about socialism

Last updated on October 31, 2024

Although I believe there are some positive factors in socialism or Utopian ideology like in their fantasy of more fairness, I disagree with Marx’s main reasonings including “surplus value” and “productivity determines production relations”, which I’ve explained several years ago but I’d like to talk a little below.

As for surplus value, production tool or capital is neccessay for production and reproduction and becomes more and more important along with the development of productivity for production and reproduction, so the accumulation and improvement of production tool or capital requires its proper share in distribution of income no matter for the tools producing needle/nail or for the funds and knowledge to create AI. And this is becoming more and more obvious along with the development of computer tech and AI, you cannot distribute or evaluate income only/mainly according to the labor time in the products as Marx’s conclusion, otherwise how could you distribute or evalute the products produced completely by self reproduced AI without any labor of human, and just remember any product cannot be unlimitedly supplied and you have to distribute it according to some rules which the labor time of Marx cannot be or do obviously.

As for productivity determines production relations, we can see that some wealthy countries and some industralized countries with quite high productivity are still basically in the political system almost as same as their feudal society of a thousand years ago, and I think if Marx can see this he will definitely realize how wrong he was.

But finally, as I said above, I believe there some positive factors in Marx’s socialism ideology or Utopian ideology of acient Greek or Datong world concept of acient China, and at least these ideology or concepts all pursue a more fair world, haha. I especially believe that: making this world better demands a more balanced social power structure, and a more balanced socail power structure demands a more balanced ownership. If the concentration of social wealth is inevitable in your current economy system, if redistribution of income by government will harm vitalness and efficiency too much, why not try to make your people have more balanced ownership? Yes, I believe public ownership is somehow reasonble and necessary in some aspects, just like a government should be publicly owned by all people not by some few individuals, and there will be other kinds of public ownerships besides government which I believe will be a good and worthy try.

PS: I’d like do some basic introduction in case that many you guys may not have basic knowledge of Marx’s theory or Marxism like I have, and after all I was born to a totalitarian socialism country which I’m still in right now.

As for surplus value, Marx believed the value of a product is only comprised of or determined by the labor time used to produce this product, and so Marx regarded that the imcome of this product should be distributed according to the labor time in this product, and capitalist steals part of value or income of this product by paying a worker lower than the share of the labor time of this worker to make profit, and the unpaid part of labor time of the worker is suplus value. You can see Marx’s understanding totally ignores the importance and neccecity of the accumulation and improvement of production tool or capital, and Marx thought the proper payment for capital is just to fulfill the requirement for simple reproduction.

In Marx’s time, I guess, adverse production environment, unfairly-paid worker or even children worker, and brutal boss colluted with government powerholders were quite usual (at some place like UK then and at some other place even today?), and the innovation and improvements of production tech are very slow, so I think Marx’s mistake on surplus value is quite understandable, and actually can you deny that Marxism is one of the important factors which contributed to the social progress of western countries today?

As for productivity determines production relations, don’t be mistaken, and let me – a half Maxism expert tell you that: this production relations include all social relations related to production, including political system and relations, business system and relations, etc.

So according to Marx, the transform of Britain from a feudal system of monarchy to a capitalist system of parliamentary representation for all people is determined by its productivity, and so all countries today which have higher productivity level that Britain of 300 years ago should have at least the same level of democracy as Britain of 300 years ago, haha??

PS2: And also, Marx seemed not realizing that something like innovation and inspiration is crucial for the development of production but cannot be evaluated simply by labor time, and obviously the innovation and inspiration need to get enough share of income to create a positive feedback for more innovation and inspiration.