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."

> European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism.

It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been...

> The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one

What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers.

> rather than creating a new one

Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch.

> Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq...

https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pensio...

Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...

European society is based on rule of law, democracy, equality, the scientific method, the justice system, free public education and capitalism.

Capitalism existed for thousands of years (first company if the world was registered like yr. 700) and only supported miserable living standards. Most of these systems appears during / after the Renaissance, and deserve more credit for the society we have today than capitalism does

While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.

Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method.

As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too.

There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.

> undesirable work

> our needs are covered

Human desires and human needs don't work the way you're probably thinking. I'd suggest to take into account Maslow's theory of human motivation. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

*less of the undesirable and more of the desirable work

is what I meant but did not specify. Is that more in line with what you mean?

Desirability is defined by the consequences the success brings, as opposed to the failure of inaction. It is a thing only in context of some unfulfilled needs.

How do you define desirability in the society where "needs are covered" (already)?

What would comprise the desirability if the profit of every action is alienated from the acting person?

Not all needs can just be covered by the economy, of course. You cannot make people respect or love someone. I was talking purely about basic physical needs such as enough varied good food and decent shelter. As your link says, 'Man is a perpetually wanting animal.'

I would say a desirable job is one with

- mostly pleasant tasks,

- good working conditions (not hard on the body (heavy lifting and bad positions, no natural light, noisy, bad air quality, ..) and mind (bad stress, bad social fit, ..),

- good relationships with the people around you, (and the ability to leave if they don't work for you)

- a good amount of agency (where 'good' might differ from person to person),

- achievable and worthwhile goals that do not feel like 'bullshit work', with a good feedback loop,

- and probably more I cannot think of off the top of my head right now.

(Respect and reward of other people is definitively a big plus, but if you yourself think your job is worthwhile it's probably enough to count as desirable.)

Most of these are not material rewards (though not having them can increase profit). If the only reason somebody does a specific job at all is money, the above conditions are not met/the person is not actively happy about doing it, and it can be done by a machine just as easily, I say we shouldn't have a need for this person to do it. Still, current society demands people have a job, any job, or even several, as a value in itself.

How the profit from work done is distributed is whole other (but connected) story. (Concerning your last question, I would argue that this disconnect to profit is already the case for many many people.)

Sorry for not writing clearly, this topic would probably warrant a seminar with lots of beer and reading at least.

Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end.

The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation.

It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.

So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?

Has communism been able to exist outside dictatorships? Or has it been unlucky in that regard and always attracted authoritarianism.

I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?

Communism has never existed at all, lets start there.

Whether the dictators where honestly trying to create communism, or they were using it to fool the populace much the same as monarchs used religion, is debatable.

It appears that from their minutes and other notes and such that Soviet leaders truly believed what they were doing was communism. It wasn’t a case of them pretending and then in secret they’d laugh at the sham they were executing. No, they truly believed they were being marxists.

Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.

A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.

There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc.

So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?

The magic line would be when the majority of privately owned businesses are illegal.

Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

Collectively funding some services has nothing to do with socialism.

If that's the magic line, then it's a thousand miles away.

I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.

> that has outlawed private business.

From my original comment: "the majority".

The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.

You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.

But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.

Also _when_ socialistic government allow some controlled capitalism (usually heavily regulated-meaning it applies to small business and not just your sulfur emoting power plants), they do it as a temporary concession on the way to complete abolition of private business.

Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.

> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.

Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.

> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

This is a borderline semantic argument.

There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.

As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.

> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.

Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories. So have they produced capital?

The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.

Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.

> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone

Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.

I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.

> is not about taking away all of your stuff

Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.

If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.

But I am not going to call that socialism.

> Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era.

Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)

The capitalist state you are celebrating is grafting on increasingly more socialist elements. Stop thinking about the cold war and start thinking about the past 200 years. There didn't use to be public education, police, justice system, etc. This trend is going to continue.

I already said that if you want to redefine socialism as to be capitalism with a slightly bigger safety net, and some government funding of education/healthcare you can do that.

But I am not going to call that socialism.

That's just capitalism, with a slightly larger safety net.

You are expanding the definition of capitalism. Why is that expansion to be preferred over what you call expanding the definition of socialism? Especially since socialists defined both?

Sure, so I can explain why my definition is better, using an example that you gave.

You said that a reasonable definition of socialism was the following: "means you can't own those goods while renting labor"

This situation, is so far removed, so far out there, so far significantly different than the current state of the world, that it makes no sense at all to call the current state of the world "socialist".

The situation you gave, is far, far outside the norm of how the world currently works, and is borderline unimaginable as to how such a society would even look like.

But my situation, of "Capitalism countries put more money into existing social safety net programs" is easily immaginable. It require no restructuring of society. It merely requires a bit more money, being put into existing programs.

Or in other words, not much would change.

Wheras making it so "you can't own those goods while renting labor" would mean that basically every major company in the world would have to be shutdown or restructured. It is such a massive change, that I cannot even begin to guess as to what such a world would look like.

If you want to make up a new word, or something, that describes giving a bit more money to existing social safety net programs, go ahead.

But whatever you decide to call it, please do not pretend that it is any way similar to if people "can't own those goods while renting labor". The situations are so extremely different, that it makes no sense to describe them using the same word.

> This is a borderline semantic argument.

There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.

But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.

> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)

> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.

No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)

> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.

Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)

And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.

> means you can't own those goods while renting labor

And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.

I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.