Forward: People say that socialism has failed catastrophically wherever it has been tried. Indeed that is a statement of fact. The historic economic stagnation, devastation, and death tolls attributable to socialism are shameful to say the least.
However! That does not prove that some form of socialism cannot work. At the end of the day you can do any right thing wrong. Man crashed and failed many times before the Right Brothers succeed in flight, so it's fair I believe to at least keep an open mind.
Socialism's dark history demands that we don't just 'believe in' it, like an impassioned faith. That is both a dangerous and absurd intellectual standard. Its history demands that we either dismiss it outright or drastically re-engineer it.
This article gives Socialism-2.0 an open-minded ponder. And as I believe, that is much better than bluntly dismissing socialism, which would probably only drive the ideology even deeper into blind faith.
-Andrew Atkin
First I want to be explicit. If we were to ever engineer some form of socialism, it should be treated like any other responsible experiment. It should first be done on a small and isolated scale, so we can see how it rolls without risking serious or widespread damage.
To this end, the 'revolution' before all others should be political decentralisation. Please open and read the attached pic, "The end of Politics". (And note, the included scenario that I express is based on the presumption that an historic form of socialism is tried. That is certainly not what I advocate for here).
From here, for the sake of curiosity, I would like to suggest some thoughts on how socialism of a sort could possibly work.
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First, we need to realise some things. In this modern age we will see some incredible increases in operating efficiency, giving a new era of easy prosperity. These are the key technologies driving it forward.
1. Driverless car technology (see video here).
2. 5g telecommunications technology.
3. Advanced mobile robotics (see example here).
These technologies will work together to create the situation where there's no functional need for anyone to leave their home (to work, learn or shop) except for recreation and socialising.
This can, and will, lead to the implosion of countless jobs as cloud-computing coupled with the rampage of never-ending software upgrades, enhanced with machine learning, evaporates the need for so many institutional jobs and at a rapid rate.
This new age of extreme automation may demand a kind of universal basic income (UBI) as we reach the point where there are simply too few jobs that require a human over robotics.
There's another thing that can greatly increase living efficiency, and that is private villages based on modern technologies. Note, the most direct way to improve real living standards is to reduce the very need to consume in the first place. We may move fast in this direction as well (see here for my modern village example).
From here, we might want to entertain expanding into some form of socialism. The model I'm thinking of moves in the direction of a universal basic income, and a voluntary workforce.
The following is a collection of what I believe to be important insights that relate to that model. I will add and update it over time.
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Markets:
We will not be able to create an effective form of socialism without first learning from free markets.
The need for market signalling is inescapable. If we want to move to a system where everything--or most things--are owned by the state, then we would still need to work with a classic market system to manage the process. The only alternative to normal markets is a 'militarised' economy, where consumption and work is directly controlled - like the army. I would say very few would want that.
If your commercial world is owned by the state, it will need to duplicate the ideal free-market model in that it must respect the need for decentralised control. This means having the state, at the executive level, allow as much freedom as practical for smaller operations to run themselves at their independent discretion. Top-down command-control never works efficiently. It makes everything complicated, inefficient, and interferes with the adaptive needs of an evolving society. That experiment has already been run - and failed.
-Curiously, in an 'ideal' socialist model you could have less regulatory intrusion over individual operations than what exists in the [so-called] free market societies of today. Indeed, the current Western model is typically so heavily regulated that it could almost be described as: "Privately owned - Government run".
As a dynamic, market discipline is vital. All operations would need to be continuously assessed for their profitability and social utility. Competition will need to be preserved as well, as different operations should be allowed to expand and contract in response to evolving demands.
Market competition is, functionally, market experimentation. There will always be the need for experimentation for improvement and correction.
A socialist model must have a culture of innovation and improvement. And the value of any initiative must be tested against the consumers willingness to pay. There's simply no other robust way to measure value and prioritise investment.
My suggestion for making socialism work:
People are not just motivated by money. People generally care about making a meaningful contribution to their society, as well. The most obvious example can be seen with the incredible sacrifices people make in war. Clearly they were not motivated by money.
So this is my point. Can we make working voluntary, and basically put every man and woman on a universal income, as a base? Could we reward people with social recognition alone, or predominantly, by making their contributions immediately recognisable online? Would people be prepared to give 10 to 20 hours a week of their time, knowing that their only reward will be social recognition and meaningful job satisfaction?
If they respect their society (which is vital) I think they might, especially if there's a degree of social stigma applied to those able-bodied people who choose to do nothing (shame is a powerful human motivator).
About 20 hours a week is easy for anyone to do (remember, I'm modeling this on an easy starting point - a technologically efficient society). And if the work is voluntary, people should not be threatened by excessive stress. They can tell their boss 'where to go' when they feel they really need to, etc. It's true that when you remove those kinds of professional stressors, the same work can go from pain to fun. The heart of stress is always a feeling of threat - fear. Take out the fear and everything feels different.
We will of course never escape the need for professional discipline to keep things running like they should. Likewise, there will also need to be an accountability system for workers, so their reliability can be assessed and exposed (this is still essential. I model a possible system to support this here).
Ugly jobs that no-one competent wants to do, may require extra payment at times. That's fine. Realistically, you would probably develop a large collection of pay jobs and voluntary jobs, in practice.
The key point is, when the pressure to pay the mortgage is off, people can enjoy making a contribution in a new way. Compassion - not worry. The result could be a great atmosphere if, again, we can maintain productivity. And if the threat of poverty becomes alien to us, it will generate a more relaxed culture and ambience. This is the plus-side to the socialism I suggest. It can take a great deal of worry off everyone's backs.
What about acquiring necessary skills? People could do that at their leisure, as required. (The entire educational model we live under is outdated - and runs on myths. I have a short but comprehensive video on tertiary education here).
Money:
Money is the greatest invention for allowing us to precisely motivate and organise people, and distribute resources accurately. However, it's also a perverter of motivation - in some ways. Money sterilises the nature of our motivation and rarely brings out the very best in us. Those who make the greatest social contributions typically do not do it for money - not primarily.
By putting money aside as the central motivator, we could bring out the best in us as a society - if it's done right. It can spawn more innovation, productive creativity, and progressive enquiry.
The spirit of innovation:
As anyone who has worked in a large institution knows, they are the most dreadful places for inducing independent initiative. May I be blunt? In a typical large operation, your ideas and suggestions--even the commonsense ones--are going to do little more than irritate your boss. If your boss isn't asking for your input, then it's best that you keep it to yourself. And alas they never ask...
A successful kind of socialism must undermine subjugation-type hierarchy to break down communication barriers, so as to ensure that innovation is induced and intelligently responded to, and to ensure operational mistakes and inefficiencies are quickly corrected (without political dramas).
I have an article relating to institutional communication here. I will add that it's absurd, though sadly normal, that the man at the bottom cannot speak as freely to the man at the top, as he can with his coworker. It's also a major reason, I believe, why large organisations can so often be amazingly "dumb" with how they do things.
Shooting for meritocracy:
Socialism fails for reasons. If we want to try some kind of socialism 2.0, with any hope of success, then we need to look closely at those reasons. Blaming sociopaths for stuffing things up just means we need to think of how we can identify those people, and block them.
There will always be sharks, and there will always be people who want power for its own sake. We need to objectively study them and study ourselves.
You may find that positions of leadership require a lot more than a crude CV to create the certainty that we have the right people running the show. Psychological profiling, IQ, and background checks looking for early child abuse, etc, may be very important to isolate dangerous or deeply apathetic personalities from executive positions. (I talk about testing for psychopathy here).
I have long believed that if you have the right people in the right positions, then it's hard to fail. Getting your personnel systems right is everything. (I talk about achieving meritocracy here).
Further thinking....
Fertility:
My model of socialism, if successful, would make child rearing relatively easy and comfortable. This is important, to ensure that parents can give the best of themselves to their children.
But there is a dark side to making fertility universally easy.
Not every person is fit to breed. When I say this, I'm talking about people who have a history of such desperate abuse that they cannot help but pass the abuse on to their own children. I'm talking about people who shake their babies when they cry, throw them against walls, neglect them worse than animals, constantly frighten them, beat them, and sexually violate them...
So the question is, do we want to make it easy for people who should not be having children, to have children? I for one say no. In fact I believe that parents-to-be should be screened before pregnancy to ensure that they have the most basic level of fitness. It's the only way we can stop the inter-generational spread of horrific child abuse.
I see this as maybe an important complement to my model of socialism, which might otherwise induce the greater fertility of those who, again, should not be having children.
To conclude, when you get rid of serious child abuse, you get rid of gangs, prisons, chronic drug abuse, the worst of mental sickness, and antisocial personality disorder. There's a powerful argument for clamping down on toxic fertility - is there not? I write further about this here.
Decentralised Socialism:
There's nothing new about small-scale socialism, of sorts. Clubs and the family unit are basic examples. We already know they can work well when their scale is tame. And a cruise ship, as an efficient stand-alone economy, is possibly the perfect example of a socialist system at its thus-far known best.
For basic needs, we can see that about 80% of economic life can be efficiently taken care of locally, at the scale of a mere couple of thousand people composing a private village. In fact, using my proposed model (below), the only things the village would need to import (mostly) is some bulk unprocessed foods and a small amount of electricity.
Decentralisation can provide a strong layer of protection against the dangers of national economic mismanagement, be it within a privatised or socialist national economy. This is a good possibility to think about in any circumstance.
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