Socialism

Ashwin Poonawala

As man started living in communities, to contain flagrant behavior of the members, communities started making rules. This is socialism.

Members bring to the table different skills/abilities and needs. For this reason a group is stronger than the sum of all the components. As society grows in size division of labor becomes more prominent. This creates the need for material socialism. Just distribution of wealth within practical limits is the aim of financial socialism. The consideration of practicality stems from the need to provide material and prestige incentives to exceptional skills and abilities. The leaders, defenders, high performers and gifted members have to be given more than the average, after each member is provided for comfortable living.

A community cannot function without some socialism. By definition, socialism is nothing but taking away some individual freedom for the good of the whole community. Even law of land is socialism.

Living beings have two basic concerns, security and comfort. We all have desires for gratification. These desires manifest themselves as greed and fear. Greed and fear are two sides of a coin; greed is the fear of not having enough to last in future, may be even forever. In interfacing others these cause unscrupulous behavior. Corruption is one expression of this.

We all posses a combination of the emotions for gratification and dedication/sacrifice. It is a question of degree. Self awareness (self respect) raises honor in our heart. An honorable person acts scrupulously.

Socialism aims to restrain the unscrupulous behavior of the members. For this, society makes rules, and adds and modifies to suit the changing conditions, and the evolution of mental attitudes of the members. The rules are enforced by the fear of punishment. The part of the community that is entrusted with the tasks, requiring quick and vigilant actions, like safety from outside factors, enforcement of the rules is the government and disaster relief. We call the rules within the authority of the government the laws.

A poor society tends to be closely knit, for the reason, that members get in crunch time frequently, and the approval and support of neighbors is essential. On the other side, affluent societies stress individuality much more. The charitable impulses emerge and flourish much more readily in the closely knit societies; the craving for prestige exerts high emotional pressure. In an intensely individualistic society like ours, we are too dependent on the government to regulate our high tier social behavior.

A society facing raw elements of nature becomes courageous. The need to depend on the neighbors forms just and honorable attitude towards brother members. This is the reason why nomads have hardly ever lost against complacent civilizations. Americans faced the nature for a couple of centuries, starting with Plymouth and James Town. That made us very independent minded and honorable society. The comparatively insignificant American colonies of merely three million people won against the then mighty British Empire, because of self respecting and fiercely independent minded citizens. Top leaders like Washington were supported by hundreds of courageous and dedicated second and third category leaders.

Man is a social animal. In a community, attitudes of the perceived leaders set trends, and the followers reinforce each other’s thinking accordingly, creating euphoria over time. This is how ordinary people gear up for heroic efforts in times of community crisis, like wars. Now big money makers have become roll-models, and have too high an influence on community’s thinking. As a result, now ruthless greed generated by reckless enterprise has become popular. This trend tends to degrade contentment and suppresses creativity of community. When a community starts measuring happiness exclusively by wealth and the associated worldly successes, virus of high level greed-fear combination destroys contentment, which destroys family values. Plentiful haggard looking people walking around with 500-dollar cell phones and 200-dollar shoes can be seen everywhere. Too many of them heedlessly fall in the spider web of our luring credit industry, sinking deeper in misery. And seeking and pursuing quick money-making schemes makes one abhor hard work. Being valuable to society by honest work has gone out of fashion. The rich and the ones craving to become rich have disdain for honest work, while the poor/nearly poor have lost their pride of performance. The number of people who are satisfied with their financial status is small, and is shrinking. The resulting loss of emotional fulfillment leads individuals to flagrant ways of pleasure.

Basically violence and corruption destroy happiness of a society. Fortunately, we have high level of order. But the corruption by the rich in form of manipulation of the government by lobbying and string attached election contributions, and manipulation of the economy is rampant. The subtle influence of the rich on our legislature keeps our tax code from correcting the loop holes, which favor the rich heavily. This keeps the taxes of the less affluent high, and the entitlement programs strained. Look at how processed food is made unhealthy with harmful preservatives and cheap ingredients, the quality of food in chain restaurants has degraded over the years, farm produce is made unhealthy by high-breeding, and the quality of dairy products by rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. This makes the nation fat and unhealthy, requiring more medical attention. On the other side, medical drugs/treatments are marketed at exorbitant prices, and once they are in circulation, our medical drug industry shows instances of suppressing and discouraging immerging cheaper/better remedies, and of suppressing discoveries of dangerous side effects. The common man is getting squeezed from every side. Our automobile industry ignored, or bought and shelved technical innovations, to avoid prerequisite expensive modifications to production processes, loosing against foreign completion in the end, retarding the country’s progress. Even our national sports have turned excessively commercial. Our society is losing from every side.

As globalization advances, the economic gap between the developed and underdeveloped economies of the world keeps shrinking. This is eating away the advantage the rich countries enjoyed. The resulting tightening profit conditions within the rich countries make their big businesses, having had tested the blood of easily rising wealth during the post world-wars era, tend to exploit domestic consumers by low quality products and to shortchange the employees by keeping the remunerations way lower than the actual values rendered by their services, progressively more and more, creating unscrupulous competition for smaller businesses, forcing these ways down the line. This keeps lowering the standard of living of the masses. In the game of greed all involved loose.

Sward used to be greed’s tool to acquire wealth and power. Democracy detached sward from greed. But with unrestrained capitalism, greed uses money as its weapon. Too much concentration of greedy power of wealth in a few hands causes poverty and associated fears for masses. Poverty is the worst form of torture. All fears are detrimental to happiness. Societies, with just distribution of wealth, have been very content and creative, throughout the history.

Our just and honorable dealings with brother members made us reach and strong. Until in the 70s our society had a lot of empathy; our ideals were lofty. After the increasing seepage of greed in our mentality, by now, we have lost a substantial portion of honor. We have drifted much from ‘Us’ to ‘Me’. This is how India lost the nation to the British. We are losing our progress. The need for more intense socialism is rising. We are very effective in controlling violence, but no so in controlling greed.

BC

As man started living in communities, to contain flagrant behavior of the members, communities started making rules. This is socialism. — Ashwin Poonawala

No, this is not socialism.

Isolated individuals who came together to form even a small community quickly discovered that rules are needed to enable ego-driven individuals (normal people are ego-driven) to get along together peaceably. Larger communities discovered that some sort of 'enforcer' was needed to help everyone abide by the rules. We can this enforcer 'government'.

Socialism is one of several economic / political arrangements which can exist in a community. In socialism, labor, operation and direction of the economy is the responsibility of the workers (who are, of course, the vast majority of any community). There are no capitalists in socialism (obviously). Another term for socialism is "economic democracy".

Capitalism is another way of arranging economic activity. In capitalism, the operation and direction of the economy is the responsibility of those who own factories, mines, railroads, etc. The object of capitalism is to extract a maximum of profit (surplus value) from the labor of workers. Capitalists are generally a small proportion of any community. Capitalists hate the idea of workers being in charge.

Capitalism is essentially economic terrorism.

jkop

↪Bitter Crank

You can have economic democracy in a company (owned by its workers) operating in a capitalist market. Likewise you can have a capitalist market in a society ruled by a socialist government (eg China). The market is not the whole of society, just the activity of trading goods and services.

schopenhauer1

Capitalism is another way of arranging economic activity. In capitalism, the operation and direction of the economy is the responsibility of those who own factories, mines, railroads, etc. The object of capitalism is to extract a maximum of profit (surplus value) from the labor of workers. Capitalists are generally a small proportion of any community. Capitalists hate the idea of workers being in charge. — Bitter Crank

Capitalist-enthusiasts would try to say that the workers, by saving, smart investments, inventiveness, and gaining business acumen, can become capitalists themselves. I am not saying this is what ordinarily happens, but this is the incentive that is often given as justification. People who defend very free-market capitalism would say that, as long as the opportunities to save, invest, be inventive, and gain business acumen are available, the people with the best ideas, business know how, and inventiveness will deservedly rise to the top.

Of course, capitalism produces inefficiencies which even capitalism has to recognize- monopolies, poor opportunities to rise to the top, and people on the bottom getting priced out of a decent living situation. Unfortunately, capitalism seems to work on supply/demand models that don't take into account the fact that human preferences don't necessarily match what is economically "efficient" or most suitable for their situation.. People on the bottom tend not to lie down, play dead, and provide themselves with economic austerity regimes. Rather, people want as much as they can get- the most luxuries, the most most comfort, with or without the means to do so.

Hanover

Capitalism is essentially economic terrorism. — Bitter Crank

Putting a concise summary at the conclusion of your post was helpful. Thank you.

ernestm

If you wish to consider socialism, the first step is to consider its origin in Marxism. While Karl Marx (1818-1883) favored ideas of communism, Marxism itself does not refer to communism as a standalone ideology, but instead as a theory of social evolution, derived from Hegel's methodology of dialectical idealism.

Hegel himself attributes the methodology to Kant's transcendental theories of reason, but expounds in practice to extraordinary depth. According to Kant's method, any process of reason has three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A thesis, simply by its statement, gives rise to a reaction that contradicts or negates the thesis. The tension between thesis and antithesis creates a conflict in reason which is resolved by their synthesis.

However, Hegel observed the synthesis is itself another thesis too, which gives rise to another antithesis, and another synthesis. Hegel therefore observes that a dialectic can start with any premise, and through the process of reasonable argument, create a series of rational deductions and contradictions which, in the process of their continued resolution, continually refines the idea of truth.

Marx extended Hegel's idea to apply to political evolution in a society, giving it the name dialectical materialism. Each formulation of a political system is a thesis for the best way to rule, which by its existence creates an antithetical movement that objects to that political system. If the society can evolve to synthesize both views, then it continues; if not, then the society collapses due to internal strife and failure, or due to rebellion. In this reformulation of Hegelianism, Marx converts the ideas of conceptual evolution into practical, or material terms. In his typical contrarian manner, Marx dogmatically indicates how his system applies the Hegelian dialectic of thought to political systems with time causing the movement to synthesis and subsequent thesis/antithesis, rather than empirical reason.

"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought."
Das Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx (Hamburg, 1887)

While posing his methodology as antithetical to Hegel, he still deduces the stages of political evolution rationally, so the system is still known as dialectical materialism.

Socialism as denial of property as a right

The above prefix to Marxist theories of socialism might appear unnecessary, but it was in fact this approach that led Marx to invent new political ideas, for which he simply asked "What is the underlying thesis of all Western government?" To which the answer is, almost so obvious as to be ignored, "A right to own private property has been assumed in all Western government." Therefore, in considering an antithesis to Western government that could fix its failures, Marx is logically led to conclude:

"Denial of the individual right to own property is the correct antithesis to failed Western government. When governments fail due the massive accrual of property by an elite privileged minority, perhaps the removal of rights to property altogether is the necessary change in the social contract which can rebalance the society. Core to Marxism is the idea of a ruling bourgeoisie that over time, exists in an escalating state of conflict: In its rational form, it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time, also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary."
Das Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx (Hamburg, 1887)

From this, Marx concludes, that Aristotle's idea of Democracy as the least-worse alternative is simply one view in a continual spectrum. As a democracy evolves, those in power simply continue to accrue power, due to the acknowledged corruptions in the system. Eventually, the antithetical forces rebel against it, and another political system is put in its place. That is to say, contrary to common views on Marxism, no particular political system is any better than any other.

ernestm

In my last comment, I summarized the idea of divine law taking precedence over human law, therefore justifying terrorism. In much of Islam that remains true, but there does exist some ideas in Islam through which consolidation could be possible.

The Maturidi school, the second largest school of Sunni theology, appears to posit the existence of a form of human law. Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (Uzbekistan, 853–944) stated that the human mind could know of the existence of God and the major forms of 'good' and 'evil' without the help of revelation. Al-Maturidi gives the example of stealing, which is known to be evil by reason alone due to man's working hard for his property. Killing, fornication, and drinking alcohol were all 'evils' the human mind could know of according to al-Maturidi.

The concept of Istislah in Islamic law superficially appears to be human law without divine guidance. However, whereas natural law deems good what is self-evidently good, according as it tends towards the fulfilment of the person, istislah calls good whatever is connected to one of five "basic goods". Al-Ghazali (Iraq and Syria, 1058–1111) abstracted these "basic goods" from the legal precepts in the Qur'an and Sunnah as religion, life, reason, lineage and property (some add also honor).
Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (Syria, 1292–1350) also posited that humans can discern between 'great sins' and good deeds without divine guidance. Major sins, such as alcohol and murder, can be understood as wrong by process of reason.

However, in Sunni theology, the Maturidi school remains smaller and less powerful than the Ash'aris school. The Ash'aris state that the unaided human mind is unable to determine if something is good or evil, lawful or unlawful, moral or immoral, without the direct aid of divine revelation. So although there are some who argue for an ability to understand law, rather than simply submit to it, it still remains a minority in Islam altogether.

Since that time, most Islamic culture still places little value in property ownership. In the lands around Israel, the Arab tribes never even created land deeds, and so when Israel started building settlements onto their grazing land, had no legal recourse to defend their land that Western cultures could recognize. This lack of concern for material wealth has continued somewhat to the current day. For example, when Westerners learned of the elaborate palaces of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it was frequently claimed that he was extorting wealth to the detriment of his population. In turn, the Arabs find Western infatuation with material possessions difficult to understand, and most would far rather live in peace than put in war in order to force them to have rights that they don't really care about that much.

Recently there has been much political discourse in understanding how Islam thinks. From Islam's perspective, what God gives he takes away. We are but a brief speck of light. From dust to dust we travel, sparkling a brief time, during which we simply make the most of what we have--hoping the bombs fall somewhere else, over which the majority have no control. Of course, there are a few military maniacs who can easily exploit the general ignorance. And the ignorance persists much as it was a thousand years ago, there being no reason to seek more, when all is in the hands of a distant and detached but all-powerful God. And that is how most Islam thinks.

mcdoodle

If you wish to consider socialism, the first step is to consider its origin in Marxism. — ernestm

Some of us are socialists, and are likely to take umbrage at this. We have been lumbered with accusations about 'Marxism' all our lives. Well, we soldier on.

I am one of the Other Socialists who find their origins in Saint-Simon and Owenite utopians, a tradition which opposed the authoritarianism of Marx and his friends at every turn in the 19th century, joined in the turn-of-the-19th-20th-centuries move to involve the working-class in democracy, pursued socialism through trade unionism for much of the 20th century, found a new lease of life with the wave of socialist feminism in the 1970's...and here we are, still agreeing to disagree. Still mutual after all these years.

ernestm

↪mcdoodle

I think you are talking to someone else. That's nothing at all to do with what I wrote, which is the philosophical derivation of socialism in the tradition of Western empiricism, not its historical forms.

mcdoodle

I think you are talking to someone else. That's nothing at all to do with what I wrote, which is the philosophical derivation of socialism in the tradition of Western empiricism, not its historical forms. — ernestm

I was talking to you, Ernest. I have read some of your website, and the breadth of your reading is amazing, but I am well-versed in this corner of learning, the history of socialism, and so I am confident that you are mistaken in saying:

If you wish to consider socialism, the first step is to consider its origin in Marxism. — ernestm

Socialism began to be used as a term, before Marx was active, in French circles (BC has just mentioned Fourier in another thread) and British circles, where Owenist 'utopianism' survived the repression of the 1790's - when the first mass working-class meetings were held, as documented in E P Thompson's 'The making of the English working class' - to establish communities in New Lanark, and later in north America.

The conflicts that broke up the First International, and bedevilled the Second International, were at least partly because some, the anarchists and syndicalists, plus the ex-Chartists and Owenites, opposed the centralism and authoritarianism of Marx and his allies. Proudhon for instance, in saying 'Property is theft', actually regarded State property as theft too, he advocated mutualist organisation.

Later the divide was more clearly between those who became 'socialists' and those who became 'Communists', though this wasn't as clear-cut as one might think till the 20th century, since for instance for a period from 1870 it was German Marxists who proposed parliamentarianism, so one shouldn't imagine the Marxian influence was entirely authoritarian.

This is all to point to socialism as a material practice, as neo-Marxists themselves would acknowledge in their histories. There may be a attractively simple scholastic line that leads neatly from Kant through Hegel and Feueurbach to Marx, but this line in the history of ideas has only a tangential relationship to 'socialism'.

ernestm

Well., As I said, I was describing the philosophical derivation of socialism in western empiricism, not its history

Glahn

↪ernestm

So ... a few things.

1. Marx distinguishes his method from Hegel's in many ways. He is clear, for instance, that for him the method of scientific discovery (i.e. the method by which we come to knowledge) is to be distinguished quite sharply from the method of presentation (i.e. the method by which we present that knowledge to others). This is a variation on the Aristotelian and Thomist idea that what is first in the order of being is not what is first in the order of knowing. Marx acknowledges that his method of presentation derives from that of Hegel, and he gives due credit to the accomplishments of the Hegelian system, granting its many shortcomings. But his method of discovery differs significantly from that of Hegel. Marx is a naturalist. His claims are not "dogmatic" or "rationalist." Every empirical claim in Capital (i.e. all those made after the initial excursus, at the start of Vol. 1, on the logic of the commodity form, which establishes the basic conceptual framework employed in what follows) is supported by appeal to evidence. No one, having read and understood Capital--having worked through the chapters of detailed attention to English state-administered labor surveys, for instance--will claim that its method is dogmatic. This is a claim made only by people who have not read the book. The notion that the dialectic form plays a constructive role is an artifact of Engels's sometimes clumsy appropriation of Marx's thinking, of the former's own forays into nature-philosophy (as in his Dialectics of Nature), and of the Bolshevik vulgarization of Marx's work.

2. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which is a vulgarization of Fichtean and Hegelian ideas, does not figure in Kant's thinking. I gather you are confusing two Kantian ideas. In the Antinomy of Pure Reason section of the First Critique, Kant treats a series of pairs of contrasting metaphysical conclusions, decision between which cannot be made by reason alone because each follows validly from true premises. His proposed resolution, however, is not to synthesize the opposed theses, but to dissolve the tension between them through the postulation of regulative ideals. Separately, in the transcendental deduction of the pure categories of the understanding (especially in the A-deduction), Kant treats of various syntheses which are involved in the logical movement from the pure, non-cognitive manifold of sensation to the conceptually thick perceptual datum we encounter in ordinary experience. Such talk also arises earlier, already in the Transcendental Aesthetic. These two notions, however,--antinomy and synthesis--are not related in the way you suppose them to be.

3. Fichte employs something like this model, but not in the rigid way you suppose. Hegel did not use the phraseology, and it aptly captures only the first few steps of his Science of Logic. Marx's few remarks on the topic of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model are critical, as for instance in his early book on Proudhon's vulgarization of Hegel, where he mocks Proudhon's employment of the model. It is unclear whether Marx himself believed at the time that Hegel employed the model. But it is very clear that by the time he revisited Hegel's Science of Logic while he wrote the Grundrisse--well before completing the first published edition of Vol. 1 of Capital--he had adopted a more sophisticated understanding of Hegel's method as involving a movement from abstract or one-sided conceptualization to concrete or all-sided conceptualization. This movement can be compared to the movement from a simple physical theory of (say) the behavior of gasses, which treats only of their behavior under idealized conditions, employing a multitude of ceteris paribus clauses, to a more all-encompassing theory, integrated with other physical theories, able not only to predict the behavior of gasses, but also to explain (in more fundamental terms) why gasses behave as they do. It is this method that Marx inherits from Hegel.

4. Marx's positive program was not concerned with "the denial of property as a right." Nor was it concerned with rights at all. Marx's principal contribution was a critique of political economy, bringing out the many odd suppositions of the classical Smithian and Ricardian tradition, and identifying a number of key structural contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. He identifies some key tensions in some of the central elements of the capitalist economic formation--in particular the category of relative surplus value, which concerns the intensification of surplus production through machine-assisted labor--which went unnoticed by previous economists. Marx identifies talk of rights, like talk of law, the good, and other ideological notions, as byproducts of underlying economic relations. And he believes that economic transformation--even of the revolutionary kind--owes its possibility and its appearance in history to economic prefiguration. Thus, though his legacy was co-opted by the authoritarian populist managerial socialism of the Bolsheviks, and from there exported to much of the Eastern world, Marx was of a thoroughly anti-populist and (basically) anti-socialist spirit. His advocacy for centralizing programs in the First International days was even then motivated by concern for economic progress, etc. This line in Marx extended, at its extreme, to support for liberal free trade and explicit opposition to socialist efforts. This because he believed that the development, within capitalism, of basic structural and class-centric antagonisms through increasing automation (as well as the intensification of labor time and ever-increasing production-side inequality between working and ruling classes) was the only way forward to a world in which large portions of the human population are not forced into harmful and alienating labor. He tended to dismiss both social democratic solutions to distribution-side inequality and utopian socialist proposals for immediate revolution as hapless instruments of the existing order, obstructing progress toward the next. For an example of explicit endorsement of free trade, see his public address to the Democratic Association of Brussels in 1848: http://marx.eserver.org/1848-free.trade/ftrade.speech.txt

ernestm

↪Glahn

1. Yes, that's pretty standard stuff.

2. That's actually what I said. Kant was the first to make the triangle, and Marx was the first to point out that the synthesis itself creates another thesis.

3. I do have some studying of Fichte to do, yes.

4. As Marx was not concerned with rights, it's rather obvious his position did not include mention of them. What others have suggested is that the 'evolution' is actually cyclic, using the antithesis to Marx of adding property as a right to complete the cycle.

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