this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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How would one support innovation in socialism? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am genuinely interested how such a thing would be done. I understand that it wouldn't be as hard as with communism, but I can't think of any way to encourage companies to make better (genuinely better) products. I remember how my mother told me how in her days (she lived in the DDR) there wasn't really any reason to be better than another company, as they would all be payed equally.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it's hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don't, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn't until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

@[email protected] when humans have their basic needs all satisfied, and they feel secure and mostly content with life, they naturally become very creative and innovative.

Think about it: if you were not worried about paying rent every month, not worried about medical bills, not worried about where your next meal is coming from, and the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week, what would you do with your abundant free time? You might have kids and devote your life to them, and that is really helpful for perpetuating society. You might be happy to just play video games and watch TV and movies and maybe read fictional novels in all of your free time, and that would be totally OK too.

But a lot of people would get antsy, they would want to find tasks for themselves to perform. They may devote themselves to sport, and become the best players in the world. They may devote themselves to art, and without a free market to satisfy, without a business case to defend the art you make, the art you make would be truly free and likely very innovative. Even in engineering and science, in which some creativity is required to come up with innovative solutions to problems, if you don't have to worry about making things that are marketable, you just want to make things that you think are cool and useful for yourself, it may turn out to be useful for millions of other people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I agree that it would increase creativity, but the question is how new inventions or better versions of existing goods are spread.

When the means of production are with the government how are they incentivised to take the risk of reducing the production of an existing article to produce an alternative, which might be more or less sought after.

Of course a similar problem exists in capitalism where a small amount of people decide what is produced in high amounts but the competition in capitalism strongly favors your product to be slightly different than your competitors, which in theory should lead to evolution as long as no monopolies are allowed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

"but the question is how new inventions or better versions of existing goods are spread."

That question is a little hard to answer unless we have more specifics of this hypothetical socialist economy we are talking about.

If everything is centrally planned, innovation might come from the government paying out bonuses to people who improve the efficiency of production of goods with very high demand, or otherwise reduce the amount of human labor necessary to produce goods.

If we are talking about a heavily regulated market economy with a concerted effort to minimize the gap between rich and poor (e.g. 100% tax rate beyond a certain level of income, along with universal basic income), then the free market forces could encourage innovation as they are theoretically supposed to do right now.

Even without government intervention, people might enjoy hosting contests in which large numbers of people vote for which products they believe deserve more innovation. This model already sort-of exists in the form of free/libre open-source software. Projects that people find to be most useful tend to amass larger communities of users, and these communities continue to innovate the software. This happens without any rewards offered, but projects that become very large tend to attract donation money which becomes a kind of reward for the innovation. This also happens in a "game jam" where participants compete to create a compute game, and the game that gets the most votes wins a prize.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week,

Has that been a common occurrence in socialism?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

the job you did only require you work 6 huors a day 4 days a week,

Has that been a common occurrence in socialism?

I wish I knew. I have never in a country like Vietnam or Cuba, and I have little knowledge about how people live in these countries. Although these few countries that are genuinely socialist/communist are heavily sanctioned by the US and forbidden from participating in trade with neighboring countries (I have heard this referred to as "economic warfare"). Without access to international trade, these countries tend to be extremely poor in natural resources, which leads to tremendous scarcity, and makes life very difficult to live. Naturally, this would be a hindrance to innovation.

So personally I don't know if the difficulties of living life in a communist country is a result of the problems inherent to communism. I strongly suspect the the problems are all caused by economic warfare, but I personally have no evidence to say one way or the other.

That said, Cuba did develop their own COVID vaccine completely on their own at the height of the crisis, so that could be a bit of evidence in favor of innovation under socialism, which if it is, would be amazing given that they could be so innovative even while being the victims of economic warfare.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Look at video game modding as an example. People want to make better things. It's part of our nature. Even today, where they have to devote their free time to it and still work under our exploitative system for money, we have people devoting time equivalent or in some cases even greater than a full time job in order to make amazing high quality mods with no monetary reward for doing so.

If the system supported it, we would see that kind of behavior in all sorts of fields.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Workers are paid fairly equally under capitalsism regardless for each job. There is a "standard rate". The incentives that could exist from the perspective of the worker would remain the same (bonus checks etc) no matter the system (minus a moneyless one).

Also remember is was the USSR who made it to space before any other country. Almost as if hard work is stimulated in many ways - and humans are not only interested in money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I do understand that it is motivating for people to perform tasks they like and to strive for goals, but how would we deal with work which does not for any of these criteria?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

My opinion:

There's really two types of innovation, one type of innovation which expands the horizons of humanities understanding, things like medical breakthroughs and space exploration,

and another that makes the same work we've been doing more efficient. Think Nickle-Iron batteries over Lithium-Ion for example.

Socialist countries tend to excel at the horizon-expanding innovation because profit motive exists less than the motive for expanding one's own consciousness at the expense at times of efficiency, and in reverse capitalist countries tend to excel at innovation that focuses on efficiency over the expansion of human knowledge

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

What are you on about? Do you have any idea how much innovation there is under socialism? Just look at the USSR space program and the USSR medical program. The USSR innovated new medical techniques we still use today.

Cuba produced multiple COVID vaccines in the same timeline the USA did and they're under a 60-year international embargo and sanctions regime! China dominates nearly every single hi tech domain in the world, many domains it has all top 10 universities.

Capitalism innovations are new ways of rent seeking. Most of the innovations people actually want and need don't turn a profit. Think about how many billions of dollars are spent on anti-piracy research and development. Think about how many patents are bought in order to stop them from coming to market. Think about how many small startups are bought and killed to prevent competition.

Innovation thrives under the conditions of liberation. The incentives for innovating are inherent in the problem the innovation solves. There is literally no need for profit systems to incentivize innovation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Money still exists under socialism, you could donate money, code, time, bug reports. You can still sell/buy products in a socialist society too

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is just an idea I've been rolling around in my head...

Make sure every citizens basic needs are met, including but not limited to food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc, and abolish the minimum wage. Then you can truly pay what a job is worth.

There would obviously be a transitional period, and working conditions would have to change to keep people in "shitty" jobs. But I promise you, there are enough people out there who would earn $3 an hour to "flip burgers" if it wasn't under shitty conditions and the threat of homelessness.

Some people would have a natural drive to pursue money/careers, while others just want their basic needs met and enough money for art supplies.