I disagree. The parents usually act as the owners and do not even pretend that the children have an equal share of ownership as is the case in socialism (whether or not it functions as such.) I’d say it’s more akin to feudalism than anything to do with socialism - then again I do not take “altruism” to be the only defining characteristic of socialism; one can paint a family so as to show that what is going on is still an exchange of values, much like on a market. As for those who’d wish to extend this model to an entire economy, they should keep in mind it only works in the same sense that corporations do, to overcome various transaction costs, and only to the extent that it can draw upon market prices. Should one say the corporation is “socialist” because of its organisational structure? Only if it involves inefficient hierarchy I’d say…
Indeed
And I would say that many Old Order Amish participate in a form of anarchic socialism.
But it isn’t socialist, as the parents are the owners of the property and make the decisions. Further, “doesn’t do much” wrt to the baby is the same sort of nonsense as the commies scream about wrt “inheritance”. Yet the baby provides them with cuteness and other “psychic profit”.
That isn’t socialism.
I think this thread became something like a semantics warfare. We should be able to differentiate between state-socialism (2 classes, the rulers and the ruled, with varying degrees of equality in the former, and much equality in the latter) and voluntary-socialism (applies to anarcho-collectivists, anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists). The most radical forms of voluntary-socialism reject private property, and establish that all possessions are under democratic control. But we should concede that it is possible a certain level of socialism into an ancap society. In fact, workers can create a cooperative, and that won’t be any monopoly whatsoever. In fact, it will be competing with other types of organizations.
Mises thesis of the impossibility of socialism addresses the impossibility of economic calculation. Distributed communes can’t behave economically because of the lack of market signals (prices, profits, losses, interest), so they must “centralize” their decisions, into a super-commune, let’s say. But this doesn’t address any problem concerning worker self-management of some (or all) means of production.
What is worker self-management? It’s my understanding that all workers will be self-managed in a free market if they choose to be.
I’m not sure what relevance it has unless I have misunderstood the idea.
Workers-ownership of the plant, and decisions being taken democratically.
It’s still propertarian - and if it’s to have any hope on surviving economically - the “workers” still trade their goods on the free market. It’s just a firm with the “workers” as owners. Big whoop.
So what about anarcho-syndicalism? The radical “anarcho-syndicalism” assumes that all the means of production are controlled by the workers in a democratically fashion. Assuming that there exists a market (price system, everything) in that system, should we say that Mises objection doesn’t apply there?
Sounds like a corportation. Instead of cartelizing past capital accumulation, they are trying to cartelize forward labour capital production.
And before someone flips their lid, yes, I know there will be no legal privilege.
A market is competitive, not democratic. Prices are not set by popular concensus or bureaucratic fiat, they must be set by exchange.
Capitalism has a pretty conventional definition that all schools agree with: wage labor. Without wage labor, there is no asymmetry between capital owner and worker. A subsistence farmer is not paid wages, he earns cash from whatever he can sell that he hasn’t consumed. It is when he leaves the land and goes to work for a capitalist that his economic situation is radically transformed.
It doesn’t matter, for the wage-laborer, if the capitalist is private, a state, a syndicate, a union, or whatever. If he is paid in constant wages by a group of people that assume all the capital-risk, he works under capitalism.
Capitalist free enterprise is the reason why the industrial revolution occurred, that is to say industrial capitalists who were free to expand their businesses found that they could realize enormous gains in productivity by making larger capital investments (bigger factories, for example). That doesn’t mean that all capitalism presented these benefits. Marxists believed that it was inevitable that the ultimate productivity be achieved by merging all capitalists into one gigantic enterprise that would own everything, and thus they thought that nationalization simply short-cutted the process.
In fact free enterprise also restrained the size of capitalist enterprise, but that was not visible at the time.
Is it predicated on private ownership (by the “workers” or the syndicate of the MOP)? If so it’s just a form of capitalism. And yes, Mises never said his argument extends to it, as the workers own and can dispose of the MOP at their discretion much like any normal capitalist can.
Such a system is not stable and would revert back to regular capitalistic capitalism over the long run. It is based on the idea that the workers can expropriate the capital owners then abolish the state, but then nothing could stop them from selling the capital they expropriated back to the capitalists and realize the gains from the division of labor this implies.
Ivanfoo is the most clear head on this in the thread so far.
Ah damn that isn’t my quote. Forgot to bracket it.
I suppose that, broadly defined, “apple” and “orange” can have the same definition.
But the ten-year-old does not have equally ownership of the dishes, garbage, and the car.
And that is the goal. To avoid being precise or consistent.
Socialism in action has common rewards with uncommon effort, and no clear ownership. I think a family is pretty close to this mode. Certainly people inside the family do not get what they earn, and the kids cannot take over the household by outcompeting Dad.
In which case, so are corporations.
I don’t think so.
Not all families are the same so there is no point in debating over whether or not “the family” is socialist. It should suffice to say that families can be very socialist but they could also be very capitalist. But this should be determined on a case-by-case basis. Btw, I wouldn’t be surpised in there was some culture out there in the world where son could compete with dad for control over the household.