The trouble with socialism

Karl Marx saw socialism as a transitory stage between capitalism and communism, with automation leading to a surplus so people had enough time to enjoy whatever they wanted.

Communism promises more individual freedom with production democratically regulated and all resources publicly held. People would be free to indulge themselves as they desired, so there would be no need for money. It is clear that something like socialism would be needed to transition to such a society, as currently most have been propagandised into being far too selfish to be willing to self-regulate their desires enough to not lead to rampant resource usage and goods accumulation that would quickly bankrupt the resource capacity of the earth.

It is the mechanics of the transitioning of our thinking that is the key to how quickly we could manage it. It would necessitate a lot of what would be propaganda reinforcing what attitudes are required to keep the process under control. The great experiments in implementing communism have all resulted in a lot of propaganda leading to heavy-handed control of those societies by despots. But they were all transitioning from typically corruption-ridden autocratic societies straight to communism, without really giving people to adapt time to adjust their thinking.

Instead, the thinking required was imposed upon them, which of course was too tempting for those in charge to keep hold of that means of population control. Basically, populations used to being controlled will continue to allow themselves to be controlled, and so a new set of despots took over control of their societies. So the theory of what a communist society should look like never came to be realised in practice.

What needs more exposition is who makes the decisions about what to produce, and the feedback loop that ensures that what is produced is in line with what people want, rather than just what the leaders think that the society needs. Communism is supposed to give people a lot of leisure time, particularly by extensive use of automation. All the so-called communist command-economy states where the leaders chose what was produced absolutely failed to lead to leisure-based societies. Instead, people were exploited and over-worked, with only the leaders getting the real benefits.

How would we prevent such exploitation? How do we maximise personal choices? These are the exact questions we have to have practical answers to if we are to evolve our current societies to be more humane. We need real explanations that layout the mechanics of operation. We can work on these over time, but then we have to have some ideal to work towards. However, that has to be much more than just a simplistic piece of propaganda that assumes that having a name and a bunch of vague promises is good enough. Our current ones of those are failing us.

Traditional socialism is seen as not fit for purpose as a model for societies to follow, but what can be changed about it to make it work better for all?

Modern socialists have tended to find more equitable ways of sharing control of resources, while incorporating our modern aspirations of democracy and social mobility. Fewer now adhere to the clear class structural division lines of Marxist socialism while trying to live up to its ideals.

One of the more recent models to address the lack of democracy in the workplace is worker cooperatives, with elected representatives on their boards and managers hired and evaluated by the workers to run them. These have been proven to scale from quite small to tens of thousands of workers. They don't tend to have excessive CEO salaries nor outsource their production to cheap labour havens overseas to save costs. These would appear to offer the best balance between flexibility and worker welfare.

Certainly, they appear to be the best model for transitioning away from a purely autocratic capitalist model, and any business could transition to them with support from government legislation that encourages and facilitates workers having the first option of buying a company when offered up for sale. Getting people away from businesses that exploit them is the first step in allowing people to have more autonomy in how they want to live their lives.

What usually occurs when people get access to a lot of resources is they find a use for them, with more resources leading to more grandiose projects. Both capitalism and socialism tend to lead to resource hogging by those who can bully, cajole, press-gang or otherwise rope others into their schemes, taking them away from their own interests or projects. This has been what has led to the great white elephants that have dogged both systems.

There needs to be more accountability to prevent such excesses. If everyone is to get to indulge their own ideas, then there needs to be limits to prevent hogging. It comes down to acknowledging that small projects can be just as enthralling as large ones, but without the needless angst. Government has a role to play in this, and things such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) can allow people the time to nurture pet projects that may lead to business opportunities, or not! It could just be for learning, and that is fine.

Whether we could actually get to a utopia like that envisioned as communism is not known. We are thoroughly indoctrinated to be too selfish for our own or society's good, but a lot of the elements that were envisioned as being necessary to getting there are already with us. There may be other society structures that will work just as well for us while not destroying the earth. We will probably be in a hybrid society for a long time, and an evolving version of that may well be our perfect society as we might converge on any one system that works for all.

A core part of any economic system is the right balance between private and public ownership.

We all individually have possessions that we want to be our own, just because we do not want to have to negotiate with others about when they can be used. These are personal use items like for grooming, communication or entertainment. With every level of grouping of people, there can be items that are shared between members, or they collectively use, but are only for use by the group. This gives individuals and groups some autonomy to control their own lives without having to get permission from others. Without that autonomy, people can feel too controlled, and they would be right.

This is the first hurdle with any economic system that centralises control of a society's resources on a macro scale, as it can easily be open to corruption, or at worst, autocracy. Unfortunately, under colonialism, the native populations lost control of their own lands and were often enslaved as little more than serfs. Even after so-called independence, their economies are still beholden to the corporations of those former colonial masters, with the native populations still largely without any equity in the land or other resources, so they are still being exploited.

If a socialist government gets elected in such exploited states, there will be attempts to wrest control of resources back from the exploiting corporations, typically by nationalising them, making them publicly owned. That means that the government now controls them, and that typically mean the leaders control them. Again, this is a possible point of susceptibility to corruption, or the whims of the leaders and whatever ideology they subscribe to. The best balance is to make them worker cooperatives with boards elected by them with government representatives.

It is when getting to the land that there can be a variance of how ownership is specified. Many post-colonial efforts have focused upon distributing land to individuals, but depending upon what scale the produce from the land has been managed, worker cooperatives might be a better ownership model. It is important that those who have to live with whatever is to be decided are equitably part of the decision process. There should also be paths to changing models between individual and collective operations, just to allow changing to more optimal production scaling to respond to market forces.

While the post-colonial state of countries may seem to favour drastic actions, and much of the population may not seem to be ready for assuming more responsibility for what they produce, that is not an excuse for a government to take complete control with vague promises of later equity. There may be a need to make some macro-level decisions to wrest control of society-wide resources away from their exploiters, but that should be applied less the closer the control gets to the fewer actually affected by that control.

That is, it is better to err on the side of more control by those directly affected by the scope of the operation than control by the few over many, just because the sense of ownership, and thus a successful outcome, is more likely to result. People can optimise for their needs better if they can control what directly affects them. When governments or corporations have retained complete control of how resources are distributed and used, individuals have usually been locked into busy lives with few options to change their own life outcomes.

The key choices when transitioning from an exploitative economic system are about how much autonomy is given to individuals and each level of grouping so they can plan their own lives, with minimal government interference in what should be personal decisions. Governments must provide a safe, supportive and equitable environment for them to thrive, while making sure that there are consistent standards of education and reasonable resource usage so that everybody has a chance to do what they can make of their lives without interfering with others trying to do the same.