Democratic Socialism would be an improvement over Capitalism/Social Democracy

Thanks to Con for a great critique in the last round – I appreciate the space constraints and will refrain from further criticism of social democracy until he has made his defence. For this round I will simply respond to Con’s critiques of democratic socialism. Issues around direct democracy Participation Con claims that getting people to vote in regular referenda would be economically inefficient, time-consuming and suffer low turnouts; this analysis betrays two harmful attitudes. Firstly there is the underestimation of people’s desire to take matters into their own hands if given the chance. Voter turnout is low in modern Britain not because voting is a chore but because we do not feel like we have real power. Give the people power and they will use it. Ask yourself: is there any major issue affecting your life which you would refrain from voting on if voting was an option? Secondly, Con implies that economic efficiency should trump democracy; this amounts to an endorsement of the socialist position that high levels of capitalist productivity are predicated upon the people being denied power. Do we really want to give up control of our lives to productivity? Which Issues? Con asks what would count as an important issue. This too would be up to the people to decide – a direct democracy in which the rules of democratic practice are not themsleves arrived at by popular consent is no democracy at all. It is highly unlikely that people would insist upon something as time-sensitive as disaster relief to be tied up in lengthy voting sessions. More likely would be that people would vote upon the amount of money generally to be put aside for such relief, and on whom they would like to have the kind of snap decision making power necessary for such an issue. Otherwise, what constitutes a major issue is up to the people. Minorities Con claims that minorities may be poorly treated by empowered majorities. Firstly, this is infinitely superior to the current system, in which elite minorities hold the majority to ransom. As far as the sorts of injuries which could be inflicted on minorites, however, I think there are relatively few. Economic injuries would be highly unlikely in a society in which equality and fairness are going to be the watchwords of an empowered working class. A more serious possiblity is social injustice, but let’s think about it. Take gay marriage, for example. Generally speaking, by the time a social issue such as this has become a political hot topic and a referendum is pushed for, most people have come around to it as part of the natural tendency for stable societies to liberalise. Since 2010, for instance, over fifty percent of Americans believe that gay marriage should be legalised, a clear majority. If this were put to the vote, discrimination against gays (a minority) would suffer a serious blow. Unfortunately, Americans do not live in a direct democracy. The economy This is the area within which, admittedly, I have the most to prove. Social systems are, ultimately, measured by their consequences. Since democratic socialism has never existed, history provides us with few lessons. The planned economy of the U.S.S.R. was extremely efficient for a long time, but a combination of internal and external economic and political factors rendered it non-viable in the long run. What follows, then, is speculation. My arguments here will be based upon a reading of Marxian economics as against the standard neo-classical and Austrian models. Firstly, let’s try to define ‘efficiency’. In theory, what this word should mean is ‘maximal production of goods’, where ‘goods’ refers to anything which is benificial to individuals and to society at large. Bourgoise economists tends to use the word efficiency to mean nothing other than growth in general, that is, the fastest possible production of commodities given current technology and labour skill. The most ‘efficient’ society possible, under this conception, would be a slave-owning society, that is, a society in which as much of social output as possible is channelled back into increased production and not ‘wasted’ on the wages (material well-being) of labour. Every concession capital makes to labour decreases efficiency is the sense Con is using the word. Understandably, then, capitalists regard unregulated free markets as the most ‘efficient’ and planned economies, which waste investment capital on worker’s material well-being, as ‘inefficient’. Con’s argument is based on the erroneous assumption that one of the main objective of economic planning is to take pricing out of the hands of the market and to put it in the hands of the planners. In a planned economy, however, there are no prices: prices are only required when the economy functions through buying and selling – when production is planned, price is irrelevent. Now, of course some things cost more than others to produce – but here we are talking about value, not price. Prices are the result of individual producers and sellers attempting to price goods so as to make a profit – values are objective – they represent the amount of human labour that has gone into the production of a good. The value of something is how much human labour it takes to make it. Let’s look at Con’s farmer example. Firstly, he wouldn’t sell his wheat for $10 if that’s what it cost him to make it – he’d sell it for the highest profit the market would allow, let’s say $12. How would this work under socialism? Firstly, what people would be voting on would not be the price of wheat, since they would not be ‘buyers’. They would vote on the proportion of total productive capacity to be devoted to the production of wheat. In balance with the rest of the economy, sufficient resources would then be dsitributed towards that goal, if possible. The value of each bushel, that is, the amount of labour it took to produce it, would be known as a result of the production process itself. Distribution would then be handled in one of two ways – either the agreed upon quantity of wheat would be distributed evenly amongst the population, or workers would receive labour tokens as ‘wages’ which they would exchange at storehouses for wheat and other goods. This would not, however, be an exchange in the typical sense: it would simply be the worker confirming that he had done x amount of labour, and receiving an equal amount of value (labour embodied in the commodity he wishes to consume) back in return. Now, as for the question of absolute productivity, I do not have an easy answer. Productivity is the result of one thing and one thing only: work. In a democratic society it should be up to people themselves to balance the two priorities of leisure/comfort and labour in the interests of themselves and society at large. Any socialist society would need to trade with other countries, meaning that at least some of its output would have to be produced for exchange rather than for use. This means that the maximum possible level of leisure that could be afforded would be that which still allowed sufficient exports to be produced to remain stable. In a competitive capitalist global system, of course, stability means growth, and it is here that my opponent is at his strongest. Ultimately, my position is that the compromise between growth and stability/leisure/comfort/well-being should be made by the people themselves. The position of a socialist society is analagous to the position of a worker-owned firm under capitalism. In theory, the workers have the option to pay themselves high salaries and only work two days a week; in reality, they all agree that this is simply not viable in a competitive marketplace. There are many successful worker-owned firms, however, and so we should not think that a balance cannot be struck. For Con, social democracy is this balance. For me it does not go far enough - we will never know what the most 'efficient' balance of work and leisure/comfort will be unless we can decide for ourselves.