davywavy | If this is Communism, where do I sign?

If this is Communism, where do I sign?

I've been debating over on

raggedhalo's journal (again) about politics and economic theory. No surprises there; when one of the basic contentions being made is that the public sector is wildly corrupt and inefficient but it is better to raise taxes to cover the ensuing shortfall than to deal with the corruption and inefficiency you can expect my blood pressure to go up dramatically.
During the course of the debating, the old Communist Manifesto line about "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" was trotted out as 'basic social contract'. On the face of it, the statement seems quite unexceptionable - but when you try and pin it down, it becomes quite a slippy concept indeed. You see the question I ask is: whose definition of the word 'need' are we going to accept? Certainly nobody I asked in the debate who supported the idea that we have a moral requirement to support the needs of others was prepared to define 'need' in absolute terms, instead prevaricating furiously whenever I really asked the question.
So I set out to look elsewhere for definitions of human needs. What are human needs, and who defines them?

The United Nations defines poverty thus: They state that any person lacking any two of the following list is, according to the UN, living in poverty: Access to adequate food, access to potable water, access to shelter, access to healthcare and access to education. I think there's a basic definition of 'need' there which we can all get behind, although a definition of what level of education (am I in poverty if I can't get to postgraduate education?) counts is still needed.
Looking closer to home, I checked out Oxfam and the Government's Social Exclusion unit.
Oxfam make a big deal about how 1 person in 4 in the UK lives in Poverty. This is a staggering number - more than 15 million people. The front page of their website makes quite a to-do about eradicating poverty. But what is "poverty" in those terms? Digging through their website, we find that Oxfam defines poverty as: "Poverty is measured here as below 60 per cent of contemporary median net disposable income in 2000/01."

Go back and read that again, and think about what it means.
It means that, according to Oxfam, who are leading a poverty eradication campaign, poverty itself can never be eradicated. Simple maths tells us that a proportion of the population will always live under a set point of the median income, because that's what the median means. In other words, if you're working for Oxfam in poverty reduction, then you've got a job for life. I'm sure it's only the cynic in me that suggests this thought might have crossed the mind of whoever set this somewhat arbitary standard of 'poverty'.

But what of the Social Exclusion unit? They too are trying to end poverty - but finding how they define 'poverty' is bloody hard. Anyone would think they didn't want you to know. Eventually, I tracked down some studies (carried out by the Joseph Rowntree foundation) they were basing their statistics of poverty on, and found some of their definitions. They, like the UN, set a list of criteria of what poverty 'is'. However, their criteria differ quite markedly from the UN; their list includes things like 'Not owning or having access to a car' and 'not owning your own home'.

What is most striking about both the Oxfam and SEU definitions of poverty (and thus 'need') is that I, personally, meet their criteria for poverty. When Oxfam or government statistics are trotted out to tell you how many people live in poverty in this country, their criteria are so broad that they catch me in there.
So, the next time an Oxfam worker collars you in the street and demands you set up a standing order to help them eradicate poverty in the UK because (adopts meaningful and portentious tone of voice) "One person in four lives in poverty", just remember what the true face of poverty in the UK looks like. It looks like mine, and I'm stuffing a jammy Wagon Wheel into it whilst I'm typing this.
As I'm in poverty, can I have a handout now, please?

These catch-all, broad definitions of 'need' and 'poverty' only serve to undermine the genuine problems of a very small proportion of the population and instead all they tell me is that when people say 'from each according to his needs', those 'needs' are a very moveable concept indeed, and the definitions given seem more designed to keep the people doing the defining in comfy jobs than to actually solve any genuine problems.
What strikes me even more is that the definitions are being defined completely arbitarily; I can make up any definition to 'need' and 'poverty' and then tell you that I want to do something about them - and most people, because they never consider the assumtions being made and the definitions being used, will go along quite happily, unaware that they're being bilked.
So; if socialists can make up their own definitions of 'need', then two can play at that game:
it strikes me that what most people need is a firm kick up the arse and, thanks to my kickboxing, I have the ability to give it to them. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs indeed.

So if you'd all line up and bend over, I've got some percussive rectal encouragement to get on with.
Why did nobody ever tell me before that Communism could be this much fun?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I need to go back to bed, I tried to read what you wrote but it made my brain hurt...

maybe I'll try again later

This works very well - the measure of poverty- until you try to get some real help. Then you find out that you- as opposed to you the statistic- don't qualify for a long string of labouriously worked out reasons.I've always been firmly of the opinion that these bodies only exist to provide employment, not to help the people who realy need help.

Ten points!

The measures of poverty are arbitary and meaningless and change dramatically; the JRF has a study which indicates that the number of people living in poverty in the UK increased dramatically between 1983 and 1999 - shocking until you consider that the definition of poverty also changed dramatically, and if the 1983 measures of standards of living are used then poverty actually fell.
But acknowledging that doesn't keep people in jobs in rather nice charity offices writing holier-than-thou reports full of moral outrage, does it?

I wish you'd linked directly to the Oxfam "how do I find out if I'm poor" section. I've been trying to find out if I'm poor too. It's not easy is it?

Anyhow, it looks as if I might be ... I can tick a few of their boxes too (no TV, budgeting on a weekly cash basis, I daresay our flat would count as "inadequately heated" if your moaning & shivering is anything to go by) so next time you're moved to help the poor, remember, charity begins at home.

Your rent goes up next month.

H

'scuse me? I'm poorer than you and therefore, by definition, morally superior to boot. I don't own my own home, you capitalist scum - and because you own property and I don't, that means you stole it from me. As we know, money is a limited resource and there's only a fixed, unchanging amount of it in the whole world. There'll never be any more.*

^{*Ill thought out argument (c)jonnyargles}

Actually, that definition of poverty can be eradicated by the complete redistribution of all wealth. :-p

See, you are a socialist!

Pah, what cobblers. As all your readers know, you are a company director, and therefore a bloated, cigar-smoking plutocrat reclining on a groaning pile of the oppressed masses, such as my worthy self. I therefore put it to you that I, not you, am the Victim in the Victim/Oppressor relationship which as we know, characterises all interpersonal pairings within a free market economy. Give me back my money, you capitalist swine.

H

Someone once told me that if we redistributed all the money in the world, everyone would have £2,000,000. My reply was "And by the end of the week, I'd have ten million, and four suckers would have nothing."

I gave it you back, this morning. A cheque, remember?

However, complete redistribution still wouldn't solve Oxfam's definition; they use 'disposable income' as their term, and, as some people consume more resources in the form of utilities (heat, light, etc), then their bills will necessarily be higher and those people will still have a lower disposable income.

You'd have to regulate to everyone an equal amount of heating, lighting and so on, into perpetuity, irrespective of their personal requirements or wants.

Wow...now you're a communist! You have been talking to

inksuldrak, haven't you? *grin*

That?? Why, that'll hardly cover one measly Max Mara cashmere coat in the sales. And according to Oxfam, "warm winter clothing" is a basic human need.

H

No, he's been talking to me. Incessantly. Without drawing breath or changing the subject. Irrespective of whether or not I'm listening, or even awake.

This seems par for the course with his interactions with everyone when he's talking politics.

Dude. Change your locks!

I was actually thinking of punching him in the gob. After all, he needs a bloody good pasting to shut him up, and I have the ability to give it to him!

Pah, to your money. With a single global currency that posit would hold true. Unfortunately, as post-WWI germany found out when it starved all the pensioners with hyperinflation, the currency of a country alters in relation to other countries. The League of Nations say we have to pay them DM200,000? Fine, let's devalue our country's currency, and screw those on a fixed income!

Money is a short-hand term for barter. I cannot raise a sheep on my back garden, but I can cut hair. I could offer to cut the hair of a sheep farmer for some wool, or I could 'nest' the reward for hair cutting which could either then be used to buy wool or other products or services.

The only way 'money' is increased is by people deciding that some services are more deserving of 'nesting tokens' than others - usually as a desire to not have to do so much work or endure a lack of luxuries themselves. This is called profit. In many cases, the item or service has no additional intrinsic value, but is merely sold as it it were a more expensive product that it actually was.

The end result is - that like pyramid schemes - someone at the end of the money cycle ends up being exploited. At the moment, the biggest losers are probably workers in China, African farmers with trade sanctions or people who sign up for that HILARIOUS Crazy Frog Ringtone and then get charged £10 a month until they realise what's happening.

I've never claimed any moral superiority is inherent in the poor; a lot of them are bastards. Most of them are bastards because of their upbringing, but some are just naturally gits. I do think it's naive, though, to say that the only reason people haven't made it as chairman of ICI is because they're lazy.

'cos I'm not doing much today, to debunk your primary assumption:

The only way 'money' is increased is by people deciding that some services are more deserving of 'nesting tokens' than others

If your idea that money is simply a replacement for barter between people and nothing more is correct, then the above statement is plainly wrong because simply adding more people (and thus more barter) to the system increases the amount of money.
Not only this, but an increase in the resources within the system also increases the amount of money, because the amount of potential barter (money can exist in potentia, you see, and most of it does) is also increased. Resources not only are natural resources and manufactured goods, but they also exist in the form of 'ideas'. The economy of the UK is now a service-based economy based upon energy and idea trading. When an economy recognises the value of intangibles, such as ideas and concepts, and is willing to pay for them, it has moved beyond the basic barter economy which you outline above.

However, money is not simply a replacement for barter - it was 3000 years ago, but fiscal econmicis has developed a bit since then. Thus, not only is your basic contenion incorrect, but you're drawing incorrect conclusions from it.

"The median is a number that separates the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution from the lower half. More precisely 1/2 of the population will have values less than or equal to the median and 1/2 of the population will have values equal to or greater than the median"
"Oxfam defines poverty as: "Poverty is measured here as below 60 per cent of contemporary median net disposable income in 2000/01.""
Therefore, providing your distribution curve is quite tight around the median, (i.e. at no individual value is below 60% of the median value) you succeed in achieving Oxfam's goal. If you have widely spread difference between your values (i.e. really poor people relative to median income) then you fail.
Oxfam are really measuring how wide the gap is between the rich and poor. Nordic countries will be much closer to achieving the metric than somewhere like Britain with a huge and increasing gap between the richest and the poorest.

But this is a false definition of poverty; it doesn't matter how rich the person at the top of the scale is if the person at the bottom doesn't meet any reasonable definition of poverty due to the standard of living of society being high.

The people at the very bottom don't meet those criteria, but to create an arbitary definition of poverty which basically means I live within their criteria is not only misleading, I consider it downright untruthful and even personally offensive, despite by usual abhorrence to taking the language of the victim.
The number of people within this country who meet any reasonable definitions of 'poverty' is a tiny minority, and I'd like to see this acknowldged.

Fine; are we talking about Fiduciary or Hard currency? If it's the latter, which being a Libertarian I think it's pretty safe to say we are, then the market model still stands, which puts money into three categories:

1. Medium of exchange
2. Store of Value
3. Unit of Account

Perhaps simplistically, I related my thoughts to the idea of Commodity money, which are (or at least used to be) related to the Gold Reserves of the UK. What we have now is a Fiat money system, which rather than being based on Italian cars, is more related to the performance of the country's trade against other nations. Money as a unit of account helps us gauge the differences between, say, a tin of beans and a house.

Now, I never said that 'barter' had to be a physical aspect. In fact, it's more of a promissory note. If you tell me a story that amuses me, then I will give you a note. Olaf the butcher owes me a piece of meat, but if you take that to him, he'll give you the meat instead.

No matter how many gypsies come to my door selling lucky heather, I'm not going to have any more money to give them. There's the possibility that I might end up giving them more money than I intended, but that money doesn't come from nowhere, and means that I have to restrict my spending on other things.

Despite interest rates and currency exchanges, and superannuation, it is, still just a fancy barter. There's not one concept extant in any degree of finance which doesn't have a correlation in the most basic exchange of goods and services.

But anyway, I haven't got time to open Keynes now - I've got slacking to get on with!

A company (let's call it "Exploitation Inc") identifies a dereliect old building on a contaminated site, which could with a bit of work be reclaimed, cleaned up & turned into flats. This work will cost £20m. Exploitation issue 20m shares, at £1 each, which are bought by gullible investors, obviously, as they are just paying £1 for a little piece of paper! I mean, how much does a sheet of paper cost? A ha'penny, right? Anyhow these people are clearly being kidded by Exploitation into handing over £20m of the money pool from the poor to the rich.

Anyhow. Exploitation refurbish the site and sell the ensuing luxury flats for a total of £50m. This means that the owners of the £1 shares are now being offered £2.50 per share.

Given a constant amount of money in this closed system, identify who has robbed from who?

a) Exploitation have robbed from the shareholders by selling them worthless paper

b) The shareholders are robbing from the people wanting to buy their shares

c) the buyers of the flats are being robbed because we were informed that the site is derelict and hence worthless

d) the building contractors were robbed because the extra £30m added to the site value must have come from somewhere and they were the workers, so it must have been them

e) some other form of robbery took place (explain)

and for a bonus point

f) explain how the £20m originally belonging to the shareholders is now distributed in the closed system, given that there has obviously been no change in overall wealth.

H

No matter how many gypsies come to my door selling lucky heather, I'm not going to have any more money to give them.

Well, you could have more money to give them by getting a better paid job. That's my strategy and it's worked pretty well for me.

Flippancy aside, you do have more money to give them than you would have done in the past. This is due to the increased wealth of society meaning you personally have more than your ancestors did.

Actually it is possible to eradicate poverty by Oxfam's definition. all you need is a suitably tight distribution of wages below the median. For example, if every person in the country is paid the same wage, then no-one is poor by Oxfam's definition, since they are all on 100% of the median wage. (Median, incidentally for those that don't know, is the point at which 50% of the population are earning less and 50% more. Interestingly, Oxfam's definition is not actually socialist in the convential sense, since it is completely independent of the distribution of wages above the 50% point. Thus a society in which all men are paid 100x that of all women has no poverty by Oxfam's definition. (Men and women not picked to make a sexual politics point, just because there are slightly more than 50% women so thus all women would be earning 100% of the median wage in this situation.)

The essential point that Oxfam misses is that to a large extent poverty is not a relative phenomenon. In this country, barring cock ups, every citizen's basic needs are provided for. I am extremely dubious of any British citizen who claims to be living in poverty since to my mind poverty does not denote not having enough money to buy a pint of beer so much as not having the means to acquire enough food to live on (and a few other things). Even people who are 50,000 pounds in debt do not have these needs provided for, although they may be unwilling to admit that they need to sell their house in order to live at an acceptable standard. But that's another essential defining factor of poverty - you can't *choose* to live in poverty. If there's some way out that you're not taking because it seems unacceptable to you, then you aren't living in poverty.

1. Who determines it costs £20 million? Surely that depends on the tender?
2. Has £30 million in value actually been added to the property? How is that defined?

In this instance, money is exchanged for the sake of someone else doing the work. Assuming that the £20 million represents an amount of actual work and investment that the customer is happy with, then there is no disproportionate element. The people who bought the flats COULD have bought the area and done them up themselves, but because they invest their time, effort and resources elsewhere, chose not to - or didn't see the opportunity. Those people, let's say, own a car dealership. The same shareholders might then go and spend their newfound wealth on a car. Thus the cycle is, if not complete, then veering that way. However, if the £20 million reflected some stud walls, a lick of paint and a trip to Ikea, and the product that the buyers gained was not that which they had expected, but merely appeared so, then they are the ones being exploited.

The shareholders risked their money - earned through the provision of goods and services - to people who could make it happen. As an incentive and reward, their contribution is reflected in the projected profit. I'd assume, though, that Exploitation was going to hold some of the shares itself, as otherwise it wouldn't make any profit itself as a result of the venture.

Not quite so; their definition is based on median disposable income. As some people will need more basic utilities like water or energy, their utility bills will be higher and their disposable income will be lower.

As noted above, the only way to eradicate poverty within Oxfams definition is to divide up water, energy and either give them away free (and who will pay for it?), or divide them completely equally irrespective of individual requirements.

Beyond that, I agree. The number of people living in poverty isn't 15,000,000 in this country. That's a prfoundly dishonest statement, and it fucks me off.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

If this is Communism, where do I sign?

no subject

no subject

no subject

To each according to her needs

Re: To each according to her needs

no subject

Re: To each according to her needs

no subject

Re: To each according to her needs

no subject

no subject

Re: To each according to her needs

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: To each according to her needs

Re: To each according to her needs

Maths clarification

Re: Maths clarification

Re: To each according to her needs

A Paradox

Re: To each according to her needs

no subject

Re: A Paradox

no subject