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Central to the meaning of socialism is common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire global population.

But does it really make sense for everybody to own everything in common? Of course, some goods tend to be for personal consumption, rather than to shareclothes, for example. People 'owning' certain personal possessions does not contradict the principle of a society based upon common ownership.

In practice, common ownership will mean everybody having the right to participate in decisions on how global resources will be used. It means nobody being able to take personal control of resources, beyond their own personal possessions.

Democratic control is therefore also essential to the meaning of socialism. Socialism will be a society in which everybody will have the right to participate in the social decisions that affect them. These decisions could be on a wide range of issuesone of the most important kinds of decision, for example, would be how to organise the production of goods and services.

Production under socialism would be directly and solely for use. With the natural and technical resources of the world held in common and controlled democratically, the sole object of production would be to meet human needs. This would entail an end to buying, selling and money. Instead, we would take freely what we had communally produced. The old slogan of "from each according to ability, to each according to needs" would apply.

So how would we decide what human needs are? This question takes us back to the concept of democracy, for the choices of society will reflect their needs. These needs will, of course, vary among different cultures and with individual preferencesbut the democratic system could easily be designed to provide for this variety.

We cannot, of course, predict the exact form that would be taken by this future global democracy. The democratic system will itself be the outcome of future democratic decisions. We can however say that it is likely that decisions will need to be taken at a number of different levelsfrom local to global. This would help to streamline the democratic participation of every individual towards the issues that concern them.

In socialism, everybody would have free access to the goods and services designed to directly meet their needs and there need be no system of payment for the work that each individual contributes to producing them. All work would be on a voluntary basis. Producing for needs means that people would engage in work that has a direct usefulness. The satisfaction that this would provide, along with the increased opportunity to shape working patterns and conditions, would bring about new attitudes to work.

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What is Socialism? | World Socialist Movement

Monday, December 1, 2014

The Spoiled Fruits of the Left are also found in Mexico

By Luis Pazos

Last century, in China, Cambodia and Viet Nam, among other countries, guerrilla and civil wars were started that caused millions of deaths, with the goal of leftist groups being to take over. Currently almost all of the countries, where the left came to govern through violence in order to establish socialism, have abandoned it due to inefficiency and the creation of misery worse than that which prevailed before the leftists took over the governments.

Most of those guerrillas, who were brainwashed since youth and convinced they must sacrifice their lives to establish socialism and do away with capitalism, have since renounced violence and some have become Presidents by democratic means, such as what happened in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Brazil.

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The Spoiled Fruits of the Left are also found in Mexico

This isnt perhaps the sort of thing that we normally congratulate people on, managing to so entirely screw up a national economy so as to generate 200% annual inflation. But we really should give credit where such credit is due. It is an achievement to manage to follow economic policies that blockheaded so, in the spirit of being entirely fair, congratulations to Venezuelas Bolivarian socialism. Its worth noting further that the reason for this stunning success of theirs is not because theyre a bit left wing, nor because theyve tried to make the lives of the poor a bit better. Its because theyve ignored the most important rule of trying to run an economy, theyve failed to understand that markets really do work. Something that we all need to recall in our own countries as various people tell us that weve got to excise market forces from one or another part of our own economies. Theres ways to deal with the effects that we dont want from market forces: but ignoring or trying to abolish them leads to, well, to success like that that Venezualan Bolivarian socialism is currently experiencing.

Heres the news of that inflation rate:

Venezuela, which already has the worlds fastest inflation rate at a reported 69 percent in December, could see that rate more than double this year as it struggles to respond to falling oil prices.

We may end up this year with inflation at close to 200 percent, Alberto Ades, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America Bank of America, said in an interview on Bloomberg Bloomberg Surveillance Friday. He forecast the economy would shrink 4 percent. Venezuela is in a dire crisis.

We need to understand why it is that the Venezuelan economy is in such a pickle. And no, its not because the oil price is falling. Its also not because the government there is lefty, nor that they were trying to take a bit of the money off the rich and make sure the poor thus had better lives. Its because the methods by which they tried to achieve these things were simply pig ignorant. And Im afraid this speaks to many more lefties than just those Bolivarian socialists. A potential Prime Prime Minister, Ed Miliband, in my native UK is marching around shouting about predistribution and how hes going to fix the prices of energy. Which is the mistake that Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro made. And the mistake that the equally lefty Nordics havent made.

The point being that markets, and the prices in them, are far from being just some random numbers that the plutocrats assign to things in order to strip the poor of their incomes. Theyre actually signals: signals of who is prepared to produce what, for what remuneration, and who actually wants stuff at what cost? Its actually how we coordinate production and consumption in fact. Its long been proven that we dont have any other effective method of such coordination (Hayeks Nobel was in large part for this, there have been other proofs since) so, markets and prices are what were left with.

Yet theres a terribly sad hangover from early socialism which insists that planning will do better than markets. This has its roots in Karl Marxs misunderstandings of markets and prices but its still a pernicious influence out there.

Because prices perform that coordination service for us we cant go around setting them at random. If we set them above market prices, as the EU did with food, then we end up with massive oversupply and mountains of butter and lakes of wine. As the EU did when they did this. If we set prices below market ones then people just wont produce what people want. We thus end up with empty shelves and shortages, as Venezuela famously does today of just about everything. And think how badly youve got to screw up to get a shortage of something as simple as toilet paper, which is something theyve managed.

If you actually want to do that redistribution bit then youve actually got to go off and do some redistribution. Take money from one group of people (we might politely call this taking tax) and then give it to some other group of people (call it welfare). This is what the Nordics do, they reduce inequality significantly by doing so and they manage to do so without generating near hyperinflation nor shortages of anything. Because, other than tax and redistribution they dont do anything to screw up markets nor prices.

And that, of course, is what Venezuela should have done. Take, perhaps, some of that oil revenue and just give it to the poor. Would have worked far better in reducing poverty than what they did do and it wouldnt have created that 200% inflation either.

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Congratulations To Venezuela's Bolivarian Socialism; 200% Inflation Is An Achievement

Published: April 11, 2015

While flattering, the March 29 letter to the editor by Don DeAngelis seems to credit me for establishing the public interest as the guiding principle in making federal law rather than Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the unanimous Supreme Court decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland in 1819. Since then, laws not in the public interest passed by Congress, most egregiously by the current one, have been by definition unconstitutional.

French economist Thomas Pikettys recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, charts the rise of the United States to its present position as the most economically unjust society in world history, and projects the trend to the year 2100, when even the most socialist country today, Sweden, will be drastically undermined by inherited wealth.

Piketty sees no alternative but a return to the progressive and, in extreme cases, confiscatory taxation of the 1950s made possible by two world wars and the Great Depression, events that temporarily suppressed the otherwise unrestrained growth of capitalism over centuries. Throughout this period, the assets of the bottom half of society in every nation have remained at little more than zero.

Along with the domestic problems found every day in the Observer-Reporter, international ones like too much carbon in the atmosphere and the mass extinctions of species are at root political, and the fundamental obstacle to the holistic approach favored by researcher Wolfgang Sachs in planning for a sustainable future is American fear and ignorance of socialism.

Jim Greenwood

Washington

Excerpt from:
Socialism fear prevents sustainable future

Class 01| Socialist Economics with Stephen Resnick
Spring 2011, Econ 373 UMass- Amherst The course is divided into four (unequal) parts. Part I focuses on how socialism and communism have been understood within the Marxian, worker ...

By: Rethinking Marxism

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Class 01| Socialist Economics with Stephen Resnick - Video