Quote Originally Posted by Monty3038 View Post
So, I'm reading some definitions of a socialist economic structure and I see that this collective ownership type structure is based upon prodcution to meet goals, not to make profits. While I see the point of this, isn't this a bit hard to judge, as you would have a harder time adjusting I would think to forces beyond your control... examples like weather, wars, etc. come to mind...
Keep in mind that these are archaic and strict definitions. Compared to many other things, socialism has been so unpopular, and this has effected into poorly developed theory and such.

Central planning is but one small, yet also somewhat unnecessary attribute of socialism. Also, US has some forms of central planning anyways.

I also see that the goals appear to be production of only what is necessary, eliminating overproduction and 'luxuries', which while effective at keeping a society alive, how would that affect the morale of the general workers, as well as those who have the means to design/improve production...
Yeah this is incredibly archaic. Any society that does that in the name of anything is doing it wrong

Another question, is there a society that you feel comes closest to this socialistic economic model?
Not exactly sure. The best so far would probably be places like Sweden, Norway, or Finland. They have been the most consistently well run economies for the last 50ish years. I wouldn't use any nation as a good socialistic example, partly because it's so poorly understood.

And one more, in a socialistic economy, how do you motivate the workers? How do you encourage production and growth? The exploration of new ideas, etc.?
See that's the thing, socialistic philosophy says nothing that discourages this. Socialism has been so vilified that even many of the academic definitions miss the point.

For example, you can have socialism in private enterprise easy peasy. Instead of incredibly top heavy corporations, more egalitarian corporations can be considered socialist. Some excellent examples of this are found in small business.

Here's socialism: instead of a small number of owners who reap all the profits and make all the decisions while the workers are merely variations of servants for hire, a socialistic enterprise will have some level of collective ownership and decision making processes, and they ALL have very strong profit and managerial incentives. Essentially, people who work for a corporation have ownership stake in that corporation. Instead of as many of the profits going to the guys on the very top like they're feudal lords, profits are more evenly distributed. This reflects deservedness much better too. Our current megacorp paradigm rewards executives for being helped by luck, while the people who make the products are really just mildly expensive slaves.


A very important point, though, is that research shows that profit incentives promoting production is probably a lie. Studies have been done on examining how production changes based on stock options, and they haven't found improvements. I saw those studies a long time ago so I don't remember exactly, but I think that some of the results were that corporations with higher profit incentives actually functioned more poorly than some with lower incentives.

Humans are not capitalists. Just because there are a few greedy cumstain sociopaths at the top who fuck over the competition doesn't mean that the rest of us are like that. Most humans care much more about being friendly and having a good community than doing what it takes to stand on top of a pyramid made of his kinfolk


If I were to make an socioeconomic system it would probably be something I call Capital Moralism. Resource acquisition is important, but it's not the only thing. We make the mistake of thinking it is the only thing, and that effects into major moral indiscretions which are destructive to health, happiness, and living standards.



Let's assume that there are other motivations, and greed is the primary motivator for 20% of the people. Let's say the other 80% believe in some sort of nationalism (probably the wrong word) and want to work for their country...

How do you get that 20% working? Or do you just let them be idle? And then, do they get the same benefits as the 80% working?

What other motivators are there out there? Sure I'll shovel my neighbors walk to help out and be a good neighbor... but when it comes to feeding my family, and wanting my family to have a good life... how do you define that in a way that everyone feels they have what they want out of life and then can use other motivation?

I'm having a hard time explaining it, but once your basic needs are met by the 'collective', what motivates you to do more, to improve the 'collective'?

I partially answered this earlier in the post, but I'll add that humans are much different than pure profit incentives suggest. You could say that 99.9% of who we are biologically has nothing to do with individual pursuit of wealth. We're far more community oriented, compassionate, happiness comes from things mostly removed from profits, and just so many other things.

Also, in your hypothetical society, people wouldn't work less or more by much than they do now. We're not robots who care only about profits. People who work hard in a profit society will probably do the same in a non-profit society. Same with people who are lazy. We just put waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much credence on profit incentives. It's all just fucking propaganda pumped into us by the few people who are actually like that anyways.

Capital has only been around for about 1% of the existence of the human species anyways. I say we don't deny who we really are in pursuit of this new artificial construct especially since it has shown us to actually drive some pretty horrible inhumanities