I think you're making two fundamental errors here. One, you're not distinguishing productivity and distribution. Two, you're not distinguishing what productivity gains are technological and what are non-technological. These are important distinctions!
Start with one. You characterize Denmark, Sweden and so on as "more socialist" -- bu…
I think you're making two fundamental errors here. One, you're not distinguishing productivity and distribution. Two, you're not distinguishing what productivity gains are technological and what are non-technological. These are important distinctions!
Start with one. You characterize Denmark, Sweden and so on as "more socialist" -- but their difference from what you would call "less socialist" countries, like the United States, is overwhelmingly in their distribution of wealth, not in their production of it. Both groups have golden gooses. They distribute the eggs quite differently. But their gooses are not very different at all. You can't use the success of messing with distribution as evidence that it would be good to mess with production. They aren't the same things. To say otherwise would be to say that, oh, ok, since messing with who gets the eggs works fine, it would also be ok to mess with the goose. That's obviously not true, and it's how you end up with a dead goose.
Second. Not all of the gains in productivity are technological. We've all had or heard of bad bosses. Not jerks or criminals, but ones who organize things badly, who make bad decisions. Bosses who are not engineers but harass the engineering team with useless suggestions and directives. Bosses who are lawyers that insist that the support staff use a word document for a task that is obviously more suited to a spreadsheet, because the lawyer is more comfortable with word documents. Bosses who insist on unanimity as a decision-making process only to discover that the only way to get that unanimity is to kick out the dissenters, which they do. It's easy to believe that these things are symptoms of capitalism, but there's another possibility which is that this sort of behavior is basically human, and capitalism's pressures to deliver the goods (especially in more competitive industries) significantly reduces such behavior. I certainly believe that, and if those of you that have worked with or seen a lot of badly-managed movements in the non-capitalist space consider how much bad management they have vs. how much bad management is in business, you may find that you believe it too. Good management is hard, and transitioning social systems can 100% throw it down the drain. I know you don't like to use the example of Chinese communist experiences because they are old, but I really think that the fact that farms in China became outrageously more productive once Deng Xiaoping allowed them to operate privately is a pretty clear indicator that it isn't all about technology. Those farms didn't suddenly get a bunch of technological breakthroughs. The technology was the same before and after. What they got was better management. It's not all about the tech.
Freddie spends most of the article advocating for socialism, and only talks about communism in the last paragraph. So its entirely possible he's okay with wealth redistribution a la Denmark and Sweden as a politically acceptable alternative to trying command communism and as a precursor to something entire new. This would be in keeping with what he's said multiple times in other essays, which is that the leftism/socialism of the future probably won't be communism in the Marxist sense.
I think you're making two fundamental errors here. One, you're not distinguishing productivity and distribution. Two, you're not distinguishing what productivity gains are technological and what are non-technological. These are important distinctions!
Start with one. You characterize Denmark, Sweden and so on as "more socialist" -- but their difference from what you would call "less socialist" countries, like the United States, is overwhelmingly in their distribution of wealth, not in their production of it. Both groups have golden gooses. They distribute the eggs quite differently. But their gooses are not very different at all. You can't use the success of messing with distribution as evidence that it would be good to mess with production. They aren't the same things. To say otherwise would be to say that, oh, ok, since messing with who gets the eggs works fine, it would also be ok to mess with the goose. That's obviously not true, and it's how you end up with a dead goose.
Second. Not all of the gains in productivity are technological. We've all had or heard of bad bosses. Not jerks or criminals, but ones who organize things badly, who make bad decisions. Bosses who are not engineers but harass the engineering team with useless suggestions and directives. Bosses who are lawyers that insist that the support staff use a word document for a task that is obviously more suited to a spreadsheet, because the lawyer is more comfortable with word documents. Bosses who insist on unanimity as a decision-making process only to discover that the only way to get that unanimity is to kick out the dissenters, which they do. It's easy to believe that these things are symptoms of capitalism, but there's another possibility which is that this sort of behavior is basically human, and capitalism's pressures to deliver the goods (especially in more competitive industries) significantly reduces such behavior. I certainly believe that, and if those of you that have worked with or seen a lot of badly-managed movements in the non-capitalist space consider how much bad management they have vs. how much bad management is in business, you may find that you believe it too. Good management is hard, and transitioning social systems can 100% throw it down the drain. I know you don't like to use the example of Chinese communist experiences because they are old, but I really think that the fact that farms in China became outrageously more productive once Deng Xiaoping allowed them to operate privately is a pretty clear indicator that it isn't all about technology. Those farms didn't suddenly get a bunch of technological breakthroughs. The technology was the same before and after. What they got was better management. It's not all about the tech.
Freddie spends most of the article advocating for socialism, and only talks about communism in the last paragraph. So its entirely possible he's okay with wealth redistribution a la Denmark and Sweden as a politically acceptable alternative to trying command communism and as a precursor to something entire new. This would be in keeping with what he's said multiple times in other essays, which is that the leftism/socialism of the future probably won't be communism in the Marxist sense.
The "leftism/socialism of the future" is vaporware. No one has the slightest idea how to make it work.