Submitted by Maxwellsdemon17 t3_ymq8z6 in philosophy
Reply to comment by TheManInTheShack in "A socialist society has no room for parties or trade unions. [...] The struggle is for the simultaneous abolition of both market and production relations, [...]for the abolition of the differences in the working class brought about by the capitalist division of labor." by Maxwellsdemon17
Hi, appreciate the reply!
You're perhaps right that exact equality is hard to determine, so I should have been more specific and said "≈1" instead of "=1" for the example, however while a perfect equality in trade might be outside of human scope, we do take it as a standard by which we judge a trade. Supply and Demand runs on this equilibrium.
Of course I do not deny that specialization of labor is good, however, such specialization predates capitalism and specialization itself does not ensure profit. No matter how efficient I am at making a product, making more of that product means nothing if there is no more demand for it, and if there is demand, it might not be consistent. Basically increase in supply does not necessarily mean increase in demand. People get full, so they don't need an abundance of corn. Enough trees are cut down so that axes are no longer necessary. A scythe is used only for the harvest and afterwards lays idle. Capitalism's solution in this case would be to introduce planned obsolescence in a product, use cheaper material or labor to make the product, or employ heavy propaganda to convince buyers that they need to buy more even if their needs are already met.
The fundamental difference here is that we have a built-in survival instinct. So we are going to work to ensure that we best we can. Profit creates a buffer so that we aren’t constantly right at the very edge of survival. As long as there’s an economy, there’s going to be a profit motive. And there should be because profit drives people to create things they their people want.
I just don’t think we should be trying to tell people how to live. That’s never ended well. We can educate but we shouldn’t be mandating.
Circumstances and values change over time. I’m sure if we could leap ahead 500 years there would be things we’d recognize and things we wouldn’t. We would be comfortable with some of how society works and very uncomfortable with other parts.
Consider that 500 years ago there were very few professions. Most people were farmers. Today we have an countless things people do to earn a living. It would seem like magic to someone from 500 years ago. It will almost certainly be true in 500 years as well.
I know many are pessimistic about mankind’s future. I’m not. We will adapt and we will wait until a problem is pretty bad before we resolve it but we will resolve it. People are terrible at predicting just about anything long term. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to take climate change seriously for example. We do. But the people who thing we won’t survive to 2100 should study history better. We’ve survived ice ages, the black plague, pandemics (prior to vaccines), wars and more.
It won’t be easy but we will survive.
I agree that we’ve had a decent track record of solving problems. But a history of success is not a predictive model of the future. The overwhelming majority of species that have existed are extinct. We’ve failed to solve many problems but it just takes one apocalyptic event to break the trend.
Absolutely agree. Either way we can’t know which outcome it will be. All we can do is the best we can and hope that’s enough.
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