I'm looking for some really lame super pragmatic minimal market socialism for the sake of giving imagination-gap terminally reform-brained normies a concrete thing they can work with.
Specifically I was looking for something which while maintaining distributed capital markets also gets rid of rewards for nonproductive actors. I didn't exactly find this, but I did find Roerner's Equal Shares proposal this follows:
>Every adult citizen would receive from the state treasury an equal endowment of coupons, that can be used only to purchase shares of mutual funds. Only coupons can be used to purchase shares of mutual funds, not money. Only mutual funds can purchase shares of public firms, using coupons. Prices of corporate shares and mutual funds are, hence, denominated in coupons; they will oscillate depending on the supply and demand for shares. Citizens are free to sell their mutual-fund shares for coupons, and to reinvest the coupons in other mutual funds. Finally, firms may exchange coupons with the state treasury for investment funds, and may purchase coupons from the treasury with money. This is the only point at which coupons exchange for money. These investment funds play the role of equity in the firm. (p. 20)
>A share of a firm entitles the owning mutual fund to a share of the firm's profits, and a share of a mutual fund entitles the owning citizen to a share of the mutual fund's revenues. When a citizen dies, his mutual fund shares must be sold and the coupon revenues are returned to the state treasury. The treasury in turn issues coupon endowments to citizens reaching the age of majority. (p. 20)
Anyway this proposal seemed to get reasonably close to what I was "looking for". I'm still not sure however if it's productive to advertise this sort of thing to others. Is it a useful strategy to build these sort of concrete programs. Further about this plan in particular is it really what anyone is after? Is there an effective even more reform minded solution that still removes rewards for unproductive actors - or at least as this one does makes such rewards equal?
/blog
some immediate reforms:
- nationalize property that is used to extract rent
- state owned enterprises competing with private enterprise at low surplus margins and with low managerial salaries
- inheritance tax
- abolish securities trading and speculative finance
- capital tax
- abolish income tax
- profit caps on large and monopolized industries; tax surpluses over the cap at 100%
- phase in labor vouchers; could begin as a % of wages and be exchangeable for things like groceries which the state then reimburses with dollars, or could be exchangeable for dollars until it's fully rolled out, or could be used only in state owned enterprises and their total rollout dependent on total state domination of all economic activity
- buy-outs of insolvent businesses rather than bail-outs
- jobs programs to train and place downwardly mobile petite-bourg in exchange for their property
- anti-price-gouging (not just for consumers but because companies use it to launder surpluses back to themselves through shell companies when profit caps are implemented)
- build affordable housing
- cap hours allowed to be worked per week and implement more robust welfare
- raise minimum wage
- free job training
Also in Principles of Communism there's a list of things to do to transition to socialism, take a look
If that's all you want, why don't you just join your local social democratic party and spend all day shitting on communists as being too unreasonable and too extreme?
I feel bad for having made this thread, it's sort of stupid. I am still curious about materially significant actions I might take, but this is a different question less stupid question.
Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:
(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.
(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.
1.Changes in organic composition of capital means that manufacturing share of labour will no longer absorb a huge amount of workers. You can't just deploy workers in a factory anymore, with how complicated and automated shit are nowadays. However I can see on-demand labour deployment in agriculture or services, India and China already do this, however this means that difference between productive capital and rent extraction becomes nul since there are no moe productive, industrial capital.
2.>state owned enterprises competing with private enterprise at low surplus margins and with low managerial salaries
This is my second biggest problem. Everything you said here, from implementation of labour vouchers to universal compulsory education to concentration of capital required an enormous, massive and powerful managerial bureaucracy, which you will need to pay and train significantly more than the average proles. You want to have your cake and eat it too; a state that needs massive managerial bureaucracy but also one without a nomenklatura. This is not gonna happen, because bureaucratic work by its nature is specialized.
3. >Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
>cap hours allowed to be worked per week and implement more robust welfare
My third biggest problem. Having full employment will result in a massive demand increase. Since we control capital we can prevent inflationary pressure on the currency equivalent but we will still be left with a skyrocketing demand for consumer and industrial goods. Unless you want to face goods shortage you have to crank up working hours instead of reducing them. Again a case of having your cake and eat it too.
However, this is already a step in the right direction. We need labour creation and mobilization program. And we need a massive, well paid bureaucracy to do that. The rest of your platform just need some moderation