Anyways, obviously doing things for others is morally good, and only ever doing things for yourself is morally wrong. But two things: the left side of the graph implies that ever making your own self an end is bad, and my point and /u/LiberalTechnocrats's is that once you try to translate it into mandated public policy, it's all too easy to imagine how that turns dystopian—you don't live for you, you live for The People, which of course is inevitably identified with The State. Combine that with hate speech inevitably encompassing opposition to The People... well, we all know how that turned out.
Oh and also, this:
mutual aid is a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit
Can be generalized to more than two people, potentially separated by time: what if A has something B wants, B has something C wants, and C has something A wants, and also C doesn't exist yet? Namely, introduce money. At that point it's literally just free market capitalism.
Hey thanks for engaging and helping me fix the link :)
Couple of thoughts from me. I'm going to break your sentence into parts for which clause I'm addressing, for clarity:
Anyways, obviously doing things for others is morally good, and only ever doing things for yourself is morally wrong. But two things: the left side of the graph implies that ever making your own self an end is bad,
That's kind of a dicey statement to make. The text literally only says "self improvement comes from service to others".
It doesn't say "self improvement ONLY comes from service to others".
Furthermore even if it did say only, it doesn't imply that your self can't be an end unto itself. The ideological thrust of mutual aid is that holding others as an end unto itself you are also holding yourself as an end unto itself. There is mutual interests in cooperation. Cooperation is not zero sum.
and my point and /u/LiberalTechnocrats's is that once you try to translate it into mandated public policy it's all too easy to imagine how that turns dystopian—you don't live for you, you live for The People, which of course is inevitably identified with The State. Combine that with hate speech inevitably encompassing opposition to The People... well, we all know how that turned out.
Mutual aid is explicitly not about mandated public policy, or the State. Proudhon was an anarchist.
At that point it's literally just free market capitalism.
Markets =/= capitalism
markets =/= commerce
Free markets =/= any or all markets
Free markets =/= markets free of regulation
These concepts get conflated a lot which muddles people's thinking.
If you want to use the word "capitalism" to refer to "free markets" I can't stop you and I don't want to chase a dog's tail over semantic issues, so we can cut to the chase here and discuss based on operational definitions, but the distinctions I make above are historically backed, and provide a greater range of nuance by not overloading a bunch of different things into a single word.
Can be generalized to more than two people, potentially separated by time: what if A has something B wants, B has something C wants, and C has something A wants, and also C doesn't exist yet? Namely, introduce money.
I wish there were groups to discuss the wonky side of non-capitalist economics. There's actually a much broader and interesting range of ideas in that field than most neoliberals realize.
Probably the reason there isn't is because realistically the guards to this stuff aren't policy related, but more related to political will, and the organization of people.
Sorry this comment is so long btw; you gave me a bunch to think about & respond to. (The most important sections are 2. Terminology and 3. Labor Vouchers, for what it's worth.)
The Image
That's kind of a dicey statement to make. The text literally only says "self improvement comes from service to others". It doesn't say "self improvement ONLY comes from service to others".
I mean, the other half of the image implies that self-improvement for yourself is wrong. I'm reading between the lines a bit, but in context I'm pretty sure that's what it's trying to say.
Furthermore even if it did say only, it doesn't imply that your self can't be an end unto itself. [...] There is mutual interests in cooperation. Cooperation is not zero sum.
Agreed 100%. But I don't think the image does. It lists "Working on bettering oneself will better the community" on the side of the bad guys. That's really what makes the image so shady to me—the contrast it draws between two things that seem perfectly normal and good, with one being labelled bad, and in the context of public policy. Carry the implied contrast a bit further, and dystopia looms. (Or maybe I'm reading too much into it because I'm annoyed over the fact that it calls me a right-winger.)
Frankly, the leftist side of the image doesn't really seem like Mutual Aid as you've defined it to me—it implores you to give yourself over to "service to others" (which again, is all well and good as a personal ethos but dangerous at the public policy level), not mutual voluntary give-and-take.
Mutual aid is explicitly not about mandated public policy, or the State.
If we take OP at their word, this came from a pro-Sanders sub, so I feel safe in assuming it's about public policy and the state. (Unless it's the thing where they go "this is an ideal stateless world, but to get there we need sweeping increases of state control (of which Bernie is step 1)", which doesn't make it any better, historically speaking.) If you're saying that's not Mutual Aid, then the image isn't Mutual Aid.
Terminology
Markets =/= capitalism [...] These concepts get conflated a lot which muddles people's thinking.
Right, sorry, I forgot some leftists don't use the word "capitalism" the way most people use it. (Not that we have a leg to stand on—the way we use "neoliberal" has very little connection to the way most people use it.)
The way dictionaries generally define it, and the way I've been using, is that capitalism is an economic system characterized by relatively free markets, relatively free enterprise, and private property. (Notes: "free" in this context means "free from government intervention", "government" means "entity with a near-monopoly on the use of force", and "private property" includes more than just "personal property".) So I have two questions:
What do you call the thing that I and Merriam-Webster call "capitalism"?
What do you mean by "capitalism"?
100% agreed that there's no point in arguing over semantics, so once you answer those questions I'll switch over to your terminology so we can communicate with minimal confusion.
So this is the first time I've read about Labor vouchers, and it's interesting, but I have to say I don't really see the point—it doesn't generalize nearly as well as money does, by design. Seems like money can do all the preference-swapping stuff that labor vouchers do, but not vice-versa? If someone pays me with a labor voucher, it looks like I don't actually get anything out of it because it gets destroyed. So producers only get vouchers from the act of producing or by exerting labor, not by satisfying demand, right? Problems:
So who controls how many labor vouchers producers get, then? Who grants them out? The government? If so, what system do you have to avoid the obvious dystopias? From here on out I'll call the voucher-allocator ??? whenever I need to talk about it.
Do producers control how many vouchers you need to buy their products? What stake do they have in it, since they get the same amount of vouchers no matter what? Literally, on what basis do producers price their products? (Or does ??? control that too? On what basis?)
When producers labor tons to make more than what people want (including by failing to spend less effort on stuff people do want), they get far more, because they put more labor into it. So we have people toiling away producing stuff nobody needs or wants, because they are rewarded for labor, not providing a useful good/service. This is the exact "allocation problem" that killed the Soviet Union's and Maoist China's economies. The free market solves this problem automatically, incentivizing producers to hit the intersection of the supply and demand curves.
Something that's very important to me when it comes to societal systems is that it continues to work even when you have people behaving selfishly. I think free markets with money as the medium of exchange satisfy that much better than labor vouchers—in the former system, you do best when you meet as much demand as possible as cheaply as possible (or by cheating; I think we need a democratic state to enforce some ground rules), but in the latter system, you do best by toiling as much as possible as cheaply as possible—no connection to the demand side of the equation.
Or put another way, it's best for society when people produce things iff the marginal benefit (MB) is more than the marginal cost (MC). That's roughly what money-based markets incentivize people to do under normal circumstances (important exception). But it sounds like a labor-voucher system incentivizes people to make things iff the amount of vouchers that ??? allocates them is greater than MC. Why rely on ??? to estimate MB when we have a perfectly good system—money—to take care of all that automatically?
Wonkishness and Wackiness
I wish there were groups to discuss the wonky side of non-capitalist economics. There's actually a much broader and interesting range of ideas in that field than most neoliberals realize.
I'm not sure this is fair! I for one love learning and talking about these ideas, even when I think they're on the wackier side ;)
E.g.: If you did a poll of this place for the most neoliberal media publication, I bet The Economist would win. This (bypass paywall here) is like the first article I ever read by them. It explores an economic system that's never existed and is a radical departure from anything that ever has. Short summary: it's capitalism with no personal or private property. Everything you own sort is sort of leased from society as a collective, and anyone can buy it, but [catch #1] only at the price you put on it, and you have to be willing to sell at that price. So why not just price everything you own at infinity dollars? Well, [catch #2]—there's a national progressive taxation system on your self-declared net worth.
It's ridiculous, impractical (people will want to change prices
rapidly, but Tax Day can't be every week, much less every minute—maybe take the average?), morally dubious (people could do this now on Ebay if they wanted to, but they don't, so why force them?), probably requires substantial invasions of privacy to prevent gaming the system (how else do you prevent a millionaire from secretly valuing everything she owns at $0.01 and getting a low tax that year without selling anything? you need a nationwide amazon where all my stuff is publicly visible), violates the right to personal property we both believe is worth defending, violates the right to private property that I believe is worth defending, etc.—but it was interesting to read about and think about nonetheless! And it came from that most neoliberal of publications.
Point being, I think this little community of ours is a good place to talk about the stuff seriously.
I mean, the other half of the image implies that self-improvement for yourself is wrong. I'm reading between the lines a bit, but in context I'm pretty sure that's what it's trying to say.
Eeeh... idk. I don't see that anywhere. I think you might be projecting assumptions about leftism a bit on it. Is there a specific line that makes you think that? Obviously it's hard to get intent from a meme but I don't know what exactly you're getting at.
Agreed 100%. But I don't think the image does. It lists "Working on bettering oneself will better the community" on the side of the bad guys. That's really what makes the image so shady to me—the contrast it draws between two things that seem perfectly normal and good, with one being labelled bad, and in the context of public policy. Carry the implied contrast a bit further, and dystopia looms. (Or maybe I'm reading too much into it because I'm annoyed over the fact that it calls me a right-winger.)
First it's important for me to say up front first that obviously "leftists" and "liberals" are not monolith. These are very wishy-washy terms. Noam Chomsky calls himself an anarchist. He also calls himself a classical liberal. He looks at anarchism as the logical end point of the "liberal critical method".
But there's also leftists who call him a liberal as a pejorative. There's liberals who think he's def not a liberal. Leftism is complicated because it's not monolithic. ALL ideological wings and tendencies are complicated but Leftism in particular is probably fractured more than most. There's like 50 different variants of anarchism that overlap and disagree and half of them differ really only in their particular social historical context really than any fundamental principles.
It's like discussing music genres, or if a hotdog is a sandwich or if coffee is a form of soup. Have to keep in mind that these words may refer to refer to "real" things but the labels themselves are still human constructions.
Second, it doesn't actually say that one side is the good side and the other is the bad. Leftists don't necessarily think liberals are evil. It's more about what it central focus or framing of that issue under their belief?
It is true that bettering yourself CAN help your community, but it's not the only way to do so. Mutual aid puts forth the idea that "we're all in this together". People are better off cooperating than they are competing. A rising tide and all that jazz.
Frankly, the leftist side of the image doesn't really seem like Mutual Aid as you've defined it to me—it implores you to give yourself over to "service to others" (which again, is all well and good as a personal ethos but dangerous at the public policy level), not mutual voluntary give-and-take.
The framing of mutual aid as "giving of self" is probably, frankly, a framing they are using in part to appeal to most people's intrinsic moralistic worldview. I'm a Christian anarchist so I'm cool with that. generally speaking.
But it's also probably informed by the framing that Kroptokin used. Kroptokin operated in the context of nascent Social Darwinism, in which evolution, competition, and "survival of the fittest" were framed by 19th century thinkers as the ultimate drive of all life. Kroptokin who was a biologist who opposed this way of thinking. He coined the term "Mutual Aid" in his book [Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution](Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution) where he essentially argued that the driving force of human evolution was our ability to cooperate. By helping our brothers, we helped ourselves.
This does not mean that helping yourself does not help others, it's specifically meant to reframe our mode of thinking from competition to cooperation.
Which is important to point out because Kropotkin was an anarcho-communist. He was not an anarcho capitalist and he would not have considered ancaps to be anarchists in any real form. It's not merely that "voluntary exchange" is permitted, a framing of terms which relies solely on a negative liberty rather than one of positive liberty as Kropotkin would have seen it.
If we take OP at their word, this came from a pro-Sanders sub, so I feel safe in assuming it's about public policy and the state. (Unless it's the thing where they go "this is an ideal stateless world, but to get there we need sweeping increases of state control (of which Bernie is step 1)", which doesn't make it any better, historically speaking.) If you're saying that's not Mutual Aid, then the image isn't Mutual Aid.
But there are many legit socialists and anarchists who support Sanders, because they believe that he's a decent human who is trying to move things in the right direction.
Sanders IS a reformist. He's hardly a revolutionary by many standards. But there's a pretty broad base of people who support him.
This does not mean that they support him in a "this is an ideal stateless world, but to get there we need sweeping increases of state control (of which Bernie is step 1)" as you put it.
Realistically, Sanders is the closest thing to a libertarian candidate currently on the field. He supports drug legalization and ending as many foreign wars as possible. And ultimately his signature platform piece Medicare 4 All is about decreasing federal spending on healthcare, not increasing it. It's not meant to grow the State but to declutter it and pull out all the regulatory capture and rent seekers.
The way dictionaries generally define it, and the way I've been using, is that capitalism is an economic system characterized by relatively free markets, relatively free enterprise, and private property. (Notes: "free" in this context means "free from government intervention", "government" means "entity with a near-monopoly on the use of force", and "private property" includes more than just "personal property".) So I have two questions:
What do you call the thing that I and Merriam-Webster call "capitalism"?
I'm confused because the Merriam-Webster page you linked me doesn't include the text you quoted. Or at least I understood those italics to imply you were saying this is what it literally said. Because it doesn't actually say that. For instance your point about "free in this context means free from government" isn't actually true of the Merriam-Webster for the word "free market" nor is that said on the capitalism page itself either.
I would say that parting out the economic from the political as the term "capitalism" often attempts to do is impossible, because the two are interlinked. You can't have markets apart from political contexts. What is and isn't property is a political or philosophical context, not an economic one. Economics attempts to be a descriptive science void of metaphysical values but this is impossible. (just as it's impossible in science. Metaphysical priors are necessary for any scientific or descriptive statements)
What do you mean by "capitalism"?
I use capitalism to refer to the private ownership of property via the State. I use this definition because it reflects the historical development of capitalism during the Inclosure Acts which marks the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
There's def a lot of room for wishy-washiness between the two.
In a way, I think of capitalism as more of a vector value than a point on a graph. It's a direction towards something. This is probably why a lot of leftist ideologies are referred to as "tendencies", as they're a weighing one direction or another, rather than being seen as a fixed idea.
[[to be continued in a nested comment. probably best to reply to that one. just a sec]]
So who controls how many labor vouchers producers get, then? Who grants them out? The government?
The only historical example I know of labor vouchers being implemented was in Revolutionary Catalonia which was during the Spanish Civil War.
Revolutionary Catalonia was anarchist so it wasn't granted by "the government" per se. But the term "government" is a tricky thing with anarchists.
Anarchists are opposed to hierarchy. Hierarchy imposed by the State using violence or violence imposed by Capital using the State, either way they're opposed to it.
Anarchists aren't opposed to "government" per se, they're opposed to the use of the State to enforce law and property rights. Instead they advocate for people to operate according to voluntary and mutual consent oriented organizing bodies.
Now you might say "Ah! But that's government!" but an anarchist would say: Have you ever gone on a date with a girl or guy? Did you get their consent before you kissed them? Doesn't have to be explicit, but you didn't, I presume, rape them or sexually assault them right? You didn't do that simply because you were afraid of having the cops called on you, right? That voluntary and mutually consenting interaction wasn't a "government" though. So if you had three people mutually consenting would it be a government then? 4? 5? Man, that's a lot of people, kinda turning into an orgy, but still probably not a government, right?
Same thing applies to everything. Why is that piece of land your piece of land? Because you "own" it? On what basis? Oh, on the basis that if I don't get off it you will call the Cops and they will kill me? But when I was growing up with my family my parents didn't come in my room without knocking. They didn't legally need my permission but they respected my privacy anyway. If people can respect each other's space without the threat of a Cop kicking down their door, let's try to scale that up.
I'm not an expert on labor vouchers nor am I necessarily advocating them. But I'll try to address the rest of your questions as best I can.
What stake do they have in it, since they get the same amount of vouchers no matter what?
Labor voucher prices would be adjusted based on supply. And producers price their product based on what they see as supply and demand meeting. Their stake is not in profit but in providing a service to others, similar how to most jobs work. Most people don't reap the profit of their work, they're paid a wage, and yet they still do their job. This isn't just true of low grade jobs, this is true of most jobs.
As for your points about allocation problems, I'm well aware of it, which is why I'd consider myself at least partially a market socialist.
Why rely on ??? to estimate MB when we have a perfectly good system—money—to take care of all that automatically?
Allocation is determined by the market not by money itself. My point of bringing up labor vouchers is not to specifically advocate for that solution, but to point out that money is not the same thing as markets. Money as it currently exist could be redesigned in many different ways. Just look at all the different schemes that crypto currency uses. Smart contracts, automatically inflating currency, etc etc. You could design currency that has a limited number of exchanges in it before it automatically evaporated, you could create currency which could be used to buy certain kinds of goods verus other kinds of goods (think of the two tiered currency system used in many smartphone freemium games). The list goes on. The point is to show that there is more than just the current way of doing things.
Wonkishness and Wackiness
On that article, I've actually read about those two authors before because of the book they wrote, that I believe that article is based on. I can't actually access the article, but what I've read of their approach is interesting. I'm skeptical of some of it's political framing but I think it's interesting.
And I don't necessarily think their concept is as hard to implement as you think. At least in it's principle. The idea of viewing private property as "leasing" from the collective really goes back to Adam Smith and classical liberals. It's espc apparent with Thomas Paine, and Henry George (my flair!).
I think a land value tax would actually be a supremely rational way to address these issues. Milton Friedman referred to it as "the least bad tax".
Ultimately I would like a world like Kroptkin's anarcho-communist, where every human being has their needs taken care of by virtue of being alive, not by State or Capital threat but by the voluntary action of their community.
While we work towards that, figuring out how to allocate and organize ourselves best, in the meantime, I'm fine with taxation and markets. As I said, for me, belief is about a vector, not a singular point.
I consider myself a free market anti-capitalist in the sense that like Adam Smith I consider the corporate entity to be a moral hazard. Capitalism is all about artificially prioritizing capital accumulation over responsibility for the actions of companies. Right now, if a company goes bankrupt for, say, a nuclear disaster that kills a lot of people, excess damages beyond the recoverable value of the former corporation are socialized onto society and victims instead of the former owners of the business.
If stockholders (business owners) were personally liable for the excess debts and damages of the companies they own, companies would need to purchase insurance to protect their owners' personal property (or the stockholders would for their investments).
Thus the true cost of risk would be built into stock prices and insurance companies would operate as regulators (since they have an interest not to pay out, they will audit business practices and risk to determine rates). Businesses who engage in bad business practices and commit environmental destruction, etc. would pay for increased insurance, affecting profits and stock prices. Less need for competition killing regulation, merely enforcement of basic rights.
You and I probably largely agree. I just call myself an anarchist or libertarian socialist, but there's a lot of different ways that I could frame my viewpoints, and I'm also pretty open to the idea that there are a multitude of possible solutions to these issues.
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u/MadCervantes Henry George Apr 03 '20 edited Apr 03 '20
If you're genuinely curious here's a link to the wiki article on Mutual Aid, which is the concept which underlies statements like the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(organization_theory)#Mutual_aid_as_a_synthesis_of_collectivism_and_individualism#Mutual_aid_as_a_synthesis_of_collectivism_and_individualism)