Re: Socialism: A Hypothesis of Working Conditions

First off,
All the societies where socialism has worked that I can think of are also
theocracies. The Inca empire is the one I know the best, but ancient Egypt
also seems to have been run this way along with others I am less sure of.

The first example that comes to my mind is the Priest-Kingdom of
Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Babylon etc.). The entire population
worked, most of them in the fields growing barley. The King was also
the High Priest, assisted by a caste of priests, essentially the
authorities. The entire harvest was property of the king, and there
was a quota that (theoretically) had to be filled. Each citizen
received a daily ration of barley from the king. So it's sort of like
100% tax rate for automatic social aid / benefits. In practice, the
quotas often could not be met due to bad harvests, natural disasters
etc. - then the king would proclaim a "general amnesty for tax
offenders" as you might call it. He had no choice but to do that,
because the official quota was based on the optimum yield, so you
can't ever balance it out with an above-quota harvest.

Anyway, enough with the past, history is bunk, let's look at the
future:
I would like to look at this matter from a slightly different angle.
Not "can socialism work" but "can capitalism work in the future?"

Firstly, I consider it impossible that a system entirely focused on
short-term profit regardless of the consequences can _ever_ develop
into a spacefaring society. That's where the so-called neo-capitalism
(as exercised by present-day corporations) can't work out: on the one
hand you're dependent on growth, on the other hand you don't want to
let the motor of growth, i.e. the work force, participate in the
benefits. Today we see this behaviour in corporations with 10-digit
annual profits firing ten thousand employees to increase their profit
from 1 billion to 1.1 billion. This _cannot_ work out in the long run,
because the corporations are ruining their own customer base.

I'm calling this "neo capitalism" because it was not always like this.
The USA for example had its Golden Age roughly from the 50s through
70s, when there was a broad middle class with houses, cars, freezers,
tvs and so forth. Today the US poverty rate is the highest of all
western/industrial nations. Thousands of people lose their homes while
The Man keeps stuffing his own pocket and proceeds to rob a pension
fund as he's about it.
As I said, it can't go on like this for long, or the entire society
will collapse.

For this reason I believe that in the long run, only an economy of
participation can function and lead us to SF-like progress. Of course,
the devil will continue to crap on the largest heap, i.e. money will
come to money. It's definitely possible that traditionally powerful
regions (like Western Europe, North America) continue to exploit
weaker regions (like Africa) as cheap source of resources. Production
however will have to be anchored in the rich countries for
protectionist reasons.

I can't say how exactly a functioning economic system will be set up,
but it will probably come down to the available work split up among
everybody, resulting in short working hours for everyone at reasonable
pay. Corporations can't be allowed to amass disproportionate profits
but must be required to split most of their profit among the
employees. It does the economy no good when ten thousand people can't
afford food for every ultra-rich who couldn't ever spend just a tenth
of his wealth if he tried.

If, for example, an increasing portion of the work is done by robots,
it would be necessary to distribute the money saved among those who
have less work due to the robot. It cannot be tolerated that the
corporation keeps the difference. The money has to go to the people so
that they can consume goods. Robots don't consume goods.

Note that I'm not saying that these fundamental changes WILL come to
pass. In fact I highly doubt it. I rather expect humanity to drown in
its own greed. But one can dream.
.

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