> What do Americans have to gain from socialism as a world system?
>
> ^^^^ CB: Reduce the military budget by 95%, close 100 military bases,
> get rid of nuclear weapons.
>
> ***********************************************************************
> A higher standard of living. We're way more productive than ever
> before. We can't produce this higher standard of living now because
> capos can't sell the goods and services--'insufficient demand'.
> Besides, workers are organised/employed as a class of wage-slaves to
> do so many things which they only need to do in order to support
> bureaucracies and services which would be totally unnecessary in a
> system where goods and services were being produced for use and need
> in a classless society.
>
> The end of the relentless commodification of useful things,
> nature/natural wealth and social relations.
>
> Just for starters,
>
> Mike B)
>
> http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/
>
> ^^^^^^^^
> CB: I agree with Mike . A _world_ socialist system would mean a
> socialist system in America, with all the benefits of a _"domestic"_
> socialist system ( but with national borders beginning to whither away
> , so "domestic" would become an obsolete term)
>
MW wrote:
But Americans and other G8 citizens, including low-skill laborers with no
capital, live much better than the rest of the world; indeed, much better
than everyone could live at, given the current physical limits of the world
economy. They appear to be doing quite well by the current system, which,
I'd hazard to guess, is why they so universally support it.
********
MB:
Socialism is the common ownership and management of the collective product of labour. However, most people have been taught to believe that socialism means mass poverty and a lack of liberty. Of course, most people don't want to sacrifice their standard of living and their liberty.
************** MW asks: Or is world socialism a system under which nations have withered away, but in which the descendants of certain nations continue to consume all the resources? What does imperialism need a police force for, then?
********************* MB:
I have no idea what you're getting at with the last question. All class dominated societies have extensive police forces of one sort or another.
Producing goods and services in the world based on an evaluation of what is taken from the social store of same. For example, we know that it takes so and so many hours of socially necessary labour to produce what is taken. We then do those hours and take from the social store the amount of hours we've put in minus the number of hours necessary to maintain the means of production, including ourselves via medical care, education and other social service needs.
Here's Marx's take from the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as
much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.
Hence, equal right here is still in principle -- bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded
only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
There is no reason to assume a lower standard of living as the association of producers now shares in the collective product of labour as opposed to merely being paid the price of what they can sell their skills for on the labour market.
Mike B)
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