Socialist Ends by Market Means: a History

Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.

$1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371

Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.

Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.

Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.

Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!

Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.

Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man

At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.

What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently.

So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.

Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used.

In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries.

I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.

The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Often touted as "the worlds largest coop".

Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.

The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics.

The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.