"'...star-exploring civilizations must be peaceful, because otherwise they would have destroyed themselves before reaching the required level of technology.'" (II, p. 22)
"'Some believe the Sigman will inevitably put itself at the disposal of the people's sacred cause, when communication has become good enough for it to realize what conditions are like on Earth.'" (V, p. 52)
These are similar statements although the first is reasoned whereas the second is doctrinaire.
What kind of regimes existed in Russia, Eastern Europe and China in 1971 when Poul Anderson wrote this novel? In all these countries, production was controlled not democratically to satisfy human needs but bureaucratically to accumulate armaments for military competition against the Western powers. According to one minority analysis, this combination of internal exploitation with external competition made these regimes not socialist but capitalist, specifically "state capitalist" as against market capitalist.
In any case, workers and their "sacred cause" were not represented by the bureaucracies but needed to resist them.
32 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would argue that the text you quoted from Chapter II of THE BYWORLDER is not NECESSARILY true, because we don't KNOW that quarrelsome races will inevitably destroy themselves before reaching the stars. I can imagine some doing so, yes, but not all.
And I simply don't believe "state capitalism" was ever real, or that it even makes sense. It's nothing like true capitalism, or better puy, free enterprise economics. It's still the STATE owning most property and the means of production and distribution. And that is socialism. "War socialism" might be a more accurate term.
Sean
Sean,
To me, socialism is working people controlling production and no longer needing a state.
Paul.
It's rather odd to compare systems where one is actually a functioning method, and the other a hypothesis which has never actually been implemented.
You can always get to win that competition, because you're comparing actuality to fantasy! The latter is much easier to control and make come out right!
Nothing can be made a reality without being first imagined; but that something can be imagined doesn't mean it can be realized.
Certainly the various Marxist-Leninist states weren't and aren't much like anything Marx came up with, but then Marx (in contradiction to other socialist thinkers of the period like Proudhon or Owen) carefully and deliberately refrained from saying anything about how a post-capitalist society would be organized or function, except in generalizations and bromides.
Just as an individual is what she does, not what she claims to be, an ideology of social organization is what it does in practice, not what it claims in theory. You don't get to say: "Well, next time will be different!" after there have been dozens of examples, all with a depressing similarity. As the saying goes, the first time may be accident, the second time may be coincidence, but the third time shows there's a pattern.
Capitalism is, by definition, a system in which the factors of production are mostly privately owned and their employment is directed primarily by market pricing signals. This is what distinguishes it from, say, feudalism.
Although not from a slave system, which also uses market pricing mechanisms, though not in quite the same way. (They're much more closely related than either is to a feudal/seigneurial/manorial system.)
As to the State, it exists primarily to monopolize and manage the 'violence function'. The primary alternative is the previous method, the 'lex talonis' -- individual and family retaliation and deterrence, which works much less well.
There was a joke in the USSR in which a child asks his teacher to define "scientific socialism".
The teacher tells young Yuri that scientific socialism is the dialectical synthesis of all the stages of human society -- taking its technology from the stone age, slavery from the ancient world, serfdom from the feudal period, exploitation from the capitalist stage, and from socialism... the name.
Kaor, Paul!
Mr. Stirling's comments above very clearly explains why I have to disagree with you about socialism. How MANY times do we have to endure these "noble experiments," all of them failing (Venezuela being the latest example), before people with similar views to yours finally give up and admit socialism will never work? Why this reluctance to accept a system, free enterprise economics, which has been PROVEN to work?
Correction, I can think of one possible situation where socialism might work: MONASTERIES! Small groups of people agree to live together according to certain rules to attain certain ends. And agree to pool their personal resources to obtain the means of doing so. What makes this different from SECULAR socialism is that monasteries don't try to force everyone to become monks or to seize everybody else's property.
Sean
Thank you both for this pertinent discussion. I agree that there are massive problems with the whole question - and many of these problems are the conflicts caused by capitalism itself! Many of us will continue to struggle within the present system, e.g., against the current austerity and xenophobia, while also hoping that a better system can be built by winning over a majority, not by empowering a new minority.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, bu what are these "massive problems" caused by the alleged "conflicts caused by capitalism itself"? How does a system of economics which has created unprecedented wealth over the past two or three centuries causing "austerity and xenophobia"? If anything, free enterprise economics, when allowed to work, lessens austerity/xenophobia. Because, in order to function properly in the long term, free enterprise economics encourages the rise of regimes which gradually becomes less harsh and oppressive.
Sean
Sean,
The system creates both wealth and poverty. The financial crisis has caused austerity in public spending. Immigrants are wrongly blamed for the suffering caused by the economic system.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks for explaining, even if I don't entirely agree with it. I would put a lot of the blame for the financial crisis on the state itself. For example, in the US, gov't policies heavily encouraging the IRRESPONSIBLE granting of loans to people who were not likely to repay them was a major cause of that crisis. I'm sure similar fiascoes caused by clumsily inept gov't policies can be found in the UK as well.
I agree it is wrong to blame immigrants, as such, for blundering of this kind.
Sean
Sean,
Higher profits means lower wages. A crisis in the rate of profit means workers laid off and receiving no wages. Thus, much wealth and poverty is down not to individual abilities or lack of them but to the workings of the system even though labor plus technology have the capacity to produce wealth for all.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm sorry, but it's not that simple. Henry Ford, for example, RAISED the salaries of his employees and still increased his profits from making cars. Many, many factors goes into the problem you mentioned.
Sean
Sean,
They do. An employer can raise salaries and increase profits when the economy, or at least his section of it, is expanding but not otherwise.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And this complexity is why I am so skeptical of SWEEPING plans and schemes for "reform." Such plans can't allow for complexities of this kind.
Sean
Sean,
Anyone who builds a new society really has to learn as they go along, consider historical precedents but also what is genuinely new and unprecedented in a situation, learn from past mistakes and consult experts - but not just unimaginative ones! Would-be innovators who are defeated by their opponents have not made a mistake - they have just been defeated by their opponents.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
AND any statesman trying to found a new society has to be REALISTIC about the human beings who will comprise that society. INCLUDING the sheer cussedness, imperfections, flaws, and vices of all of us. Any schemes for an "ideal" society which is not realistic about human beings will fail.
Sean
Sean,
There is an important distinction to be made. Some people confidently predict that a new social experiment will fail whereas others do their best to make it fail. These are not the same thing!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Truthfully, I'm tired of "noble social experiments" which never succeed. Far better to be content with the limited state (in whatever form), and free enterprise economics. Because we KNOW those things have worked. I prefer the actuality to mere fantasy, to paraphrase S.M. Stirling.
Sean
Sean: families usually don't operate on market principles either. Setups which closely (and in terms of their emotional psychology) emulate an extended family, like a monastery or kibbutz or a Hutterite village, can do that too.
Throughout most of post-neolithic human existence, family or analogous combinations were the primary units of economic production.
Even the first States, the Bronze Age monarchies and temple-states of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, were grossly extended households, or alliances of extended households, which internally developed the tools of bureaucratic administration. That's why writing was invented as a development of accounting techniques.
The same is true of some other types of human institution. Armies aren't market-oriented, for example -- not even mercenaries.Armies are made up of pseudo-families and pseudo-clans, primary units bound by extremely strong emotional ties and devotion to symbols of group identity -- this has been more or less consciously done for millennia. As Montinesquue said, an army of rationally-motivated individualists would be impossible, because it would run away.
What markets do best is coordinate the economic activities of -strangers-, people who don't know each other and don't care about each other.
The alternatives for -that- task are necessarily high-coercion.
Paul: when someone comes up with a hypothetical system of social organization, I do two things by way of analysis:
a) has this, or something closely similar to it, been tried before? If so, what are the results?
I do -not- assume that if people got consistent results with "System A" in the past, it'll be different next time. That's motivated reasoning, which is to say, wishful thinking.
b) is it compatible with what I know of human nature, that is, the inbuilt psychological products of our evolutionary history? We're behaviorally flexible, more so than any other animals, but we're not infinitely flexible or anything close to it.
To take just one example, a system which depends on everyone or even most people consistently following the Golden Rule towards people they don't know is a complete non-starter. Human beings are simply not capable of operating that way over any substantial length of time.
Or to take another, a system which required people to be capable of unbiased reasoning about something which closely affects their interests or their identities. That just doesn't happen much; we're not built that way.
So xenophobia and tribalism are not problems to be solved; they're conditions to be managed. Trying to eliminate them not only doesn't work, it makes them harder to manage.
Likewise, the desire for and struggle for power over others cannot be eliminated; it can at best be channeled and managed. Again, trying actually get -rid- of power and the struggle for it simply releases the beast unchecked and unconstrained.
Human beings are by their inherent natures tribal, suspicious of and hostile to (or at best coldly indifferent to) outsiders, and viciously dangerous when they perceive a threat; and all social organizations larger than an extended family are inherently unstable -- the bigger, the more likely they are to fall apart.
It's not an accident, for example, that European social democracy and welfarism got started in and were strongest in, small ethnically homogenous societies like Denmark or Sweden, where treating the entire country as an extended kin-group was more psychologically plausible and there were fewer triggers for "out-group" feeling.
It's also not an accident that social democracy has been collapsing as a political movement and social culture as those societies become less integrated that way.
Yelling at people for feeling and behaving like that is beyond futile -- it merely arouses murderous passions.
It's like beating a box of explosives with a stick to teach it manners.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks for the comments you addressed to me. And I don't disagree with them. I do wonder how or where I might have been erring.
Yes, the first real states were extensions of the families and households of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Many of the ancient kings (and down to feudal times as well) chief officials began as household officers, such as butlers and stewards. Some remnants of this survives even now in the UK.
Sean
Mr. Stirling,
I also agree with you that xenophobia and tribalism are not problems to be solved. They are conditions which can only be managed. Ditto for what you said about social democracy/welfarism and how they work best in small, homogeneous societies. And begin to fail when those states became less socially integrated.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
My idea of a better society is based not (just) on the Golden Rule (although that is good for those who can do it) but on a perceived collective interest. Thus, workers, having taken control of production, would see it as in their interests to keep control and this would include preventing the rise of a bureaucracy, especially in the light of history. Some measures to prevent delegates from becoming bureaucrats are experiential, not just notional, but most features of a future society are beyond our experience. Good sf helps by showing us that social arrangements can and will be different.
Eliminating xenophobia (or not) and responding to immediate threats, like attacks on mosques, are two different problems. In Britain, organized groups of fascists (with swastikas) and racists become demoralized and decline in numbers when we outnumber them in street demonstrations but, because of the conditions that we are living in, they perpetually revive and we have to repeat the exercise when we would prefer to be doing something else.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm sorry, but some of your comments here still look like fantasy ignoring ACTUAL facts and realities. I don't in the least believe workers, or large numbers of them, will take over control of the means of production. How and why should they? How will they raise the funds needed for expansion, say of a car factory? Investors will quite rightly demand a say in how their money used. Hence we will see the sale of stock and emergence of boards of directors representing those stock owners. And you simply CAN'T run a largescale organization, private or public, without some administrative staff. It's also my view that private firms do a better job than the state in keeping such administrative staffs from becoming too large.
You are asking workers, however defined, to do two very different things, BOTH work at making cars, say, and running and managing the company. It can't be done, not without specialization and division of labor. You can't expect a worker, after eight hours of hard work, to also pore over financial and statistical reports, to determine how well the products he was working on are selling. And so on.
Despite the contempt I have for Islam, I certainly agree in leaving Muslims and their mosques alone (unless a particular mosque is a hot bed of fanaticism and supports jihadist terrorism). And I do see your point about demonstrations discouraging the neo-Nazis and nastier racists. Just keep in mind you are not going to DISSUADE them of the error of their ways by such means. There will be, unfortunately, many such persons who never go on demonstrations.
Sean
Sean,
There is a body of theory about how "workers' control" might work and some limited experience to back it up but, of course, it needs to be demonstrated in practice. If it is such a good idea, then why hasn't anyone made it work yet? I think that we have pursued the issue as much as is appropriate here. We keep returning to this and other major questions because we are reading Poul Anderson who addresses the nature of mankind and the universe.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't believe "workers control" of a business will ever be practical for more than a SMALL business, where the owners and their employees all have a very close and personal stake in the enterprise. It hasn't succeeded in anything larger than small businesses because it can't be done, for reasons I've already given.
I agree, Poul Anderson (and S.M. Stirling) raises many issues in their works which leads to such discussions as this.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I’m behind in the blog, so I didn’t manage to participate in this fascinating discussion earlier. I would like to address something you said: Higher profits (in the sense of return on capital) do not necessarily mean lower wages. They do for a particular firm in the short run, but when the economy, or a particular sector of it, is flourishing, wages will typically rise, profits will be high, and unemployment will be low. In a depression, wages will be low, profits will fall, many businesses will go bankrupt, and unemployment will be high. Be careful how you speak of “profits”, please, because profits in the accounting sense can include elements of wages, return on capital, land rent, and special privileges.
A crisis in the rate of “profits” often results from a speculative bubble in land prices, with increased land rents crowding out both wages and return on capital, until labor and capital are in effect locked out from the opportunity to use land, which results in a crash and unemployment. Speculation in land results in people borrowing more and more money to buy land, and when the bubble finally bursts, people cannot or will not pay their mortgages and other borrowings, setting off a chain-reaction financial crisis.
If you have the kind of mind which is capable of reading Marx and staying awake, you might want to consider reading Henry George and modern Georgists. George was a much better stylist than Marx, as well as having, IMHO, much sounder ideas.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Just when I thought that this discussion had finished, Nicholas starts it up again! This is what the blog is for.
Paul.
Kaor, Nicholas!
And don't forget the role played by gov't bungling! The crash of 2008 was brought on largely because of gov't agencies in the US like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pressuring banks and other financial institutions into giving real estate loans to people many of whom could not or would not repay. The increasingly desperate efforts by many banks to hedge or minimize the risks from having bad loans on their books also contributed to the crash.
My conclusion is that gov't should not be in the real estate market, and should not pressure banks into giving loans to people they don't believe can afford them.
Regards! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
I agree with you about government bungling, Fannie Mae, the Community Reinvestment Act, etc. However, there were also real estate booms followed by busts in the U.K., Ireland, Canada, and Spain. They didn’t have exactly the same policies in these various countries, but the basic dynamic of the real estate cycle (a term that ma6 be more accurate than “the business cycle”) played out in all of them.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
If I did not mention the countries you listed it was because I felt unable to comment on how the Crash of 2008 affected them. But, if the real estate policies pursued by the gov'ts of these nations followed the same pattern as the foolishness in the US, then I argue that gov'ts should not be meddling with real estate markets in those nations as well. And I do agree that the cycles of booms and busts seen in the US would apply to them as well.
The conclusion I make is that gov'ts in all nations should not interfere with real estate markets, should not force financial institutions to give loans to borrowers they don't believe will repay them, etc. I also think booms would be less "feverish" and busts less catastrophic if gov'ts would simply stop interfering with the economimes of their nations in counterproducdive ways.
Sean
Hi folks,
I think that businesses ask for government intervention when they think that it would be in their interests? Also, that the economy is so unpredictable that the results can be unsatisfactory either way?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree with you. Your comment reminds us of how politics plays a role in these things. That is, private firms (large or small) will, if they believe it necessary (or possible), try to use gov'ts to obtain favors, concessions, privileges they really should not obtain from a purely economical point of view. That simply shows how the PEOPLE in these organizations can be just as greedy, foolish, and short sighted as anybody else.
But my conclusion still remains that free enterprise economics, when allowed to function, does more real and actual good than any other system has done (and certainly not socialism!).
Sean
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