Antiwork

Competition is inherent to our existence.

This is capitalist propaganda talking. We are discussing a recent economic system with a very specific manifestation of "competition", something that drives little petty fiefdom holders (business owners) to preemptively degrade working conditions and pay for workers and to gradually shift more and more to fixed costs. We live in the world of real things, not little phrases passed on from our oppressors. The divine right of kings was also supported as "the natural state of things". How convenient for our oppressors!

Not everybody can have a house of gold or even live on the coast. How do you allocate scarce resources? Competition is everywhere.

Is your argument that only competition can resolve scarcity?

• A house of gold: need not exist at all. This kind of thing is reserved for the dragons sitting atop their treasures as a way to show off.

• Living on the coast: this is a so-called natural monopoly, something that cannot be reproduced and scaled up. There is an actual scarcity of livable coastline. Let's talk about how "competition" currently addresses this.

A tiny minority, mostly those in the exploiter class, use their ill-gotten gains to purchase these desirable properties, often only living in them for a few weeks out of the year. They buy them with the expectation that values will increase, as they are dependent on the financialized housing system that increases housing prices far faster than the rest of inflation, than population increase, etc. The decision of who gets to live there is made implicitly, as so many things are in this system, by whether you have joined the exploiter class.

The idea that this is the only way to organize a scarcity is capitalism stealing a person's basic imagination. Humans have invented many systems for doing this and humans can do so again. That's democracy, isn't it? Here's two examples: (1) there could be a lottery or (2) they could be held in common and used by all for vacations. The two options could be combined. And in both cases, addressing the poverty induced by capitalism should come first: who gives a shit about how we decide to redistribute fancy housing until we actually house everyone? The system you're defending forces a good percentage of the population to have no housing at all.

There are also natural monopolies that are already state-run and normalized, as they align with the capitalist system. Individual capitalists don't own the roads, they are held (and paid for) in common. Same for all kinds of utilities. You cannot build 10 totally separate road systems to get from A to B, so they are owned by government agencies. Somehow, they do this without competing with one another.

Nationalizing supplies only hides the true prices and will create a grey market for undervalued goods.

Hides what prices? To what concept are you referring? Capitalism and markets already hide the true costs, as society pays for so much that isn't on the sticker price. Even putting common infrastructure aside (capitalism requires a state), the capitalist isn't including the environmental degradation or public health impacts of their productive process on their sticker. They're not paying for the cancer they inflicted on your relstive, nor did they ask permission to inflict it. They are, instead, constantly trying to minimize their costs regardless of how much it hurts everyone else. Climate change is another example. A civilization-ending apocalypse is looming due to the failure of capitalism to do anything other than seek profit at the cost of all else.

A nationalized productive process also has the same ability to do accounting on its costs, so who knows what you're talking about. There are entire industries that have been nationalized and work quite well, even in capitalist countries where there're constantly undermined by privatization.

Finally, let's not have any illusions about the actual existence of competition. Capitalism creates a psychology among the exploiter class to cut costs or die. Often this is true. But another way to increase profits and survive is to become a monopoly, which are now ubiquitous. Monopolies end up running their own little planned economies largely free of competition and are about as efficient as anything else under capitalism. They just charge far more than they need to. Imagine if they weren't hellbent on taking as much from you as they could.

Problem is that most goods will be overvalued because, as you write, only capitalists are incentiviced to reduce costs.

I never said anything like that, lol. I'd feel silly if I did.

No leadership can overcome the misalignment of incentives.

Leadership inherently uses incentives so this means nothing. Every decision by leadership must be backed by an incentive or it won't happen. But don't limit your concept of incentives to be merely the mechanisms of capitalism, of course.

The sovjet union could have had better leaders but which resources can they use if managers don't dare to cut costs?

As I mentioned, Soviet political leadership was cut off at the feet by a genocidal campaign by capitalists. Capitalists are incredibly violent - violence is what sustains their system and attempts to prevent other systems from taking hold. This implicitly suggests a viability to the alternatives.

Soviets did all kinds of things, they took a non-industrialized, largely feudal country and turned it into an industrialized superpower within 10-15 years. This involved cutting costs all the time, so I have no idea what you're talking about.

Similarly, compare blockaded Cuba to Haiti. We haven't even touched on imperialism, a form of capitalism between states, but Haiti is what an imperialized country gets under global capitalism and Cuba is what you get despite the violence and extreme hardship forced on them by capitalist countries. The imperialists have literally and figuratively never forgiven Haiti for their self-emancipation from slavery, rewarding them with massive debt and regular coups.

Coops can be more competitive when workers understand that they are not only compensated with money to consume but also influence. At least the unemployed should be willing to participate.

Under the capitalist system, competition is defined very simply: your business lives or dies. Your business lives because it is profitable or is playing some game to become profitable that is underwritten by finance. Your business dies because it is not profitable or similarly underwritten. Workers being compensated with workplace power does not inherently make a business more profitable and will definitely lead to a higher floor on what costs get cut (labor).

A simpler way to put it might be that if co-ops were simply more viable under capitalism than capitalist businesses, they'd be dominant. Instead, they are usually kept to small-scale outfits. There are exceptions, but they are rare.

This does not mean that co-ops are bad or disorganized. It means the capitalist system barely permits them to exist by its fundamental nature.

If workers cannot be motivated to support coops, how can socialism be sustained?

Workers do support co-ops. Every worker would rather have a say in their own workplace conditions than get fucked over by some small business tyrant.

But we live under a capitalist system that does not support co-ops and it isn't exactly democratic. We do not control capital, petty tyrants do. We can't just wish for more co-ops, or just want them, we need the capital, the means of production. Socialists know this.

Again, you don't just get access to capital and profit because you want it or even because you're particularly good at organising production. You have to be able to undercut or eliminate the competition. You have to worship the gods of CMC' or delve into the dark arts of bullshit (finance).