The thing is, the people would still be making a profit under socialism and communism.
The difference is it wouldn’t be at the expense of others, it wouldn’t be to a point they can hoard necessities from others, and it wouldn’t all be funneled to some trust fund rich kid asshole who’s provided nothing of value to this world.
The difference is [the profit you make under socialism/communism] wouldn’t be at the expense of others
How is that possible? Isn’t “profit” defined as value you get in excess of the value of the thing you traded for? Isn’t profit “at the expense of others” by definition?
Depends how you define “expense”. A good service provided at a fair price, all stakeholders benefit. My CSA share of a farmers produce gives me cheap, quality veggies and gives the farmer consistent cash flow regardless of disease/weather/whatever. We clearly both benefit. Someone else buying UPFs from Walmart because they have literally no other option to affordably feed their family in their neighbourhood… maybe not such a good deal for the consumer.
P.s. Profit is the value in excess of the cost of good sold, not over what the buyer values it as. In a “good” transaction (where the parties are transacting at parity, without monopolistic/exploitative practice) the price is less than the consumer would be willing to pay (the “value” for them) but still enough for the seller to be compensated for the risk and cost they took in buying/making and stocking the product.
Yes, you are right. Profit is surplus by definition. When we are talking about conducting our affairs under socialism, there is no such concept. If a business under socialism were to expand its operations through investment, that’s not profit.
You know the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? Trade creates value because certain items are most valuable to certain people, and getting them where they’re most needed is a valuable service.
Profit can also be achieved without stealing from others via the creation valuable items. A finished product can be more valuable than its individual pieces and the time and skills used to create it.
Socialism and communism isn’t about abolishing production and trade, it’s about collectivising ownership of the means of production and its profit so that just a few people can’t eat up all of the profits.
If I buy a bunch of seeds, plant them, grow a bunch of vegetables, and sell the vegetables for more than the price I paid for everything (seeds, fertilizer, tool wear and tear, and any other expenses related to the garden), I have made a profit. It doesn’t come at the expense of anyone.
It wouldn’t be fair to insist I sell the vegetables at exactly the cost of everything I put into them. I put my own labour into growing them and bringing them to market. If I couldn’t profit by selling them then I wouldn’t sell them, I’d just eat them myself or not even bother growing them at all.
This is known as the free gifts of nature.
Another “gift” of nature is its capacity to absorb and remediate the pollution from our industries. Some of us have grown rich by exploiting this capacity, although unlike solar power there is a limit.
Not to contradict you in any way. But just to introduce the concept for the unfamiliar
“Profit” is after labour costs. If you are the one selling the seeds, or managing the operation, you pay yourself for that work before profit.
It’s a funny example, because many of the “farm coops” that actually sell seeds and agriculture supplies are already non-profit structures.
Even debts to creditors supplying capital are before profit. Profit is the surplus that is un-earned, and the direct result of charging more than necessary, or under-paying for supplies, labour, or capital.
Where do you think the person who paid you got the money, and the person who gave them their money, etc.
Economics is not a closed system where everything cycles around with perfect precision, each person have exactly the amount of money required at a time and paying exactly the right price for exactly the right supply.
I mean if I plant tomatoes, water them, and pick them, I’m profiting from the nutrients in the soil, the sun and the rain, as well as countless other factors.
There’s a lot of ways to make profit without exploiting others or hoarding private property of valuables and infrastructure that is needed by the needy.
You got some good examples in other comments.
My ultimate point is that the average Joe will still work for an income greater than what they had prior to the work. However, it’d be a true meritocracy and they couldn’t accumulate to a point of harming others, like the rich do today.
The difference is it wouldn’t be at the expense of others
You live in USSR year 1934, you write an anonymous complaint that your neighbor is a Japanese spy recruited by the British while digging potatoes, your neighbor gets executed and their family sent to Siberia, you get his things (as a gratitude for cooperation with authorities or just cause nobody looks).
You live in USSR year 1934
Not communism or socialism.
Congrats, you’ve been brainwashed.It seemed pretty communist and socialist for people living it. And it was derived from something that is pretty commonly considered communist and socialist.
Anyway, it doesn’t work in your favor to highlight that the biggest examples of, good or bad, practical application of your ideas are actually not that. Means that there are close to no examples.
the biggest examples of, good or bad, practical application of your ideas
All they ever were, were techniques to use ideas that appeal to the masses in order to bait-and-switch them into voting would-become dictators to power, but do carry on with your head in the sand.
Bye :)You haven’t read the relevant things, like Stalin’s short history of RCP(b) where he explains what he thought (by the way, that’s the real starting point in literature of Maoist ideology, Castro regime and so on ; Marx and Engels those people didn’t like, and even Lenin was too wordy), and such.
It’s the other way around, Soviet ideology, Stalin included, till at least 70s was more thoroughly Marxist than anything else really implemented.
It’s just that most of the western leftist groups don’t like how it went, so they pretend USSR was something alien. With the notable exception of communists in France.
Also I don’t think fair pluralism is part of Marxism in any way. It’s similar to modern leftist perception of the USSR.
See also: all of history before capitalism lmao
Or, rather, a huge percentage of the work done right now that we just don’t classify as “work” under capitalism. Nearly all of us were literally raised with decades of effort stretched over long days, based on motivations that ran counter to personal “profit.” As is with most care for the elderly and disabled, as further examples among many.
It was quite the propagandist coo that “work” was re-defined only as work paid for under capitalism, so therefore capitalism motivates all “work”
Fan fiction writers
You forgot non-profit organisations
A lot of them are just indirect-profit. Let’s limit this to [some] charities.
That the system is abused by bad actors doesn’t invalidate all the many thousands of non-profits out there that are literally /not/ motivated by profit (because they cant make any), but by developing a long-term stable operation that pays well for their labour, supports more clients, or serves some other need in the community long-term.
Operating a non-profit means thinking about building a 100-year organization or whatever, not bonuses for shareholders. They are also different from charities, as they can exist to serve a specific, small group of people, like FLOSS developers of a project, or a bunch of volleyball teams for teenagers, or a worker-owned bicycle shop, or a farm co-op, or whatever.
#input.[true]Is this real code?
In some language, possibly.
I love saying nothing in combobulated ways.
i think it’s wrong to say that “without profit motive, no one would be productive”, but it should rather be “without a profit motive, people would be less productive”.
deleted by creator
“Without a profit motive, we wouldn’t take advantage of people who are productive!”
FYI those open source coders are probably working some kind thankless job that will pay the bills but gives them enough time to pretend to be a big dev firm making main level code contributions.
And other ones are being paid by a big firm to work on FOSS projects because it’s still easier than reproducing something from scratch.
Students and Junior devs alike also contributing to pad their resume and document experience.
Sure but pretending the the majority of contributes are not being paid is just fake. FOSS is big companies paying people to develop.
Is that not somewhat the point though? They want to be doing meaningful work and they’re so motivated to do meaningful work they’ll sit after a day of work and chip out more code just so they can do something meaningful to them.
No lots of open source coders are getting paid. Linux and lots of FOSS is so far past the coder working in their spare time.
- People who put their shopping cart back in the corral
People who put their shopping cart back in the corral
… are not creating jobs for supermarket employees to do it instead.
(not including the ones who do it to get their £1 coin back)
Christ, what are the coins made out of?
I’m not sure it’s that simple.
All of these except Minecraft have perpetual funding and labour issues, especially for the less sexy parts.
You’re not going to staff a pharmaceutical factory with volunteers.
This seems like a post about UBI or a post scarcity society, and whether or not humans will be lazy/do nothing if they no longer need money.
So within that premise, those 3 things wouldn’t necessarily have labor issues if people can have a good life regardless of what they’re up to. I think a lot of people would want to spend time contributing to Wikipedia, FOSS, firefighting, etc. if they were compensated all the same. Similarly, if profit was no longer a concern, resources could be allocated to projects based on need, and so funding wouldn’t be a factor.
It’s fun to think about, and I think the post has value for what it’s pointing out
I have usually seen this argument applied as saying that we’re post scarcity now and that if we just gave everyone UBI, you’d be able to fill all the jobs you actually need with volunteers today, and just ‘get rid of’ the unnecessary/wasteful consumer goods.
Yeah, if you centrally applied resources to fields that actually needed it rather than profitable fields, that would in some ways be great. Ads would basically die overnight, for starters.
There’s a small proportion of the population that loves what they do - and more would if you were able to get rid of middle management. A good part of the reason volunteer projects tend to be successful is that they’re almost entirely composed of people who completely believe in the project.
Are you going to find a few thousand people in the same area who really believe in building great quality drugs/aircraft/electrical cables/plastic pipe when their job is mostly repetitive labour?
I’ve worked a fair bit of construction. There’s a feel-good factor for certain kinds of projects, but at the end of the day you’re installing stuff. Are we going to be able to build, staff, and maintain a semiconductor fab, a pharma factory, or an aircraft/engine assembly line with volunteers? What about the wire/steel/pump factories that make the bits used to build the building?
Part of how we’ve got to record low levels of e.g. aircraft fatalities is meticulous documentation (certain issues notwithstanding), procedures, and double/triple checking. And no-one really wants to be QA for long, or have QA watching over them like a hawk, especially when it’s both.
Replacing some of these roles with AI/robots doesn’t necessarily help that much. AI is bad at meticulous paperwork. So are unenthusiastic people.
UBI is supposed to cover basic needs, no? It doesn’t mean you’ll get the funds to cover the things you do to stave off boredom or fill your life with meaning. Thus people still work making, installing, and doing the less pleasing jobs, but there’s no longer the “work or starve in an alleyway” pressure in the background. It also provides leverage against abusive employers, as you don’t need the job to make rent and groceries. (Though people are willing to withstand a lot of abuse to reach their goals as well)
Yes. You’re still going to need to reward those people in some way that isn’t generic feel-good or worthless karma. People won’t go “I’m on the UBI and all my needs are met, but I’ll go build water pumps where one in fifty might get used in a pharma application just for the feel-good”.
I always think of the worst jobs that exist and how there would need to be incentive beyond feel good for those jobs to be worked. Think what you’d see on the show Dirty Jobs. Most of these are jobs that need to be done but nobody would want to do them without additional incentive
BioHacking with local made open source pharma is already a thing. People are already volunteering to make medication for others.
And is that actually achieving reliable quality and traceability? Not that mass-market pharmaceuticals are perfect, but I don’t remember hearing that many scandals about actual contamination/mismanufacturing (as opposed to testing/development failures like Thalidomide).
Let’s not exploit people either.
Employment doesn’t have to be exploitative.
Even a Minecraft server requires a benefactor.
You’re missing the point: that benefactor doesn’t pay the people that contribute to the server.
You’ve missed my point. The benefactor is themself a paid contributor.
Can not speak for all firefighters but we have more applicants than we have spots. We currently need 100 for the municipality we work for and we have some 110 firefighters.
Firefighting is probably one of the best fields to attract volunteers to. Save lives, glamorous, awesome PR, play with cool ‘toys’. Downside is danger but there’s enough people for whom that’s an upside.
Does that mean they’re all/mostly trainable, stick around long enough to justify the training, and willing to put in the work even when it comes to more mundane tasks like training, cleaning, equipment overhaul, drying pipes etc?
I believe most places have both paid and volunteer firefighters and I imagine it’s for a reason.
Downside is danger but there’s enough people for whom that’s an upside.
Worth noting that the shit firefighters breath in absolutely will shave years off their lives.
There’s a growing body of evidence that the payouts from the 9/11 first responders funds are for medical care that’s not exclusive to first responders to 9/11 specifically but just normal long term effects of being a first responder to fires and disasters in general.
Yeah I mean you could do something interesting one day and then just watch some place for a few hours after a fire on another. We have a turnover rate of like 2-5 people per year, but that includes people who are too old since there is a maximum age or people move and join the chapter at their new place.
And trainable, I mean we need people who guide traffic or something else that is not physically taxing so there is something to do for everyone.
And at least here the paid firefighters are usually the first responders since they are on alert 24/7, volunteers usually need up to 15 minutes (our record is 2 Minutes) to respond. So the professionals go im first and then get backed up by the volunteers. Or if it is just something small the professionals will not respond at all and let us handle it.
Not volunteers, per se, but my career has been 20+ years of vaccine and biologic discovery and manufacturing. All non-profit.
Yeah. I’m not saying that no positions can be filled by volunteers or people working for feel-good rather than profit motive… but it’s a lot easier to find people willing to do novel research or development than it is to find someone to keep the plant chilled water systems running, or to build the pumps for the plant.
Minecraft tangent
On my family’s Minecraft server we’ve been using a trick to prevent labor issues. Let’s say we’re making that building in OP’s pic. I’ll stack a bunch of building materials at the front in a pile, set up a bunch of extra scaffolding, and we build from the bottom up.
That way if we find motivation waning, it’s easy to pause and resume. Because it’s not an incomplete Minecraft build. It’s a completed Minecraft build of a building under construction, that we might later upgrade.
Money (and hence profit motive) is an analogue for being able to acquire and do things we need and want.
There’s two kinds of miserable people in relation to profit motive - those who can’t acquire enough money for the basic things they need to be happy, and those who took the analogue so far that they think money = happiness.
There is generally very little issue getting people to do things they want to do (things that feel meaningful) as long as they manage to cover their basic needs somehow, but there are definitely issues getting people to do things that they don’t want to do - which is where profit motive shines.
There is much more garbage to collect than there are people who want to collect garbage, more deliveries to make than people who want to make them, more places to clean than people who want to clean them.
Luckily, there is someone who wants the garbage collected, someone who wants the toilets cleaned, someone who wants their trinkets delivered. Hence, we get people to pay for that, and thus we can use profit motive to incentivize someone to do those things, at least until we manage to automate it.
Funnily enough, the less someone wants to do it the more of that “incentive” is purely stick and no carrot. Almost as if there’s something fishy about that whole notion 🤔
Unless… people actually prefer to be garbage men over the grueling work of an investment banker?
I would personally prefer the hands-on labor of garbage collection to a desk job, provided good working conditions and treatment like a human being are included.
If it weren’t for the pay difference, I’d certainly prefer garbage man. A huge percentage of kids want that job before the economy crushes their dreams. It’s cool!
It’s overtaken deep sea commercial fishing for deadliest job in the US.
That is true and I’d still rather be a garbage man than an investment banker. I’d die of depression and they wouldn’t blame my job.
This is the most important video I’ve ever watched on the subject of what motivates us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&t=32s
Everything from capitalism to linux to this meme is explained. That video explained why I was unhappy making $80K, taking every Friday off on PTO, vs. making $40K and putting in hours at home for free.
Are you happy in your work, your life, or unhappy? Maybe give the 10-minute video a spin? Not like they’re selling anything, just an analysis of human behavior and emotions. I found it life changing. You do you. I’ll never take another job that doesn’t give me those three, simple things.
I like what I do, and I hate the people I work for.
IDK where I land for motivation.
I need a new job.
Watch the video? It’s only 10-minutes. Maybe you do need a new job?
I think I do. I’m very self critical and self aware; it comes with the territory for my particular brand of executive function disorder. I’ve spent most of my life trying to find ways to motivate myself to do things. Even things I want to see done…
I’ve just been a bit on the busy side for the last few days. I’ll take a look at the video tonight if I remember to.
Be well.
Even if someone knows they would be happier in another job, that isn’t always a choice you can actually take. There is pretty limited choices for work where I live, but I can’t really move as my house is here and my partners job is here. Quite a bit of retail/care work, beyond that choices are limited.
Yep. Tons of places are hiring and getting any job isn’t really that hard (in my area at least), but if you’re wanting a job that pays decent or at least more than $15/hr then you’re gonna be searching pretty damn hard. I got a new job a couple months ago that shot me up from getting paid $27k to getting paid $50k. However the hours suck with my shift starting at 5 AM and going for around 10 or 11 hours. When I look for other jobs in my area that offer similar pay, all I get are sales or something like building fences which I imagine would make me more miserable.
UK has a reasonable minimum wage (one of the best on the planet), a job isn’t too hard but often it could be part time or irregular hours. Or just kinda shit work.
Hey chill fellow internet person - the video was very cool (thanks), so don’t spoil it by meaning man in the comments, eh?
Not sure what you mean? Spoiler in my OP? I removed that so the video is more of a surprise.
Was I being mean to my replier? I honestly hoped they would watch the video and get inspiration, understand where they are at in life.
To my ears what you said to the first reply sounded a bit “fighty” that’s all. But it didn’t derail the discussion so all good.
Volunteer firefighters get paid when they’re working, it’s just implies that it is not a full time position. They have normal jobs that they all drop on a dime to rush to a fire scene to stand around and collect.
Not salty about the system or anything
Income/ revenue is not the same as profit, just like a meat patty is not a hamburger.
Socially acceptable to use interchangeably and even a dictionary might call them synonyms but they’re not.
Yes volunteer firefighters are paid for their time when responding to an emergency but no one else is making money off the firefighter or the equipment being deployed. We all pitch in through taxes and get a service in exchange, no one is enriched by it.
In my experience, the fire department sues through the country for “restitution”, so I got to pay twice…
Really doing open source programmers dirty with that insane code formatting
