I mean, we first need to define what a luxury and what a necessity is. For some things like food, shelter, water, healthcare it’s pretty straightforward. But for resources like energy or communications it’s less obvious.
I’d argue that the internet is now a necessity rather than a luxury, but many people to this day still don’t have or choose not to have internet access (due to geography or religion). Energy is the same way, if we take an obviously bad example, but say you’re socializing electricity for everyone, what’s to stop someone from mining cryptocurrency on everyone else’s dime ? That person would be profiting off of the social net. Where do we put the cursor between “luxurious” energy use and “necessary” energy use ? It’s a tough thing to figure out.
Furthermore, for most people you need an incentive to work, right now it’s survival, which is not great, but if all of your needs basic, and more are taken care of by the state, you only work for the luxuries, which would greatly reduce the available workforce. It’s again a tough balance to find.
If you’re socializing electricity for everyone then you can tell when usage is far outside norms and audit usage
I also don’t think money is the ultimate incentive, and most people would work whether or not they needed money to survive. Sure they wouldn’t work at some crappy unfulfilling job, but people would still be productive according to their idea of productivity.
Also not having people working all these useless jobs would save energy and resources.
There’s lots of study on how humans respond to incentives and money and its not a straightforward relationship at all.
Allowing capitalist relations to persist, even if basic goods like food and homes were nationalized, enables a society in which capitalist profiteers continue to operate. History shows pretty explicitly that Capital will use the levers of power that exist, like The State, to eat away at or overturn any socialistic advances. E.g., suddenly the luxury capitalist corporation that sells idk, pearls, is lobbying (bribing) their way into privatizing beaches from which they operate. Slowly but surely the socioeconomic relations produced under capitalism foment and claw their way back to their former position. This requires a constant, indefinitely revolutionary society to keep capitalist relations at bay; that sort of momentum is not possible to sustain, certainly at the current moment.
It’s necessary to abolish capitalists as a class because leaving capitalist systems of relations alone enables them to continue to re-produce themselves.
That doesn’t preclude this sort of dual-economic setup from being a good thing, just insufficient.
yeah I guess from my point of view all the systems for distributing resources and power ‘fairly’ fail on their own. Mostly because they usually silo power in 1 or 2 mechanisms, so power concentrates and corrupts over time.
Also from a systems engineering standpoint -I dislike ‘purity’. I prefer blended systems with backups and counter-measures. If I want to know which systems work best I look at what is delivering the best results and right now for me thats the nordic socialist democracies which still have plenty of capitalism.
Im not saying we’ve arrived at the best and should stop improving, but Im not interested in the endless hypothetical arguments about which ideology would be best if perfectly implemented. They are never perfectly implemented so best design something that can withstand reality.
This is what I think every time I see this socialist / capitalist dichotomy set up:
also I know Im not using the meme right.
I mean, we first need to define what a luxury and what a necessity is. For some things like food, shelter, water, healthcare it’s pretty straightforward. But for resources like energy or communications it’s less obvious.
I’d argue that the internet is now a necessity rather than a luxury, but many people to this day still don’t have or choose not to have internet access (due to geography or religion). Energy is the same way, if we take an obviously bad example, but say you’re socializing electricity for everyone, what’s to stop someone from mining cryptocurrency on everyone else’s dime ? That person would be profiting off of the social net. Where do we put the cursor between “luxurious” energy use and “necessary” energy use ? It’s a tough thing to figure out.
Furthermore, for most people you need an incentive to work, right now it’s survival, which is not great, but if all of your needs basic, and more are taken care of by the state, you only work for the luxuries, which would greatly reduce the available workforce. It’s again a tough balance to find.
If you’re socializing electricity for everyone then you can tell when usage is far outside norms and audit usage
I also don’t think money is the ultimate incentive, and most people would work whether or not they needed money to survive. Sure they wouldn’t work at some crappy unfulfilling job, but people would still be productive according to their idea of productivity.
Also not having people working all these useless jobs would save energy and resources.
There’s lots of study on how humans respond to incentives and money and its not a straightforward relationship at all.
Allowing capitalist relations to persist, even if basic goods like food and homes were nationalized, enables a society in which capitalist profiteers continue to operate. History shows pretty explicitly that Capital will use the levers of power that exist, like The State, to eat away at or overturn any socialistic advances. E.g., suddenly the luxury capitalist corporation that sells idk, pearls, is lobbying (bribing) their way into privatizing beaches from which they operate. Slowly but surely the socioeconomic relations produced under capitalism foment and claw their way back to their former position. This requires a constant, indefinitely revolutionary society to keep capitalist relations at bay; that sort of momentum is not possible to sustain, certainly at the current moment.
It’s necessary to abolish capitalists as a class because leaving capitalist systems of relations alone enables them to continue to re-produce themselves.
That doesn’t preclude this sort of dual-economic setup from being a good thing, just insufficient.
yeah I guess from my point of view all the systems for distributing resources and power ‘fairly’ fail on their own. Mostly because they usually silo power in 1 or 2 mechanisms, so power concentrates and corrupts over time.
Also from a systems engineering standpoint -I dislike ‘purity’. I prefer blended systems with backups and counter-measures. If I want to know which systems work best I look at what is delivering the best results and right now for me thats the nordic socialist democracies which still have plenty of capitalism.
Im not saying we’ve arrived at the best and should stop improving, but Im not interested in the endless hypothetical arguments about which ideology would be best if perfectly implemented. They are never perfectly implemented so best design something that can withstand reality.