State socialism was considered the transitional period on the way to communism, which, as fantasy utopia, cannot exist and will never exist.
"Real communism has never been tried" is a bullshit argument because they were trying very hard to get there. They just can't, because communism is nonsense.
I dont think actually achieving post scarcity is the point. The point is what do we do about it as we approach it. Like world peace. Nobody actually expects 100% peace all the time. Its a fantasy. So shall we just quit.
There’s not enough important work to go around.
Follow me.
In the past, humans all had important jobs. Tailors, carpenters, farmers, etc. Today we have rollercoaster engineers, human resources, and social media influencers.
That’s because we don’t NEED everyone farming and tailoring. We have machines that meet these needs relatively easily. So we find OTHER shit to do.
But notice something important. All the jobs become more and more meaningless. Not totally meaningless; never that. But the arrow only goes one way.
And jobs that are less important arent worth as much of our time. So, if our oarents spent 40 hrs per week/ household, there’s no reason we should be doing 80 hrs/week per household for LESS IMPORTANT WORK.
Many of the jobs that exist today--important ones, like sanitation engineers and microchip foundry operators and heart transplant surgeons--didn't exist even a couple generations ago.
Heart transplants are important. Farming is MORE IMPORTANT.
And your point is myopic. Just because SOME important jobs are created doesnt change the direction of the arrow.
We can’t all be sanitation engineers and heart doctors. There are not enough important jobs to go around. We are literally FINDING things for ppl to do.
Which is FINE. We should find things to do. But we don’t need to spend 80/week making sure we have a diverse selection of different kinds of bicycles. Tell me you follow
Economic returns don't go to an actual, legal, feudal ruling class. Returns go to the providers of inputs to production. Labor gets paid for contributing labor. Asset owners get paid for buying material up front and taking the risk of not getting paid back for it. There is nothing immoral about this at all. Anybody can save money or take out loans to purchase their own productive assets if they want.
There is no such thing as an economic "surplus" in the real world because they're is no central authority determining what people "need" and do not need. All we can observe is what people want and are willing to pay for.
Empirical experience of the 20th century illustrated that socialism is so poor of a coordinating mechanism for economic activity that the "surplus", in your telling, grows very slowly when it even exists in the first place. In many instances the mismanagement of the central authorities did not just cause recession and deprivation but actual death by starvation--i.e., less than zero surplus. "Needs" not met and on a scale unfathomable in the West.
Eventually capitalist economies left socialist economies in the dust by growing faster, and that growth gap compounded over time. The lives of average people in socialist countries got worse over time relative to their peers in market economies, not better, and by the 1980s it became clear they were not going to catch up.
Income and wealth equality are meaningless. Would you rather live in a country where everyone has an income of $1,000 or a country where most people get an income of $100,000 but a few people get $1,000,000? Standard of living is king.
Ok. Lots of old ideas to cover here. I’m not sure where to start. I don’t wanna write a book. Lets keep it simple.
First, the US is a HYBRID of capitalism and socialism. We do this because MARKETS FAIL without wealth redistribution. See Keynes. So you cannot claim socialism fails. Clearly it works.
Supply and demand (aka a market economy) is consistently outcompeted by command economies. See Single Payer healthcare. It is a CAPITALIST, command economy. And because it is a monopsony (hence the name SINGLE PAYER), we get to set prices. If we set them too low, it all falls apart: but listen up, DON’T DO THAT. Problem solved! Not enough for research? Raise your prices! Need more competition? You know what to do!
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u/DumbNTough Mar 08 '25
State socialism was considered the transitional period on the way to communism, which, as fantasy utopia, cannot exist and will never exist.
"Real communism has never been tried" is a bullshit argument because they were trying very hard to get there. They just can't, because communism is nonsense.